The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (55 page)

Given this grisly propaganda, ordinary Italians would have been surprised to learn that their government refused to help civilians who wanted to leave the occupied territory. The Supreme Command argued that the local people were more useful at home: they obstructed Habsburg control, strengthened Italian claims to the territory, and provided camouflage for spies. Orlando concurred, and refused to repatriate Italians from the occupied territory, except in extreme need.

The real scale of sexual crime during the occupation will never be known. The postwar royal commission found that rape was widespread in the first few weeks and continued to the end. The victims often preferred to keep silent, deterred by shame and social stigma from admitting the crimes against them. There is evidence that ‘most rapes were carried out in the absolute certainty of impunity, above all when officers or NCOs took part’. In these conditions, Boroević’s personal honesty had little impact on lawlessness and corruption. Even the attitude of the pro-Habsburg clergy hardened over the summer. Occasional acts of sabotage led the administration to fear an uprising. Secret lists were prepared of people to seize as hostages. They were not needed: smouldering anger did not crystallise into active resistance, however hopeless things became, partly because people believed that time was on their side. In October, a foreign ministry official reported to Vienna that if the administration did not improve, 1919 would bring ‘an economic collapse that will swallow up human lives as well as our reputation’. Too late! Their reputation had already perished. Allied troops advancing beyond the Piave in early November found destitution, dereliction, ‘an air of utter emptiness … completely cleaned out of food’. Brutal, arrogant and predatory, the occupation did Rome the favour of destroying any trace of nostalgia in north-eastern Italy for Habsburg law and order. In the empire’s last year of existence, imperial rule finally became as bad as Italian nationalists said it had always been.

Civilian life under the occupation was hardly studied until the 1980s. The whole topic jarred too uncomfortably against the narrative of triumphal recovery. Patriotic historians were troubled by the lack of ‘heroic’ resistance, repelled by the webs of collaboration and profiteering, and perplexed by the postwar polemics between returnees and civilians who never left.

This lack of curiosity looks trivial, however, beside the oblivion that shrouded an even more sensitive subject until the 1990s. This was the official attitude to Italian prisoners of war in Austrian and German camps. The 300,000 men taken during the Twelfth Battle joined the 200,000 or more in camps across the empire. If these men had known that it was more dangerous to be taken prisoner than to serve on the front line, fewer of them would have welcomed their capture. For the Italian government, uniquely, refused to send food parcels to its prisoners of war. As a result, more than 100,000 of the 600,000 Italian prisoners died in captivity – a rate nine times worse than for Habsburg captives in Italy. Only 550 of these were officers, dying of tuberculosis or wounds; the remainder died directly or indirectly of cold and hunger.

Provision of food and other aid to prisoners had been accepted practice since the Central Powers announced in late 1914 that, due to the Allied blockade, they would no longer be responsible for feeding and clothing Allied prisoners of war. While Britain and France subsidised the aid to their captured soldiers, Italy refused to take such measures, or even, except in extreme cases, to allow the exchange of sick prisoners. Fearful that soldiers would desert en masse if they believed they would be safe in captivity, the government treated Italian POWs as cowards or defectors who should be punished. This unpublicised policy was bolstered by a propaganda campaign against prisoners of war. (D’Annunzio, dependably odious, branded them ‘sinners against the Fatherland, the Spirit, and Heaven’.) Charity subscriptions for captured soldiers were prohibited. As a concession, the Red Cross was permitted to take aid for officers only. Private packages were permitted, but few were sent – due to the penury in which many soldiers’ families lived – and even fewer arrived.

This heinous policy was proposed by the Supreme Command and supported by successive governments thanks above all to Sonnino, who insisted that, under international law, responsibility lay with the captors. The worst effects were felt after Caporetto, when the vast flood of prisoners strained the camp system in Austria and Germany beyond its limits. Over the terrible winter of 1917–18, hundreds of prisoners died every day. According to Carlo Salsa, an inmate in Theresienstadt camp, prisoners concealed the corpses in their barracks, so the dead men’s rations would keep arriving. The Red Cross appealed to the government in Rome, but nothing was done until summer 1918, when hard-tack rations were sent. They reached the camps in November, when the war was already over.

The Austro-Hungarian army in Italy shrank from 650,000 to 400,000 between July and October. Few of these men were combat casualties. Many deserted; others succumbed to the malaria that ravaged the coastal areas and the lower Piave, to dysentery or the so-called Spanish flu that appeared around Padua in July and spread eastwards. In their weakened condition, starving, with their uniforms in shreds, lacking boots and underclothes, they were prey to every illness. The average body weight in one division had sunk by August to 50 kilograms, less than 8 stones.

Despite blizzards of propaganda by Czech, Yugoslav, Polish and other separatist groups; half a million POWs returning from Russia, many of them newly politicised and loudly critical; extremely degrading conditions at the front, and the disappearance of any hope of victory – despite all this, the Habsburg army remained loyal. There were no mutinies on the Italian front until late October, just before the last battle; even these were limited to a few units. This testifies to the effectiveness of military discipline, the power of habit, the unthink ability of historic change, and the grip on soldiers’ minds of their immediate circumstances. Perhaps the anticipation of a final decisive Italian attack was another binding element.

The army’s endurance is more striking because the erosion of morale was unstoppable. A battalion commander on Mount Grappa explained the pressures on his men, in a stoical letter of 1 July:

We have been officially notified to expect that men of the [Allied] Czechoslovak brigade will dress in Austrian uniforms and attack our positions – this, when half our regiment is Czech. I won’t go into the miserable state of our position except to mention some key words: 8 degrees Centigrade, heat and light forbidden, no water, ice-cold food, no caves, no shelter etc. – repeated desertions, countless Italian propaganda leaflets, but no press reports of our own.

Far from producing counter-propaganda, the Austrian newspapers were part of the problem; Boroević warned that journalism about the ‘miserable internal state of Monarchy’ amounted to enemy propaganda. The Army High Command went further: the normal language in the newspapers was indistinguishable from enemy propaganda: namely, ‘self-determination’, ‘persecution’ and ‘demands of oppressed peoples’. Little could be done: the machinery of government was too decayed for censorship to be effective.

Increasingly, morale could only be raised by appealing to nationalist emotion, which begged the question of why the men should fight for the empire at all. A divisional commander on the Piave reported in mid-July that ‘mental and physical depression’ gripped his soldiers, ‘regardless of nationality, rank or intelligence’. Few men’s morale was proof against the combination of nationalist agitation at home, shortages on the front, and enemy propaganda. Desertions increased over the summer, usually to the interior. A staff officer, inspecting a corps in the Tenth Army in September, found no enthusiasm.

Most of the men are apathetic, but they will fulfil their duty bravely and unflaggingly … The longing for peace is widespread … Efforts of the company commanders to put heart into the ranks by patriotic instruction are unsuccessful largely because of news from the hinterland.

By July, many non-German regions of the empire were shearing away. Separatist goals were promoted by emerging leaders from Poland to Slovenia. Even token reference to the dynasty was often lacking at public rallies. The German ambassador estimated that two-thirds of people in Vienna believed the Allies would win the war. Morale at the front had been partly cordoned against this encroaching gloom, but there was now a feedback loop: troops demoralised by news from home would desert and spread news of disillusion at the front. Morale had depended on junior officers who by this stage were more likely than their men to sympathise with the nationalist arguments raging across the empire.

The 56 divisions now in Italy had a fighting strength of less than 37 divisions. In August, General Arz informed the German high command that the empire could only stay in the war until the end of the year; the army would then be needed to resolve ‘internal political questions’. On 8 August, the Allies took the initiative in France: following a French counter-offensive on the Marne, British forces broke through near Amiens. A string of victories brought the end of the war into sight. At the end of the month, Foch asked Diaz to support the operations in France by attacking across the Piave. Diaz refused: his army was not ready. Orlando agreed, but changed his mind by mid-September when it dawned that the Allied breach of the Hindenburg Line meant that German defeat was close. His impatience mounted along with Allied pressure, and Orlando pressed Diaz to plan an attack in early October, or by the end of October at the latest. Diaz found Orlando’s advice confusing and unreliable. He insisted that it would be reckless to attack in the near future. Senior commanders were told to expect the final push in spring 1919.

Sonnino suspected that dread of ‘doing a Cadorna’ was making Diaz – whom he admired – overly cautious. For his part, the Foreign Minister saw that Bulgaria’s collapse at the end of September and Ottoman Turkey’s imminent capitulation had shifted the balance: with their south-eastern flank wide open and the Allies poised to attack, the Central Powers would not hold out much longer. If the Italians were left digging in for the winter while the Allies drove the Germans out of France and Belgium, their negotiating position would be feeble. If they were to win the territory pledged in 1915, they had to defeat the Austrians once and for all, knocking them out of the war.

Diaz awoke to these realities when Austria and Germany sought a rapid negotiated end to the war in the first week of October. Within a few hours of each other, first Vienna and then Berlin asked Wilson for an armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points. When Wilson made no answer, Karl announced that the empire would become a confederated monarchy. He tried to win time and favour by proclaiming that the Austrian half of the empire would be a federation where every ‘ethnic group’ formed its own ‘state community’. It was too vague, too little, and much too late to save his inheritance by magically reconciling dynastic survival with national self-determination.

Diaz prepared to attack in the second half of October. His plan was ready by 9 October. When they met three days later, Orlando was smarting from his latest interrogation by Allied leaders in Paris; Clemenceau, easily irritated by the Italians, was galled by their inaction. Diaz issued the first orders for the offensive. By now, Germany was corresponding with Wilson; a peace based on the Fourteen Points was infinitely preferable to full-scale defeat and occupation. On the 14th, Wilson said any armistice must guarantee Allied military superiority and democratic government in Germany. A few days later he answered Karl’s request; ‘certain events of utmost importance’ had overtaken the tenth of the Fourteen Points; instead of ‘autonomous development’, the peoples of Austria-Hungary would decide their own future.

The Italians were worried to learn on 19 October that Austria was working on a proposal to sue for peace on the basis of a unilateral retreat from Italian territory. This would steal their thunder, and Orlando – now so vexed by the chief of staff’s prudence that he wondered if he could replace him – telegraphed Diaz at once: ‘Between inaction and defeat, I prefer defeat. Get moving!’ Wilson fuelled the fire under Diaz with a statement on 21 October supporting the Habsburg Slavs’ bid for independence. Diaz decided that zero hour would be 03:00 on the 24th.