The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (8 page)

After dallying with admirers in his hotel, D’Annunzio travelled on to Rome, where his first speech – from his hotel balcony – invoked the spirit of Garibaldi ‘the Liberator’ against ‘the odour of treachery that has begun to stifle us’. He contrasted Italy’s present shame with the glories of the Risorgimento:

No, we are not, we do not want to be a museum, an inn, a holiday destination, a horizon touched up with Prussian blue for international honeymoons, a delightful marketplace for buying and selling, for swindling and bartering. Our Genius calls us to put our stamp on the confused material of the new world. 

The roar of acclaim drowned the rest of his words.

His speech the next day to another tumultuous crowd was more sharply focused: 

If it is a crime to incite the citizens to violence, then I boast of committing that crime. Today the treachery is blatant. We don’t only breathe in its horrid stench, we feel all its appalling weight. And the treachery is being committed in Rome, city of the soul, city of life. 

He called on the people to form patrols, a ‘vigilant militia’, and hunt down the traitors, above all Giolitti. Mixing mystical nationalism with appeals for vigilante violence against liberal opponents, this speech begs fair to be counted as the first fascist oration.

The irony hanging over these blasts against the government’s cunning and incompetence is that this government – in which Giolitti played no part – had committed Italy to join the Entente by signing the Treaty of London on 26 April. When Salandra’s cabinet resigned, D’Annunzio seemed to believe he had brought down a neutralist cabal singlehandedly. Next morning, a member of the cabinet took him aside and told him about the Treaty of London, and that the government had already disowned the Triple Alliance.

D’Annunzio, rarely nonplussed, adjusted at once. That evening (14 May) he told an audience in a theatre about the nullification of the Triple Alliance, assuring them he had known all about it before leaving France. He then resumed his attacks on Giolitti and neutralism. Giolitti, ‘the chief evil-doer, whose soul is nothing but a frozen lie’, was betraying the King and the fatherland. D’Annunzio was not the first to accuse the neutralists of being
nemici interni
, ‘internal enemies’, but nobody else gave the accusation such prestige.

In the run-up to parliament’s crucial vote on intervention, D’Annunzio intensified his attacks, denouncing the treacherous politicians who had spent months parleying with the enemy, ‘clowns camouflaged in the flag’. Who has saved Italy in these dark days if not the genuine people, the profound people? ‘Long live our war! Long live Rome! Long live Italy! Long live the Army! Long live the Navy! Long live the King! Glory and victory!’ He wrote in his diary that the rabble had been ‘sublimated’ by its delirium at his words.

On 19 May, he was gratified by an audience with the King. On the evening of the 20th, after parliament voted for war, he spoke triumphantly to the swelling crowds: 

The honour of the Fatherland is saved … We do not fear our destiny but move to meet it, singing … In each of us burns the youthful spirit of the two twin Horsemen who guard the Quirinale.
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They will descend tonight and water their horses in the Tiber, beneath the Aventine Hill, before riding towards the Isonzo that we shall turn red with barbarian blood. 

If that sounded ominous, it was mild beside remarks he made at dawn on the 25th, after celebrating the first day of war:

Our vigil is ended. Our exultation begins … The border has been crossed. The cannon roars. The earth smokes. The Adriatic is as grey at this hour as the torpedo boat that cuts across it.

Companions, can it be true? We are fighting with arms, we are waging our war, the blood is spurting from the veins of Italy! We are the last to join this struggle and already the first are meeting with glory … The slaughter begins, the destruction begins. One of our people has died at sea, another on land. All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood; and that blood begins to flow … We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed.

The author of these psychotic remarks was a national hero. Has any artist played a more baleful part in decisions that led to violence and suffering on the largest scale? Yet, however clinical his obsessions now appear, there is a sense in which he truly was – as he claimed – a mouthpiece of the ‘national will’, defined as the preference of a minority with the power to shape policy. Some of the artists in the Futurist movement anticipated the mass slaughter with equal relish, as we shall see, but none of them had D’Annunzio’s rhetorical skill or the megaphone of his international fame. Other interventionists could be withering about D’Annunzio as an artist and personality, yet they were all working to bring about his vision of smoking blood. The decadent fantasist was more perceptive about the coming war than those who took pride in their lucid realism.

At the end of May, Cadorna promised D’Annunzio a commission in the Novara Lancers. Assigned to Third Army headquarters near the Isonzo front, he was authorised to visit any corps and ‘witness any action’. As well as his officer’s salary, he cajoled a retainer from Albertini. He became a freelance warrior-reporter, quartered privately in Venice, dipping in and out of battle as he chose, dosing himself with enough danger to pique his appetite, and writing up his adventures and exhortations, as well as penning inspirational odes. Styling himself ‘a poet of slaughter’, he became the nation’s foremost propaganda asset. War was his extreme sport, or extreme therapy. Sometimes the stunts came off; often they led to the death of his associates; and at least once, as we shall see, they led to a fiasco that cost many Italian lives. 

 Among the crowd in Genoa on 5 May 1915 was a lantern-jawed journalist. The fact that his report did not even mention D’Annunzio or his speech is not as odd as it seems, for Benito Mussolini still insisted he was a socialist. Beyond ideology, the omission may also have been intuitive, hinting at the rivalry that would develop after the war, when D’Annunzio was mooted in proto-fascist circles as a contender for national leadership, and before Mussolini rewarded him lavishly to stay out of politics. (‘Two things can be done with a bad tooth,’ he quipped. ‘Pull it out or fill it with gold.’) Mussolini, too, had venerated Nietzsche, whose glorious ideals would only be understood by ‘a new species of free spirits’ who would be ‘fortified in war’. Mussolini wrote that in 1908; in 1915, he was not ready to apply these concepts to the inter ventionist debate, and he balked at D’Annunzio’s erotics of racial bloodletting.

In summer 1914, Mussolini was the Socialist Party’s rising star, a journalist and agitator on the extreme left of the party, committed to revolution. He was passionately militant, anti-bourgeois, brave though not reckless, and highly ambitious. When Italy attacked Libya in September 1911, he called on workers to block troop transports by blowing up the railway lines. Sentenced for inciting violence, he used his four months in jail to write racy memoirs that nurtured the image of a wild, uncalculating revolutionary. When Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece attacked Turkey in October 1912, in what became known as the First Balkan War, Mussolini ardently supported the threat by the Socialist parties of the Second International to start a general strike if a European war broke out. Taking over the party newspaper
Avanti
! in December 1912, he almost doubled the circulation within a year. Party membership boomed.

He was disillusioned by the party’s prudence during ‘red week’ in June 1914. Publicly, he respected the party’s refusal to support an unlimited general strike; privately, he shared the anarchists’ frustration. He was likewise respectful of the Socialists’ anti-war position. On 26 July, he thundered that Italian workers should give ‘not a man, not a penny’ to the cause of war, nor spill ‘one drop of blood’ for a cause that had ‘nothing to do with it’. If the government failed to declare neutrality, the proletariat would force it to do so.

When the executive committee of the Socialist International met in Brussels on 29 July, the Austrian Social Democrats refused to support a general strike. The workers in Vienna were clamouring for revenge on Serbia, they said, and it was better to be wrong with the working class than right against it. Other parties, too, refused to condemn their own governments. The German Social Democrats held out longest against the war, but in early August they buckled under the pressure. Only the Italian party stuck to an anti-war position. Holding firm, in mid- September 1914 Mussolini lamented (admittedly to a female comrade whom he hoped to get into bed) that his Socialist comrades were switching sides, becoming ‘apologists for war! It is a contagion that spares no one. But I mean to hold the rampart until the end.’ He drafted a manifesto on the ‘profound antithesis’ between war and socialism. For war ‘amounted to the annihilation of individual autonomy and the sacrifice of freedom of thought to the State and militarism’.

He abandoned the rampart in October. When the party reaffirmed its commitment to neutrality, and denounced the betrayals of socialism in Germany and elsewhere, only Mussolini voted against the resolution. In mid-November he resigned the editorship of
Avanti!
and launched a new newspaper with French and Belgian money.
Il Popolo d’Italia
(‘The People of Italy’) called for intervention on the Allied side. The other party leaders denounced his treachery, and he was expelled on 24 November.

This switch did not come out of the blue. There was a wobble in his neutralism from the outset, for he always divided the warring countries into aggressors and defenders. This proved to be the thin end of a wedge: by mid-October, he was close to arguing for pre-emptive action against ‘possible future reprisals’. As the historian Paul O’Brien argues, Mussolini was latently pro-intervention and – like the government – waited for the outcome of the Battle of the Marne before declaring himself for war. With Germany bogged down in France, the odds had shifted far enough in the Allies’ favour for intervention to look sensible.

In the end, Mussolini’s about-face was ordained by character. When the balance of energy and likely success favoured intervention – with its inspiring vistas of limitless political tumult – his switch of allegiance was only a matter of time. A former comrade in the Socialist Party later alleged, rightly, that the only cause Mussolini ever recognised ‘was his own’, and his 

only use for ideas was to enable him to dispense with ideas … The whole object of his intellectual researches was to collect everything which detracted, or appeared to detract from the reality or binding nature of principles … Only action counted, and on the plane of action betrayal did not exist, only victory or defeat. 

At first, he claimed to be rescuing Socialism from the ‘docile herd’ in the party. Defining his position as national but not nationalist, he denounced Salandra’s appeal to ‘sacred egoism’ and continued to invoke anti-imperialism as the basis for intervention. Even for a man with Mussolini’s power of self-conviction, anti-Socialist socialism was an uncomfortable stretch. This is why Filippo Corridoni was so important to him. For Corridoni was a trades union leader who wanted Italy to intervene because war would create the best conditions for socialist revolution. The July Crisis found him in prison for fomenting a general strike. Released in August 1914, he threw himself into the pro-war campaign. Italian workers should support the ‘revolutionary war’. Only neutered men wanted neutrality, Corridoni cried, for we who oppose the bourgeoisie, the dynasties and the capitalists of all countries – we are ready for battle! When this effort failed, he and others founded the breakaway Italian Union of Labour and borrowed anti-imperialist language to try to stir the masses.

‘This is not a dynastic war’, he bellowed at the thousands who packed into the cathedral square in Florence on 10 May, 

… it is not a war to save a ruling house, it is a war of liberty and revolution, a war of the people. And the Italian people, once the old men in Rome have stopped delaying and called it to arms, shall not sheathe its sword before the Austrians have been hunted all the way across the Alps. 

He took care to add that this was not a war of hatred against the German and Austrian people. After the war, the masses would have to rejoin the class struggle. For the time being, this struggle was best served in uniform. In fact, politics as such should be suspended. ‘For now, there is only one party: Italy. Only one programme: action. Because Italy’s salvation means the salvation of every party.’

Mussolini warmed to this millenarian rhetoric. He trailed Corridoni on his later appearances around the country, sometimes joining him on the platform. He was slower to emulate him when war came: Corridoni volunteered at once, whereas Mussolini waited to be called up. In 1933, Mussolini’s regime built a monument on the Carso where Corridoni died in October 1915. If the Duce never stopped exaggerating the other man’s significance – turning him into a Fascist martyr – it was because he had shown him how to argue that not he but the Socialist Party had betrayed its ideals.

Italy’s part in the Great War obsessed Mussolini for the rest of his life. After 1922, he used his dictatorial power to mould and polish a mythical version of events, with intervention marking Italy’s birth as a dynamic, self-confident state. Maintaining this version involved much censorship and distortion, yet the Duce was not incapable of uttering blunt truths about the war.

At five o’clock one Saturday afternoon in July 1943, the Fascist Grand Council convened in Rome. Italy had reached a turning point: Allied forces were overrunning Sicily; an attack on the mainland could not be long in coming; and Hitler refused to send more troops. The previous weekend, Allied bombers had struck Rome for the first time. High-level dissatisfaction with Mussolini was growing, and Italy’s dithering king – still Victor Emanuel III – was for once not inclined to stand by him: he foresaw his dynasty being dragged into oblivion along with the regime. Mussolini had ignored rumours that a momentous challenge was brewing, so was taken aback when the meeting passed directly to a proposal that the King should replace him as commander-in- chief and prime minister. When someone blamed him for the unpopularity of the war, he saw an opening. ‘The people’s heart is never in any war,’ he protested. ‘Was the people’s heart in the 1915–1918 war, by any chance? Not in the least. The people were dragged into that war by a minority … Three men launched the movement – Corridoni, D’Annunzio and myself.’ Far from being bound in sacred unity, Italy in 1915 was divided ‘in an atmosphere of civil war’. Not even the defeat at Caporetto in 1917 had healed this rift. ‘Was the people’s heart in a war that produced 535,000 deserters?’ he asked.
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‘It is a law of history that when there are two contrary currents of opinion in a nation, one wanting war and the other peace, the latter party is invariably defeated even when, as always happens, it represents the numerical majority.’