The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (28 page)

Life at the front encouraged modernist concision; for ‘There was no time: the words you used had to be the decisive, absolute words, there was this necessity to express yourself with the fewest words, to cleanse yourself, not to say anything except what had to be said.’ With their startling lack of connective tissue, his poems measure a duress that threatens to cancel individuality altogether, drowning out the personal voice – the voice of poetry. They imitate the posture of the infantry, crouching to minimise their exposure. The wondrous musicality of Italian has been internalised, driven inside the word or phrase. Rhythms lie low until the pulse of speech releases them. Syllables are cherished like comrades’ lives, and spent reluctantly. These poems skirt the brink of silence: heroically minimal, revealing depth in paucity. Commitment to his material is gauged by devotion to its purity.

They might never have seen print. Ungaretti’s first collection was published thanks to a chance encounter. Ettore Serra, a lieutenant with literary interests, was strolling through Versa, ‘a fly-bitten, dusty little village’ where the 19th Infantry happened to be resting. His eye was caught by a ragged, insouciant soldier who was taking such pleasure in the sunshine that he failed to salute the passing officer. Serra wanted his name, which led to a conversation about a few early poems that Ungaretti had published in a magazine. Asked about his recent work, Ungaretti dug in his pockets for the scraps of paper. Serra took them away and turned them into a book that changed Italian poetry. Not that
The Buried Harbour
, privately printed in Udine late in 1916, made much impact at the time, even on the poet’s avant-garde friends in Florence and Rome, except Papini, who announced with relish that Ungaretti had ‘strangled rhetoric’. Slipping onstage without benefit of manifestos, the implications of this debut would have been hard to see even without the distraction of war. The poet himself may not have grasped them at the time. For he was not having a quarrel with poetic tradition when he wrote his ‘book of desolation’, as he called it; he was saving his sanity.

His poems still carry the charge of new expression, minted for new experience. Written as a sort of journal, not meant for publication, they have the self-communing quality of something kept for no one else’s eyes. Early in 1917, he wrote to a friend about an enthralling discovery: ‘liberty is in us’. Nothing can prevent him ‘marvelling at life’s marvels’, and this compensates for his woes. 

I’ve lain down on muddy stones where mice the size of cats run over me as if I’m one of them, while the lice, charming creatures, tenacious as Germans, chewed on us contentedly. But my imagination had nothing to feed on except contemplation of itself, rejoicing that I’m still myself. 

Perhaps Ungaretti kept his status as Italy’s foremost war poet because he proved that lyrical transcendence survived on the Carso, shrunken, introverted, but intact. He spared his readers from reflecting on Italy’s conduct of the war and imagining the horrors inflicted on the soldiers. More than this: by clinging ‘so hard to life’ in the midst of death, he partly redeemed those horrors. Half a century later, he identified ‘the almost savage exaltation’ in his war poems, powered by ‘the vital impulse and the appetite to live’. This is the source of consolation in his work. His poetry, he said, ‘burst like starlight from violence’. Starlight reaches the eye across gulfs of space and time, aeons from the explosion that creates it. Poetry like Rebora’s is more like phosphorus: searing and intolerable.

Ungaretti valued two kinds of calmness and found them both in the war. Away from the trenches, a receptive stillness of soul let him

yield

to the drifting

of the limpid universe

as he wrote early in 1916. The reprieve from danger cast a halo around sunlight on dewy grass, purple shadow thrown by mountains, the carnal pink of sunset, a green glade amid blitzed woodlands above the Isonzo. We hear the din of battle in the white silence around his words. There is a seven-syllable poem, ‘Morning’, written in the quiet village of Santa Maria la Longa. When the sky is clear, the mountains to north and east serrate the horizon: a glorious view.

M’illumino

d’immenso

became the best-known Italian poem since Dante.
3
Today, it stands on signposts along the main road through the village.

Then there was the endless resignation of the men in the trenches. The word that linked these states of being was
docile
: docile, meek, yielding. After Caporetto, he described the soldiers in retreat: ‘They went in silence, meekly, as the Italians go, dying with a smile.’ Despite his ready grin, Ungaretti did not impress others as particularly docile himself. Explosive, rather; truculent; his own man. A friend was working at the Supreme Command when Ungaretti dropped by in June or July 1917. The poet was soon complaining loudly about the soldiers’ conditions and plummeting spirits. The friend told him to lower his voice: General Diaz was in the next office. But Ungaretti’s nerves were shot after a year and a half on the Carso. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on in your general’s head,’ he shouted. ‘What’s going on in all their heads, here? The soldiers are worn out, they’re at the end of their tethers, and as for morale, that’s been stagnant for a long time. Where’s this all leading? Where?’

Three months later, the Twelfth Battle supplied the answer.

Source Note
SIXTEEN
Starlight from Violence

1
not war poems but a soldier’s poems
: Cortellessa. Other poems cited in this chapter are from this superb anthology.

2
‘
You smile upon the land that is your prey
’: Cortellessa.
Laus vitae
means ‘Praise of Life’.

3
‘
kiss the noiseless vulva of the sky
’: Cortellessa, 142.

4
some of the most radical propagandists for war
: Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici.

5
‘
the holy city of modern man
’: Piccioni [1979], 79.

6
‘
I don’t like war,’ he said
: Ungaretti [1981b].

7
‘
I’m a lost soul
’,
he confessed
: Ungaretti [1981b].

8
‘
everything is at stake
’: Mauro.

9
‘
a more heroic humanity
’: Piccioni [1979], 81.

10
‘
I have never seen bluer waters
’: Mussolini cited by Svolšak [2003], 93.

11
he petitioned the dictator for favours
: Piccioni [1980], 105.

12
An excruciating letter came recently to light
: Zingone, 172.

13
the memory of dead comrades’ hands
: Albertazzi; Salsa, 65.

14
The other night I had to march
’: From a letter to Papini, 29 June 1916. Piccioni [1979]

15
‘
if my knapsack is hurting
’: Ungaretti [1981b], 13–14, 38.

16
‘
unfit for command
’
was the verdict
: Ungaretti [1981b].

17
‘
The least thing that would have distinguished
’: Ungaretti [1981a], 132.

18
his beloved friend Apollinaire
: Piccioni [1980], 82.

19
‘
My dear comrades have looked death
’: Piccioni [1980], 192.

20
the
‘
community of suffering
’: Piccioni [1979], 86.

21
‘
There was no time
’: Piccioni [1979], 86.

22
‘
a fly-bitten, dusty little village
’: Dalton, 35. 

23
‘
I’ve lain down on muddy stones
’: Piccioni [1980], 95.

24
‘
the almost savage exaltation
’: Cortellessa. Ungaretti’s
slancio vitale
(vital impulse) translated the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s
élan vitale
or life force. See Chapter 20, ‘The Gospel of Energy’.

25
‘
burst like starlight from violence
’: Cortellessa, 37.

26
‘
Where’s this all leading? Where?
’: Dario Puccini, 250.

1 
With one exception, the translations in this chapter are my own, though indebted to previous versions by Patrick Creagh (in McKendrick’s anthology) and Andrew Frisardi. The exception is ‘Vigil’, which is newly translated by Jamie McKendrick.

2 
The leaf is also any soldier likely to die before his time. Transferred to France in summer 1918, Ungaretti wrote a micro-epic called, simply, ‘Soldiers’:
‘Si sta come d’autunno / sugli
alberi le foglie
’. (A tone-deaf reduction into English: ‘Here like leaves / on autumn trees’.) With Japanese delicacy, these lines renew a comparison that is as old as literature. Homer’s Greeks stood before Troy ‘as numberless as leaves bred in the spring’, (
continued on p. 188
) and Milton imagined Satan’s legions, the fallen angels, lying ‘thick as autumnal leaves’ (
Paradise Lost
, i. 302). By 1918, the exhausted Ungaretti felt more damned than vernal.   

3 
Clive Wilmer’s paraphrase gets the sense: ‘I flood myself with the light of the immense.’ 

SEVENTEEN

Whiteness

Snow is truly a sign of mourning; I don’t know
why the westerners chose black; this is another
thing where the Chinese are more intelligent.
Black makes me feel mystery, fear, the absolute,
infinity, God, universal life; but white gives me
the sense of things ending, the iciness of death.

P
RIVATE
U
NGARETTI
, at the front, early 1917

In the second half of September 1916, snow began to fall on the Alpine front. The winter that followed was one of the harshest on record. It closed down the fighting on the middle and upper Isonzo, where six to eight metres of snow smothered the mountainsides, three times the annual average today. The impact was greatest on the western portions of the front. From Flitsch on the upper Isonzo to the Stelvio Pass on the Swiss border is more than 400 kilometres, much or most of it over 2,000 metres. Five metres of snow fell during the second half of December alone. In this terrain, warfare – like other human activity before man- made fabrics, aviation and electronics – was a hostage to climate.

The Dolomite mountains, midway along the Alpine front, were not a priority for either side. With Italy’s consuming focus on the Isonzo, the Fourth Army – responsible for this sector – was not given resources to exploit a breakthrough even if one could be achieved. On the other hand, offensive objectives were defined: the Fourth Army was supposed to drive westwards towards Bozen and the Adige valley; north-west, towards the Brenner Pass; and north-east towards inner Austria. This contra diction between means and ends was always likely to have bloody consequences.

The Austrian forces were spread even more thinly here than elsewhere in the mountains; parrying the Italian thrusts was their only aim. In the decades before 1914, most of the Habsburg budget for renewing and extending fortifications had been devoted to Galicia in the east and Istria on the Adriatic. As chief of the general staff, Conrad neglected the Dolomites in favour of strengthening the south Tyrol as a base for attacking the Veneto. As a result, the defences were second-rate compared with those in Trentino. In May 1915, rather than try to hold the small fortresses against Italian artillery, the sector commander, Major General Ludwig Goiginger, abandoned the forts without a fight and distributed their artillery around the mountains. By dividing up their batteries among more or less isolated positions on the flanks and summits, the Austrians wrung every advantage from the dramatic topography of the Dolomites. Goiginger hoped he could pen the Italians in the southern valleys, away from the strategic passes.

As on the Isonzo, then, the Austrians pulled back from the prewar border to the nearest defensible line. This meant inaccessible cliffs and pinnacles hundreds of metres above the approach roads. Before they became a playground for climbers, hikers and skiers, these mountains were a limestone jungle, a thinly populated frontier where pious farming communities, loyal to the emperor in Vienna, eked a living. For the Italians deployed here between 1915 and 1917, the Dolomites were a terrible place, one that mocked their ambitions and their courage. After touring the front in August 1916, the English writer H. G. Wells reflected this mood in a propaganda report. The ‘grim and wicked’ Dolomites are 

worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with the square jointings and occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and jagged. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through which passes the road of the Dolomites. 

The prewar border between Italy and Austria looped through the Dolomites just south of Cortina d’Ampezzo, then becoming known as a resort. Cortina lay at the crossroads of the only two highways through the Dolomites. The Emperor’s Road linked Toblach (now Dobbiaco) in the north to Belluno and the coastal plains, while the Dolomites Road – the one that Wells surveyed – connected the Julian Alps and the Isonzo valley in the east to Bozen and the Adige valley in the west. Completed a few years before the war, it was a feat of engineering, zigzagging over passes, dropping into broad valleys and skirting the edge of streams.

In May 1915, the Italians did not believe the Austrians would abandon Cortina without a fight, so lost precious days before venturing into the town. Then they waited another week or ten days before pushing north, along the Emperor’s Road. The same errors that plagued the early campaigns on the Isonzo were repeated here. For example, they put a token force of Alpini on the flat summit of Mount Piana, neglected to reinforce it, and were driven off by Austrian militia. A miniature war of position ensued; the Austrians lost ground, but clung to the northern edge of the summit. Although casualties were measurable in hundreds rather than tens of thousands, they were incurred with no better result than on the Isonzo. If anything, these lives were spent even more wastefully, for the Italians had not committed the forces that would be needed to exploit a breakthrough. At least, on the Isonzo, Cadorna believed he had sufficient forces to break through eventually. In the Dolomites there was no such belief, yet the Fourth Army was still obliged to attack. As on the Isonzo, these attacks were not concentrated. By mounting simultaneous attacks along the Dolomites sector – some 80 or 100 kilometres – the Italians lengthened the already long odds against their cracking the Austrian grip on the key routes northward.

Rebuffed to the north, the Italians pushed westwards from Cortina, along the arterial road towards the Adige, twisting up through meadows, shadowed by huge cliffs. They crept forward for 10 kilometres or so, reaching the head of the Falzarego valley by mid-June 1915.
1
They approached a feature called the Sasso di Stria, a spike rising a couple of hundred metres like a miniature Matterhorn, forcing the road to swing south-westwards. A secondary route forks north through the Valparola Pass towards the town of Bruneck. The Austrians had fortified the Sasso, on the southern side of the Valparola Pass, and prepared strong positions on the northern side. If the Italians were to have any chance of reaching Bozen and the Brenner Pass, they had to break out of the Falzarego valley.

The first attempt to penetrate the Valparola Pass, on 15 June, was a fiasco. The battalion leading the assault was told that the Alpini had captured the Sasso, on their left flank, and that the wire in front of them had been successfully breached. Both reports proved to be false.
2
Their own artillery support failed to materialise; the gunners on the south side of the valley were afraid of hitting their own infantry. The battalion commander was so bent on glory that he ignored the lack of supporting fire. The bugles sounded, and the battalion – Sardinians of the Reggio Brigade – charged at the wire yelling ‘Savoy!’ They lost contact with the reserves and were picked off as they scrabbled for shelter behind boulders on the open hillside. Days later, a junior officer wrote in his diary that the battalion’s spirits had not recovered: ‘No joking, no laughter any more.’

Over the next months, the Sasso di Stria and adjacent positions at the throat of the Valparola valley were occasionally seized, at great cost, but could not be held. A valiant officer led a small unit almost to the top of the Sasso on 18 October. He was shot and his men were captured. It was a pointless gesture. Better results were obtained a couple of kilometres away, where important footholds were captured on the northern rim of the valley. The first counter-attacks were beaten back, but the Italians were not securely placed: the emerging front line was often high above their nearest resources, horribly exposed to enemy fire. The closer the Italians could get to the cliff face, the safer they were. By late autumn they were tucked on ledges hundreds of metres above the valley floor, living in huts pinioned to the rock, supplied by cableways, probing the Austrian lines as and where they could. Donning hemp- soled shoes, they wormed their way up cracks that would challenge a trained alpinist. Easier gradients were overcome by bolting ladders to the rockface. Machine guns and small artillery were hauled by rope to the top of overhangs.

With progress measured in vertical centimetres and no breakthrough in sight, the Italians decided to blast the Austrians off their eyries above the Falzarego valley. This endeavour led to extraordinary feats of engineering: for two years, Italian sappers tunnelled hundreds of metres in order to lay mines under enemy positions. The largest of these mines was laid under the Castelletto or ‘little castle’, a curious rock formation that looms over the entrance to the Travenanzes valley, an alternative passage northward. When they failed to break beyond the Sasso di Stria, the Italians switched their offensive efforts in this direction. One problem with this fallback plan was that the Travenanzes valley was wild and trackless. Getting and supplying an army through it would be difficult, if not impossible, without control of the surrounding heights – something the Italians never looked likely to achieve.

The other problem was access to the valley, which lay over a pass some 500 metres above the road through the Dolomites. This pass, the Forcella Col dei Bos, was dominated by the Castelletto. Geologically, the Castelletto is a fragment of Mount Tofana, which rears over Cortina d’Ampezzo like a mile-high megalith. Separated from the hulking Tofana by a narrow saddle of scree, the Castelletto rises 200 metres to a jagged crest. On its other (western) side, it falls 400 metres to the threshold of the Travenanzes valley. It is a natural fortress.

During the autumn, the Italians edged upwards from the valley almost to the foot of the Castelletto. They captured Tofana without firing a shot and kept a presence on the summit, dug in and supplied under Austrian fire, in temperatures that sank below minus 30 degrees, hammered by blizzards. They expected the Castelletto to fall into their hands, but it could not be sighted from Tofana’s summit and artillery fire did little damage. It could accommodate a platoon in a warren of tunnels and caves. Although it lay 500 metres ahead of the nearest Austrian cover, the rock could be resupplied in darkness. It had to be conquered if the Italians were to secure the Falzarego Pass and get into the Travenanzes valley, leading north to Bruneck, then the Brenner Pass and eventually the Austrian heartland. The sector commanders grew obsessed with the Castelletto, and battered it with everything they could find. To the Austrians, it was the
Schreckenstein
or ‘rock of terror’. Italian infantrymen crossed themselves when it was mentioned. Apart from tactical reasons, the Italians argued, army morale demanded its capture.

All the misplaced ingenuity and energy of the Alpine campaign was expressed in the attempt to do just this. Two young officers conceived the plan of mining the Castelletto in late 1915. It involved digging a 500-metre gallery from positions at the foot of Tofana, behind the face of the mountain, under the saddle. The two engineers said they needed 35 tonnes of gelignite to be sure of forcing the Austrians off the rock. This would make it the biggest military mine in history.

The mine should have been ready by the end of May 1916, but rapid progress became possible only in March, when two rock-drills were delivered. Except for the officers, the sappers were not military engineers; they were soldiers in the Alpino units of the Fourth Army who had worked as miners before the war in Germany and Austria. With 120 of these men working in shifts, it was possible to drive five or six metres in 24 hours. By early June, they were still 33 metres short of the objective.

The Austrians were aware of the Italian operation, and had started to dig a countermine. Lacking a rock-drill, they could make little headway and were very unlikely to discover the Italian mine. Even so, by the end of the month, the Italian engineers reckoned that the head of their gallery – the chamber for the gelignite – lay no more than six metres from the nearest countermine. After filling the chamber with explosives, the miners plugged the tunnel with 33 metres-worth of rubble, sandbags and broken furniture: sufficient, they reckoned, to stop the blowback of gas. As they had taken the extra precaution of building right-angles into the tunnel, they were confident that their own troops, poised to move onto the saddle from above and below, would be safe from the massive explosion. Half the Italians were waiting in a subsidiary tunnel inside Tofana, above the saddle of scree linking it to the Castelletto. The membrane of rock at the end of this tunnel would be blown out just after the main detonation, freeing the men to swarm down on the shattered Austrian positions. The remainder were ready below the saddle. Across the valley, the King, Cadorna, and the commander of the Fourth Army peered through binoculars as the minutes ticked down to zero. 

In the final stage of digging, aromas from the Austrian rations being prepared in the Castelletto seeped through fissures in the limestone to the Italians below. If the Austrians noticed these air currents, they might release poison gas above the fissures, slowing the tunnelling or even stopping it. Apparently the idea never occurred to the Austrians, who were absorbed by the challenge of keeping their sanity.

The senior officer on the Castelletto was Hans Schneeberger, a 19-year- old ensign in the Austrian Kaiserjäger, the Emperor’s Hunters, native Tyrolean soldiers. In early June, he was ordered to lead his platoon up to the Castelletto. A reputation for agility around the mountains had already earned young Schneeberger the nickname of ‘the snow-flea’, yet his commanding officer explained that the main reasons for his assignment were his age (he was the youngest officer available) and marital status (single). For it was clear that the enemy were preparing to detonate a spectacular mine. The rock was buzzing and trembling under the Austrians’ boots. Another drill could be heard behind the surface of Tofana, across the saddle.