The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (10 page)

One reason why the general staff did not press harder for machine guns and artillery was that lessons from other fronts were not being learned. Cadorna had 25,000 copies of his famous pamphlet distributed to officers in February 1915. In this edition, he claimed bizarrely that the Western Front confirmed his faith in frontal attack and breakthrough tactics. Enemy positions could be captured; the challenge lay in retaining them. He was not entirely wrong; solving this problem, however, called for fresh thinking about the use of reserves. To his mind, a war of attrition was always a hiatus. Since attrition in itself achieved no result, whichever side first ‘feels truly stronger than the other’ would take the offensive. Hence, ‘Manoeuvre will continue to decide the outcome of war.’

This simple-minded thinking was reinforced by the analysis arriving from his military attachés at the Italian embassies in Paris and Berlin. While these men rightly saw that successful French resistance on the Marne portended a reversal of German fortunes, they misinterpreted the stabilisation of trench lines during October. It did not occur to them that events had exposed a fundamental flaw in tactical assumptions. Their reports noted the new technology in use, but missed the tactical implications of barbed wire, trenches and machine guns. Both attachés clung to the faith that gains in defensive strength had merely raised the cost of successful frontal attacks, though not to an unacceptable level. ‘Today, as in the past, the offensive retains its superiority over the defensive; victory still requires attack and manoeuvre.’ Attrition was a phase, an intermezzo. Like Cadorna, who insisted that ‘the possibilities for successful offensives are greater today than in the past’, they mistook a tautology for sturdy insight. After visiting the front in February 1915 and seeing that the second and third lines were strongly fortified, the attaché in Paris reported that the only way to break the deadlock would be through a third party ‘entering the field with new forces in the sacred name of its own jeopardised interests, and those alone’. No prize for guessing which party he had in mind.

Proof that an open-minded amateur could see more clearly what awaited Italy’s army came from Father Agostino Gemelli, the extraordinary Franciscan friar who pioneered the study of military psychology and served as Cadorna’s chaplain in Udine. By March 1915, Gemelli realised that the coming war would be fought in trenches, where months would pass without any decisive action. ‘Gone are the wars of impetuous assaults and great battles, instead there is the struggle which exhausts with its uniformity.’ He gleaned this much from reading press reports and letters from the Western Front, and from a brief stay in Germany during autumn 1914.

A more conventional voice from the general staff reflecting on the Western Front was that of Colonel Angelo Gatti, mentioned in an earlier chapter. A fluent writer, he commented on the war for the (strongly inter ventionist) daily
Corriere della Sera
from August to December 1914. He warned readers in November that, if military means determined the duration of the war, it would last a long time. Then he assured them that Austria was the weakest of the warring powers. Her citizens were not united behind the army, heart and soul. Unlike Germany, with its ‘organic living strength’, or infinite Russia, Austria like France possessed only ‘the strength to resist’. On the other hand, he granted that Austria possessed remarkable ‘powers of recovery’. Just how remarkable, the Italians would discover.

If there was a date when prewar planning ceased to provide guidance to the warlords, it was perhaps 25 November 1914, when Falkenhayn ordered German forces in the West to form defensive positions and hold their ground. Watching trenches spread along the Western Front from the Channel ports to the Swiss frontier, Lord Kitchener, the British minister of war, famously confessed that he did not know what to do. ‘This isn’t war.’ By late December, the lines in France had been static for two months. Manoeuvre had become very difficult, if not impossible. It was hard to see how the situation could change beyond the capture or loss of a few hundred metres of trench.

Gatti’s end-of-year summary was grimly poetical: ‘All is slow, vast, exhausting in this monstrous conflict, where the lives of men and the fate of nations descend towards death with the majesty and calm of the great American rivers flowing to the sea.’ He spoiled the effect by forecasting that Germany would muster all its forces for a supreme effort in spring 1915. If this failed, Germany would collapse in exhaustion. The Allies should pre-empt this titanic offensive, Gatti said in a coded plea for intervention, by pooling their strength. This would lead to battles that dwarfed anything yet seen and finish the war, one way or another. Like many other intelligent analysts, he could not imagine the perpetuation of deadlock. So he contradicted himself: militarily, there could be no quick solution, but there
would
be a military solution the following spring – when, as Gatti knew but his readers did not yet, Italy would almost certainly enter the war itself.

Source Notes
FOUR
Cadorna’s Clenched Fist

1
Who is Cadorna? What has he done
: Rocca, 179.

2
The Ministry of War once wanted
: Rocca, 31–2.

3
‘
length of service and reasons
’: Rocca, 24. 

4
Cadorna sent his pamphlet
: Rocca, 45–7.

5
Cadorna issued a memorandum
: Rusconi, 162.

6
Cadorna rejected the Minister of War’s compromise
: Rochat [1991a].

7
Italy’s army was the weakest
: Gooch [1989], Rochat [1991a].

8
Parliament, controlled by anti-war deputies, still refused
: Zamagni, 210.

9
The artillery was in even worse shape
: De Simone, 162.

10
‘
if another army were thrown into the fray
’: Rusconi, 115.

11
the analysis arriving from his military attachés
: Rochat [1961].

12
‘
the possibilities for successful offensives
’: Cadorna [1915], 32.

13
‘
Gone are the wars of impetuous assaults
’: Labita.

14
He warned readers in November
: Gatti [1915], 308.

15
Gatti’s end-of-year summary
: Gatti [1915], 343, 347.

1 
‘Dead ground’ is not visible from enemy positions. 

2 
The upper Isonzo refers to the portion from Flitsch to Tolmein; the middle Isonzo runs from Tolmein to Gorizia; the lower Isonzo runs from Gorizia to the sea.    

3 
Cadorna airbrushed this episode from his memoirs, maintaining that the army was too weak and ill-organised for rapid action in 1914. ‘Morally unprepared for war’, the nation would have been ‘practically defenceless’ against a pre-emptive Austrian attack. Salandra’s memoirs were equally deceptive; he blamed the parliamentary system and the ‘disastrous’ condition of the officer corps for forcing him to delay intervention.  

FIVE

The Solemn Hour Strikes

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night and
when you move, fall like a thunderbolt
.

S
UN
T
ZU

War should be undertaken with forces corresponding
to the magnitude of the obstacles that are to be
anticipated
.

N
APOLEON
,
Military Maxims
(1827)

Yellowed prints of the 1866 border show simple guardhouses beside stone bridges. Farmers pose, squinting, by the barrier poles alongside their carts and livestock, while children play at the roadside under listless flags. Few traces of that frontier can be seen today. On the outskirts of Cormons, a guardhouse has been adapted into a loggia for a private home, sheltering an expensive car. Deep in its stony bed, the River Judrio trickles past the end of the garden. Traffic whines along the SS356 highway, a hundred metres away, beyond a monument marking where the first shots were fired in Italy’s last war of independence. The inscription says that on the night of 23/24 May, Italian customs officers opened fire to stop Austrian reservists from burning the wooden bridge over the Judrio. A few hours later, the first Italian casualty was brought back across the bridge on a farmer’s cart.

The 23rd was a Sunday, and parish priests along the border warned their congregations that war was coming. Hostilities officially com menced at midnight. Assuming supreme command, the King over came his diffidence and spoke to the people – something he rarely did. The solemn hour of national claims had struck, he cried, standing on the balcony of the Quirinale palace and waving a flag. The enemy were battle-hardened and worthy; favoured by the terrain and by careful preparations, they would fight tenaciously, ‘but your indomitable ardour will certainly overcome them’. It was an oddly subdued performance. Even so, according to press reports, the crowd was delirious. With this ordeal behind him, the King hurried to the front; he did not want to miss a moment of his army’s dash to glory.

The army was not, however, dashing anywhere. Full mobilisation began on 22 May and was scheduled to take 23 days. It took twice as long; the army was not fully deployed until mid-July. The general staff had prepared for war as if it would occur in peacetime conditions. Little allowance was made for systemic stress and breakdown, all the concomitants that Clausewitz called ‘friction’.

When the fighting began, Cadorna had some 400,000 men in the plains of Veneto and Friuli. Yet, these hastily concentrated forces included only two of the army’s 17 regular corps – fewer than 80,000 rifles. On the lower Isonzo, the Third Army was to rush to the river, establish bridgeheads and capture Monfalcone. Gorizia was to be isolated by taking the hills that flanked the city. On the middle and upper Isonzo, the Second Army’s priority was to take the Caporetto basin and then the Krn–Mrzli ridge. The Fourth Army was supposed to pinch the neck of the Trentino salient by occupying a series of towns in the north: first Cortina, deep in the Dolomite mountains, then Toblach (Dobbiaco) and Bruneck (Brunico). The First Army was deployed defensively around the western side of the salient.

Cadorna should have had the benefit of co-ordinated operations by Russia and Serbia, but the Serbs were in no condition to attack and anyway resented Italian ambitions in the Balkans, while the Russians were paralysed after heavy losses in May and early June. The Italians were on their own, and the long build-up deprived them of surprise. Also, Austrian agents in the border areas had been feeding them disinformation, so they were expecting ambushes and sabotage on the roads to the east.

There was another reason for the Third Army’s snail’s pace. As it rolled into action, Cadorna replaced its commander, General Zuccari, because he had delayed his arrival at the front or possibly to settle a score. The timing was astonishing; Zuccari’s successor, the Duke of Aosta, took up his command on 27 May, exactly when the Third Army should have been smashing the enemy lines. The Italians crept to the Isonzo instead of racing there. The cavalry were ordered to take the bridges above Monfalcone on the morning of the 24th. But their commander, expecting tough resistance, wanted to keep contact with the supporting infantry, so the Austrians had time to blow the bridges that afternoon. Cadorna blamed the men’s lack of ‘offensive spirit’, rather than poor preparation, sheer inexperience, or the enemy’s skill at spreading false reports.

The Habsburg secret services scored real successes in April and early May 1915. Italian intelligence reported that the enemy had eight or ten divisions on the Italian border – around 100,000 infantry. In fact, the Isonzo frontier was guarded in mid-May by only two divisions – some 25,000 rifles, supported by around 100 artillery pieces. Intelligence from the Alpine regions was no better. Crucially, Cadorna was unaware that in the Tyrol and the Dolomites the Austrians had withdrawn to a defensive line some way behind the state border, leaving large tracts of territory near Lake Garda and north of Asiago practically undefended.

The Habsburg commander in the Tyrol reported on 20 May:

We are on the eve of an enemy invasion. We have erected a weak line of combat on the border, but we have only 21 reserve battalions and seven and a half batteries along a front of some 400 kilometres. All our proper troops are on the Eastern Front [meaning Galicia]. Only the Trent zone is a bit better fortified and sufficiently garrisoned … I don’t know what will happen if the Italians attack vigorously, everywhere.

The reservists were mostly labourers who had been building the defences and were then put in uniform, given a rifle and basic training.

There was no vigorous attack. West of the Isonzo, only the Fourth Army under General Nava and the Carnia Corps were deployed to attack, targeting the Puster valley and Villach. With just five divisions, Nava’s force was too dispersed to make much impact. They had only one heavy battery and no other means of breaching wire: no gelignite tubes or even wire-cutters.
1
Small wonder that Nava’s men advanced so slowly in May and June. An Austrian officer posted in the Dolomites wrote on 23 May that, if the Italians knew their business, they would march overnight and reach the Puster valley inside Austria by morning; nothing could have stopped them. But they did not know their business, and the window closed. The Fourth Army occupied Cortina five days after the Austrians evacuated it, then delayed the offensive proper until 3 June, for no clear reason. This gave the Austrians ample time to strengthen their line. Lieutenant General Krafft von Dellmensingen, leading the German Alpine Corps on this sector, recalled that the Italians’ initial superiority was so great that they could have broken through at will. ‘We expected them to do just that, and were more and more astonished when they let two weeks and more pass without moving.’ The Italians never got near the Puster valley.

In Carnia, the mountainous hinge of the entire front, the Italian force was, again, too small for its ambitious tasks of breaking through at Tarvis. No artillery was available until 12 June and anyway there were no tracks or roads to bring the batteries close to enemy lines, so it was impossible to attack the well-protected approaches to the passes into Austrian Carinthia.

West of Carnia and the Dolomites, General Brusati, commanding the First Army, was straining at the leash. Although he had only five divisions for a sector of 130 kilometres around Trentino, he was dismayed by Cadorna’s decision not to let him attack.
2
So he attacked anyway, achieving no success because he chose the only strongly fortified zone in his sector: the high ground between Trent and the coastal plain. His offensive unfurled as if in slow motion.

With Habsburg troops pouring in from Serbia, the balance was changing every day. By 24 May, the Austrians had 50,000–70,000 men on the Italian front. A further 40 battalions (40,000 men) arrived by the end of the month. By mid-June, there may have been 200,000 Habsburg troops facing the Italians. Nonetheless, Italy had a broad advantage of at least 4:1 in fighting strength for the first month of the war. This disparity was not admitted at the time, or under Fascism. Mussolini would claim that the Italians had faced 221 enemy battalions. The Austrians credited the Italians with 48 divisions (44 infantry, 4 cavalry), instead of 35. Each side overestimated the other’s initial strength, but the overestimation had dire consequences for one side only.

Local people had helped the Austrians to erect barriers across the border roads, using trees, glass, barbed wire, and even farm implements. They also warned the advancing Italians about mines, traps and electrified wire barriers that did not exist. Nosing tentatively forward, skirmishing with Austrian patrols but meeting no fierce resistance, the Italians only reached the Isonzo on the 26th. The brunt of Cadorna’s attack was planned to take place across the river, between Sagrado and Monfalcone, a distance of 12 kilometres, east of the lower Isonzo. The bridges were all blown. Further days were wasted in exploring the riverbanks. Heavy rain had swollen the Isonzo and its tributaries. What with accurate enemy fire and shortages of bridging equipment, it proved impossible to cross the river until the night of 4/5 June. Once they reached the eastern side, the Italians found that the enemy had flooded the low-lying area between the river and the Carso by closing the sluices on a raised canal. The Italians blew up the sluice gates, but too late to save the troops from being bogged down. This bought the Austrians more time to prepare their defences on the Carso ridge.

The rapture and creeping disillusion of early June were chronicled by Giani Stuparich, a volunteer from Trieste. Stuparich enlisted in the 1st Regiment of Sardinian Grenadiers at the end of May and entrained for the front at once. He was a fastidious man and the company in the crowded carriage (‘two Florentines … a Roman … a Sicilian … one from Livorno’) soon became tiresome. A sergeant in the reserves made ‘loudly incomprehensible speeches about humanity, barbarism, sacrifice, duty and many other muddled concepts’. Looking for distraction from the chatter, Stuparich noticed a silent figure in the corner of the carriage. ‘He is not listening or talking, he is the only one rapt in a preoccupation that he cannot account for, but it fevers his expression and stiffens his limbs, paralysing his soul in an intense stupor.’ His mouth hung open, his eyes were fixed and shining. He was a peasant in uniform, perhaps leaving home for the first time in his life, probably fluent only in dialect. The nameless man was still far from the front, but even now he could not grasp what was happening. Wrenched from his family and routine for reasons neither explained nor understood, he was in shock. While the writer saw this and was moved, too much separated them for a friendly word to be uttered.

At Mestre station, outside Venice, the men see wounded soldiers waiting for transport away from the front. ‘There are thousands of them!’ says one of the Tuscans in a trembling voice. (Thanks to censorship, he would have had no idea of the initial casualties.) Smells of blood and iodine seep into the carriage. Like the peasant in the corner, the wounded say nothing. The train moves on towards the front. Marching to the border, the men are nervous, starting at shadows by the roadside. Beyond Cervignano, there are tree trunks across the road. Bersaglieri speed past them on bikes, raising trails of dust.
3
A public fountain slakes their thirst. They sleep on their capes under the stars, and awaken spangled with dew. Ordered to carry heavy cauldrons, Stuparich – a bespectacled, intense, 25-year-old intellectual – notes euphorically that his body alone could not have borne the weight; ‘my strength is sheer willpower’.

They cross the Isonzo on 5 June, ‘a tremendous, foaming azure current cut by pontoons’. His rucksack no longer weighs him down. Near the front, smells of putrefaction emanate from the roadside bushes, but the men are too hopeful to be gloomy. Marching towards Monfalcone on 8 June, they talk excitedly about reaching Trieste within a fortnight. Giani dreams of being one of the first to enter the main square, covered in dust. Next day, he reaches the Carso. The unit is sheltering from Austrian fire in a dyke. They clamber out, and come face to face with a rocky, barren hillside. ‘A chilly gust of wind hits me, a bullet whistles over my head, then another, then more buzz past my ears with a softer, keening sound.’

The Carso figures in this story as a landscape, a battlefield, practically a character in its own right. It is a triangle of highland with vertices near the hill of San Michele in the north, Trieste in the south, and somewhere around the town of Vipava – deep inside Slovenia – in the east. To the south and east, it merges into the limestone ranges that reach into Slovenia and Croatia, and ultimately stretch all the way along the eastern Adriatic coast to Montenegro. In the north, it is bounded by the valley of the River Vipacco. It is from the west, however, that the Carso shows its most impressive aspect, at first like a bar of cloud on the horizon, then surging from the ground.