The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (15 page)

‘I remember the mountains,’ said Orelli, making a final effort for my benefit, ‘places where we fought. I remember my part of the front, at Sagrado, where the artillery was. I remember waking one morning and finding myself in a cemetery! But many things I don’t remember any longer,’ he finished, with a hint of frustration. Forgetting was a new experience, still resented. Even so, he recognised the names of hills on the Carso more quickly than his children’s names. He wanted to see those places again, but his legs were not what they had been. His parting handshake was warm and light, like holding a bird. ‘Many greetings to your family, and when you visit Rome again, come and see me,’ he said, patting the chair. ‘I’ll be right here.’

There is so much talk nowadays about Trento and Trieste, and the war to liberate them [he told his last interviewer], but nobody really knows what it was like.

He died in January 2005, a month after his 110th birthday.

Source Notes
SEVEN
Walls of Iron, Clouds of Fire

1
a junior officer in the Pisa Brigade
: Faldella, 18–20.

2
‘
All at once the cry goes up
’: Albertazzi.

3
The last veteran of the first battle on the Isonzo
: As well as interviewing Mr Carlo Orelli myself in May 2004, I have drawn on interviews by Paolo Rumiz of
La Repubblica
(unpublished); Aldo Cazzullo of
Corriere della Sera
, 1 November 2003; and Bultrini.

1 
When the Austrians began to identify the battles on the Isonzo by number, the Italians followed suit, not guessing that this would play into the hands of enemy propaganda. As Cadorna launched offensive after offensive from the same positions against the same lines, the numbering of the battles underscored his failure to break through.

EIGHT

Trento and Trieste!

When I asked the 109-year-old Carlo Orelli what he had believed he was fighting for, he replied almost testily, ‘Why, Trento and Trieste!’ Another veteran, perhaps the last still alive at this time of writing, Delfino Borroni, gave the same answer to the same question: ‘For Trento. For Trieste. To get what was due to Italy. It was our land. Instead the Germans and the Austrians had chased us away. That wasn’t right.’

Their long dead comrades would say the same – if they could identify a reason at all. With an average age of 20 or 21, pulled straight from labour on the land, many or even most had little idea why they were in uniform. Italy’s war poets noticed a tragic symmetry between the completeness of their comrades’ ignorance and the totality of the sacrifice they were called on to make. Fresh evidence of this came as recently as 2005, in a series of interviews with surviving veterans, all well over 100 years old. Many confessed to having felt bafflement about Italy’s aims. ‘I did not know why there was a war at all,’ said one. ‘For that matter they didn’t let the troops in on anything. You had to find your reasons for yourself, on the spot.’ Introducing these interviews, the historian Lucio Fabi said the old-timers had forgotten the reasons. Given the vividness of their accounts, they were more likely expressing a truth that has not yet become quite palatable. Lectures by officers on Italy’s goals and purposes did not necessarily leave the blank-faced conscripts any the wiser. The key word ‘irredentism’ was mysterious to the majority. After months at the front, Private Mussolini reported in his newspaper that the peasant soldiers remained ‘unaware of the existence’ of the words ‘neutrality’ or ‘intervention’.

The task of explanation was made no easier by the secrecy that shrouded the Treaty of London. Expansion in the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor was hardly the stuff for inspirational talks to the troops, while the elaborate bloodthirsty speeches of D’Annunzio would make no more sense to many officers than to the men. According to Curzio Malaparte, the veteran and journalist, ‘The profound ignorance of our masses did not admit historical or geographical complexities. When the officers explained to us the ideal reasons of our war and the need to crush the barbarism and militarism of the Central Powers, the soldiers were deeply attentive; but they did not understand a word.’

Trento and Trieste, on the other hand, were actual places, not airy concepts, even if most of the soldiers had never heard of them before. They became the symbols of injustice and a national mission unfulfilled. The keyword in nationalist accounts of Austrian rule was ‘domination’. This vague word was paired with another, equally emotive: ‘redemption’. Redeeming these two cities for Italy was the most publicised and least controversial of the government’s reasons for going to war. Interventionists wore rosettes of red, white and green ribbon around the names of Trento and Trieste. Alliteration evoked a military rhythm: the tongue struck the palate like boots on freedom’s road. To the Triestine poet Umberto Saba, it was like diastole and systole: ‘the double-name’ that beat louder than his own heart.

The Trentino is a mountainous area the size of Devon or Delaware, shaped on the map like a man riding a bull. It reaches from the northern tip of Lake Garda to a line midway between Trento and Bolzano. It is bisected by the River Adige, whose narrow valley has always been one of the main trans-Alpine corridors and is now tinged with smog from traffic pounding up to the Brenner Pass or down to Venice, Verona and points beyond. A century ago its population was overwhelmingly Italian: the 1910 census found that its 383,000 inhabitants included only 13,500 German-speakers. The city of Trento had around 20,000 people. Between the Trentino and the Alps proper lies the region known to Italians as Alto Adige, the ‘upper Adige’, where the ethnic balance is very different. Its population of 242,000 included 16,500 Italian-speakers at most, and perhaps many fewer. (The 1910 census findings are disputed.) An Italian guide to the ‘unredeemed lands’ published in September 1915 admitted that the rural parts of the Alto Adige were ‘absolutely German’.

When it came under Austrian control in 1815, the Trentino was merged with the Tyrol – a move that local Italians resented. Their demand for autonomy was raised in 1848, the year of revolutions, then periodically up to 1914. The Austrians refused to risk losing control of this sensitive frontier. Their argument, that Trentino formed a natural extension of the Tyrol, admittedly somewhat Italian in character but still part of a Germanic whole, was not tenable if only for ethnic reasons.

For nationalists, Trentino was undeniably Italian, a reasonable claim that was taken, unreasonably, as proving Mother Italy’s entitlement to the whole of the south Tyrol. Although the tiny size of the Italian community undermined any ethnic claim to Alto Adige, the strategic claim was paramount. Unless Italy controlled the Tyrolese Alps up to the watershed, Venice and its lowlands would always be vulnerable to Austrian assault. Mazzini did not doubt that Italy must possess everything up to ‘the highest circle of the Alps’. The imperative of so- called natural borders trumped the national rights that Mazzini himself generally upheld. The Austrians were equally adamant that the Tyrol was theirs for ever. It had a particular status in their empire; coming under the direct authority of the royal house, it was the apple of Franz Josef’s eye. With its cattle and vineyards, felt hats, Lederhosen and dirndl skirts, pine-clad mountainsides and foaming rivers, it was an album of luscious images that summed up Habsburg Austria.

The failure of the 1866 campaign dealt a blow to irredentists in the Trentino. Vienna halted a process of enlightened reform that went back seventy years. Some societies and newspapers were banned. Students were no longer allowed to study at the University of Padua. Austria erected a customs barrier with Italy where there had been none before, hurting commerce across the frontier. In 1903, Italian teachers were banned from the university in Innsbruck, provoking demonstrations in Italy. Italian deputies in the Tyrolese assembly, also in Innsbruck, were outvoted by their German colleagues.

The Trentino’s Italian identity could only be dismantled by tyrannical repression, which was not in the Habsburg repertory. Despite the partial repression, extensive concessions were made to the Italians. Except in the army and police, theirs was the official language of local govern ment, courts and schools. In 1890, they founded a National League to defend their nationality. (It was tolerated until 1915.) The community paid for a monument to Dante; unveiled in 1896, the massive statue was a potent reminder of Italy’s past greatness and current misfortune. Around this time, an Italian ideologue floated the idea that the German-speaking Tyrolese were Germanised Italians. (This thesis would be exploited under Fascism and even afterwards.) An official counter-offensive of pro- German measures and pan-Germanist propaganda, launched in the 1880s, only hardened the ethnic and linguistic divide. Yet the fact of division did not translate automatically into resistance. As elsewhere, irredentism was a concern of the urban élite. The farmers mostly favoured staying in the empire, for their best market lay to the north. Indifference to nationalist grumbles rested on economic common sense.

The empire persisted in its self-destructive policies. Over the long run, measures to suppress irredentism served to strengthen it. A few Austrian officials realised that economic under-development was fuelling tension, but little was done. When routes to rational progress are blocked, people turn radical, embracing ideologies of salvation. This process was personified by Cesare Battisti, a name familiar to all Italians because of his martyr’s death (every town in the land has a via Battisti). Editing magazines, launching cultural initiatives, penning a stream of reports on social and economic conditions, serving as a city councillor, a Socialist deputy in the provincial assembly and then in Vienna, Battisti was the sort of figure who can ignite and organise a political movement almost single-handed. He was a tireless agitator for Italian interests within the Habsburg empire before he became an enemy of that empire. As a councillor, he campaigned for civic issues: the quality of flour, public health. Not an extremist by nature, he was clear-thinking and practical, only driven to violent solutions by Habsburg refusal to reform.

By 1913, when the Italian army secretly hired him to write a military guide to the Trentino, Battisti had given up on Austria. He already knew his native valleys and villages by heart. Using his parliamentary position to get access to Habsburg army maps, he combed the territory anew. The following spring he started to do the same for the Alto Adige, up to the Brenner Pass, when he was abruptly redirected to the Carnian and Julian Alps. When he reached the Isonzo, in early August, an Austrian patrol stopped him and asked why he was examining this particular bridge over the river. Trekking around the mountains, Battisti had no idea that Austria had declared war on Russia and mobilised all men between 20 and 40. He hurried back to Trento and led his family over the border into Italy.

Unlike other leaders in Trento such as the Catholic activist Alcide De Gasperi, who became Italy’s prime minister after the Second World War, Battisti realised that the events of August 1914 had destroyed reformist illusions for ever. He was still a socialist, anti-clerical, committed to the equality and liberation of all peoples. Austria’s rage to destroy Serbia confirmed that multinational empires had to be dismantled if socialism was to be established in Europe. Only national states could provide the framework of legitimate governance that gives socialist parties a chance to win power. For the Italians of the empire, the hour of destiny had struck. Battisti became the first prominent Italian to call publicly for Austria-Hungary to be abolished.

Over the next six months or so, he spoke at over a hundred public meetings up and down the land, arguing for Italy to intervene. Sometimes he was cheered to the echo; at others, the anti-war faction stopped him reaching the platform or making himself heard. Privately he disagreed with nationalist demands for all of the south Tyrol; publicly he kept the faith, ‘because it is not for me, as an irredentist, to deprecate the maximal programme of the irredentists’. His speeches were larded with propaganda. He claimed that Trentino’s population was ‘entirely Italian’, and the only reason why Alto Adige’s population was four-fifths German was that ‘barbarian irruptions’ from the north during the decline of the Roman Empire had driven the ‘Romanised elements’ away from the Alps. Trentino’s mission was to hold back the ‘Teutonic elements’ and preserve its ‘incorruptible Roman-ness’. Everything about Trentino was, he insisted, Italian: the sky, the flora, the climate, the customs, traditions and feelings. Even the criminals were
passionately
delinquent, not like cold-hearted German crooks.

Along with such absurdities, Battisti harshly criticised Rome’s official attitude to irredentism since 1866. While the Trentino sank into ‘wretched squalor’, governments in Rome sacrificed Trento and Trieste to their relationship with the great powers. Whenever Italy ratified its existing borders, it drove another nail into the coffin of patriotic aspirations. After the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, irredentism was dropped from foreign policy. ‘Whole generations in Italy not only feel no fraternity with the Italians of Trento and Trieste; they lack the most elementary geographical notion about those lands.’ This, Battisti argued, was why the real defender of Italian identity in the Trentino had become – Austria itself! For the brutality and cynicism of repression fanned the fire of rebellion. The more Austria discouraged political awareness among its Italians, the more convinced they grew that Trentino had no future in the empire. He gave political and economic reasons why Trentino should be annexed to Italy, but what he called ‘the reason of blood’ was paramount. ‘All the sons of Italy should be united in a single family.’

Battisti’s Trento was recognisably medieval. Craftsmen and merchants bustled along narrow lanes in the shadow of a great castle, overlooked by steep hillsides crowded with vineyards and meadows. There were and still are a dozen places more or less like it on all sides of the Alps. Trieste was very different. The Austrians invented it in the eighteenth century to be their great port, connecting the empire to the seaways of the world.

Trieste lies in the north-eastern corner of the Adriatic Sea, on the upper edge of the Istrian peninsula. It faces north-west, towards the Italian mainland, with its back to the Balkans. The city elders chose Habsburg rule in the fourteenth century to protect themselves against Venice. In 1719, when it was a fishing town with some 7,000 inhabitants, Vienna gave it the status of a Free Port and development began in earnest. The salt pans were filled in and a grid of streets was laid around a short canal, with imposing piazzas, a seafront, and quays reaching into the deep-water harbour. The old castle and cathedral were left on a hilltop in the background, picturesque witnesses to the activity below. When the railway arrived in the 1850s, Trieste grew even faster as the transit port for goods coming from or going to central Europe. After Venice was lost in 1866, it became the empire’s naval headquarters. After 1869, when the Adriatic became a route to the Suez Canal, Triestine prosperity increased again. (Italian trade hardly benefited at all.)

Thriving in their fabricated city, the Triestines were more interested in commerce than politics. Language was a marker of class, not a flag of identity; the Italians filled the wide space between German-speaking merchants, administrators and army or navy officers on one side, and the Slavic peasants drawn in by the promise of paying work on the other. The commercial élite of shipping magnates, bankers and insurers comprised many nationalities. Cultures mixed here, overlapping rather than blending. The Jewish, Greek and Serbian communities all left their stamp on the architecture. They coloured its idiom too: the dialect called
triestino
amalgamates several influences in an Italian matrix.