The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (30 page)

For soldiers on the Alpine front, the elements were a third army, one that would kill them all, given a chance. This plight connected soldiers who often came from the same region, sharing the same customs and dialects. For politicians, mountains symbolised the lofty values that justified the war. For the men fighting among them, they were a very present danger, beyond politics altogether. Carlo Salsa’s reflection on the mutual anonymity that made trench war possible is worth quoting again: ‘If I knew something about that poor lad, if I could once hear him speak, if I could read the letters that he carries near his heart, only then would killing him like this seem like a crime.’ Veterans’ memoirs show that this subjunctive state of mind arose more easily in the mountains than on the Carso. Long months of inaction induced more thoughtfulness than soldiers’ conditions usually allowed. Amid the silence, it was easier to realise that the enemies were men like themselves.

Unlike the war on the Isonzo, the war in the Dolomites did not obliterate the individual. What did character matter on the Carso, where sheer numbers and mass were decisive? Here, individuals could influence the outcome of an action. And, despite everything, the mountains were magnificent and the soldiers were young men. This explains the transcendental undertone of veterans’ letters and memoirs, the sense of communing with nature at her most sublime. Living above the tree line, surrounded for months on end by a silence that was intensified rather than broken by the moaning wind, repeating a routine of simple duties, the soldiers could forget that war was more than an occasional disturbance. H. G. Wells was struck by the sight of ‘Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable enemies’. The sporadic violence could even merge with the natural cycle. For Paolo Monelli, an Alpino officer, the bright cloudlets left by bursting shells were in perfect harmony with the sky around them.

At the same time, these letters and memoirs express a boyish zest for adventure amid the mighty peaks. The small scale of most operations on this front meant that they easily resembled stunts. Luis Trenker, a mountain guide turned Habsburg soldier, described an attempt to capture a machine gun on a solitary ledge, reachable only by climbing a ‘chimney’ or narrow cleft up a sheer rockface. The account reads like mountaineering literature: war as sport.

Despite these differences, the Italian strategy was the same as on the Isonzo. Taking and holding as much ground as possible, regardless of its strategic value, entailed colossal effort for little or no benefit. Colonel Giulio Douhet, chief of staff in the Carnia sector and an implacable critic of Cadorna’s methods, noted that 900 porters working in relay were needed to maintain a garrison of 100 men on a 3,000-metre peak. Munitions, too, were wasted on a grand scale. On one occasion, Italian gunners fired 950 rounds to drive a dozen Austrians off a small turret of rock. Two Austrians were killed (‘4 tonnes of steel per dead man’, as Douhet drily calculated), and the remainder withdrew. The Italians occupied the spur, but as so often were unable to hold it.

Around 1980, when the Cold War was in full swing, Mary Kaldor described the ‘feats of tremendous ingenuity, talent and organisation’ needed to produce modern armaments as
baroque
, meaning essentially decorative rather than functional. These weapons ‘can inflict unimaginable destruction’, but ‘are incapable of achieving limited military objectives’. In this sense, the war in the Dolomites was baroque: complex, expensive (in life and resources), and ineffectual. So great was the Austrians’ defensive advantage that the Italians’ courage, stamina and triumphs of engineering could not break through. Mining offered a way to make the landscape work in their favour: the Austrians shot down on them, but they burrowed underneath the Austrians. It did not succeed; the mines altered details of the landscape for ever without affecting the strategic picture.
3
No technical fix could solve the contradiction between ends and means on the Alpine front. 

Source Notes
SEVENTEEN
Whiteness

1
‘
Snow is truly a sign of mourning
’: Ungaretti [1981b], 12.

2
‘
No joking, no laughter any more
.’: Giacomel [2003a], 57.

3
Hans Schneeberger, a 19-year-old ensign
: My account of the mine under the Castelletto draws on Schneeberger’s description, 38–109.

4
the Austrians regained the summit
: On 14 November 1915, Alfredo Panzini recorded a rumour that capturing Col di Lana cost 20,000 lives.

5
‘
feats of tremendous ingenuity, talent and organisation
’: Kaldor.

1 
At 2,105 metres above sea-level, the Falzarego Pass is only 140 metres lower than the summit of Krn, the highest peak on the Isonzo. Such were the altitudes on the Dolomites front.

2 
In fact the Alpini had seized positions close to the summit, capturing most of the Austrian unit on the Sasso. The Fourth Army commander, General Nava, inexplicably abandoned these positions three days later. The Austrians filled the vacuum, and their hold on the Sasso was not seriously threatened again. Nava was replaced in September.

3 
Perhaps the Italians should have laid even bigger mines. More than 1,400 mines were fired on the Western Front during 1916 alone, compared with 34 on the Italian front. In the following year, 1917, more than 400 tonnes of explosive were detonated in 19 separate mines at the Battle of Messines, killing an estimated 10,000 men. But where were the Italians to get more gelignite? In 1916, they could only produce 80 tonnes a month. 

EIGHTEEN

Forging Victory

I do not remember much about the days, except
that they were very hot and that there were
many
victories in the papers
.

H
EMINGWAY
 

Arriving on the Alpine front from the Isonzo valley and the Carso, journalists felt they had escaped to another war altogether. They were quick to capitalise on the difference. One of them exclaimed that ‘up here the soul of Italy is as pure as the snow that covers all the valleys’. Another wrote that ‘life is healthy here, the war is gentle, even death is beautiful’. The journalists’ relief was genuine, but their reports were full of fakery.

The chief fraudster was Luigi Barzini, perhaps the most famous journalist in the world when the war started. He was the star correspondent of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
, helping it to sell 350,000 copies a day. The Boxer uprising in China, the Russo-Japanese War, the Peking to Paris rally, the coronation of King George V in London, the Balkan Wars and the Mexican Revolution: he covered them all. Newsboys hawking
Corriere
boosted their sales by shouting ‘Barzini’s latest!’ Female readers sent him ardent letters. His fame and talent for evocative description made him the obvious choice to cover the outbreak of war in 1914, and he was the first Italian journalist into occupied Belgium. His son remembered him as a provincial gentleman of the old school, handsome, spruce, chain- smoking, devoted to his family, masking self-doubt with courtesy. Like other
Corriere
staffers, he was radicalised by the Libyan war of 1911–12. His new-found convictions led to a series of lurid articles on the ‘tragic and sublime battle’ for Italian identity being waged ‘at the frontiers of the race’, across the Adriatic Sea. Propagating such views, Barzini would have shared his newspaper’s commitment to intervention in 1915. He worked very hard throughout the war, spending long periods at the front where he became ‘a sort of institution … as well- known by sight as the King or General Cadorna’, churning out despatches that were collected into instant books which sold by the thousand.

Yet reporting the war turned out to be fraught with painful dilemmas. Barzini went to the front wanting to produce patriotic journalism that would increase public support for the war. As he told Albertini at the end of May 1915, the ‘soul of the country’ was in the care of the newspapers. ‘We have to create pride and optimism,’ he added. Publicly, he said that wartime journalism could ‘give the national soul the nourishment of enlightening truth’. He was dismayed when army censors initially hacked his copy to shreds in their determination to suppress any information that could prove useful to the enemy – not that such information was easy to come by. ‘They don’t let us see much,’ he complained to his wife in August. A few weeks into the war, he asked Albertini to let him come home; the ‘ferocious severity’ of the censors made it pointless. Albertini knew his man; he kept him at the front, and Barzini adapted. By mid-September, the censors were ‘very polite’ with Barzini: ‘they never touch a word’.

What he lacked in bread-and-butter detail was made up with verbose description. The war in the mountains brought out the purple worst in his style; his despatches from the Dolomites were closer to travel writing or penny-dreadful fiction than reporting. ‘Reaching the hut, we found ourselves facing a panorama of horror, above an incredible world of titanic walls, fascinating, frightful, sublime …’ The limestone peaks and ridges soar like ruins of mythic ramparts where the Olympians once fought the Titans, and men now scurry like ants. He wildly exaggerated the importance of the relatively minor clashes above the snow line, and nourished a myth of the Alpini as ‘hunters of men’, authentic warriors who had reconnected with their ‘primordial soul’. His accounts of combat are unreal and undifferentiated; the infantry attacks magnificently and irresistibly; gunsmoke rolls over the lines; men die with smiles on their faces. If setbacks are mentioned, they are not explained or analysed. Even the practical outcome seems of little account; what matters is martial spirit. Barzini’s comments on tactics were cut from the same cloth. He assured readers that the 1915 battles on the Isonzo proved ‘It is much easier to attack uphill against dominant positions than downhill against dominated positions … The theory of the offensive appears to be irrefutable.’ His fawning descriptions of the Supreme Command focus on the superhuman figure of Cadorna. Staff officers emerge from the generalissimo’s office transformed by contact with Italy’s strategic genius. ‘Armed with an indefinable new strength, with certainty in their eyes, a serene firmness on their faces, their brows lofty and as it were clarified, their worries are dissipated, their doubts are banished, one feels that each of them has found the solution to his problems on the far side of that magical door.’ No wonder Barzini was so popular at the Supreme Command that other journalists protested, obliging him to use his access more discreetly.

Privately, he developed grave doubts. When Albertini arrived at the start of the Fourth Battle, Barzini gave him an earful about Cadorna’s organisational and tactical failures. His letters to his editor could be equally blunt. The forward positions along the middle Isonzo were, he confided, ‘held by a miracle, or because they have never been attacked’, and noted the delay in supplies (‘nothing arrives on time’). His wife also received frank correspondence. 

I got up to the positions, and you will see something in today’s
Corriere
[he wrote in July 1916] but I cannot do anything good, in my own style … I am very tired today. The journey was exhausting, I wrote like a lunatic, without even time for lunch, and anyway, with the stink of corpses still clinging to me, my appetite isn’t exactly hearty. What an impossible life! And all I really want is to be left alone. For a month at least. 

The self-pity was due to more than fatigue and frustration. Barzini felt the stress of his false position without being able to identify its cause, which lay out of sight, hidden in his conception of journalism. This conception did not recognise a public entitlement to know what was happening, or an obligation on journalists to seek out and tell the truth. As long as the truth was ‘enlightening’, he could avoid the conclusion that he was a military propagandist. When the bare facts condemned the war, it was harder to square his conscience with his copy. This is what happened in June 1917, at the end of the Tenth Battle, when the slaughter defied Barzini’s usual cosmetic techniques. After a week, he told his editor that he could not file any more reports, because he would have to lie or be censored. In other words, he had reached the limit of self-censorship. ‘Ortigara alone has cost us 20,000 men!’ he exclaimed, in a recently discovered letter to Albertini. The Italians were incapable of concentrating their offensive. Cadorna’s staff officers could only reach him through his deputy Porro, ‘whose studied imbecility is beyond dispute’. ‘We lurch from one disastrous action to the next,’ he went on angrily, ‘massacring whole divisions without inflicting equal damage on the enemy. We are wearing ourselves out when everything advises prudence, husbanding all our strength.’

He stayed at Ortigara, filing reports about the infantry attacking uphill in torrential rain that turns into snow. When darkness cloaks the scene, he tries to follow the ebb and flow of battle by its sounds. The atmosphere is tragic, yet there is no critique of Italian tactics. Events unroll with the inevitability of nature, as if human decisions play no part. His resources of self-censorship were not, after all, exhausted. Perhaps the letters to Albertini were a valve for perfidious feelings.
1

When reporters face this dilemma today, they can usually write about it. Pressure to toe a censor’s line enters the story as a topic for coverage. But this technique was hardly available in the First World War, and apparently it never crossed Barzini’s mind to entrust the reader with his doubts. The primary censorship was internal, performed by himself on his own copy. He buried his misgivings under words, ever more positive words about Italy’s noble warriors on land, at sea and in the air. And the more he wrote, the more the warriors themselves detested him. Whatever his standing
outside
the war zone, many of the men in the trenches thought his articles were more putrid than those corpses which spoiled his appetite. ‘If I see that Barzino, I’ll shoot him myself’ was the pithy comment by a nameless infantryman that passed into legend. Lauding failed operations and heaping hosannas on incompetent officers, the journalists became hated figures. ‘In the journalists’ version of events,’ wrote the pro-war publicist Giuseppe Prezzolini, ‘Italy had become the most important country in the world and the Italian war the centre of the European conflict.’ More than anyone else, Barzini was responsible for the ordinary soldiers’ weary disgust with the press – an outlook caught by Giulio Barni, a tough-minded volunteer from Trieste, in a little poem called ‘Propaganda’. 

 Newspapers arrived
in the trenches
– so-called ‘propaganda’ –

and since there was no other paper
the soldiers took them
to wipe their arses 

None of this was unique to Barzini or Italy. Across Europe, journalists believed their overriding duty was to the army, right or wrong. The chiefs of staff wanted to ban the press from the front and force it to rely exclusively on official bulletins. In Germany and Russia, the generals got their way. In Britain, the government and the leading newspapers quickly reached an informal understanding; the press would co-ordinate the dissemination of official news from the front, and in exchange, the government would keep censorship to a minimum. The press then tested the army’s patience by using freelancers who hurried to France, where they played cat-and-mouse with the army around northern France. Their coverage supplemented the official version of events with colour and detail. Later, the British army agreed to accredit five British correspondents at the front. Dressed in officers’ uniforms, lent a château and a fleet of cars, they were flattered and controlled. One of their censors described the process of co-optation: the five correspondents ‘lived in the Staff world, its joys and sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed?’ Among the rules under which they worked was this: ‘There must be no criticism of authority or command.’ They toed the line, filing bland and hopeful accounts of battles that they had not been allowed to see, untouched by the ‘helpless anger’ that their reports stirred among the infantry.

The Italian ‘system of lies’ was based on a similar arrangement. On 23 May 1915, when they realised that Cadorna wanted to ban all journalists from the front, the leading newspapers petitioned the government and general staff to give selected correspondents access, and let them file their copy after the Supreme Command had approved it. This privilege should be granted to newspapers with the ‘attitudes’ and ‘moral capacity’ needed for ‘such a delicate task’. The corres– pondents should be ‘rigorously militarised’, and subject to military discipline. How could Cadorna resist? Correspondents were allowed to visit the front in large groups, under close military escort. (On his first tour, Barzini travelled with 60 other journalists.) Later, a corps of nine journalists plus three foreign correspondents were allowed to remain.

The scope of military censorship of the press, post, telephones and telegrams was set out in the war powers law (22 May 1915), authorising the government to examine the contents of any post and the regional prefects to seize any publications that might be ‘gravely prejudicial to the supreme national interests’. Crucially, the publication of ‘military information not from official sources’ was forbidden. A catch-all decree on 20 June banned ‘false news’. The prefect of Naples used this decree to arrest and fine newsboys who shouted about Italian losses. Reinforcing the message, Salandra stated that criticism of Italy’s actions and aims was impermissible; nothing could be allowed to shake public trust in ultimate victory. The press did not object in principle to these constraints. What galled them, as we saw with Barzini, was their crude imposition.

One reason why this patriotic consensus was so sturdy is that it had been forged in 1911, when the press acclaimed the invasion of Libya. Editors had shared and reinforced public impatience with Giolitti’s reforms, and hailed the invasion as a great enterprise that would unite the nation. The press conjured up a vision of Libya as a Promised Land where grateful natives eagerly awaited Italy’s troops, and nature’s bounty would pour into Italy’s coffers. The half-dozen correspondents who felt that the Libyan campaign was
‘their
endeavour’, and who shaped public perceptions of it, were hardcore interventionists in 1914–15.