TWENTY
Only an immense force of will, which
manifests itself in perseverance admired by
present and future generations, can conduct
us to our goal.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
During the Eighth Battle, an officer behind the jump-off trench watches the little black figures scramble over the parapet clutching their rifles, then pause, ‘calm and steadfast’. He is fascinated by this moment: surely the men halt to focus ‘their stalwart spirits’ on the task ahead, for each soldier is ‘like a small thing with a single will, which is stronger than the metal that breaks it’. Then they set off, across the Carso. The line ripples under enemy fire, the men flinch, set off again in a crouching run, stop to aim and fire, run again. ‘If they don’t fall, they get there. If they don’t get there, they don’t come back.’ This particular attack succeeds, despite furious bombardment. For, the officer intones, ‘the will of man is stronger than all the guns’.
What starts as a deeply felt description turns into scripted rhetoric. The clue to the officer’s identity as an educated man, an intellectual, is his interpretation of that moment on the parapet. Although veterans’ memoirs say little about the frontal attack – the core of the infantry’s unspeakable experience, and the reason why their casualty rates over the war were 40 per cent (ten times worse than for cavalry and gunners) – one man still remembered that precise moment nearly ninety years later. Antonio Di Nardo (1896–2005) described the ‘absurd’ moment of ‘pleasure at liberation from all that anxiety’ when he got out of ‘that muddy ditch’. Rather than steeling their resolve, the infantry halted to savour their relief that the waiting was over, and delay a moment longer their plunge into the lethal unknown.
The countdown was excruciating; after fixing bayonets and draining the double tot of grappa, the men had to get through endless minutes before their officer shouted ‘Avanti Savoia!’ and led them into the smoking din. Another long-lived veteran remembered how his heart hammered, his ‘whole body racked by terror’, while comrades mumbled prayers or rehearsed their battle-cries, ‘thinking of nothing but death’. Guido Favetti noted how ‘the blood chills before an assault, the troops fall silent. Iron discipline! Whoever questions their orders by so much as a word will be shot immediately.’ The attack was the moment of truth, the ultimate test of discipline and resolve. For Emilio Lussu, a junior officer in the Sassari Brigade, this interval was worse than the attack itself. ‘Those who have not been through such moments do not know what war is.’
The men knew an attack was imminent when the military police mounted their machine guns behind the trench, ready to shoot at soldiers who lingered when the cry of ‘Savoy!’ went up. There are no data on the casualties caused by the carabinieri, but an impression emerges from memoirs and diaries. After a minor action in the Dolomites, an army doctor matter-of-factly recorded treating 80 casualties of enemy machine-gun fire, and another 25 shot in the buttocks by the carabinieri. This practice had no equivalent on the Western Front, where the British military police merely set up ‘straggler posts’ as a barrier to stop men leaving the front line before or during battle. If anything, it anticipated the Red Army ‘blocking units’, which gunned down soldiers who tried to escape in the Russian Civil War.
When zero hour came, the men knew that failure was the likeliest outcome. A failed attack on the Carso felt like this:
Voices and shouting on all sides: a torture of sounds. You don’t understand a thing, but you intuit from the noises and whistles all around that things are not going well. You drop to the ground. The rain keeps falling, a thousand snakes hissing in your ears; a confusion of people coming and going; deafening clamour. Then, solemn silence. Slithering on your stomach, you regain the track in twos and threes. But you have no clear idea what happened: whether you were cowardly or brave, or whether, turning back, you would meet the same officers and men as before or another unit, or even the Austrians.
In common with their allies and enemies, the Italians had expected a war of manoeuvre: bold operations along the valleys, then sweeping victories on the lowlands beyond the Alps and the Carso. What they could not foresee or explain was how the infantry should prevail against machine guns in dominating positions protected by barbed wire that was, for the most part, still stubbornly intact after heavy bombardment. This omission did not trouble the staff officers, because the Supreme Commander had solved the conundrum in his famous tract, Frontal Attack and Tactical Training, discussed in an earlier chapter. ‘The outcome of war will always’, Cadorna wrote, ‘be decided by manoeuvre.’ Cadorna’s guidance to attacking troops was childish: ‘Infantry that finds itself under fire during an attack must remove itself from this fire as quickly as possible in the only way permitted: by proceeding with all speed … Stopping and lying down would be a very serious mistake.’ Convinced that attrition could not alter the scope for manoeuvre, Cadorna was not interested in how to get from here (attrition) to there (victorious manoeuvre). Instead of treating this tremendous question on its merits, he dismissed it with a stunningly simple solution: willpower, or morale. ‘When a soldier lacks the spirit and will to fight,’ he wrote to the prime minister, ‘he lacks everything.’ By the same token, possession of this spirit and will make the soldier unstoppable. In the simpler language of the Libretto personale, a military service document issued to every soldier: ‘A soldier who has faith and courage almost always triumphs over the difficulties and dangers presented by war.’ What really mattered was to go forward wherever and whenever possible.
According to traditional doctrine, before machine guns, barbed wire and concrete dug-outs changed the battlefield for ever, infantry should attack after superiority of fire had been achieved. Cadorna agreed in principle, but insisted that attacks ‘should proceed without such certainty’. There was realism, too, in his observation that the assault ‘does not have to be carried out by a mass of men’. Given the efficacy of modern artillery and their power of concentration, masses of men ‘would face certain destruction’. The assault should therefore be carried out by ‘waves’ of men in lines that were ‘not dense’. In practice, he ignored this precept or did not take it far enough, preferring to promote the will as a total solution to tactical challenges, capable of making up for any technical or geographical disadvantages. ‘Victory is determined’, he wrote in his tract, ‘by the demoralisation of the enemy.’ This would only be true if demoralisation and defeat were one and the same.
Military thinkers have always emphasised the importance of morale and willpower, for the logical reason that soldiers who strongly want to win are more likely to prevail. In the decades before 1914, this emphasis became inflamed and fanatical. The argument ran that machine guns, barbed wire and concrete dug-outs did not knock willpower (or morale) off its pedestal as the decisive factor on the battlefield. On the contrary, by isolating willpower they confirmed its primacy. For French strategists, the key to success was ‘élan’, passionate ardour or flair. The Italian equivalent was ‘slancio’, one of Cadorna’s favourite words. The British general staff was less poetical, as befits Anglo-Saxons, but the substance was the same: every leader in an attack must be ‘imbued with a determination to close with the enemy’, for success depended on ‘the exercise of human qualities directed by the willpower of individuals’. A British general proposed that war was essentially the ‘triumph’ of ‘one will over a weaker will’. In the same year, 1911, the Director of Military Operations at the French general staff advocated the development of ‘a conquering state of mind’.
Faith in the will belonged to a set of powerful convictions that can be linked under the umbrella term ‘vitalism’, a matrix of assumptions about existence and value that influenced thinking in many fields. Vitalism championed impulses and intuitions over abstract ideas, character over structure, irrationalism over intellect, energy over fixity, soul or will over materialism, ‘life force’ over inherited forms. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, hugely influential in the prewar decade, coined the term élan vital as a tag for ‘the inner force that cannot be rationally grasped or articulated, which thrusts its way into the empty and unknowable future, and moulds both biological growth and human activity’. Depending on context, vitalism was a banner for genuine innovation, a cloak for fear of technology, an alibi for egoism on the smallest (personal) or largest (collective) scale, and even a charter for racial hatred and killing.
For vitalists, action supplants virtue or utility as the measure of value. Action is not a substitute for knowledge but a higher mode of knowledge, soaring above the pedantry of investigation and research. From this angle, concepts are the enemy of understanding, because they separate us from the flow of sensations and intuitions that make up life’s substance. Vitalism appealed to the anti-intellectual bent of intellectuals who already doubted the rationalist rules of their game. Trapped in the vast dynamics of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, industrialisation and commerce, and by the theories of natural evolution, human history and the unconscious mind discovered by Darwin, Marx and Freud, what room was left for individual reason and moral will? How should men not succumb to the dark currents running below Progress (justly called ‘the political principle of the nineteenth century’), namely a gnawing sense of degeneration and impotence, merging fear of technology with fear of women? In hind sight, vitalism was a resistance movement, a late-romantic defence of the individual male and his solitary resources, a consolation after the ‘death of God’ in the mid-nineteenth century and before the birth of ‘human rights’ after 1945. For the vitalist vision is self-deifying, promising to restore mankind to his rightful place in the scheme of things, able to master all species and materials through mystical life-force.
The shrillness of military vitalist thinking around 1910 showed the urgency of the problem confronting the general staffs. Arguing that soldiers’ morale was detachable from the quality of training, equipment and command, or the mere probability of survival, was a strange endeavour for the military mind. In this case, it was a resort adopted under great pressure. How else to reconcile the drastic improvements in defensive power since the American Civil War with the tactical necessity of infantry attacks? The staffs were well aware that modern weaponry had created what General Foch called a ‘death zone’ between armies. How could large numbers of men cross this zone intact? Before tanks and parachutes they had to use their legs, and before lightweight body armour they had no significant protection against bullets.
Frontal attack was the military expression of vitalist beliefs about nation and society. Denying the dominance of technology over the human spirit and boasting about the sovereignty of the will were axiomatic in vitalist thinking. And from a Social Darwinist perspective, victory should be costly. This doctrine was irresistible to commanders who needed to encourage their troops before operations that were likely to get them killed. Inspired by vitalist ideas, the generals could celebrate the offence as inherently superior to the defence and reassure their men that the enemy’s advantages were trivial beside their own spiritual ascendancy. For the nation – weakened by modern urban living – must be ready for sacrifice in order to strengthen its moral fibre. This benefit would follow from the sacrifice; it did not depend on the soldiers’ consciousness of why they had to lay down their lives. This helps to explain why the Supreme Command paid so little attention to the psychological welfare of the soldiers.
This neglect looks contradictory; if the soldiers’ will could be eroded by defeatist propaganda, as Cadorna complained was happening, surely it could be built up by positive measures? Yet, if the soldiers were intended for sacrifice, why use up resources on educating and amusing them? Only after Caporetto would the penny drop: if the men did not understand, their motivation suffered. Vitalism also formed the mental background of the politicians who blocked aid packages to Italian prisoners of war. Captured men were not worth assisting; even if they had not betrayed the nation, they had let it down. The calculation that the benefit of discouraging potential deserters (by demonstrating the horrors of captivity) outweighed the prisoners’ own rights, was premised on vitalist contempt.
Of all the prominent Italians discussed in this book, perhaps only two were immune to vitalism: the poet Rebora and the liberal leader Giolitti. Catholics inveighed against materialism and burned with contempt for the moral nullity of science, while reactionaries and Marxists alike preached faith in revolutionary action and the necessity of conflict for spiritual renewal or social progress. The compromises of parliamentary democracy were reviled. Perhaps Italian vitalism was the index of three volatile quantities: nationalist anxiety, territorial appetite, and military inefficiency. The reality of the unified kingdom – Giolitti’s despised Italietta – felt to many Italians like a betrayal of Risorgimento dreams. Italy had lost in battle to Ethiopia and struggled with the tribes of Libya. Its industrialisation was half-baked; its per capita income was half that of Germany, Europe’s other recently unified state, and one-third of Great Britain’s; its cultural contribution to modern Europe was uncertain. No place, then, at the table of great powers. This situation seemed especially unjust to generations that grew up with the myth of a ‘glorious minority’ that had ‘decided the destiny of Italy’ by ‘its own will’. With this achievement at their backs, those born since the 1870s felt that Italy’s vitalist credentials were in better shape than other nations’, and merited a leading role on the world stage.
The pressure of this background shapes the memoirs of veterans who could express their deeper assumptions. During failed offensives on the eastern Carso, Mario Puccini fantasised that the very vegetation ‘did not want to become Italian’. Revisiting this location after it had been captured, he noticed the plants ‘twisted, shorn, uprooted’ by the fighting, and realised that ‘if he only wants to, man can overcome any natural obstacle, however strong and stubborn it may be’. Vitalist ideas were palpable, too, in the army training manual, called Military Life and Discipline. Written in 1917 for use in military colleges, it is a primer of applied Social Darwinism. ‘Outside the struggle there is only putrefaction, dissolution, death’, wrote the author, an infantry lieutenant, for the benefit of teenaged cadets. ‘The struggle is synonymous with life.’ Combat and sacrifice are essential to the moral life and health of the state. In war, force must be disciplined if it is to be used effectively. This is why the army is the nation’s school, its physical force, the test of its fitness for life, the cure for ‘civic illiteracy’. All the ‘individual wills which compose the army’ must be unified ‘under the supreme will of the commander’. What matters is action: ‘faith in reality, in what we do: activity, that is our good’.
Looking back at Cadorna’s prestige during the war, Carlo Sforza was caustic: ‘The Italian middle classes wanted to believe that a harsh mask and hermetic silence were the sure signs of genius, and that brutality was energy.’ The vogue for vitalism encouraged people to believe that a great commander has certain qualities of energy and will. Italy’s supreme warlord must be great, therefore Cadorna possessed these qualities: youthful zest, tenacity, strength, manliness and decisiveness, but also modesty, goodness and simplicity. While he possessed some of these qualities in some degree, they recur so often in descriptions because the authors saw what they wanted to see. During the tragic last phase of the Eleventh Battle, Gatti was fascinated by Cadorna’s self- possession: ‘tranquil, serene, rested’, the Supreme Commander appears happy. ‘He speaks slowly, but is sure of himself: he sees nothing but his own thought. Everything that others say or do slides off Cadorna like waves off a rock. It leaves no trace. His energy is simple, primitive, infinite.’ These were hallmarks of true greatness. When Luigi Barzini paid tribute to Cadorna’s magical charisma, he took a cue from the generalissimo’s own tract on tactics, which stated that a ‘firm and indestructible will must descend from above to permeate and assiduously incite all levels of the hierarchy’.
Compared to the cult surrounding Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s, Cadorna’s was modest, even frugal. It is impossible to imagine Cadorna fondling lions for the camera or making his generals sprint in their parade uniforms, sabres and medals a-jangle. For stunts of that kind, D’Annunzio was the model. Cadorna’s aristocratic hauteur, always with an air of noblesse oblige, was quite unlike Mussolini’s chosen style. The Duce’s charisma was crafted to maximise his communication with the masses, something that Cadorna did not have to do and would not stoop to attempt.
Still, there were seeds of the later cult in the earlier. If Cadorna was the first to be acclaimed as Duce or ‘Leader’, the second was D’Annunzio (as ‘commandant’ of the city-state of Fiume in 1919–20), and the last was Mussolini. The press promoted Cadorna as the nation’s best champion, above political squabbling, indeed above politics as such, perhaps to fill a vacuum; for nobody in government could inspire people to sacrifice. Mussolini’s energy, will, dedication, serene self- possession, virility, strength, decisiveness, simplicity, health, youth – and all the rest – dwarfed Cadorna’s. For Fascism was the vitalist regime par excellence, enthroning energy as the gauge of political value and the pretext for what one of its most penetrating critics – writing, as it happens, within a stone’s throw of the Isonzo – would call ‘a permanent revolution, emancipating action from the principle of responsibility, exempting it from the embarrassing specificity of a purpose’.
The most startling form of cultural vitalism was Italian. This was Futurism, launched in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876– 1944) as a campaign to promote new ways of writing poetry, liberated from rhyme and metre. Though he was a gifted writer, Marinetti’s real talent was for publicity and provocation, using his private fortune to win huge exposure for events that would otherwise have gained little attention.
With Napoleonic self-confidence, Marinetti identified a tension in the cultural values of western Europe. Humanism and nationalism had promoted each other while keeping each other in check. An Italian patriot was supposed to take pride in Rome and Venice, Julius Caesar and Michelangelo. Marinetti cancelled the debt to humanism; condemning Venice as a sordid disgrace, he refused to venerate the great artistic achievements of the past. Denouncing tradition, museums, prudence, moderation and peace, the Futurists celebrated dynamism, energy, speed, novelty, mechanisation and violence, the last not so much as a political means, rather as an end in itself. ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the freedom-bringer, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.’ The last phrase was crucial: the Futurists mocked the fear of technology, but fear of women still lurked.
They claimed the Italian national character was innately attuned to life itself, la vita: flexible, quick, anti-intellectual, fiery, sensuous – all Futurist virtues. War was no mournful necessity; it was an incredible expression of energy, a source of renewal, the ultimate happening.1 Futurist events were calculated to outrage and amuse. The flippancy of their declarations was part of a populist style; Marinetti realised that cultural statements can be snappy and accessible like newspaper headlines.
With his moustache, bowler hat and jaunty air, Marinetti looked like a music-hall impresario. Recruits had flocked to his banner and Futurism branched into painting, sculpture, discordant music (‘the art of noises’) and an architecture of ‘fearless audacity’. In Futurist theory, every object has an ‘interior force’ that art should disclose. Seeking forms that could record or embody not fixed moments but dynamic sensations, they produced a few of the most memorable images of twentieth-century art. Bright canvases of charging cavalry, armoured trains, shattering detonations or crowded urban life, rendered with neo- impressionist techniques for splitting the spectrum into planes or dots of primary colour, rendering movement by ‘velocity-lines’ that trace motion through space; these have a permanent place in the great galleries of the world.
The Futurists spat on liberal ideals. According to Antonio Gramsci, the communist leader from Turin, they enjoyed a following among workers before the war. This esteem was not reciprocated. The Futurists proclaimed a contempt for ordinary people that pro-war politicians expressed by their decisions and generals by their tactics. ‘Down with democracy!’ was their refrain. For democracy was slow, middle-aged, the dismal kingdom of slaves. It was fit only for ‘democretins’, not free spirits. Freedom should be the preserve of an élite; it ‘is only for those who know what to do with it and how to live it’. Elected chambers should be abolished: ‘The time has come to finish with parliament. We did not need parliament in order to wage war. We shall know how to make peace without parliament.’ The ‘chamber of plotters, babblers and incompetents’ should be replaced with a ‘technical corps’ that would know how to direct ‘the corporation of the state’. It was a proto– fascist vision.
The Futurists have not lost their power to disturb. Their delight in the mayhem of war offends our conviction that violence must be abominated. We have confined that delight to the realm of simulation and virtual fantasy – the violence of movies and computer games, or the vignettes of real but remote horror delivered by television. Marinetti and his friends proved their commitment in 1914, when they became red-hot interventionists, imploring a ‘great fraternal sacrifice of all Italians’, and raising the temperature of anti-German polemics (for the stolid, collectivised Germans were devoid of Futurist virtues). They were truly prophetic about war and technology; their monstrous vision matched the enormity of what was about to happen. The cartoonish terrorism of their rhetoric showed how difficult it was to escape from the sonorous clichés, genteel emotions and pasteboard décor of Italian culture. In the event, war reunited the Futurists with their old enemies under the banner of aggressive nationalism. Marinetti and D’Annunzio stood side by side, in uniform, despite their artistic differences.
For Marinetti, the war was ‘the culminating and perfect synthesis of progress (aggressive velocity + violent simplificationm …)’, and ‘the most beautiful Futurist poem that has yet seen the light of day’. He became a fairly familiar figure along the Isonzo front; General Capello asked him to give pep talks to the Second Army before the Tenth Battle. What the men made of his ‘violent Futurist speeches’, as he proudly called them, declaiming poems called ‘The Pope’s Aeroplane’ and ‘The Song of the Pederasts’, is not known, though a sardonic officer from Turin told an American Red Cross volunteer that Italy was famous for three things: ‘D’Annunzio because he was immoral, Caruso because he was a bad singer, and Marinetti because he was mad’.
Mad or not, he was persona grata with the more intellectual commanders during the war, such as Capello. While he was the only top-flight commander to challenge Cadorna’s tactics, and often showed better judgement of battlefield realities, Capello was banally conventional in his commitment to frontal offensives. ‘Victory lies beyond the last trench’ was a maxim that must have provoked inward groans among his men. He considered the average Italian soldier was ‘too southern’ to be ‘spontaneously and voluntarily active’, hence ‘his spirit must be warmed to white heat’. Boasting about his own brute strength and ‘splendid optimism’, he liked to remind his officers that his will was their fate. (It was no less than the truth, but why rub it in?) He was notorious for devising an exhausting routine of exercises and fatigue duties for troops out of the line. One regiment was put to laying barbed wire, and suffered twice as many deaths during a week as during 40 days at the front. The commission of inquiry after Caporetto found that the Second Army troops often returned to the line in worse condition than they had left it. Capello wanted the men to look forward to returning to the front line. The main effect was something else: exhaustion and resentment, mounting into hatred.
On 22 April 1917, Marinetti lunched with Capello and his corps commanders. Badoglio ingratiated himself with the celebrity guest: ‘I like your whole campaign against Italian “commemorative patriotism”. I’m with you there. All our wars of independence from ’48 to ’70 only cost about 6,000 dead!’ Capello interrupted: ‘I had more than that at Oslavia’, referring to a village near Gorizia, the site of ferocious fighting. Was the general’s tone sorrowful, thoughtful or proud? Marinetti’s diary does not say. Capello pounced on an officer for using the word ‘hope’. ‘What what what! What was that word?’ Marinetti interjected helpfully: ‘It was a passéist word.’ Capello agreed: ‘Yes, a passéist word. “Hope” indeed! I want victory, and it will be.’
For all the talk of ardour and will, battle turned out to provide above all ‘an experience of supreme helplessness’ for the front-line troops. This was an irony that patriotic vitalists could not afford to admit, even if they let themselves notice it.
The most troubling Futurist artwork is a small sculpture created just before the war by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Ambitious, competitive, with a ‘restless, aggressive mind’, Boccioni wanted Italy to commit itself to ‘ferocious conquest’, and was arrested at an interventionist rally in Milan in September 1914, along with Marinetti. Once he set fire to an Austrian flag in a theatre, a favourite Futurist stunt. Called up in July 1915, he joined Marinetti, the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo, and the Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia in the Lombardy Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists, the only volunteer unit in the army. ‘My Futurist ideals, my love of Italy, and my infinite pride in being Italian drive me irresistibly to do my duty.’ He practised sculpting in dough when the mess sergeant allowed. The Futurists fought bravely, and Boccioni’s diaries record keen exhilaration as well as hunger and cold at their posting high in the Trentino. ‘The life we lead’, he wrote, ‘is a thrilling continuous effort of will.’
Returning to active service in summer 1916, after a long gap, was difficult. Weary, and missing his creative life, he wrote to a friend: ‘Nothing is more terrible than art…. There is only art.’ That, and the bathos of death. A proper Futurist extinction would come while storming a trench, atomised by a heavy calibre shell, or perhaps crushed by an armoured train. Instead, Boccioni, who had been assigned to an artillery regiment, died from injuries sustained after his horse shied at a car. He was not a skilled horseman and reacted to the creature’s panic by digging his new shiny spurs into its flanks. It was an ironic end, nature’s revenge on a champion of mechanistic beauty. If he had lived, he would have surely followed Marinetti into the Fascist Party.
Defiantly titled ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’, like a laboratory specimen, Boccioni’s sculpture is a male figure striding forward, superbly balanced, poised as he thrusts – an emblem of virile determination, needing no weapon because he himself is ‘a living gun’. The angles and planes of his shoulders, spine, hips and thighs convey the tension of a coiled spring. While it recalls the French artist Millet’s striding ‘Sower’ and nods to the Renaissance statue of the warrior Colleoni, and further back to the Winged Victory of Samothrace,2 the figure’s robotic smoothness and anonymity – its ‘reproducibility’ – are modern. The muscled hero strides forward in a nimbus of resolution, invisible currents flaming around his limbs, safe inside the force-field of his will. No wonder that the government of Silvio Berlusconi, bent on impressing the world with Italian vigour, put Boccioni’s figure on one of the new Euro coins in 2002.
Boccioni modelled the piece in plaster; bronze casts were only made after his death. Even so, he knew it was his sculptural masterpiece, the closest he had come to conveying ‘pure plastic rhythm’. Pure in form, however, rather than motive, for his figure is imbued with violent Futurist purpose. It has been compared with Marinetti’s vision of a superman, a ‘nonhuman and mechanical being, constructed for an omnipresent velocity … cruel, omniscient and combative … endowed with surprising organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks’. Boccioni’s figure even has the protrusion ‘in the form of a prow from the outward swell of the breast bone’ that Marinetti foresaw as the evolutionary result of modern life.
Art historians praise its ‘bursting vitality’ and ‘vital tension’ for ‘representing an epoch’, ‘the dynamic anxiety of our time’. This does not go far enough: Boccioni prefigured the infantry attack, not as it really would be, but as generals and intellectuals imagined it. The sculpture was only a year old when its posture began to be replicated by soldiers on the Western Front. In this sense, Boccioni’s nameless, mutilated figure, storming unstoppably ahead, as if propelled by ‘extreme resolution’, was, in Nietzsche’s phrase, born posthumously. And after all, had not Nietzsche himself ruled that ‘the magnitude of an “advance” is even to be measured by the mass of things that had to be sacrificed to it’? In the First World War, the image of infantry as masses of ‘things’ was more than a metaphor. Father Gemelli, who had Cadorna’s ear, argued in his influential studies that a ‘good soldier’ must lose his identity; for the price of complete obedience was depersonalisation, isolated from familiar bonds and affections. With hindsight, Gemelli’s theory and Boccioni’s figure anticipate the Fascist myth of a ‘new Man’, the ‘soldier citizen’ who would be stripped of ‘individual autonomy and consciousness… trained to consider himself as a mere instrument of the State, and prepared to sacrifice his life for it.’ Has a sculpture ever dramatised more memorably its creator’s contempt for the ‘brutalised and cowardly race’ of ordinary people, the ‘rabble whom we must lead into slavery’? Has an omen of the avant-garde ever been fulfilled on such a scale?
It is delightful that the best Italian critique of vitalism should be a comic novel, written in and about Trieste, the powder-keg city itself. Italo Svevo’s masterpiece, The Confessions of Zeno (1923), recounts the decidedly unheroic adventures of a man who is inept, irresolute, unsuited to the battle of life, but generous, and truthful to the paradoxes of his nature, which is also ours. But Svevo wrote his novel in the war’s aftermath. While researching this book, I found one solitary insight about vitalism written at the Italian front. It came from John Dos Passos, the future novelist. He came to Europe in 1916 as a Harvard graduate, naïvely intent on cultural tourism, then volunteered for the American Red Cross. After a few months of driving ambulances on the Western Front, he was transferred to Italy, arriving at the end of 1917. He spent seven months on the plain near Venice, watching the Italians strengthen their defensive line between Padua and the sea. The landscape was dreary in winter, its horizontal lines broken by rows of pollarded trees, ‘black and gnarled in the mist’.
With little to do, time weighed heavily. The war seemed far away; distant gunfire rattled the windows of the café where he wrote letters. Amid the monotony, an air raid was ‘wonderfully exciting … the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earthshaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.’
Dos Passos’s letters and diaries are perceptive in a democratic American vein. The Italian officers’ contempt for the other ranks outrages him; their ‘overbearing nastiness to anyone they don’t lick the boots of is disgusting’. Intrigued by the abstract motives and forces that bind people to the war, he is shocked by the power of nationalism with its ‘patriotic cant’; it is ‘the one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war’. Near the end of his tour, he dropped a startling remark into a letter home: ‘No I believe no more in the gospel of energy – One thing the last year has taught me has been to drop my old sentimentalising over action.’ Among eyewitness accounts from the front, this is a sentence in a million. It took an American volunteer to notice something so fundamental about Italy’s war.
Source Notes
TWENTY The Gospel of Energy
1 ‘calm and steadfast’: Frescura, 139–41.
2 veterans’ memoirs say little about the frontal attack: This impression is confirmed by Isnenghi, who probably knows the veterans’ literature better than anyone. Isnenghi [1997], 285–8.
3 their casualty rates over the war: Bosworth [1996], 66.
4 the ‘absurd’ moment: Bultrini & Casarola, 85.
5 ‘whole body racked by terror’: Bultrini & Casarola, 114, 149, 44.
6 ‘the blood chills before an assault’: Favetti, 113.
7 ‘Those who have not been through’: Lussu, 95.
8 another 25 shot in the buttocks by the carabinieri: Giacomel 2003a, 105.
9 ‘straggler posts’ as a barrier: Sheffield, 74.
10 ‘Voices and shouting on all sides’: Mario Puccini.
11 ‘The outcome of war will always’: Cadorna [1915], 34.
12 ‘Infantry that finds itself under fire’: Cadorna [1915], 28.
13 ‘When a soldier lacks the spirit’: Cadorna to Orlando, 3 November 1917, in Orlando [1960], 501.
14 ‘should proceed without such certainty’: Cadorna [1915], 36, 27.
15 ‘waves’ of men: Cadorna [1915], 31–2.
16 ‘imbued with a determination’: British Army General Staff, 141.
17 ‘the exercise of human qualities’: Howard.
18 the ‘triumph’ of ‘one will’: Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton, in Howard.
19 ‘a conquering state of mind’: Howard.
20 ‘the inner force that cannot be rationally grasped’: Berlin, 317.
30 ‘the political principle of the nineteenth century’: Arendt, 178.
31 a ‘glorious minority’: Missiroli [1932], 22.
32 ‘did not want to become Italian’: Mario Puccini.
33 ‘Outside the struggle’: Russo, 12, 47–8, 153–4.
34 ‘The Italian middle classes wanted to believe’: Sforza [1945], 136.
35 ‘tranquil, serene, rested’: Gatti [1997], 162.
36 Luigi Barzini paid tribute to Cadorna’s: Isnenghi [2005], 191.
37 ‘firm and indestructible will’: Cadorna [1915], Premesse, para.
38 there were seeds of the later cult in the earlier: Isnenghi [1999]; Ventrone [2003], 219.
39 Fascism was the vitalist regime par excellence: Bosworth [2007], 181.
40 ‘a permanent revolution, emancipating action’: Satta, 42.
41 an architecture of ‘fearless audacity’: Antonio Sant’Elia, quoted by da Costa Mayer.
42 they enjoyed a following among workers: Ballo, 369.
43 ‘is only for those who know what to do’: Quotations from Schiavo.
44 a ‘great fraternal sacrifice of all Italians’: Carrà.
45 ‘D’Annunzio because he was immoral’: Dos Passos.
46 ‘splendid optimism’: ‘splendido ottimismo’ was Marinetti’s tribute. Marinetti [1987], 73.
47 twice as many deaths during a week: De Simone, 176.
48 ‘I like your whole campaign’: Marinetti [1978]
49 ‘an experience of supreme helplessness’: Ousby, 84–5.
50 ‘restless, aggressive mind’: Golding’s phrase.
51 ‘ferocious conquest’: Tallarico, 108.
52 ‘My Futurist ideals, my love of Italy’: Tallarico, 127.
53 ‘The life we lead’: Boccioni [1971], 318.
54 ‘a living gun’: from W. H. Auden’s 1937 poem, ‘Wrapped in a yielding air …’ Auden in the 1930s was brilliantly perceptive about vitalism and its ambiguities.
55 the Renaissance statue of the warrior Colleoni: The masterpiece of Andrea del Verrocchio, made around 1480, this equestrian statue stands on a high plinth in Venice.
56 ‘nonhuman and mechanical being’: Marinetti [1971]. The comparison is suggested by an art historian, Marianne Martin.
57 ‘bursting vitality’: Tallarico, facing 121; Ballo, 366.
58 propelled by ‘extreme resolution’: This is how Carlo Salsa interpreted the crouching run of the infantry during an attack. Like Frescura, Salsa was a vitalist intellectual who went on to support Fascism. Salsa; Isnenghi [2005], 239.
59 a ‘good soldier’ must lose his identity: Procacci [2000], 81.
60 Fascist myth of a ‘new Man’: Gentile [1986], 115.
67 ‘brutalised and cowardly race’: From Boccioni’s Open Letter to Papini, dated 1 March 1914. Boccioni [1971], 74
1 The composer Stockhausen’s scandalous comment on the destruction of New York’s twin towers on 11 September 2001 – ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’ – was pure Marinetti.
2 The Futurists were obsessed with the headless statue of Nike, Greek goddess of victory, in the Louvre. Marinetti proclaimed that a racing car was more beautiful, and a plaster reproduction was smashed at the wedding feast of the painter Gino Severini. Were they disturbed because they could not reconcile her contemptible prestige as a cultural treasure with her splendid (Futuristic) attitude of surging and sensuous affirmation?