The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (42 page)

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Authors: Mark Thompson

Tags: #Europe, #World War I, #Italy, #20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, #Military History, #European history, #War & defence operations, #General, #Military - World War I, #1914-1918, #Italy - History, #Europe - Italy, #First World War, #History - Military, #Military, #War, #History

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After a decent interval, at the end of September, Boselli convened a cabinet meeting with Cadorna to discuss the matters raised in his letters. Cadorna said the army was verminous with defeatism, and urged drastic steps. If he had really wanted to alert the government to Socialist agitation, he would have claimed that the riots in Turin directly hurt morale at the front. But, as Boselli knew, Cadorna’s real purpose was twofold: to shift the blame for poor morale away from the Supreme Command, and to target Orlando. The despised minister happened to be a Sicilian, so Cadorna’s letters to Boselli focused on Sicily, painting it as a hotbed of Socialist propaganda, an allegation that Orlando easily rebutted. Any crisis of morale in our army, he said, had nothing to do with propaganda; rather, it ‘stems from the fact that the Supreme Command has killed too many soldiers, too quickly’.

Nevertheless, Cadorna got his way. The minister of justice prepared a decree to criminalise ‘defeatism’, an elusive target for prosecution. Issued on 4 October 1917, the Sacchi Decree was as draconian as the military measures (though the punishments were less severe). It dovetailed with Cadorna’s military penal regime to form a solid wall of repression. For example, it was used to jail a civilian for six months for chanting a satirical rhyme from the trenches:

General Cadorna sent a postcard to the Queen:
‘Here’s a picture of Trieste, so you can say: Trieste I’ve seen!’

Complete data on military justice are still not available. What is clear is that at least one Italian soldier in 12 was subject to disciplinary investigation during the war: a much higher proportion than in other Allied armies. More than half of the 870,000 charges related to absenteeism, leaving some 400,000 offences committed under arms. By the time a general amnesty for deserters was issued in September 1919, courts martial had heard 350,000 cases. Of the 210,000 sentences passed, 100,000 were for desertion, 24,500 for ‘indiscipline’, and 10,000 for self-mutilation. Of the 4,028 capital sentences, 729 were carried out. As for summary executions, the unflagging research of Marco Pluviano and Irene Guerrini discovered records of more than 300, but the real total may run to several thousand. For comparison: the French army was roughly twice the size of the Italian, and the British army mobilised approximately the same number of men in Britain. Around 350 British and 600 French soldiers were executed after courts martial, and summary executions were very rare. In France, parliamentary concern over executions was so strong that the army lost the authority to approve death sentences; the government gained a right to review every capital sentence, and each one had to be approved by the president of the republic. Only in the emergency of June 1917 did General Pétain succeed in wresting back this authority. In the British army, both the theatre judge advocate general and commander-in-chief had to review capital sentences.

There were no such safeguards in the Italian army. Nor was there any equivalent in Italy of a prime minister like Lloyd George, prepared to challenge the commander-in-chief, or cabinet ministers like Churchill, who publicly criticised the huge loss of life, or a bridging figure like General Robertson, quite capable of delivering unwanted messages from the government to the commander-in-chief and vice-versa. The best checks against abuse of military power were political or institutional, not dependent on the letter of the law. In the last analysis, these checks are cultural; Haig was annoyed by the Australian government’s refusal to let Australians serving with the British army be shot for desertion, but it did not occur to him to ignore that veto. British and French courts martial were sometimes pressured to hand down harsh sentences and curtail defendants’ rights, but due process was not disregarded routinely, with impunity, at the insistence of the commander-in-chief.

After the war, the Italian army’s judge advocate general (responsible for the conduct of courts martial) ruled that most of Cadorna’s directives on military justice were illegitimate. Cadorna would surely retort that, if he had led the British or French army, he would not have needed to take such measures. He had little respect for many of his senior commanders (who often deserved none) or their brigades. Italy was committed to a war that placed unprecedented demands on officers and men alike. This situation was what it was; he had to deal with it, and he did so by remaking the military justice system in his own image: intolerant, confrontational, devoid of empathy. Terror and barbarous punishment were not his last resort for getting soldiers to obey; they were his preferred means. Obedience was a beautifully simple requirement, not to be contaminated with notions of education or motivation. The soldiers did not need to reason; they merely had to do and die.

Count Carlo Sforza, foreign minister in the early 1920s and again after 1945, wrote witheringly of Cadorna’s ‘mystical sadism’, implying that the penal regime was more expressive than practical, satisfying the warped appetite of a single man. To be sure, the regime did not crush all disobedience. Violent misbehaviour by troops going to and from the front became so widespread in summer 1917 – firing on carabinieri in the railway stations, shooting out of the windows, hurling stones and bottles – that the men’s rifles had to be taken away for the duration of the journeys. And this was at the apex of Cadorna’s terror.

The draconian measures against desertion also had little effect. The number of deserters almost trebled between April and August 1917. Would-be deserters became more astute; rather than escaping at the front, they failed to return from home leave. By October, more than 100,000 deserters and draft-dodgers were hiding in the interior of the country. Overall, desertion rates doubled during 1917, then diminished in 1918. The average rate of desertion was significantly higher than in other western European armies.
2
Indeed, an internal report in March 1918 admitted a connection between the penal regime and desertion; punishments that were perceived as savagely unjust, could encourage disaffected soldiers to take the ultimate risk.

Even so, historians believe that Cadorna’s harshness was functional, not mystical. The scholar Bruna Bianchi, no admirer of Cadorna, argues that summary execution kept a lid on potential rebellion; without it, mutinies on a French scale would have erupted. Yet terror was a ‘cure’ with disastrous side-effects; evidence that soldiers’ morale was harmed by the almost arbitrary killing of their comrades is strong and ample. All that can be said for Cadorna’s methods is that they reinforced the obedience which almost all soldiers already displayed.

That humbling, haunting obedience: what are we to make of it, so long after the event? The historian Giovanna Procacci argues that the archive of censored letters proves that loathing of the war and hostility to the state and its institutions were ‘very widespread’, much more so than in other armies. It was above all ‘the certainty of ferocious repression’ that deterred the troops from acting out their feelings of ‘internal rebellion’. Giorgio Rochat, on the other hand, argues that their obedience mainly reflected ‘the dearth of cultural alternatives which would provide legitimation and external support for rebellion’. Disobedience lay beyond the conception of men who had grown up in a world where absolute authority was personified by the priest and the mayor. Rochat believes the deepest sources of obedience are unknowable; a historian should accept this, and salute the men’s sacrifice.

To an outsider, this divergence is more political than scholarly. Procacci in particular frames her argument with a larger contention; the war, she says, exposed the authoritarian bones of the Italian state, and confirmed that ‘the working class had never shared in patriotic sentiments’. Although the structure of the state was liberal, with a constitutional monarchy, elected parliament and formal separation of powers, the relations between state and society, government and citizens, were absolutist: closer to Germany and Austria-Hungary than to Britain and France.

The state still protects Cadorna’s bloody regime. In 1990, a descendant of Corporal Silvio Ortis, who was executed in a blatant miscarriage of justice in 1916, tried to clear his forebear’s name by seeking a pardon. After eight months, the military court in Rome replied ineffably that under applicable law, only the ‘interested party’ may seek a pardon. As Silvio Ortis had not filed this request himself, it was ‘inadmissible’. When his appeal was rejected, the descendant wrote to the president of the republic. In 1998, his persistence bore fruit: a deputy in parliament agreed to propose an amendment allowing a spouse or relative to request a pardon. The amendment was presented to parliament in 2001, when the deputies agreed that a sub-committee would consider it in June 2006. In other words they kicked it into the long grass – where it remains to this day.

Source Notes
TWENTY-TWO
Mystical Sadism

1
‘
Death to D’Annunzio!
’: Alatri.

2
‘
helmets, shreds of brain
’: Bonadeo [1995], 132.

3
‘
You are peasants
: D’Annunzio [2005], 718–24.

4
‘
The summary justice of the bullet
’: Directive dated 28 September 1915. Procacci [2000]; De Simone, 206.

5
He openly deplored the courts’ reluctance
: This was on 22 March 1916.

6
‘
unworthy of an army that upholds
’: Procacci [2000], 52.

7
a letter to Salandra in January 1916
: Procacci [2000], 52.

8
not unknown in the French army
: Watt, 92.

9
nine men of the Ravenna Brigade
: Melograni, 296–8.

10
gave a statement to the commission of inquiry
: Commissione di inchiesta, vol. 2, 359–65.

11
‘
almost universally treated with respect
’: Smith, 183.