EIGHTEEN
I do not remember much about the days, except
that they were very hot and that there were
many victories in the papers.
HEMINGWAY
Arriving on the Alpine front from the Isonzo valley and the Carso, journalists felt they had escaped to another war altogether. They were quick to capitalise on the difference. One of them exclaimed that ‘up here the soul of Italy is as pure as the snow that covers all the valleys’. Another wrote that ‘life is healthy here, the war is gentle, even death is beautiful’. The journalists’ relief was genuine, but their reports were full of fakery.
The chief fraudster was Luigi Barzini, perhaps the most famous journalist in the world when the war started. He was the star correspondent of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, Corriere della Sera, helping it to sell 350,000 copies a day. The Boxer uprising in China, the Russo-Japanese War, the Peking to Paris rally, the coronation of King George V in London, the Balkan Wars and the Mexican Revolution: he covered them all. Newsboys hawking Corriere boosted their sales by shouting ‘Barzini’s latest!’ Female readers sent him ardent letters. His fame and talent for evocative description made him the obvious choice to cover the outbreak of war in 1914, and he was the first Italian journalist into occupied Belgium. His son remembered him as a provincial gentleman of the old school, handsome, spruce, chain- smoking, devoted to his family, masking self-doubt with courtesy. Like other Corriere staffers, he was radicalised by the Libyan war of 1911–12. His new-found convictions led to a series of lurid articles on the ‘tragic and sublime battle’ for Italian identity being waged ‘at the frontiers of the race’, across the Adriatic Sea. Propagating such views, Barzini would have shared his newspaper’s commitment to intervention in 1915. He worked very hard throughout the war, spending long periods at the front where he became ‘a sort of institution … as well- known by sight as the King or General Cadorna’, churning out despatches that were collected into instant books which sold by the thousand.
Yet reporting the war turned out to be fraught with painful dilemmas. Barzini went to the front wanting to produce patriotic journalism that would increase public support for the war. As he told Albertini at the end of May 1915, the ‘soul of the country’ was in the care of the newspapers. ‘We have to create pride and optimism,’ he added. Publicly, he said that wartime journalism could ‘give the national soul the nourishment of enlightening truth’. He was dismayed when army censors initially hacked his copy to shreds in their determination to suppress any information that could prove useful to the enemy – not that such information was easy to come by. ‘They don’t let us see much,’ he complained to his wife in August. A few weeks into the war, he asked Albertini to let him come home; the ‘ferocious severity’ of the censors made it pointless. Albertini knew his man; he kept him at the front, and Barzini adapted. By mid-September, the censors were ‘very polite’ with Barzini: ‘they never touch a word’.
What he lacked in bread-and-butter detail was made up with verbose description. The war in the mountains brought out the purple worst in his style; his despatches from the Dolomites were closer to travel writing or penny-dreadful fiction than reporting. ‘Reaching the hut, we found ourselves facing a panorama of horror, above an incredible world of titanic walls, fascinating, frightful, sublime …’ The limestone peaks and ridges soar like ruins of mythic ramparts where the Olympians once fought the Titans, and men now scurry like ants. He wildly exaggerated the importance of the relatively minor clashes above the snow line, and nourished a myth of the Alpini as ‘hunters of men’, authentic warriors who had reconnected with their ‘primordial soul’. His accounts of combat are unreal and undifferentiated; the infantry attacks magnificently and irresistibly; gunsmoke rolls over the lines; men die with smiles on their faces. If setbacks are mentioned, they are not explained or analysed. Even the practical outcome seems of little account; what matters is martial spirit. Barzini’s comments on tactics were cut from the same cloth. He assured readers that the 1915 battles on the Isonzo proved ‘It is much easier to attack uphill against dominant positions than downhill against dominated positions … The theory of the offensive appears to be irrefutable.’ His fawning descriptions of the Supreme Command focus on the superhuman figure of Cadorna. Staff officers emerge from the generalissimo’s office transformed by contact with Italy’s strategic genius. ‘Armed with an indefinable new strength, with certainty in their eyes, a serene firmness on their faces, their brows lofty and as it were clarified, their worries are dissipated, their doubts are banished, one feels that each of them has found the solution to his problems on the far side of that magical door.’ No wonder Barzini was so popular at the Supreme Command that other journalists protested, obliging him to use his access more discreetly.
Privately, he developed grave doubts. When Albertini arrived at the start of the Fourth Battle, Barzini gave him an earful about Cadorna’s organisational and tactical failures. His letters to his editor could be equally blunt. The forward positions along the middle Isonzo were, he confided, ‘held by a miracle, or because they have never been attacked’, and noted the delay in supplies (‘nothing arrives on time’). His wife also received frank correspondence.
I got up to the positions, and you will see something in today’s Corriere [he wrote in July 1916] but I cannot do anything good, in my own style … I am very tired today. The journey was exhausting, I wrote like a lunatic, without even time for lunch, and anyway, with the stink of corpses still clinging to me, my appetite isn’t exactly hearty. What an impossible life! And all I really want is to be left alone. For a month at least.
The self-pity was due to more than fatigue and frustration. Barzini felt the stress of his false position without being able to identify its cause, which lay out of sight, hidden in his conception of journalism. This conception did not recognise a public entitlement to know what was happening, or an obligation on journalists to seek out and tell the truth. As long as the truth was ‘enlightening’, he could avoid the conclusion that he was a military propagandist. When the bare facts condemned the war, it was harder to square his conscience with his copy. This is what happened in June 1917, at the end of the Tenth Battle, when the slaughter defied Barzini’s usual cosmetic techniques. After a week, he told his editor that he could not file any more reports, because he would have to lie or be censored. In other words, he had reached the limit of self-censorship. ‘Ortigara alone has cost us 20,000 men!’ he exclaimed, in a recently discovered letter to Albertini. The Italians were incapable of concentrating their offensive. Cadorna’s staff officers could only reach him through his deputy Porro, ‘whose studied imbecility is beyond dispute’. ‘We lurch from one disastrous action to the next,’ he went on angrily, ‘massacring whole divisions without inflicting equal damage on the enemy. We are wearing ourselves out when everything advises prudence, husbanding all our strength.’
He stayed at Ortigara, filing reports about the infantry attacking uphill in torrential rain that turns into snow. When darkness cloaks the scene, he tries to follow the ebb and flow of battle by its sounds. The atmosphere is tragic, yet there is no critique of Italian tactics. Events unroll with the inevitability of nature, as if human decisions play no part. His resources of self-censorship were not, after all, exhausted. Perhaps the letters to Albertini were a valve for perfidious feelings.1
When reporters face this dilemma today, they can usually write about it. Pressure to toe a censor’s line enters the story as a topic for coverage. But this technique was hardly available in the First World War, and apparently it never crossed Barzini’s mind to entrust the reader with his doubts. The primary censorship was internal, performed by himself on his own copy. He buried his misgivings under words, ever more positive words about Italy’s noble warriors on land, at sea and in the air. And the more he wrote, the more the warriors themselves detested him. Whatever his standing outside the war zone, many of the men in the trenches thought his articles were more putrid than those corpses which spoiled his appetite. ‘If I see that Barzino, I’ll shoot him myself’ was the pithy comment by a nameless infantryman that passed into legend. Lauding failed operations and heaping hosannas on incompetent officers, the journalists became hated figures. ‘In the journalists’ version of events,’ wrote the pro-war publicist Giuseppe Prezzolini, ‘Italy had become the most important country in the world and the Italian war the centre of the European conflict.’ More than anyone else, Barzini was responsible for the ordinary soldiers’ weary disgust with the press – an outlook caught by Giulio Barni, a tough-minded volunteer from Trieste, in a little poem called ‘Propaganda’.
Newspapers arrived
in the trenches
– so-called ‘propaganda’ –
and since there was no other paper
the soldiers took them
to wipe their arses
None of this was unique to Barzini or Italy. Across Europe, journalists believed their overriding duty was to the army, right or wrong. The chiefs of staff wanted to ban the press from the front and force it to rely exclusively on official bulletins. In Germany and Russia, the generals got their way. In Britain, the government and the leading newspapers quickly reached an informal understanding; the press would co-ordinate the dissemination of official news from the front, and in exchange, the government would keep censorship to a minimum. The press then tested the army’s patience by using freelancers who hurried to France, where they played cat-and-mouse with the army around northern France. Their coverage supplemented the official version of events with colour and detail. Later, the British army agreed to accredit five British correspondents at the front. Dressed in officers’ uniforms, lent a château and a fleet of cars, they were flattered and controlled. One of their censors described the process of co-optation: the five correspondents ‘lived in the Staff world, its joys and sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed?’ Among the rules under which they worked was this: ‘There must be no criticism of authority or command.’ They toed the line, filing bland and hopeful accounts of battles that they had not been allowed to see, untouched by the ‘helpless anger’ that their reports stirred among the infantry.
The Italian ‘system of lies’ was based on a similar arrangement. On 23 May 1915, when they realised that Cadorna wanted to ban all journalists from the front, the leading newspapers petitioned the government and general staff to give selected correspondents access, and let them file their copy after the Supreme Command had approved it. This privilege should be granted to newspapers with the ‘attitudes’ and ‘moral capacity’ needed for ‘such a delicate task’. The corres– pondents should be ‘rigorously militarised’, and subject to military discipline. How could Cadorna resist? Correspondents were allowed to visit the front in large groups, under close military escort. (On his first tour, Barzini travelled with 60 other journalists.) Later, a corps of nine journalists plus three foreign correspondents were allowed to remain.
The scope of military censorship of the press, post, telephones and telegrams was set out in the war powers law (22 May 1915), authorising the government to examine the contents of any post and the regional prefects to seize any publications that might be ‘gravely prejudicial to the supreme national interests’. Crucially, the publication of ‘military information not from official sources’ was forbidden. A catch-all decree on 20 June banned ‘false news’. The prefect of Naples used this decree to arrest and fine newsboys who shouted about Italian losses. Reinforcing the message, Salandra stated that criticism of Italy’s actions and aims was impermissible; nothing could be allowed to shake public trust in ultimate victory. The press did not object in principle to these constraints. What galled them, as we saw with Barzini, was their crude imposition.
One reason why this patriotic consensus was so sturdy is that it had been forged in 1911, when the press acclaimed the invasion of Libya. Editors had shared and reinforced public impatience with Giolitti’s reforms, and hailed the invasion as a great enterprise that would unite the nation. The press conjured up a vision of Libya as a Promised Land where grateful natives eagerly awaited Italy’s troops, and nature’s bounty would pour into Italy’s coffers. The half-dozen correspondents who felt that the Libyan campaign was ‘their endeavour’, and who shaped public perceptions of it, were hardcore interventionists in 1914–15.
The central figure in this consensus was Luigi Albertini, editor of Corriere della Sera, mouthpiece of Milanese business and industrial interests, the only newspaper that could aspire to the grand manner of The Times of London, where Albertini himself had trained. He was Italy’s nearest equivalent to Lord Northcliffe, the British newspaper tycoon, though the differences are more revealing than the parallels. Northcliffe told Haig to drop him a line if The Times printed anything he disliked. Albertini would have done the same for Cadorna, but he did not confront the established authorities as Northcliffe famously did with his campaigns against Kitchener and Asquith and over the production of shells. His intimacy with ministers was much more deferential than Northcliffe’s; he rarely tested his power to challenge the government, and when he did so, could easily be tamed again, as we shall see in a later chapter. He wanted his paper to be ‘not only the mirror but the soul and stimulus of a young nation, searching for its identity and for modernity’. As a free-trade conservative with a social outlook that combined populism with paternalism, he opposed Giolitti (except over Libya) and favoured his successor, Salandra. In 1914, sharing Salandra’s view that ‘sacred egoism’ should steer Italy in the European crisis, he shadowed the prime minister’s evolution from neutralism to interventionism and later boasted of being one of the people most responsible for getting Italy into the war. The government showed its appreciation by making him a senator.
During the war, the three-way links between Corriere, the government and the Supreme Command were astonishingly close. In all but name, the national newspaper of record – now selling 600,000 copies daily – became a parallel ministry of information, propaganda and intelligence. It saw itself, and was seen by the government and the Supreme Command, as part and parcel of the war effort. Albertini’s mission was to nurture patriotism, support the men at the front, and expose profiteers. His correspondents in Europe and Africa sometimes served as a parallel intelligence network, even a parallel diplomatic service, more efficient than the real thing. Favoured papers were exempt from the Supreme Command’s rule that newspapers could not accredit more than two correspondents; Corriere della Sera had some 20 correspondents along the front. Colonel Gatti, who ran the Historical Office at the Supreme Command, was one of the paper’s military advisors. Corriere journalists drafted Cadorna’s florid bulletins. Another staffer, Giuseppe Borgese, left the paper after Caporetto to organise Italian propaganda in Allied countries. And a Corriere man drafted General Diaz’s famous Victory Bulletin at the war’s end.
At the start of the war Cadorna was blind to public opinion and let his deputy deal with journalists. Addressing correspondents in Trentino, General Porro urged them to see their reports as supplements to the daily bulletins issued by the Supreme Command. For no army can march willingly to victory unless it has a united, enthusiastic nation at its back. ‘Our mission’, he intoned, ‘is to forge victory. Keep that well fixed in your minds.’ The journalists did as they were asked, with little prompting by the military. Until the end of 1915, the only official source of information was the daily bulletin, which was usually too rhetorical and phoney to be much use; even Sonnino, who had no time for journalists, thought they reflected badly on Italy’s cause, but Cadorna disliked the foreign minister and rejected his plea to make the bulletins more credible. If the press found them unappetising, that was their problem.2
Only in December, facing political rumbles in Rome and disillusion around the country, did he accept that the Supreme Command needed a press office. The man chosen to design this new unit was a professional writer, Ugo Ojetti. As a middle-aged volunteer in the Territorial Militia, Ojetti had pulled strings to get sent to the Supreme Command, and was waiting for just this opportunity. ‘In Rome, Cadorna felt troubled – at last! – about public opinion,’ Ojetti explained to his wife, referring to the generalissimo’s difficult sojourn in the capital over Christmas. ‘For the first time since the start of the war he found himself – just a little – in contact with “public opinion”. Now he wants the press to tackle this peril resolutely.’ Ojetti formulated a strategy to provide the press with material that would be ‘more moral and social than practical and military’, and tailored to the city or region for which it was intended. At the same time, the output should be more informative about the operations at the front, covering ‘the difficulties overcome, those that still have to be overcome, the purpose of particular actions’. This was too sophisticated for Cadorna, who simply wanted a more efficient way to get official statements disseminated by obedient reporters. Ojetti was replaced by a colonel on Cadorna’s staff and put in charge of the photograph library.
If Cadorna was reluctant to accept the importance of the media, he flatly refused to see why the soldiers should need an information service of their own. Asked why no trench newspapers were produced for the infantry, he said there was no money. His conception of soldiering was too abstract and inhumane to accommodate the idea that his men would be better soldiers if they understood why they had to risk death for their country. Soldiers must obey and criticism must be punished harshly.
By today’s standards, what most war correspondents filed in the First World War was hardly journalism at all. The combination of flattery, coercion and patriotism was fatal to free inquiry, as it often still is. Reporters now tend to take a more modest view of their role; they should take care of reporting, and leave the mustering of support for war to politicians, or at least to the leader writers. This distinction hardly existed during the Great War. There was no conception that the journalists’ first duty is to report what they see truthfully and honestly.
Journalists who believed nothing was more important than winning the war, and that truthful reporting might discourage the public, easily persuaded themselves that they should serve the ‘higher truth’ of Italy’s national mission. They expressed few misgivings about this price. Prezzolini noted privately in December 1915 that soldiers on home leave were spreading anti-war propaganda among the masses, while the officers did the same among the middle classes. ‘I too inevitably make propaganda against the war if I tell the truth,’ he added, ‘given all the reasons we have to be dissatisfied with how it is being waged.’ When truth and defeatism looked identical, patriotic journalists made decisions which posterity judges with a severity that would have bewildered them.
The Supreme Command’s conduct of the war from 1915 to 1917 was a classic example of what can go wrong without the scrutiny of a sceptical press. Servile journalists relayed the lies and misjudgements of the Supreme Command, which welcomed their reports as evidence of its wisdom. This closed loop encouraged the Command’s arrogance, hatred of criticism, brutal treatment of the troops, and a zero-sum attitude to its relations with government. The commission of inquiry after Caporetto found that hospitality and access had been repaid with friendly coverage; as a result, ‘the public at large was given a false and exaggerated opinion about our successes … Not a few soldiers have brought to our attention the damage done to the morale of officers and men by the inaccuracies and exaggerations of the war correspondents.’
This was true, but incomplete. The Socialist leader Turati was closer to the mark when he told parliament that censorship (not flattery) had produced Caporetto. The commission also failed to mention that the Supreme Command was not the sole responsible party. For the government had outlawed criticism, and the journalists wanted to conspire against what is now called the public’s right to know. They believed they were acting for the best, and would have been baffled by the principle – generally acknowledged if not always honoured – that ‘there are certain rules of hygiene in the relationship between a newspaper correspondent and high officials, people in authority … Newspapermen cannot be cronies of great men.’
One of the first to grapple with the political implications of public opinion was Giulio Douhet, Italy’s most innovative military thinker since Machiavelli. He argued that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 had confirmed the power of public opinion. This aspect of modern war was, he warned, particularly dangerous in Italy, where people’s ‘emotional sensitivity’ made them vulnerable to the ‘exaggerated motions of the childish soul of crowds’. Easily swayed, the Italians should be protected from harmful influences. The Supreme Command took the same view of the average citizen’s unfitness to be treated as an adult. The corollary of paternalism is infantilisation. What bound journalists, ministers and staff officers was a deep conservative assumption that ordinary people – unlike themselves – were incapable of grasping their true interests.
Source Notes
EIGHTEEN Forging Victory
1 ‘up here the soul of Italy is as pure’: Fabio Todero [1999], 68.
2 sell 350,000 copies a day: Bosworth [2007], 175.
3 ‘tragic and sublime battle’: Barzini [1913].
4 ‘a sort of institution’: Price, 64.
5 the ‘soul of the country’: Bricchetto, 170–1.
6 the censors were ‘very polite’: Ojetti, 100.
7 ‘Reaching the hut, we found ourselves’: Fabio Todero [1999], 77.
8 ‘hunters of men’: Bricchetto, 172.
9 ‘It is much easier to attack uphill’: Bricchetto, 172.
10 ‘Armed with an indefinable new strength’: Isnenghi [2005], 191.
11 ‘held by a miracle, or because’: Bricchetto, 174.
12 ‘I got up to the positions’: Bricchetto, 177–8.
13 ‘Ortigara alone has cost us 20,000 men!’: Bricchetto, 177–8.
14 ‘If I see that Barzino, I’ll shoot him’: Prezzolini.
15 ‘unacceptable from any point of view’: De Simone, 140.
16 ‘lived in the Staff world, its joys and sorrows’: Montague, 76–7.
17 Italian ‘system of lies’: Prezzolini,
18 ‘gravely prejudicial to’: Ventrone [2003], 103.
19 ‘their endeavour’: Gualtiero Castellini of the Gazzetta di Venezia.
20 hardcore interventionists in 1914–15: Isnenghi [2005], 179–81.
21 if The Times printed anything he disliked: Macdonald, 179.
22 ‘not only the mirror but the soul’: According to Enzo Bettiza, 57.
23 boasted of being one of the people most responsible: Mack Smith [1978], 217.
24 ‘Our mission’, he intoned: Fabio Todero [1999], 59.
25 ‘In Rome, Cadorna felt troubled – at last!’: Ojetti, 185.
26 ‘the difficulties overcome’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 39.
27 hardly journalism at all: Macdonald, 82–3.
28 ‘Thanks to the very complete’: Macdonald, 84.
29 ‘I too inevitably make propaganda’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 39.
30 ‘the public at large was given a false and exaggerated’: De Simone, 160.
31 Turati was closer to the mark: Orlando [1923]. Turati said this on 23 February 1918.
32 ‘there are certain rules of hygiene’: Walter Lippmann, quoted by Sevareid, 1.
33 ‘emotional sensitivity’ made them vulnerable: Sema in Masau Dan & Porcedda.
1 Another journalist who kept his public and private accounts of the war in separate boxes was Rino Alessi of Il Secolo. Alessi’s ‘secret letters’ to his editor form a fascinating parallel chronicle that often bears little resemblance to the war described in his articles. For example, he criticised Cadorna’s decimations privately (‘unacceptable from any point of view’), not in his reports.
2 In substance, Cadorna’s bulletins were not more misleading than Haig’s. British GHQ after the first day of the Somme notoriously assured readers that ‘Thanks to the very complete and effective artillery preparation, thanks also to the dash of our infantry, our losses have been very slight … ’