Most of the troops were uneducated, very far from home and very young. Many of them complained that they could not understand what the war was about, and even those who had set out with some comprehension of, and allegiance to, irredentist ideals, had been nonplussed by the way the people of Friuli had received them. Far from welcoming the Italians come to “redeem” them, the ethnically mixed people, whose villages had become billets and whose fields were battlegrounds, had retreated behind closed shutters, and watched the progress of the war in sullen misery. For many of them united Italy—barely two generations old—meant less than the empire which had dominated the region for centuries. A journalist reported that north Italian peasants were ready to welcome an invasion, believing the Austrians would “chop off the heads of the gentlemen who wanted the war, and then help the poor.”
Colonel Angelo Gatti, the high command’s official historian, was told by an infantry commander that, when ordered to attack, his men obeyed. They allowed themselves to be pushed out of their trenches. “They went; but they wept.” They had cause to weep. In some battalions, during this dreadful summer, seventy per cent of the men were killed.
Not all the soldiers went meekly to their deaths. In July 1917 a brigade whose men had been counting on longer leave and a less deathly posting, were ordered back onto the Carso after only a few days’ rest. There was muttering in the barracks, and then armed mutiny. The rebels killed three officers and four military policemen, before being overwhelmed by cavalry, armoured cars and artillery. They were in revolt against the war, and the irrational ethos which had inspired it, and their particular target was the man who had made himself the voice and the embodiment of that ethos. A group of them tried to break into the house of a local aristocrat, mistakenly believing d’Annunzio was there, shouting: “Down with war! We want peace! Death to d’Annunzio!”
D’Annunzio was in fact at a nearby airfield, and made his way to the troubled base the next day. Thirty-eight men were to be shot, some of them identified as instigators of the mutiny, others chosen by lot to die. D’Annunzio, fully aware of the hostility the condemned men felt towards him, chose to be present at the executions.
His notes made on the day are starkly factual. “The grey wall with pebbles visible in the mortar … The airless heat. The song of the larks. Corpses lined up face down … pale ears … the sounds of hoes and spades digging the deep ditch … nettles against the tragic wall.” The gifts he had employed in his fiction to describe the complexities of human emotion hadn’t atrophied in wartime. He was perfectly capable of inciting men to make war while pitying them for having to do so. The condemned men, he recognised, were peasants “bled white by too much fighting.” Their punishment was cruel. As the firing squad awaited the order to fire, d’Annunzio saw their gaze fixed on him and felt himself pale. For all that, he welcomed their deaths as a necessary sacrifice. In a private letter he expressed his disappointment that the commanders had executed so few of the rebels. “Not even decimation!”
Cadorna—the commander against whom the men might more justly have directed their anger—still sent troops marching up mountainsides in tight formation which made them perfect targets for enemy artillery, still insisted on attacking every peak and ridge, however inaccessible and strategically unimportant, and on holding every position gained, whatever the cost. Those costs were enormous. An officer with a critical view of his commander-in-chief’s strategy calculated that to maintain a garrison of a hundred men on a 3,000-metre peak required 900 porters working in relay, and that on one occasion Italians had fired the equivalent of four tons of steel per dead man in the process of driving a dozen Austrians off a pinnacle of rock. The highest price of all was that paid in human lives.
August 1917 saw another massive attack along the River Isonzo, one which initially seemed so successful that Ambassador Rodd telegraphed Lloyd George, telling him to expect the “complete smashing of the Austrian army,” and Arturo Toscanini, who was visiting the front, led a military band to the top of the newly conquered Monte Santo to play patriotic songs “in the Austrians’ faces.” Soon though, the advance halted again. The Austrians had sited their artillery and their base camps in caverns deep in the rock. The Italians bombarded their positions in vain. One mountain lost ten metres in altitude, so heavily was its summit shelled. But for all the fire, for all the air filled with shells and shattered rock, and for all the thousands upon thousands of dead young men (40,000 Italians were killed in less than a month), nothing much was gained. “I feel something collapsing inside me,” wrote Colonel Gatti. “I shall not be able to survive this war, none of us will; it is too gigantic … it will crush us all.”
A little to the west of the Casetta Rossa along the Grand Canal is the splendid baroque Palazzo Pisani, home to the College of Music. Working one afternoon at home, d’Annunzio heard in the distance the opening bars of one of Frescobaldi’s canzone. He hurried over to the Palazzo and slipped into the grand salon, which was deserted but for the celebrated organist Goffredo Giarda, then recovering after the motorboat on which he was a volunteer had been wrecked in the lagoon.
Giarda looked round, without interrupting his playing. D’Annunzio murmured, “Am I disturbing?” Giarda shook his head and played on. At the end of the piece d’Annunzio introduced himself and the two had an animated conversation about how much Bach owed to the Italian master. Thereafter d’Annunzio went frequently to the Palazzo Pisani to listen, sometimes alone, sometimes with lady friends, and sometimes, in the evenings, with a pair of soldiers whose job it was to wind the generator, in case of power cuts, so that the music need not be interrupted.
One night, when d’Annunzio had brought along an English-woman in a white dress, the sirens sounded an air-raid warning. The lights went out. The lady, terrified, huddled moaning in a corner of the room, visible only by flashes of anti-aircraft fire from the gun emplacements on the palace roof. To calm her d’Annunzio asked the maestro to keep repeating the piece (a Frescobaldi toccata) until the all-clear. Giarda played it twenty-four times. A bomb fell just across the canal from the Casetta Rossa. “That,” said d’Annunzio (quite possibly correctly—the Austrian high command were longing to be rid of him), “was meant for me.”
In September 1917, d’Annunzio was in the Casetta Rossa preparing to depart on a raid on Cattaro. This was to be his most ambitious aerial attack yet. Two squadrons would fly south by stages to an airbase in Puglia, and then cross the Adriatic, returning on the same night. D’Annunzio had been working for months, with Veniero and other engineers, to refine the aircraft that were to undertake the flight, but on the eve of his departure his mind was elsewhere.
He had fallen out with Olga. She had been jealous (almost certainly with good reason: the historian Damerini, who was living in Venice at the time, reports that gossip linked d’Annunzio with at least six other women) and they were parting on bad terms. D’Annunzio posed in the garden for a sculptor who was making his portrait bust, but felt so dejected he could take no pleasure in the process. He packed, assisted by the red-eyed Aélis, who wept as she folded his shirts. It was on his mind as well as hers that he might well not come back. His doctor brought a new vial of poison for him to take in case of capture. Renata and her husband (she had recently married one of his officers) escorted him to the station by gondola. He held his daughter’s hand all the way. In the stuffy sleeping compartment of the train he opened his overnight bag and found some flowers pinned to his pyjamas, with a touching note from Aélis.
In Rome he visited the Ministry of War and talked to staff officers about extending the air force, but all the time he was thinking of his love trouble. “I am dying of sadness. The very will to live withdraws from me, like warmth from a corpse.” From Rome he flew on southwards, and was pleased to believe that those waiting on the airstrip were surprised by his nimbleness in springing from the cockpit.
After several frustrating days waiting for equipment and ammunition, he and his squadron were finally ready to depart, and
at once his depression lifted. He wrote a farewell letter to Olga (quoting from Wagner’s Tristan) to be read in the event of his death. Feeling a “savage need to drink from a woman’s mouth before passing on,” he pressed himself on a woman with slim ankles whom he had met at the base, and then led his men in a “Francescan litany’:
For Brother Wind, that he be not against us, Eia Eia Eia! Alalà!
For Brother Fire, that he does not burn us,
Eia Eia Eia! Alalà!
For Sister Water, that she does not drown us,
Eia Eia Eia! Alalà!
At last they took off, and he stood up in the prow to yell out his Alalà! while all his fellow aviators yelled back and waved as they swooped upward. His single eye seemed to see prodigiously well. This “adventure” was his latest creation: war was his new poetry. He entered a kind of ecstasy. For the rest of his life he was to recall the experience with wonder. He had found a transcendental “third way” of being, beyond life and beyond death.
The flight was long and dangerous; the raid successful. All of the fourteen planes involved returned safely (although three of them had to turn back before reaching Cattaro). Jubilant, d’Annunzio gave the squadron its own motto “Iterum rudit leo”—the lion, Venice’s symbolic beast, roars again.
Some two weeks after d’Annunzio’s aerial attack on Cattaro, Italian troops on the mountainsides above the Isonzo Valley saw a column of Austrian soldiers marching two abreast up the valley towards the town of Caporetto (now Kobarid in Slovenia). The Italians assumed they were watching prisoners being escorted behind the lines. They were wrong. A century earlier Napoleon Bonaparte had noticed that the otherwise insignificant town of Caporetto lay in a gap in the mountains through which an army could flood down onto the Friulian plain. The next defensible line to the west, judged Napoleon, was the River Piave, barely thirty kilometres from Venice. Over the next catastrophic fortnight the Italians were to discover that he was right.
The Austrian army had been reinforced for the first time by German troops. On 24 October 1917 they attacked, beginning with a devastating bombardment along a thirty-kilometre front, following it up with poison gas shells, and then with an advance so rapid that one Italian unit after another found itself surrounded. Where Cadorna had sent his men plodding up heavily defended mountains, the Germans simply skirted them, leaving the rock fortresses isolated and useless. Italian troops surrendered en masse.
Caporetto was a defeat which rapidly became a rout. On the afternoon of 25 October, Cadorna wrote to his son: “the men are not fighting … A disaster is imminent … I shall go and live somewhere far away and not ask anything of anyone.” He had given up, and so had nearly all of the men under him. As the line broke Italian troops turned and streamed to the rear, throwing away their rifles as they went and chanting: “The war’s over! We’re going home!” while their officers, weeping or enraged, looked on helplessly, or did likewise. An officer who refused to surrender was shot dead by his own troops. For days on end the narrow roads through the mountains were clogged with exhausted men, who jettisoned their equipment, burnt their stores, blew up bridges behind them and pressed doggedly homewards. One of them recalls it: “They move on, move on, not saying a word, with only one idea in their head: to reach the lowland, to get away from the nightmare.” Back on the plain they spread out through muddy fields, units dissolving, officers and men losing each other.
Cadorna hoped to reform the line on the west bank of the River Tagliamento, but the Austro-German forces were too close behind. On 4 November he ordered a general retreat to the Piave. Four days later, with the Italian armies on the river’s western side, the rout was finally halted and all the bridges over the Piave were blown up, leaving the enemy in possession of the entire Friulian plain. Of the million or so men who had been fighting for Italy on the Isonzo, 40,000 had been killed or wounded during the previous two weeks, 300,000 had been taken prisoner, and 400,000 had vanished, most of them having set off on a long walk home.
It was a military disaster, maybe more. Curzio Malaparte described soldiers rampaging—part modern anarchists, part ancient Bacchae. “Often they hoisted on their shoulders, cheering, along with prostitutes, some fat, pot-bellied senior officer—Bacchus and Ariadne—while the orgy of the sans-fusils dissolved into brawls and riots, cries of lust and lewd songs.” Coming as it did within days of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia, to many contemporary observers Caporetto looked like the beginnings of a revolution.
In public, d’Annunzio coped with the calamity by denying it. Later he was to write about the “wretched herds of deserters,” and about cowards as “vile” as the “sludge of mules’ excrement and liquid clay through which they shuffled.” But at the time he was still devoted to the task of conjuring glory from failure. He repeatedly referred to Caporetto as a “Victory.”
His apartment in Cervignano was now way behind the lines (an Austrian officer, who had taken it over, courteously offered, two years later, to return all of his forty damask cushions to him). He found a new mainland base in Padua, as guest of a friendly Contessa, from which he repeatedly visited the troops on the Piave, promising national resurrection and new victories. He told the army which had just stampeded for home, letting slip an entire province, that it was composed of indomitable heroes, and that he knew it would never bend by so much as the breadth of a fingernail. He addressed the latest batch of recruits, all of them seventeen years old, elaborating a metaphor of Italy as an effigy repeatedly battered and cast down, but tirelessly renewing itself. “From the ashes of all the shattered idols it has once more raised the deity of its Genius.” His speeches of that month were published and distributed to the troops in a pamphlet wishfully entitled “La Riscossa” (The Reconquest).
The front line was now only thirty kilometres from Venice. Artworks, archives and government offices were all hurriedly moved out of the city. Many of the citizens went as well. In Venice, in December 1917, d’Annunzio went to watch Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni being lowered from its plinth by the church of San Zanipolo (Giovanni e Paolo). Colleoni was one of the Renaissance condottieri whom d’Annunzio saw as personifying all that was boldest and most virile about Italy’s history. Verrocchio’s magnificent bronze was a technological marvel in its time, and remains one of the world’s grandest monuments. The warrior’s stern face and armoured body surmounting the great, high-stepping horse convey dauntless resolution and physical force. Viewers, obliged to peer upwards, are dwarfed by it. It is everything that futurist and subsequently fascist art aspired to be—a hard image of power and obduracy, metallic, beautiful and overbearing. D’Annunzio admired it immensely.
Now it was to be taken down and removed to a place of safety. Grounded, it could be viewed from close-up as never before. D’Annunzio noticed the normally invisible fudging whereby the artist had made up for flaws in the casting, the little divot of wood keeping the helmet steady. He was impressed by the confident negligence of detail, the way the warlord’s frown is made with three slashing lines. There were a flock of little boys bowling tin hoops noisily over the square. Being d’Annunzio, he noticed the children’s hands, how small they were, and the “imperious power” of the colossal hands of the bronze horseman. One-eyed, he noticed the eyes—the pupils were two “terrible holes,” one deeper than the other.
Peering at the bronze as it lay on the cobbles, d’Annunzio was the craftsman and connoisseur of the applied arts. Back at his desk, drafting his next speech, he became once more the bombastic orator, harnessing the heroes of the past to his present project. What he had actually seen was the warrior downed, an image of defeat, but what he wrote was that Colleoni, personification of Italian valour, was back in his saddle and riding once again to war.
Venice was emptying. For those who remained, wrote Damerini (who was among them), d’Annunzio “symbolised the spirit of resistance.” In the almost deserted streets he was repeatedly stopped by “outbreaks of affection and respect.�
�� His passage across the piazza would be met with applause and shouts of “Evviva!”
He and Olga had made up their quarrel. D’Annunzio would send her a note telling her he was free and within minutes they could be meeting, as it were by accident, on the short route of alleys and little bridges separating their two homes. And because for d’Annunzio to experience something was to be moved to set it down on paper, those meetings didn’t deter him from writing to her, sometimes several times a day. He told her: “When you said those unsayable words in my ear … when I was deep inside you, I was burning in all my bones like a bundle of resinous branches.” He was also seeing a young woman whom he called Nerissa, a Red Cross nurse, whose nun-like demeanour and obvious infatuation with him was deliciously gratifying to his vanity. “I am aware of her thrilling to my voice as to a searching caress.” For all that, he wrote nostalgically to Giuseppina Mancini on the anniversary of their first night together telling her: “I am alone … I can never be loved again.”
The war on the ground had stalled. The Austrian armies occupying Friuli, their supply lines impossibly long, were starving. They were ordered to live off the land, but after two months there was nothing left to steal. Bread and polenta were mixed with sawdust or sand. Men boiled grass. Horses died of exhaustion, and soldiers traded in their weapons for a cut of meat. They were in no more of a fit state to attack than the Italians were to defend themselves.
With no fighting on the ground, for his next adventures d’Annunzio looked to the sea and air. Italian naval engineers had developed a fleet of small, light attack craft called Motoscafi Armata Svan (MAS). D’Annunzio was much taken with them, perhaps seeing that, like the little planes, they were a fit vehicle for an individual hero and his intrepid band. He laid claim to them as he habitually laid claim to a woman, with a name. The sailors had taken to calling the MAS Motoscafi Anti Sommergibile (anti-submarine motorboats). D’Annunzio went better: the initials he declared, stood for Memento Audere Semper—remember always to dare. His friends in the naval command told him of a planned raid, using three MAS, on the Austrian naval base in the Bay of Buccari (now Bakar), a deep indentation into the mountainous Croatian coast just south-east of Fiume, a kind of fjord running nearly five kilometres inland with only a narrow and heavily defended opening to the sea. D’Annunzio obtained permission to join the expedition.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 42
