The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (13 page)

The situation on the Isonzo was less satisfactory. Work in some northern sectors was almost complete but further south the defences were still patchy. The positions around Gorizia were mostly ready, though the barbed wire and minefields were not. The Carso and Monfalcone sectors – guarding the route to Trieste – were still sketchy; the Austrians had taken too long deciding where their front line should run. On the coast, they fixed their rear defences near Duino, a few kilometres east of Monfalcone, where their position overlooked open marshes and a deep fast river, the Timavo.
3
By 26 May, Rohr could report that the line on the Isonzo was ‘almost completely closed’, with two rows of barbed wire, increasing to four rows at decisive points. The first line would be ready by the end of the month, though the second, he warned, could not be finished in the near future.

Conrad reportedly said on 22 May that, if the Italians did not attack at once, it would show they were ‘stupid dogs’ as well as cowards. When the last Habsburg officials pulled out of Gorizia on 25 May, they told the head of the grammar school to hand over authority to the first Italian troops to enter the city. Two days later, General Erwin Zeidler led the 58th Division into the city. The Italians had missed a chance to capture Gorizia almost without firing a shot. He was soon joined by General Wenzel Wurm, arriving with his corps from Serbia and an order to ‘stop the Italians with all methods as early as possible and to slow down their advance by causing them as many casualties as possible’. On his own initiative, Wurm prepared a bridgehead around Gorizia. He and Zeidler, an outstanding engineer, would make a first-rate team. By 1 June, the Austrians realised they were in the fight after all. This is why a Hungarian historian recently described the Italian delay as ‘a gift from heaven’.

Conrad organised the five divisions on the Isonzo into a new formation, the Fifth Army, led by a Croatian general – the highest ranking ‘Yugoslav’ in the empire. On 27 May, the day he assumed command, Svetozar Boroević von Bojna issued a set of fundamental orders. All positions must be held to the last man. Commanders must allocate all manpower not needed in the front line to the
sacred duty
of adapting positions so that counter-offensives could be launched. Defences had to include at least five rows of barbed wire, with the first row camouflaged. If the troops stayed calm and only opened fire when the enemy was less than 100 paces away, they would hold the line. If the enemy broke through, the defenders must not panic but stay in their place while the reserves moved up to contain and reverse the breach. Prisoners should be taken whenever possible, to gain information.

Like Cadorna, Boroević had lived in uniform since the age of ten, had an unremarkable appearance and a reputation for ruthlessness. Unlike the other man, his career was based on achievements in war. First decorated for bravery during the capture of Sarajevo in 1878, he rose to become a corps commander fighting the Russians in 1914–15. Consistently impressive and effective, able to inspire devotion as well as respect, he proved an excellent choice to lead the defence. If the Italians had made all speed in May, they would have caught the Austrians before Boroević set his seal on his new command.

Cadorna’s opposite number across the border was Franz Conrad von Hötzen dorf (1852–1925), the Austrian chief of staff until March 1917. Near anagrams as well as near contemporaries, the two men were alike in several ways. Their direct experience of war was marginal and long ago (Cadorna at Rome in 1870, Conrad in the Balkans around 1880). Like Cadorna, Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance without adequate artillery support against entrenched positions’. Both men over rated the capacity of their armies to carry out successful offensives, while underrating their enemies – a blindness that was accentuated by their remoteness from the troops and their almost unaccountable powers. Temperamentally, both were possessed by intense convictions and strong passions, and given to rhetorical boldness that wavered in front of real opportunity.

The differences, too, were striking. Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality. He was popular and self-confident as well as ambitious, exercising a power to charm and disarm that Cadorna never had. A brilliant linguist who mastered half a dozen languages, he loved the process of ‘entering into the spirit of a language … coming closer to the mentality of the people’. He assured his Italian mistress that he much admired her people’s ‘racial characteristics’; he also keenly admired Japanese martial spirit, so much finer than the ‘softened whites’ of Europe. He shared the Victorian fascination with the laws of nature (without the Victorians’ softening faith in Christian morality), the Viennese obsession with imperial decline, and the conservative hatred of liberalism. He was a tactical innovator who came up with new ideas for combat training, mountain warfare and military mapping. He was an inspirational teacher at the War School. He was also, however, a slave to philosophical dogma. For he was a Social Darwinist, convinced that the struggle for existence was an almighty law, the great principle that rules all earthly events. His first sight of corpses on a Bosnian battlefield filled him with ‘the conviction of the relentlessness of the struggle for existence’. As we shall see in a later chapter, Social Darwinism was a common belief, but the intensity of Conrad’s conviction was exceptional. Believing that non-Germanic peoples belonged to lesser races, such as the Turks in Bosnia with their
criminal
physiognomies
, or the
primeval, bestial warriors
he had faced in Herzegovina, he argued that nationalist threats to the empire should be confronted and whenever possible, eliminated.

In practice, he advocated preventive wars against the Serbs and Italians. As incoming chief of staff, he was keen to settle accounts with Italy at the first opportunity. (Kaiser Wilhelm sympathised: it would, he said, give ‘lively satisfaction’ to join Austria in teaching their nominal allies a ‘salutary lesson’.) Italy responded with bristling suspicion until Alberto Pollio became chief of staff in 1908, when military operations against Austria became almost unthinkable. Conrad was still convinced that a showdown was inevitable and had best be launched before nationalism eroded the armed forces beyond utility. In February 1910, he again urged a preventive war against ‘Austria’s congenital foe’. Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s heir, shared Conrad’s visceral hatred, but the Foreign Ministry and the Emperor did not. When Conrad repeated his call the following year – tempted by Italy’s distraction in Libya – he was sacked. This move was naturally welcomed in Rome, just as his recall the following year was deplored. It came at the behest of Franz Ferdinand, who resented Serbia’s success in the First Balkan War (1912) and wanted Conrad back at the helm.

Conrad loved the empire’s Italian holdings in the way that British colonialists loved India, with a delicious sense of entitlement. As a young man, on the train to Trieste, he suddenly saw – as one still does, approaching from the north or east – the Adriatic spread below. ‘The world lay open before me. I was filled with a sense of joy and freedom.’ He spent four and a half years there, commanding the 55th Infantry Brigade, followed by a stint as commander in the Tyrol, where, as in Trieste, he despised the Italian agitators who were drawn, as he observed, from ‘the intelligentsia, the propertied classes, the middle class, schoolboys, teachers, and a part of the clergy’. The Italian peasantry, on the other hand, were mostly still loyal. He was convinced that the south Tyrol would be an excellent base for attacking Italy.

Conrad’s pessimism turned his high-risk programme for imperial renewal into a suicidal drive. Contrasting a
desire
for victory with the
will
to win, he accepted that the Habsburg empire lacked this will, yet believed it was better to risk total defeat than try to adapt. As he wrote to his mistress at the end of 1913, ‘Our purpose ultimately will be only to go under honourably … like a sinking ship.’ His actions the following summer showed the same spirit. When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Conrad urged immediate war against Serbia; he wrote privately that it would ‘be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because such an ancient monarchy and such a glorious army cannot perish ingloriously’. For he was under no illusion about Austria’s ability to win on three fronts (or four, if Romania joined the Entente). When the short, victorious campaign of his public predictions did not come to pass, he blamed the politicians for dragging the empire into war before it was ready.

As for Italy, Conrad was the last person to show facile optimism in 1914 – especially after Pollio’s sudden death removed the only Italian general that he almost trusted. On 23 July, when the Austrian foreign minister voiced doubts about Italy, Conrad commented that ‘If we also have to fear Italy, then we should not mobilise.’ Why did he ignore his own warning? His biographer, Lawrence Sondhaus, suggests that Conrad’s carelessness was due to the impossibility of including another variable in his calculations, amid the tumult of July, without losing his mind. Yet there were other reasons why he omitted to reckon on Italy’s likely betrayal. He despised the Italians as soldiers; on the other hand, if Austria was doomed to lose in the end, what did it matter if they joined the Allies?

At the same time, Italy was intimately associated for Conrad with love and hope, not war and betrayal. For he was besotted with an Italian woman, the wife of an Austrian industrialist. They had met at a social occasion in Trieste, when Conrad was happily married, but he remembered her when they met in Vienna seven years later. Conrad was now a widower, and Virginia was the mother of six children. Fascinated by his ardour, she recovered from her shock at his avowal of love. Her husband was complaisant, and Conrad became a fixture at the family home, and ‘uncle’ to her children. He persisted in wanting marriage, despite Catholic morality, his own eminence, and Virginia’s horror at the prospect of losing her children, as would happen if she were the cause of a divorce. Conrad fantasised about returning from a triumphant campaign in the Balkans, bolstered with such prestige that he could sweep all obstacles aside and make Gina his wife. Amid the shattering events of September 1914 on the Eastern Front, with the old Habsburg army in tatters around him, he confided to an astonished fellow officer that failure in the field would mean losing Gina: ‘a horrifying thought … because I would be lonely for the rest of my life’.
4
Rationally convinced that Austria was doomed, but unconsciously bent on engineering a conflagration that would let him smash the chains separating him from the woman he loved – what could be more Viennese, more human, banal and apocalyptic?

Source Notes
SIX
A Gift from Heaven

1
this particular story
: Weber, 11–13.

2
losses that almost beggar belief
: Deák. 

3
‘
civilians in uniform
’: This is Deák’s phrase.

4
military spending, even at its zenith
: Rothenberg [1985].

5
The only ‘completely reliable’ elements
: Spence [1985].

6
at least one British Foreign Office mandarin
: Rothwell, 30.

7
The last Habsburg census before the war
: Spence [1985].

8
the purge of many Serbs
early in the war
: Spence [1992].

9
these
‘
schoolboys and grandfathers
’: Jung.

10
The Italians had missed a chance to capture
: Del Bianco, vol. I, 402.

11
‘
stop the Italians with all methods
’: As quoted on the webpage: http://www.austro-hungarian-army.co.uk/biog/wurm.htm, accessed in February 2008.

12
as
‘
a gift
from heaven
’: Farkas’s phrase.

13
‘
the water gleamed as if covered with silver
’: this was the description by Rilke’s hostess, the Princess of Thurn and Taxis.

14
Conrad ‘believed that infantry could advance
’: Rothenberg [1985].

15
Conrad’s was a larger, more gifted and complex personality
: Information about and quotations by Conrad are from Sondhaus’s excellent biographical study (Sondhaus, 2000).

16
‘
be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued
’: Rothenberg [1985].

17
‘
If we also have to fear Italy, then
’: Palumbo [1983].

18
‘
a horrifying thought
’: Sondhaus [2000], 158–9