TWENTY-TWO
The power of punishment is to silence, not to
confute.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–84)
Summary Justice in Cadorna’s Army
By July 1917, the Catanzaro Brigade was brittle with exhaustion. The southern peasants who made up the 141st and 142nd Infantry had fought on the Carso and the Asiago plateau for two years, taking heavy casualties. Many men had not received a fortnight’s leave since the winter of 1915–16. Rations were bad and scanty. Bloody losses on Mount Hermada at the end of the Tenth Battle left the survivors depressed and desperate for rest.
After more than forty days at the front, the brigade was relieved and sent to the village of Santa Maria la Longa, a logistics base of the Third Army. Word had it that the Catanzaro would be sent to Carnia or the Dolomites – mountain sectors, relatively quiet after the Carso. Instead, it was ordered back to Hermada after a few days. Furious muttering in the barracks tipped into open revolt, involving both regiments but centred on 6th Company of the 142nd Infantry. Shots were fired. The mutiny was contained with cavalry, armoured cars and light field artillery, despatched by Third Army headquarters. Even so, eleven men died, including two officers. A third officer had a lucky escape, for, according to one version of events, a band of rebels went to a nearby villa where they thought Gabriele D’Annunzio was staying, crying ‘Death to D’Annunzio!’ Luckily for himself, the poet was staying at a nearby airfield, preparing a bombing raid over Istria.
Next day, 28 men were charged with rebellion and executed on the spot. Of these, 12 were chosen by lot from 6th Company. Another 123 were sent for court martial. It was not the brigade’s first clash with military justice, but it was by far the worst. Historians describe the episode at Santa Maria as the only real mutiny in the Italian army through out the war. D’Annunzio hurried back to witness the executions. The men were lined against a cemetery wall beside a field of maize, chanting a hymn or prayer. Nettles grew by the wall. ‘Sultry heat. Skylarks singing.’ Short, dark-skinned, the men come from Campania, Calabria, Puglia and Sicily. The poet looks away as their bodies slump to the ground. His notes include no emotional response, merely details after the event: ‘helmets, shreds of brain swarming with flies, and dried rivulets of blood’. Writing up the experience later, he addresses the dead men: ‘You are peasants. I know you by your hands. I know you by your way of planting your feet on the earth. I do not want to know if you were innocent or guilty. I know you were valiant, I know you were true.’ Like Major Randaccio, they are sublimated by extinction.
D’Annunzio’s indifference to the men’s innocence or guilt was in Cadorna’s own spirit. What mattered was the deterrent effect. Other commanders-in-chief during the First World War shared this instrumental view of military justice. They, too, were angry when the penal code hindered the swift application of extreme measures, especially against deserters. What set Cadorna apart was his assumption that he was entitled to adapt the justice system to his convenience.
The Supreme Command’s directives on discipline passed from severity to depravity. Cadorna’s first directive to the army, on 19 May 1915, was wholly concerned with discipline. Order, authority and obedience would be maintained with indestructible firmness. Unit commanders would be held responsible if they hesitated to apply ‘extreme measures of coercion and repression’. The implied threat of summary execution became explicit in a September directive. ‘The summary justice of the bullet’ awaited anyone who tried to surrender or retreat, instead of ‘taking the way of honour that leads to victory or death’. Whoever escaped this ‘salutary justice’ would face court martial, then execution in front of their comrades.
Within a few months, Cadorna had the court-martial system in his sights. He openly deplored the courts’ reluctance to pass capital sentences, and called for maximum severity. The Justice Department at the Supreme Command followed up with a statement that proper courts martial should only be convened if they were sure to pass severe sentences. Otherwise, improvised tribunals in the field would suffice, with no requirement for a military magistrate to take part, and sentences that could not be appealed
The crisis caused by Conrad’s attack in spring 1916 hardened Cadorna’s views still further. On 26 May, as the Austrians poured across the Asiago plateau, an infantry regiment was routed. When several hundred men failed to regroup, Cadorna urged the immediate execution of any soldier whose actions were ‘unworthy of an army that upholds the cult of military honour’, regardless of rank. The letter was given the widest circulation. When the missing men crept back to their position next day, the colonel commanding the regiment chose 12 members of the company by lot and had them shot for desertion. For this achievement he was mentioned in the daily bulletin – the first officer singled out for this honour. It was the first documented case of decimation, a punishment that became the dreadful emblem of Italian military justice. Historically, decimation was the Roman practice of killing every tenth member of a mutinous legion. When Cadorna revived the ancient term, he did not insist on this ratio. What mattered was the procedure of pulling names out of a helmet or knapsack, practically guaranteeing that innocent men would die. This, the most unacceptable element of decimation, was the one that Cadorna most prized. When the soldiers realised that they could be murdered randomly, regardless of their individual actions, if their unit offended their commanding officer, they would be terrified into complete obedience.
This was Cadorna’s theory, presented with his usual candour in a letter to Salandra in January 1916, regretting that the military penal code did not authorise decimation to punish serious collective offences. After the mass desertions at the end of the Tenth Battle, he complained to Boselli that this punishment had been ‘irresponsibly’ deleted from the penal code. In fact, decimation had never been mentioned in the code. He took it on himself to authorise this ‘supreme act of repression’: a November 1916 directive stated that commanding officers had the duty to decimate guilty units. This caused a commotion that rippled as far as Rome; Cadorna wrote to Boselli on 20 November, protesting that all armies practised decimation. This was false. While the drawing of straws was not unknown in the French army, especially in putting down the 1917 mutinies, and may well have occurred in other armies as well, only in Italy did the commander-in-chief urge this punishment.
1917 was the year of decimation. In March, nine men of the Ravenna Brigade were chosen for execution after their regiment protested over the cancellation of leave. More is known about this atrocity than most others because the brigade commander’s aide de camp (ADC) gave a statement to the commission of inquiry set up after Caporetto. Deployed on a notorious sector of the Carso, the brigade’s two regiments alternated their front-line tours with fatigue and labour duties in the rear. To keep up their spirits, the men were promised perks in the form of extra leave, which never materialised. When one of the regiments was ordered to relieve another unit elsewhere on the Carso, ‘there was a moment of discontent’ in one battalion, whose men had been drinking. The battalion commander informed the brigade headquarters ‘as a matter of duty, but more to offload the responsibility’. The general commanding the Ravenna Brigade hurried to the battalion barracks. ‘We found the men a bit annoyed, tired, and almost all in dreadful physical condition, officers included.’
The CO and his ADC let the men air their grievances. For the most part they were amenable to reason, but a few shots were fired in the air. This prompted the ADC to telephone division HQ, which despatched ‘lots of carabinieri’. While the men calmed down and set off for their new posting, Division HQ sent staff officers to the spot and informed the corps commander, who telephoned the brigade ADC and thundered that the barracks should be burned to the ground and the offenders shot. The ADC tried to assure him that order had already been restored.
The divisional CO now got involved, presumably to cover himself vis- à-vis the corps commander. By the time he reached the barracks, they were empty; it was late at night and raining hard. The brigade CO reported that everything was in order and the troops were on their way to their new posting. ‘How many did you shoot?’ asked the divisional CO. ‘None,’ came the answer. ‘That’s bad, very bad!’ exclaimed the divisional CO. Then the carabinieri found two soldiers asleep in the barracks. They had no idea that their company had left, nobody had woken them. The brigade CO told the carabinieri to put the men up against a wall and shoot them. One of the soldiers howled so desperately (‘What have I done to make you shoot me? I’ve got seven children!’) that the carabinieri hesitated. The divisional CO spoke up: ‘Let us be done with this jabbering. Shoot them at once. Orders are orders.’
The brigade CO was relieved the following day. The corps commander ordered 20 soldiers to be picked by lot from the most rebellious company. Five of these men were selected for execution. This process presumably doubled the agony of those compelled to take part, and therefore also – in the corps commander’s view – the salutary deterrent effect. The firing squad shook so badly that six volleys were needed to finish the job. The ADC told the incoming brigade CO that the measures taken ‘seemed a little exaggerated’, and had shattered the men’s morale. ‘The soldiers trembled at the mere sight of me.’
A fortnight later the Ravenna Brigade was transferred to the middle Isonzo, near Gorizia. To his astonishment, the ADC was called in to divisional HQ along with his new CO and told that he would be a member in a court martial of nine men involved in the rebellion. (‘What!, I thought, won’t you let it drop?’) Before the court martial convened, the corps commander urged severity. The brigade commander’s reaction was terse: ‘That’s easily said. We each of us have a conscience.’ Charged with reluctance (not refusal) to take up their new position, the men could not defend themselves because the court martial required no proof either way. According to the ADC, ‘nothing was established’. The prosecution called no witnesses. One defendant was a corporal who had fought in Libya, volunteered in 1915, and already been acquitted on similar charges over a different episode. His bearing impressed the court, which nonetheless sentenced him to death along with three infantrymen. The others were given ten years in prison. Refusing a blindfold, the corporal urged the firing squad to ‘Aim at the breast, and always serve your country. Long live Italy!’ The brigade commander muttered in distress that he should have been promoted to colonel, not shot as a criminal.
The bloodletting was not over. The corps commander now ruled that all those men who had received capital sentences for desertion – due to returning late from leave – should be executed, as it would be wrong to show clemency when the brigade was ‘disturbed’. Consequently another 18 men were shot. The brigade commander reported that the entire brigade felt terrorised; it should be sent out of the line for a spell. The corps commander refused; if the measures taken did not restore discipline, he would take others. The brigade commander – ‘perhaps more concerned for his career than anything else’, as the ADC boldly remarked to the commission – raised no further objection.
A total of 29 men died to punish a minor rebellion in one battalion that lasted a few hours, causing no casualties. To put this in perspective, consider the French reaction to the widespread mutinies in spring 1917, following the Nivelle Offensive. More than 30,000 soldiers were caught up in the mutinies, which were for the most part peaceful protests, with unarmed soldiers chanting their refusal to return to the trenches. Even in the most mutinous division, the 5th, officers were ‘almost universally treated with respect (probably because they returned the compliment)’. The contrast with the Italian case could not be clearer. Nivelle blamed pacifist propaganda, just as Cadorna had done in Italy, and with as little basis. The French reaction did not, however, involve a ruthless crackdown. While the ringleaders were court-martialled, careful efforts were made to rebuild the relationship between officers and men. In this way, discipline was restored before the capital sentences were carried out. Courts martial sentenced 554 mutineers to death, of whom 49 were executed. Records indicate that only three summary executions occurred during the turbulence – an official figure that is not much disputed. Given that fully half the French divisions were affected, this was an impressively low number. The Italians, on the other hand, shot 54 men in May 1917 alone, not counting ‘numerous’ summary executions, for infractions that were almost certainly less grave.
The monstrous treatment of the Ravenna Brigade says much about military justice in the ‘war zone’, a jurisdiction which eventually included most of northern Italy and much of central and southern Italy too, where the army had legislative as well as judicial power. From battalion to brigade, then up to division and corps, the commanding officers were governed by fear of seeming lenient. Otherwise the matter would have rested with the battalion commander or, at most, the general commanding the brigade. In a hierarchy that respected its own penal code, few if any of the 29 victims would have been put to death. At no point did the officers responsible for the executions argue that capital punishments were needed to re-establish order. These punishments were exemplary in a different sense; they were intended to demonstrate unflinching rigour to these officers’ peers and seniors, especially in the Supreme Command.
Other decimations followed. On 15 August, in a trench above Caporetto occupied by two companies of IV Corps, a piece of doggerel was scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The gist was that the soldiers would surrender to the enemy unless their unit was relieved. (Their tour had been extended by 20 days, so their mood was not surprising.) This came to the notice of the corps commander, General Cavaciocchi, who ordered an investigation. When no culprits could be traced, he ordered four men to be chosen by lot and shot without ado. In September, the 3rd Battalion of the 58th Infantry (Abruzzi Brigade) was deployed on Mount San Gabriele, east of Gorizia. One night, a five-man patrol moved around no-man’s land, hoping to take prisoners who would spill details about the Austrians’ rumoured offensive. When the patrol returned empty-handed, the battalion commander tore into them: so they thought they could save their skins by hiding in a crater, did they? Ignoring the men’s protest that they simply had not met any enemy patrols, the major ordered two of them to be shot at once. Other men were present, and someone shot the major. The divisional commander moved the regiment several kilometres behind the lines where 14 men were chosen by lot from the 3rd Battalion, and executed.
The Justice Department at the Supreme Command, which should have defended the penal code, supported Cadorna’s illegal directives. As for the staff officers who could have tried to oppose the butchery, their attitude was perhaps illustrated by Ugo Ojetti’s comment to his wife after the Catanzaro Brigade’s first decimation, in May 1916. ‘If they do not noisily shoot ten or twelve cowards and runaways, they cannot restore stability. The soldiers are like horses: they know when a rider says “forward” but thinks “back”: and they won’t jump.’
Under Cadorna, discipline was corrupted by arrogance. In some brigades, minor offences were punished by tying up the miscreant in view of enemy positions – ‘saving bullets’, as General Carignani, commanding VII Corps, put it. Officers were encouraged to treat the men brutally. If they refused to send their men to pointless slaughter or criticised the conditions and equipment, they could be court-martialled themselves, or even shot summarily. Notorious sadists included General Saporiti of the Second Army, so incensed by the sight of a soup tureen overturned in a trench that seven men were court-martialled for ‘causing harm to equipment of the Royal Army and insufficient concern for the cleanliness of the trench’. (The trench was littered with corpses, torn sandbags and broken planks.) Ignoring an explicit request for harsh sentences, the court martial bravely acquitted the men. Saporiti then sacked the colonel who had presided over the court.
The worst was General Andrea Graziani, who beat a soldier so savagely for dropping his rifle while entraining that the man lost the use of his hand. A court martial dismissed Graziani’s grotesque accusation of attempted mutiny. When the presiding officer reproached him for maiming an innocent man, the general replied that he could not care less. ‘The minister of war has assured me in writing that a commendation has been entered in my record.’ On 2 November 1917, five months after the incident in Bologna, Cadorna made Graziani responsible for restoring discipline among the troops retreating from Caporetto. The wolf was now in charge of the sheep; he had 19 men shot in the back for sundry offences on the morning of 16 November alone; another man was shot for saluting without taking his pipe out of his mouth1 and two more for hiding a couple of kilos of flour in their knapsacks. The total number of summary executions in the weeks after Caporetto can only be guessed at.
Despite these examples of courts martial showing independence, there were few acquittals for other ranks. Cases were often heard collectively, with as many as 40 men herded before a court martial, giving little opportunity for details to be discussed. Life sentences were frequent, and sentences of 15–25 years were common. In British and French courts martial, the presumption of innocence was often weaker than it should have been, and was occasionally discarded altogether. In Italy, this presumption was turned on its head; the accused were guilty because they had been charged. As in other armies, officers were much more likely to avoid severe sentences. Before 1917, the courts martial sometimes even criticised the conduct of the war, as mitigating the offences committed by junior or reserve officers.
As the government was too cowed and the press too patriotic to challenge the use of decimation, parliament was the only source of potential pressure on Cadorna to stop killing quantities of innocent men. Opposition deputies occasionally raised their voice, in vain. In June 1917, a Socialist deputy told the chamber that Cadorna was ‘a century behind the times, also in his manner of maintaining military discipline – with terror and shootings by lot and decimation’. There was no reaction; the government did not even pretend to have oversight of Cadorna’s regime. In December, after Caporetto, another Socialist deputy asked the government to investigate the decimations, given their importance in sapping the army’s morale, ‘rather than the alleged Socialist propaganda’. The government was reluctant, and there was no investigation until after the war. The result was a whitewash: the investigators concluded that some 140 summary executions were carried out from October 1915 to November 1917 – fewer even than the executions that were officially reported in this period. While the commission of inquiry did not offer a number, at least its language was honourable: decimation was a ‘savage measure that nothing can justify’.
The military penal code did permit ‘summary justice’, bypassing courts martial, in specified circumstances. Acts of ‘cowardice’ or ‘revolt’ could be punished summarily when they posed ‘grave and imminent danger’ to the army in whole or part. Crucially, such offences had to be ‘flagrant’ – conspicuous, egregious, and ongoing. Hence the punishment must be carried out on the spot. Any delay would delegitimate the execution. Even so, the code also stated that every act of summary justice must be preceded by ‘a conscientious, albeit rapid, assessment of responsibilities’. Of the summary executions that were reported in sufficient detail, very few met these narrow conditions. Cadorna did not worry, informing the prime minister in June 1917 that summary executions had been carried out ‘on a vast scale’, without regard for legal niceties, in order to cut out the evil of indiscipline at the roots. He added that if the contagion spread, he would be forced to resort to decimation – a step he had taken the previous November. This murderous policy had no equivalent in other countries. Summary executions in the French army were rare: around a dozen for the whole war according to the evidence, which is incomplete. In the British army, summary punishments could not exceed imprisonment or field punishment for 28 days.
As in other armies, the majority of capital sentences were given for desertion, the form of indiscipline that most worried all commanders. Punishment was harsher than in Britain, France or Germany. The military penal code defined the offence very widely, to encompass evasion of the draft. Of 189,000 soldiers charged with desertion, only 7.4 per cent were accused of desertion in the face of the enemy. Most charges were factitious, concerned with late return from home leave and such like. The code was also exceptional in disallowing a defence in terms of intention (which British military law, for example, permitted). A prosecutor had only to demonstrate the defendant’s absence from his unit.
The scope for imposing the death sentence for desertion was widened during the war. Again, 1917 was the nadir. Early that year, capital sentences became mandatory for third-time deserters. In April 1917, disregarding the military penal code, under which a capital sentence could be passed after five days’ unauthorised absence, the death penalty was decreed for any soldier who was more than three days late returning from leave. From June, state assistance could be denied to the families of deserters. In August, the Supreme Command slashed the period of grace to 24 hours.
Terrible as the burden was of knowing that a day’s delay in returning from leave could be fatal, the non-capital offences may have caused more misery. Charges of insubordination could be laid for so trivial a ‘lack of deference, of civil and military education’ as a shrug or an irreverent tone of voice, picked up by an irritable officer.
Consider, too, the censorship of private letters. On 28 July 1915, Cadorna made it a military crime to denigrate war operations, scorn or vilify the army, mention news ‘other than that which had been made public’, or write anything at all which might ‘disturb public tranquillity and lower public spirits’. It was not enough to omit details that might be considered sensitive, because the military censors did not distinguish between opinions and information, as British and French censorship tried to do. This latitude was used to suppress any kind of criticism. The government wanted to examine all private correspondence. When this proved impossible, censorship was limited to correspondence to and from the front, and abroad. This, too, was far beyond their resources; by summer 1917, soldiers were sending nearly three million letters and cards daily from the front. Still, the censors’ net had mesh fine enough to land many soldiers in prison for long terms. Military censors in other countries used soldiers’ letters to gauge the mood at the front. In Italy, the sole purpose was repression.
The more thoughtful the criticism, the graver the consequences. Simple complaints about officers or rations could lead to six months or a year in prison. A 25-year-old private got four years for writing that newspaper stories about the valiant troops were full of lies. ‘They don’t fight with pride, no, nor with ardour. They go to the slaughter because they are led to it, and are frightened of being shot.’ A 21-year-old gunner from Viterbo got 22 months for urging his father to tell people the war was unjust ‘because [only] a minority wanted it … It is the people who make this war, the workers, the men with callused hands, and they are the ones who do the dying.’ The court martial found that the defendant put himself beyond clemency by calling the war unjust when ‘by universal consent the whole nation wanted it’. Although every democracy in the world wanted to overthrow German imperialism, the defendant – who claims to champion the working class – opposes this aim!
By August 1917, when this sentence was handed down, the Supreme Command had convinced itself that sole responsibility for sinking morale at the front lay with Socialists, pacifists and others who wanted Italy to lose the war, and with the government that tolerated them. These defeatists infiltrated the front with propaganda and corroded the resolve of soldiers on leave. ‘Internal enemy’ was one of Cadorna’s stock antiaircraft phrases, a catch-all for civilians who questioned or criticised the war. In June and August, he sent a series of astonishing letters to the Prime Minister, accusing him of letting Italy’s internal enemies go about their evil business with impunity, urging him to match the ‘inexorable severity’ of the military penal regime in the rest of the country.
Boselli chose not to reply. The attacks were unjustified, for Italy had functioned as a police or martial state since 1915. Military encroachment on civil jurisdiction peaked in March 1917, when the Supreme Command announced that civilians living outside the war zone could be tried by courts martial. Socialist deputies tried vainly to muster resistance in parliament.
Besides, Cadorna’s thesis about defeatist propaganda does not stand examination. Salandra, the prime minister when Italy intervened, wrote in 1917 that ‘only children believe the newspapers’ when they blame ‘pacifist tendencies’ on Socialists and followers of Giolitti. The Italian front was no more saturated with Socialist leaflets than other fronts. The difference is that Italy was divided over the war, as it had been from the beginning. The carnage had deepened the divisions, and stained them with class hatred. It was indeed the people who made this war, the horny-handed workers, and they were indeed, overwhelmingly, the ones who did the dying; no fewer than 65 per cent of war orphans were the children of peasants. This situation was a gift to Socialist agitators, especially in Turin, the country’s only proletarian city. Discontent was ably exploited by Marxists at the newspaper New Order. In August 1917, soldiers put down a protest against food shortages that turned antiaircraft into a riot. Around 40 people died. The unrest was more ominous because it was not simply about wages or shortages; these complaints focused a more political discontent and a smouldering sense of injustice over who was making the greatest sacrifice in the war. Workers in different industries organised joint stoppages, as when the iron, steel, metal and engineering workers demanded a single contract. Workers’ councils were set up in some factories, as embryonic structures of self- government. This went on even though war-related industries came under military direction; by summer 1918, some 900,000 workers were in this position.
To Italy’s nervous élite, especially the entrepreneurs who flourished thanks to war contracts, this solidarity portended a revolution that might forge an alliance between the ‘reds’ and ‘blacks’ – Socialists and clerical Catholics. For the Pope had dropped a bombshell of his own. In a note to the warring powers, released on 9 August after consultation with Vienna, Benedict XV mooted the conditions for ending a war that ‘looks more like useless slaughter every day’. Cadorna was aghast; the Vatican was punishing him again for his father’s part in liberating Rome! The Supreme Command tried to prevent the statement reaching the front, in vain. If this was the last gasp of Emperor Karl’s diffident peace initiative, it was much the most effective. Amid the gloom after the Tenth Battle, the damning phrase ‘useless slaughter’ struck a chord.
Cadorna’s network of military police and civilian agents kept tabs on public figures who were suspected of undermining the war effort. Presumably this network helped to organise the rallies in Milan and elsewhere over the summer, supporting the war and calling for Cadorna to be made dictator. The generalissimo’s relish of this acclaim fed suspicions that he was involved in a plot to carry out a military coup. (Allegations were made over the summer by a pro-Giolitti deputy.) The target would be the Minister of the Interior, Vittorio Orlando, viewed in some quarters as dangerously liberal and cunning with it. A coup would oust him, opening the way to a clamp-down on Cadorna’s critics in parliament, striking workers in northern cities, families of deserters and other malcontents. If Boselli resisted, he too would be removed. General Giardino, the minister of war, was also suspected by some of toying with scenarios for a coup, putting Orlando under arrest and installing a military dictatorship.
Given Cadorna’s record since 1915, these jitters were not surprising, yet there is no definite evidence against him. He bullied, ignored, manipulated and harangued the government, usually with eye-watering bluntness, and would have rejoiced at Orlando’s downfall. After the war, he blandly denied having ever wanted a ‘reign of terror’. On the contrary, order could have been ensured by rounding up a few hundred ringleaders and propagandists and transporting them to Eritrea or Somalia, as well as suppressing the newspapers that the government allowed to whinge the length and breadth of the country. How a regime of arbitrary arrests, banishment and increased censorship could have been instituted without a coup, he did not say.
After a decent interval, at the end of September, Boselli convened a cabinet meeting with Cadorna to discuss the matters raised in his letters. Cadorna said the army was verminous with defeatism, and urged drastic steps. If he had really wanted to alert the government to Socialist agitation, he would have claimed that the riots in Turin directly hurt morale at the front. But, as Boselli knew, Cadorna’s real purpose was twofold: to shift the blame for poor morale away from the Supreme Command, and to target Orlando. The despised minister happened to be a Sicilian, so Cadorna’s letters to Boselli focused on Sicily, painting it as a hotbed of Socialist propaganda, an allegation that Orlando easily rebutted. Any crisis of morale in our army, he said, had nothing to do with propaganda; rather, it ‘stems from the fact that the Supreme Command has killed too many soldiers, too quickly’.
Nevertheless, Cadorna got his way. The minister of justice prepared a decree to criminalise ‘defeatism’, an elusive target for prosecution. Issued on 4 October 1917, the Sacchi Decree was as draconian as the military measures (though the punishments were less severe). It dovetailed with Cadorna’s military penal regime to form a solid wall of repression. For example, it was used to jail a civilian for six months for chanting a satirical rhyme from the trenches:
General Cadorna sent a postcard to the Queen:
‘Here’s a picture of Trieste, so you can say: Trieste I’ve seen!’
Complete data on military justice are still not available. What is clear is that at least one Italian soldier in 12 was subject to disciplinary investigation during the war: a much higher proportion than in other Allied armies. More than half of the 870,000 charges related to absenteeism, leaving some 400,000 offences committed under arms. By the time a general amnesty for deserters was issued in September 1919, courts martial had heard 350,000 cases. Of the 210,000 sentences passed, 100,000 were for desertion, 24,500 for ‘indiscipline’, and 10,000 for self-mutilation. Of the 4,028 capital sentences, 729 were carried out. As for summary executions, the unflagging research of Marco Pluviano and Irene Guerrini discovered records of more than 300, but the real total may run to several thousand. For comparison: the French army was roughly twice the size of the Italian, and the British army mobilised approximately the same number of men in Britain. Around 350 British and 600 French soldiers were executed after courts martial, and summary executions were very rare. In France, parliamentary concern over executions was so strong that the army lost the authority to approve death sentences; the government gained a right to review every capital sentence, and each one had to be approved by the president of the republic. Only in the emergency of June 1917 did General Pétain succeed in wresting back this authority. In the British army, both the theatre judge advocate general and commander-in-chief had to review capital sentences.
There were no such safeguards in the Italian army. Nor was there any equivalent in Italy of a prime minister like Lloyd George, prepared to challenge the commander-in-chief, or cabinet ministers like Churchill, who publicly criticised the huge loss of life, or a bridging figure like General Robertson, quite capable of delivering unwanted messages from the government to the commander-in-chief and vice-versa. The best checks against abuse of military power were political or institutional, not dependent on the letter of the law. In the last analysis, these checks are cultural; Haig was annoyed by the Australian government’s refusal to let Australians serving with the British army be shot for desertion, but it did not occur to him to ignore that veto. British and French courts martial were sometimes pressured to hand down harsh sentences and curtail defendants’ rights, but due process was not disregarded routinely, with impunity, at the insistence of the commander-in-chief.
After the war, the Italian army’s judge advocate general (responsible for the conduct of courts martial) ruled that most of Cadorna’s directives on military justice were illegitimate. Cadorna would surely retort that, if he had led the British or French army, he would not have needed to take such measures. He had little respect for many of his senior commanders (who often deserved none) or their brigades. Italy was committed to a war that placed unprecedented demands on officers and men alike. This situation was what it was; he had to deal with it, and he did so by remaking the military justice system in his own image: intolerant, confrontational, devoid of empathy. Terror and barbarous punishment were not his last resort for getting soldiers to obey; they were his preferred means. Obedience was a beautifully simple requirement, not to be contaminated with notions of education or motivation. The soldiers did not need to reason; they merely had to do and die.
Count Carlo Sforza, foreign minister in the early 1920s and again after 1945, wrote witheringly of Cadorna’s ‘mystical sadism’, implying that the penal regime was more expressive than practical, satisfying the warped appetite of a single man. To be sure, the regime did not crush all disobedience. Violent misbehaviour by troops going to and from the front became so widespread in summer 1917 – firing on carabinieri in the railway stations, shooting out of the windows, hurling stones and bottles – that the men’s rifles had to be taken away for the duration of the journeys. And this was at the apex of Cadorna’s terror.
The draconian measures against desertion also had little effect. The number of deserters almost trebled between April and August 1917. Would-be deserters became more astute; rather than escaping at the front, they failed to return from home leave. By October, more than 100,000 deserters and draft-dodgers were hiding in the interior of the country. Overall, desertion rates doubled during 1917, then diminished in 1918. The average rate of desertion was significantly higher than in other western European armies.2 Indeed, an internal report in March 1918 admitted a connection between the penal regime and desertion; punishments that were perceived as savagely unjust, could encourage disaffected soldiers to take the ultimate risk.
Even so, historians believe that Cadorna’s harshness was functional, not mystical. The scholar Bruna Bianchi, no admirer of Cadorna, argues that summary execution kept a lid on potential rebellion; without it, mutinies on a French scale would have erupted. Yet terror was a ‘cure’ with disastrous side-effects; evidence that soldiers’ morale was harmed by the almost arbitrary killing of their comrades is strong and ample. All that can be said for Cadorna’s methods is that they reinforced the obedience which almost all soldiers already displayed.
That humbling, haunting obedience: what are we to make of it, so long after the event? The historian Giovanna Procacci argues that the archive of censored letters proves that loathing of the war and hostility to the state and its institutions were ‘very widespread’, much more so than in other armies. It was above all ‘the certainty of ferocious repression’ that deterred the troops from acting out their feelings of ‘internal rebellion’. Giorgio Rochat, on the other hand, argues that their obedience mainly reflected ‘the dearth of cultural alternatives which would provide legitimation and external support for rebellion’. Disobedience lay beyond the conception of men who had grown up in a world where absolute authority was personified by the priest and the mayor. Rochat believes the deepest sources of obedience are unknowable; a historian should accept this, and salute the men’s sacrifice.
To an outsider, this divergence is more political than scholarly. Procacci in particular frames her argument with a larger contention; the war, she says, exposed the authoritarian bones of the Italian state, and confirmed that ‘the working class had never shared in patriotic sentiments’. Although the structure of the state was liberal, with a constitutional monarchy, elected parliament and formal separation of powers, the relations between state and society, government and citizens, were absolutist: closer to Germany and Austria-Hungary than to Britain and France.
The state still protects Cadorna’s bloody regime. In 1990, a descendant of Corporal Silvio Ortis, who was executed in a blatant miscarriage of justice in 1916, tried to clear his forebear’s name by seeking a pardon. After eight months, the military court in Rome replied ineffably that under applicable law, only the ‘interested party’ may seek a pardon. As Silvio Ortis had not filed this request himself, it was ‘inadmissible’. When his appeal was rejected, the descendant wrote to the president of the republic. In 1998, his persistence bore fruit: a deputy in parliament agreed to propose an amendment allowing a spouse or relative to request a pardon. The amendment was presented to parliament in 2001, when the deputies agreed that a sub-committee would consider it in June 2006. In other words they kicked it into the long grass – where it remains to this day.
Source Notes
TWENTY-TWO Mystical Sadism
1 ‘Death to D’Annunzio!’: Alatri.
2 ‘helmets, shreds of brain’: Bonadeo [1995], 132.
3 ‘You are peasants: D’Annunzio [2005], 718–24.
4 ‘The summary justice of the bullet’: Directive dated 28 September 1915. Procacci [2000]; De Simone, 206.
5 He openly deplored the courts’ reluctance: This was on 22 March 1916.
6 ‘unworthy of an army that upholds’: Procacci [2000], 52.
7 a letter to Salandra in January 1916: Procacci [2000], 52.
8 not unknown in the French army: Watt, 92.
9 nine men of the Ravenna Brigade: Melograni, 296–8.
10 gave a statement to the commission of inquiry: Commissione di inchiesta, vol. 2, 359–65.
11 ‘almost universally treated with respect’: Smith, 183.
12 shot 54 men in May 1917: From Cadorna’s letter to Boselli, 13 June 1917. Procacci [2000], 50–1.
13 a piece of doggerel was scrawled: De Simone, 166.
14 ‘If they do not noisily shoot ten or twelve cowards’: Ojetti, 308.
15 ‘The minister of war has assured me’: De Simone. Ugo Ojetti, usually discreet to a fault, called Graziani ‘that lunatic’. Ojetti, 424.
16 can only be guessed at: A Socialist deputy claimed after the war that the number exceeded 4,000. De Simone, 284.
17 ‘a century behind the times’: Rocca, 224.
18 ‘on a vast scale’: USSME, 653.
19 the evidence, which is incomplete: Offenstadt.
20 Punishment was harsher than: Franzina [2003], 130.
21 ‘They don’t fight with pride, no’: Forcella & Monticone, 43.
22 ‘because [only] a minority wanted it’: Forcella & Monticone, 186.
23 ‘by universal consent the whole nation wanted it’: Forcella & Monticone, 186–78.
24 a series of astonishing letters: USSME, 653–62.
25 civilians living outside the war zone: Procacci [2006], 299.
26 some 900,000 employees were in this position: Zamagni, 219.
27 ‘only children believe the newspapers’: Salandra to Sonnino, quoted by Monticone [1972].
28 overwhelmingly, the ones who did the dying: Giuliano Procacci, 235.
29 a smouldering sense of injustice: Procacci [1992].
30 ‘looks more like useless slaughter every day’: Rocca, 246.
31 plot to carry out: Camera dei Deputati – Segretariato generale. The deputy was Marcello Soleri.
32 General Giardino, the minister of war: Melograni, 350.
33 denied having ever wanted a ‘reign of terror’: Melograni, 351.
34 ‘stems from the fact that the Supreme Command’: Calderoni, 182.
35 a decree to criminalise ‘defeatism’: Bianchi [2006], 303.
36 Complete data on military justice: Cadorna [1967], 205; Forcella & Monticone, 441–2.
37 real total may run to several thousand: De Simone guesses that at least 2,000 were summarily shot between May 1915 and 24 October 1917, plus a further 5,000 among the troops retreating pellmell after Caporetto. De Simone, 270.
38 respected even in times of crisis: Sheffield, 7.
39 Cadorna’s ‘mystical sadism’: Sforza [1945], 135.
40 so widespread in summer 1917: De Simone, 78.
41 desertion rates doubled during 1917: Cappellano & Carbone.
42 an internal report in March 1918: Procacci [2000], 83.
43 Bruna Bianchi, no admirer of Cadorna, argues: Bianchi [2003], 131.
44 evidence that soldiers’ morale was harmed: for example De Simone, 198.
45 The French army: Watt. Germany mobilised: Jahr.
46 Giovanna Procacci argues that the archive: Procacci [2000], 97–105.
47 ‘the working class had never shared’: Procacci [1992], 170.
48 relations between state and society: Procacci [2006], 301.
49 ‘inadmissible’: Calderoni, 166
1 When the Socialist newspaper Avanti! exposed this crime in 1919, the minister of war rejected calls for Graziani to be sacked or prosecuted. Graziani, a list of whose excesses would fill pages, became an enthusiastic Fascist, and was rising to the highest levels of the military when he died in mysterious circumstances in 1931.
2 The Italian army found 101,685 men guilty of desertion, rising from 10,000 in the first year of war to 55,000 in the last year. In the British army around 38,000 soldiers were tried on desertion charges. (Over 2,000 were sentenced to death, of whom 266 were executed.) The French army had 509 desertions in 1914, rising fivefold in 1915, then to 8,924 in 1916, and soaring to 27,000 in 1917. (Figures based on successful charges brought.) Germany mobilised 13.5 million soldiers, three times more than Italy, and convicted 130,000 to 150,000 men of desertion or absence without leave, up to 50,000 of them in the field army.