The White War

by Mark Thompson

  It was a catastrophe: Italy’s equivalent of the first day on the Somme. Low cloud cover meant that Italy’s 430 guns and 220 mortars could not target the enemy wire. The general commanding the division directly below Ortigara realised the implications, and asked permission to delay the assault. This was refused by Mambretti, who was unaware that, as on the Carso, the Austrians had abandoned their trenches and excavated deep caverns for men and artillery, often three metres under the surface. The Austrian gunners on the adjacent summits had excellent sight of the Italian positions and the ground where the Sixth Army had to pass.

  At 15:00 hours the men of 52nd and 29th Divisions went over the top. Torrential rain had turned the mountainsides to quagmires. The effect was like flypaper: the infantry were trapped under the machine guns, in front of intact wire. Some battalions took 70 per cent losses. After three waves of attack, progress was made elsewhere on the line, at immense cost. The survivors spent the night on the mountainside, trapped in front of the wire, pressing their bodies into the gaps between boulders, playing dead under Austrian flares, waiting for the order to retreat. No order came. Next day the clouds closed in again, and rain turned to snow on the heights. Cadorna arrived after lunch with his entourage, fresh from their hotel. Even Gatti was incredulous: ‘He is perfectly calm, serene, even smiling. He discusses the fighting yesterday with Mambretti as if everything had gone splendidly.’ The two men agree that yesterday’s little difficulties will be investigated. If they can be overcome, the offensive will be re-launched. The men stay on the mountainside for eight days. When the skies clear on 18 June, the artillery opens up and the infantry attack again, with air support from Caproni bombers. That afternoon the clouds return. Next day, men of the 52nd Division hack their way to the summit of Ortigara with daggers and bayonets, capturing a thousand prisoners and several guns. They hang on until the 25th, resisting bombardments and counterattacks, until stormtroopers sweep them off with gas and flame-throwers. The Austrians repeat their success elsewhere on the line. On the evening of the 29th, Mambretti orders a withdrawal to the original positions. The Italians have taken at least 25,000 casualties over the 19 days of the battle, on a front of three kilometres, for no gains whatever.

  A captain in the Alpini, Paolo Monelli, recalled that when the last enemy bombardment stopped,

  … a vast silence spreads … Then groans from the wounded. Then silence once more. And the mountain is infinitely taciturn, like a dead world, with its snowfields soiled, the shell-craters, the burnt pines. But the breath of battle wafts over all – a stench of excrement and dead bodies.

  The Supreme Command blurred the scale of the disaster, calling in favours from journalists to help conceal the casualties and withholding an internal report from the government. Despite privately admitting that it had been a ‘proper fiasco’, Cadorna’s analysis was predictably coarse. The infantry, he complained, did not attack as they should have done, they had no faith, they were indecisive, they lacked ‘dash’, the famous slancio.

  This same infantry would supply the battle’s most durable legacy, in the form of trench songs:

  Battalion of all the dead,

  We swear to save Italy …

  When the battalion goes back to the valley,

  there will be no soldiers left …

  At the end of the century, still an emblem of pointless carnage, Ortigara inspired a new anti-war song:

  My granddad went to Ortigara,

  Nineteen years old, in Alpino green …

  Source Notes

  TWENTY-ONE Into a Cauldron

  1 According to Cadorna: Cadorna [1921], 329.

  2 his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917: The relevant portion is excerpted in Lloyd George, 1422–5.

  3 Rodd reflected that it was a moment: ‘Cadorna need not have considered the obligation to return the guns as an insuperable obstacle, inasmuch as, if the Austrian defences had been successfully broken, the operations would obviously not have been arrested and the enemy man-power on the Western front would probably have been proportionately diminished.’ Rodd, chapter XIII, ‘Rome 1916–1917’.

  4 What has not been clear is the source of his conviction: In his exhaustive study of Lloyd George’s wartime premiership, John Grigg merely observes that his ‘thoughts turned to the idea of an offensive on the Italian front’ during December 1916. Grigg, 25.

  5 ‘indifference to military opinion’: Robertson, 203.

  6 well regarded by Victor Emanuel: Bosworth [1979], 265.

  7 four times more Allied guns per kilometre: Dalton, 29.

  8 during the Tenth Battle, the siege artillery: Dalton, 29.

  9 the ‘supreme Leader’: Rocca, 191.

  10 new recruits protested at the draft: Sema, vol. II, 70.

  11 ‘subversive elements’ might stir up discontent: Sema, vol. II, 70.

  12 ‘the gross misconduct of the Germans’: Secretary of State Lansing. Seymour [1935], 143.

  13 ‘hottempered and not easily soothed’: Lloyd George, vol. 4, chapter 61.

  14 ‘unjust and unrealistic’: Rothwell, 117.

  15 ‘imminent operations’. Boselli gave his word: Sema, vol. II, 101.

  16 ‘very slight progress’: Ojetti, 378.

  17 ‘fought well until their generals’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 30.

  18 the official bulletin will say otherwise: The Official Bulletin of the Supreme Command, 29 May 1917, 44.

  19 ‘battle leaves in the sensual man’: D’Annunzio [2002], 360.

  20 800 officers and men of the Puglie Brigade: Gatti [1997], 44.

  21 ‘They did not rebel’: Gatti [1997], 48.

  22 It might carry on like this for months: Gatti [1997], 48

  23 ‘He is perfectly calm, serene’: Gatti [1997], 76.

  24 The Supreme Command blurred the scale: De Simone, 178.

  25 ‘proper fiasco’: Cadorna [1967], 207.

  26 The infantry, he complained, did not attack: Gatti [1997]; ‘slancio’ is from Cadorna [1967], 206.

  27 a new anti-war song: ‘Mio nonno parti per l’Ortigara, / Dicianovenne, vestito da Alpino’, by Chiara Riondino. Text available at http://www.obiezione.it/antiwarsongs.html, accessed in May 2007.

  1 Explaining this harsh judgement, Robertson added: ‘For two years past he [Lloyd George] had repeatedly shown that he regarded British methods of making war as commonplace, costly, and ineffective.’ Perhaps it took a field marshal to overlook so grandly the chance that readers might share Lloyd George’s opinion.

  2 Given the pitch and roll of the gradients, the name ‘plateau’ is misleading (as it is for the ‘Asiago plateau’). Mountainous by British standards, the Bainsizza was almost a trackless wilderness – there were no proper roads and very few paths. And it was almost waterless.

  3 A full account of these surrenders did not appear until 1938. Even after their line was broken and they were encircled from the rear, the Italians had ‘fought well until their generals were killed and they were completely cut off’.

  4 Among the documented cases of a corps firing on its own men, the most notorious involved a company of the Salerno Brigade. On 1 July 1916, this company was caught in no-man’s land after repulsing an Austrian attack above the Isonzo. Pinned down by machine guns, more than 200 men were unable to move or be helped, even at night. After a couple of days, voices in the Italian front line shouted that the men should surrender to save themselves. When some of the survivors crawled towards enemy lines, the corps commander carried out to the letter Cadorna’s directive of September 1915, ordering machine-gun and artillery fire against the deserters.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mystical Sadism

  The power of punishment is to silence, not to

  confute.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–84)

  Summary Justice in Cadorna’s Army

  By July 1917, the Catanzaro Brigade was brittle with exhaustion. The southern peasants who made up the 141st and 142nd Infantry had fought on the Carso and the Asia
go plateau for two years, taking heavy casualties. Many men had not received a fortnight’s leave since the winter of 1915–16. Rations were bad and scanty. Bloody losses on Mount Hermada at the end of the Tenth Battle left the survivors depressed and desperate for rest.

  After more than forty days at the front, the brigade was relieved and sent to the village of Santa Maria la Longa, a logistics base of the Third Army. Word had it that the Catanzaro would be sent to Carnia or the Dolomites – mountain sectors, relatively quiet after the Carso. Instead, it was ordered back to Hermada after a few days. Furious muttering in the barracks tipped into open revolt, involving both regiments but centred on 6th Company of the 142nd Infantry. Shots were fired. The mutiny was contained with cavalry, armoured cars and light field artillery, despatched by Third Army headquarters. Even so, eleven men died, including two officers. A third officer had a lucky escape, for, according to one version of events, a band of rebels went to a nearby villa where they thought Gabriele D’Annunzio was staying, crying ‘Death to D’Annunzio!’ Luckily for himself, the poet was staying at a nearby airfield, preparing a bombing raid over Istria.

  Next day, 28 men were charged with rebellion and executed on the spot. Of these, 12 were chosen by lot from 6th Company. Another 123 were sent for court martial. It was not the brigade’s first clash with military justice, but it was by far the worst. Historians describe the episode at Santa Maria as the only real mutiny in the Italian army through out the war. D’Annunzio hurried back to witness the executions. The men were lined against a cemetery wall beside a field of maize, chanting a hymn or prayer. Nettles grew by the wall. ‘Sultry heat. Skylarks singing.’ Short, dark-skinned, the men come from Campania, Calabria, Puglia and Sicily. The poet looks away as their bodies slump to the ground. His notes include no emotional response, merely details after the event: ‘helmets, shreds of brain swarming with flies, and dried rivulets of blood’. Writing up the experience later, he addresses the dead men: ‘You are peasants. I know you by your hands. I know you by your way of planting your feet on the earth. I do not want to know if you were innocent or guilty. I know you were valiant, I know you were true.’ Like Major Randaccio, they are sublimated by extinction.

  D’Annunzio’s indifference to the men’s innocence or guilt was in Cadorna’s own spirit. What mattered was the deterrent effect. Other commanders-in-chief during the First World War shared this instrumental view of military justice. They, too, were angry when the penal code hindered the swift application of extreme measures, especially against deserters. What set Cadorna apart was his assumption that he was entitled to adapt the justice system to his convenience.

  The Supreme Command’s directives on discipline passed from severity to depravity. Cadorna’s first directive to the army, on 19 May 1915, was wholly concerned with discipline. Order, authority and obedience would be maintained with indestructible firmness. Unit commanders would be held responsible if they hesitated to apply ‘extreme measures of coercion and repression’. The implied threat of summary execution became explicit in a September directive. ‘The summary justice of the bullet’ awaited anyone who tried to surrender or retreat, instead of ‘taking the way of honour that leads to victory or death’. Whoever escaped this ‘salutary justice’ would face court martial, then execution in front of their comrades.

  Within a few months, Cadorna had the court-martial system in his sights. He openly deplored the courts’ reluctance to pass capital sentences, and called for maximum severity. The Justice Department at the Supreme Command followed up with a statement that proper courts martial should only be convened if they were sure to pass severe sentences. Otherwise, improvised tribunals in the field would suffice, with no requirement for a military magistrate to take part, and sentences that could not be appealed

  The crisis caused by Conrad’s attack in spring 1916 hardened Cadorna’s views still further. On 26 May, as the Austrians poured across the Asiago plateau, an infantry regiment was routed. When several hundred men failed to regroup, Cadorna urged the immediate execution of any soldier whose actions were ‘unworthy of an army that upholds the cult of military honour’, regardless of rank. The letter was given the widest circulation. When the missing men crept back to their position next day, the colonel commanding the regiment chose 12 members of the company by lot and had them shot for desertion. For this achievement he was mentioned in the daily bulletin – the first officer singled out for this honour. It was the first documented case of decimation, a punishment that became the dreadful emblem of Italian military justice. Historically, decimation was the Roman practice of killing every tenth member of a mutinous legion. When Cadorna revived the ancient term, he did not insist on this ratio. What mattered was the procedure of pulling names out of a helmet or knapsack, practically guaranteeing that innocent men would die. This, the most unacceptable element of decimation, was the one that Cadorna most prized. When the soldiers realised that they could be murdered randomly, regardless of their individual actions, if their unit offended their commanding officer, they would be terrified into complete obedience.

  This was Cadorna’s theory, presented with his usual candour in a letter to Salandra in January 1916, regretting that the military penal code did not authorise decimation to punish serious collective offences. After the mass desertions at the end of the Tenth Battle, he complained to Boselli that this punishment had been ‘irresponsibly’ deleted from the penal code. In fact, decimation had never been mentioned in the code. He took it on himself to authorise this ‘supreme act of repression’: a November 1916 directive stated that commanding officers had the duty to decimate guilty units. This caused a commotion that rippled as far as Rome; Cadorna wrote to Boselli on 20 November, protesting that all armies practised decimation. This was false. While the drawing of straws was not unknown in the French army, especially in putting down the 1917 mutinies, and may well have occurred in other armies as well, only in Italy did the commander-in-chief urge this punishment.

  1917 was the year of decimation. In March, nine men of the Ravenna Brigade were chosen for execution after their regiment protested over the cancellation of leave. More is known about this atrocity than most others because the brigade commander’s aide de camp (ADC) gave a statement to the commission of inquiry set up after Caporetto. Deployed on a notorious sector of the Carso, the brigade’s two regiments alternated their front-line tours with fatigue and labour duties in the rear. To keep up their spirits, the men were promised perks in the form of extra leave, which never materialised. When one of the regiments was ordered to relieve another unit elsewhere on the Carso, ‘there was a moment of discontent’ in one battalion, whose men had been drinking. The battalion commander informed the brigade headquarters ‘as a matter of duty, but more to offload the responsibility’. The general commanding the Ravenna Brigade hurried to the battalion barracks. ‘We found the men a bit annoyed, tired, and almost all in dreadful physical condition, officers included.’

  The CO and his ADC let the men air their grievances. For the most part they were amenable to reason, but a few shots were fired in the air. This prompted the ADC to telephone division HQ, which despatched ‘lots of carabinieri’. While the men calmed down and set off for their new posting, Division HQ sent staff officers to the spot and informed the corps commander, who telephoned the brigade ADC and thundered that the barracks should be burned to the ground and the offenders shot. The ADC tried to assure him that order had already been restored.

  The divisional CO now got involved, presumably to cover himself vis- à-vis the corps commander. By the time he reached the barracks, they were empty; it was late at night and raining hard. The brigade CO reported that everything was in order and the troops were on their way to their new posting. ‘How many did you shoot?’ asked the divisional CO. ‘None,’ came the answer. ‘That’s bad, very bad!’ exclaimed the divisional CO. Then the carabinieri found two soldiers asleep in the barracks. They had no idea that their company had left, nobody had woken them. The brigade CO told
the carabinieri to put the men up against a wall and shoot them. One of the soldiers howled so desperately (‘What have I done to make you shoot me? I’ve got seven children!’) that the carabinieri hesitated. The divisional CO spoke up: ‘Let us be done with this jabbering. Shoot them at once. Orders are orders.’

  The brigade CO was relieved the following day. The corps commander ordered 20 soldiers to be picked by lot from the most rebellious company. Five of these men were selected for execution. This process presumably doubled the agony of those compelled to take part, and therefore also – in the corps commander’s view – the salutary deterrent effect. The firing squad shook so badly that six volleys were needed to finish the job. The ADC told the incoming brigade CO that the measures taken ‘seemed a little exaggerated’, and had shattered the men’s morale. ‘The soldiers trembled at the mere sight of me.’

  A fortnight later the Ravenna Brigade was transferred to the middle Isonzo, near Gorizia. To his astonishment, the ADC was called in to divisional HQ along with his new CO and told that he would be a member in a court martial of nine men involved in the rebellion. (‘What!, I thought, won’t you let it drop?’) Before the court martial convened, the corps commander urged severity. The brigade commander’s reaction was terse: ‘That’s easily said. We each of us have a conscience.’ Charged with reluctance (not refusal) to take up their new position, the men could not defend themselves because the court martial required no proof either way. According to the ADC, ‘nothing was established’. The prosecution called no witnesses. One defendant was a corporal who had fought in Libya, volunteered in 1915, and already been acquitted on similar charges over a different episode. His bearing impressed the court, which nonetheless sentenced him to death along with three infantrymen. The others were given ten years in prison. Refusing a blindfold, the corporal urged the firing squad to ‘Aim at the breast, and always serve your country. Long live Italy!’ The brigade commander muttered in distress that he should have been promoted to colonel, not shot as a criminal.