The difference was that Germany and Hungary had lost the war. Uniquely among the winning states, political life in Italy perpetuated the prewar and wartime divisions. The former warmongers howled against Wilson and wept over Fiume, while the former neutralists were branded as ‘Caporettists’, collaborating in their country’s humiliation. This suited the radical nationalist mindset which expected betrayal at the hands of bullying, ungrateful Allies. D’Annunzio had warned about the peril of a ‘mutilated victory’ as early as 24 October, when the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was scarcely under way. His grisly metaphor became a rallying cry.
In truth, victory was mutilated by Italy’s own leaders. Twenty years later, from his voluntary exile in New York, the journalist Giuseppe Borgese looked back in near disbelief at the ‘unprecedented miracle of psychopathic alchemy’ that had been performed at the end of the war. ‘Italy, or at least the intellectual and political élite to which an evil destiny had entrusted Italy, had transubstantiated a victory into a disaster. The nation, masochism-stricken, exulted in frustration.’ This enduring sense of bitterness, betrayal and loss was an essential ingredient in the rise of Mussolini and his Blackshirts.
After the Second World War, Italy lost everything to the east of Gorizia and south of Trieste. The Julian Alps, the Isonzo valley, Istria, Fiume, Zara: all were transferred to Communist Yugoslavia. The new border bisects the old battlefields on the Carso. Mount San Michele stayed in Italy, Monte Santo went to Yugoslavia, and they shared Mount Sabotino. The monumental ossuaries that Mussolini built near the Isonzo to honour the remains of fallen warriors now stand at Italy’s outermost limit, within the sliver of land that Luigi Cadorna conquered in the first year of Italy’s last war of independence.
The final demarcation around Trieste was agreed in 1954, almost 90 years after Raffaele Cadorna led the Italian V Corps in its race to the Isonzo. It had taken a century to work out a durable border settlement. Even then, the collision between nationalist fantasy and ethnic reality was only cut short by Italy’s wholesale defeat and occupation in 1945. Pressure amounting to terror then drove 200,000–300,000 Italians out of Yugoslavia, across the Cold War frontier. The refugees’ plight was made doubly bitter by their near-invisibility; when Tito’s self-management reforms turned Yugoslavia into the West’s favourite Communist state and tourists flocked to Dalmatia, nobody much cared to hear about the Italian victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Only since May 2004, when Slovenia became the first former Yugoslav republic to join the European Union, has it been possible to see the sharp angles of the Isonzo valley as so many sutures, stitching the borderlands together.
Source Notes
TWENTY-SEVEN From Victory to Disaster
1 ‘There are things awaiting us’: Wilson, vol. 53, 598.
2 ‘to produce a plan of permanent peace’: Seymour [1951].
3 a snippet from their session on 13 May: Mantoux, vol. II, 56.
4 ‘the crushing weight’: Huddleston, 103.
5 ‘a new international morality’: Wilson quoted by Bonsal, 103.
6 ‘obliging, courteous and impossible’: Bonsal, 100.
7 ‘all things to all men, very Italian’: MacMillan, 298.
8 ‘very hawklike, ferocious’: Seymour [1965], 273.
9 the government stopped treating: Mamatey, 359–60.
10 one of the greatest that history: Orlando [1923], 268.
11 A fortnight later, he told: Orlando [1923], 276–7.
12 ‘has revealed a power of action’: Orlando [1923], 331.
13 ‘militarily useless and dangerous’: This was Cadorna’s judgement, though not his alone. Mack Smith [1978], 215.
14 ‘war veterans, conspirators’: Colapietra, 273.
15 ‘that unmistakable voice’: Borgese, 152–3.
16 reversed its attitude to the League: Mack Smith [1978], 223–6.
17 ‘the first act of organised’: O’Brien, [2004] 28, citing Mimmo Franzinelli, ed., Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003).
18 silent in all the languages he spoke: Cervone, 260.
19 Orlando, he wrote acidly: Sforza [1966], 162,
20 ‘never was a foreign minister’: Sforza [1944], 48.
21 ‘unparliamentary language’: Wickham Steed, quoted by Kernek.
22 Sonnino, on the other hand, wanted: Albrecht-Carrié [1950], 123.
23 no chance to address the waiting crowds: Albrecht-Carrié [1938], 83–4.
24 ‘how far he could disappoint’: Wilson, vol. 3. 53, 697.
25 ‘disastrous concession’: Bonsal, 104. See also Nicolson, 170.
26 ‘insufficient study’: Seymour [1928], vol. 4, 450 ff.
27 ‘stench of peace’: Cicchino & Olivo, 282.
28 ‘that mishmash of southern Slavs’: MacMillan, 304.
29 ‘acute starvation’: Hoover.
30 officials still obstructed American aid: Hoover, 104.
31 ‘that most Italian city’: Orlando [1923], 339.
32 ‘not very important’: Bonsal, 247.
33 the King urged Orlando: Burgwyn, 274.
34 ‘100,000 foreigners’: Mantoux, vol. I, 277, 279.
35 Sonnino said: Mantoux, vol. I, 285–6, 288–9.
36 he would abandon the Conference: Lansing [1922].
37 suggested that provisional acceptance: Mantoux, vol. I, 290–1, 293–5.
38 ‘moment of agitation will be followed’: Mantoux, vol. I, 329.
39 ‘cast doubt’: Mantoux, vol. I, 358.
40 ‘white with anger’: Hoover, 206.
41 the old man pulled out a list: Sforza [1944].
42 ‘They always believe that we’: Mantoux, entry for 2 May 1919.
43 ‘catastrophe’: Mantoux, vol. I, 286.
44 ‘they will soon come back’: Mantoux, vol. I, 469.
45 ‘a compensation for the enormous’: Slovene–Italian Relations 1880–1956, 126.
46 think that Wilson sympathised: Lansing [1922], 228.
47 some Italians from Fiume, brought to Paris: Zivojinovic, 269.
48 a spontaneous hypocrite who: Orlando [1960], 353.
49 The war had cost 148 billion lire: Information in this footnote comes from Giuliano Procacci; Schindler; Toniolo; Zamagni, 210 ff.
50 ‘At the very outset we shall have followed’: Wilson, vol. 57, 271.
51 ‘It seems to the Italians’: On 13 May. Mantoux, vol. II, 54.
52 ‘self-determination is applicable’: Bonsal, 97.
53 Wilson sought to renew American faith: I owe this insight to Kernek.
54 It was hopeless: Seymour [1965], 323; Mantoux, vol. II; Sonnino, 338.
55 he withdrew from Albania: Lederer, 290–1.
56 enjoyed deploring the Italians: Mantoux, vol. II, 571.
57 ‘Yugoslavs, clericals and socialists’: Canavero, 18–19.
58 ‘were treated like conquered provinces’: Mowrer, 351.
59 ‘the new enemy that stabs’: Hametz, 22.
60 ‘The abolition of personal rights’: Quotation and information from Salvemini [1934].
61 ‘attempted to realise a programme’: Slovene–Italian Relations 1880–1956, 135.
62 ‘atmosphere of war’: a ‘Fascist journalist’ in Corriere della Sera, 4 April 1931, as quoted by Salvemini [1934], 20.
63 ‘No Italian who remains’: Salvemini [1934], 19.
64 killed 689,000 Italian soldiers: Schindler. This includes the estimated 100,000 Italians who died in prisoner of war camps. (Procacci [2000], 78.) Other statistics are from Schindler; Bosworth [2007], 164.
65 perpetuated the prewar and wartime divisions: Giuliano Procacci, 237.
66 victory was mutilated by Italy’s own leaders: Pieri [1965], 199.
67 ‘unprecedented miracle of psychopathic’: Borgese, 159.
68 drove 200,000–300,000 Italians: Slovene–Italian Relations 1880–1956, 159.
1 The Quarnero is the bay between Istria and northern Dalmatia.
> 2 Italy, with a population of 35 million, lost 689,000 soldiers in the war; Great Britain, with 46 million, lost 662,000 (plus another 140,000 missing).
3 The war had cost 148 billion lire, a sum equivalent, as John Schindler points out, to twice the Italian governments’ total expenditures from 1861 to 1913. Italy was the only belligerent that did not increase tax levels during the war; this led to a huge public budget deficit. Foreign debt increased eightfold between 1916 and 1919 while government spending soared – as did inflation, after the relaxation of wartime price controls. Having prospered by the often corrupt allocation of wartime contracts, the northern industrialists had no interest in seeing a more honest system introduced.
4 Meeting on the 26th, the Big Three enjoyed deploring the Italians for one last time: ‘WILSON: The truth is that Italy went to the highest bidder. LLOYD GEORGE: That is a harsh thing to say; but I fear there is some truth in it. WILSON: During this conference, Italy had no interest in anything that did not directly affect her … LLOYD GEORGE: I went through the entire war and, unfortunately, I always saw Italy trying to do as little as possible.’ Etc.
TWENTY-EIGHT
End of the Line
everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound
WALLACE STEVENS
Looking south from the ski-lift at the head of the Isonzo valley, after summer storms, a striped tower glimmers in the farthest distance. It is the power-station at Monfalcone, more than 60 kilometres away, across a panorama of peaks and ridges; from this angle, the entire Isonzo front can be framed on the cover of a book.
The buzz of people fades when you take the path to Rombon, winding around boulders, through hollows filled with snow, across limestone amphitheatres. At this height the light is ultramarine, the air tingles. Your own breathing and the crunch of pebbles are the only sounds. Except for strands of rusty wire poking over the path, there is very little detritus. After the war, communities along the old front earned money by retrieving military scrap and human remains from the mountains. Corpses fetched 10 lire each, and 10 kilos of barbed wire sold for 1 lire. Steel, cast iron, brass and copper were more lucrative but harder to find. On the higher battlefields, foragers camped in old tunnels and dug-outs during the summer. Farmers dug up animal carcasses to sell the bones, fuelled their stoves with the stocks of old rifles, and sold the breeches and barrels. Today’s foragers scour the hillsides for memorabilia. It is a risky pastime: someone dies every year from exploding ordnance.
A couple of hours’ walking and scrambling get you to the top of Rombon, an airy field of boulders, halfway between the sky and the valley. Faint Habsburg trenches lead down towards the spur called Cukla, which overlooks Bovec, formerly Flitsch. The Isonzo is a silver line, nearly 2,000 metres below. The trenches are grooves in the rubble, more like a natural feature than man-made defences. Another hundred years will smooth these wrinkles away.
You get to Čukla by clambering down a rocky cleft, then running the scree at its base. Your boots turn up cartridge cases and bits of shell casing. Looking back, it is obvious why the Italians never took the summit. The path down to Bovec zigzags over the open hillside, then on mule tracks through woods that cloak the lower slopes. It is half an hour’s drive to Kobarid, formerly Caporetto, where the valley opens out. Kobarid is recognisably the same town that changed hands so suddenly on 24 October 1917. The south-eastern skyline is dominated by the peak of Krn, soaring like a shark’s fin.
A mule track loops up to Krn from a corrie above the valley floor. The route is popular with hikers; a hostel below the summit does a brisk trade in bean soup and beer. The summit is ten minutes away, a turret pointing at the Julian Alps. The onward path to Mount Mrzli passes a plaque to the handful of Yugoslav partisans – communist-led guerrilla forces – who died here in the Second World War. There is no plaque to the thousands of First World War dead; for more than seventy years, the nations that fought Italy from 1915 to 1918 did not care to recall the Great War. As well as the pain of defeat, there was embarrassment for the states that emerged from Austria-Hungary: their peoples had died defending the empire. The duty of remembrance fell to veterans, penning memoirs that burn with resentment at the official amnesia. After these states became Communist, they had even less incentive to examine their role as mainstays of the dynastic rule.
Matters only changed after the end of the Cold War. For Europe’s ‘new democracies’, trying to recover their pre-fascist, pre-communist history, the imperial cause is no longer awkward. On the contrary, a mild Habsburg nostalgia pervades the area from Trieste to Vienna and Prague, flattered by tourist-board posters of art nouveau cafés and rediscovered statues of Franz Josef’s beautiful empress. New monuments have been added to the Habsburg cemeteries, paying respect where it is due, yet the polished marble facets look odd amid the mossy turf and lichen-covered crosses. These places remind us that states, too, have their life-span.
The information on the plaques – name, corps, rank and date of death in German (‘the language of the army, in death as in life’) – proves that the men came from all corners of the empire. ‘What the state failed to achieve in time of peace became a reality in these war cemeteries. Here they all are, united by death in an indissoluble brotherhood.’ The mystery of obedience hangs in the air.
The Isonzo has become a recreational river. Its turquoise waters are flecked with kayaks in summer; hikers throng the paths, and the cliffs are hung with climbers’ ropes. The tree cover is thick on Mount Mrzli, above Tolmin; the stanchions of wartime cableways rot in the shade, sinking into the leaf mould. The summit is still jagged from Italian shellfire. Overhead, paragliders ride the thermals, unhurried; someone tells us they are Czechs, holding a competition. If their great- grandfathers could revisit the front, the greenery would amaze them. In their time, the tree line was lower and the grass much thinner. Even so, the grim beauty of the front made a deep impression on many of the troops, as their diaries show. Even in the worst situations, soldiers caught the scent of thyme high on the limestone ridges; the sight of comrades dying did not blot out the last patches of snow gleaming blue in the moonlight, or the constellations wheeling overhead. The ‘indescribable joy’ of battle that filled young Ferruccio Fabbrovich in June 1916 was a real thing, and it was felt more readily in the mountains. What one veteran called the ‘exhilaration of extreme situations’ could reach a pitch of ecstasy when vistas opened at your feet. The Austrian troops felt it when they went out of the line, marching to the edge of the Carso, and saw the Adriatic Sea below, azure to the horizon.
While soldiers in other theatres experienced this sensuous, heightened awareness of the natural world, it may have been more widespread on the Italian front. The Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote a story, ‘The Blackbird’, about his service in the Tyrol.
… on every one of those nights I poked my head over the edge of the trench many times … I saw the Brenta mountains light blue, as if formed of stiff- pleated glass, silhouetted … the sky stayed blue all night … sometimes I could stand it no longer, and giddy with joy and longing, I crept out for a little nightcrawl around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees… It is as if the fear of one’s demise, which evidently lies on top of man forever like a stone, were suddenly rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.
This ‘unaccountable inner freedom’ enlivens much Italian literature about the war, offsetting the documentary element, the chronicling of unprecedented torment. Italian historians sometimes regret that their writers produced no classics to rank beside Jünger, Barbusse, Remarque or Hemingway. What sets their books apart is perhaps an inability to sustain the despair. Excitement keeps breaking through – not so much the Homeric bloodlust of Jünger, though this is present, as a sense of boyish adventure within an enterprise that is felt as essentially worthwhile, whatever its horrors. When the aged Emilio Lussu
saw the fine film of his autobiographical novel, A Year on the Plateau, one of the best books about the Italian front, he objected that it was too grim. ‘That’s not all there is to war,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we even sang, joked and dreamed our dreams.’
Consider Eugenio Montale, Italy’s greatest modern poet, stationed in the spectacular valley of Vallarsa in the Trentino, linking Mount Pasubio to the valley of the Adige. Today it is a green chasm with a narrow road unspooling along the northern side, plunging through tunnels and propped on stilts. Untouched by political passion, the young Montale felt uncomfortable in uniform, like ‘an outcast’. The nearest settlement was a hamlet called Valmorbia. The valley sides were strewn with corpses, dead mules, slews of rock and mud, spilled munitions. Night transformed the brutal scene; Montale lay in the entrance of a cave, listening to the river. As the moon rose and sank, the valley seemed to set sail. Snuffling sounds and an acrid smell revealed the proximity of wolves. He turned this memory into a short poem, the only one he ever published about the front. Here is the last stanza:
The lucid nights all through were dawn
and brought wolves to my cavern.
Valmorbia – a name – and now in wan
remembrance, a land unknown to dusk.
Why does this feel patriotic when it dwells on a private moment, remote as a fairy-tale? Perhaps because the poet’s survival enacts Italy’s own, after the ravening threat of Caporetto.
The White War Page 52