The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (18 page)

The Second Battle was the first full-scale bloodbath on the front, costing 42,000 Italian casualties. Combined with the 15,000 losses in the first battle, the Italians had lost more than 1 in 20 of their able men. They still advanced in ranked masses, as if for close-order drill, led from the front by junior officers brandishing swords, against entrenched positions where the vastly outnumbered Austrians waited with machine guns and rifles.
2
These officers also led patrols and wire-cutting parties. Their uniforms were clearly recognisable at a distance, making them easy targets. (A new regulation, stipulating that officers’ uniforms should be identical to the other ranks’, was passed only on 15 July, and could not be implemented quickly.) Disproportionate numbers of young officers died, often left hanging on the wire. The cycle of bombardment and attack was unvarying. The Austrians could usually observe the Italian lines; when the artillery fell silent, they knew the infantry would clamber into view a few minutes later. The gunners still did not know how to support the advancing infantry, leaving it exposed to defensive barrages. Austrian prisoners admitted that shooting at the Italians was better than target practice.

When the Italians occupied Austrian trenches, they were amazed at their quality. They actually zigzagged; they had communication trenches, so the men could move between the lines without exposure; some even had concrete walls. And they were stocked with demijohns of wine! These impressions said more about the standard of Italian positions than about Austrian defences, which, though excellent in some places (including Mrzli and Rombon), were still rudimentary in others. They had not yet learned to use the natural grottoes in the Carso that were impregnable even against the heavy artillery that was beginning to reach Cadorna’s army.

This is one reason why Habsburg losses also ran so high: nearly 47,000, according to official sources, exceeding Italian losses for the only time during the war. More effectively targeted than in the first offensive, large numbers of Austrians were killed and wounded as they moved between their front and rear lines, still unprotected by helmets against the splinters that burst from the ground. The other reason for the casualties was Boroević’s refusal to cede
any
ground, no matter the odds against keeping it. Tactical withdrawal was out of the question, and positions lost had to be counter-attacked at once.

On the Italian side, anxiety about casualties was mounting. Senior officers began to massage the statistics. General Reisoli of the Second Army, stationed at Plava, ordered that losses should not be reported to higher authorities unless absolutely necessary. In Rome, Foreign Minister Sonnino told a journalist that the war was not going to plan, it was turning into something new, a struggle of positions and attrition without decisive manoeuvres. ‘Had you not seen what was happening on the other fronts?’ asked the journalist sensibly. Sonnino replied as a politician: it was now possible to see more clearly. Cadorna, hypersensitive to criticism from any quarter, tried to head off Salandra’s disapproval with a letter on 6 August, explaining that the failure of the second offensive should be blamed on shortages of shells and reserves, and the lack of aerial observation. This was partly true, yet these factors hardly accounted for the dire outcome. Unlike Sonnino, the Supreme Command did not realise that positional war had turned into attritional warfare. The Austrian history of the war, straining for an apt definition of the conflict at this point, settled for calling it ‘a war of manoeuvre on the spot’. Cadorna wrote to his son that the war would not be over before 1917.

The condition of the troops after the offensive alarmed some of their commanders. Reports from the Catanzaro and Sassari Brigades noted the physical and moral deterioration caused by continuous weeks and months in the trenches, never far from the enemy. The men’s spirits were depressed by continuous anxiety and danger, by lack of sleep, by seeing their comrades fall wounded or dead at every moment. The awful weather obliged them to live in mud and water. They slept – when the lice let them – without straw or blankets on bare, often soaking ground. They were weakened by enteritis, rheumatism and bronchial complaints. Even worse, Habsburg troops had brought cholera from the Russian front, and by mid-August it was spreading along the front. The rations were usually late, cold and not nourishing. Drinkable water was often scarce and brackish.

The gloom was also due to the quality of the Italian positions, which were makeshift for doctrinal reasons as well as due to lack of time. If the whole purpose of war is ceaseless attack, it is a waste of energy to build protective positions that will soon be left behind on the march to victory.

Source Notes
NINE
From Position to Attrition

1
the men’s nerves are shot
: Stuparich’s published diary ends on this grim note.

2
the Supreme Command did not realise
: Faldella quoted by Alliney, 43.

1 
It was his first experience of trench mortars.

2 
The Austrian officers, by contrast, led from behind, revolvers at the ready to threaten fainthearts and potential deserters. From January 1916, the Italians were allowed to do the same.

TEN

The Dreaming Barbarian

O my country O my country etc. what shall
I do I cannot shed my blood for you who do
not exist any more etc. etc. etc. what great
deed shall I do?

L
EOPARDI
(1798–1837)

During the war and for decades afterwards, Italian historians claimed that Habsburg Italians flocked across the border in their thousands to join the fight against Austria in 1915. Recent research by Fabio Todero has exposed this claim as a myth that endured by downplaying the number of
regnicoli
, who were Italian citizens living in Austria- Hungary for economic reasons. Some 49,000
regnicoli
lived in Trieste: a fifth of the population. They had to return home in 1915 or face prosecution, so should not be counted as volunteers. From March 1915, they were queuing to get their passports stamped at the Italian consulate in Trieste. Some 35,000 made the one-way journey. Only 881 Triestines really volunteered for the Italian army: less than 1 per cent of the city’s Italian community, drawn from the middle classes. The proportion of Tyrolese Italian volunteers was even smaller: 650 from a population of 400,000.

The ‘foreign’ volunteers were disliked by ordinary Italian soldiers, for they might be Austrian spies and they actually wanted this foul war. Patrizio Borsetti, a volunteer from the south Tyrol, wrote home in August 1915: ‘the soldiers look at us as if we were the reason why they have to fight. How many curses on account of “Trento and Trieste”…’ So widespread were the ‘mockery and rebukes’ directed at volunteers that in October 1915, the commander of the 65th Division (Second Army) formally ordered his officers to monitor and punish ‘such ignoble attitudes’.

The volunteers were geeky and bookish, afire with conviction. Giani Stuparich’s brother Carlo marched to war at the age of 21 with Dante, Homer, the Bible and Mazzini in his knapsack. The brothers were anguished by their comrades’ suspicion. ‘What more do we have to do to convince them that we are Italians too?’ Giani asked his diary. ‘Just like them, just like them!’ They were not just like them. Highly educated, mostly unmarried and childless, these zealots were ready, even enthusiastic, to lay down their lives. Modelling themselves on Garibaldi’s famous redshirts, they were even less prepared for the horror of modern warfare than their working-class comrades, who took revenge in trench songs:

Cursed be those young students
full of learning, wanting war
They put Italy in widow’s weeds
she’ll be grieving a century more.

The volunteers’ letters and journals are impossibly exalted. Marco Prister, a Triestine Jewish Italian, kept a diary which ends with these lines: ‘22 November [1915], 13:00: Going into action, maybe I’ll soon be dead! Farewell everyone! Long live Italy! I’ve got the order to advance. I’m ready! My destiny unfolds! Long live Italy! Long live Trieste!’

Antonio Bergamas wrote to his mother from Udine in June 1915:

Tomorrow I am going away, who knows where, almost certainly to death. When this reaches you, I will no longer exist … Perhaps you won’t understand, cannot understand how, without being forced, I went to die on the battle¬ field … it is a thousand times sweeter to die facing my native land, our sea, for my natural Fatherland, than over there on the frozen fields of Galicia or the stony fields of Serbia, for a Fatherland that was not my own and that I hated. Farewell beloved mother, farewell dear sister, farewell father, and if I die, I do so with your adored names on my lips facing our savage Carso.

 He survived for another year, until he was cut down by machine-gun fire trying to cross a third line of barbed wire.

More than 300 Triestine volunteers died in the war: a knucklebone in the hecatomb of the Great War. Yet Mussolini turned them into a full-blown cult, naming streets, squares and schools after them. One of the survivors lived to spell out the tragic irony of their sacrifice:

Everything we hated about Austria, the oppression of different peoples, the suppression of liberty in general and the press in particular, the Church’s interference in public life as the established religion of state, the huge power of militarism – all this came back to life in Fascist Italy, in an even worse form.

The cult survives, ghoulishly, in the Risorgimento Museum in Trieste, off the Piazza Oberdan, not far from D’Annunzio Avenue. The custodian did not look up from her newspaper when I walked in. My footsteps echoed among glass cases of faded uniforms, medals, illegible documents, fuzzy photos of the beardless dead. The volunteers’ complex ardour could hardly be worse served; the museum is like a second death. Depression only lifted when I read a heartfelt entry in the visitors’ book: ‘Nationalism – what a deadly infection! Let us hope we’re less infected with it today.’

Of all the Italians who volunteered in 1915 and died on the Isonzo front, Scipio Slataper was perhaps the most gifted, the sort of figure who defines a place and a time. To his admirers he was a meteor in the skies above Trieste, alerting all Italy to the new ideas coursing through Europe. Yet he turned into a passionate champion of the values that led to Europe’s nemesis in two world wars.

Slataper was born in Trieste in 1888 to middle-class parents. His mother was Italian while his father’s roots were Slovene or Croatian. Perhaps as a result, he was keenly alive to his city’s uniqueness, with its triple identities – Italian, Germanic and Slavic – woven together by Habsburg power. He loved its anomalies, as he loved its odd location between the limestone uplands of the Carso and the Adriatic Sea. What he did not love was its provincialism; he longed to shake its citizens out of their money-making routines, and help Trieste discover its vocation as Italian culture’s gateway to the Germanic and Slavic worlds, stretching to the Baltic and the Black Seas. For he longed to be a heroic educator, even a prophet. ‘I was born to give form to clay’, he wrote to a friend, with the solemnity of 19 years. ‘When they tell the story of my life, they will say: he was a
vivifier
in everything he did.’ He was an alpha-male; ‘domination is in my character’, he airily confessed. Handsome and charismatic, he gathered a following of talented men and women who shared his idealism and were under his spell. His closest acolyte, Giani Stuparich, became his biographer. The three women in the group all fell in love with him. One killed herself on his account; another married him; after his death, the third married his future biographer in a union-by-proxy that could not last.

In 1908, the end of a sentimental affair made Trieste suddenly unbearable. He won a scholarship to study in Florence, which then possessed the sort of cultural glamour in Italy that Paris exerted over Europe as a whole. Florence was part of his inheritance as an Italian, yet he felt like a savage amid its splendours. (From a letter to one of his three muses: ‘I am a barbarian who dreams. I have nothing but my pain and the joy of having it.’) For other strands completed his inheritance – strands remote from Tuscany’s placid landscapes, immemorial cities and the secure achievements of the Renaissance. By these standards, Trieste had no culture. Yet its newness held a promise: Trieste was raw and vital, with the potential to become something. Was not Italy decrepit by comparison?
1
His mind teemed, and being Slataper, he shouted his insights to the nation. A series of ‘Triestine Letters’ was pub lished in an avant-garde journal called
La Voce
(‘The Voice’), published in Florence. Predictably, the bourgeois Italians of Trieste were scandalised, taking as condescension what was meant as a bracing challenge.

The Voice
became Slataper’s intellectual home soon after he reached Tuscany. He noticed the first issue in a bookshop, read it from cover to cover and soon called on the editors. It was the most exciting cultural and political review in Italy. Irreverent and caustic as well as learned, it had a broad concept of culture and a mighty ambition: nothing less, according to Slataper’s biographer, than ‘a systematic critical revision of Italian life’, renewing national culture by quarrelling with its makers, canons and clichés. While their concerns were national, the editors were moved by a ‘yearning for universal culture’. Slataper was the quiet one among the
vociani
, soaking up their ease of allusion and acerbic self- assurance. He never quite became one of them; his background set him apart, and he had no thought of disowning it. He corresponded intensely with his Triestine circle, especially the women. To one of them in particular, Anna Pulitzer, he described his efforts to get over the botched affair that had brought him to Tuscany in the first place.

In the course of these confidences, he grew infatuated with Anna herself. Calling her Gioietta, ‘little joy’, he said she was ‘the most divine woman I could have dreamed of’, an ominous tribute. The infatuation was mutual. Slataper poured out passion and opinions in equal measure. ‘I don’t want to command’, he declared not quite convincingly. ‘I want to bring people to
their
liberty so that they can find their own way. What stops them is slavery, the terrible slavery of the internal lie.’ He sounds like D. H. Lawrence’s Adriatic cousin, wrestling with sexual convention. ‘All the world should be remade by my desire,’ he exulted; but what about the object of that desire? His letters were serial monologues, and they swamped Anna. His worship became oppressive and eventually unbearable. What did it have to do with her as she actually was? How could she live up to his ideal? Anna shot herself in May 1910, standing in front of a mirror. She left a note dedicating her suicide to Scipio’s future work.

His reaction confirmed the grounds of her despair. He intensified the torrent of letters to her. ‘Letters of pride, of anger, of prayer, of grief, of humiliation,’ Stuparich calls them. ‘The beloved lived on in his imagination, as she had lived before dying.’ The fact of her self- destruction eventually sank in. ‘Gioietta’s love had made him feel like a god. Her suicide destroyed that.’ His self-belief was too strong to be cowed for long. The following year, under the shadow of her loss, he wrote his masterpiece.
Il mio Carso
(‘My Carso’) has a triple subject: Slataper’s growth and character, his birthplace of Trieste, and the Carso. The first pages evoke a happy childhood, rich in sensuous detail. Young Scipio serves his appetites, recording trials of inner strength with adults and physical endurance with other boys, yearning for mastery. He prays for ‘our fatherland’ across the sea, traces Garibaldi’s campaigns on a map and dreams that Italy ‘will liberate us’. He and his pals sing irredentist songs in the street, then scatter when the police give chase. First love is giddy (‘I brought her the finest pear on the tree between my teeth’), and ends abruptly, without pain. As he grows, his vision is touched with nationalist paranoia. ‘Every step in the city is monitored by spies who pretend not to see anything.’ Contact with irredentists leaves him underwhelmed; where is their passion? The story of Oberdan makes his heart pound. ‘I wished I could die like him.’ At a loose end after school, he becomes a journalist – a modern version of the prophet’s calling.

Slataper’s Trieste is a thriving port, crammed with goods passing from the Orient, America and Italy towards central Europe. Wagons clatter through the streets, laden with crates of oranges, casks of oil, grey sacks of coffee beans and rice, trailing lines of snow where customs officers have punctured the sacks with their ink-stamps. Colliers hauling fuel on board the steamships pause to hawk and spit on the quayside. ‘I move through the streets and am happy that Trieste is so wealthy.’ For it is also a bourgeois city; motor cars roll along the Corso, past strollers in fur coats. And it is a city of political tensions. The Bosnian sentries in front of the governor’s palace remind Slataper how far away the fatherland really is. He joins the demonstrators marching for an Italian- language university, is arrested and led away but twists free from the Habsburg policeman. It is good sport, but serious too.

Then there is the Carso, rising behind the city, a tramride away. It is a dreamscape, a psychogeography of contradictions. In his half-feral boyhood, he ran with the wind, bounding over the stone walls and juniper bushes, plunging into a stream ‘to slake my skin’, then flinging himself naked on the heather. Scent of bitter almonds. Gentians (distilling the blue of spring skies) and primroses (‘the first sunrays!’) amid the weathered rocks. His loneliness is writ large in the Carso’s desolation. ‘My cape sticks to its rocks like flesh to embers.’

As Slataper strides across the rocky meadows, a Slovene peasant eyes him warily. ‘You are barbarous in your soul,’ thinks the Italian, but adds that ‘selling milk in the city for a few coppers would be enough to soften you’. The peasant could be urbanised, and who is to stop this from happening? Slataper’s dislike yields to frank admiration.