The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (21 page)

D’Adamo’s job was made harder by several murderous reprisals against local people. At the end of May 1915, the commander in Villesse believed – mistakenly – that the villagers were shooting at his men. He ordered everyone to be rounded up and kept as hostages. Then he shot six people, including the deputy mayor. The rest were interned. A week later, the Italians carried out a summary decimation of farmers from half a dozen hamlets between Caporetto and Tolmein. The adult males were rounded up and accused of betraying positions to the enemy and sheltering Italian deserters. Their denials were waved away by the commanding officer, a captain, who lined the farmers up and ordered every tenth man to step forward. The unlucky six were shot in the back and buried where they fell, scapegoats for the Italian soldiers’ lack of enthusiasm for futile attacks against a much smaller Habsburg force, including many Slovenes, on the Krn–Mrzli ridge.

Compared with the slaughter on the hills above, these were minor mishaps, statistically almost invisible. But they were blatantly unjust, and they echoed around the occupied territory, poisoning local attitudes. A soldier stationed near Tolmein wrote in his diary on 30 June: ‘The population is still hostile. Spies are constantly being shot at Caporetto.’ In fact the shootings were sporadic; the soldier’s impression of incessant executions – like the rumours that spread, for example about Slovene women cutting off the heads of wounded Italians – spoke volumes about the nerve-jangling atmosphere.

The Italians believed the liberated areas were teeming with spies – how else to explain their failure to break through? The other reason for their jumpiness was dismay at their reception by the people who were being ‘redeemed’. Expecting fierce resistance, the troops were dis comfited by the eerie emptiness of the land that they entered on 24 May. Then they were baffled by the attitude of the civilians. The villages were heavy with fear and distrust; even in towns with a reputation for nationalism, like Cervignano, the streets were empty and the houses shuttered. A deputy who had volunteered wrote to Salandra that ‘we are welcomed coldly, with suspicion, often with open antipathy’ in every village from the sea to the mountains. Italian commanders were reduced to forcing the local authorities to put on a show of pro-Italian emotion.

The welcome was even chillier in the Dolomites. Some valleys were pro-Austrian, others pro-Italian, depending on their proximity to the border and the trade that flourished along them. On the whole, the Habsburg Italians were loyal to their emperor. Italian nationalists venerated the Alps, their ‘natural frontier’, as the home of epic virtues: strength, sincerity, simplicity, faith and family. Ironically, these virtues tilted the mountain-dwellers against new-fangled Italy. For nationalism came late to the mountain communities, filtering in with the spread of Alpinism in the last third of the nineteenth century, when Italian and Austrian climbers competed for the honour of first ascents. Soldiers were dismayed to find people even in the southern valleys, closest to Italy, ‘very hostile’ to the men who were ‘fighting to liberate their brothers’. An elderly Italian in Cortina was heard to comment, ‘Wonderful! They have come to liberate us. But who will liberate us from them?’

Slovene newspapers reported with glee that the Italians were ‘particularly angered’ by the local people’s attitude. After the wild rhetoric about the mission of Latin civilisation, many soldiers expected ‘the Slavs’ to hail their deliverance from cultural inferiority. By an irony that eluded them, the Italians were reaping the harvest of state policy towards the Slovene minority on their own side of the border. Since 1866, the Slovenes in Italy had envied the position that their conationals (often their blood kin) enjoyed across the border. The Italians did not realise that the terms of the Treaty of London meant – especially when simplified by Austrian propaganda – that they were seen as alien conquerors. Italian propagandists blamed their Austrian counterparts for brainwashing the locals with lies about Italian savagery.

But these people had been living with the war for nearly a year. Their menfolk were fighting in Galicia or Serbia. In the summer and autumn of 1915, the civilians in eastern Friuli saw their world turned upside down. They were dazed by the disappearance of the empire in which they and their forefathers had lived. The
regnicoli
, peaceable immigrants from Italy who in many cases had lived in these villages for decades, were forced out. The dusty lanes were torn up by the first motor vehicles that some of the locals had ever seen. Men and women were drafted into labour gangs to build tracks into the mountains. Fields were seized for barracks, depots, field kitchens, hospitals and airfields. The mortality rate in these villages soared, for the war brought disease.

All this occurred against a background of low-level ethnic distrust. The Slovenes were broadly pro-Austrian, without being aggressively anti-Italian. Their experience of war was exactly what the Italians could not imagine. Behind these misunderstandings lay a deep ignorance of the people who lived around Italy’s north-eastern border. North of Gorizia, the population on the Isonzo front was entirely Slovene, mostly smallholding farmers with cows and goats, maize fields and orchards, shod in wooden clogs, ploughing their narrow fields with horses, eating rye bread and polenta, flat cake made with maize flour. The only Italian- speakers were women who had been in domestic service in Trieste. Further north, in Carnia, even the locals who were not Slovene and spoke something a bit like Italian, larded with Germanic and Slavic terms, were quite unlike the Venetians. The first Italian officials to make their way up these valleys after the 1866 war did not know how to classify the locals: were they German or Italian? These settlements shared an Alpine culture that linked them with the north and west; they also lay close to trade routes that connected the Mediterranean with central Europe.

The Austrians had tried to dilute Italian nationalism by encouraging the regional identity of Friuli. There was and is a Friulan identity – as the Italian state has accepted since 1945. Other ethnic identities had survived in the lee of the Alps: the Ladini, who had kept their ancient forms of community life in the high valleys of the Dolomites; the Cimbri on the Asiago plateau, with their Germanic dialect; the Mocheni further west in the Trentino. These particularities held no interest for Italian nationalists. The committed volunteers pouring across the border in 1915 felt they were entering virgin land that was, in a mystical way, destined to be Italian. Amleto Albertazzi, a 2nd lieutenant in the Fusiliers, shinned up a beech tree near the eastern bank of the Isonzo, in the first week of June 1915. His heart leaped to see ‘the lands that will soon be ours: a high chain of mountains on the horizon; lower down, a series of hills sloping down to the plain, studded with little villages, growing denser around industrial Monfalcone’, then Mount Hermada ‘like a colossus’ and Duino with its sombre castle, lapped by the sea. On the horizon, there is Trieste, ‘white city of our dreams’.

What mattered was the
place
. The inhabitants were décor, not essential. Mussolini’s journal shows this outlook perfectly. Moving over the old (1866) border in September 1915, he notices a little boy drawing water at a pump. What is his name? ‘Stanko.’ Stanko what? The boy does not understand the question, and Mussolini does not realise that Stanko must be a Slovene. Someone tells him the boy’s surname is Robančič. ‘A completely Slavic name,’ notes Mussolini, then changes the subject. This encounter, so revealing of Italian assumptions, needs no comment on his part. In Caporetto a few months later, he notes the ‘enigmatic faces’ of the Slovenes. They still do not like us, he reflects. ‘They submit with resignation and ill-concealed hostility. They think we are only passing through and don’t want to compromise themselves in case yesterday’s masters return tomorrow.’

For the most part, civilians were not brutally treated. Compared with the sufferings inflicted on Armenians, Belgians, French, Poles, Serbs and Russian Jews, they were fortunate. The Italians’ lack of initial planning probably worked in the civilians’ favour; mixed with the general population rather than cooped up in camps, like the Austrian evacuees, they had more opportunities to earn a living and integrate with the community. Perhaps, too, the lawful treatment of Slovenes and German- speaking Austrians in the border area reflected a general failure by Italian propagandists to poison the attitudes of ordinary soldiers.

It was different on the other side of the front. Before the war, life for Slovenes had been better in Austria than in Italy. During the war, life was better in Italy – even under occupation. Compared with conditions in the empire, it was easy to survive in occupied Caporetto. Even a week before Italy attacked in May 1915, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior advised people to stay at home, assuring them that full provision had been made in the event of war. Three days later, the villages on the Carso and the Isonzo began to be evacuated. Trieste, Gorizia and Monfalcone were not evacuated, perhaps for propaganda reasons. Many of their inhabitants left of their own will. Half the populations of Trieste and Gorizia moved away. Many villagers, too, took the initiative to go east. By the end of May, 100,000 civilians – Italians, Slovenes and Croats – had moved or been moved to the interior.

As elsewhere, internment was a preventive tool against suspected spies and saboteurs, potential enemy sympathisers, and political opponents (anarchists and socialists). It was the fate of some 3,000 male
regnicoli
of military age who had not left the empire by the end of May. Their wives and children – almost 12,000 individuals – were sent elsewhere in Austria or returned to Italy via neutral Switzerland, with the help of the Red Cross. These families often left their apartments fully furnished, with the floors swept and clean tablecloths on the table, never dreaming they would be gone for years. Life was particularly hard for Habsburg Italian evacuees and refugees in the empire. Statistics are fuzzy, but there were probably well over 20,000 of these. They were victims of the difficulty of proving a negative: how to convince the authorities that they were not covert irredentists? Mistaken for
regnicoli
or political internees, they met with hostility that corroded their loyalty to the empire. They had done nothing wrong, yet they were virtual prisoners far from home, subject to strict order, half starving, denied the chance of work, unable to move far from their camps, suspected by the local people. The camps became hotbeds of Italian nationalism.

Assistance for internees, evacuees and refugees was better organised but less generous than in Italy. In 1915, some of the camps were equipped with schools, churches, baths, laundries and electric light; others were primitive, insanitary barracks. Conditions deteriorated during the war, along with everything else in the empire. By late 1916, food was in short supply. The Ministry of the Interior was responsible but until the end of 1917, helping refugees was a concession, not a legal obligation, made to preserve what the ministry called ‘the sense of belonging to a common fatherland’. Like any concession, it was arbitrary; hence the ethnic Italians were treated like ‘objects of administration’, as one of their leaders complained, ‘as if they had no will, no rights of their own’. Matters were hardly better for the Slovenes, who killed time in the camps by singing songs and reciting the verses of Simon Gregorčič, a shy priest from Caporetto, who had foretold the carnage nearly forty years earlier:

Here at the clash of sharpened blades,
your waters will be tinged with red: 
our blood will run to you, 
that foe will make your current drag! 
Bright Isonzo, then remember 
what your ardent heart implores …

The first historian of the war in Friuli explained why Italy’s internees and evacuees were not worth studying: ‘They do not stir that sense of the heroic which makes suffering admirable, sacrifice luminous, death honourable and envied.’
2
It was better to omit these elements than spoil a sublime picture. The real history was preserved and transmitted orally, by survivors. Families never forgot the catastrophe of displacement. When the Italian soldiers broke the news, the lanes between the houses rang with screams; some people tried to bury their valuables in the cellar while others beat their heads on the wall, wailing.

One man who lived long enough to inform a new generation of historians was Andrej Mašera of Caporetto, interviewed when he was ninety.

What I think is that the Italian soldiers who came to fight here felt cheated. Because they had been told, ‘We’re going to liberate our brothers.’ But when they spoke to us, nobody understood a word. This is why I think the Italian soldiers really
had
been cheated. Before they came into the war, there was great propaganda about liberating us, but once they got here, they asked themselves ‘Where are those brothers of ours? Just what are we doing here?’

Source Notes
TWELVE
Year Zero