The bombardment got under way in the first week of August. By the middle of the month, it was in full swing. The gunners had learned how to register on their targets, and the effect along the 12-kilometre Bainsizza front was devastating. Italian pilots controlled the sky, and their raids added to the Austrian sense that there was no protection to be had. From Tolmein to the sea, the Habsburg lines and rear positions were shrouded in smoke and fire, roaring day and night with shellbursts. Hermada was pounded from floating batteries, fixed on rafts near the mouth of the Isonzo.
Zero hour was 05:30 on the 19th. The infantry attacked along the whole front. On the Carso, the Third Army dented the Austrian lines in three places. The biggest advance was at the hamlet of Selo, long since pulverised, several kilometres inland. The Hermada massif was still impregnable. A push up the Vipacco valley, between the Carso and Gorizia, gained some ground before Habsburg counter-attacks forced the Italians back to their starting point.
So far, so familiar. Above Gorizia, however, something novel was happening; the Second Army had stormed across the Isonzo and made dramatic progress on the Bainsizza, where Boroević’s skeleton force was overwhelmed. Capello was exultant: ‘They do not know what a torrent of men I am unleashing.’ Four corps were poised to exploit the opening. He realised the troops might soon run short of rations, water and even munitions; however, they were ordered to press ahead regardless. For several days the Italians made dream-like progress across the Bainsizza, rolling forward for two, three, four, five kilometres, smashing 45 Austrian battalions as they went, capturing dozens of guns and 11,000 prisoners. Italy had seen nothing like this. Was it too good to be true? Colonel Gatti, already worried that the whole offensive was unnecessary, was perplexed. Why did the Austrians not bring up their reserves? If they weren’t here, where were they? Could it be that they had none? What else were they planning …?
The Italians did not know that the Emperor Karl had visited Boroević’s headquarters in Postojna, half way to Ljubljana, on 22 August. It was, they agreed, a moment of crisis. Long-range fire blocked their supply routes to the front; the troops were running short of munitions. The Bainsizza was untenable, and Karl prevailed on his general to fall back. Only the sovereign could have wrung this compromise from ‘the lion of the Isonzo’. Under imperial pressure, Boroević utilised the elastic defence, or defence in depth. It was risky; a tactical withdrawal from the Bainsizza would lengthen the front around an Italian salient and boost enemy morale. On the other hand, given the Austrians’ excellent defensive record, it should be possible to block the enemy when they reached the eastern limit of the plateau. As an extra inducement to flexibility, the Emperor reportedly pledged that the next operation on the Isonzo would be an Austrian offensive out of the Tolmein bridgehead. This promise revitalised Boroevic´ and his staff; for the prospect of endless defence, with no chance of turning the tables, had a peculiar effect even on the hardiest soldiers. It was like watching their own death draw closer day by day. The stimulus to resist, in this condition, might at any moment flip into its opposite: a doomed fatalism, with a collapse of will. Karl’s army on the Isonzo was poised on a razor’s edge; the discussion at Postojna shows that he realised this. Before dawn on the 24th, the 12 Austrian regiments on the Bainsizza silently pulled back to the eastern edge of the plateau, with their guns. Secrecy was maintained, and a few hours later the weary Austrians had the satisfaction of seeing the Italian artillery hammer their empty positions.
From then on, the Italians fulfilled Boroević’s hopes to the letter. Capello’s divisions washed across the plateau, and subsided there. The Supreme Command had not prepared for such progress. The strategic reserves were centred on the front, ready to move wherever an opportunity arose. This was mistaken, as a breakthrough was much less likely south of Gorizia than north of it. As a result, the Second Army could not exploit the Austrian withdrawal. With the artillery toiling along rough tracks far behind, the infantry’s scope for manoeuvre was limited. Instead of reinforcing his forward units, Capello launched several half-baked sorties towards Tolmein, which the Austrians swatted back. The flanking movement to the south, towards Monte Santo and San Gabriele, never transpired: the Austrians’ cordon around the plateau contained it.
The pull-back also affected the defence behind Gorizia. Capello’s assault on Monte Santo had groped upwards into the blaze of shellfire crowning the hill. Since the Italians captured it in May, only to lose it again, the Marian shrine on the summit had been razed. The imminent Italian occupation of the Bainsizza would expose another of Monte Santo’s flanks, rendering it indefensible. Accordingly, the last Habsburg defenders quietly pulled back from their foxholes in the rubble, down the eastern flank of the mountain, and across the narrow pass to Mount San Gabriele. The nearest Italian regiment was only 40 metres from the ruins; when its colonel realised what had happened, he led his men to the summit. Monte Santo was Italian, once and for all.1
The 24th was a great day, and word of the army’s achievements flashed to Rome. Ambassador Rodd telegraphed Lloyd George that the offensive might end in ‘a complete smashing of the Austrian army’. The Prime Minister was jubilant; Cadorna’s breakthrough (for such it seemed) confirmed his earlier hunch about the Italians. On the 26th, he re-launched his scheme to help them ‘convert the Austrian retreat into a rout’, as he put it. Again, General Robertson and the top brass dug in. By the time London and Paris agreed how many guns to send Cadorna, the Italians had stalled.
For a few days, however, anything seemed possible. Gatti joined in the acclaim for Cadorna: he alone had wanted the battle, and he ‘has held everything together with his iron fist’. By the 28th, with the Bainsizza more like a cul-de-sac than a gateway, doubts were creeping back. Cadorna suspended operations on the plateau. The capture of Monte Santo was a spectacular success with great propaganda benefits, but it did not alter the strategic balance. Loyal as ever to the Supreme Command, General Delmé-Radcliffe blamed the ‘extraordinary difficulty of the ground and the lack of roads’.
The Carso was quiescent. The Third Army had scaled down its operations around the 23rd, releasing Austrian forces for transfer to San Gabriele, which was now the major obstacle between the Bainsizza and the Carso. If the Italians took it, they should quickly reduce the remaining Austrian strongholds north of the Vipacco valley, break through towards Laibach and outflank Hermada. By the same token, if the Austrians held on to it, the advance on the Bainsizza would have little meaning.
After the exhilarating advance over the Bainsizza, the attack on San Gabriele brought a reversion to type. Compact blocks of infantry were sent up mountainsides, into field-gun and machine-gun fire, proving yet again that weight of numbers could not substitute for planning and preparation. One brigade after another assaulted San Gabriele for more than a fortnight. The hilltop caverns were impregnable, even against the 420-millimetre batteries which made San Gabriele look like a volcano, spewing fire and rock. The fire was so intense that the mountain lost 10 metres in altitude during the battle. Teams of Italian arditi – newly formed shock troops – came close to seizing the summit. At one point, Boroevic´ believed it could not be held.
On 19 September, Cadorna halted the battle and ordered all units onto the defensive. The Italians had taken 166,000 casualties, including 40,000 dead, of whom 25,000 died on San Gabriele for trivial gains. Some 400 of the 600 battalions involved in the battle had lost one-half to two-thirds of their strength. Cadorna’s and Capello’s actions in the Eleventh Battle were so careless and self-destructive that historians have struggled to account for them. In truth, the two men acted fully in character. Cadorna’s battle plans always tended to incoherence, his command often slackened fatally in the course of offensives, and he had never been able to control Capello (except by banishing him from the Isonzo). Capello’s disobedience at critical moments was equally familiar.
The Eleventh Battle was a technical victory that felt like defeat. A close bystander who grasped the enormity of this failure
without identifying its source (his mind refused to follow the evidence) was Colonel Gatti, the official historian at the Supreme Command. As the corpses piled up on San Gabriele, he wrote despairingly in his diary: ‘I feel something collapsing inside me; I shall not be able to endure this war, none of us will; it is too gigantic, truly limitless, it will crush us all.’ He found solace in the men’s morale, which was holding up well, he thought. Yet he picked up a sense that their stamina was linked to a mysterious expectation that this would be the final battle. They were making a last colossal effort. What will happen, he mused, when they see that this is not the end?
Proportionately, Boroević’s losses – at around 140,000 men – were even heavier, and could not be made good. The next Italian thrust would likely smash the line between Gorizia and the sea. This probability was not lost on Austria’s ally. Ultimately, the strategic significance of the Eleventh Battle is that it forced Germany to pay urgent attention to the Italian front for the first time. The German Supreme Command realised that further loss of ground would lead to the loss of Trieste, which held the key to Austria’s economic independence. ‘Trieste must therefore be saved, with German help if not otherwise.’
One of the men ferrying cartridges up San Gabriele was Private Antonio Pardi of the 247th Infantry: slogging uphill with a crate on his back, clambering over the dead, hunching under continual explosions, dumping his crate by the forward positions and half running, half sliding down again in a panic, grabbing at corpses to keep his balance, arriving at the bottom ‘clotted with filth, blood and mud’. Pardi set down his memories fifty years after the event, ‘not out of love for a just and terrible war’, but so that later generations could know what it had been like. ‘Death was so certain that you almost stopped thinking how to avoid it, yet every passing second was another second of life.’ This obliquely answers Gatti’s question: when the soldiers realised this battle was not the last, they would carry on, living for the next second of life.
Source Notes
TWENTY-THREE Another Second of Life
1 ‘grievously impressed’: Martini, 941.
2 ‘They do not know what a torrent’: Gatti [1997], 134.
3 the Emperor reportedly pledged that the next operation: Weber, 234.
4 ‘has held everything together’: Gatti [1997], 159.
5 Italians had taken 166,000 casualties: De Simone, 128.
6 ‘I feel something collapsing inside me’: Gatti [1997], 161.
7 What will happen, he mused, when: Gatti [1997], 159.
8 ‘Trieste must therefore be saved’: Hindenburg, 285.
9 ‘not out of love for a just and terrible war’: Faldella, 74, 73.
1 The great conductor Arturo Toscanini, who happened to be visiting the front, formed a military band and climbed to the top of Monte Santo the day after its liberation. ‘We played in the Austrians’ faces and sang our national anthems,’ he wrote proudly to his wife. When General Capello awarded him the silver medal for valour at a ceremony in front of a bersaglieri brigade, the maestro was overcome by ‘violent emotion’ and ‘cried like a baby’.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Traitor of Carzano
Is this a tragedy or an operetta?
MAJOR CESARE FINZI (1917)
While the Eleventh Battle raged and waned beyond the Isonzo valley, something extraordinary happened 200 kilometres away, on a quiet sector of the front near the city of Trent.
The River Brenta curves tightly around the Asiago plateau before making for the plains and the Venetian lagoon. The northern part of its course – called the Sugana valley – passes below the plateau on one side (the heights of Ortigara) and the Dolomite foothills on the other. Here and there the valley broadens out, and the lower flanks are dotted with settlements. One of these is the unremarkable village of Carzano, surrounded by woods and vineyards, where the little River Maso flows to the Brenta.
As one of the easiest routes from the Veneto plains to the Tyrol, the Austrians should have fortified the Sugana valley. Instead they had strengthened the Asiago plateau. In summer 1915, the Italians penetrated the Sugana valley to within a dozen kilometres of Trent. Conrad’s Punishment Expedition pushed them back, before the counterattack in June 1916 regained some of the lost ground. The new front stabilised near Carzano.
This sector lay in the operational zone of Cadorna’s First Army, responsible for most of the Trentino front. Despite its strategic importance, it was generally quiet. Days passed without a shot fired; weeks passed without glimpsing the enemy. The soldiers manning the forward positions facing Carzano had no reason to expect anything unusual when, on a moonless night in July 1917, a Habsburg non- commissioned officer slipped through the wire and presented himself at a dug-out. The Italian officer who scrambled out of the dug-out looked in astonishment at the man calmly saluting him. True, he was unarmed and carried a sealed envelope, but he wore a fez, showing that he belonged to a Bosnian regiment. The fez had the same effect on Italians that the Scottish kilt had on Germans: it meant primeval savagery. How could a Bosnian intend anything except harm? When the Italian tried to take the envelope the other man refused, insisting it was for someone more senior. ‘Io essere parlamentario’, he repeated: it was bad Italian for ‘I have come to parley.’ Nonplussed, the officer blind folded the Bosnian and led him to the sector command. He turned out to be a Czech sergeant in the 5th Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment of Bosnia & Herzegovina.
His envelope made its way to the divisional chief of staff, who realised the documents were detailed plans of Habsburg defences around Carzano. There was a covering note signed by one ‘Paolino’: ‘We are ready to help you. If you accept, fire two 152-mm shells at the church tower in Carzano at noon, then shine a searchlight from Levre mountain at dusk. A junior officer will appear at midnight.’ The staff officers were extremely doubtful. They let the mysterious envoy return to the Habsburg line, and referred the matter to the Information Office at Sixth Army headquarters in Vicenza.
The head of information was Major Cesare Finzi, probably the only intelligence officer in the army who would not assume the contact was a trap. For he was part Hungarian, and understood the complex workings of nationality politics in the empire. The maps were authentic: Italian data proved it. If the Austrians were setting a trap, why had ‘Paolino’ asked for nothing more than another meeting? And if it was not a trap, what was it? He decided to take the bait. The signals were sent, the Czech sergeant arrived again, and Finzi proposed a nocturnal meeting in the apple orchards of no-man’s land. ‘Paolino’ turned out to be a Slovene lieutenant, interim commander of the 5th Battalion, who introduced himself as Dr Ljudevit Pivko. A bespectacled schoolmaster from Marburg (now Maribor), Pivko explained that the Slovenes and Italians should be allies against the empire. He wanted to ‘redeem’ Slovenia for the Slovenes, he said, just as the Italians wanted to redeem Trent and Trieste.
Finzi was intrigued. Everyone knew that the Slovenes were outstandingly loyal to the empire, like the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Inquisitive as well as cautious, he asks the other man to say more. Pivko complies, unburdening himself. ‘I used to think my fatherland and the empire were one and the same. No longer. Today I understand that we Slavs have nothing in common with the Germans. You do not know how the Austrians and Hungarians treat us; we are slaves, cannon fodder.’ He wants the Italians to achieve something important. The whole of Trentino is, he says, thinly defended. Breaking through the Sugana valley would lead straight westwards to the trophy of Trento itself. That triumph would, though, be short-lived unless the Italians attacked simultaneously from the west, chopping the Trentino salient in half.
He has discussed these ideas with a few sympathetic officers – Czechs and Bosnian Serbs. Not, however, with his men, who are good but simple. The Serbs, who hate the empire to a man, would support him; others – Muslims and Croats – would kill him if they thought he was plotting against the Emperor. Pivko’s sincerity shines through; Finzi trusts him, but can he convince
the higher levels? Only if he shows them a flow of accurate data from his Habsburg source. He tells Pivko that if he can feed him information about the situation and developments on his side of the line, while recruiting supporters among the battalion’s Serbs and Czechs, they can do something momentous.
After the meeting, Finzi is euphoric. The more he thinks about it, the greater the opportunity becomes in his mind. At their next meeting, Pivko brings two Czech officers, who gravely offer Finzi their services. It is a surreal situation. Pivko hands over a wad of documents: field orders, transfer lists, artillery dispositions. Finzi presses for details of troop numbers, dispositions and movements throughout Trentino; also on garrisons, communications, the traffic in and out of Trento railway station. Pivko agrees to procure all this, and they devise an elaborate code of signals: flares, machine-gun fire, coloured smoke trails by aeroplanes.
Something else has been on Finzi’s mind; it is important, but he does not know how to broach it. Italy’s goals in the war include the annexation of territory where Slovenes and other South Slavs (Yugoslavs) make up a majority of the population. As a Slovene nationalist, Pivko is bound to oppose Italy’s expansion around the Adriatic. By betraying the empire, he will support that project. Finzi cannot contain his curiosity; how does Pivko see this sensitive matter? In whispered discussions, they agree that their views on the best settlement on the eastern Adriatic coast are different rather than irreconcilable, and need not hamper their collaboration. This pragmatism seals the men’s mutual liking. Finzi is unusual among Italian officers in wanting to see the empire destroyed; this was not an Allied war aim at the time, still less an Italian policy.
The White War Page 38