The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (33 page)

The Austrians were forced back, giving the Italians a salient five kilometres wide and three deep. The hill of Fajti, bulwark of Habsburg defence on the northern Carso, had fallen. The flood was stemmed on one flank by the Habsburg 43rd Division, clinging to its positions between Gorizia and the Vipacco valley, and on the other by a tough Czech regiment. But for how long? Was this the breakthrough? When the counter-attack came, eight Austrian battalions tore forward from their second line wielding any weapons to hand: rifles, grenades, teargas bombs, iron-tipped clubs. With both sides’ gunners trying to stop fresh units from reaching the line, their forces clashed on the pitted moonscape of the Carso amid shellbursts and hissing fragments of limestone. Cadorna had kept back 22 regiments for this, the second day, and they determined its outcome. Despite regaining a few positions, the Austrians had to fall behind their second line, accepting the Italian salient as accomplished fact. By 3 November, even this line looked untenable. As John Schindler finely recounts, the focal point was Hill 464, a few hundred metres east of Fajti. Boroević sent his last reserve battalion into the fray. This was the 4th Battalion of the 61st Infantry, a rich ethnic mix from the Banat region, today divided among Romania, Hungary and Serbia. Although they were outnumbered by six to one, their rampaging counter-attack triggered one of those failures of nerve that overtook Cadorna’s men. This turned the tide, and the arrival of an extra division from Galicia a few hours later clinched Cadorna’s decision to halt the Ninth Battle. The Italians had lost 39,000 men, some 6,000 more than the enemy, and he refused to throw his last reserves into the battle. The Austrians were astounded; did he not know how close he was to breaking through?

Cadorna recognised that the ratio of losses and gains in the autumn campaigns was horrific, which explains why the account in his memoir is unreliable even by the general standard of that book. But it does not follow that he was battering blindly at a door that showed no sign of yielding, learning nothing from experience. 

He revised his battle plan before the Ninth Battle. While he still paid lip-service to the aim of reaching Trieste before winter, his goal was more modest: an improvement in Italy’s position on the Carso, reaching an imaginary line between the hills of Trstelj and Hermada – at least 15 kilometres north of Trieste – without incurring huge casualties. By providing the army, the government and the nation with limited but secure territorial gains, without colossal bloodletting, he would build on the capture of Gorizia, disarm his critics and end the year on a positive note, well placed for spring 1917. He formalised this thinking in a circular to his divisional generals on 17 October. After achieving ‘total destruction’ of the enemy front line, the infantry would attack across the Carso. The offensive would halt at the ‘critical point’ before the enemy had time to regroup.

It was hard to do these things singly, let alone in a tightly timed sequence amid the chaos of battle. Even with their trench mortars, the Italians could not be sure of breaching barbed wire. A tactic of holding back the infantry until this had been achieved, in order to launch a simultaneous assault, was sure to fail. And how to identify that ‘critical point’? Cadorna’s new realism rested on some highly unrealistic foundations.

Making matters worse, the Austrians had adapted their tactics to turn static defence into dynamic counter-attack. Instead of trying to hold their front line against the shelling and frontal attack, they waited in their second line, then rushed forward to clash with the enemy around the almost deserted front line. The element of surprise and enhanced morale made this method effective enough to be worth using, though the depth and improved accuracy of Italian fire ensured that initial casualties stayed high.

Cadorna had finally done what his critics wanted: he had concentrated his forces on a narrow front, and employed his batteries more effectively. Yet, in other respects, these offensives repeated the errors of 1915. The outcome confirmed that defensive superiority could be overturned only by a combination of patient preparatory sapping, artillery fire that was both colossal and precisely accurate, and the timely deployment of reserves. Worst of all, Cadorna had discovered a knack for abandoning offensives when Boroević had committed his last reserves. The steely exterior concealed a vacillating spirit.

Nevertheless, these battles brought the Italians within sight of the goal of attritional warfare: exhausting the enemy to the point of collapse. The Austrians had no hope of replenishing their losses. Since August, at least 130,000 had been killed, wounded or captured on the Isonzo. Many divisions were shadows of themselves; almost all had been completely reconstructed half a dozen times.

Yet Cadorna’s advantages were less solid than they appeared to the enemy. His recruits were poorly trained, incoming officers likewise, and the army’s material superiority did not nullify the defenders’ advantage.
1
As for his actual gains on the Carso, they amounted to several villages and a couple of kilometres of limestone, won at a cost of 80,000 casualties. The Italians were nowhere near the Trstelj– Hermada line. This was far from a limited success at reasonable cost. By blaming these results on the infantry’s lack of fighting spirit, among other factors, he twisted a consequence of his tactics into a cause of their failure. His claim that all three battles were halted as soon as the casualties became disproportionate to the results was equally cynical, for the impact of these campaigns on morale was clear at the time. Douhet put his finger on the problem when he said that none of Cadorna’s offensives gave the troops ‘the feeling that they had really won’. As Italy was fighting an aggressive war, success had to be measured by a different scale than resistance or endurance. The men knew this very well, and mocked the shortfall between ambition and performance with a little rhyme that they chanted when their officers were out of earshot: 

 See Cadorna rampage, hear him roar! 

He’s killed all the mice on the kitchen floor. 

If the Italians were not driving ahead, they were, by definition, failing. The finest trench-memoir was written by a lieutenant who fought on the Carso in the winter of 1916. ‘It is not dying that is the demoralising thing, the thing that grinds you down’, he recalled. ‘It is dying so uselessly, for nothing. This is not dying for the fatherland; it is dying for the stupidity of specific orders and the cowardice of specific commanding officers.’ The mood of incipient despair grew during the last months of 1916, and found expression. On 1 November, as the Ninth Battle got underway, the Duke of Aosta had six men summarily executed for mutiny. Cadorna seized on this grim incident to issue a directive that commanders were duty-bound to decimate mutinous units. While he had no authority to revise the military penal code, nobody was prepared to challenge him. 

Source Notes
NINETEEN
Not Dying for the Fatherland

1
‘
He began to see me as the worst of enemies
’: Melograni, 197.

2
a week later he blundered
: Rocca, 176.

3
a blistering assessment of Cadorna’s performance
: Rocca, 179.

4
‘
it looked like an attempt at mass suicide
’: Weber, 242.

5
their only significant gain was a hilltop
: Schindler, 176.

6
other Habsburg units sometimes donned fezzes
: From an unpublished memoir by Aleksandar Grlić.

7
with 12 fresh divisions, the Italians
: Weber, 250.

8
disinformation from Habsburg prisoners
: Sema, vol. II, 33.

9
a circular to his divisional generals on 17 October:
Rocca, 171–2.

10
blaming these results on the infantry’s lack of fighting spirit
: Cadorna [1921], 318.

11
equally cynical
: Cadorna [1921], 328.

12
‘
the feeling that they had really won
’: Sema, vol. II, 28.

13
a little rhyme that they chanted
: Rocca, 238.

14
‘
It is not dying that is the demoralising thing
’: Salsa, 63.

15
the Duke of Aosta had six men
: Melograni, 218–19.

16
Capello boasted that his artillery
: Sema, vol. II, 97.

1 
For example, use of the creeping barrage – allowing infantry to advance behind a curtain of artillery fire – was standard practice on the Western Front by the end of 1916. By March 1917, it was still unknown on the Italian front, due to the relative inaccuracy of Italian guns and poor co-ordination between infantry and artillery. The mountainous landscape posed insuperable problems to communications at the front. Capello boasted that his artillery, around Gorizia, had mastered the creeping barrage, but it was not true. 

TWENTY

The Gospel of Energy

Only an immense force of will, which
manifests itself in perseverance admired by
present and future generations, can conduct
us to our goal
.

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ

During the Eighth Battle, an officer behind the jump-off trench watches the little black figures scramble over the parapet clutching their rifles, then pause, ‘calm and steadfast’. He is fascinated by this moment: surely the men halt to focus ‘their stalwart spirits’ on the task ahead, for each soldier is ‘like a small thing with a single will, which is stronger than the metal that breaks it’. Then they set off, across the Carso. The line ripples under enemy fire, the men flinch, set off again in a crouching run, stop to aim and fire, run again. ‘If they don’t fall, they get there. If they don’t get there, they don’t come back.’ This particular attack succeeds, despite furious bombardment. For, the officer intones, ‘the will of man is stronger than all the guns’.

What starts as a deeply felt description turns into scripted rhetoric. The clue to the officer’s identity as an educated man, an intellectual, is his interpretation of that moment on the parapet. Although veterans’ memoirs say little about the frontal attack – the core of the infantry’s unspeakable experience, and the reason why their casualty rates over the war were 40 per cent (ten times worse than for cavalry and gunners) – one man still remembered that precise moment nearly ninety years later. Antonio Di Nardo (1896–2005) described the ‘absurd’ moment of ‘pleasure at liberation from all that anxiety’ when he got out of ‘that muddy ditch’. Rather than steeling their resolve, the infantry halted to savour their relief that the waiting was over, and delay a moment longer their plunge into the lethal unknown.

The countdown was excruciating; after fixing bayonets and draining the double tot of grappa, the men had to get through endless minutes before their officer shouted ‘
Avanti Savoia!
’ and led them into the smoking din. Another long-lived veteran remembered how his heart hammered, his ‘whole body racked by terror’, while comrades mumbled prayers or rehearsed their battle-cries, ‘thinking of nothing but death’. Guido Favetti noted how ‘the blood chills before an assault, the troops fall silent. Iron discipline! Whoever questions their orders by so much as a word will be shot immediately.’ The attack was the moment of truth, the ultimate test of discipline and resolve. For Emilio Lussu, a junior officer in the Sassari Brigade, this interval was worse than the attack itself. ‘Those who have not been through such moments do not know what war is.’

The men knew an attack was imminent when the military police mounted their machine guns behind the trench, ready to shoot at soldiers who lingered when the cry of ‘Savoy!’ went up. There are no data on the casualties caused by the carabinieri, but an impression emerges from memoirs and diaries. After a minor action in the Dolomites, an army doctor matter-of-factly recorded treating 80 casualties of enemy machine-gun fire, and another 25 shot in the buttocks by the carabinieri. This practice had no equivalent on the Western Front, where the British military police merely set up ‘straggler posts’ as a barrier to stop men leaving the front line before or during battle. If anything, it anticipated the Red Army ‘blocking units’, which gunned down soldiers who tried to escape in the Russian Civil War.

When zero hour came, the men knew that failure was the likeliest outcome. A failed attack on the Carso felt like this: 

Voices and shouting on all sides: a torture of sounds. You don’t understand a thing, but you intuit from the noises and whistles all around that things are not going well. You drop to the ground. The rain keeps falling, a thousand snakes hissing in your ears; a confusion of people coming and going; deafening clamour. Then, solemn silence. Slithering on your stomach, you regain the track in twos and threes. But you have no clear idea what happened: whether you were cowardly or brave, or whether, turning back, you would meet the same officers and men as before or another unit, or even the Austrians.

In common with their allies and enemies, the Italians had expected a war of manoeuvre: bold operations along the valleys, then sweeping victories on the lowlands beyond the Alps and the Carso. What they could not foresee or explain was how the infantry should prevail against machine guns in dominating positions protected by barbed wire that was, for the most part, still stubbornly intact after heavy bombardment. This omission did not trouble the staff officers, because the Supreme Commander had solved the conundrum in his famous tract,
Frontal
Attack and Tactical Training
, discussed in an earlier chapter. ‘The outcome of war will always’, Cadorna wrote, ‘be decided by manoeuvre.’ Cadorna’s guidance to attacking troops was childish: ‘Infantry that finds itself under fire during an attack must remove itself from this fire
as
quickly as possible
in the only way permitted: by proceeding with all speed … Stopping and lying down would be
a very serious mistake
.’ Convinced that attrition could not alter the scope for manoeuvre, Cadorna was not interested in how to get from here (attrition) to there (victorious manoeuvre). Instead of treating this tremendous question on its merits, he dismissed it with a stunningly simple solution: willpower, or morale. ‘When a soldier lacks the spirit and will to fight,’ he wrote to the prime minister, ‘he lacks everything.’ By the same token, possession of this spirit and will make the soldier unstoppable. In the simpler language of the
Libretto personale
, a military service document issued to every soldier: ‘A soldier who has faith and courage almost always triumphs over the difficulties and dangers presented by war.’ What really mattered was to go forward wherever and whenever possible. 

According to traditional doctrine, before machine guns, barbed wire and concrete dug-outs changed the battlefield for ever, infantry should attack after superiority of fire had been achieved. Cadorna agreed in principle, but insisted that attacks ‘should proceed without such certainty’. There was realism, too, in his observation that the assault ‘does not have to be carried out by a
mass
of men’. Given the efficacy of modern artillery and their power of concentration, masses of men ‘would face certain destruction’. The assault should therefore be carried out by ‘waves’ of men in lines that were ‘not dense’. In practice, he ignored this precept or did not take it far enough, preferring to promote the will as a total solution to tactical challenges, capable of making up for any technical or geographical disadvantages. ‘Victory is determined’, he wrote in his tract, ‘by the demoralisation of the enemy.’ This would only be true if demoralisation and defeat were one and the same.

Military thinkers have always emphasised the importance of morale and willpower, for the logical reason that soldiers who strongly want to win are more likely to prevail. In the decades before 1914, this emphasis became inflamed and fanatical. The argument ran that machine guns, barbed wire and concrete dug-outs did not knock willpower (or morale) off its pedestal as the decisive factor on the battlefield. On the contrary, by isolating willpower they confirmed its primacy. For French strategists, the key to success was ‘
élan
’, passionate ardour or flair. The Italian equivalent was ‘
slancio
’, one of Cadorna’s favourite words. The British general staff was less poetical, as befits Anglo-Saxons, but the substance was the same: every leader in an attack must be ‘imbued with a determination to close with the enemy’, for success depended on ‘the exercise of human qualities directed by the willpower of individuals’. A British general proposed that war was essentially the ‘triumph’ of ‘one will over a weaker will’. In the same year, 1911, the Director of Military Operations at the French general staff advocated the development of ‘a conquering state of mind’.

Faith in the will belonged to a set of powerful convictions that can be linked under the umbrella term ‘vitalism’, a matrix of assumptions about existence and value that influenced thinking in many fields. Vitalism championed impulses and intuitions over abstract ideas, character over structure, irrationalism over intellect, energy over fixity, soul or will over materialism, ‘life force’ over inherited forms. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, hugely influential in the prewar decade, coined the term élan
vital
as a tag for ‘the inner force that cannot be rationally grasped or articulated, which thrusts its way into the empty and unknowable future, and moulds both biological growth and human activity’. Depending on context, vitalism was a banner for genuine innovation, a cloak for fear of technology, an alibi for egoism on the smallest (personal) or largest (collective) scale, and even a charter for racial hatred and killing.

For vitalists, action supplants virtue or utility as the measure of value. Action is not a substitute for knowledge but a higher mode of knowledge, soaring above the pedantry of investigation and research. From this angle, concepts are the enemy of understanding, because they separate us from the flow of sensations and intuitions that make up life’s substance. Vitalism appealed to the anti-intellectual bent of intellectuals who already doubted the rationalist rules of their game. Trapped in the vast dynamics of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, industrialisation and commerce, and by the theories of natural evolution, human history and the unconscious mind discovered by Darwin, Marx and Freud, what room was left for individual reason and moral will? How should men not succumb to the dark currents running below Progress (justly called ‘the political principle of the nineteenth century’), namely a gnawing sense of degeneration and impotence, merging fear of technology with fear of women? In hind sight, vitalism was a resistance movement, a late-romantic defence of the individual male and his solitary resources, a consolation after the ‘death of God’ in the mid-nineteenth century and before the birth of ‘human rights’ after 1945. For the vitalist vision is self-deifying, promising to restore mankind to his rightful place in the scheme of things, able to master all species and materials through mystical life-force.

The shrillness of military vitalist thinking around 1910 showed the urgency of the problem confronting the general staffs. Arguing that soldiers’ morale was detachable from the quality of training, equipment and command, or the mere probability of survival, was a strange endeavour for the military mind. In this case, it was a resort adopted under great pressure. How else to reconcile the drastic improvements in defensive power since the American Civil War with the tactical necessity of infantry attacks? The staffs were well aware that modern weaponry had created what General Foch called a ‘death zone’ between armies. How could large numbers of men cross this zone intact? Before tanks and parachutes they had to use their legs, and before lightweight body armour they had no significant protection against bullets.

Frontal attack was the military expression of vitalist beliefs about nation and society. Denying the dominance of technology over the human spirit and boasting about the sovereignty of the will were axiomatic in vitalist thinking. And from a Social Darwinist perspective, victory
should
be costly. This doctrine was irresistible to commanders who needed to encourage their troops before operations that were likely to get them killed. Inspired by vitalist ideas, the generals could celebrate the offence as inherently superior to the defence and reassure their men that the enemy’s advantages were trivial beside their own spiritual ascendancy. For the nation – weakened by modern urban living – must be ready for sacrifice in order to strengthen its moral fibre. This benefit would follow from the sacrifice; it did not depend on the soldiers’ consciousness of why they had to lay down their lives. This helps to explain why the Supreme Command paid so little attention to the psychological welfare of the soldiers.

This neglect looks contradictory; if the soldiers’ will could be eroded by defeatist propaganda, as Cadorna complained was happening, surely it could be built up by positive measures? Yet, if the soldiers were intended for sacrifice, why use up resources on educating and amusing them? Only after Caporetto would the penny drop: if the men did not understand, their motivation suffered. Vitalism also formed the mental background of the politicians who blocked aid packages to Italian prisoners of war. Captured men were not worth assisting; even if they had not betrayed the nation, they had let it down. The calculation that the benefit of discouraging potential deserters (by demonstrating the horrors of captivity) outweighed the prisoners’ own rights, was premised on vitalist contempt.