The rejoicing was widespread and spontaneous. For many soldiers, the Battle of the Solstice cleansed the stain of Caporetto, and the name of the Piave has ever since evoked a glow of fulfilment, as smooth as the sound of its utterance, untouched by the horrors of the Isonzo front or the controversy that overshadowed Italy’s victory in November. Ferruccio Parri, a much-decorated veteran who became a leading antifascist, said at the end of his long life that the Battle of the Solstice was ‘the only proper national battle of which our country can truly be proud’.
For the Allies, two things were clear: the Italians were a fighting force again, and the Austro-Hungarian army was still dangerous: its morale had not collapsed and the soldiers were still loyal. The view inside Boroević’s army was different; to their eyes, the civilian system had let them down. They were still better soldiers than the Italians, but what could they do without food or munitions? The spectacle of his own men after the battle filled the genial Blašković with despair: ‘weary, dejected and starving, their tattered uniforms crusted with reddish dry clay. Their weapons alone gave them any likeness to soldiers, for otherwise they looked like beggars roaming from pillar to post.’ Gloom settled over the Austrian lines.
The failure of the Piave offensive made life even harder for the civilians under Austrian occupation.
Looking confidently ahead after Caporetto, the Habsburg high command had proposed that the postwar border between Austria and Italy should run along the River Tagliamento. Boroević mooted an even more vengeful settlement: the border should be pushed back to the line of the rivers Adige and Mincio, restoring all the Veneto to Austria, undoing the 1866 war of unification. By July 1918, these ambitions had gone up in smoke.
When Cadorna’s army retreated after Caporetto, most of the urban population packed its belongings: as many as 400,000 civilians fled across the Piave, including the state employees, landowners, lawyers and so forth. The exception was the clergy, for many priests were glad to see the return of Habsburg power. (Relations between the Vatican and the government in Rome, always difficult, had not recovered from the Pope’s condemnation of ‘useless slaughter’.) Beyond the Piave, these refugees were joined by a quarter of a million civilians from the new front-line areas – Venice, Padua, Treviso.
A much higher proportion of people in the villages and countryside stayed, and waited for the enemy. When the new front stabilised, the occupiers and the local civilians were roughly equal in number: about 800,000 of each. Except for 30,000 Slovenes around Gorizia and a few German-speaking pockets, the locals were Italian, while the occupiers came from all the lands of the Habsburg empire. The Central Powers were ill-prepared to take over the civil administration, and the territory came under military government led by Boroević, headquartered at Udine. The portion of territory under German control was ceded to the Austrians in March.
It was a martial regime. Railways, post and telegraph were subject to exclusive use by the military. Citizens needed a permit to move from one district to another. All Italian patriotic images were removed from public places and schools, and people were forced to celebrate the birthday of Empress Zita, charming emblem of Austrian–Italian unity. The military penal code was applied throughout the territory. There are no statistics for sentences passed by the courts martial; an Italian commission, set up after the war to investigate abuses under the occupation, concluded that death sentences were seldom passed. Exceptions included two civilians hanged for lighting lanterns at night. Their corpses were left on the gibbet for several days, to drive home the message that spies could expect no leniency.
Capital sentences were probably rare because the population was cooperative. Many people were not sorry to see the Austrians take control; they felt let down by the Italian army and tricked by the civilian authorities, which gave no warning or help in October 1917. Besides, communal memories of Habsburg rule before 1866 were not so bad. This attitude could not last. The first wave of plunder and pillage was followed by requisitions that stripped the population of almost everything edible. Livestock was confiscated in January. Vegetables, nuts, wine and oil were next to be seized, followed by the dry forage. All the manure was stolen. Despite these predations, and the benefit of a good local harvest, the occupiers could no longer feed themselves by February, when the requisitions extended to fabric, leather and other material. Household linen was taken in March; people could keep three sets of underwear, two pillow-slips, three sheets and three towels each. In at least one case, soldiers went from house to house, leaving people with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The loot was inventoried, in Habsburg style: the army took 95,000 sheets, 65,000 shirts, 39,000 items of underwear, 47,000 towels, 56,000 pillow-slips and 3,400 ‘unspecified items’.
The ‘Italian traitors’ were supposed to be left enough for their own needs. This did not happen, and by April severe malnutrition was common. Soldiers and civilians alike ate anything they lay their hands on – mice, acacia flowers, vineleaves, wild chicory from the hedgerows. Stray dogs and cats were skinned for the pot. Desperate mothers took their children as close to the front as they could get, hoping to beg food from kindly officers. By the end of the war, almost 10,000 civilians had starved to death. The situation was hardly better for the Slovene evacuees from the Isonzo valley who returned after the Twelfth Battle to find their homes ransacked and fields picked bare of anything that could be eaten or sold. The very landscape had altered. One woman, returning to her village near Tolmein, recorded the desolation:
… the mountains were bare and the trees broken and destroyed by shells, it was sad to see them. There was a soldiers’ cemetery at the foot of Mount Mrzli, reaching as far as the eye could see, grave after grave, each marked with a little wooden cross and covered with moss and ivy. Wherever I looked in the valley all I could see were graves.
Boroević knew the brutal treatment of civilians was counterproductive. People hid whatever they could, depriving his front-line troops of victuals. He opened public kitchens, but his administration lacked the resources and, at lower levels, the will to ensure that people did not starve. Despite his efforts to provide a basic health service, more than 12,500 civilians perished for lack of medical care. Even the censorship office was too short-staffed to be much use, though it caught a woman from Pordenone who described the occupying army, in a letter, as ‘a mass of famished barbarians who have come to Italy to steal everything’.
For Italian nationalists safe on the other side of the Piave, the multiple identity of the occupying force proved its wickedness. One journalist wrote of ‘heterogeneous masses’ of ‘Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, even the lurid Turks set foot on that sacred ground’. She meant the befezzed troops from Bosnia and Herzegovina, many of them Muslim by confession. One of these ‘lurid Turks’ was Pero Blašković who, though not a Muslim, wore the fez as the emblem of his beloved regiment. Compared to his native land, Friuli and the Veneto were highly developed, and the handsome towns, rich countryside and dignified people impressed him. He enthused about the fine straight edges of the fields, with wheat and rice, vineyards and mulberry groves, separated by tidy ditches, neat as a chessboard. Even the military graveyard at Redipuglia, near Gorizia, was evidence of ‘the high level of Italian culture’. The Austrians were ‘literally starving’ when they arrived in this ‘blessed land’; even so, Blašković deplored the scale of pillage, with everyone ‘from the commanding officers to the chauffeurs’ stealing whatever could be grabbed, ripped out or dismantled. Everything that could be melted down for munitions, from factory plant to church bells, was sent to Austria and Germany.
Boroević’s regime could not seal the area against Italian propaganda,1 which naturally portrayed the invasion as a primeval nightmare of rape and pillage, like the Germans in Belgium or – a local legend of mindless atrocity – the ancient Huns in Friuli (where Attila had sacked Aquileia in ad 452). Trench newspapers focused the soldiers’ minds on images of ‘the barbarian violating the women of Italy’, married women dis
honoured beside the corpses of their husbands, girls throwing themselves out of windows rather than submit. ‘Protect them, soldier of Italy, for if you give way, your wife too will be defiled.’ Postcards and posters conveyed the same frightful message, which had an added charge because Italian pro-war images of ‘Italia’ had from the start been ‘very erotic’, portrayed as ‘a young, soft, rather sad girl’.
Given this grisly propaganda, ordinary Italians would have been surprised to learn that their government refused to help civilians who wanted to leave the occupied territory. The Supreme Command argued that the local people were more useful at home: they obstructed Habsburg control, strengthened Italian claims to the territory, and provided camouflage for spies. Orlando concurred, and refused to repatriate Italians from the occupied territory, except in extreme need.
The real scale of sexual crime during the occupation will never be known. The postwar royal commission found that rape was widespread in the first few weeks and continued to the end. The victims often preferred to keep silent, deterred by shame and social stigma from admitting the crimes against them. There is evidence that ‘most rapes were carried out in the absolute certainty of impunity, above all when officers or NCOs took part’. In these conditions, Boroević’s personal honesty had little impact on lawlessness and corruption. Even the attitude of the pro-Habsburg clergy hardened over the summer. Occasional acts of sabotage led the administration to fear an uprising. Secret lists were prepared of people to seize as hostages. They were not needed: smouldering anger did not crystallise into active resistance, however hopeless things became, partly because people believed that time was on their side. In October, a foreign ministry official reported to Vienna that if the administration did not improve, 1919 would bring ‘an economic collapse that will swallow up human lives as well as our reputation’. Too late! Their reputation had already perished. Allied troops advancing beyond the Piave in early November found destitution, dereliction, ‘an air of utter emptiness … completely cleaned out of food’. Brutal, arrogant and predatory, the occupation did Rome the favour of destroying any trace of nostalgia in north-eastern Italy for Habsburg law and order. In the empire’s last year of existence, imperial rule finally became as bad as Italian nationalists said it had always been.
Civilian life under the occupation was hardly studied until the 1980s. The whole topic jarred too uncomfortably against the narrative of triumphal recovery. Patriotic historians were troubled by the lack of ‘heroic’ resistance, repelled by the webs of collaboration and profiteering, and perplexed by the postwar polemics between returnees and civilians who never left.
This lack of curiosity looks trivial, however, beside the oblivion that shrouded an even more sensitive subject until the 1990s. This was the official attitude to Italian prisoners of war in Austrian and German camps. The 300,000 men taken during the Twelfth Battle joined the 200,000 or more in camps across the empire. If these men had known that it was more dangerous to be taken prisoner than to serve on the front line, fewer of them would have welcomed their capture. For the Italian government, uniquely, refused to send food parcels to its prisoners of war. As a result, more than 100,000 of the 600,000 Italian prisoners died in captivity – a rate nine times worse than for Habsburg captives in Italy. Only 550 of these were officers, dying of tuberculosis or wounds; the remainder died directly or indirectly of cold and hunger.
Provision of food and other aid to prisoners had been accepted practice since the Central Powers announced in late 1914 that, due to the Allied blockade, they would no longer be responsible for feeding and clothing Allied prisoners of war. While Britain and France subsidised the aid to their captured soldiers, Italy refused to take such measures, or even, except in extreme cases, to allow the exchange of sick prisoners. Fearful that soldiers would desert en masse if they believed they would be safe in captivity, the government treated Italian POWs as cowards or defectors who should be punished. This unpublicised policy was bolstered by a propaganda campaign against prisoners of war. (D’Annunzio, dependably odious, branded them ‘sinners against the Fatherland, the Spirit, and Heaven’.) Charity subscriptions for captured soldiers were prohibited. As a concession, the Red Cross was permitted to take aid for officers only. Private packages were permitted, but few were sent – due to the penury in which many soldiers’ families lived – and even fewer arrived.
This heinous policy was proposed by the Supreme Command and supported by successive governments thanks above all to Sonnino, who insisted that, under international law, responsibility lay with the captors. The worst effects were felt after Caporetto, when the vast flood of prisoners strained the camp system in Austria and Germany beyond its limits. Over the terrible winter of 1917–18, hundreds of prisoners died every day. According to Carlo Salsa, an inmate in Theresienstadt camp, prisoners concealed the corpses in their barracks, so the dead men’s rations would keep arriving. The Red Cross appealed to the government in Rome, but nothing was done until summer 1918, when hard-tack rations were sent. They reached the camps in November, when the war was already over.
The Austro-Hungarian army in Italy shrank from 650,000 to 400,000 between July and October. Few of these men were combat casualties. Many deserted; others succumbed to the malaria that ravaged the coastal areas and the lower Piave, to dysentery or the so-called Spanish flu that appeared around Padua in July and spread eastwards. In their weakened condition, starving, with their uniforms in shreds, lacking boots and underclothes, they were prey to every illness. The average body weight in one division had sunk by August to 50 kilograms, less than 8 stones.
Despite blizzards of propaganda by Czech, Yugoslav, Polish and other separatist groups; half a million POWs returning from Russia, many of them newly politicised and loudly critical; extremely degrading conditions at the front, and the disappearance of any hope of victory – despite all this, the Habsburg army remained loyal. There were no mutinies on the Italian front until late October, just before the last battle; even these were limited to a few units. This testifies to the effectiveness of military discipline, the power of habit, the unthink ability of historic change, and the grip on soldiers’ minds of their immediate circumstances. Perhaps the anticipation of a final decisive Italian attack was another binding element.
The army’s endurance is more striking because the erosion of morale was unstoppable. A battalion commander on Mount Grappa explained the pressures on his men, in a stoical letter of 1 July:
We have been officially notified to expect that men of the [Allied] Czechoslovak brigade will dress in Austrian uniforms and attack our positions – this, when half our regiment is Czech. I won’t go into the miserable state of our position except to mention some key words: 8 degrees Centigrade, heat and light forbidden, no water, ice-cold food, no caves, no shelter etc. – repeated desertions, countless Italian propaganda leaflets, but no press reports of our own.
Far from producing counter-propaganda, the Austrian newspapers were part of the problem; Boroević warned that journalism about the ‘miserable internal state of Monarchy’ amounted to enemy propaganda. The Army High Command went further: the normal language in the newspapers was indistinguishable from enemy propaganda: namely, ‘self-determination’, ‘persecution’ and ‘demands of oppressed peoples’. Little could be done: the machinery of government was too decayed for censorship to be effective.
Increasingly, morale could only be raised by appealing to nationalist emotion, which begged the question of why the men should fight for the empire at all. A divisional commander on the Piave reported in mid-July that ‘mental and physical depression’ gripped his soldiers, ‘regardless of nationality, rank or intelligence’. Few men’s morale was proof against the combination of nationalist agitation at home, shortages on the front, and enemy propaganda. Desertions increased over the summer, usually to the interior. A staff officer, inspecting a corps in the Tenth Army in September, found no enthusiasm.
Most of the men are apathetic, but they will fulfil their duty brav
ely and unflaggingly … The longing for peace is widespread … Efforts of the company commanders to put heart into the ranks by patriotic instruction are unsuccessful largely because of news from the hinterland.
By July, many non-German regions of the empire were shearing away. Separatist goals were promoted by emerging leaders from Poland to Slovenia. Even token reference to the dynasty was often lacking at public rallies. The German ambassador estimated that two-thirds of people in Vienna believed the Allies would win the war. Morale at the front had been partly cordoned against this encroaching gloom, but there was now a feedback loop: troops demoralised by news from home would desert and spread news of disillusion at the front. Morale had depended on junior officers who by this stage were more likely than their men to sympathise with the nationalist arguments raging across the empire.
The 56 divisions now in Italy had a fighting strength of less than 37 divisions. In August, General Arz informed the German high command that the empire could only stay in the war until the end of the year; the army would then be needed to resolve ‘internal political questions’. On 8 August, the Allies took the initiative in France: following a French counter-offensive on the Marne, British forces broke through near Amiens. A string of victories brought the end of the war into sight. At the end of the month, Foch asked Diaz to support the operations in France by attacking across the Piave. Diaz refused: his army was not ready. Orlando agreed, but changed his mind by mid-September when it dawned that the Allied breach of the Hindenburg Line meant that German defeat was close. His impatience mounted along with Allied pressure, and Orlando pressed Diaz to plan an attack in early October, or by the end of October at the latest. Diaz found Orlando’s advice confusing and unreliable. He insisted that it would be reckless to attack in the near future. Senior commanders were told to expect the final push in spring 1919.
The White War Page 47