The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (35 page)

Returning to active service in summer 1916, after a long gap, was difficult. Weary, and missing his creative life, he wrote to a friend: ‘Nothing is more terrible than art…. There is only art.’ That, and the bathos of death. A proper Futurist extinction would come while storming a trench, atomised by a heavy calibre shell, or perhaps crushed by an armoured train. Instead, Boccioni, who had been assigned to an artillery regiment, died from injuries sustained after his horse shied at a car. He was not a skilled horseman and reacted to the creature’s panic by digging his new shiny spurs into its flanks. It was an ironic end, nature’s revenge on a champion of mechanistic beauty. If he had lived, he would have surely followed Marinetti into the Fascist Party.

Defiantly titled ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’, like a laboratory specimen, Boccioni’s sculpture is a male figure striding forward, superbly balanced, poised as he thrusts – an emblem of virile determination, needing no weapon because he himself is ‘a living gun’. The angles and planes of his shoulders, spine, hips and thighs convey the tension of a coiled spring. While it recalls the French artist Millet’s striding ‘Sower’ and nods to the Renaissance statue of the warrior Colleoni, and further back to the Winged Victory of Samothrace,
2
the figure’s robotic smoothness and anonymity – its ‘reproducibility’ – are modern. The muscled hero strides forward in a nimbus of resolution, invisible currents flaming around his limbs, safe inside the force-field of his will. No wonder that the government of Silvio Berlusconi, bent on impressing the world with Italian vigour, put Boccioni’s figure on one of the new Euro coins in 2002.

Boccioni modelled the piece in plaster; bronze casts were only made after his death. Even so, he knew it was his sculptural masterpiece, the closest he had come to conveying ‘pure plastic rhythm’. Pure in form, however, rather than motive, for his figure is imbued with violent Futurist purpose. It has been compared with Marinetti’s vision of a superman, a ‘nonhuman and mechanical being, constructed for an omnipresent velocity … cruel, omniscient and combative … endowed with surprising organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks’. Boccioni’s figure even has the protrusion ‘in the form of a prow from the outward swell of the breast bone’ that Marinetti foresaw as the evolutionary result of modern life.

Art historians praise its ‘bursting vitality’ and ‘vital tension’ for ‘representing an epoch’, ‘the dynamic anxiety of our time’. This does not go far enough: Boccioni prefigured the infantry attack, not as it really would be, but as generals and intellectuals imagined it. The sculpture was only a year old when its posture began to be replicated by soldiers on the Western Front. In this sense, Boccioni’s nameless, mutilated figure, storming unstoppably ahead, as if propelled by ‘extreme resolution’, was, in Nietzsche’s phrase, born posthumously. And after all, had not Nietzsche himself ruled that ‘the magnitude of an “advance” is even to be measured by the mass of things that had to be sacrificed to it’? In the First World War, the image of infantry as masses of ‘things’ was more than a metaphor. Father Gemelli, who had Cadorna’s ear, argued in his influential studies that a ‘good soldier’ must lose his identity; for the price of complete obedience was depersonalisation, isolated from familiar bonds and affections. With hindsight, Gemelli’s theory and Boccioni’s figure anticipate the Fascist myth of a ‘new Man’, the ‘soldier citizen’ who would be stripped of ‘individual autonomy and consciousness… trained to consider himself as a mere instrument of the State, and prepared to sacrifice his life for it.’ Has a sculpture ever dramatised more memorably its creator’s contempt for the ‘brutalised and cowardly race’ of ordinary people, the ‘rabble whom we must lead into slavery’? Has an omen of the avant-garde ever been fulfilled on such a scale? 

It is delightful that the best Italian critique of vitalism should be a comic novel, written in and about Trieste, the powder-keg city itself. Italo Svevo’s masterpiece,
The Confessions of Zeno
(1923), recounts the decidedly unheroic adventures of a man who is inept, irresolute, unsuited to the battle of life, but generous, and truthful to the paradoxes of his nature, which is also ours. But Svevo wrote his novel in the war’s aftermath. While researching this book, I found one solitary insight about vitalism written at the Italian front. It came from John Dos Passos, the future novelist. He came to Europe in 1916 as a Harvard graduate, naïvely intent on cultural tourism, then volunteered for the American Red Cross. After a few months of driving ambulances on the Western Front, he was transferred to Italy, arriving at the end of 1917. He spent seven months on the plain near Venice, watching the Italians strengthen their defensive line between Padua and the sea. The landscape was dreary in winter, its horizontal lines broken by rows of pollarded trees, ‘black and gnarled in the mist’.

With little to do, time weighed heavily. The war seemed far away; distant gunfire rattled the windows of the café where he wrote letters. Amid the monotony, an air raid was ‘wonderfully exciting … the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earthshaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.’

Dos Passos’s letters and diaries are perceptive in a democratic American vein. The Italian officers’ contempt for the other ranks outrages him; their ‘overbearing nastiness to anyone they don’t lick the boots of is disgusting’. Intrigued by the abstract motives and forces that bind people to the war, he is shocked by the power of nationalism with its ‘patriotic cant’; it is ‘the one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war’. Near the end of his tour, he dropped a startling remark into a letter home: ‘No I believe no more in the gospel of energy – One thing the last year has taught me has been to drop my old sentimentalising over action.’ Among eyewitness accounts from the front, this is a sentence in a million. It took an American volunteer to notice something so fundamental about Italy’s war.

Source Notes
TWENTY
The Gospel of Energy

1
‘
calm and steadfast
’: Frescura, 139–41.

2
veterans’ memoirs say little about the frontal attack
: This impression is confirmed by Isnenghi, who probably knows the veterans’ literature better than anyone. Isnenghi [1997], 285–8.

3
their casualty rates over the war
: Bosworth [1996], 66.

4
the ‘absurd’ moment
: Bultrini & Casarola, 85.

5
‘
whole body racked by terror
’: Bultrini & Casarola, 114, 149, 44.

6
‘
the blood chills before an assault
’: Favetti, 113.

7
‘
Those who have not been through
’: Lussu, 95.

8
another 25 shot in the buttocks by the carabinieri
: Giacomel 2003a, 105.

9
‘
straggler posts
’
as a barrier
: Sheffield, 74.

10
‘
Voices and shouting on all sides
’: Mario Puccini.

11
‘
The outcome of war will always
’: Cadorna [1915], 34.

12
‘
Infantry that finds itself under fire
’: Cadorna [1915], 28.

13
‘
When a soldier lacks the spirit
’: Cadorna to Orlando, 3 November 1917, in Orlando [1960], 501.

14
‘
should proceed without such certainty
’: Cadorna [1915], 36, 27.

15
‘
waves
’
of men
: Cadorna [1915], 31–2.

16
‘imbued with a determination’: British Army General Staff, 141.

17
‘
the exercise of human qualities
’: Howard.

18
the ‘triumph’ of ‘one will
’: Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton, in Howard.

19
‘
a conquering state of mind
’: Howard.

20
‘
the inner force that cannot be rationally grasped
’: Berlin, 317.

30
‘
the political principle of the nineteenth century
’: Arendt, 178.

31
a
‘
glorious minority
’: Missiroli [1932], 22.

32
‘
did not want to become Italian
’: Mario Puccini.

33
‘
Outside the struggle
’: Russo, 12, 47–8, 153–4.

34
‘
The Italian middle classes wanted to believe
’: Sforza [1945], 136.

35
‘
tranquil, serene, rested
’: Gatti [1997], 162.

36
Luigi Barzini paid tribute to Cadorna’s
: Isnenghi [2005], 191.

37
‘
firm and indestructible will
’: Cadorna [1915], Premesse, para.

38
there were seeds of the later cult in the earlier
: Isnenghi [1999]; Ventrone [2003], 219.

39
Fascism was the vitalist regime par excellence
: Bosworth [2007], 181.

40
‘
a permanent revolution, emancipating action
’: Satta, 42.

41
an architecture of
‘
fearless audacity
’: Antonio Sant’Elia, quoted by da Costa Mayer.

42
they enjoyed a following among workers
: Ballo, 369.

43
‘
is only for those who know what to do
’: Quotations from Schiavo.

44
a
‘
great fraternal sacrifice of all Italians
’: Carrà.

45
‘
D’Annunzio because he was immoral
’: Dos Passos.

46
‘
splendid optimism
’: ‘
splendido ottimismo
’ was Marinetti’s tribute. Marinetti [1987], 73.

47
twice as many deaths during a week
: De Simone, 176.

48
‘
I like your whole campaign
’: Marinetti [1978]

49
‘
an experience of supreme helplessness
’: Ousby, 84–5.

50
‘
restless, aggressive mind
’: Golding’s phrase.

51
‘
ferocious conquest
’: Tallarico, 108.

52
‘
My Futurist ideals, my love of Italy
’: Tallarico, 127.

53
‘
The life we lead
’: Boccioni [1971], 318.

54
‘
a living gun
’: from W. H. Auden’s 1937 poem, ‘Wrapped in a yielding air …’ Auden in the 1930s was brilliantly perceptive about vitalism and its ambiguities.