The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (34 page)

Of all the prominent Italians discussed in this book, perhaps only two were immune to vitalism: the poet Rebora and the liberal leader Giolitti. Catholics inveighed against materialism and burned with contempt for the moral nullity of science, while reactionaries and Marxists alike preached faith in revolutionary action and the necessity of conflict for spiritual renewal or social progress. The compromises of parliamentary democracy were reviled. Perhaps Italian vitalism was the index of three volatile quantities: nationalist anxiety, territorial appetite, and military inefficiency. The reality of the unified kingdom – Giolitti’s despised
Italietta
– felt to many Italians like a betrayal of Risorgimento dreams. Italy had lost in battle to Ethiopia and struggled with the tribes of Libya. Its industrialisation was half-baked; its per capita income was half that of Germany, Europe’s other recently unified state, and one-third of Great Britain’s; its cultural contribution to modern Europe was uncertain. No place, then, at the table of great powers. This situation seemed especially unjust to generations that grew up with the myth of a ‘glorious minority’ that had ‘decided the destiny of Italy’ by ‘its own will’. With this achievement at their backs, those born since the 1870s felt that Italy’s vitalist credentials were in better shape than other nations’, and merited a leading role on the world stage.

The pressure of this background shapes the memoirs of veterans who could express their deeper assumptions. During failed offensives on the eastern Carso, Mario Puccini fantasised that the very vegetation ‘did not want to become Italian’. Revisiting this location after it had been captured, he noticed the plants ‘twisted, shorn, uprooted’ by the fighting, and realised that ‘if he only wants to, man can overcome any natural obstacle, however strong and stubborn it may be’. Vitalist ideas were palpable, too, in the army training manual, called
Military Life
and Discipline
. Written in 1917 for use in military colleges, it is a primer of applied Social Darwinism. ‘Outside the struggle there is only putrefaction, dissolution, death’, wrote the author, an infantry lieutenant, for the benefit of teenaged cadets. ‘The struggle is synonymous with life.’ Combat and sacrifice are essential to the moral life and health of the state. In war, force must be disciplined if it is to be used effectively. This is why the army is the nation’s school, its physical force, the test of its fitness for life, the cure for ‘civic illiteracy’. All the ‘individual wills which compose the army’ must be unified ‘under the supreme will of the commander’. What matters is action: ‘faith in reality, in what we do:
activity
, that is our good’.

Looking back at Cadorna’s prestige during the war, Carlo Sforza was caustic: ‘The Italian middle classes wanted to believe that a harsh mask and hermetic silence were the sure signs of genius, and that brutality was energy.’ The vogue for vitalism encouraged people to believe that a great commander has certain qualities of energy and will. Italy’s supreme warlord must be great, therefore Cadorna possessed these qualities: youthful zest, tenacity, strength, manliness and decisiveness, but also modesty, goodness and simplicity. While he possessed some of these qualities in some degree, they recur so often in descriptions because the authors saw what they wanted to see. During the tragic last phase of the Eleventh Battle, Gatti was fascinated by Cadorna’s self- possession: ‘tranquil, serene, rested’, the Supreme Commander appears happy. ‘He speaks slowly, but is sure of himself: he sees nothing but his own thought. Everything that others say or do slides off Cadorna like waves off a rock. It leaves no trace. His energy is simple, primitive, infinite.’ These were hallmarks of true greatness. When Luigi Barzini paid tribute to Cadorna’s magical charisma, he took a cue from the generalissimo’s own tract on tactics, which stated that a ‘firm and indestructible will must descend from above to permeate and assiduously incite all levels of the hierarchy’.

Compared to the cult surrounding Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s, Cadorna’s was modest, even frugal. It is impossible to imagine Cadorna fondling lions for the camera or making his generals sprint in their parade uniforms, sabres and medals a-jangle. For stunts of that kind, D’Annunzio was the model. Cadorna’s aristocratic hauteur, always with an air of
noblesse oblige
, was quite unlike Mussolini’s chosen style. The Duce’s charisma was crafted to maximise his communication with the masses, something that Cadorna did not have to do and would not stoop to attempt.

Still, there were seeds of the later cult in the earlier. If Cadorna was the first to be acclaimed as
Duce
or ‘Leader’, the second was D’Annunzio (as ‘commandant’ of the city-state of Fiume in 1919–20), and the last was Mussolini. The press promoted Cadorna as the nation’s best champion, above political squabbling, indeed above politics as such, perhaps to fill a vacuum; for nobody in government could inspire people to sacrifice. Mussolini’s energy, will, dedication, serene self- possession, virility, strength, decisiveness, simplicity, health, youth – and all the rest – dwarfed Cadorna’s. For Fascism was the vitalist regime par excellence, enthroning energy as the gauge of political value and the pretext for what one of its most penetrating critics – writing, as it happens, within a stone’s throw of the Isonzo – would call ‘a permanent revolution, emancipating action from the principle of responsibility, exempting it from the embarrassing specificity of a
purpose’
. 

The most startling form of cultural vitalism was Italian. This was Futurism, launched in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876– 1944) as a campaign to promote new ways of writing poetry, liberated from rhyme and metre. Though he was a gifted writer, Marinetti’s real talent was for publicity and provocation, using his private fortune to win huge exposure for events that would otherwise have gained little attention. 

With Napoleonic self-confidence, Marinetti identified a tension in the cultural values of western Europe. Humanism and nationalism had promoted each other while keeping each other in check. An Italian patriot was supposed to take pride in Rome and Venice, Julius Caesar and Michelangelo. Marinetti cancelled the debt to humanism; condemning Venice as a sordid disgrace, he refused to venerate the great artistic achievements of the past. Denouncing tradition, museums, prudence, moderation and peace, the Futurists celebrated dynamism, energy, speed, novelty, mechanisation and violence, the last not so much as a political means, rather as an end in itself. ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the freedom-bringer, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.’ The last phrase was crucial: the Futurists mocked the fear of technology, but fear of women still lurked.

They claimed the Italian national character was innately attuned to life itself,
la vita
: flexible, quick, anti-intellectual, fiery, sensuous – all Futurist virtues. War was no mournful necessity; it was an incredible expression of energy, a source of renewal, the ultimate happening.
1
Futurist events were calculated to outrage and amuse. The flippancy of their declarations was part of a populist style; Marinetti realised that cultural statements can be snappy and accessible like newspaper headlines.

With his moustache, bowler hat and jaunty air, Marinetti looked like a music-hall impresario. Recruits had flocked to his banner and Futurism branched into painting, sculpture, discordant music (‘the art of noises’) and an architecture of ‘fearless audacity’. In Futurist theory, every object has an ‘interior force’ that art should disclose. Seeking forms that could record or embody not fixed moments but dynamic sensations, they produced a few of the most memorable images of twentieth-century art. Bright canvases of charging cavalry, armoured trains, shattering detonations or crowded urban life, rendered with neo- impressionist techniques for splitting the spectrum into planes or dots of primary colour, rendering movement by ‘velocity-lines’ that trace motion through space; these have a permanent place in the great galleries of the world.

The Futurists spat on liberal ideals. According to Antonio Gramsci, the communist leader from Turin, they enjoyed a following among workers before the war. This esteem was not reciprocated. The Futurists proclaimed a contempt for ordinary people that pro-war politicians expressed by their decisions and generals by their tactics. ‘Down with democracy!’ was their refrain. For democracy was slow, middle-aged, the dismal kingdom of slaves. It was fit only for ‘democretins’, not free spirits. Freedom should be the preserve of an élite; it ‘is only for those who know what to do with it and how to live it’. Elected chambers should be abolished: ‘The time has come to finish with parliament. We did not need parliament in order to wage war. We shall know how to make peace without parliament.’ The ‘chamber of plotters, babblers and incompetents’ should be replaced with a ‘technical corps’ that would know how to direct ‘the corporation of the state’. It was a proto– fascist vision.

The Futurists have not lost their power to disturb. Their delight in the mayhem of war offends our conviction that violence must be abominated. We have confined that delight to the realm of simulation and virtual fantasy – the violence of movies and computer games, or the vignettes of real but remote horror delivered by television. Marinetti and his friends proved their commitment in 1914, when they became red-hot interventionists, imploring a ‘great fraternal sacrifice of all Italians’, and raising the temperature of anti-German polemics (for the stolid, collectivised Germans were devoid of Futurist virtues). They were truly prophetic about war and technology; their monstrous vision matched the enormity of what was about to happen. The cartoonish terrorism of their rhetoric showed how difficult it was to escape from the sonorous clichés, genteel emotions and pasteboard décor of Italian culture. In the event, war reunited the Futurists with their old enemies under the banner of aggressive nationalism. Marinetti and D’Annunzio stood side by side, in uniform, despite their artistic differences. 

For Marinetti, the war was ‘the culminating and perfect synthesis of progress (aggressive velocity + violent simplificationm …)’, and ‘the most beautiful Futurist poem that has yet seen the light of day’. He became a fairly familiar figure along the Isonzo front; General Capello asked him to give pep talks to the Second Army before the Tenth Battle. What the men made of his ‘violent Futurist speeches’, as he proudly called them, declaiming poems called ‘The Pope’s Aeroplane’ and ‘The Song of the Pederasts’, is not known, though a sardonic officer from Turin told an American Red Cross volunteer that Italy was famous for three things: ‘D’Annunzio because he was immoral, Caruso because he was a bad singer, and Marinetti because he was mad’.

Mad or not, he was persona grata with the more intellectual commanders during the war, such as Capello. While he was the only top-flight commander to challenge Cadorna’s tactics, and often showed better judgement of battlefield realities, Capello was banally conventional in his commitment to frontal offensives. ‘Victory lies beyond the last trench’ was a maxim that must have provoked inward groans among his men. He considered the average Italian soldier was ‘too southern’ to be ‘spontaneously and voluntarily active’, hence ‘his spirit must be warmed to white heat’. Boasting about his own brute strength and ‘splendid optimism’, he liked to remind his officers that
his will
was
their fate
. (It was no less than the truth, but why rub it in?) He was notorious for devising an exhausting routine of exercises and fatigue duties for troops out of the line. One regiment was put to laying barbed wire, and suffered twice as many deaths during a week as during 40 days at the front. The commission of inquiry after Caporetto found that the Second Army troops often returned to the line in worse condition than they had left it. Capello wanted the men to look forward to returning to the front line. The main effect was something else: exhaustion and resentment, mounting into hatred.

On 22 April 1917, Marinetti lunched with Capello and his corps commanders. Badoglio ingratiated himself with the celebrity guest: ‘I like your whole campaign against Italian “commemorative patriotism”. I’m with you there. All our wars of independence from ’48 to ’70 only cost about 6,000 dead!’ Capello interrupted: ‘I had more than that at Oslavia’, referring to a village near Gorizia, the site of ferocious fighting. Was the general’s tone sorrowful, thoughtful or proud? Marinetti’s diary does not say. Capello pounced on an officer for using the word ‘hope’. ‘What what what! What was that word?’ Marinetti interjected helpfully: ‘It was a passéist word.’ Capello agreed: ‘Yes, a passéist word. “Hope” indeed! I
want
victory, and it
will
be.’

For all the talk of ardour and will, battle turned out to provide above all ‘an experience of supreme helplessness’ for the front-line troops. This was an irony that patriotic vitalists could not afford to admit, even if they let themselves notice it.

The most troubling Futurist artwork is a small sculpture created just before the war by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Ambitious, competitive, with a ‘restless, aggressive mind’, Boccioni wanted Italy to commit itself to ‘ferocious conquest’, and was arrested at an interventionist rally in Milan in September 1914, along with Marinetti. Once he set fire to an Austrian flag in a theatre, a favourite Futurist stunt. Called up in July 1915, he joined Marinetti, the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo, and the Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia in the Lombardy Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists, the only volunteer unit in the army. ‘My Futurist ideals, my love of Italy, and my infinite pride in being Italian drive me irresistibly to do my duty.’ He practised sculpting in dough when the mess sergeant allowed. The Futurists fought bravely, and Boccioni’s diaries record keen exhilaration as well as hunger and cold at their posting high in the Trentino. ‘The life we lead’, he wrote, ‘is a thrilling continuous effort of will.’