The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (37 page)

As before, the Supreme Command and the government worried that public morale would plummet when the soldiers came home for Christmas. In November, the Ministry of the Interior warned Italy’s regional governors that ‘subversive elements’ might stir up discontent, and even incite men to desert or mutiny. In the event, many men’s leave was cancelled due to anxiety over a possible Austrian attack from Trentino. The public mood was darkening, too, as people suffered the effects of Germany’s submarine blockade of Allied shipping. Butter, sugar and petroleum were running low, rationing was introduced, and a crisis over wheat supplies in summer 1917 would lead to violent demonstrations. Civilian mortality rates climbed, as unheard-of numbers succumbed to malaria and tuberculosis. Nevertheless, the soldiers’ and civilians’ dedication to the struggle remained intact and was bolstered in early April, when the United States of America declared war on Germany. President Wilson had been forced off his neutralist fence by ‘the gross misconduct of the Germans’ in killing American citizens travelling on American and Allied ships. Ordinary Europeans could at last imagine that the war might end.

For the Austrians, the winter began with the death of the old emperor on 21 November. Like their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, this generation of Habsburg soldiers had fought for that slim, impassive figure with his pendulous lip and muttonchop whiskers. Unchanging, utterly dependable, his Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty Franz Josef had personified the empire. ‘Uncle Joe’ was as familiar to the Italians as to the Austrians. All of Italy’s wars of independence had been fought against him. His mystique was irreplaceable, and its loss gradually revealed the empire as being, after all, a state like any other, and sillier than most.

His successor, Karl, nephew of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, married to an Italian princess, realised that the empire was heading for disaster. Whether Austria-Hungary became a vassal of victorious Germany or disintegrated under the shock of defeat, it was probably doomed. His foreign minister, Count Czernin, warned that the army was on the brink of exhaustion, and popular despair might lead to proletarian revolution and national uprising, for the Habsburg Slavs were much affected by the unrest in Russia, which would soon lead to the first of the revolutions that brought down the Tsar.

Karl, an instinctive liberal, relaxed the severe controls on civilian life and marginalised the bellicose Conrad. Abroad, he explored whether he could extricate the empire from the war that threatened to destroy it. By chance, in the same month, December 1916, the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, tried to forestall American intervention on the Allied side by proposing terms to discuss peace. Having crushed Romania, and as Russia was sucked into crisis, the German Supreme Command was in no mood for compromise. With the Kaiser’s acquiescence, Ludendorff attached such tough conditions to the proposal that it became an ultimatum. The result was a minor coup for Allied propaganda.

A week later, President Wilson asked all parties to state their war aims. While Germany reiterated Bethmann Hollweg’s hollow offer, the Allies began to talk about liberating the subject nations of the Habsburg empire – something that had never been a war aim. Alarmed, Karl made sure that the Allies were aware of his interest in a separate peace. Having ousted Conrad in March 1917, he let the Allies know that Austria sought peace on the basis of the restoration of Belgian and (on certain conditions) Serbian independence, and the award of Alsace- Lorraine to France.

French Prime Minister Alexandre Ribot was doubtful, while Lloyd George was intrigued. France and Britain had very few men in the field against Austria-Hungary; even so, they would benefit if Germany were alone on the Eastern Front. A bigger problem with Karl’s initiative was its omission of any reference to Italy, for he opposed any concessions to the ‘traitor’, and argued that the Austrian élite would not accept them in any case. When the Allies said that Rome must be consulted, Karl’s envoy explained that Austria would not give the Italians any territory that they had not conquered. Lloyd George demurred; the Italians should, he said, get the south Tyrol up to Bozen. The envoy wondered if they might not be offered a piece of south-eastern Anatolia instead.

On 19 April, with this crucial point unresolved, the British and French premiers met Sonnino in a railway carriage in the Alps, and – without showing him the emperor’s letter – sounded him on the notion of a separate peace with Austria. Sonnino rejected requests for flexibility over the terms of the Treaty of London. Stubborn, ‘hot-tempered and not easily soothed’, harbouring ‘vast ambitions for Italy, which he hoped to see realised as a result of the combined effort of all the Allies’, he was not much liked in Paris and London. But he was respected; the Allies recognised that he had done more than anyone to bring Italy into the war on their side, and they knew he was the strongest figure in the government. Predictably, Sonnino now insisted that Italy’s war aims necessitated the full defeat of the Central Powers; anything less would dishonour Italy’s fallen. He did not comment on Lloyd George’s suggestion that, with Austria out of the picture, Italy could concentrate on her aims in Asia Minor. Italy had gone to war for the ‘unredeemed lands’; how could it make peace without liberating Trento and Trieste? He warned that Italy would be swept by revolution if the Allies reneged on their Adriatic pledges. While rejecting a separate peace, he pocketed the promise of territory in Anatolia and the port of Smyrna.

Karl’s overtures did not recover from that encounter in the railway carriage. Back in London, digesting his second Italian snub since the start of the year, Lloyd George told the cabinet that Italy might be ‘compelled’ to accept an Allied agreement with Austria. He was reluctant to destroy Karl’s illusion, just as he refused to give up the idea of supporting the Italians with guns. For now, however, Sonnino prevailed, at the price of confirming London’s view that Italy’s claims were ‘unjust and unrealistic’.

When Cadorna learned about these feelers at the end of April 1917, he demanded assurances that nothing would prevent the army’s ‘imminent operations’. Boselli gave his word and urged Cadorna to make the next action ‘decisive, in the sense that it virtually gives us Trieste’. By this time, the Eastern Front too had fallen quiet. Spinning in the vortex of revolution, Russia had lost its tsar in March. The offensive capacity of its army was dwindling fast, and the Central Powers stood back. Germany fuelled the fire with propaganda (telling the Russian soldiers that their government was against peace) and by helping Bolshevik exiles to return to Russia. (Lenin had reached St Petersburg three days before the secret summit in the Alps.) The prospect of Austrian divisions transferring to the Italian front, and the hope of inducing Cadorna to support their offensive in France, spurred the Allies to lend Cadorna 100 heavy guns.

Domestically, Austria was in dire straits. There had been food riots as early as 1915, and the harsh winter of 1916–17 aggravated shortages. Hunger was widespread; by March 1917, soldiers were volunteering for the front in order to get the better rations that were served in the line. Hungary supplied the army with grain, but not Austrian civilians. Economic conditions worsened; industrial output declined sharply over 1917. So many miners had been drafted that coal was in short supply.

The military picture was mixed. Romania had been subdued by the end of 1916, and Russia’s internal crisis almost paralysed the Eastern Front. (A final botched offensive in the summer would finish off the Russian army.) On the Italian front, patches of territory around Gorizia were reclaimed in minor actions over the winter. The new defensive line down to Hermada was completed. Turning the Carso’s geology to excellent account, the Austrians concealed billets, munitions and telephone wires deep in the limestone. The Imperial forces had taken 1,700,000 casualties during 1916, however, and there was no way to replace them. In the short term, transfers from Galicia could make up Boroević’s shortfall, but they would not close the widening gap with the Italians.

On 1 February, General Nivelle visited Cadorna, seeking assurances that Italy would attack when the French and British offensive commenced in April. Cadorna, bristling at the Frenchman’s careless reference to ‘the hills’ on the upper Isonzo, was not to be drawn. He still feared an Austrian attack out of Trentino. 

Launched on 16 April, the Nivelle offensive went badly. Fielding 174 divisions, the Allies took almost 350,000 casualties before the operation was halted in mid-May. On 20 April, the French military attaché in Udine demanded that Cadorna must attack ‘
très instamment
’. He was told that the offensive could not begin before early May. For the Italians had to transfer artillery from Trentino to the Isonzo, which could not be done until the Supreme Command was confident that the Austrians would not attack. In fact the Supreme Command had already assessed that this risk was acceptable, and detailed planning for the Tenth Battle was in hand. As Cadorna intended the next offensive to be decisive, it would be much more ambitious than the campaigns of autumn 1916. On the Carso, the Third Army would drive once again towards the Trstelj–Hermada line. Further north, three corps would target the heights behind Gorizia. General Capello, who was rehabilitated in March, would lead these corps. Cadorna had decided he could not do without Capello; he might be ‘a rogue’, but his energy and flair made him irreplaceable.

The Tenth Battle has to be understood in terms of ridges and summits. Mount San Gabriele, east of Gorizia, stands as an isolated summit. Monte Santo, further north, is the southern tip – and highest point – of a ridge that runs south-east for six or seven kilometres from Hill 383, above the Italian bridgehead at Plava. On its three other sides, Monte Santo falls away steeply. Italian shelling had reduced the church and monastery on its summit to ruins.

The battle would start on the Carso. After several days, the onus would switch to the 12 divisions under Capello’s Gorizia Zone Command. Five days later, when Boroević had taken forces away from the Carso to strengthen the lines north of Gorizia, Capello would send 200 guns to the Carso, so that the Third Army could attack a depleted enemy. If Boroević did not take the bait, he would risk losing ground north of Gorizia, where the Austrians were vulnerable. The sole exceptions were Hill 383 above Plava and Monte Santo itself, both swathed with wire, riddled with caverns, and defended by batteries in the rear. Elsewhere, the trenches were shallow and discontinuous, and the positions exposed.

Capello proposed an audacious variation on this plan. He would attack across the river between Plava and Tolmein, creating a new bridgehead 10 kilometres north of Hill 383. The shortest route to Monte Santo lay southwards across arid highlands called the Bainsizza plateau.
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Reasonably, Boroević had assumed that the Italians would not dedicate major resources to breaking onto the Bainsizza, which had played no part in the war. If Capello could get substantial forces onto the Bainsizza, they would have several clear days to drive down behind Monte Santo and Mount San Gabriele, outflanking the Austrians all the way to the Vipacco valley. At the same time, he would attack the ridge between Plava and Monte Santo, east of the Isonzo. Secondary attacks would take place further south, between Gorizia and the Vipava valley. 

As usual, Italian deserters were Boroević’s best source of information. In early May, they swore that a major operation was imminent. Thanks to transfers from the Eastern Front, the Habsburg army on the Isonzo comprised 200,000 men in 215 battalions, with 1,700 machine guns and over 1,300 artillery pieces. Still outnumbered by roughly two to one, they were a ragtag force in some ways, with scrappy uniforms and worn-out weapons. Yet they were still disciplined and resolute, aware that any retreat on the Carso would threaten the empire and open the way to Italian conquest of the Slovene lands and Dalmatia.

The initial bombardment, when it started on 12 May, was more intense than anything the Austrians had seen before. With more than 3,000 guns, it was on a scale familiar in France and Flanders, and it built to a fearsome climax. Crossing into the Isonzo valley at dawn on the 14th, the Scottish Quaker volunteer George Barbour was struck by the contrast between the serenity of the Bainsizza plateau, stretching away in front of him, and ‘this extraordinary strip of hell, right down 2,000 feet below like a volcanic rift in the ground, full of noise and black smoke with the silver stream of the river waggling like a snake in the underbrush’. Descending towards Plava, 

… the road seems to be going straight down into a cauldron, screened alternately on left and right by wicker screens as it zigzags. At one point I stopped the car and looked down through a gap in the screening right down onto the nose of Monte Kuk which was having a heavy dose from the Italian large calibre guns, so that the [Austrian] trench line stood out as the base of a continuous smoking wall of dirty black fumes.