The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (7 page)

1
a coup d’état in all but name
: Salvatorelli [1950].

2
Isnenghi argues that
: Isnenghi [1999], 17.

3
he wanted to cut the figure
: Bosworth [2007], 170 

4
little faith in the future of the monarchy
: Martini, 393.

5
the pledge by Italy’s new chief
: Rusconi, 150.

6
‘
Is it not more logical
’: Quotations and details about Pollio and the Triple Alliance are from Rusconi, 27–41.

7
Italy wanted Austria’s
: Rusconi, 93.

8
‘
the transport of the largest possible force
’: Rusconi, 90.

9
‘So
what should I do
?’: Rocca, 52.

10
‘
incompatible with the liberal principles
’: Rusconi, 83.

11
Italy depended on Britain and France
: Zamagni, 210.

12
‘
This may not be heroic
’: Rusconi, 96, 97, 94.

13
‘
Their famous lightning strike
’: Rusconi, 100

14
‘
a hundred journalists
’: Rusconi, 106,

15
‘
complete and enlarge the fatherland
’: Rusconi, 104

16
predicted with only partial exaggeration
: Rusconi, 91.

17
the retort was doubly irrelevant
: Rusconi, 121

18
‘
a good deal
’: Rusconi, 122.

19
Why, then, go to war
?: Rusconi, 143–4.

20
ensure Balkan and Mediterranean markets
: Rochat & Massobrio, 177.

21
neutrality was
‘
suicide
’: Rusconi, 127.

22
a candid letter to Sonnino
: Monticone [1972], 63–4.

23
he predicted that it would be the turning point
: Rothwell, 23.

24
the Italians had ‘blackmailed’ them
: Mantoux, vol. I, 477.

25
‘
Russia is quite right
’: Asquith to Venetia Stanley in spring 1915. Cassar [1994]. 

26
‘
the harlot of Europe
’: Rusconi, 24, 25.

27
‘
the most contemptible nation
’: Rothwell, 86.

28
‘
wretched “pound-of-flesh” convention
’: Wickham Steed, vol. 2, 66.

29
disperse the
‘
negative constellation
’: Rusconi, 146.

30
Salandra, meanwhile, instructed Italy’s regional governors
: Monticone [1972]. Salandra later denied that he had ordered the 55 reports; they were, he claimed, part of a neutralist plot to keep Italy out of the war. Gibelli, 29

31
This unconditional promise, not to be found
: Rothwell, 30.

32
home to some 230,000 German-speaking Austrians and up to 750,000 Slovenes and Croats
: Nicolson, 161; Kernek, 264.

33
one of Sonnino’s advisors as
‘
derisory
’: Sforza [1944], 44.

34
‘
But this means immediate war!
’: Rocca, 66.

35
the port of Fiume was assigned to
: Mantoux, vol. I, 66.

36
He told a journalist, off the record
: Rusconi, 137.

37
‘
Salandra lied to me!
’: Rusconi, 137

38
‘
What are we doing
?’: Rocca, 68

39
Trevelyan saw ‘hundreds of thousands
’: Trevelyan.

40
‘
it has all been a trick
’: Rusconi, 140.

41
‘
Either Parliament will defeat the Nation
’: Isnenghi & Rochat, 136.

42
decrees with the force of law
: Procacci [2006], 286.

43
Salandra’s ‘swinish and faithless
’: Rusconi, 139.

44
He later denied having ever believed
: Mack Smith [1978], 215.

45
building a new anti-Socialist bloc
: Procacci [1992].

46
purge liberalism of its democratic
‘
dross
’: Rusconi, 147.

47
a solution to internal problems
: Giuliano Procacci, 229.

48
‘
only a war, with a phase of compulsory
’: Procacci [1992]. 

49
‘
a modern plutocracy, unencumbered
’: From Croce’s
History of Italy from
1871 to 1915
, cited by Rusconi, 147.

50
proto-fascists shrieking
: Alfredo Rocca, the ideologist of Italian radical nationalism, quoted by Tranfaglia.

51
no German–Austrian plans
: Palumbo [1983].

52
‘
we have been the horse
’: Rusconi, 141.

53
lacked strength or boldness
: Rusconi, 50.

54
‘
This whole war has been
’: Rusconi, 13.

1 
Many in Rome still saw the Habsburg dynasty – led by ‘His Apostolic Majesty’, the Emperor – as the mainstay of Catholic values. The leader of the Catholic bloc in parliament, Paolo Boselli, who became prime minister in 1916, even claimed that Austria’s aggression against Serbia had not nullified the Triple Alliance.

2 
On 1 May, accused by a British journalist of having betrayed the Yugoslavs with this ‘wretched “pound-of-flesh” convention’, the French foreign minister protested that ‘Italy put a pistol to our heads. Think what it means. Within a month there will be a million Italian bayonets in the field, and shortly thereafterwards 600,000 Romanians. Reinforcements as large as that may be worth some sacrifice, even of principle.’

3 
Probably at Russia’s insistence, the port of Fiume was assigned to ‘Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro’. This provision would return to poison the peace settlement in 1919.

4 
He mistakenly believed this offer included Gorizia and some Dalmatian islands. When the journalist corrected him, Giolitti went red in the face and shouted, ‘Salandra lied to me! Just like a Puglian!’ 

5 
Italy’s decision not to declare war on Germany – hoping against reason to avoid fighting Austria’s dreaded ally – was its first violation of the terms of the Treaty of London, and cost the government in Allied goodwill. When German troops were captured on Italian soil, in the Dolomites, the government turned a blind eye. Rome declared war on Berlin in August 1916, after capturing Gorizia.

6 
Alfredo Panzini, a professor from Pesaro, caught this mood in his diary: ‘We know that three-quarters of parliament do not want war, and three-quarters of the nation too: they endure it as an
ananke
[force of destiny]. But it really is an ananke: (
continued opposite
) everyone feels this … It is a terrible moment. A nation that isn’t provoked, is not attacked, indeed is being flattered, has to find the strength to throw itself into such a conflict!’ (11 May 1915) 

THREE

Free Spirits

‘There’s no such thing as a Latin. That is
“Latin” thinking. You are so proud of your
defects.’ Rinaldi looked up and laughed
.

    H
EMINGWAY
,
A Farewell to Arms
(1929)

D’Annunzio and Mussolini: Demagogues for War

Salandra and Sonnino had no more charisma than the King. Incapable of stirring the crowds themselves, and still needing (as members of a minority government) to keep the extreme warmongers at arm’s length, they wanted to turn their conspiracy into a mass movement. Even with the support of the press, the agitators and intellectuals could not reach a broad enough public. Eventually this vital task was contracted to Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Between the death of Verdi in 1901 and Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922, D’Annunzio became the most famous Italian in the world. Born in 1863, he started publishing verse in his teens. By his thirties, he was the country’s best-known poet, most acclaimed novelist and glittering dramatist. He had a matchless ear for the mellifluous, incantatory qualities of the language. Artistically bold and highly intelligent, he owned all the talents for a brilliant career. An exuberant, insatiably acquisitive personality, he lived in fine villas and had countless love affairs. Magnetised by his reputation, society ladies reserved rooms in hotels where he stayed, hoping to catch his eye. He was a committed dandy; his collars were the stiffest, his creases the sharpest, his buttonhole carnations the whitest. His greyhounds wore livery tailored by Hermès. His correspondence with his jeweller has been published as a separate volume. Even his debts were legendary.

His status was always controversial. Accusations of plagiarism were hard to shake off. In Rome, the Catholic Church placed his works – rife with decadent sensuality – on the Index of Prohibited Books. In Dublin, the student James Joyce claimed that D’Annunzio had broken new ground in fiction. (He would later call him one of the three greatest natural talents among nineteenth-century writers.) In London – where at least one of his plays was banned – Henry James reviewed his novels. In Paris, the young Marcel Proust hailed him as a great writer. His steadiest biographer, John Woodhouse, catches the glitter of his celebrity before the flight to France in 1910: ‘For almost thirty years not a week had passed without D’Annunzio’s name appearing in the newspapers, and for almost as long his name had been held before the public thanks to the undeniable fact that his works had been on display in the windows of every bookseller in Italy.’ In short, he acquired fame, salted with notoriety, on the scale that Byron and Liszt had enjoyed: glamour of the kind now reserved to film stars, rock musicians or footballers.

If this glamour is now hard to convey, it is partly because his work has become almost unreadable. Love lyrics, idylls on classical themes, patriotic dramas, and trashily plotted novels about supermen figures who are transparently the author himself: D’Annunzio’s output was formally varied, but the variety is skin-deep. Mummified at its centre lies an effigy of the poet himself. The hosts of characters in his collected works are, with few exceptions, shadows or silhouettes, denied individuation by the monotonous gaudiness of his language, styled to hypnotise and overmaster a reader. The historical themes and political ideas that he discusses are ciphers of himself, pretexts for rapture. Meanwhile the waves of swooning rhetoric roll on, rising to crescendos of alliteration before subsiding in cycles as incessant and oceanic as the poet’s self- regard. It was an ideal style to promote a policy of ‘sacred egoism’.

D’Annunzio was a spectacular case of arrested emotional development, arguably a natural fascist. The otherness of other people – a puzzle that haunts modern thought and art – could not fascinate him because other people existed as objects of appetite or will, research opportunities in a quest to investigate the effects of denying himself nothing. The lovers he venerated came to repel him when sex led to expectations that limited his freedom. The actress Eleonora Duse, herself an international celebrity, was lavish with inspiration and money for nine years. Among the surviving shreds of their correspondence is an exchange from summer 1904, when the relationship foundered. Reproached by Duse, who was driven to despair by his infidelities and excuses, D’Annunzio found nothing to regret: ‘The imperious needs of a violent, carnal life, of pleasure, of physical risk, of happiness, have kept me from you. And you… can you cry shame on me for these needs of mine?’

Duse’s reply still carries a charge: 

Do not speak to me of the imperious ‘reason’ of your ‘carnal’ life, of your thirst for ‘joyous existence’. I am tired of hearing those words. I have heard you repeat them for years now: I can neither entirely go along with your philosophy nor entirely understand it. What love can you find which is worthy or profound if it lives only for pleasure? 

Her question would have made no sense to D’Annunzio, who found a philosophical alibi for egotism in a selective reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. He had no use for Nietzsche the prophet of radical uncertainty, unstitching the assumptions of Western philosophy, the mocker of ‘profundity’, the ironic psychologist, the teasing critic of repression by grammar. For D’Annunzio, as for the German and Italian fascists after him, Nietzsche was the champion of life as endless expression, the revaluer of good and evil, scorning normal experience, unmasking Christian ‘slave morality’, and the discoverer of the Will to Power as the wellspring of human motivation.

Above all, he was the author of the concept of the Superman. D’Annunzio’s first book to show the impact of Nietzsche’s ideas was
The
Triumph of Death
(1894). The novel’s hero, Giorgio, is haunted by his search for someone who can be ‘the strong and tyrannical master, free of the yoke of every false morality, secure in the feeling of his own power … determined to lift himself above Good and Evil through the sheer energy of his will, capable even of forcing life to keep its promises.’
The
Virgins of the Rocks
followed in 1895, replete with Nietzschean insights: 

The world is the representation of the sensibility and the thought of a few superior men, who have created and adorned it in the course of time and will go on adding to it and adorning it further in future. The world as it appears today is a magnificent gift bestowed by the few upon the many, by free men upon slaves: by those who think and feel upon those who must labour. 

D’Annunzio detested socialism. For him the emancipation of the masses was an absurdity, if not a crime.

While the dust settled long ago on the incestuous and sadomasochistic traces in his work, his career in the First World War has gained a power to appal. The whiff of sulphur around his name has transferred from his sex life and steamy novels to his politico-military career. For he emerged in 1915 as the figurehead of the intervention campaign, and went on to become the country’s most publicised and decorated soldier. Daring exploits with aeroplanes and torpedo boats lifted his popularity to new heights; he became a full-blown national hero. The sordid aspects of his past – adulteries, illegitimate children, trails of creditors – were obscured by the blaze of glory conferred by the press, the military and politicians.

D’Annunzio’s embrace of war in 1915 was predestined. An outspoken patriot all his life, he attacked Austria as an oppressor of subject peoples, but his real commitment was to Italy’s imperial mission in the Adriatic basin and beyond. He loved the idea that Italy should control the entire Dalmatian coast. He complained that Austria was crushing Italy’s ‘left lung’ – its north-eastern territories. Economic or demographic arguments against these maximalist claims could not touch him; for his position rested on faith in ‘Latin genius’ and the superiority of ‘Latin’ civilisation.

As Italy was duty-bound to assert itself as a great power, it had to build up its armed forces. In his journalism, D’Annunzio had called since the late 1880s for Italy to develop its navy (‘Italy will be a great naval power or it will be nothing’). Favouring war on principle, he was thrilled by the Libyan campaign of 1911, and wrote a series of commemorative poems for
Corriere della Sera
, swiping at Austria as well as Turkey. One poem, ‘The Song of the Dardanelles’, was censored by the government, on the grounds that its attack on Austria was dangerous to Italy’s strategic interests. (In a typical flourish, he likened the double-headed imperial eagle to ‘the head of a vulture which vomits the undigested flesh of its victims’.) D’Annunzio did not forgive Prime Minister Giolitti for this affront.

By this point,
Corriere
was his preferred outlet in Italy. Its editor, Luigi Albertini, became a confidant. He paid off some of his debts, and warned that his creditors would take every penny if he returned. During 1913 and 1914, D’Annunzio wrote desultory pieces for
Corriere
, trying to fend off his French creditors. He had tired of his current principal mistress, a Russian countess. In short, he was hankering for change when Germany attacked France, a clash that he saw as ‘almost divine’ in scope, a ‘struggle of races, an opposition of irreconcilable powers, a trial of blood’. He wrote to Albertini at the end of August that ‘destiny’ appeared to be shaping events ‘like a sublime tragic poet’. He refused to leave Paris, instead laying in a stock of tinned food, filing articles to
Corriere
and seeking official permission to visit the front. He hailed the successful French resistance on the Marne as a miracle.

Italy’s rightful place, in his view, was with the Allies. He told friends that he would end his ‘exile’ when Italy declared war, but his confidence in this longed-for outcome wavered. Then, out of the blue, in March 1915, a letter held out an opportunity to return in proper style, giving the countess and his creditors the slip. He was invited to speak at the unveiling of a monument to Garibaldi and his volunteers, on 5 May, at the spot near Genoa where the heroes had set sail to conquer Sicily in 1860. The King and his ministers were to be present. At the same time he was contacted by Peppino Garibaldi, grandson of the great man. Peppino had led a brigade of Italian volunteers fighting with the French. After heavy losses, the brigade was dis banded on 5 March. D’Annunzio was contacted by French govern ment figures to assist with a propaganda project: the surviving volunteers would be re-equipped, given new red (Garibaldian) shirts, and sent back to Italy to shout for intervention.

Providence was taking a hand. He would lead the volunteers home and be flanked by them when he made a glorious speech at Genoa, reclaiming the place in national life that was his due. He recorded his excitement in a notebook: ‘To arrive not as an ordinary speaker but as the leader of Youth, mediator between two generations!’ Everything
ordinary
carried a pejorative reek, while
youth
was a token of every thing vital and masterful. He arranged for
Corriere
to publish the oration on the day of its delivery. The text was also sent to the Prime Minister. Under pressure from the Vatican and the German embassy, which was still hoping the Italians could be bought off, Salandra and his ministers kept a prudent distance from D’Annunzio’s calls for the ‘enslaved lands’ of Trieste, Istria, the Adriatic and Trento to be liberated. Excuses were found for the King to break his engagement.

On 3 May, D’Annunzio boarded a train in Paris. Although Albertini subsidised the trip, he raised more funds by pawning emeralds that Duse had given him. His Italian biographers still see his arrival in Italy in the poet’s own grandiose terms: cometh the hour, cometh the man.
1
At the time, however, D’Annunzio expected to return to France after a round of banquets in Genoa. The trip was to be an excursion, not the start of a new life. Unsure of his reception, he hoped for one outcome but was equally prepared – with the resilience that was one of his less obvious qualities – for disappointment. Warming up for the following day, he spoke to the crowd that welcomed him in Genoa. ‘Is it a gift of life that I bring,’ he asked, ‘that you should surge to meet me?’ Without spelling it out, this gift was himself, come to assure his compatriots that ‘doubt cannot touch us. We shall not let Italy be dishonoured; we shall not let the fatherland perish.’ He tells the crowd that they want ‘a greater Italy, not by acquisition but by conquest, not measured in shame but as the price of blood and glory’. 

His speech the next morning was relentlessly purple. Churchill at his most orotund was prosy beside D’Annunzio in full flight. Citing the ‘holy bronze’ of the monument as warrant for claiming Garibaldi’s approval, he invoked the spirit of self-sacrifice, rising to a pastiche of the Sermon on the Mount, shot through with his hallmark prurience. 

O blessed are they that have, for they have more to give, they can burn more brightly. Blessed are the twenty-year-olds, pure of mind, well-tempered in body, with courageous mothers. Blessed are they who, waiting with confidence, do not dissipate their strength but guard it in the discipline of the warrior. Blessed are they who disdain sterile love-affairs to be virgins for this first and last love. Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be sated. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have splendid blood to wipe away, radiant pain to bind up. 

People caught the gist: now is the time for all of you to find the courage to die for your country. Croce called the speech a piece of buffoonery. Others agreed it was vulgar and grotesque. The big false intimate words that had embittered Duse’s heart had yielded to big false political words. More speeches followed ‘in a species of lyric frenzy’, keeping up the pressure. That evening, toasting ‘the martyred cities’ on the other side of the Adriatic, the poet told his audience – students for the most part – that they were pilgrims of love, messengers of faith, the intrepid arsonists of the great fatherland, the impetuous sparks of a holy blaze!