The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (63 page)

For the Fascists, the war was a portal to revolution and rebirth. As a new political religion, Fascism needed a ‘sacred history’, and the dates of Italy’s intervention and victory were celebrated with ritual pageantry. The revolution had, in Mussolini’s phrase, ‘reconsecrated’ the victory. The Duke of Aosta, who adapted seamlessly to the new regime, called the war ‘the glorious epic of the great Redemption’. After the ‘Golgotha’ of Caporetto, Vittorio Veneto brought resurrection to ‘crucified Italy’.

The place of the Great War in this ersatz theology is graphically clear at Redipuglia, site of Italy’s biggest military cemetery, built in the 1930s, between Gorizia and Monfalcone. This ‘shrine’ to the ‘undefeated’ Third Army stretches implausibly up the western slope of Mount Sei Busi, scene of ferocious bloodletting in 1915 and 1916. It is a limestone landscape in itself: a geometrised model of the Carso, complete with its fatal gradient. Beyond a deep apron of stone, the Duke of Aosta lies at the foot of the slope within a 75-tonne block of porphyry: a tomb worthy of Achilles. Behind him, the bones of 100,187 soldiers are gathered inside 22 colossal terraces, each 140 metres wide, flanked by cypresses like dark flames. From below, visitors look like fleas on a stairway to Fascist heaven. In raised lettering on the edges of the terraces is the word PRESENTE, reiterated over and over: the soldier’s reply at roll call. Ceaselessly summoning the dead to defend Italy’s frontier, the monument taps into legends as old as warfare, of fallen soldiers returning to the battlefield. New accounts of such ghostly resurrection were heard during the war and for years afterwards, such as the tale of a labourer trudging home over the Asiago plateau and seeing an endless column of men move across the landscape. They were Italian and Austrian soldiers, pale and unarmed, marching noiselessly. All night the labourer watched them pass, until dawn dispersed them.

The original cemetery at Redipuglia was very different. Looking down from the terraces, you see a low green hill on the other side of the road to Trieste. At the end of the war, the regimental cemeteries on the Carso were emptied and the remains brought to that hill. The dead men’s families fashioned little monuments from battlefield detritus: a broken propeller blade for a pilot, crossed pickaxe and shovel for a sapper, or simply a battered helmet, with a nameplate on a plinth of boulders and sprigs of wire like ivy. Infinitely sad and truthful, this cemetery expressed the native genius that nationalists had boasted about before the war (‘We are for the ephemeral … We hate methods, we are for disorder against discipline.’) Mussolini decided the Fascist myth about the Great War needed something more grandiose and streamlined, less ramshackle – and less honest. Redipuglia became the showpiece of Fascist commemorative architectonics, one of the few places where a visitor still feels the urgency of Walter Benjamin’s warning in 1940: ‘
Even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.’

By the end of 1923, nearly 6,000 committees were preparing com memorative pathways and parks in cities, towns and villages. Monuments appeared in front of town halls, cathedrals and village churches. The inscriptions commemorated the ‘sons’ who ‘gave’ (treacherous verb!) their lives to the Fatherland, often figured as a Mother. The expression
Madre Patria sacra
, confusing in English, turned the nation-state and its dead young men into a holy family. By 1938, there were 40 major monuments to the Great War dead. This civic activity did not mean that ordinary Italians wanted to remember. The anti-fascist Carlo Levi, exiled to remote Lucania in the 1930s, was struck that local people never mentioned the war. Nearly 50 names were carved in marble on the town hall; every family had lost someone. Even so, the war held no interest for the farmers; it had nothing to do with their way of life. The state, meaning ‘Rome’, had sent them off to fight for incomprehensible reasons. ‘It had been a great misfortune, the people bore it as they always did.’

The Fascist visual language of commemoration has not been super seded; it is still definitive, embedded in the culture. Written history, by contrast, moved on. Even under Mussolini, serious work saw the light in a few specialised journals and privately published books. From the 1950s, historians began to dismantle the nationalist versions of the war. The most tenacious of these was the myth or cult of the ‘
umile fante
’, the humble soldier, figured as a deferential patriot, superbly energetic and aggressive, scorning safety, meeting death with a song and a smile.

Even in its more intelligent guises, this cult was based on a presumption about the innermost motivations of several million men who, with few exceptions, did not or could not speak for themselves. A telltale sign is the attitude taken towards the other ranks’ low level of awareness of Italy’s reasons for fighting. Time and again, junior officers remarked that the men did not know why they were fighting at all. Standard accounts of the war did not condemn this ignorance as a failure of the Ministry of War, the Supreme Command or even the press; it was seen sentimentally as proof of the men’s good-hearted innocence. One of the finest war memoirs is
Days of War
by Giovanni Comisso, a lieutenant in the engineers. He ends with a last description of the men: black as smoke, ragged, exhausted. Convinced that he will never see their like again, he stamps their image on his memory; they smile wearily, ‘as if they themselves did not know what they had done, or why’.

The feeling of never-such-innocence-again was not uniquely Italian. In Britain, it refers to the volunteers of 1914 who expected a swift and glorious campaign; and it implies that the industrial slaughter on the Western Front stained our civilisation with a new kind of knowledge, some dark revelation about the human capacity for causing and enduring pain. Although Italy also expected a swashbuckling ‘Garibaldian’ war in 1915, the feeling about lost innocence that lingers in Comisso’s and other memoirs was more insidious: never again, they implied regretfully, would vast numbers of conscripted peasants and workers sacrifice themselves on the basis of blind trust in their social, intellectual superiors. It is easy to see why officers might be moved by this feeling, and how the men’s lack of understanding flattered the educated minority, confirming a sense of themselves as Italy’s elect, destined to steer the nation onwards and upwards. To be sure, an officer’s perception of his men as objects of the war was not necessarily self-serving. When the poet and future priest Clemente Rebora, whose sense of duty to the men glowed like a vocation, refers to ‘the anonymous flesh of the infantry’, he sounds quite unlike the agitator and future dictator Mussolini, praising ‘the simple and primitive souls, who, despite everything, still make up a splendid human material’, or the journalist Luigi Barzini, whose despatches did so much to propagate the myth of the humble soldier. ‘Who are these valiant souls that spend their life’s last spark in lighting a fuse?’ Barzini asked. ‘They can no longer be told apart, they have a single name, they are a single thing; they are the army.’ It is the difference between empathy and presumption, or worse.

It is impossible not to bridle at the paternalism that refused to see the men’s ignorance as a moral affront, or even as a practical problem. For there is no evidence that the infantry were charmed by their own blankness. Pasquale Costanzo (1899–2007), who served with the 119th Infantry throughout the war, told interviewers near the end of his life: ‘I did not know why there was a war at all, for that matter they didn’t let the troops in on anything. You had to find your reasons for yourself, on the spot.’ This remark is worth quoting a second time because it says more about the infantry’s real heroism than reams of memoirs, let alone monuments like Redipuglia.
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The most influential revisionist work was a movie. Mario Monicelli’s
La
grande guerra
(1959) follows the comical progress of two conscripts from the rigours of boot camp to the relative ease of life at the front, between battles. One is a naïve patriot, the other a cheeky slacker. On the Piave in 1918, they get separated from their platoon and are taken prisoner. A vicious Austrian officer will spare their lives if they reveal the Italian battle plans. Overcoming their terror, the bumbling pair choose death, so saving their honour and their country. The film’s satire is mild by later standards, but the lack of piety was novel at the time. Its gallows humour resembles a folk ballad or a trench song, immune to official sentiment. The general staff took umbrage and the newspapers stirred up controversy.

When the movie showed in Rome, one of its older viewers was a corpulent, silver-haired man with startled eyes, slab cheeks, and dark furrows pulling down the corners of his mouth. Since we left him in Caporetto, as a prisoner of war in October 1917, Carlo Emilio Gadda had become a great writer, master of a baroque and multilayered style, more respected than read. An eccentric figure, persuaded against his better judgement to see the film, he was appalled. By scoring easy points against Italy’s lack of military preparation in 1915, Monicelli disparaged ‘the purity of intention and certainty of heroic sacrifice’ that marked the tragedy. While some scenes at the front were accurate, others – dwelling on the squalor and bureaucratic pettiness – were ‘too implacably severe’ and above all
too late
. For ‘duty’ was felt at the time as an emotion and an obligation; only later did it turn into hollow rhetoric. As for the comedy, it was too derisive. ‘Whoever lived through those “facts” and those years, whoever
wanted
to sacrifice himself, cannot endorse those facile gags and farce.’ He was equally dismayed by the youthful audience. ‘They split their sides laughing. No French or German public would laugh like this.’

Had he forgotten his own satire of the war as a ridiculous quarrel between ‘Maradagals’ and ‘Parapagals’? Or was he claiming a veteran’s privilege, as if nobody younger could strike the rightly anguished note? A veteran in Gadda’s novel finds his service pistol in a chest in the attic, years after the war. Greased and glinting, the weapon fits his hand snugly, sparking instant recall of the Carso in summer, ‘the noonday heat without trenches, ready, in the stink, among the scaly rocks, five minutes after the counter-attack’. Ambushed by memories that were better left undisturbed, the veteran’s brain swarms with violent fantasy.

Perhaps, watching the film, Gadda could not bear the implication that the ideals of 1915 had been swallowed up by fascism, then discredited along with it, making the veterans’ values incommunicable. His essay on the film included a swipe at Hemingway. Presumably he resented the fact that so many Italians got their idea of the war from
A Farewell to Arms
, with its debunking of patriotic ideals and in difference to Italy’s victory. I would wager that Gadda, an expert self-tormentor, and ashamed of his own seduction by fascism, was haunted by the possibility that Hemingway’s outsider vision was more accurate than his own, even if it was based on only a few weeks at the front as a Red Cross volunteer.

As soon as he was demobbed, in 1919, Gadda planned to write something that would ‘break the circle of silence’ about the reality of the war, and make it impossible for anything like it to happen again. Not surprisingly, he never wrote that book, though he managed a chapter of steely aphorisms for his novel,
The Castle of Udine
(1934), such as this: ‘Speaking of war and peace as if they were myths, or earthquakes, is a disgusting thing in a man and a citizen.’ Maybe
A Farewell to Arms
made him so uncomfortable because he had shared its anti-hero’s distaste for patriotic rhetoric:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression, in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity … Abstract words suchas glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

If it is true that nobody in the Europe of August 1914 would have understood what Hemingway was talking about in this famous passage, it is equally true that by 1916, even pro-war Italians were saying very similar things, in revulsion at the deceitful rhetoric that swilled around the nation like a polluting tide. That September, Gadda told a friend that, if he died, the announcement should be as laconic as possible, avoiding words and phrases like ‘fatherland, honour, fervent youth, flower of his youth, hated enemy, proud and grieving, etc.’
Fell in the course of combat
would suffice. Another officer told his wife that he avoided using the word ‘fatherland’ in front of his men. ‘I never use big words: faced with the real vision of death, my men are suspicious and unresponsive.’ At the Supreme Command, Father Gemelli argued that the men’s indifference to ‘inspirational’ speeches did not mean they were immune to high ideals. Rather, it confirmed that bourgeois rhetoric was of very limited use for communication with peasants and workers. Following events from afar, Professor Alfredo Panzini wondered with sharp flippancy if Italy’s salvation depended on abolishing adjectives. It was in 1916, too, that Ungaretti wrote the pared-down poetry which passed a creative judgement on the bankruptcy of conventional expression. Unlike these men, Hemingway was not saturated in Italian war-language; but he did not need to be. His American artist’s ear caught the poisoned sonorities of European nationalism, which his hard-bitten style satirised automatically in
A Farewell to Arms
, his best novel. It was a style that became influential around the world. Modern literature owes a debt-by-reaction to Italian war discourse.

Wandering over the Carso today, it is hard to recover much impression of the barren harshness that tormented the soldiers. Above the coast, the plateau has been scored with roads; traffic roars between the Rocca and Mount Cosich. The ambient temperature rose by two degrees over the last century, and the bora lost its edge. Sumac trees, planted as windbreaks, protected the thin soil; hornbeam, evergreens and stunted oak flourish. The undergrowth is like rainforest, impassable in summer. It is good to follow the old Habsburg highway from Redipuglia to Trieste on a clear afternoon, take the fork to Aurisina and find a path to the cliff top. Light flashing off the Adriatic lingers in the branches overhead, like ‘a cast of the imagination’.