The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (39 page)

A greatly outnumbered and completely multiethnic Habsburg force – comprising Dalmatians, Ruthenes, German Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs and Poles – had repulsed the biggest Italian attack yet mounted. Austrian artillery fire was still accurate and effective against regiments that still advanced slowly over difficult terrain, in compact masses. The Austrians, by contrast, used highly mobile assault forces, which proved their worth during counter-attacks. 

Following events from his cell, the implacable Colonel Douhet concluded that the Tenth Battle had failed to achieve a single strategic goal. Gorizia had not been secured, key objectives on the Carso or the coast had not been captured and the Hermada massif had not been touched, let alone conquered. More surprisingly, this bleak judgement was echoed at the highest level of command. The Duke of Aosta, leading the Third Army, cut an imposing figure. Tall, handsome, melancholy, he was not given to airing controversial views or large conceptions. The bright young things around Cadorna at the Supreme Command thought he was diffident and dull-witted. Colonel Gatti, the brightest of the bright, liked him but judged him ‘uncultured’ because his grammar was faulty.

When the two men met on the evening of 26 May, Gatti was startled to hear the Duke say that, while the battle had gone well, at this rate it would take more than ten years to win the war. Final victory could only come by crushing the Central Powers, which would always recover from smaller defeats. But how could this be achieved? People had had enough of the war; at some point they would rebel. The Allies could not be expected to give more help. The army would press ahead, taking bits of territory here and there, until the peoples of the warring states cried ‘Enough!’ 

He is absolutely right
, Gatti thought.
There is no military solution
.
American intervention may make a difference, but who knows when
? This hopeless vista was widely shared. The mood on the Isonzo front was resigned, or worse. The journalist Rino Alessi wrote to his editor on 6 June that the troops seemed ‘depressed beyond measure’. Gatti was haunted by something the commander of the 120th Infantry told him at the end of the battle. ‘They did not rebel: when they were pushed out of the trenches, they went; but they wept.’
Something new is starting
to appear
, Gatti reflected in his diary,
something that was not there at
the beginning of spring
. The Tenth Battle had knocked the stuffing out of the army.
It might carry on like this for months or years, just like
–
so they say – in Germany and Austria, where each illusion of victory
has yielded to the next, down to the present day
. Or it might not. He wondered if the Italians were still paying for Cadorna’s original decision not to attack the Tyrol in 1915. For the Tenth Battle had involved fewer than half the Italian divisions: ‘149 splendid battalions and 500 guns’ remained in Trentino.

The Tenth Battle had a codicil elsewhere, far from the Carso. The Austrian counter-attack around Hermada in early May led Cadorna to bring forward a long-planned offensive on the Asiago plateau. After the failure of the Punishment Expedition in 1916, the Austrians had not been driven off the plateau. In fact, they re-created their strategic advantage on the Isonzo, by holding firm on a chain of hills that bisected the plateau. The northern end of this chain overlooks the Sugana valley, like the gable end of a house that towers 2,000 metres high. This is Ortigara, a wilderness as rocky as the Carso but steeper, and with even better sight-lines onto the approaches. 

Cadorna’s first assault, in November 1916, had come to nothing. Now he resolved to overwhelm the Austrians with sheer weight of shells and men. A new force was created for this purpose, the Sixth Army, under General Mambretti. Eventually the date of 20 June was set; Mambretti would have 200,000 men with 100,000 reserves. When the Austrians counter-attacked on the Carso, the attack was brought forward to 9 June. On the 7th, the weather turned: summer storms lashed the plateau. The following day, a mine under the Austrian front line exploded a day early, killing 130 Italians. By this point, the Austrian action on the Carso had petered out, so Mambretti could have reverted to his original timetable. Instead he attacked on the 10th. The target was a chain of four peaks that had to be approached over open, steep terrain.

It was a catastrophe: Italy’s equivalent of the first day on the Somme. Low cloud cover meant that Italy’s 430 guns and 220 mortars could not target the enemy wire. The general commanding the division directly below Ortigara realised the implications, and asked permission to delay the assault. This was refused by Mambretti, who was unaware that, as on the Carso, the Austrians had abandoned their trenches and excavated deep caverns for men and artillery, often three metres under the surface. The Austrian gunners on the adjacent summits had excellent sight of the Italian positions and the ground where the Sixth Army had to pass.

At 15:00 hours the men of 52nd and 29th Divisions went over the top. Torrential rain had turned the mountainsides to quagmires. The effect was like flypaper: the infantry were trapped under the machine guns, in front of intact wire. Some battalions took 70 per cent losses. After three waves of attack, progress was made elsewhere on the line, at immense cost. The survivors spent the night on the mountainside, trapped in front of the wire, pressing their bodies into the gaps between boulders, playing dead under Austrian flares, waiting for the order to retreat. No order came. Next day the clouds closed in again, and rain turned to snow on the heights. Cadorna arrived after lunch with his entourage, fresh from their hotel. Even Gatti was incredulous: ‘He is perfectly calm, serene, even smiling. He discusses the fighting yesterday with Mambretti as if everything had gone splendidly.’ The two men agree that yesterday’s little difficulties will be investigated. If they can be overcome, the offensive will be re-launched. The men stay on the mountainside for eight days. When the skies clear on 18 June, the artillery opens up and the infantry attack again, with air support from Caproni bombers. That afternoon the clouds return. Next day, men of the 52nd Division hack their way to the summit of Ortigara with daggers and bayonets, capturing a thousand prisoners and several guns. They hang on until the 25th, resisting bombardments and counterattacks, until stormtroopers sweep them off with gas and flame-throwers. The Austrians repeat their success elsewhere on the line. On the evening of the 29th, Mambretti orders a withdrawal to the original positions. The Italians have taken at least 25,000 casualties over the 19 days of the battle, on a front of three kilometres, for no gains whatever.

A captain in the Alpini, Paolo Monelli, recalled that when the last enemy bombardment stopped, 

… a vast silence spreads … Then groans from the wounded. Then silence once more. And the mountain is infinitely taciturn, like a dead world, with its snowfields soiled, the shell-craters, the burnt pines. But the breath of battle wafts over all – a stench of excrement and dead bodies. 

The Supreme Command blurred the scale of the disaster, calling in favours from journalists to help conceal the casualties and withholding an internal report from the government. Despite privately admitting that it had been a ‘proper fiasco’, Cadorna’s analysis was predictably coarse. The infantry, he complained, did not attack as they should have done, they had no faith, they were indecisive, they lacked ‘dash’, the famous
slancio
.

This same infantry would supply the battle’s most durable legacy, in the form of trench songs: 

Battalion of all the dead,
We swear to save Italy …

When the battalion goes back to the valley,
there will be no soldiers left … 

At the end of the century, still an emblem of pointless carnage, Ortigara inspired a new anti-war song:

My granddad went to Ortigara, 

Nineteen years old, in Alpino green … 

Source Notes
TWENTY-ONE
Into a Cauldron

1
According to Cadorna
: Cadorna [1921], 329.

2
his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917
: The relevant portion is excerpted in Lloyd George, 1422–5.

3
Rodd reflected that it was a moment
: ‘Cadorna need not have considered the obligation to return the guns as an insuperable obstacle, inasmuch as, if the Austrian defences had been successfully broken, the operations would obviously not have been arrested and the enemy man-power on the Western front would probably have been proportionately diminished.’ Rodd, chapter XIII, ‘Rome 1916–1917’.

4
What has not been clear is the source of his conviction
: In his exhaustive study of Lloyd George’s wartime premiership, John Grigg merely observes that his ‘thoughts turned to the idea of an offensive on the Italian front’ during December 1916. Grigg, 25.

5
‘
indifference to military opinion
’: Robertson, 203.

6
well regarded by Victor Emanuel
: Bosworth [1979], 265.

7
four times more Allied guns per kilometre
: Dalton, 29.

8
during the Tenth Battle, the siege artillery
: Dalton, 29.

9
the
‘
supreme Leader
’: Rocca, 191.

10
new recruits protested at the draft
: Sema, vol. II, 70.

11
‘
subversive elements
’
might stir up discontent
: Sema, vol. II, 70.

12
‘
the gross misconduct of the Germans
’: Secretary of State Lansing. Seymour [1935], 143.

13
‘
hottempered and not easily soothed
’: Lloyd George, vol. 4, chapter 61.

14
‘
unjust and unrealistic
’: Rothwell, 117.

15
‘
imminent operations
’.
Boselli gave his word
: Sema, vol. II, 101.

16
‘
very slight progress
’: Ojetti, 378.

17
‘
fought well until their generals
’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 30.

18
the official bulletin will say otherwise
: The Official Bulletin of the Supreme Command, 29 May 1917, 44. 

19
‘
battle leaves in the sensual man
’: D’Annunzio [2002], 360.