TWENTY-ONE
If victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons
will grow dull and their ardour will be
damped.
SUN TZU
The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo
Boroević was certain that Cadorna wanted to attack again before the end of 1916. He was right: an attack was planned for early December. On the 7th, a break in the bad weather allowed the artillery to warm up. But the winter soon closed in again and the infantry stood down. (Someone joked that even the weather was Austrian.) According to Cadorna, the troops in the Vipacco valley were drowning in mud. The postponement would last five months. Minor actions flared here and there as the Austrians tried to wrest back the territory they had lost since August. Still, the front was relatively calm and sometimes completely so. General Robertson was struck by the ‘absolute quiet’, broken by an occasional rifle shot: ‘a very different state of affairs from what we were accustomed to on the Western Front’.
Meanwhile, much was happening across Europe that affected the Italian war. Joffre hosted another inter-Allied conference in mid-November, where the chiefs of staff agreed that the Allies’ decisive blow should involve combined offensives in May 1917. Cadorna’s task was to draw the maximum number of Austrian divisions away from the Eastern Front. He was also asked to help the French and British by sending more units to Albania and Salonika. This request was refused, but he pledged to support an offensive in France.
Italy was again treated as capable at best of diversionary action. But things were about to change for the better. When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as British prime minister in early December 1916, he was bent on carrying out what he would call a ‘fundamental reconstruction of Allied strategy on all fronts’. He planned to launch the process at a conference of Allied prime ministers, ministers of war, and chiefs of staff. In the first week of January 1917, the British and French prime ministers travelled to the conference in Rome by train from Paris. Lloyd George was nurturing a pet project with huge implications for the coming year’s campaigns. He wanted Britain and France to lend the Italians so much artillery in the early part of the year, up to 400 medium and heavy guns, that Cadorna would retake the initiative on the Isonzo, capture Trieste, ‘get astride the Istrian peninsula’, and knock out the Austrian fleet. His logic ran like this: the events of 1916, including the bloodbaths on the Somme and at Verdun, had confirmed there was no prospect of breaking through on the Western Front, where both sides had massed their strongest forces. Yet the Allied military leaders were so obsessed with Flanders that they failed to realise how weak Germany’s ally now was; Austria’s subject nationalities were not wholehearted about the war; and it was fighting alone against Italy. If the Italians could land a solid blow, their tottering enemy would have to transfer forces from the Eastern Front, weakening the Germans. This would strengthen the Allies everywhere. In the best of outcomes, the reinvigorated Italians would knock the Habsburg empire out of the war altogether.
While the cabinet agreed to let him float his idea in Rome, Lloyd George was well aware that the British and French military would resist any scheme that diminished the Western Front. The French were now committed to launching a vast offensive no later than April 1917. As conceived by the new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, who had recently replaced Joffre, this could produce a breakthrough that would cripple the Central Powers. Lloyd George, much taken by Nivelle, was ready to accept French leadership in a joint operational command, but Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, bridled at playing second fiddle to ‘a junior foreign commanding officer’, as he complained to the cabinet.
Robertson was also travelling to Rome. Although he and Haig had their differences, they both deplored Lloyd George’s attempts to find a way around the Western Front, and resented his loathing of the doctrine that cost so many lives for so little gain. They were convinced he was toying with public dismay at the scale of killing in Flanders, only pretending not to understand why the enemy must be attacked frontally, where he was strongest. At various times, after all, he had promoted the Balkans, the Eastern Front and the Middle East as alternative theatres. Now he was doing the same with Italy, and Robertson would have none of it. Sensibly, he neither trusted the Italian estimates of their own potential nor believed that Germany would let Austria-Hungary reach a separate peace with the Allies, regardless of how well the reinforced Italians might perform.
In this situation, Lloyd George might have been expected to exercise his legendary powers of persuasion on the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, and his minister of war during their hours on the train. He did nothing of the sort. He did not even show them his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917. When the party reached Rome, he sent the cabinet secretary to brief Cadorna. But the canny Robertson got to him first.
When Lloyd George made his case, next day, the British and French generals’ scepticism was deepened by the overdone praise of Cadorna. The French objected that lending batteries to Italy would jeopardise the Nivelle offensive, so Lloyd George promised that the 300 guns would ‘absolutely’ be returned in good time. When Cadorna’s turn came to speak, he showed no enthusiasm. Guns that had to be returned in May were, he said, not worth having. Haughtily reluctant to plead his own cause, confused by the Anglo-French tensions, and anxious not to raise expectations, he ducked and quibbled. An onlooker who knew him quite well was Sir Rennell Rodd, Britain’s ambassador to Rome. Watching Cadorna pass up a unique chance of substantial Allied support, Rodd reflected that it was a moment when character shapes outcome.
Undaunted, Lloyd George offered to let Cadorna keep the British guns for longer. This off-the-cuff contradiction of policy infuriated Robertson without reassuring Cadorna, who was haunted by the spectre of a second Austrian attack out of the Trentino, dismayed that the Allies would lend no troops, and troubled that he would have to attack, inviting German reprisals, without simultaneous offensives on other fronts. These were not negligible problems, yet another man would have sensed that nothing was to be gained by rubbing a would-be benefactor’s nose in his own shortcomings. Lloyd George did not forgive Cadorna for squandering ‘the most promising chance afforded to him to win a great triumph for his country’. Publicly, however, Italy’s eligibility for military aid was on the table, and the Anglo-French commanders could not wish it off again.
Cadorna’s sense of Austro-German intentions was sound. Conrad could be counted on to argue for a combined attack from the Trentino and across the Isonzo. In December 1916, he had won influential support from the chief of operations at the German Supreme Command. General Ludendorff, however, still rejected the idea. When Conrad raised it again in January, the Germans offered to discuss it after the next Allied offensive.
From Cadorna’s point of view, the danger remained real and present. When the Germans shortened their line in France at the beginning of 1917, he worried that the spare troops would be sent in his direction, and sent urgent pleas to the Allies for 20 divisions plus artillery. Even Robertson conceded that contingency plans for Italy’s defence should be prepared. When he visited the front at the end of March, he was dismayed by the makeshift condition of the defences; it was with a view to bolstering these, not to support an offensive, that planning began in April to move six British divisions to Italy by rail, to strengthen the rear lines around Padua. Also in April, ten British batteries of 6-inch howitzers were despatched to the Carso.
Lloyd George’s argument in Rome is familiar to every scholar of British policy and planning in the war. What has not been clear is the source of his conviction that Italy held the key to a transformation of the war. Robertson decided the whole harebrained scheme was Lloyd George’s invention, of a piece with his detestable ‘indifference to military opinion on military matters’.1
There may be a missing link, in the form of Brigadier-General Charles Delmé-Radcliffe, who led the British Military Mission to the Italian army in the field. Contemptuous of politicians and desk-wallahs, arrogant and rude, jealous of his patch and well regarded by Victor Emanuel, Delmé-Radcliffe resembled the generalissimo himself. His quarrel with the British ambassador in Rome could have been modelled on Cadorna’s feuds with any number of politicians. Long on gossip and short on crisp assessment, his communiqués to the highest levels of government perhaps baffled their recipients. What did Lloyd George make of the telegram of 26 December 1916, warning against alleged anti-war elements in Rome, particularly ‘the Caillaux–Giolitti–Tittoni intrigue’? Or his sideswipe at Sonnino’s ‘suspicious and bargaining nature, due perhaps to the Jewish blood in his veins’? Was Lloyd George impressed by expressions like ‘the internal enemy’ and the promotion of maximal Italian war aims? Whatever the answer, he surely approved Delmé-Radcliffe’s perennial optimism about Italy’s performance, putting the best spin on every setback, lobbying the Prince of Wales and Lord Northcliffe to support calls for Allied machine guns and artillery. ‘I have no doubt that the second phase of the battle will produce even better results than the first phase’, he reported to the War Office in late August 1917, just as the Italians were running out of steam in the Eleventh Battle; ‘All the prospects on the Carso are also satisfactory’, he added in the teeth of all evidence; ‘The spirit of all the Italian troops is excellent’ – an astonishing claim. He maintained that most Italians were strongly pro-war, and blamed ‘this damned anti-war propaganda’ for spreading defeatism.
Although they heartily detested each other, he and Ambassador Rodd saw eye to eye on the need to promote Italy’s cause. Rodd suspected the British of undervaluing Italy’s effort. Asquith, Kitchener and the Prince of Wales had all visited the Supreme Command, but something more was needed to catch the popular interest. As a well-connected mandarin with artistic interests, Rodd persuaded Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and others to tour the front and pay tribute in articles and instant books. Wells opined that ‘Italy is not merely fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion but she is doing a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing in fighting at all.’ Visiting in June 1916, before the Sixth Battle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes saw ‘Trieste or death!’ scrawled on walls all over northern Italy and had a close call with a shellburst. (‘Had the Ostro-Boches dropped a high explosive upon us they would have had a good mixed bag.’) Barred from the Carso, he went to Carnia instead, where the war was ‘a most picturesque business’. Picturesque is the key word in British impressions, usually as part of a comparison with France and Flanders. Kipling was impressed by the feats of engineering in the mountains, as everyone was, and also by the generals he met: ‘wide browed, bull-necked devils, lean narrow hook-nosed Romans – the whole original gallery with a new spirit behind it’. (Comparisons with ancient Romans came naturally to Englishmen with a classical education. Cadorna struck Conan Doyle as ‘an old Roman, a man cast in the big simple mould of antiquity’.) He wrote five cheerleading essays for the Daily Telegraph and the New York Tribune. A sixth article, which mentioned that the Italians had sometimes oversold their military achievements, did not see print.
It was hard even for such prestigious writers to engage the British and American public, when all the Allied armies were making huge efforts amid terrible conditions. What might have caught the British imagination was resounding, unambiguous success on the battlefield. Gorizia was hardly enough. Such success was what Cadorna now set about preparing. He had lost 400,000 dead and wounded in 1916. Proportionally this was an improvement over 1915, but – leaving aside its impact on the survivors’ morale – it left yawning gaps. No fewer than 151 new battalions were created, mostly in the infantry, bringing the total to 860. This was achieved by calling up classes back to 1873 and forward to 1898, while relaxing the entrance qualifications. By spring 1917, Italy had 59 divisions under arms; in all, there were nearly two million men at the front – some 200,000 more than in November 1916. In artillery, the army gained 52 new field batteries, 44 mountain batteries, and 166 heavy batteries. The number of medium and heavy guns doubled over the year to May 1917. (Even then, there were four times more Allied guns per kilometre of the Western Front than Italian guns on the Isonzo.) Trench mortars continued to arrive in large numbers. Even now, production of machine guns and shells lagged far behind needs; during the Tenth Battle, the siege artillery fired six rounds per gun per hour, contrasting with 30 rounds for British guns on the Western Front.
At the front, positions on the Carso and around Gorizia were strengthened. Mount Sabotino was turned into a battery, with dozens of guns hidden in the tunnel complex that the Austrians had excavated below the summit ridge. Sabotino faced Monte Santo across the Isonzo, still held by the Austrians, so the gunners on the two mountains could blast away like men o’ war firing broadsides. The defensive lines in Trentino and the Asiago plateau were strengthened; by spring 1917, there were six lines on the plateau.
Politically, too, Cadorna shored up his position over the winter. By March, he had the cabinet eating out of his hand. Bissolati, his conversion complete, seemed infatuated by him. Another minister referred to him admiringly as il Duce supremo, the ‘supreme Leader’. The problem of troop morale remained. The gloom that settled over the army towards the end of 1916 thickened like fog along the Isonzo valley, and little was done to identify its causes, let alone address them. As the army prepared for another winter, visitors noticed a sullen weariness at the front. A reduction in rations in December did nothing for the soldiers’ spirits. The new year brought several worrying incidents where new recruits protested at the draft. Infantry shouted abuse at passing staff cars. When a journalist mentioned these omens to Cadorna, he waved them away. ‘It is like that everywhere, and of course the soldiers are tired after two years.’ A few serious cases of insubordination had been handled in the only proper way: by shooting the malefactors, ‘to prevent sparks from becoming fires’. The Supreme Command was in denial, the press supported the Supreme Command, and the government was too distracted by its own weakness to challenge their combined version of events: that Italy was on the right track, making steady progress.
As before, the Supreme Command and the government worried that public morale would plummet when the soldiers came home for Christmas. In November, the Ministry of the Interior warned Italy’s regional governors that ‘subversive elements’ might stir up discontent, and even incite men to desert or mutiny. In the event, many men’s leave was cancelled due to anxiety over a possible Austrian attack from Trentino. The public mood was darkening, too, as people suffered the effects of Germany’s submarine blockade of Allied shipping. Butter, sugar and petroleum were running low, rationing was introduced, and a crisis over wheat supplies in summer 1917 would lead to violent demonstrations. Civilian mortality rates climbed, as unheard-of numbers succumbed to malaria and tuberculosis. Nevertheless, the soldiers’ and civilians’ dedication to the struggle remained intact and was bolstered in early April, when the United States of America declared war on Germany. President Wilson had been forced off his neutralist fence by ‘the gross misconduct of the Germans’ in killing American citizens travelling on American and Allied ships. Ordinary Europeans could at last imagine that the war might end.
For the Austrians, the winter began with the death of the old emperor on 21 November. Like their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, this generation of Habsburg soldiers had fought for that slim, impassive figure with his pendulous lip and muttonchop whiskers. Unchanging, utterly dependable, his Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty Franz Josef had personified the empire. ‘Uncle Joe’ was as familiar to the Italians as to the Austrians. All of Italy’s wars of independence had been fought against him. His mystique was irreplaceable, and its loss gradually revealed the empire as being, after all, a state like any other, and sillier than most.
His successor, Karl, nephew of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, married to an Italian princess, realised that the empire was heading for disaster. Whether Austria-Hungary became a vassal of victorious Germany or disintegrated under the shock of defeat, it was probably doomed. His foreign minister, Count Czernin, warned that the army was on the brink of exhaustion, and popular despair might lead to proletarian revolution and national uprising, for the Habsburg Slavs were much affected by the unrest in Russia, which would soon lead to the first of the revolutions that brought down the Tsar.
Karl, an instinctive liberal, relaxed the severe controls on civilian life and marginalised the bellicose Conrad. Abroad, he explored whether he could extricate the empire from the war that threatened to destroy it. By chance, in the same month, December 1916, the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, tried to forestall American intervention on the Allied side by proposing terms to discuss peace. Having crushed Romania, and as Russia was sucked into crisis, the German Supreme Command was in no mood for compromise. With the Kaiser’s acquiescence, Ludendorff attached such tough conditions to the proposal that it became an ultimatum. The result was a minor coup for Allied propaganda.
A week later, President Wilson asked all parties to state their war aims. While Germany reiterated Bethmann Hollweg’s hollow offer, the Allies began to talk about liberating the subject nations of the Habsburg empire – something that had never been a war aim. Alarmed, Karl made sure that the Allies were aware of his interest in a separate peace. Having ousted Conrad in March 1917, he let the Allies know that Austria sought peace on the basis of the restoration of Belgian and (on certain conditions) Serbian independence, and the award of Alsace- Lorraine to France.
French Prime Minister Alexandre Ribot was doubtful, while Lloyd George was intrigued. France and Britain had very few men in the field against Austria-Hungary; even so, they would benefit if Germany were alone on the Eastern Front. A bigger problem with Karl’s initiative was its omission of any reference to Italy, for he opposed any concessions to the ‘traitor’, and argued that the Austrian élite would not accept them in any case. When the Allies said that Rome must be consulted, Karl’s envoy explained that Austria would not give the Italians any territory that they had not conquered. Lloyd George demurred; the Italians should, he said, get the south Tyrol up to Bozen. The envoy wondered if they might not be offered a piece of south-eastern Anatolia instead.
On 19 April, with this crucial point unresolved, the British and French premiers met Sonnino in a railway carriage in the Alps, and – without showing him the emperor’s letter – sounded him on the notion of a separate peace with Austria. Sonnino rejected requests for flexibility over the terms of the Treaty of London. Stubborn, ‘hot-tempered and not easily soothed’, harbouring ‘vast ambitions for Italy, which he hoped to see realised as a result of the combined effort of all the Allies’, he was not much liked in Paris and London. But he was respected; the Allies recognised that he had done more than anyone to bring Italy into the war on their side, and they knew he was the strongest figure in the government. Predictably, Sonnino now insisted that Italy’s war aims necessitated the full defeat of the Central Powers; anything less would dishonour Italy’s fallen. He did not comment on Lloyd George’s suggestion that, with Austria out of the picture, Italy could concentrate on her aims in Asia Minor. Italy had gone to war for the ‘unredeemed lands’; how could it make peace without liberating Trento and Trieste? He warned that Italy would be swept by revolution if the Allies reneged on their Adriatic pledges. While rejecting a separate peace, he pocketed the promise of territory in Anatolia and the port of Smyrna.
Karl’s overtures did not recover from that encounter in the railway carriage. Back in London, digesting his second Italian snub since the start of the year, Lloyd George told the cabinet that Italy might be ‘compelled’ to accept an Allied agreement with Austria. He was reluctant to destroy Karl’s illusion, just as he refused to give up the idea of supporting the Italians with guns. For now, however, Sonnino prevailed, at the price of confirming London’s view that Italy’s claims were ‘unjust and unrealistic’.
When Cadorna learned about these feelers at the end of April 1917, he demanded assurances that nothing would prevent the army’s ‘imminent operations’. Boselli gave his word and urged Cadorna to make the next action ‘decisive, in the sense that it virtually gives us Trieste’. By this time, the Eastern Front too had fallen quiet. Spinning in the vortex of revolution, Russia had lost its tsar in March. The offensive capacity of its army was dwindling fast, and the Central Powers stood back. Germany fuelled the fire with propaganda (telling the Russian soldiers that their government was against peace) and by helping Bolshevik exiles to return to Russia. (Lenin had reached St Petersburg three days before the secret summit in the Alps.) The prospect of Austrian divisions transferring to the Italian front, and the hope of inducing Cadorna to support their offensive in France, spurred the Allies to lend Cadorna 100 heavy guns.
Domestically, Austria was in dire straits. There had been food riots as early as 1915, and the harsh winter of 1916–17 aggravated shortages. Hunger was widespread; by March 1917, soldiers were volunteering for the front in order to get the better rations that were served in the line. Hungary supplied the army with grain, but not Austrian civilians. Economic conditions worsened; industrial output declined sharply over 1917. So many miners had been drafted that coal was in short supply.
The military picture was mixed. Romania had been subdued by the end of 1916, and Russia’s internal crisis almost paralysed the Eastern Front. (A final botched offensive in the summer would finish off the Russian army.) On the Italian front, patches of territory around Gorizia were reclaimed in minor actions over the winter. The new defensive line down to Hermada was completed. Turning the Carso’s geology to excellent account, the Austrians concealed billets, munitions and telephone wires deep in the limestone. The Imperial forces had taken 1,700,000 casualties during 1916, however, and there was no way to replace them. In the short term, transfers from Galicia could make up Boroević’s shortfall, but they would not close the widening gap with the Italians.
On 1 February, General Nivelle visited Cadorna, seeking assurances that Italy would attack when the French and British offensive commenced in April. Cadorna, bristling at the Frenchman’s careless reference to ‘the hills’ on the upper Isonzo, was not to be drawn. He still feared an Austrian attack out of Trentino.
Launched on 16 April, the Nivelle offensive went badly. Fielding 174 divisions, the Allies took almost 350,000 casualties before the operation was halted in mid-May. On 20 April, the French military attaché in Udine demanded that Cadorna must attack ‘très instamment’. He was told that the offensive could not begin before early May. For the Italians had to transfer artillery from Trentino to the Isonzo, which could not be done until the Supreme Command was confident that the Austrians would not attack. In fact the Supreme Command had already assessed that this risk was acceptable, and detailed planning for the Tenth Battle was in hand. As Cadorna intended the next offensive to be decisive, it would be much more ambitious than the campaigns of autumn 1916. On the Carso, the Third Army would drive once again towards the Trstelj–Hermada line. Further north, three corps would target the heights behind Gorizia. General Capello, who was rehabilitated in March, would lead these corps. Cadorna had decided he could not do without Capello; he might be ‘a rogue’, but his energy and flair made him irreplaceable.
The Tenth Battle has to be understood in terms of ridges and summits. Mount San Gabriele, east of Gorizia, stands as an isolated summit. Monte Santo, further north, is the southern tip – and highest point – of a ridge that runs south-east for six or seven kilometres from Hill 383, above the Italian bridgehead at Plava. On its three other sides, Monte Santo falls away steeply. Italian shelling had reduced the church and monastery on its summit to ruins.
The battle would start on the Carso. After several days, the onus would switch to the 12 divisions under Capello’s Gorizia Zone Command. Five days later, when Boroević had taken forces away from the Carso to strengthen the lines north of Gorizia, Capello would send 200 guns to the Carso, so that the Third Army could attack a depleted enemy. If Boroević did not take the bait, he would risk losing ground north of Gorizia, where the Austrians were vulnerable. The sole exceptions were Hill 383 above Plava and Monte Santo itself, both swathed with wire, riddled with caverns, and defended by batteries in the rear. Elsewhere, the trenches were shallow and discontinuous, and the positions exposed.
Capello proposed an audacious variation on this plan. He would attack across the river between Plava and Tolmein, creating a new bridgehead 10 kilometres north of Hill 383. The shortest route to Monte Santo lay southwards across arid highlands called the Bainsizza plateau.2Reasonably, Boroević had assumed that the Italians would not dedicate major resources to breaking onto the Bainsizza, which had played no part in the war. If Capello could get substantial forces onto the Bainsizza, they would have several clear days to drive down behind Monte Santo and Mount San Gabriele, outflanking the Austrians all the way to the Vipacco valley. At the same time, he would attack the ridge between Plava and Monte Santo, east of the Isonzo. Secondary attacks would take place further south, between Gorizia and the Vipava valley.
As usual, Italian deserters were Boroević’s best source of information. In early May, they swore that a major operation was imminent. Thanks to transfers from the Eastern Front, the Habsburg army on the Isonzo comprised 200,000 men in 215 battalions, with 1,700 machine guns and over 1,300 artillery pieces. Still outnumbered by roughly two to one, they were a ragtag force in some ways, with scrappy uniforms and worn-out weapons. Yet they were still disciplined and resolute, aware that any retreat on the Carso would threaten the empire and open the way to Italian conquest of the Slovene lands and Dalmatia.
The initial bombardment, when it started on 12 May, was more intense than anything the Austrians had seen before. With more than 3,000 guns, it was on a scale familiar in France and Flanders, and it built to a fearsome climax. Crossing into the Isonzo valley at dawn on the 14th, the Scottish Quaker volunteer George Barbour was struck by the contrast between the serenity of the Bainsizza plateau, stretching away in front of him, and ‘this extraordinary strip of hell, right down 2,000 feet below like a volcanic rift in the ground, full of noise and black smoke with the silver stream of the river waggling like a snake in the underbrush’. Descending towards Plava,
… the road seems to be going straight down into a cauldron, screened alternately on left and right by wicker screens as it zigzags. At one point I stopped the car and looked down through a gap in the screening right down onto the nose of Monte Kuk which was having a heavy dose from the Italian large calibre guns, so that the [Austrian] trench line stood out as the base of a continuous smoking wall of dirty black fumes.
Zero hour followed at 12:00. By now, the mercurial Capello had been convinced by intelligence reports that a frontal assault on the ridge to Monte Santo held the key to glory. Five regiments were launched against the lone Habsburg battalion on Hill 383. Outnumbered by 15 to 1, the Austrians still inflicted 50 per cent casualties on the attackers before succumbing. Italian interdiction fire played a part: reinforcements could not reach the beleaguered defenders. A kilometre to the south, the Avellino Brigade crossed the Isonzo and wiped out the Dalmatian infantry of the 22nd Regiment. So violent were these clashes that the Avellino took 60 per cent casualties, losing 3,000 men.
The next summit along the ridge was Mount Kuk, a steep-sided cone with excellent sight-lines into the Isonzo valley. The Florence Brigade, edging up the hillside, was held at bay. Better results were achieved further south, on Monte Santo. After a devastating bombardment, involving the batteries hidden in the summit of Sabotino, the Austrians could not resist the Campobasso Brigade. The summit was taken but could not be held. For the next 24 hours, attackers and counter- attackers chased each other across the summit in increasingly ragged waves. As for the new bridgehead north of Kanal, Capello decided to spare only two battalions for this bold action. They crossed the river easily but could not penetrate the Bainsizza. There would be no flanking operation behind the Kuk–Vodice–Monte Santo ridge.
On the central Carso, the Duke of Aosta threw 60 battalions at the fortified line beyond the Vallone, aiming to deepen the salient that was carved out during the Ninth Battle. The Duke had dramatically increased the reserves, ready to exploit any success. But there was nothing to exploit. To their amazement, the Italians found they were outgunned on the central Carso. With their usual pinpoint accuracy, the Austrian batteries barred the way. Halfway through the second day, the Third Army’s losses stood at 25,000 men. The offensive was scaled down.
At this point, the feeling at the Supreme Command was that Capello had made ‘very slight progress’ at a heavy price: 5,000 or 6,000 dead and wounded in three days. Cadorna was rattled. He had not expected such fierce resistance. Accusations were flung around, and heads rolled. In keeping with his original plan, Cadorna was minded to halt operations on the middle Isonzo and bolster the Third Army with mobile batteries. Capello promised that if he could keep the 200 medium and heavy guns, he would capture Vodice and Monte Santo. Cadorna let himself be talked around. As soon as Monte Santo had fallen, the guns would be sent to the Third Army.
Capello’s flaws were on a scale with his talent. By letting him sweep aside the sober assessment of tactical realities, Cadorna reduced the prospects of a breakthrough on the Carso. For a couple of days, Capello made impressive progress. Kuk fell on the 17th. Fresh forces attacked the line below Mount Vodice, the last peak before Monte Santo itself. On the 18th, several Italian divisions attacked a few thousand Austrians, remnants of various regiments. The Italians were separated from the summit ridge by 250 metres of open ground, with rudimentary defences – no wire or foxholes – but enfiladed by machine guns. Despite immense losses, they pushed the Polish militiamen off the summit in the late afternoon. There was no breakthrough, however: the Italians were stopped on the ridge, unable to push down its eastern flank. At the same time, Capello’s secondary action – further south, along the six-kilometre front between Monte Santo and the Vipava valley – came to nothing. He had hoped that surprise would compensate for the lack of artillery preparation or support. Predictably, the Italians were driven back with heavy losses.
Early on the 20th, Capello’s artillery opened up against Monte Santo. Ten or twelve waves of infantry were flung uphill. Eventually the Italians overran the summit, only to be forced back yet again by a counter-attack. Vodice had fallen at last, but efforts to proceed along the ridge to Monte Santo were unavailing. With the men back in their jumping-off line, Capello called a halt, judging that exhaustion had cancelled the advantage of numbers.
A price was paid for rewriting the battle plan. For Cadorna’s original gambit had succeeded. Boroević reacted to the preparatory bombardment on the middle Isonzo by correctly suspecting a diversion from the Carso. When the infantry attacked the Kuk–Monte Santo ridge on the 14th and 15th, however, he changed his mind and rushed five divisions up to the ridge and the Bainsizza plateau. By 18 May, the Austrian force on the central Carso was cut to a single division. But the Third Army was unable to take advantage; it sat on its hands while Capello failed to capture Monte Santo.
On the 23rd, the Third Army batteries belatedly opened the second phase of the battle. Although still lacking those 200 extra guns, the shelling was fiercer than anything before on the Carso. Supported from the air and by floating batteries at the mouth of the Isonzo, the infantry’s surprise attacks on the 24th and 25th widened the salient, rolling over three Austrian lines to capture a band of territory two kilometres deep from the central Carso to the sea. The Austrians melted away in front of the Italian right. Habsburg prisoners reported a crisis of morale, yet the Austrians did not buckle. The Third Army was still several kilometres from the Hermada–Trstelj line, but real progress had been made. By the 26th, Boroević was moving units south from Gorizia to contain the Italian thrust. A few extra regiments were transferred from the Tyrol, and the Germans allowed the Austrian high command to transfer two more divisions from the Eastern Front. Meanwhile the Italians ran out of energy and resolve, and almost out of shells, just when the enemy was at the point of collapse.
The Austrians would, though, have the last word. On 4 June, Boroević used his reinforcements from the East to launch surprise attacks north of Hermada, regaining some of the ground lost to the Third Army. The Italian losses were huge: 22,000 men, including 10,000 prisoners. Rumour had it that three regiments had surrendered without fighting, complete with their officers and equipment. Cadorna railed at the treachery of men who chose surrender rather than death. Privately, he wished he could ask Boroević to have them flogged. Officially, he wrote a furious letter to Prime Minister Boselli, blaming the government for laxity towards domestic opponents of the war.3 After three weeks, the Italians had taken more than 150,000 casualties, including 36,000 killed. The Austrians had only 7,300 killed.
One of the last operations in the Tenth Battle took place on 28 May, near a tiny place called San Giovanni, on the coast road to Trieste. A church in a grove of trees, a few houses, a war memorial: if you blink, you miss it. Below the road, Italy’s shortest river surges from under a limestone cliff. This is the Timavo: green, glassy, gelid, some thirty metres across and scarcely a couple of kilometres long, but deep.
The advance since 24 May had stalled here. Inland, the Austrians held firm on the Hermada massif. Ahead, the way was blocked by Hill 28, a thinly wooded knoll on the coast. A battalion of the 77th Infantry, the ‘Tuscan Wolves’, would cross the river on plank bridges below Hill 28 and capture it. A detachment would then cross two kilometres of low, open ground to the cliff-top village of Duino and hoist a huge Italian flag on the castle ramparts. The Italians of Trieste would take heart while the Austrians lost it.
The chances of success were negligible. The ground on both sides of the Timavo was a dreary marsh, with no tree cover. It would be impossible to infiltrate enough men across a plank bridge, under fire, quickly enough to reach the target. Even if by a double miracle the Italians took the hill and reached Duino castle, their flag would have been invisible from Trieste, nearly 20 kilometres away.
This ridiculous plan was partly conceived by a 54-year-old captain in the Novara Lancers – none other than Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s celebrity bard and all-round decadent. Sharing the Futurists’ fascination with aeroplanes, he had made daring flights over Austrian territory. He also milked events for personal publicity, lobbying far and wide for medals. He admired Cadorna, composing odes in his honour. Unofficially, many in the army found him comical and even hateful.
For this operation D’Annunzio was adjutant to the battalion commander, a Major Randaccio. The poet’s diary is thick with omens. The weather is overcast, threatening rain. The men are exhausted after ‘suffering and fighting for 24 days!’ Only one of the planned bridges has been constructed: a line of planks 40 centimetres wide lashed to oil drums, with no handrail or cable. Observers have spotted barbed wire and snares on the objective. The ‘enormous difficulties’ have disheartened Randaccio: ‘He does not seem to have much faith. I comfort him.’ Rumours that the operation may be postponed send D’Annunzio hurrying to the high command, where he gains instant access to the Duke of Aosta, and authorisation to proceed.
Back at the Timavo, he can see the lightning conductor on the castle of Duino. The river fascinates him, and he is thrilled to see soldiers washing where mythical Castor or Pollux once watered a white horse. He is woken at a quarter to midnight from a delicious dream of his lover’s breasts. (She is a Triestine lady, installed in Venice with complaisant husband.) Off in single file to the riverbank, with the poet carrying the flag. A small force manages to cross the planks under fire and some men reach the hilltop but cannot secure it. Randaccio sends for re inforcements which, as ever, are lacking. Austrian machine gunners concealed on the hillside enfilade the river bank and bridge.
When the remaining troops on the riverbank see what they are expected to do, forty of them mutiny. Tying white shirts to their bayonets, they shout back at the officers who call them cowards. ‘We don’t want to be led to the slaughter!’ ‘Even the men who were taken prisoner write that it’s fine in Austria!’ The men who reached the hilltop are surrendering. Randaccio orders a retreat. Men stagger back across the planks, under fire. Some fall into the water. D’Annunzio, who apparently has not crossed though the official bulletin will say otherwise, helps them to clamber out. Randaccio is badly wounded; the poet pillows his bleeding head on the flag.
The survivors’ sullen faces make D’Annunzio wonder if these ‘traitors’ will shoot him. Consoled by the certainty that any Italian blade or bullet will turn into diamond the moment it pierces his heart or shatters his brow, he is determined to punish the renegades. For he is convinced the objective could have been held if only ‘a small unit of real men’ had got there. So he orders the nearest battery to fire on the column of Italian prisoners across the river. Later, he notes that ‘battle leaves in the sensual man a melancholy similar to that following great pleasure’. The infantry feel sad as well, though in a different way. The impact of this fiasco on their morale can be gauged from the fact that 800 officers and men of the Puglie Brigade surrendered on the Timavo later on the 29th, complete with rifles and knapsacks.
D’Annunzio alone profited from the operation, futile even by Cadorna’s standards: a miniature version and indictment of the great offensives that had cost half a million casualties. For D’Annunzio was a propagandist more than a soldier, and propaganda is a realm where gesture is substance and words are deeds. The Timavo operation was a gesture, and in his terms it succeeded brilliantly, culminating beside Randaccio’s grave in Aquileia, where the poet gave an oration that launched the major’s posthumous career as a legend. The Duke of Aosta had copies of the speech distributed to the men of the Third Army.
Randaccio fulfilled the poet’s criteria of heroism: leading a ‘heroic’ action, dying in the attempt, then depending on the poet for transfiguration. On his deathbed, Randaccio begged for the capsule of poison that he knew the poet always carried into battle. He asked three times and was, biblically, thrice refused. Why? D’Annunzio explained in his funeral oration: ‘It was necessary that he suffered so that his life could become sublime in the immortality of death.’ Legend also required a final, ruthless illusion; D’Annunzio swore to the dying man that Hill 28 had been taken and held, making Randaccio ‘the victor’. For a loser to die in battle was merely banal; for a winner to do so, on the other hand, was ‘beautiful’. His reported last words, inevitably, were ‘Viva l’Italia.’
The action was written up rapturously in the official bulletin, which stated that the ‘audacious few’ were ordered to retreat on the brink of achieving their objective, despite ‘the violent storm of bullets’. Surprisingly, D’Annunzio’s biographers make little of this episode, even the boast about firing at his own men. Maybe they suspect he made it up, though he had the rank to do it and was vicious enough. It would, also, have been fully in keeping with Cadorna’s notion of military discipline.4 Perhaps he invented Randaccio’s deathbed scene. What he did not fabricate was the pointless slaughter of the men of the 77th Infantry. Yet the poet’s irresponsibility pales beside that of the Duke of Aosta and the Supreme Command, seduced out of thought by charisma, whether Capello’s blustery vitalism or D’Annunzio’s flattering glamour.
A greatly outnumbered and completely multiethnic Habsburg force – comprising Dalmatians, Ruthenes, German Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs and Poles – had repulsed the biggest Italian attack yet mounted. Austrian artillery fire was still accurate and effective against regiments that still advanced slowly over difficult terrain, in compact masses. The Austrians, by contrast, used highly mobile assault forces, which proved their worth during counter-attacks.
Following events from his cell, the implacable Colonel Douhet concluded that the Tenth Battle had failed to achieve a single strategic goal. Gorizia had not been secured, key objectives on the Carso or the coast had not been captured and the Hermada massif had not been touched, let alone conquered. More surprisingly, this bleak judgement was echoed at the highest level of command. The Duke of Aosta, leading the Third Army, cut an imposing figure. Tall, handsome, melancholy, he was not given to airing controversial views or large conceptions. The bright young things around Cadorna at the Supreme Command thought he was diffident and dull-witted. Colonel Gatti, the brightest of the bright, liked him but judged him ‘uncultured’ because his grammar was faulty.
When the two men met on the evening of 26 May, Gatti was startled to hear the Duke say that, while the battle had gone well, at this rate it would take more than ten years to win the war. Final victory could only come by crushing the Central Powers, which would always recover from smaller defeats. But how could this be achieved? People had had enough of the war; at some point they would rebel. The Allies could not be expected to give more help. The army would press ahead, taking bits of territory here and there, until the peoples of the warring states cried ‘Enough!’
He is absolutely right, Gatti thought. There is no military solution. American intervention may make a difference, but who knows when? This hopeless vista was widely shared. The mood on the Isonzo front was resigned, or worse. The journalist Rino Alessi wrote to his editor on 6 June that the troops seemed ‘depressed beyond measure’. Gatti was haunted by something the commander of the 120th Infantry told him at the end of the battle. ‘They did not rebel: when they were pushed out of the trenches, they went; but they wept.’ Something new is starting to appear, Gatti reflected in his diary, something that was not there at the beginning of spring. The Tenth Battle had knocked the stuffing out of the army. It might carry on like this for months or years, just like – so they say – in Germany and Austria, where each illusion of victory has yielded to the next, down to the present day. Or it might not. He wondered if the Italians were still paying for Cadorna’s original decision not to attack the Tyrol in 1915. For the Tenth Battle had involved fewer than half the Italian divisions: ‘149 splendid battalions and 500 guns’ remained in Trentino.
The Tenth Battle had a codicil elsewhere, far from the Carso. The Austrian counter-attack around Hermada in early May led Cadorna to bring forward a long-planned offensive on the Asiago plateau. After the failure of the Punishment Expedition in 1916, the Austrians had not been driven off the plateau. In fact, they re-created their strategic advantage on the Isonzo, by holding firm on a chain of hills that bisected the plateau. The northern end of this chain overlooks the Sugana valley, like the gable end of a house that towers 2,000 metres high. This is Ortigara, a wilderness as rocky as the Carso but steeper, and with even better sight-lines onto the approaches.
Cadorna’s first assault, in November 1916, had come to nothing. Now he resolved to overwhelm the Austrians with sheer weight of shells and men. A new force was created for this purpose, the Sixth Army, under General Mambretti. Eventually the date of 20 June was set; Mambretti would have 200,000 men with 100,000 reserves. When the Austrians counter-attacked on the Carso, the attack was brought forward to 9 June. On the 7th, the weather turned: summer storms lashed the plateau. The following day, a mine under the Austrian front line exploded a day early, killing 130 Italians. By this point, the Austrian action on the Carso had petered out, so Mambretti could have reverted to his original timetable. Instead he attacked on the 10th. The target was a chain of four peaks that had to be approached over open, steep terrain.
It was a catastrophe: Italy’s equivalent of the first day on the Somme. Low cloud cover meant that Italy’s 430 guns and 220 mortars could not target the enemy wire. The general commanding the division directly below Ortigara realised the implications, and asked permission to delay the assault. This was refused by Mambretti, who was unaware that, as on the Carso, the Austrians had abandoned their trenches and excavated deep caverns for men and artillery, often three metres under the surface. The Austrian gunners on the adjacent summits had excellent sight of the Italian positions and the ground where the Sixth Army had to pass.
At 15:00 hours the men of 52nd and 29th Divisions went over the top. Torrential rain had turned the mountainsides to quagmires. The effect was like flypaper: the infantry were trapped under the machine guns, in front of intact wire. Some battalions took 70 per cent losses. After three waves of attack, progress was made elsewhere on the line, at immense cost. The survivors spent the night on the mountainside, trapped in front of the wire, pressing their bodies into the gaps between boulders, playing dead under Austrian flares, waiting for the order to retreat. No order came. Next day the clouds closed in again, and rain turned to snow on the heights. Cadorna arrived after lunch with his entourage, fresh from their hotel. Even Gatti was incredulous: ‘He is perfectly calm, serene, even smiling. He discusses the fighting yesterday with Mambretti as if everything had gone splendidly.’ The two men agree that yesterday’s little difficulties will be investigated. If they can be overcome, the offensive will be re-launched. The men stay on the mountainside for eight days. When the skies clear on 18 June, the artillery opens up and the infantry attack again, with air support from Caproni bombers. That afternoon the clouds return. Next day, men of the 52nd Division hack their way to the summit of Ortigara with daggers and bayonets, capturing a thousand prisoners and several guns. They hang on until the 25th, resisting bombardments and counterattacks, until stormtroopers sweep them off with gas and flame-throwers. The Austrians repeat their success elsewhere on the line. On the evening of the 29th, Mambretti orders a withdrawal to the original positions. The Italians have taken at least 25,000 casualties over the 19 days of the battle, on a front of three kilometres, for no gains whatever.
A captain in the Alpini, Paolo Monelli, recalled that when the last enemy bombardment stopped,
… a vast silence spreads … Then groans from the wounded. Then silence once more. And the mountain is infinitely taciturn, like a dead world, with its snowfields soiled, the shell-craters, the burnt pines. But the breath of battle wafts over all – a stench of excrement and dead bodies.
The Supreme Command blurred the scale of the disaster, calling in favours from journalists to help conceal the casualties and withholding an internal report from the government. Despite privately admitting that it had been a ‘proper fiasco’, Cadorna’s analysis was predictably coarse. The infantry, he complained, did not attack as they should have done, they had no faith, they were indecisive, they lacked ‘dash’, the famous slancio.
This same infantry would supply the battle’s most durable legacy, in the form of trench songs:
Battalion of all the dead,
We swear to save Italy …
When the battalion goes back to the valley,
there will be no soldiers left …
At the end of the century, still an emblem of pointless carnage, Ortigara inspired a new anti-war song:
My granddad went to Ortigara,
Nineteen years old, in Alpino green …
Source Notes
TWENTY-ONE Into a Cauldron
1 According to Cadorna: Cadorna [1921], 329.
2 his memorandum outlining Allied options for 1917: The relevant portion is excerpted in Lloyd George, 1422–5.
3 Rodd reflected that it was a moment: ‘Cadorna need not have considered the obligation to return the guns as an insuperable obstacle, inasmuch as, if the Austrian defences had been successfully broken, the operations would obviously not have been arrested and the enemy man-power on the Western front would probably have been proportionately diminished.’ Rodd, chapter XIII, ‘Rome 1916–1917’.
4 What has not been clear is the source of his conviction: In his exhaustive study of Lloyd George’s wartime premiership, John Grigg merely observes that his ‘thoughts turned to the idea of an offensive on the Italian front’ during December 1916. Grigg, 25.
5 ‘indifference to military opinion’: Robertson, 203.
6 well regarded by Victor Emanuel: Bosworth [1979], 265.
7 four times more Allied guns per kilometre: Dalton, 29.
8 during the Tenth Battle, the siege artillery: Dalton, 29.
9 the ‘supreme Leader’: Rocca, 191.
10 new recruits protested at the draft: Sema, vol. II, 70.
11 ‘subversive elements’ might stir up discontent: Sema, vol. II, 70.
12 ‘the gross misconduct of the Germans’: Secretary of State Lansing. Seymour [1935], 143.
13 ‘hottempered and not easily soothed’: Lloyd George, vol. 4, chapter 61.
14 ‘unjust and unrealistic’: Rothwell, 117.
15 ‘imminent operations’. Boselli gave his word: Sema, vol. II, 101.
16 ‘very slight progress’: Ojetti, 378.
17 ‘fought well until their generals’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 30.
18 the official bulletin will say otherwise: The Official Bulletin of the Supreme Command, 29 May 1917, 44.
19 ‘battle leaves in the sensual man’: D’Annunzio [2002], 360.
20 800 officers and men of the Puglie Brigade: Gatti [1997], 44.
21 ‘They did not rebel’: Gatti [1997], 48.
22 It might carry on like this for months: Gatti [1997], 48
23 ‘He is perfectly calm, serene’: Gatti [1997], 76.
24 The Supreme Command blurred the scale: De Simone, 178.
25 ‘proper fiasco’: Cadorna [1967], 207.
26 The infantry, he complained, did not attack: Gatti [1997]; ‘slancio’ is from Cadorna [1967], 206.
27 a new anti-war song: ‘Mio nonno parti per l’Ortigara, / Dicianovenne, vestito da Alpino’, by Chiara Riondino. Text available at http://www.obiezione.it/antiwarsongs.html, accessed in May 2007.
1 Explaining this harsh judgement, Robertson added: ‘For two years past he [Lloyd George] had repeatedly shown that he regarded British methods of making war as commonplace, costly, and ineffective.’ Perhaps it took a field marshal to overlook so grandly the chance that readers might share Lloyd George’s opinion.
2 Given the pitch and roll of the gradients, the name ‘plateau’ is misleading (as it is for the ‘Asiago plateau’). Mountainous by British standards, the Bainsizza was almost a trackless wilderness – there were no proper roads and very few paths. And it was almost waterless.
3 A full account of these surrenders did not appear until 1938. Even after their line was broken and they were encircled from the rear, the Italians had ‘fought well until their generals were killed and they were completely cut off’.
4 Among the documented cases of a corps firing on its own men, the most notorious involved a company of the Salerno Brigade. On 1 July 1916, this company was caught in no-man’s land after repulsing an Austrian attack above the Isonzo. Pinned down by machine guns, more than 200 men were unable to move or be helped, even at night. After a couple of days, voices in the Italian front line shouted that the men should surrender to save themselves. When some of the survivors crawled towards enemy lines, the corps commander carried out to the letter Cadorna’s directive of September 1915, ordering machine-gun and artillery fire against the deserters.