The Lost Prince (35 page)
Eleanor never faltered in her confidence in his safe return. Once, she wrote, “It will be hard for you, dear Arnauld, but I know, know as surely
as I know any part of life, that you will return to St. Gregory’s and to your friends here.”
Reading these words seemed to transfer that confidence to him, as for the remainder of the first year of the war he never mentioned the dark thoughts again; in fact, he began to sound, at least in writing, positive and optimistic.
Then in 1915, when the Italians, wishing to better themselves by acquiring new territory, worked out a deal with the Allies—Winston Churchill would later call them “the whores of Europe”—and entered the war on the side of the English and French, Arnauld reflected, along with the Austrian sense of betrayal, a renewed gloom. “Imagine,” he wrote, “being enemies now with old friends with whom we have shared so much literature and culture over the centuries, and only months ago a beer.” And he noted that the opening of a whole new front in northern Italy, all around Trieste, put an entirely new strain on the railroads and gave him a demanding new challenge, pulling him deeper and deeper into the daily logistics, so that resigning his commission and returning to Boston, as he had planned, now seemed “a remote dream.”
That Arnauld had friends in Italy, as he had friends all over Europe; that he had visited Italy countless times as a young man; that he could walk the streets of Florence, Venice, Verona, and Rome nearly as well as the Ringstrasse, made this whole conflict absurd. As an officer in the Hapsburg army doing his part to make sure that supplies and munitions traveled speedily and efficiently along the railroads, he tried not to think about the possibility that the specific supplies and munitions he sent along their way would lead to the deaths and injuries of his friends and their loved ones.
When the Italians decided to enter the war on the side of the Allies and began their military campaign to take over Trieste, the principal seaport of the empire, one of his favorite cities in the world, his transportation efforts took on the greatest irony. Arnauld simply could not imagine that those Italians he knew well and whose coffeehouses he had frequented with regularity would think that attacking the Austrian Empire was a good idea.
Most difficult in this rapid adjustment to Italy’s declaration of war was the tragic consequence for his great friend and cousin Miggo.
“Remember, he thinks he’s a Rough Rider,” Arnauld said, trying to explain to Alma how, back in Genoa, hearing the call of gallantry and
war, Miggo had accepted an officer position in the army. But unlike Arnauld, his cousin Miggo, his father’s nephew,
did
love the look of an officer’s uniform and the entrée into hearts and beds it brought with it. “Especially the latter,” Arnauld told Alma. “You would have preferred him as your childhood friend,” he added.
Alma had met Miggo on a number of occasions and admitted to being quite taken, as Eleanor had been, by his panache and flair. “He is for you,” she told her introverted friend Arnauld, “what our Herr Dr. Freud would call a good alter ego.” And then she added, rolling her eyes with her famous license, “Were I not taken…”
In 1914, while Italy and Austria were still allies, and Arnauld had been sent to Rome to discuss railroad matters with the Italian high command, Miggo had met him and had escorted him around the city, introducing him to every manner of artist and coffeehouse eccentric, using their respective uniforms for maximum effect. He had even tried to arrange for Arnauld a tryst with an exotic Romanian violinist. “We’ll send you back to Vienna,” the irrepressible Miggo said, “with your blood a little more Romanian and your stature a few centimeters taller.”
And so it was that in his newly activated position in the Italian army, being swept up, Arnauld was sure, in nationalistic fervor—not giving much thought that it would be Austrians and Hungarians and Czechs he would be shooting at—Miggo embraced with vigor the thought of racing across southern Tyrol and into Trieste in a “quick war.” Later, Arnauld wondered how even his brash and impulsive Italo-American cousin could have thought the proud Austrians capable of sitting idly by and watching the pretentious and deceitful takeover.
And now, adding to the grinding negative effect of watching the wounded pouring back from the Russian front on his trains for all those months, word reached him. Because, this southern war being sudden and new, communication between Genoa and Vienna had not fully terminated, the news arrived almost immediately. It was just as the Italians approached the Isonzo River, on the first day of combat on the plains of Friuli, that an artillery shell burst from an unknown quarter, both sides not yet knowing fully how to coordinate firings with troop movements, and fell into the center of the advanced convoy in which Major Michelangelo Sabatini was riding. Miggo was dead. And Arnauld’s decline into emotional chaos was under way.
THE BATTLE OF CAPORETTO
E
xactly why Arnauld’s posting had been shifted to the Italian front is never made clear in the various sources. We can only guess. His original assignment of organizing the priorities of the railroad lines from general headquarters in Vienna, “far from harm,” as he described it, had evolved to assignments at stations on the actual fronts, first and temporarily in the east, against the stubborn Russians in Galicia, then what appeared to be permanent placement on the Italian front, securing delivery of supplies and transporting wounded and prisoners away from the war zone. Perhaps as movement of supplies and men became more and more overburdened, it became essential for officers of Arnauld’s experience to be in the center of the action.
What is certain is that by 1917, the two huge armies had been locked in a two-year stalemate the whole length of the Isonzo River, from the high and rugged Dolomites down to the flatlands of the Adriatic coast, seen from the start by both sides as crucial for capture or defense of the great prize: the port of Trieste.
The fateful stalemate was punctuated by twelve separate battles, in which one million soldiers died. Since the Austrian defenses featured mountain gun emplacements along the whole expanse of the Isonzo front, Italian attacks required charging up perilously steep mountainsides, encountering barbed wire two and three lines deep and withering machine-gun fire. Occasionally the attackers would break through, leading to hand-to-hand combat and violent counterattack.
In the first battle alone, there were tens of thousands of casualties on each side.
The Italian strategy was based on faith in superior numbers in constant attack, wearing down the enemy and allowing no chance of rest.
Wars are fought with yesterday’s strategies and tomorrow’s technologies, it is said. And so it was on the Isonzo, where the strategies of the nineteenth century met the barbed wire, machine guns, and artillery shells of the twentieth. The Italian high command believed implacably that an enemy who uses mountainous positions is always vulnerable to undercover advancement at the inevitable weak points unexpected by the defender. The Austrians would defend both the Tyrolean and Isonzo regions by holding such high positions, and the Italians would attack uphill with overwhelming numbers, after devastating artillery barrages. The result of this hopelessly antiquated strategy was a total advance of less than ten miles in twelve battles over two years, with too many casualties to count accurately.
For the Italians, it was to have been a quick acquisition of territory, and the occupation of the ancient seaport. For the outnumbered Austrians, it was simply a fierce resistance to the takeover by the treacherous former allies.
Life in the trenches on all sections of the stalemated Isonzo was grim. There was little ground on either side of the river that had not been subjected to artillery shelling, machine-gun fire, and carnage. Bodies that had been hastily buried during one part of the campaign were blown out of the ground in the next. The rainwater that accumulated at the bottom of most trenches was rendered fetid by the decomposed flesh and human waste. There were rats everywhere and lice the size of pebbles. The armies of both sides had no choice but to dig in and wait for an enemy offensive or one of its own.
The change in tone in Arnauld’s letters and journal entries appeared gradually in 1917, a year or so before the armistice and about the time he found himself permanently assigned to a regiment in the heart of the war zone on the Isonzo River. Earlier, in 1915, Arnauld’s letters to Eleanor and his parents bore the rational and objective tone of a university intellectual, his writings to Eleanor more restrained perhaps than those to his parents, such as the following:
Life along the front, mostly along the Isonzo River, is bleak, and after months of fighting and five separate battles, the soldiers of the
empire are resigned to the most wretched of conditions. My journeys there accompanying supply trains through countryside and seeing the effects of deprivation on towns and villages that depended on our trains for food and supplies is shocking. Townspeople stand beside the tracks and at the stations and watch us pass through without stopping. One feels a hopelessness, feeling everything, able to do nothing. Then on the return trip, our train cars filled with wounded and prisoners, no one appears trackside.
Conditions are even worse in the enemy trenches. Captured Italian soldiers describe the prospects of spending the duration of the war in Austrian prison camps, regardless of how grim they might be, as far better than serving in General Cadorna’s army.
And then this passage from Arnauld’s war journal. Written now with shaky hand, his sketchy and stark notations tell of the appalling conditions mostly omitted from his letters to his parents and Eleanor.
Enemy soldiers poorly trained know not how to avoid exploding artillery or to keep heads down—they have been issued wool caps, not helmets. Our snipers know when new recruits arrive in the trenches as heads keep popping up—easy target practice. “We lop off the heads of Italians we would have shared a beer with at a street café a few years ago,” says one of our officers. “Not unless you shared a beer with ignorant peasants,” says another. “These are not the university students you
consorted with in Trastevere.”
Because Arnauld continued to send his letters out through the special courier reserved for officers with connections, he continued his surprising candor and with Will Honeycutt seemed to hold back nothing. In those letters we can see the grim life he had settled into. One in particular suggests what lay ahead for Arnauld and those of his sensitive colleagues who might survive.
Trench life is deplorable and a new experience in war for both sides. Soldiers eat, sleep, and take care of bodily needs all in the confined space of the trench, with predictable results. Tents leak, clothes are sodden and reeking, and most everything smells of rot and discharge. These are the
daily conditions, and the soldiers tolerate it all because it is better than going over the top and facing the barb wire and raking of enemy machine guns. At least, hunkered down in trenches, there is safety from sniper fire and the overhead bursting of shells.
But even in the trenches, debilitating explosions are not uncommon. One hears the distant percussion, then the approaching whistle of the shell and the concussion that tears into the protecting earth and rips into bodies, sending parts flying and covering the faces and hands of neighbors with bits of flesh and bone. Those who were alive and laughing and singing to pass the time one moment are blown into grotesque fragments in another. The infantryman keeps watch with his rifle while a shell smashes the trench a few meters away. Someone is screaming because a poor soul has lost his leg, or his stomach is split open. And always there is the moaning of the wounded and dying and the quick survey of bodies to see if there is perhaps a jacket or trousers or socks or boots that could be of use to the living. No wonder men become deranged.
Usually the wounded are already dead or writhing in their last throes, but occasionally it becomes apparent that there is still the hope of life, sometimes with a limb gone or a stomach ruptured or a face torn away, in which case a comrade bends over the body until a priest arrives or the medics with a stretcher.
Times were hard on both sides. The Italians had proven to be ineffective and poorly organized, plagued, even a casual observer could see, by outdated and incompetent leadership, ruling out from the start the quick campaign to capture Trieste they had once envisioned. The Austrians, although much better off in morale and leadership, had supply difficulties, and their troops had to endure the devastating cold of the mountain regions, with poor equipment and a desperate shortage of rations.
The Austrian countryside between this area on the Adriatic and the heartland around Vienna was brought to near starvation as the railroads they depended on for food were commandeered for the military. It was a brutal time for everyone, soldier and civilian alike, and the seemingly pointless offensives launched by the Italians in an attempt to cross the river took a great toll.