Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The boats didn’t carry nearly enough fuel to make the trip to Buccari from Venice. They were to be towed by destroyers a distance of over a hundred kilometres through Austrian-patrolled waters, until they were near the coastline. Then, by night, they would thread their way between the offshore islands, pass through the strait and travel up the long inlet, overlooked by mountains thick with armed lookout posts, to the harbour. On arrival they would torpedo the enemy ships (thereby inevitably revealing their presence), before making their way back by the same dangerous route, constantly in range of enemy guns. D’Annunzio was delighted with the plan. The most intense experience of life, he believed, was “to be bought only with the coin which has life on one side and death on the other.” He set himself to write a defiant message to the Austrians. While his companions loosed their torpedoes, he would drop sealed bottles overboard, each one containing his text, and decorated with tricolour streamers.

  This was to be one of the great adventures of his life. He called it the “Beffa di Buccari,” the Buccari prank. Like his first flight over Trieste, it was an act of impudent provocation, a snook cocked at the enemy. He saw that it would make a great story. In the days preceding it he kept a detailed diary, which he subsequently published in the Corriere della Sera virtually unchanged, judging correctly that the intimate details there recorded (a tiff with Olga, their voluptuous reconciliation, his nostalgic observation of the anniversary of his first night with Giuseppina) would make the exploit all the more exciting to the public. He wrote a ballad with an insistent beat and a stirring refrain, and ensured its wide circulation among the civilian public and the servicemen alike:

  We are thirty with one fate,

  and thirty-one, counting death.

  Eia! That last one! Alalà!…

  For several anxious days the pranksters waited for clear skies: they needed at least twenty hours of fine weather if the little boats, not designed for open seas, were to twice cross the Adriatic successfully, even under tow. At last, on 10 February 1918, the expedition was launched.

  All of us will return, or none.

  Eia! Depths of the Carnaro! Alalà!

  They made it safely to Buccari, eating en route a good picnic, packed by Aélis, (chicken in aspic, cakes and marmalade, biscuits, mandarins, liqueurs). For the rest of his life d’Annunzio would be revisiting the memory of that night: the darkness, the “pride and intoxication of being few against many,” the comradeship he felt with his handful of companions, together defying the massive technological might of the Austrian Empire in their wobbly little vessel.

  D’Annunzio dropped his bottles. The torpedoes were launched. Most of them were caught in the nets protecting the harbour. The three MAS turned and chugged back to open sea, rejoining their escort safely while the Austrian gunners, apparently unable to believe what they were seeing, let them pass unscathed.

  No enemy warship was damaged (the only vessel to be hit was a commercial ferryboat) but the Beffa was a hugely successful propaganda exercise. For Italians, demoralised after Caporetto, and for Austrians alike, it was a sign that the fight wasn’t over. The plan had not been d’Annunzio’s (as the raid on Cattaro really was), but he made it his own. In the message in his bottles he called himself the Nimicissimo (the supreme enemy), and announced he had come to make a mockery of the price the Austrians had placed on his head. He posed for photographs (previous page) in oilskins and sou’wester, looking like a shiny little water sprite, next to strapping sailors nearly twice his height.

  After the debacle of Caporetto the King visited General Cadorna at his headquarters to inform him that he was to be replaced. The conversation lasted two hours. At the end of it Cadorna, the man who had caused the deaths of tens of thousands of his own men by refusing ever to relinquish a position, was, true to his own obstinacy, still refusing to stand down. It was only the next day, on receipt of a written dismissal and with his successor already in his office, that he left at last.

  That replacement was General Armando Diaz, the man who believed that a battle before which d’Annunzio had harangued the troops was already three-quarters won. Where Cadorna had expected his men to do or die in deaf and dumb obedience, Diaz was solicitous about their morale. He knew they needed food and boots above all else, but he also believed in the efficacy of “a healthy fortifying word.” He made propaganda a priority, setting up the new “P Service,” to coordinate it. Posters and leaflets, talks, theatre and cinema, “trench newspapers” edited by servicemen for their peers, all played a part in his effort to resurrect the army. Minister Martini wrote sourly in his diary that d’Annunzio’s Beffa was an adventure “without common sense,” but the new commander understood the value of the flamboyant gesture, the grandstanding performance in the theatre of war. With his encouragement, d’Annunzio was called upon to speak to the troops lined up along the Piave again and again.

  More conferring with technicians and manufacturers over new weapons of war. Six and a half thousand planes were built in the last year of the war (up from under 400 in 1915), and d’Annunzio was consulted by ministers and manufacturers alike. He was in contact with Caproni, and also with Giovanni Agnelli, founder and managing director of Fiat, whose company had grown sixfold during the war years, turning out trucks and lorries by the tens of thousands and Italy’s first tanks. “My little one would be amazed,” he wrote to Olga, “to see me talking straight-faced and ardently about engines, as though a steel piston was the most important thing in the world.”

  More daring excursions by air and sea. In April, d’Annunzio joined a naval expedition to bombard Pola. In June he flew over the Piave, dropping bombs on Austrian batteries. In July he was bombing Pola again. Day after day he flew, sometimes making two or even three sorties in a day. “Action rejuvenates me,” he told Albertini. “I barely have time to sleep.” Between raids he was participating in more test flights in preparation for his best ever prank.

  For over a year d’Annunzio had been urging the supreme command to authorise an air raid on Vienna. Repeatedly he had been denied. The round trip from Venice, weaving through and over mountains, would be some thousand kilometres, at unprecedentedly high altitudes. The planes would be continuously in the air for ten hours, with no chance to refuel. Such a flight had never yet been attempted.

  Throughout the summer of 1918, while the armies faced each other over the Piave, d’Annunzio was conferring with Caproni about ways of increasing fuel capacity and strengthening aircraft to withstand the buffeting they could expect while overflying the Alps. At last he was able to demonstrate, with a ten-hour, thousand-kilometre flight over Italian mountains, that the thing could be done. General Diaz gave his approval. On 8 August, d’Annunzio spent the evening in the College of Music listening, alone, to a recital of baroque music. On 9 August, eleven monoplanes took off from Treviso, d’Annunzio riding in one which had been especially constructed to accommodate a passenger (see overleaf). Three had to turn back almost immediately. A fourth came down in Austrian territory, but the remaining seven arrived safely in the skies over the imperial capital.

  In 1908, H. G. Wells wrote a novel, The War in the Air. In it Wells imagines the aerial bombardment of a city. “No place is safe … bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air fleets passing overhead—dripping death—dripping death!” At the time the story was received as improbable fantasy. Now, only ten years later, the Viennese faced the possibility that it could be realised in their own city. Austrian bombers had been targeting Venice, but no one in Vienna had expected their own capital, so far behind the lines, to be under such a threat. The Italians, appearing overhead, were terrifying.

  In the event d’Annunzio dripped not death but words. He and his squadron let fall 50,000 copies of a text by d’Annunzio printed on red, white and green paper. Giving his address as “The Sky over Vienna,” d’Annunzio announced: “On the wind of victory arising from the rivers of liberty, we have come only for the joy of the daring deed … Viennese! We co
uld now be dropping bombs on you! Instead we drop only a salute.” The people of Vienna were urged to reject their own government, and to plead for peace. “If you wish to continue the War—continue it! You will thereby commit suicide.” A further 100,000 copies were dropped of a rather blunter and more explicit message, composed by Ugo Ojetti, written in German and urging the citizens of Vienna to save themselves and their city by surrendering.

  On the return trip the engine of d’Annunzio’s plane cut out three times. Each time he reached for his little damascened box of poison. Each time the pilot, Natale Palli, managed to restart it. Returning safely to the airfield near Venice, d’Annunzio was received rapturously. His exploit was lauded not only in Italy but in all the Allied countries as well. The Times of London (British journalists clearly being better conversant with European literature then than they are now) called him “a new Ruggiero,” alluding to Ariosto’s hero and his gallant flight astride a hippogryph. The French awarded him the Croix de Guerre. The enemy was equally impressed. “And our d’Annunzios,” asked the leader writer of the Viennese Arbeiter Zeitung, “where are they?”

  · · ·

  Throughout September 1918 the Italian administration was pressing General Diaz to move. Italy’s seventeen-year-olds had been drafted to replenish an army emaciated by the desertions of Caporetto. British and French divisions had arrived to lend support. But still Diaz insisted the army was not ready.

  On 19 October word came that the Austrians were about to make a peace offer, agreeing to withdraw from all Italian territory. The prospect of Italy’s gaining what it wanted with no further loss of life seemed intolerable to Prime Minister Orlando. In 1866, when the Austrians offered to restore the Veneto to Italy in return for their neutrality, Nino Bixio, the Garibaldino whose sword d’Annunzio had brandished on the Capitol, vociferously opposed the deal, telling parliament that he would rather 100,000 Italians died for Venice than accept it without a fight. Irrational, self-destructive and wickedly careless of human lives, that mindset lived on. In the first months of the war d’Annunzio had written that territory obtained peacefully could never become a true part of Italy. Unless it was “watered with our own blood” it would remain an alien limb, subject to gangrene. Prime Minister Orlando was of like mind. He telegraphed Diaz: “Between inaction and defeat, I prefer defeat. Get moving!”

  On 24 October, the anniversary of Caporetto, “the Virgin Victory shook the frost of Autumn from her wings” (or so d’Annunzio put it) “and, flexing her bare foot upon the blood-nourished grass of the river’s margin, soared aloft from the right bank of the Piave in her stupendous flight.” In other words, the Italian counterattack began. A battalion of Gordon Highlanders were ferried across the Piave by Venetian gondoliers (the fact that the Italians had Allied support in this final campaign is one d’Annunzio never publicly mentioned). Soon the Austrians, by now so starved that the average weight of a soldier in their armies was down to eight stone, were retreating so fast their pursuers could barely keep up with them. For ten “lacerating and divine” days, d’Annunzio and his squadron flew above the advancing Italian troops—d’Annunzio on his feet in the unsteady plane so as to be able to see, and be seen by, all of his pilots. They dropped seventy bombs on the retreating Austrian troops, needlessly killing men who only wanted to go home. D’Annunzio was, once again, nearly killed when his plane, still loaded with bombs, crashed soon after take-off (the bombs didn’t explode; he was unhurt).

  By 31 October the Italians had reached the town of Vittorio (now Vittorio Veneto), by whose neatly appropriate name the Italian victory would be known. On 1 November the Austrian governor of Trieste left hurriedly, by train. Two days later an Italian warship entered Trieste’s harbour, bringing the new Italian governor who announced “our dead are dead no longer.” On 4 November, with almost all the territory lost at Caporetto redeemed, the armistice between Austria and Italy came into effect.

  Early in October, d’Annunzio told Marcel Boulanger: “I adore war,” and wrote to another friend: “For me and for you and for those like us, peace today is a disaster.” On the day that Diaz ordered his armies to advance, d’Annunzio’s Prayer of Sernaglia was published in the Corriere della Sera. It’s an incantation full of disdain for Italy’s allies (President Woodrow Wilson, although not named, comes in for some withering invective) and rage against Italy’s enemy. Austria is still the vomiting vulture who has fouled Italy’s houses, contaminated its springs, flogged its old men, raped its women and mutilated its young men. But the real adversary is peace, which comes to grieving men, “not like a snowy dove but like a clammy serpent.”

  War had brought d’Annunzio adventure, purpose, a cohort of brave young comrades whom he loved with a love beyond the love of women, a new and manlier brand of fame, and the intoxication of living in constant deadly peril. His contemporary, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, who was serving on the other side in mountains near Trento, wrote about the giddy joy he felt while facing mortal danger, as if the fear of death “which lies on top of man forever like a stone” were rolled back by the fact of death’s probable imminence, and “an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.” D’Annunzio had felt that freedom: civilian life seemed like a stinking jail to which he was about to be forcibly returned. While millions of people all over Europe hoped that at last the stupid killing might be at an end, he wrote: “I smell the stench of peace.”

  Peace

  IN DECEMBER 1917, with the nation traumatised by the rout from Caporetto, Benito Mussolini proclaimed a new order. “The music of tomorrow will have a new tempo … the brutal and bloody apprenticeship of the trenches will mean something.” A year later, on 1 January 1919, Mussolini wrote to d’Annunzio suggesting that a meeting between them might be of use to the cause they shared. But in the first weeks of peace, d’Annunzio had other things on his mind than making the acquaintance of the editor of one of the several journals that published his speeches. Another six months would go by before the two men came face to face.

  Mussolini served in the war first as a private soldier and latterly as a corporal. He was in the front line for over nine months and took part in fighting on the Asiago—the Alpine plateau where d’Annunzio had admired the little mauve flowers on the airstrip. In 1917, Mussolini was injured when a mortar bomb exploded in his trench, and invalided home with some forty shards of metal in his body.

  Mussolini’s inspirations were d’Annunzio’s. As a young man he used to walk the streets of his home town declaiming passages from Dante. Nietzsche filled him with “spiritual eroticism.” He had learnt from Sorel. He called himself “an apostle of violence.” Resuming his editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia, he celebrated the “moral force” generated by the war and prophesied that the future belonged to a new elite of battle-hardened veterans, the “trenchocracy.”

  It was true that the war had altered Italy’s political composition. General Cadorna had repeatedly resisted attempts by the elected government in Rome to prevail upon him to change his tactics, or to replace him. Facing down the government with the King’s tacit approval, Cadorna created a split between the parliamentary democracy and the military, which weakened the government and left the troops disgruntled and suspicious of their civilian masters. In the summer of 1917 there were demonstrations in Milan during which people called upon Cadorna to make himself dictator.

  The interventionists who had swept their reluctant government into the war never fully trusted the civilian authorities. Over a hundred deputies had remained loyal to Giolitti in 1915. Like him, they saw the war as wasteful and unnecessary. As the years of attrition went by, and the pointless expenditure of Italy’s economic resources was joined with the killing of hundreds of thousands of young men, and the wounding or capture of hundreds of thousands more, the civil administration became ever more alienated from the apostles of violence who were, effectively, running the country. On the other hand the military made the usual complaints about the parsimonious bureaucrats stinting on suppli
es of food and equipment, and so failing to support the gallant young men so bravely sacrificing their lives. There was talk of the army’s being “betrayed” by a timorous administration.

  Then came the ignominy of the flight from Caporetto. The rout shocked and humiliated the entire nation and, for those who lived in fear of a socialist revolution, the spectacle of mass desertion and mutiny in the very month in which the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia was terrifying. People searched for others to blame. The military blamed “defeatists”—those who had been, in the first place, insufficiently enthusiastic about the war and who had continued to question its usefulness and likely outcome. There were secret societies whose members vowed to assassinate leading socialists, or to blow up the Vatican (Pope Benedict—dubbed “Pope Pilate” by Mussolini—had refused to declare the conflict just). “Resistance committees” and “Fasci of national defence” were formed (the word fascio was becoming increasingly popular in political circles). Their functions included the harassment of the “enemy within”—meaning neutralists, socialists, Giolittians.

  General Cadorna was ousted. For a whole year Italians lived with the awareness of defeat. When victory finally came it was too late to restore the nation’s morale. The exhausted troops redeemed themselves with their counterattack in the last weeks of the war, but it was increasingly evident that their efforts were to be wasted: the triumphant advance on Vittorio Veneto would never be translated into equally splendid terms in the peace treaty.