The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  All countries, especially Britain, had unimaginative commanders who ordered their infantrymen to advance in straight lines, elbow to elbow, against well-defended positions, but Cadorna was in a league of his own. He failed to concentrate his forces, he attacked on too wide a front, he sent his men over open ground against barbed wire and machine guns, and he repeated these mistakes. His forces invariably outnumbered the Austrians, who were busy on their other two fronts, by a ratio of five to two, and he almost always suffered higher casualties than his opponents. These would have been even higher if Austrian soldiers had not sometimes felt pity for their enemies and risked court martial by encouraging them to retreat before they were gunned down.12

  Cadorna was an obtuse and deluded general who liked to compare himself with Napoleon: when things were going really badly on the Isonzo, he consoled himself with the thought that not even the great Corsican could have fought better on the banks of that accursed river. His reaction to setbacks for which he was responsible was to sack or transfer his officers, singling out those who had shown spirit and originality: during the two and a half years of his command he removed more than 200 generals and over 600 colonels and battalion commanders. Another habit of his was to blame the poor fighting qualities of his soldiers, who were punished for their failings more savagely than their counterparts in the armies of Germany, France, Austria and Britain. Cadorna insisted that even mildly mutinous behaviour should be countered with summary executions. He also revived the ancient Roman custom of decimation, executing by lot a proportion of a censured unit’s soldiers, a practice guaranteed to kill innocent men. Before offensives military police with machine guns were stationed behind the trenches, ready to shoot at soldiers who appeared to dawdle as they were going over the top.

  In the summer of 1917 Rudyard Kipling travelled to the Italian front and convinced himself that he was viewing a ‘new Italy’ in possession of an army comparable to the old Roman ‘exercitus’: even the generals – ‘wide-browed, bull-necked devils’ or ‘lean narrow hook-nosed Romans’ – resembled sculptures of classical times.13 A few weeks later, the illusion dissolved as the exercitus crumpled before the German–Austrian offensive at Caporetto and was forced to retreat all the way way back to the River Piave, not far north of Venice. 40,000 soldiers were killed or wounded, 300,000 were taken prisoner, and 350,000 deserted, disappearing into the hills and attempting to find their way home. The army lost vast quantities of weapons including 3,000 machine guns and 300,000 rifles. And the nation lost 14,000 square kilometres that contained a million of its citizens. There is little evidence that the return of the Austrians to Friuli, fifty years after their departure, was greatly regretted by the region’s inhabitants.

  Cadorna had held on to his post for so long because he had secured the king’s support, and this allowed him to browbeat the prime minister and the cabinet. The disaster of Caporetto failed to dent his complacency, and he even managed to convince himself that public opinion would not tolerate his dismissal as the army’s commander. When the British and French insisted on his resignation, he blamed ‘the notorious ingratitude of the House of Savoy’.14 His replacement was General Armando Diaz, who held the line on the Piave and sensibly refused to launch costly offensives. In October 1918 the new commander eventually ordered an advance and won the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a victory hailed as one of the greatest of all time, one that by itself caused the destruction of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire. In fact it was achieved with the support of French and British units at a time when the Germans were already beaten, the empire was already dissolving, and the Viennese government was seeking an armistice.

  The First World War cost Italy a million casualties – one-third wounded, two-thirds dead – from a population of 35 million people. At the front its soldiers had suffered at least as badly as those of any other nation. Except perhaps for the Turks, they were the worst fed, worst led, worst clad and worst equipped in the conflict; they were expected to cut through Austrian barbed wire with implements resembling garden secateurs. Such deprivations may help explain why so many men deserted and why over half a million were taken prisoner. One German officer, the future General Rommel, recalled how at Caporetto Italian soldiers were so delighted to surrender that hundreds of them threw away their rifles and rushed at him, shouting ‘Evviva Germania!’15 Yet the prisoners had a miserable time in captivity. Since their own government feared that the thought of eating well in a prison camp would be an incentive to surrender, it refused to send food parcels to its captured soldiers in Germany and Austria. This policy, which no other country adopted, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 men from hunger and diseases brought on by starvation.16

  It has often been claimed in Italy that the Great War made the country feel more patriotic, but there is little proof of this except among people who were patriots already. Conscripts naturally saw parts of their country beyond their provinces, and they were thus able to meet other Italians, even if their dialects made it difficult to communicate with them. Yet the evidence does not suggest that they cared very much for the cause, especially the soldiers who came from the south and were sent to northern mountains to die for places they had never heard of. Soldiers seldom exhibited signs of patriotic sentiment and sometimes they even spat at the national flag. Nor did they display much hostility to the enemy; it seemed that Italians no longer even pretended to hate the Austrians. Southern men employed ingenious methods to avoid conscription, including putting tobacco leaves under their arms, which gave them an artificial fever that appeared to be malaria. An American anthropologist found a Sicilian villager who made himself ill by eating cigars, while two of his neighbours even blinded themselves so as to be unfit for military service.17

  Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the prime minister in 1918, told parliament that Italy’s victory had been one of the greatest in recorded history, a fantasy that encouraged him and his supporters to make extravagant claims at the peace conference in Paris that opened in January 1919. In addition to gaining what he called Italy’s ‘God-given’ borders in the Alps, Orlando demanded Fiume, a Croatian port with an Italian middle class that had formerly been administered by Hungary. Although the city had not been included in the provisions of the Treaty of London, and though it was superfluous now that Trieste was in Italian hands, Orlando insisted on acquiring a place which, he mysteriously asserted, was ‘more Italian than Rome’.18 Sonnino, who was still foreign minister, was even more demanding than Orlando. In Paris the Italian delegation claimed it was ‘a matter of no significance’ that the South Tyrol (as Austria called it; for Italians it was the Alto Adige) contained over 200,000 German speakers, because they were there only as a ‘result of violent intrusion and foreign invasions’ in the past.19 Italy needed the Alpine watershed, insisted Sonnino, for its security and independence; it required a strategic ‘natural’ frontier rather than a purely ethnic one. He did not explain why Italy needed a strategic frontier when, in all recent wars between Italy and Austria, the aggressors had been the Italians.

  If its western allies had remained limited to Britain and France, Italy would have stood a reasonable chance of gaining most of its demands; the Treaty of London had after all promised it a good deal of extra territory. In 1917, however, the United States had entered the war under a high-minded president with strong views about the right of peoples to self-determination: the ninth of Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points stated that the ‘readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality’. This was plainly an appalling principle for Sonnino, who was intent on acquiring a large chunk of Dalmatia even though its population of 610,000 was almost entirely Slav and included only 18,000 Italian-speakers. One Italian diplomat supported his view by arguing that self-determination may have been ‘applicable to many regions but not to the shores of the Adriatic’.20 Arguments of this sort bewildered the American president, who could not understand how the nation of Garibaldi and Mazzini could aspire to rul
e subject peoples.

  The Italian government’s response to Wilson was to send troops to the eastern Adriatic and impose Italian rule, a policy so provocative that it led to the resignation of the two most left-wing members of the cabinet in Rome. When he could not get his own way in Paris, Orlando tried another tactic. He walked out of the conference and waited in Rome for the allies to offer concessions and implore him to come back. As the delegates of the other three principals shared the view that Italy had contributed little to the conference except in discussions about its own borders, they were content to let him stay there until he decided, somewhat sheepishly, to return. Wilson had already agreed to let the Italians have the South Tyrol, a decision he later regretted, but he refused to concede Dalmatia, which was ear-marked for the new Yugoslavia.

  Spurred on by the rhetoric of D’Annunzio and the nationalists, Orlando and Sonnino had raised such expectations that Italians were bound to feel disappointment at a settlement that was inevitably a compromise. Since Italy did not receive everything it wanted, its people were encouraged to believe that it had done badly out of the war, that it had been betrayed by its allies (who according to propaganda had been saved from defeat by the Italian army), and that the settlement was, in D’Annunzio’s searing phrase, a ‘mutilated peace’. Yet in fact Italy did quite well from the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) which, while denying it Dalmatia and Fiume, granted it the Trentino and the South Tyrol, Trieste and the Carso, plus Gorizia, Zara and several islands in the eastern Adriatic. Another gain for Italy was the defeat and dismemberment of its traditional enemy, the Austrian–Hungarian Empire, whose chief component was now confined to the Austrian heartland. Some Italians resented their exclusion from the allocation of the German colonies in Africa, from running a mandate in the Middle East, and from receiving no colonial additions except for a few border changes in Libya and east Africa. And they had a point, even if Italy had proved itself an inept colonial power so far. France and Britain liked to boast of their administrative skills as colonizers, but French policy in Lebanon led to predictable conflict and eventually to a ferocious civil war, while British policy in Palestine introduced a bloody antagonism that was showing few signs of abating nearly a century later.

  Trento had been linked with Trieste to create Italy’s chief slogan of the war, a fact reflected by changes in street names all over the country. The Neapolitans had to sacrifice St Ferdinand so that his square could become Piazza Trento e Trieste, just as the Sardinians of Cagliari awoke one day to find a Viale Trieste meeting a Viale Trento in the long Piazza Trento. The city of Trento itself had once been the capital of powerful prince-bishops and, as the natural meeting-place between the Italian and Germanic peoples, had been chosen as the site of the great council that in the sixteenth century proclaimed the dogmas of the Counter-Reformation. With 90 per cent of its population speaking Italian, the Trentino was a legitimate national objective, as the Austrians had recognized by offering most of it to Italy before the fighting started. Its northern neighbour, the South Tyrol (now the Italian province of Bolzano), was a correspondingly unjustifiable aim because 90 per cent of its people were German-speakers. Italy’s insistence on possessing it has led to disputes and occasional violence since the Second World War. Tyroleans from both sides of the Alpine border – men wearing Lederhosen and fancy braces and dripping with folksy Gemütlichkeit – still gather at the city of Innsbruck to demand ein Tirol. Even today, when one visits the town of Bressanone, north of Bolzano, one feels one is not in Italy but in Italian-occupied Austria.

  The ‘Fourth War of the Risorgimento’ provided its quota of martyred heroes. The most prominent Trentino was Cesare Battisti, a passionate irredentist who enlisted in the Italian army in 1915, was captured by the Austrians soon afterwards and was executed in the moat of Trento’s Castello di Buonconsiglio. Parts of that majestic castle now form a shrine to Battisti. You can see the room where he was sentenced and the spot where he was hanged, and you can tell from the photographs of his last minutes that he died well: having made no attempt to avoid death by renouncing his beliefs, his gaze is fierce, fearless, stern and unrepentant. A square in the old town is named after him, but his chief memorial is a vast mausoleum erected on a hill across the river. Consisting of fourteen bridged pillars in a circle, its lettering proclaims that Cesare Battisti prepared Trento for its new destiny and its union with the patria.

  Yet the story of Battisti’s last year is more complicated than a simple and moving tale of martyrdom. A leader of the Trentino Socialist Party, Battisti had been a deputy in the parliament in Vienna and also, for a brief time, of the Diet of Innsbruck. However noble his behaviour and understandable his motives, he was by any legal standard a traitor to Austria who had joined the army of a foreign power that had reneged on its alliance and attacked the state of which he was a citizen. Similarly treacherous had been the earlier actions of Battisti’s most conspicuous counterpart in Trieste, the nationalist Guglielmo Oberdan, who deserted from the Austrian army and fled to Italy before returning in 1882 with the intention of killing the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef. As Italy had just become a formal ally of Austria, the attempted murder of his legal sovereign might thus be seen as an act of double treachery. Yet memorials to this aspirant assassin can be found not only in Trieste but all over Italy. Even the small Sardinian island of La Maddalena contains a Via Oberdan; even sensible Bologna has a plaque on its town hall saluting the martyr’s stand against ‘tyrants abroad and cowards within’.

  Trieste had been a fishing village until the Habsburgs transformed it into a free port at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Thereafter it grew to be a vast commercial emporium and a vital deep-sea port for the Habsburg Empire. It became one of those great multiethnic cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, as Venice had once been and Istanbul and Alexandria still were, a tolerant, open-minded place where its foreign businessmen – Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Egyptians – lived prosperously among an indigenous population of Italians, Slovenes and Jews of diverse origins. Its multicultural complexity is well illustrated in the person of its most famous writer, who called himself Italo Svevo (Italo the Swabian), whose real name was Schmitz, whose father’s family was Jewish-Hungarian and his mother’s Jewish Triestino, who went to school in Germany, who wrote badly in Italian and who felt comfortable only when speaking and writing in the dialect of his native city. Svevo was a businessman and an unsuccessful novelist when in 1907 he employed an Irish tutor to improve his English. The Irishman, also obscure at the time, was James Joyce, who became an enthusiast for Svevo’s work, promoted its author as ‘the Italian Proust’ and gained for his friend a late but enduring fame by persuading a French firm to translate and publish The Confessions of Zeno, written when Svevo was in his sixties. Recognition in Italy soon followed.

  Italians were in a majority in Trieste itself but were outnumbered by Slovenes in the suburbs and the surrounding countryside. Although they included a smattering of nationalists, mainly students, very few of them volunteered to fight for Italy in 1915. The inhabitants understood a basic truth about their city: economically, Italy did not need Trieste – just as Trieste did not need Italy – but Austria and Trieste needed each other. The port is today linked to Italy only by a strip of land to the north-west; its real hinterland is Croatia and Slovenia, and its natural trading relationships are with central Europe, which is why the Austrians had encouraged its development. No rational person really believed that Trieste would prosper from unification with Italy. Even Sonnino, in the days when he cared more about economics than expansionism, admitted that the city would be ruined if it became part of the Italian kingdom.

  Trieste is still a nineteenth-century city, one that was prevented from becoming a twentieth-century metropolis because the Paris peace conference abolished its role, severing it from its hinterland and handing it to Italy. Its new masters did little to retard its now inevitable decline. While it became Italian so late that it was spared an epidemic of statues, its
streets were renamed – one even commemorates the ineffable Cadorna – and it received a Museo del Risorgimento which, perhaps because Trieste took no part in the real Risorgimento, is seldom visited and is only open two mornings a week. After unification with Italy, the city’s trade languished – and failed to recover – and its population declined. Today the steamers have gone, the docks are idle, the quays are used mainly by pleasure vessels. Trieste’s contact with the non-Italian world has also withered. Until the advent of budget airlines, you could not fly from it direct to any foreign city except Munich and even in 2008 you could not travel by rail to Ljubljana (the nearest city) unless you were prepared to arrive at a quarter to two in the morning.

  Trieste is an evocative place for sentimentalists, for connoisseurs of decadence, and for a travel writer who depicts ambience as well as Jan Morris, who has written of ‘the sweet tristesse that is onomatopoeic to the place’.21 You can sip hot chocolate at a café in the great square (the Piazza Unità d’Italia), you can follow in the footsteps of Svevo and Joyce, you can listen to a town band playing the ‘Radetzky March’, and you can sense the enchantment of Miramar, the seaside castle built by the Archduke Maximilian before he went to Mexico and was shot as its emperor. Yet you will feel, even if you are not a nostalgist like Morris (and myself), that it is a place without a purpose and you may wonder why it had to be ruined for so tawdry a cause as Italian expansionism. Today, when nationalism in Italy barely exists, the exercise strikes one as peculiarly pointless. According to an opinion poll taken at the end of the twentieth century, a large majority of Italians did not even realize that Trieste was in Italy.22