World War One: A Short History (15 page)

The record of the interrogation of the deserters was found on the floor of Italian headquarters in Udine a few days later; by then, catastrophe had occurred. Relative success on the Bainsizza plateau, in the middle of the Isonzo front, had pushed part of the Italian army uncomfortably forward; there was an Austrian bridgehead at Tolmein (Tolmino), and the enormous Italian army corps in the area occupied a position divided by the river; its commander – curiously enough the General Badoglio who later had a prominent role first for and then against Italian Fascism – clearly did not know whether to put the weight on the eastern, attacking bank or the western, defending one. In any event, chased by a German bombardment,
he ended up in a cave, not able to direct either part. To his north was an army corps centred on an Isonzo village called Flitsch (Plezzo, now Bovec). Entirely unexpected, five of the best Austrian divisions were going to come down a mountain at that corps. Down-river was another little place, Caporetto,
³
marking the join of the two main Italian units. Neither was ready. Cadorna himself had had some notion that he ought probably to go over to the defensive. However, Capello, commander of the main Isonzo army – the Second – had other ideas, and for a month, delayed preparations: if the Central Powers attacked, he would counter-attack, he said, and held his troops forward. Cadorna was scared of Capello – a volcanic little Neapolitan Freemason, of none too grand social origins. He tolerated the disobedience, and when the Central Powers struck, Italian artillery was being hauled into defensive positions at last, wending a wearisome way through the middle of retreating troops.

On 24 October at 2 a.m. the guns opened up. The German expert, a Brigadier von Berendt, understood how to organize the mixture of gas – which killed the mules transporting guns – and high explosive. Since there was air superiority, the Germans knew where the Italian batteries were, and silenced most of them. The bombardment waxed and waned – a pause, around 4.30, for an hour, to gull the enemy into taking some fresh air, then more intensive fire, then, in the last fifteen minutes, ‘drum-fire’, including the dropping of shell by trench-mortars on the front positions, which were utterly wrecked. At 8 a.m. the attackers moved. On the Flitsch side, the Austrians came down a mountain and the Italian defenders had no gas masks. The Austrians then went ahead through a valley to the plains not far beyond. The general in charge of the Italian corps (he had only four divisions to cover twenty miles of complicated front) ordered a retreat, and also a counter-attack. One of his divisional generals, wondering what was happening, drove into
the village of Caporetto to use a working telephone. He was captured, because the other element of the Central Powers’ attack had broken through Badoglio’s confused positions and swung north-west, along the river, to Caporetto. The division then disintegrated, as did the northern corps altogether.

At Tolmein, there was an extraordinary feat of arms. German mountain troops had to seize some commanding heights, which meant a climb, after the bombardment, of 900 metres. Rommel, then just a captain, with 200 men of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion showed the German army at its best. He did not try a direct attack on the ridge of the Kolovrat, the massive mountain on the western side of the river. Instead, he sent a group of eight men under a corporal to see if there was a way through the defences. There was. Italian sentries were sheltering from the rain, and were captured. There was a gap beyond in the wire. Another dug-out was taken, and Rommel’s men crept up to the ridge. Then they moved along it – the Italians so surprised that one battery of heavy guns was captured from behind, while the officers were at lunch and the men were playing cards. Then Rommel moved on the southern side of the ridge, inviting surrender. One after another, he took the better part of five Italian regiments. In spirit, it was the same performance as he was to put up in the summer of 1942, when he wrapped cardboard tank-like structures round Volkswagen cars, drove to the great British base at Tobruk, bombarded it into surrendering, and took such quantities of petrol from it that he was able to drive on, almost to Cairo. In the Caporetto battle, another officer of his regiment also captured a mountain and was awarded the highest possible decoration. Rommel’s commanding officer asked for Rommel to be given the medal too, and was told that that decoration could not possibly be given twice to the same unit at the same moment. Rommel captured another mountain and the rule had to be broken.

On 25 October the Italian position had collapsed and the
generals started looking for excuses. Capello played the sickness game: full of energy one moment at the best hotel in Verona, stricken at Padua hospital the next. Badoglio hastened to pin the blame on him, and hid. Only the Duke of Aosta, commanding the Third Army to the south, kept his head and retreated in reasonable order. Cadorna himself, on the 27th, composed the most remarkable document sent by any general in this war, claiming that the Second Army had simply not fought at all and that ‘the Reds’ were infiltrating the country. The government suppressed the telegram, but not before it had been sent abroad. When the British and French were asked for direct help, they made the dismissal of Cadorna a precondition, a demand most reluctantly conceded by the Italian establishment; in that army, as in the Russian, duds were adhesive, and were even able to influence official histories (the true story did not emerge until 1967).

Guns were captured wholesale as they were manoeuvred around narrow passes; soldiers, in droves, surrendered out of utter bewilderment when they found Austrians and Germans coming along paths in the rear, where they had never been expected at all; Cadorna muddled things further, when he mismanaged retreat. There were four bridges over the river Tagliamento, which marked the opening of the great Friulian plain, some twenty miles from the Isonzo front line, along roads flanked by huge mountains. Two of these bridges were assigned to the Third Army, which withdrew over the river in reasonable order. Parts of the Second Army had to struggle north-west, coinciding with refugees, and found one of the bridges captured; over the other there was a disorganized mass evacuation, with, on the other side of the river, pot-bellied little colonels shooting any man apparently straggling. The episode was described in one of the famous books about this part of the war, Ernest Hemingway’s
Goodbye to Arms
.
⁴
In the event, there were 300,000 prisoners and 300,000
sbandati
– men who
had lost their units – and half of the entire artillery of the Italian army was captured. An attempt was made to stand on the Tagliamento, but the attackers’ artillery, thanks to Porsche, was being manoeuvred quite fast; the retreat went on to the river Piave and, on the western side, the
massif
of Monte Grappa. British and French troops arrived. So did malaria, from the marshes of the area. The front was now much shorter – seventy miles, as against 180 – and the Central Powers’ forces were by now a very long way from railheads, themselves inadequate. In Italy, national resistance at last became popular. The sensible Diaz succeeded Cadorna, and the Italian High Command stopped treating their soldiery as cattle; the Austrians and Germans could not break the Piave and Grappa positions. On 2 December the Caporetto offensive was officially halted, and Otto von Below was sent to the western front, where the offensive of all offensives was about to begin. The German leadership had not quite managed to knock out Italy. But they were now given an enormous advantage: Russia collapsed.

NOTES

1.
Guy Pedroncini,
Les mutineries de 1917
(Paris, 1967).

2.
Lenin had an extraordinary intermediary, Helfand, a one-time revolutionary (code-named ‘Parvus’) who had made a fortune out of the Young Turks and taken over the Ottoman tobacco monopoly (he lived in the house, on an island in the Sea of Marmara, where Lenin’s principal lieutenant, Trotsky, was exiled by Stalin in 1929). He fixed the Germans, who wanted chaos in Russia and arranged for Lenin and his followers to travel through Germany to Stockholm (where the go-between was Kurt Riezler) by the first no-smoking train in history, Lenin being fanatical about this as well. Then it was arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, on 16 April, after a week’s travel, with a ceremonial welcome.

3.
It gave its name to the battle, not altogether accurately. There is an excellent Slovene museum in the town, now called Kobarid (German name, Karfreit).

4.
Hemingway did not in fact reach Italy until 1918.

SIX •
1918

preceding pages: British Mark IV tank

On the very day the Caporetto offensive was officially halted, a Bolshevik delegation arrived to arrange an armistice at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German army in the east, a town ruined in the retreat of 1915, few of its major buildings usable. To begin with, the Bolsheviks had supposed that, if they just appealed for peace, the ordinary soldiers would throw down their arms and call it a day. Trotsky announced that his foreign policy would be ‘to launch a few proclamations and then shut up shop’. He published the ‘secret treaties’ – the agreements, which he found in the archives, as to the carving up of the world by the Entente. However, despite some fraternization and, somewhat later, some sympathetic strikes, ‘imperialism’, as the Bolsheviks saw it, did not collapse. The Russian army had disintegrated, the capital was in chaos, and the soldiers were going home, ‘voting with their feet’, as Lenin said. There was not much else that the Bolsheviks could do but negotiate an armistice and hope that the propaganda would strike a chord in the war-weary of all nations. Their rather motley gathering, peasant and all, arrived at Brest-Litovsk, there to be treated to another of those surreal scenes that marked the German war effort: a banquet, the peasant sitting between Austrian aristocrats who asked him about the planting of onions. The armistice was arranged, and terms of peace were discussed.

These discussions were interminable, at times philosophical,
at times historical: both sides were playing for time, the Germans in the expectation that the non-Russian peoples of the Tsarist empire would declare independence, the Bolsheviks in the expectation of universal revolution. In the event, the Germans delivered an ultimatum, signed a separate peace treaty with the Ukraine, marched in to protect their new satellite, and moved forward into territory vacated by Russian soldiers, especially in the Baltic regions. For the Central Powers, expecting that the blockade would be tightened, the resources of these areas mattered greatly, and for the Austrians – the population of Vienna below the bread line – it was a matter of life and death. Would the Bolsheviks recognize the satellite states – Finland, Georgia, the Ukraine, and so on? Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks: go back to the Russian heartland, recoup, and wait to see what happens. He persuaded them, and on 3 March the Bolsheviks signed a treaty that turned much of Tsarist Russia into a huge German protectorate. General von Eichhorn ran the Ukraine; General von Lossow wandered into Georgia, to control the oil of the Trans-Caucasus; there were plans for U-Boats to be transported to the Caspian itself. Ludendorff talked of invading British India; Otto-Günther von Wesendonck, grandson of the woman who had inspired Wagner’s songs of that name, opined that ‘even the idea of a German land-route to China can no longer be dismissed as fantasy.’
¹
Would this last? It depended upon the western front.

Forty divisions were now transferred from east to west. This gave Germany superiority at least until the Americans arrived – a process that took the Allies time, and even disrupted the trade in vital raw materials. The war-economic position of Germany was now such that her alternatives were outright victory or outright collapse. The Hindenburg programme had involved an enormous effort, with huge investments in machinery and factories. Output was at its maximum. But it was at the expense of the longer term: the railway network was
starting to give out, so was agricultural machinery and industrial plant. If the war were not speedily ended, Germany would plunge. There was a clear choice: to make the last great effort at outright victory, or try for peace. In fact, around this time came the only really serious move towards a general agreement, when Kühlmann, the foreign secretary, hinted to the British that Germany might give up Belgium in return for a free hand in the east. Niall Ferguson rightly says that at this moment the Allies’ morale was lower than at any other point in the war. It has also rightly been remarked that, since about 1850, there has only really been one question in British foreign policy: Germany or Russia? A few despairing conservatives and some farsighted socialists might agree, in the end, on Germany. They were isolated: every measure of public opinion shows huge support for war to the bitter end, and Lloyd George, after some hesitation, responded to it. He would be The Man Who Won the War, not The Man Who Made the Peace. He said himself: a Germany running Russia would be unbeatable; would swallow up everything else. And in any case, there was America; and by now other states were queuing up to declare war on Germany, with a view to taking over ships and property. Lloyd George told his allies about Kühlmann’s approach, and declared that he regarded the French claim to Alsace-Lorraine as a British war aim. Kühlmann became enraged. It did him no good: Ludendorff soon engineered his dismissal, and he was replaced by Admiral von Hintze, who did what he was told. The might-have-been peace ran into the sand; there would be no British representative at Brest-Litovsk. Much ink has been spent on peace initiatives during the war, but Kühlmann’s was the only serious one from Berlin. President Wilson also produced a plan that was serious: the ‘Fourteen Points’, in essence about the self-determination of nations. The Germans at Brest-Litovsk could have accepted these then adapted them in detail. Instead they went ahead for outright victory.