Cadorna’s initial operation beginning 24 May, commonly known as the sbalzo offensive, achieved little. For the Italian 4th Army’s advance through the fortified Dolomites to have had even the remotest chance of success, huge quantities of heavy artillery would have been needed. But on intervention Italy had just over 2,000 pieces of artillery and only 192 of these were of medium and only 132 of heavy calibre. Like the French, Italy had a preponderance (1,797) of 75 mm light field pieces. Siege artillery was in place only on 5 July and even then was shy of a battery. In any case, the army as a whole was not fully mobilized until 15 June (Pieropan, 1988: Ch. 4; Isnenghi and Rochat, 2000: 145-51; Schindler, 2001: 41-5). On 13 June Cadorna decided to switch all attention to the river Isonzo, transferring seven reserve divisions to that area. For their part, the Austrians had tactically withdrawn to the east bank of the river between Gorizia and the sea. Exceptions to this were the bridgeheads at Gorizia and, further north, Tolmino. These two strongholds now represented the defining feature of the Isonzo front, the one at Gorizia becoming Cadorna’s primary objective. He paid particular attention to the Oslavia-Podgora trench system and the Mount San Michele-San Martino del Carso line, which reinforced the north and south of the Gorizia bridgehead respectively. Four offensives were unleashed on the Isonzo in 1915: 23 June-7 July, 18 July-4 August, 18 October-4 November and 10 November-2 December. These were marked by the inability of Italian 75 mm light field artillery to seriously damage enemy barbed wire trench protections, and by the ability of by now experienced Austro-Hungarian soldiers, having absorbed the brunt of the artillery bombardment, to return quickly to defensive positions to meet the frontal assault. Between June and December 1915 Italy had over 130,000 casualties in return for irrelevant territorial gains which did nothing to remove the Gorizia bridgehead (Pieropan, 1988: Chs 7-12; Isnenghi and Rochat, 2000: 162-5; Schindler, 2001: Chs 3-6).
Mussolini observed the initial confrontation, up to and including the Second Battle of the Isonzo, from an unchanged position as journalist and political activist. Between 24 May and 2 September (the day on which he published a farewell article as he downed pen and headed for the front) he published sixty-four articles and one letter in IL Popolo d’ltalia. These allow us to assess what became of his interventionist ideas, political language and military theories, and to explore the extent to which he used the war to experiment with a national-religious type language that could give greater political substance to the D’Annunzian nationalist-imperialist aesthetic.
Eleven articles (16.9 per cent) were dedicated to Italy’s war (OO, VIII: 3-4, 17-19, 23-5, 71-3, 79-82, 87-9, 97-9, 128-30, 138-40, 186-8, 291-2), though of these only two made (fleeting) reference to Italian operations on the Isonzo (OO, VIII: 87-9, 97-9). A third reference to Isonzo operations appeared (again fleetingly) in an article dedicated to the Russian front (OO, VIII: 40-22). Against this, twenty-six articles (40 per cent) were devoted to war issues outside the Italian theatre (OO, VIII: 8-10, 20-22, 26-9, 33-6, 37-9, 40-42, 43-6, 58-61, 65-8, 69-70, 74-6, 100-101, 106-8, 134-7, 141-4, 150-51, 152-4, 155-7, 158-60, 161-2, 163-7, 168-70, 171-3, 175-7, 178-80, 189-91). If we add to the latter the eight articles on German social democracy (OO, VIII: 5-7, 11-15, 47-9, 50-54, 62-4, 84-6, 181-3, 184-5), the total number of pieces not dealing with Italy rises to 52.3 per cent.
A language of national renewal through blood and sacrifice, death and resurrection appeared in seven pieces, or 10.7 per cent of the total (OO, VII: 418-19; OO, VIII: 30-32, 90-91, 92-6, 97-9, 195-6, 291-2). Of these seven pieces four had an anti-socialist thrust (OO, VIII: 30-32, 90-91, 92-6, 291-2): ‘Blood is blood’, affirmed Mussolini on 20 June, ‘and too much has been spilt to be able to go on speaking of a future of universal brotherhood.’ The nation, referred to as the ‘hard and solid terrain of the race’, had been ‘revivified’ through the blood of its sons, and for this reason ‘international socialism is a corpse’ (OO, VIII: 30-32). The interventionist demonstrations of May were a key indicator of national renewal for Mussolini, a theme which he touched upon in six articles and which on some occasions he linked to anti-socialism. He argued on 20 July, for example, that ‘the purification of Italy’ was begun by ‘the marvellous days of May’ which also marked ‘the last step of the official Socialist Party towards putrefaction’ (OO, VIII: 92-6; see also VII: 418-19 and OO, VIII: 55-7, 74-6, 79-82, 90-91).
Anti-socialism was in fact a key component of this bulk of material. Of the sixty-five pieces seventeen (26.1 per cent) were engaged in polemic with the PSI (OO, VIII: 30-32, 55-7, 77-8, 83, 90-91, 92-6, 102, 103-5, 109-11, 112-14, 115-17, 118-27, 131-3, 145-7, 148-9, 174, 192-4), and if we add to these the eight articles dedicated to attacks on German social democracy the total rises to 38.5 per cent. A total of thirty articles were written before the Second Battle of the Isonzo and it is revealing that when the anti-German, Balkans and eastern front articles from this period are combined they account for seventeen of those thirty articles, or 56.7 percent (OO, VIII: 5-7, 8-10, 11-15, 20-22, 26-9, 33-6, 37-9, 40-42, 43-6, 47-9, 50-54, 58-61, 62-4, 65-8, 69-70, 74-6, 84-6). But during the Second Battle of the Isonzo the polemic against the PSI replaced the predominant focus on the war outside Italy of the articles written before the battle and accounts for eleven of the eighteen pieces written during this time, or 61.1 per cent (OO, VIII: 90-91, 92-6, 102, 103-5, 109-11, 112-14, 115-17, 118-27, 131-3, 145-7, 148-9). In the period following the Second Battle of the Isonzo, Mussolini returned to the form and content of his articles prior to that offensive. A heavy emphasis on foreign issues, amounting to thirteen out of seventeen pieces, equivalent to 76.5 per cent (OO, VIII: 150-51, 152-4, 155-7, 158-60, 161-2, 163-7, 168-70, 171-3, 175-7, 178-80, 181-3, 184-5, 189-91), was accompanied by only one article dedicated to the home front war regime (OO, VIII: 186-8). The absence of language of national religion once again correlates with the reduction of the anti-socialist content to the articles which amount to five of the seventeen pieces (OO, VIII: 148-9, 174, 181-3, 184-5, 192-4).
A provisional conclusion from the above is that as a distant observer Mussolini was unable to reconcile his politico-military preconceptions with the reality of the war on the Italian front, notably the stalemate, about which he had little to say. As a response to the stasis he focused on the eastern front, the Balkans or Germany (with whom Italy was not at war). But ignoring the Italian front did not mean that Mussolini was not influenced by events unfolding there. Anti-socialism, present in Mussolini’s discourse since October-November 1914, radically intensified during the Second Battle of the Isonzo. Anti-socialism was also linked to national-religious terminology which itself was bound up in a system of terrain and the renewal of the ‘race’ (stirpe) through sacrificial and cleansing blood. He certainly recognized that ‘the war’s long delay in the trenches has completely altered the character of the war itself’, and argued that ‘an army of heroes is doomed to disaster if it doesn’t have munitions’ (OO, VIII: 23-5). However, missing from his discussion was the concept of artillery and he in fact dealt only with bullets (pallottole).
Finally, Mussolini responded in seven of the sixty-five published pieces (10.8 per cent) to accusations concerning his absence from the front (OO, VIII: 16, 77-8, 83, 109-11, 145-7, 148-9, 192-4). Moreover, of the three letters written in this period, including two not published until the 1950s (OO, VIII: 291-2), all mentioned the same theme. It was a touchy point. But why was Mussolini not at war? He claimed he had been refused as a volunteer because he was liable for imminent call up (OO, VIII: 16). Archival evidence of unclear origin nevertheless suggests that in 1915 Mussolini consciously sought to be exempted from military service through the good offices of Bissolati. The latter refused, however, saying that those who preached war should go and fight it (ACS, SPDCR, b. 98, fasc. X/R ‘Bissolati Leonida’). At any rate, Mussolini now had a chance to prove his detractors wrong. He was going to the zone of combat which he had to all intents and purposes excluded from his writings of late May to early September 1915. Any abstract considerations surrounding the war’s technological character and related tactics would have to be re-examined in the concreteness of industrialized mass death. Or would they?
Mussolini was called up on 31 August 1915. He left IL Popolo d’ltalia in the managerial hands of Manilo Morgagni (Bosworth, 2002: 114) and former syndicalist Giuseppe De Falco, who had become chief editor on 12 March 1915 (OO, VII: 252). Mussolini was now free to switch his attention to the daily representation of his combat experience in a war diary, which he wrote for contemporary publication in IL Popolo d’ltalia and which was republished in volume form in 1923. When the latter volume appeared it was with the addition of some non-diary material, the clarification of real names with respect to some originally used initials, the specification of dates (Mussolini sometimes only used the day) and one or two minor (but not for that reason insignificant) cuts from the IL Popolo d’ltaliaversion. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from the 1923 publication. Alex Aronson explains that the desire to have one’s diary published reflects a psychological urgency to remain visible to a public which is to draw lessons from the internal retreat which the diary represents (Aronson, 1991: 102). Hence while Mussolini’s diary shared the common feature of all diaries in that it was a means through which the author’s identity could be reconstructed (Didier, 1976: esp. Ch. 2; Aronson, 1991: Ch. 6), the fact that it was written for publication strongly suggests that Mussolini intended using it as a vehicle for self-promotion and self-projection on a new plane. Through the diary Mussolini literally wrote himself into the war. It thus becomes the key source for understanding his response to the conflict and the way he applied and adapted his political ideas and language in relation to his personal experience of combat. The remainder of the present chapter will examine the first section of the diary (9 September-16 November 1915) with the following questions in mind. Did Mussolini’s language of national religion intensify with respect to the May-September articles, and if so in what context and for what reason? How did Mussolini relate to the men and the officers? Did he reassess his position on offensive doctrine and arms and munitions in the war of attrition? Finally, what was the ideological nature and function of the war diary?