The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (36 page)

55
the Renaissance statue of the warrior Colleoni
: The masterpiece of Andrea del Verrocchio, made around 1480, this equestrian statue stands on a high plinth in Venice.

56
‘
nonhuman and mechanical being
’: Marinetti [1971]. The comparison is suggested by an art historian, Marianne Martin.

57
‘
bursting vitality
’: Tallarico, facing 121; Ballo, 366.

58
propelled by
‘
extreme resolution
’: This is how Carlo Salsa interpreted the crouching run of the infantry during an attack. Like Frescura, Salsa was a vitalist intellectual who went on to support Fascism. Salsa; Isnenghi [2005], 239.

59
a
‘
good soldier
’
must lose his identity
: Procacci [2000], 81.

60
Fascist myth of a
‘
new Man
’: Gentile [1986], 115.

67
‘
brutalised and cowardly race
’: From Boccioni’s Open Letter to Papini, dated 1 March 1914. Boccioni [1971], 74

1 
The composer Stockhausen’s scandalous comment on the destruction of New York’s twin towers on 11 September 2001 – ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’ – was pure Marinetti.  

2 
The Futurists were obsessed with the headless statue of Nike, Greek goddess of victory, in the Louvre. Marinetti proclaimed that a racing car was more beautiful, and a plaster reproduction was smashed at the wedding feast of the painter Gino Severini. Were they disturbed because they could not reconcile her contemptible prestige as a cultural treasure with her splendid (Futuristic) attitude of surging and sensuous affirmation? 

TWENTY-ONE

Into a Cauldron

If victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons
will grow dull and their ardour will be
damped
.

S
UN
T
ZU

The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo

Boroević was certain that Cadorna wanted to attack again before the end of 1916. He was right: an attack was planned for early December. On the 7th, a break in the bad weather allowed the artillery to warm up. But the winter soon closed in again and the infantry stood down. (Someone joked that even the weather was Austrian.) According to Cadorna, the troops in the Vipacco valley were drowning in mud. The postponement would last five months. Minor actions flared here and there as the Austrians tried to wrest back the territory they had lost since August. Still, the front was relatively calm and sometimes completely so. General Robertson was struck by the ‘absolute quiet’, broken by an occasional rifle shot: ‘a very different state of affairs from what we were accustomed to on the Western Front’.

Meanwhile, much was happening across Europe that affected the Italian war. Joffre hosted another inter-Allied conference in mid-November, where the chiefs of staff agreed that the Allies’ decisive blow should involve combined offensives in May 1917. Cadorna’s task was to draw the maximum number of Austrian divisions away from the Eastern Front. He was also asked to help the French and British by sending more units to Albania and Salonika. This request was refused, but he pledged to support an offensive in France.

Italy was again treated as capable at best of diversionary action. But things were about to change for the better. When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as British prime minister in early December 1916, he was bent on carrying out what he would call a ‘fundamental reconstruction of Allied strategy on all fronts’. He planned to launch the process at a conference of Allied prime ministers, ministers of war, and chiefs of staff. In the first week of January 1917, the British and French prime ministers travelled to the conference in Rome by train from Paris. Lloyd George was nurturing a pet project with huge implications for the coming year’s campaigns. He wanted Britain and France to lend the Italians so much artillery in the early part of the year, up to 400 medium and heavy guns, that Cadorna would retake the initiative on the Isonzo, capture Trieste, ‘get astride the Istrian peninsula’, and knock out the Austrian fleet. His logic ran like this: the events of 1916, including the bloodbaths on the Somme and at Verdun, had confirmed there was no prospect of breaking through on the Western Front, where both sides had massed their strongest forces. Yet the Allied military leaders were so obsessed with Flanders that they failed to realise how weak Germany’s ally now was; Austria’s subject nationalities were not wholehearted about the war; and it was fighting alone against Italy. If the Italians could land a solid blow, their tottering enemy would have to transfer forces from the Eastern Front, weakening the Germans. This would strengthen the Allies everywhere. In the best of outcomes, the reinvigorated Italians would knock the Habsburg empire out of the war altogether.

While the cabinet agreed to let him float his idea in Rome, Lloyd George was well aware that the British and French military would resist any scheme that diminished the Western Front. The French were now committed to launching a vast offensive no later than April 1917. As conceived by the new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, who had recently replaced Joffre, this could produce a breakthrough that would cripple the Central Powers. Lloyd George, much taken by Nivelle, was ready to accept French leadership in a joint operational command, but Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, bridled at playing second fiddle to ‘a junior
foreign
commanding officer’, as he complained to the cabinet.

Robertson was also travelling to Rome. Although he and Haig had their differences, they both deplored Lloyd George’s attempts to find a way around the Western Front, and resented his loathing of the doctrine that cost so many lives for so little gain. They were convinced he was toying with public dismay at the scale of killing in Flanders, only pretending not to understand why the enemy must be attacked frontally, where he was strongest. At various times, after all, he had promoted the Balkans, the Eastern Front and the Middle East as alternative theatres. Now he was doing the same with Italy, and Robertson would have none of it. Sensibly, he neither trusted the Italian estimates of their own potential nor believed that Germany would let Austria-Hungary reach a separate peace with the Allies, regardless of how well the reinforced Italians might perform.

In this situation, Lloyd George might have been expected to exercise his legendary powers of persuasion on the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, and his minister of war during their hours on the train. He did nothing of the sort. He did not even show them his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917. When the party reached Rome, he sent the cabinet secretary to brief Cadorna. But the canny Robertson got to him first.

When Lloyd George made his case, next day, the British and French generals’ scepticism was deepened by the overdone praise of Cadorna. The French objected that lending batteries to Italy would jeopardise the Nivelle offensive, so Lloyd George promised that the 300 guns would ‘absolutely’ be returned in good time. When Cadorna’s turn came to speak, he showed no enthusiasm. Guns that had to be returned in May were, he said, not worth having. Haughtily reluctant to plead his own cause, confused by the Anglo-French tensions, and anxious not to raise expectations, he ducked and quibbled. An onlooker who knew him quite well was Sir Rennell Rodd, Britain’s ambassador to Rome. Watching Cadorna pass up a unique chance of substantial Allied support, Rodd reflected that it was a moment when character shapes outcome.

Undaunted, Lloyd George offered to let Cadorna keep the
British
guns for longer. This off-the-cuff contradiction of policy infuriated Robertson without reassuring Cadorna, who was haunted by the spectre of a second Austrian attack out of the Trentino, dismayed that the Allies would lend no troops, and troubled that he would have to attack, inviting German reprisals, without simultaneous offensives on other fronts. These were not negligible problems, yet another man would have sensed that nothing was to be gained by rubbing a would-be benefactor’s nose in his own shortcomings. Lloyd George did not forgive Cadorna for squandering ‘the most promising chance afforded to him to win a great triumph for his country’. Publicly, however, Italy’s eligibility for military aid was on the table, and the Anglo-French commanders could not wish it off again.

Cadorna’s sense of Austro-German intentions was sound. Conrad could be counted on to argue for a combined attack from the Trentino and across the Isonzo. In December 1916, he had won influential support from the chief of operations at the German Supreme Command. General Ludendorff, however, still rejected the idea. When Conrad raised it again in January, the Germans offered to discuss it after the next Allied offensive.

From Cadorna’s point of view, the danger remained real and present. When the Germans shortened their line in France at the beginning of 1917, he worried that the spare troops would be sent in his direction, and sent urgent pleas to the Allies for 20 divisions plus artillery. Even Robertson conceded that contingency plans for Italy’s defence should be prepared. When he visited the front at the end of March, he was dismayed by the makeshift condition of the defences; it was with a view to bolstering these, not to support an offensive, that planning began in April to move six British divisions to Italy by rail, to strengthen the rear lines around Padua. Also in April, ten British batteries of 6-inch howitzers were despatched to the Carso.

Lloyd George’s argument in Rome is familiar to every scholar of British policy and planning in the war. What has not been clear is the source of his conviction that Italy held the key to a transformation of the war. Robertson decided the whole harebrained scheme was Lloyd George’s invention, of a piece with his detestable ‘indifference to military opinion on military matters’.
1

There may be a missing link, in the form of Brigadier-General Charles Delmé-Radcliffe, who led the British Military Mission to the Italian army in the field. Contemptuous of politicians and desk-wallahs, arrogant and rude, jealous of his patch and well regarded by Victor Emanuel, Delmé-Radcliffe resembled the generalissimo himself. His quarrel with the British ambassador in Rome could have been modelled on Cadorna’s feuds with any number of politicians. Long on gossip and short on crisp assessment, his communiqués to the highest levels of government perhaps baffled their recipients. What did Lloyd George make of the telegram of 26 December 1916, warning against alleged anti-war elements in Rome, particularly ‘the Caillaux–Giolitti–Tittoni intrigue’? Or his sideswipe at Sonnino’s ‘suspicious and bargaining nature, due perhaps to the Jewish blood in his veins’? Was Lloyd George impressed by expressions like ‘the internal enemy’ and the promotion of maximal Italian war aims? Whatever the answer, he surely approved Delmé-Radcliffe’s perennial optimism about Italy’s performance, putting the best spin on every setback, lobbying the Prince of Wales and Lord Northcliffe to support calls for Allied machine guns and artillery. ‘I have no doubt that the second phase of the battle will produce even better results than the first phase’, he reported to the War Office in late August 1917, just as the Italians were running out of steam in the Eleventh Battle; ‘All the prospects on the Carso are also satisfactory’, he added in the teeth of all evidence; ‘The spirit of all the Italian troops is excellent’ – an astonishing claim. He maintained that most Italians were strongly pro-war, and blamed ‘this damned anti-war propaganda’ for spreading defeatism. 

Although they heartily detested each other, he and Ambassador Rodd saw eye to eye on the need to promote Italy’s cause. Rodd suspected the British of undervaluing Italy’s effort. Asquith, Kitchener and the Prince of Wales had all visited the Supreme Command, but something more was needed to catch the popular interest. As a well-connected mandarin with artistic interests, Rodd persuaded Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and others to tour the front and pay tribute in articles and instant books. Wells opined that ‘Italy is not merely fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion but she is doing a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing in fighting at all.’ Visiting in June 1916, before the Sixth Battle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes saw ‘Trieste or death!’ scrawled on walls all over northern Italy and had a close call with a shellburst. (‘Had the Ostro-Boches dropped a high explosive upon us they would have had a good mixed bag.’) Barred from the Carso, he went to Carnia instead, where the war was ‘a most picturesque business’. Picturesque is the key word in British impressions, usually as part of a comparison with France and Flanders. Kipling was impressed by the feats of engineering in the mountains, as everyone was, and also by the generals he met: ‘wide browed, bull-necked devils, lean narrow hook-nosed Romans – the whole original gallery with a new spirit behind it’. (Comparisons with ancient Romans came naturally to Englishmen with a classical education. Cadorna struck Conan Doyle as ‘an old Roman, a man cast in the big simple mould of antiquity’.) He wrote five cheerleading essays for the
Daily Telegraph
and the
New
York Tribune
. A sixth article, which mentioned that the Italians had sometimes oversold their military achievements, did not see print.

It was hard even for such prestigious writers to engage the British and American public, when all the Allied armies were making huge efforts amid terrible conditions. What might have caught the British imagination was resounding, unambiguous success on the battlefield. Gorizia was hardly enough. Such success was what Cadorna now set about preparing. He had lost 400,000 dead and wounded in 1916. Proportionally this was an improvement over 1915, but – leaving aside its impact on the survivors’ morale – it left yawning gaps. No fewer than 151 new battalions were created, mostly in the infantry, bringing the total to 860. This was achieved by calling up classes back to 1873 and forward to 1898, while relaxing the entrance qualifications. By spring 1917, Italy had 59 divisions under arms; in all, there were nearly two million men at the front – some 200,000 more than in November 1916. In artillery, the army gained 52 new field batteries, 44 mountain batteries, and 166 heavy batteries. The number of medium and heavy guns doubled over the year to May 1917. (Even then, there were four times more Allied guns per kilometre of the Western Front than Italian guns on the Isonzo.) Trench mortars continued to arrive in large numbers. Even now, production of machine guns and shells lagged far behind needs; during the Tenth Battle, the siege artillery fired six rounds per gun per hour, contrasting with 30 rounds for British guns on the Western Front.

At the front, positions on the Carso and around Gorizia were strengthened. Mount Sabotino was turned into a battery, with dozens of guns hidden in the tunnel complex that the Austrians had excavated below the summit ridge. Sabotino faced Monte Santo across the Isonzo, still held by the Austrians, so the gunners on the two mountains could blast away like men o’ war firing broadsides. The defensive lines in Trentino and the Asiago plateau were strengthened; by spring 1917, there were six lines on the plateau.

Politically, too, Cadorna shored up his position over the winter. By March, he had the cabinet eating out of his hand. Bissolati, his conversion complete, seemed infatuated by him. Another minister referred to him admiringly as
il Duce supremo
, the ‘supreme Leader’. The problem of troop morale remained. The gloom that settled over the army towards the end of 1916 thickened like fog along the Isonzo valley, and little was done to identify its causes, let alone address them. As the army prepared for another winter, visitors noticed a sullen weariness at the front. A reduction in rations in December did nothing for the soldiers’ spirits. The new year brought several worrying incidents where new recruits protested at the draft. Infantry shouted abuse at passing staff cars. When a journalist mentioned these omens to Cadorna, he waved them away. ‘It is like that everywhere, and of course the soldiers are tired after two years.’ A few serious cases of insubordination had been handled in the only proper way: by shooting the malefactors, ‘to prevent sparks from becoming fires’. The Supreme Command was in denial, the press supported the Supreme Command, and the government was too distracted by its own weakness to challenge their combined version of events: that Italy was on the right track, making steady progress.