TWENTY-SIX

Resurrection

Troops are never in better spirits for fighting

than when they have to wipe out a stain

CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

The new lines had settled by the end of the year. From the Swiss border to the Asiago plateau, the front was unchanged. From Asiago to the sea, it now ran east to Mount Grappa, then swung south-eastwards for 130 kilometres along the River Piave. Fortunately for Diaz, defeat had cropped 170 kilometres from the front: otherwise his much-reduced army might not have blocked the last Austro-German thrusts at the Piave line.

The German guns were transferred to the Western Front during November, followed in mid-December by the troops. The Austrians were on their own again. Not so the Italians, who benefited from several Allied divisions and their batteries: 130,000 French and 110,000 British troops by the end of the year, deployed as a strategic reserve. Other Allied support in the form of munitions, shipping and extra loans ensured that coal and food shortages did not become acute.

Arriving from France and Flanders, the British soldiers were touched by their warm welcome. Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers were greeted at Ventimiglia with ‘extravagant fervour’, ‘showered with carnations, and barrels of wine stood waiting for them at the official welcoming ceremony’. After the dull tones of Flanders, the Britons were captivated by the scenery. Moving along the Riviera to Genoa, Gunner James Blackburn (197th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery) gazed at the ‘red tiled roofs, pale pink and pale green buildings, the blue sky, green fields, greener trees and hedgerows’. The longest-lived British veteran to serve in Italy was Gunner Alfred Finnigan, who in 2005 still remembered the ‘absolute joy’ of seeing the Mediterranean and the sun in December. The Italians, too, were fascinating: the carabinieri on Monte Carlo station who conjured oranges from under their capes, and the shopkeeper in Genoa who ‘danced with delight’ when she saw the Tommies and, having nothing else, gave away straw hats.

Some, like Captain L. Ferguson (1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment), felt embarrassed by the largesse – ‘we found the troops getting pelted with oranges and figs’ – and distributed corned beef and biscuits to the children around the train. After the dismal sight of Italian soldiers begging for bread at Verona station, he was cheered to meet some alpini who spoke enough English to blame southerners for Caporetto and to promise that ‘the armies now have no idea of retreating an inch more’.

To Major Arthur Acland (Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry), the land up to the Piave was ‘flatter than you would think it possible for any country to be’. South of Mount Grappa, where the Piave emerged onto the plains, the river flowed to the sea in tresses or braids along a wide stony course, around low islets of shingle and boulders, sometimes topped with scrubby vegetation. In spate, the Piave was several kilometres wide in some places, ‘a mighty expanse of water’. In summer, it could safely be waded. A river that rose and fell by a metre or more in a day was a tricky proposition for bridging engineers.

The soft muddy banks of the Piave presented other problems after Carso limestone. Water constantly seeped into the trenches, which collapsed without constant revetting. The men appreciated the distance between the front lines, but keeping healthy was another challenge; it was almost impossible to stay dry, and the swamps on the lower Piave were malarial. Things were easier further from the sea. Acland’s division was deployed on a whaleback hill called the Montello, ‘some seven miles long, broadening to four miles at its widest and rising to about 800 feet, a pleasant hill, covered with vineyards and cultivated fields, interspersed with small woods … The northern slopes fell steeply to the river bank, above which they towered like cliffs.’ This was the last Alpine ripple before the maritime plain, and it gave good observation of the enemy lines. The Tommies liked the posting; by day, they strengthened the communications and defences on the hill; by night, they ‘played in the waters of the Piave’. The Indian summer days were hot, the nights bitingly clear, and there was ample wood to burn. Christmas Day was so warm that ‘we could sit around with our shirts off to deal with our vermin’. The rear lines were of poor quality, but it hardly seemed to matter: the enemy showed no intention of attacking again, and Allied planes controlled the sky. All in all, ‘it was such a gorgeous rest after Flanders’. Until Haig recalled two of the five British divisions at the end of February, the main challenge, much of the time, was to keep the men busy.

The British troops only knew the Italians had taken a hard knock, not how close they had come to collapse or the scale of the task facing Diaz, who had to consolidate the new line with only 33 intact divisions, half the number before Caporetto. His priorities were to restore discipline, rebuild disintegrated units, then raise morale. The first task was unexpectedly straightforward. The fear early in November that the army might unravel had passed by the end of the month. After the front settled in December, Diaz rounded up the soldiers who had dispersed, resurrecting 25 infantry divisions and more than 30 artillery regiments by the end of February 1918. Some of the men who were judged less reliable were sent to serve in labour units in France. He restructured his forces into six armies, none of them unmanageably huge as Capello’s Second Army had been. He reinstated the organic connection between divisional infantry and their artillery. Taking a leaf out of the German book, he devolved more operational decision-making authority to lower levels. Training and equipment were improved.

At the Supreme Command, Diaz restored responsibility to the competent offices, decentralising the authority that Cadorna had gathered in his fist. The Operations Office could play its proper part for the first time. A network of liaison officers ensured a flow of information between the Supreme Command and the front-line units. Badoglio became a trusted and effective deputy, not a stuffed shirt as General Porro had been. Although he had never been interested in politics, or perhaps because of this, Diaz’s attitude to the state authorities was co-operative without being submissive. He lunched with the King twice a week and met the Prime Minister several times a month. He had no objection to the formation of a war committee inside the cabinet, and was always ready to brief politicians.

Diaz’s strategic priority was purely defensive, so he did not need to devise offensive tactics. On the other hand, he could not yield any ground: if the Piave line broke, the Italians would probably lose Venice, Padua and Vicenza – the whole of the Veneto, maybe more. Also, he faced an imminent shortage of manpower; after the class of 1899 was drafted at the end of 1917, he had only the 260,000-strong class of 1900 (called up in February) as a reserve for the following year. Diaz knew that his overall strength would probably decline over the coming months, and that substantial losses could not be made good.

In the first months of 1918, while the rear defences were prepared behind Venice, Diaz tested his army by launching limited operations to strengthen the crucial sector between the Asiago plateau and Mount Grappa. Involving the specialist assault teams called arditi, these operations succeeded well enough to raise the army’s self-confidence. Otherwise, he would not be drawn into offensive action before he was ready. When General Foch, as Allied Supreme Commander, hard-pressed by the German spring offensives, implored Diaz to launch a diversionary action in May, he refused.

Diaz took steps to reform the conditions and treatment of his men. In December 1917, the rations were increased and made more varied. Pay was increased. Canteens were placed near the front, selling food and useful goods at discounted prices. Annual leave was raised from 15 to 25 days, and older draft classes were granted extra leave to work their land. All soldiers were provided with free insurance policies, and death benefits were paid to the families without delay. From May 1918, soldiers’ families in hardship could apply for emergency relief. As for discipline, Diaz did not repeal Cadorna’s rulings; he simply forbore to use his most savage methods. There would be no more decimations.

He took a rational approach to military morale. Although morale was seen as the key to victory, the men had been expected to supply their own. Under Diaz, the soldiers’ attitude to the war – hitherto a vast neglected hinterland – became a bright arena, crowded with officers taking notes. An internal report in November and December 1917 found that the men were physically inert and morally apathetic; their letters home proved that they did not identify with the war and its aims; while there was no organised anti-war propaganda, passivity and resignation were widespread. Many of them believed rumours that the government would sue for peace before the year was out. There was no conviction that the war was necessary and must be won.

Against this alarming background, Diaz issued directives and guidelines on vigilance, propaganda and care for the troops. Propa ganda would be channelled through newspapers, posters and leaflets, theatre and cinema. Meetings should be organised to learn the men’s views and to impart ‘a healthy, fortifying word’. Each army should have its own newspaper, with a humorous angle on army life, written by the men themselves where possible. ‘Care’ referred to material and moral wellbeing, such as hygienic accommodation and palatable rations. ‘The best system for fighting anti-war propaganda’, Diaz stated, ‘is the elimination, as far as possible, of the causes of discontent.’ This approach was unthinkable before Caporetto.

A new structure called ‘P Service’ was set up to co-ordinate all this. Its task was to spread ‘the conviction of the absolute necessity of our war’ among the troops and bolster civilian morale. Its officers included many gifted and sometimes eccentric figures who took deep pride in their work. This, after all, was a time when, as one officer said, ‘the flower of the Italian intelligentsia [was] in a fervour of moral renewal’. These men were the commissars of national recovery.

Military and civilian surveillance were, at last, connected. The Information Service in each army was tasked to develop networks of informants from different social groups, starting with the police and extending to mayors, doctors, teachers and – naturally – journalists. ‘Every movement in civic life’ was to be turned towards a single goal: ‘the triumph of the aspirations and demands of the Fatherland’. Propaganda should be adapted to its audience; the days of all-purpose rhetoric were over. In some situations, the men would gain most from discussions with a ‘P’ officer; in others, a musical revue would be the best way to build faith in ‘our growing superiority over the enemy and our inevitable victory’. Photographs from the front were exhibited around the country, while films and plays toured the land. At the end of November, Diaz set new ground-rules for war corres pondents; from now on, they could file up to 500 words a day, ‘without rhetoric’. The Italian army became, of all things, a model of integrated information management.

Naturally, the authorities talked up the impact of these measures. Father Gemelli believed that the eight months after Caporetto saw ‘a profound transformation’ of soldiers’ ‘souls’, involving the growth of a ‘national soul’. Exalted claims of this kind set a tone that patriotic historians accepted without examination for decades.

The real story of morale after Caporetto is more complex. The governing class and the middle classes did experience a defining moment or apotheosis, and shelved their political quarrels to resist the threat as effectively as possible. For these groups, as the American ambassador noted, the scale of the disaster brought the remedy. ‘To be or not to be’: this was now Italy’s choice, as Orlando thundered in parliament, relishing the roar of cross-party acclaim. The historian Giovanna Procacci argues that Italy’s rulers and bourgeoisie were now united in dedication to a supreme purpose, something like the mood of other western European countries in August 1914. In the words of Francesco Nitti, Orlando’s minister of finance, a war of political adventure turned into a war of national defence. All manner of patriotic committees and ‘national associations for victory’ sprang up. Politically conservative, intensely motivated, these citizens’ groups were determined to root out defeatism in all its slippery forms. The Anti-German League, perhaps the most extreme group, offered cash rewards for denouncing ‘defeatists’ and spies. The government played the same game, promising rewards to state employees who sniffed uncertainty among their colleagues.

Vigilance easily warped into vigilantism. Citizens’ committees worked with the police to identify fainthearts or appeasers. The press bayed for strong government to crush the ‘enemy within’, with no quarter for the filthy neutralists, socialists and Giolittians. Down with them all! In Rome, 158 pro-war deputies formed a Parliamentary Group (Fascio) for National Defence. With an eye on this powerful bloc, the Prime Minister took on the colours of the radical nationalists who had been his sharpest critics over the summer. Still holding the home affairs portfolio, Orlando urged the judges to apply the Sacchi Decree with relentless severity. A woman in Bologna was jailed for six months for saying that the Germans were invincible and Britain was to blame for the war. In April 1918, a priest in Florence got four months for ‘not believing in Italian victory’. A man from Viterbo got three months for saying in a restaurant that Italians were cowards.

Food riots began again in February 1918, when wheat rationing was introduced. (The 1917 harvest was poor.) While labour unrest was muted compared to summer 1917, statistics on labour stoppages show there is little ground for arguing that a union sacrée was forged after Caporetto. Strikes increased during spring and summer, drawing in the more experienced, skilled workers (by contrast with 1917). Industrial action continued throughout June, showing no deference to the army during the Austrian offensive. The strikers had learned from the bloody clashes of 1917: these actions were better organised, often involving women, less violent, and often successful in wresting concessions. The workers understood their own importance to the war effort; it was harder to intimidate them. Ironically, they took encouragement from politicians like Orlando and Salandra who promised that a better world would rise from the ashes of war. Industrial troubles in the north were matched by unrest in the southern countryside. Soothing promises were made of granting land to the peasants after the war, a gesture that backfired by reducing the peasants’ age-old deference to landowners and awakening a sense of political rights.

This is why some historians see ‘repression of dissent, rather than the creation of consensus’ as the government’s priority after Caporetto. And there was plenty to repress, especially outside the cities. Diaz knew this already from other sources; on 24 November, he warned Orlando that the rural population of north-east Italy was broadly against the war. Women were especially outspoken, saying it would be better to be occupied by the Austrians because then the war would be over and ‘anyway everyone knows the Austrians treat people well’. At the end of October, a journalist reported that people around Milan were celebrating ‘the arrival of the Austrians in Italy – who had come, according to the peasants, to chop off the heads of the gentlemen who wanted the war, and then to help the poor’. Worrying reports also arrived from further south, indicating that many Italians were not at all distressed by the emergency. Tuscan farmers were seen carousing over the defeat, and Neapolitans were overheard grumbling that if the Germans were in charge, at least there would be bread in the shops.

High levels of disaffection were suggested by an incident at a primary school near Mantua. The teacher set her class an essay topic: ‘For Italy to win, we must resist to the end.’ Most of her pupils – farmers’ children – took issue with the title. One boy wrote that the officers (‘the ones who give orders’) were ‘not tired yet of killing the poor people who aren’t guilty of anything. To make it a just war, they should 1. send all those who want war to the front, because if they want it they should fight it. 2. send the rich people who give money for war bonds. 3. send the poor men home. Then it would be a just war!’ The scandalised teacher reported her pupils’ ‘subversive’ tendencies to the military police and the local magistrate.

The ‘military model’ that had encroached on Italian society since 1915 was now fully imposed, involving ‘submission, the demonstration of absolute loyalty, and the elimination of all criticism’. Far from healing divisions in society, this process may have deepened them. Especially in the south, the state was felt increasingly as an incubus, a predatory master, not much different from the Bourbon tyrants of old. Orlando and his ministers, for their part, were doing what they believed was necessary to reverse the effects of Caporetto. A key to success would be the arms industry. General Alfredo Dallolio, an effective Under-Secretary of Arms and Munitions since 1915, was promoted to Minister in June 1917 with a staff of 6,000. Even so, the Boselli government had not reversed the cautious conservative policy that it inherited from Salandra. Over the summer and autumn of 1917, Francesco Nitti, a deputy who had been Giolitti’s last minister for industry and trade, denounced Italy’s partial economic mobilisation. As Orlando’s minister of finance, subsidised by lavish credits from the USA, he loosened the government’s purse-strings and deluged the arms manufacturers with fresh orders. Military production restored the huge losses after Caporetto and supplied the army for the final battles.

It was a fine achievement, and by no means inevitable. Yet pricing policy was slack, the large companies practically wrote their own contracts, profits were exorbitant, and corruption flourished. The discovery of accounting irregularities at his ministry led to Dallolio’s resignation in May 1918. On the other hand, industries had incentives to plough back their profits into improving their plant and equipment. The northern engineering companies grew apace: Alfa-Romeo’s 200 workers became 4,000; Fiat’s 4,300 multiplied tenfold; Ansaldo’s workforce grew from 6,000 to 56,000. The aeronautical industry grew from scratch to employ 100,000 people by the war’s end. The great names of Italian engineering made their breakthroughs thanks to lavish state subventions and militarised management of the workforce.

Unfortunately for Orlando, no sooner had the political class stopped feuding over intervention and the conduct of the war than another source of contention opened up. This was the ever more delicate question of Italy’s aims on the farther shore of the Adriatic Sea. The rout in the Twelfth Battle had harmed the Italians’ prospects of getting their full dividend of territory after the war. Allied statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic ‘now looked upon Italian war aims with even less deference than before’. In a speech on war aims in early January, Lloyd George kept silent about Italy’s expansion across the Adriatic.

The European acclaim for Lloyd George’s speech irked President Woodrow Wilson, who was putting the final touches to a statement of his own. He need not have minded, for his speech on 8 January became the best-known blueprint for a just peace, the rallying cry for millions who dreamed of a new postwar order. After reiterating his calls for open diplomacy (no more ‘secret covenants’), free trade, a global reduction of arms to the lowest possible level and a ‘general association of nations’, Wilson called for the open-minded review of all colonial claims, taking equal account of ‘the interests of the populations concerned’: a warning to the Allies. Among their specific interests, absolute support was only given to Belgium, which ‘must be evacuated and restored’. For the rest, the conditional was used: France, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated, and so forth.

Dismayingly for Rome, the ninth of Wilson’s fourteen points was a shot across the bows: ‘A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.’ On this basis, Italy would have little claim to Istria, less to Dalmatia, and none to the Alto Adige or the Isonzo valley above Gorizia, let alone the Greek islands or Asia Minor. This affront to the Treaty of London was rammed home by Wilson’s tenth point: ‘The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.’ Publicly, Orlando and Sonnino ignored this call for the empire to become some sort of federation. Privately, Sonnino complained to the American ambassador that Wilson had ‘made no mention whatever of our aspirations, which are not at all imperialistic but simply defensive, for our security and independence, especially in the Adriatic’.

The background to Wilson’s speech was an inter-Allied meeting in Paris several weeks earlier, where President Wilson’s emissary – the diminutive Texan, Edward House – wanted the Allies to agree a new, liberal statement of their aims, pledging that they were ‘not waging war for the purpose of aggression or indemnity’. The idea was to neutralise the peace proposals emanating from Bolshevik Russia and undercut domestic propaganda in Germany. While the British and French dragged their feet, fearing bad publicity if they were seen as going soft, only Italy strongly resisted. House was left feeling that ‘it is perfectly hopeless trying to get Sonnino into anything progressive or constructive’. Sonnino’s problem was that the United States was not bound by the Treaty of London, which was one of those ‘secret covenants’ denounced in the Fourteen Points speech. Wilson’s only interest in the territorial issues turned on their implications for the postwar world. For he had overcome neutralist opinion in the United States by promising to fight for a new liberal international system, to eradicate many traditional causes of war. If Italy’s claims promoted instability, he was duty-bound to resist them.

Both parties were careful not to let latent disagreement get in the way of practical alliance. A few days after the unsatisfactory meeting in Paris, the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary. The empire had not attacked America, nor did Wilson intend to fight Habsburg troops. This step had been requested by Orlando’s government after Caporetto, and urged by the American ambassador in Rome. Wilson complied, both to aid Italian morale and to satisfy domestic critics who wanted the United States to show more grit. The declaration was muted, however, and reassured Vienna that the USA had no wish to ‘impair’ or ‘rearrange’ the empire.

Rome welcomed this signal of support. A month later, the Fourteen Points speech came as a cold shower. In truth, American opinion always had misgivings about Italy’s aims, which seemed typical of sneaky European statecraft, singing with the anti-imperialist chorus while pursuing a quasi-imperial role. The tone of misgiving was caught by journalist Walter Lippmann, a liberal interventionist and advisor to Wilson: ‘More and more the war has ceased to look like a clean-cut fight between right and wrong, between democracy and absolutism, between public faith and international lawlessness. Italy, Romania, Russia with their aggressive programs confuse the situation too much.’

Orlando tried to defuse the problem by denying there was one, blandly summarising Italy’s aims: ‘the completion of her national unity and the security of her borders on land and sea’. But he hurried to Britain for reassurance at the end of January, when both governments solemnly reaffirmed the Treaty of London. British liberal opinion was not convinced; the editor of The Nation queried the discrepancy between that ‘most cynical’ of all the secret treaties and the increasingly anti-imperialist flavour of Allied war aims. The treaty could only be implemented by cancelling the emergent aim of autonomy for the Habsburg nations. By forcing injustice onto non-Italians, this would have bad repercussions inside Italy: ‘By the acquisition of German, Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Albanian, Greek, Turkish and possibly Abyssinian subjects, Italy would become an Empire doomed to racial unrest and firm government.’

This sort of prophecy cut no ice with Allied policy-makers, who needed to defeat the Central Powers. The Italians were keeping 44 Austrian divisions away from the Western Front. Insofar as London and Paris could assuage Rome, they would do so. But they were still persuaded that the Habsburg empire should emerge more or less intact in any settlement. National aspirations were encouraged, within limits; ‘autonomy’ fell far short of self-determination. Apart from diplomatic caution, it made no sense to question the empire’s existence as long as there was a chance of tempting Emperor Karl to break with Germany.

The Allies’ attitude suited Rome very well. If the empire did not survive the war, Italy would have to compete for territory with at least one new national state on the eastern Adriatic. This explains why Sonnino, jealous father of the London Treaty, his ‘paltry masterpiece’, refused to sanction the use of propaganda to reassure Yugoslav soldiers on the Isonzo front that Italy supported their dream of independence. He also blocked the formation of a Czech and Slovak volunteer brigade in Italy, even though his government had no designs on Czech lands. In his view, the cohesion of the empire should not be weakened any more than necessary.

On 3 March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war on terms that strengthened Germany. Three weeks later, the Germans launched their spring offensive in the west, which made shattering progress for a couple of weeks. Then, in a political tit-for-tat with Vienna, Clemenceau revealed Karl’s peace initiative of March 1917, with its friendly reference to French claims on Alsace and Lorraine. German fury at this betrayal had large consequences. When the two emperors met a month later at Spa, in occupied Belgium, Wilhelm tested Karl’s loyalty with a double demand: the Central Powers should form a pan-Germanic political, economic and military union, and the Austrians should support the continuing German offensive by attacking Italy once more.

Germany was riding high. Apart from the accomplishment of Brest-Litovsk, Romania had been forced to accept humiliating terms for peace; it was hard to remember the last Allied triumph in Europe; Ludendorff’s spring offensives had not yet stalled. Wilhelm’s comments at Spa reveal an impossibly arrogant cast of mind, still bent on the mastery of Europe; the resemblance to Hitler’s mindset in 1944 is striking. Neither he nor Karl grasped that Germany’s recent successes veiled an imminent exhaustion. Unable to resist Wilhelm’s pressure, Karl pledged a two-pronged attack from Asiago in the north and across the River Piave towards Venice.

Karl’s consent more or less ended British and French hopes that Austria-Hungary could be split away from Germany, and the Allies became more willing to contemplate the dissolution of the empire, though not yet self-determination for the Slav nations. This turn in Allied thinking coincided with an influential new campaign of pro-Yugoslav propaganda. In February, the British government had set up a Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, under the brilliant press baron Lord Northcliffe, whose primary target was the Habsburg empire. With Northcliffe telling the government that self-determination was a powerful tool against the Austrians, the department embraced the idea that a Yugoslav state would be a viable successor to the empire between the middle Danube and the Adriatic Sea. Inevitably, this had an impact on Italian designs. British propaganda urged a policy that challenged the fundamental aims of a British ally.

The first practical outcome was a conference in Rome, in April. The Congress of the Oppressed Nationalities of Austria-Hungary was meant to demonstrate a harmonious commitment to self-determination for the Habsburg nations. Top-heavy with journalists and artists, it was a noisy event. The Italian government did not take part, but Orlando was discreetly supportive and persuaded Albertini to help organise and perhaps subsidise the congress through Corriere della Sera. Sonnino hoped the participants would fail to reach a common position. Instead they affirmed the right of each people (counting the Yugoslavs as one) to ‘set up a national State entity of its own’, and pledged respect for the rights of minorities. There was a tactful, circle-squaring paragraph on Italian–Yugoslav relations, committing both sides to ‘devote all their efforts’ to achieving Yugoslav unity and independence, and also ‘the completion of Italian unity’.

While the government chose not to recognise the congress, Orlando met its members, urging them to overcome ‘the inexplicable and grievous misunderstanding’ over Italy’s war aims and to remember that no country sympathised more keenly with the Habsburg nations. He was eloquent about ‘generous Poland’ and the Czech cause; on the Yugoslav issue, however, he merely urged the Italians and ‘the southern and Adriatic Slavs’ to make common cause against their common enemy. This effort to soften the impact of the congress declaration before it was published (after a mysterious delay of nearly two months) was unavailing, for a new body was set up to milk this breakthrough. The Central Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission prepared colossal quantities of material: some 60 million copies of 643 manifestos and two million copies of 80 news-sheets in numerous Habsburg languages, skilfully crafted to undermine enemy unity and resolve. Deserting officers put their names to leaflets that were dropped over the Habsburg lines, with cunning messages: ‘The Italians and Yugoslavs are in complete agreement and the Italians receive us and accept us as allies and brothers. Everyone who comes here is sorry that he did not come before, for here hunger and misery, fear and slavery, are unknown.’

Italian civilians were meanwhile exposed to a very different propaganda campaign. Jubilation at Wilson’s declaration of war against Austria had curdled when no American troops arrived. Wilson’s administration responded with a campaign to win hearts and minds. Except for the intervention campaign in 1914–15, it was the first time the public had been exposed to modern techniques, with pamphlets, postcards, ribbons, badges, and articles commissioned for the press. Families of emigrants who volunteered for the US Army were sent substantial grants. Trades unions, the American Red Cross, Italian-American community leaders – all sent the same message: that the United States would commit its huge resources to fighting for peace.

Given that ordinary Italians never saw proof positive of this commitment – for only one in every thousand of the ‘doughboys’ served in Italy – this campaign should have been an uphill struggle. Never theless, it succeeded. Many Italians saw the United States as a promised land where emigrants could make a new life, and Wilsonian ideals filled a vacuum in the labour movement since the Socialist Second International had split in 1914. Popular faith in American intervention showed again that the national division over the war had not healed; most Italians wanted peace more than territory.

This campaign encouraged a strand of liberal opinion, including the so-called ‘democratic interventionists’, to take up the cause of the Habsburg nationalities. (It was the same strand that had been disturbed to learn – after the Bolsheviks mischievously leaked the terms of the Treaty of London late in 1917 – that Italians were dying not only for ‘Trento and Trieste’ but also for the eastern Adriatic seaboard and its overwhelmingly Slav population.) This led to a press campaign for a Czechoslovak Legion to be formed. Permission was granted in May: the volunteer division of 14,000 Czech and Slovak deserters and prisoners of war fought the last two battles of the war alongside the Italians. Sonnino still blocked the formation of a Yugoslav Legion; better that 18,000 Croat and Slovene prisoners of war languish in camps than fight for the Allied cause.

Italian realists were coming to accept what liberals such as Bissolati and Giolitti already believed: that Yugoslav pressure for self-determination had to be accommodated. Orlando, learning the new script, marked the third anniversary of intervention by declaring that, by fighting for Trento and Trieste, the Italians were also fighting on behalf of Warsaw, Prague and Zagreb. By June, Allied propaganda addressed the ‘Yugoslavs’ and urged the ‘resurrection’ (sic) of ‘a free ‘Yugoslavia’. At the end of June, Wilson’s secretary of state declared that ‘All branches of the Slav race should be completely freed from German and Austrian rule.’ The French foreign minister then broke new ground by referring to the future Czechoslovak, Polish and Yugoslav states. Britain supported this statement. The Allies had almost embraced the radical position that the empire would have to go.

The Italians still hesitated. Britain turned the screws by signalling that the London terms might have to be revised. Around the same time, Diaz asked Orlando to increase the flow of pro-Yugoslav propaganda, which was proving very valuable. In mid-August, under this pressure, the government pledged support for the Allied aim of ‘a free and united Yugoslav state, embracing Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’. Sonnino’s abiding hostility was common knowledge, and by early September, Albertini was convinced that Italy was paying an excessive price for its foreign minister’s intransigence. Corriere della Sera challenged the censorship regime by attacking the foreign minister openly. (Orlando probably encouraged this unwonted boldness.) Denying the army an alliance with the Yugoslavs, wrote Albertini, meant depriving it of a powerful weapon.

As a sop to more liberal colleagues, Sonnino did not block a cabinet statement that Yugoslav independence and unity were ‘consonant with the principles for which the Entente is fighting, as well as with the aims of a just and durable peace’. His real view was expressed later in September to the American ambassador: that Austria would emerge from the war as a great power once again, able to dominate and even absorb the Yugoslavs.

Karl’s promise of a two-pronged offensive flew in the face of warnings that Field Marshal Boroević (his new rank) had sent to the high command since the end of March. Karl and his chief of staff hoped to make Rome negotiate, and enlarge their spoils when Germany won the war. Boroevićdid not believe the Central Powers could win. Instead of wasting its strength on needless offensives, Austria should conserve it to deal with the turmoil that peace would unleash in the empire.

But Karl and the high command were adamant: there must be an offensive. Boroević prepared a plan to attack across the River Piave, towards Venice and Padua. Yet again, Conrad argued for an attack from the Asiago plateau: if successful, this would make the Piave line indefensible and force another Italian retreat. He urged the Emperor to attack on both sectors, and Karl gave way. Preparations began on 1 April with a view to attacking on 11 June.

Boroević had seen Cadorna make this very mistake time and again, attacking on too broad a front. He spoke up again: if they had to attack on both sectors, the high command should send reinforcements. In mid-May, he repeated his warning that it was irresponsible to attack without enough shells and with troops ill-equipped and famished. By way of reply, the high command told Boroević to confirm that he would be ready by 11 June. Not before the 25th, he replied. The date was set for 15 June.

On paper, the Austrian army looked strong enough. With Russia out of the war, most of the 53 divisions with a further ten in reserve could be kept in Italy, which was now the empire’s major front. However, the infantry divisions were down from 12,000 to 8,000 or even 5,000 men. New battalions were at roughly half strength. Some 200,000 Hungarian soldiers had deserted in the first three months of 1918. In the spring, Karl approved the call-up of the class of 1900; the new intake would be boys of 17, plus older men returning after convalescence. Cavalry divisions were even more depleted. The railways were dilapidated from over use, and motor vehicles lacked fuel.

The industrial capacity of the empire had never been strong; by 1917, output was declining under the double impact of battlefield casualties and the Allied blockade. In 1918, the decline became a slump. Production of artillery weapons and shells halved in the first half of the year, compared with 1917. Production of rifles fell by 80 per cent in the same period. Uniforms were tattered, there was no new underwear, and worn-out boots could not be replaced. Food shortages helped to trigger a general strike in January. The stoppages spread until 700,000 workers were crying for peace, justice and bread. Radical Socialists exploited the hardship caused by hunger, war taxes and inflation. (‘In Russia, the land, the factories and the mines are being given to the people.’) The mainstream Social Democrats, however, decided not to support the calls for revolution; instead they negotiated with the government. Even so, the army had to send forces from the front to ensure order. February brought the first significant mutiny, by naval crews in Montenegro. Food shortages and officers’ privileges were the trigger, and the unrest spread up the Adriatic coast. Hopes that cooperation with newly independent Ukraine would unlock huge imports of grain came to nothing. April brought food riots in Laibach and ‘mass rallies at which oaths for unity and independence were being sworn’. By now, seven divisions were deployed in the interior of the empire.

The army was not cushioned against the shortages. By 1918, it was getting only half the flour it needed. The daily rations of front-line troops in Italy were reduced in January to 300 grams of bread and 200 grams of meat. Even these statistics only tell half the story. A Czech NCO, Jan Triska of the 13th Artillery Regiment, recorded the real conditions. The rations had run out during the Caporetto offensive, and matters had grown much worse since then. The army was ordered to provision itself from the occupied territory. This was only possible for a month or two; in February, Boroević told the Army High Command that the situation was critical: the men had been hungry for four weeks, and were ‘no longer moved by incessant empty phrases that the hinterland is starving or that we must hold out’. They must be properly fed if they were to fight.

By late April, the men were starving. Bread and polenta were very scarce, and often mixed with sawdust or even sand. Meat practically disappeared. Soldiers stole the prime cuts from horses killed by enemy fire, and orders went out for carcasses to be delivered directly to the slaughterhouse. Triska’s battery horses were dying; only six of 36 were healthy. Even the coffee made of chicory was in short supply. ‘Salt was only a memory.’ The men were often given money instead of food, but there was nothing to spend it on. The men grew so weak during May that they could only walk with difficulty. Triska risked punishment by trading his service revolver and ammunition for horsemeat. He collected stems of grass to boil and eat, and picked mulberries when they could be found. Such was the condition of the men who were sent against the Italians in June.

*

With 23 undersized divisions on the Asiago plateau, another 15 on the line of the Piave and 22 more in reserve, the Habsburg force barely outnumbered the Italians, who had a clear advantage in firepower and in the air. The offensive would start on the Piave, where Boroević’s divisions would attack across the river. Conrad’s divisions were to follow up by striking from the north.

Addressing his officers, Boroević openly criticised the shortages of men and supplies. Due to Conrad’s stubbornness, he implied, the Piave line was short of ten divisions. After this rare indiscretion, the field marshal did his duty, ordering his battalion commanders to attack like a hurricane and not pause until they reached the River Adige. ‘For this, gentlemen, could well be the last battle. The fate of our monarchy and the survival of the empire depend on your victory and the sacrifice of your men.’ It has been claimed that, despite everything, Habsburg morale ran high in June. Certainly, there are reports of soldiers marching to the line with maps of Treviso in their pockets, gaily asking the bystanders how far it was to Rome. They would have taken heart from the order to plunder the Allied lines (no shortages there). Different testimony came from Pero Blašković, commanding a Bosnian battalion on the Piave. According to Blašković, a Habsburg loyalist to the bone, everyone without exception hoped the offensive would be postponed, for they were all aware of Karl’s muted search for a separate peace. It was this, more than hunger or lack of munitions, Blašković says, that took the men’s minds off victory, making them reflect that defeat would cost fewer lives, letting more of them get safely home in the end.

The bombardment began at 03:00 on 15 June. As at Caporetto, the Austrians aimed to incapacitate the enemy batteries with a pinpoint attack, including gas shells. However, their accuracy was poor, due to Allied control of the skies; many of the shells may have been time-expired, and the Italians had been supplied with superior British gas-masks. Too many Austrian guns were deployed in the Trentino, a secondary sector; some heavy batteries had no shells at all; and there was no element of surprise, for Diaz’s army had agents in the occupied territory, and deserters were talkative. The Austrian gunners only had the advantage on the Asiago plateau, where thick fog blanketed the preparations.

At 05:10, the guns lengthened their fire to strike the Italian rear lines and reserves. The pontoons were dragged out from behind the gravel islands near the river’s eastern shore. The enemy batteries were still silent; perhaps the gas shells had knocked them out? No such luck; the Italian guns opened up, pounding the Austrian jump-off positions. The Italian riverbank was still wreathed in gas fumes when the assault teams jumped ashore, quickly taking the Italian forward positions amid the chatter of machine guns.

The morning went well; the Austrians moved 100,000 men across the river under heavy rain. Watching the infantry pour over the pontoons, Jan Triska and his gunners wondered if this time they would reach Venice. Enlarging the bridgeheads proved more difficult. Progress was made on the Montello, where the four divisions pushed forward several kilometres, and around San Donà, near the sea. Elsewhere, the attackers were pinned down near the river. Further north, Conrad’s divisions attacked from Asiago towards Mount Grappa. Slight initial gains could not be held; the Italians had learned how to use the ‘elastic defence’, absorbing enemy thrusts in a deep system of trenches, then counter-attacking. By the end of the day, Blašković realised, ‘our paper house had been blown down’. The Emperor sent Boroević a desperate telegram: ‘Hold your positions, I implore you in the name of the monarchy!’ The answer was curt: ‘We shall do our best.’

Progress on the second day was no easier. Conrad was in retreat; his batteries – more than a third of all the Habsburg guns in Italy – were out of the fight. Boroević ordered his commanders to hunker down while forces were transferred from the north. Meanwhile the Piave rose again, washing away many of the pontoons. Supplying the bridgeheads across the torrent became even more dangerous. The Austrians were too close to exhaustion and their supplies too uncertain for a sustained battle to run in their favour. By the first afternoon, Major Blašković realised that the Austrian artillery, laying down a rolling barrage for the assault troops, were already husbanding their shells. If the under-used Italian units further north were to be redeployed around Montello, the Habsburg goose would soon be cooked. Overhead, the Caproni aeroplanes chased away the Habsburg planes and British Sopwith Camels proved their worth, bombing along the river. (‘In aviation, too, morale is very important,’ Blašković remarked sadly, ‘but technology is even more so.’) The pontoons and columns of men on the riverbank, waiting to cross, offered easy targets. While the Austrians ran out of shells, the Allied artillery and air bombardment were unrelenting. The fate of Jan Triska’s battery on the Piave was indicative: over the week of battle, it lost 58 men, half its strength.

Conrad’s divisions were too hard pressed to transfer men to the Piave. In fact, the opposite happened: the Italians transferred forces from the mountains to the river. When these reinforcements arrived, on 19 June, the Italians counter-attacked along the Piave. They failed to crack the bridgeheads, but the Austrian position was untenable. Pontoons that had survived the bombing were damaged by high water and debris. Blašković’s regiment (the 3rd Bosnia & Herzegovina Infantry) ran out of shells and bullets; the men fought on with bayonets and hand-grenades until a Hungarian regiment managed to bring up a few crates of ammunition from the river.

Boroević told the Emperor that if the Montello could be secured, it should be the springboard for a new offensive. Securing it would need at least three more divisions, including artillery. If the high command did not intend to renew the offensive from the Montello, it was pointless to retain the bridgeheads; they should be abandoned and all efforts dedicated to strengthening the defences east of the river. As Karl wondered what to do, the German high command stepped in, ordering a cessation of hostilities so that the Austrians could despatch their six strongest divisions to the Western Front. For Ludendorff’s spring offensives were running out of steam and 250,000 American troops were arriving every month. Karl consulted his commanders in the field, who echoed Boroević’s stark choice: either reinforce or withdraw. Then he consulted his chief of the general staff, General Arz von Straussenberg. A new offensive within a few weeks was, they agreed, not a realistic prospect. Their reserves were almost used up; even if enough divisions could be transferred to the Piave from elsewhere – and none could safely be spared from Ukraine or the Balkans – the Italians would match them. It would not be possible to recapture the zest of 15 June without a lengthy recovery.

Late on the 20th, Karl ordered the right bank of the Piave to be abandoned. General Goiginger, commanding the corps that had performed so well on the Montello, refused to obey. They had taken 12,000 prisoners and 84 guns; how could they retreat? Eventually he submitted, and the withdrawal began. Both sides were exhausted, and the manoeuvre was completed without much fighting. The Bosnians and Hungarians on the Montello worked their way back to the river. The last Austrians crossed on 23 June, ending the Battle of the Solstice. The Italians had lost around 10,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and more than 40,000 prisoners, against 118,000 Habsburg dead, wounded, sick, captured and missing. Early in July, Third Army units capped the achievement by seizing the swampy delta at the mouth of the Piave which the Austrians had held since Caporetto.

The rejoicing was widespread and spontaneous. For many soldiers, the Battle of the Solstice cleansed the stain of Caporetto, and the name of the Piave has ever since evoked a glow of fulfilment, as smooth as the sound of its utterance, untouched by the horrors of the Isonzo front or the controversy that overshadowed Italy’s victory in November. Ferruccio Parri, a much-decorated veteran who became a leading antifascist, said at the end of his long life that the Battle of the Solstice was ‘the only proper national battle of which our country can truly be proud’.

For the Allies, two things were clear: the Italians were a fighting force again, and the Austro-Hungarian army was still dangerous: its morale had not collapsed and the soldiers were still loyal. The view inside Boroević’s army was different; to their eyes, the civilian system had let them down. They were still better soldiers than the Italians, but what could they do without food or munitions? The spectacle of his own men after the battle filled the genial Blašković with despair: ‘weary, dejected and starving, their tattered uniforms crusted with reddish dry clay. Their weapons alone gave them any likeness to soldiers, for otherwise they looked like beggars roaming from pillar to post.’ Gloom settled over the Austrian lines.

The failure of the Piave offensive made life even harder for the civilians under Austrian occupation.

Looking confidently ahead after Caporetto, the Habsburg high command had proposed that the postwar border between Austria and Italy should run along the River Tagliamento. Boroević mooted an even more vengeful settlement: the border should be pushed back to the line of the rivers Adige and Mincio, restoring all the Veneto to Austria, undoing the 1866 war of unification. By July 1918, these ambitions had gone up in smoke.

When Cadorna’s army retreated after Caporetto, most of the urban population packed its belongings: as many as 400,000 civilians fled across the Piave, including the state employees, landowners, lawyers and so forth. The exception was the clergy, for many priests were glad to see the return of Habsburg power. (Relations between the Vatican and the government in Rome, always difficult, had not recovered from the Pope’s condemnation of ‘useless slaughter’.) Beyond the Piave, these refugees were joined by a quarter of a million civilians from the new front-line areas – Venice, Padua, Treviso.

A much higher proportion of people in the villages and countryside stayed, and waited for the enemy. When the new front stabilised, the occupiers and the local civilians were roughly equal in number: about 800,000 of each. Except for 30,000 Slovenes around Gorizia and a few German-speaking pockets, the locals were Italian, while the occupiers came from all the lands of the Habsburg empire. The Central Powers were ill-prepared to take over the civil administration, and the territory came under military government led by Boroević, headquartered at Udine. The portion of territory under German control was ceded to the Austrians in March.

It was a martial regime. Railways, post and telegraph were subject to exclusive use by the military. Citizens needed a permit to move from one district to another. All Italian patriotic images were removed from public places and schools, and people were forced to celebrate the birthday of Empress Zita, charming emblem of Austrian–Italian unity. The military penal code was applied throughout the territory. There are no statistics for sentences passed by the courts martial; an Italian commission, set up after the war to investigate abuses under the occupation, concluded that death sentences were seldom passed. Exceptions included two civilians hanged for lighting lanterns at night. Their corpses were left on the gibbet for several days, to drive home the message that spies could expect no leniency.

Capital sentences were probably rare because the population was cooperative. Many people were not sorry to see the Austrians take control; they felt let down by the Italian army and tricked by the civilian authorities, which gave no warning or help in October 1917. Besides, communal memories of Habsburg rule before 1866 were not so bad. This attitude could not last. The first wave of plunder and pillage was followed by requisitions that stripped the population of almost everything edible. Livestock was confiscated in January. Vegetables, nuts, wine and oil were next to be seized, followed by the dry forage. All the manure was stolen. Despite these predations, and the benefit of a good local harvest, the occupiers could no longer feed themselves by February, when the requisitions extended to fabric, leather and other material. Household linen was taken in March; people could keep three sets of underwear, two pillow-slips, three sheets and three towels each. In at least one case, soldiers went from house to house, leaving people with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The loot was inventoried, in Habsburg style: the army took 95,000 sheets, 65,000 shirts, 39,000 items of underwear, 47,000 towels, 56,000 pillow-slips and 3,400 ‘unspecified items’.

The ‘Italian traitors’ were supposed to be left enough for their own needs. This did not happen, and by April severe malnutrition was common. Soldiers and civilians alike ate anything they lay their hands on – mice, acacia flowers, vineleaves, wild chicory from the hedgerows. Stray dogs and cats were skinned for the pot. Desperate mothers took their children as close to the front as they could get, hoping to beg food from kindly officers. By the end of the war, almost 10,000 civilians had starved to death. The situation was hardly better for the Slovene evacuees from the Isonzo valley who returned after the Twelfth Battle to find their homes ransacked and fields picked bare of anything that could be eaten or sold. The very landscape had altered. One woman, returning to her village near Tolmein, recorded the desolation:

… the mountains were bare and the trees broken and destroyed by shells, it was sad to see them. There was a soldiers’ cemetery at the foot of Mount Mrzli, reaching as far as the eye could see, grave after grave, each marked with a little wooden cross and covered with moss and ivy. Wherever I looked in the valley all I could see were graves.

Boroević knew the brutal treatment of civilians was counterproductive. People hid whatever they could, depriving his front-line troops of victuals. He opened public kitchens, but his administration lacked the resources and, at lower levels, the will to ensure that people did not starve. Despite his efforts to provide a basic health service, more than 12,500 civilians perished for lack of medical care. Even the censorship office was too short-staffed to be much use, though it caught a woman from Pordenone who described the occupying army, in a letter, as ‘a mass of famished barbarians who have come to Italy to steal everything’.

For Italian nationalists safe on the other side of the Piave, the multiple identity of the occupying force proved its wickedness. One journalist wrote of ‘heterogeneous masses’ of ‘Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, even the lurid Turks set foot on that sacred ground’. She meant the befezzed troops from Bosnia and Herzegovina, many of them Muslim by confession. One of these ‘lurid Turks’ was Pero Blašković who, though not a Muslim, wore the fez as the emblem of his beloved regiment. Compared to his native land, Friuli and the Veneto were highly developed, and the handsome towns, rich countryside and dignified people impressed him. He enthused about the fine straight edges of the fields, with wheat and rice, vineyards and mulberry groves, separated by tidy ditches, neat as a chessboard. Even the military graveyard at Redipuglia, near Gorizia, was evidence of ‘the high level of Italian culture’. The Austrians were ‘literally starving’ when they arrived in this ‘blessed land’; even so, Blašković deplored the scale of pillage, with everyone ‘from the commanding officers to the chauffeurs’ stealing whatever could be grabbed, ripped out or dismantled. Everything that could be melted down for munitions, from factory plant to church bells, was sent to Austria and Germany.

Boroević’s regime could not seal the area against Italian propaganda,1 which naturally portrayed the invasion as a primeval nightmare of rape and pillage, like the Germans in Belgium or – a local legend of mindless atrocity – the ancient Huns in Friuli (where Attila had sacked Aquileia in ad 452). Trench newspapers focused the soldiers’ minds on images of ‘the barbarian violating the women of Italy’, married women dishonoured beside the corpses of their husbands, girls throwing themselves out of windows rather than submit. ‘Protect them, soldier of Italy, for if you give way, your wife too will be defiled.’ Postcards and posters conveyed the same frightful message, which had an added charge because Italian pro-war images of ‘Italia’ had from the start been ‘very erotic’, portrayed as ‘a young, soft, rather sad girl’.

Given this grisly propaganda, ordinary Italians would have been surprised to learn that their government refused to help civilians who wanted to leave the occupied territory. The Supreme Command argued that the local people were more useful at home: they obstructed Habsburg control, strengthened Italian claims to the territory, and provided camouflage for spies. Orlando concurred, and refused to repatriate Italians from the occupied territory, except in extreme need.

The real scale of sexual crime during the occupation will never be known. The postwar royal commission found that rape was widespread in the first few weeks and continued to the end. The victims often preferred to keep silent, deterred by shame and social stigma from admitting the crimes against them. There is evidence that ‘most rapes were carried out in the absolute certainty of impunity, above all when officers or NCOs took part’. In these conditions, Boroević’s personal honesty had little impact on lawlessness and corruption. Even the attitude of the pro-Habsburg clergy hardened over the summer. Occasional acts of sabotage led the administration to fear an uprising. Secret lists were prepared of people to seize as hostages. They were not needed: smouldering anger did not crystallise into active resistance, however hopeless things became, partly because people believed that time was on their side. In October, a foreign ministry official reported to Vienna that if the administration did not improve, 1919 would bring ‘an economic collapse that will swallow up human lives as well as our reputation’. Too late! Their reputation had already perished. Allied troops advancing beyond the Piave in early November found destitution, dereliction, ‘an air of utter emptiness … completely cleaned out of food’. Brutal, arrogant and predatory, the occupation did Rome the favour of destroying any trace of nostalgia in north-eastern Italy for Habsburg law and order. In the empire’s last year of existence, imperial rule finally became as bad as Italian nationalists said it had always been.

Civilian life under the occupation was hardly studied until the 1980s. The whole topic jarred too uncomfortably against the narrative of triumphal recovery. Patriotic historians were troubled by the lack of ‘heroic’ resistance, repelled by the webs of collaboration and profiteering, and perplexed by the postwar polemics between returnees and civilians who never left.

This lack of curiosity looks trivial, however, beside the oblivion that shrouded an even more sensitive subject until the 1990s. This was the official attitude to Italian prisoners of war in Austrian and German camps. The 300,000 men taken during the Twelfth Battle joined the 200,000 or more in camps across the empire. If these men had known that it was more dangerous to be taken prisoner than to serve on the front line, fewer of them would have welcomed their capture. For the Italian government, uniquely, refused to send food parcels to its prisoners of war. As a result, more than 100,000 of the 600,000 Italian prisoners died in captivity – a rate nine times worse than for Habsburg captives in Italy. Only 550 of these were officers, dying of tuberculosis or wounds; the remainder died directly or indirectly of cold and hunger.

Provision of food and other aid to prisoners had been accepted practice since the Central Powers announced in late 1914 that, due to the Allied blockade, they would no longer be responsible for feeding and clothing Allied prisoners of war. While Britain and France subsidised the aid to their captured soldiers, Italy refused to take such measures, or even, except in extreme cases, to allow the exchange of sick prisoners. Fearful that soldiers would desert en masse if they believed they would be safe in captivity, the government treated Italian POWs as cowards or defectors who should be punished. This unpublicised policy was bolstered by a propaganda campaign against prisoners of war. (D’Annunzio, dependably odious, branded them ‘sinners against the Fatherland, the Spirit, and Heaven’.) Charity subscriptions for captured soldiers were prohibited. As a concession, the Red Cross was permitted to take aid for officers only. Private packages were permitted, but few were sent – due to the penury in which many soldiers’ families lived – and even fewer arrived.

This heinous policy was proposed by the Supreme Command and supported by successive governments thanks above all to Sonnino, who insisted that, under international law, responsibility lay with the captors. The worst effects were felt after Caporetto, when the vast flood of prisoners strained the camp system in Austria and Germany beyond its limits. Over the terrible winter of 1917–18, hundreds of prisoners died every day. According to Carlo Salsa, an inmate in Theresienstadt camp, prisoners concealed the corpses in their barracks, so the dead men’s rations would keep arriving. The Red Cross appealed to the government in Rome, but nothing was done until summer 1918, when hard-tack rations were sent. They reached the camps in November, when the war was already over.

The Austro-Hungarian army in Italy shrank from 650,000 to 400,000 between July and October. Few of these men were combat casualties. Many deserted; others succumbed to the malaria that ravaged the coastal areas and the lower Piave, to dysentery or the so-called Spanish flu that appeared around Padua in July and spread eastwards. In their weakened condition, starving, with their uniforms in shreds, lacking boots and underclothes, they were prey to every illness. The average body weight in one division had sunk by August to 50 kilograms, less than 8 stones.

Despite blizzards of propaganda by Czech, Yugoslav, Polish and other separatist groups; half a million POWs returning from Russia, many of them newly politicised and loudly critical; extremely degrading conditions at the front, and the disappearance of any hope of victory – despite all this, the Habsburg army remained loyal. There were no mutinies on the Italian front until late October, just before the last battle; even these were limited to a few units. This testifies to the effectiveness of military discipline, the power of habit, the unthink ability of historic change, and the grip on soldiers’ minds of their immediate circumstances. Perhaps the anticipation of a final decisive Italian attack was another binding element.

The army’s endurance is more striking because the erosion of morale was unstoppable. A battalion commander on Mount Grappa explained the pressures on his men, in a stoical letter of 1 July:

We have been officially notified to expect that men of the [Allied] Czechoslovak brigade will dress in Austrian uniforms and attack our positions – this, when half our regiment is Czech. I won’t go into the miserable state of our position except to mention some key words: 8 degrees Centigrade, heat and light forbidden, no water, ice-cold food, no caves, no shelter etc. – repeated desertions, countless Italian propaganda leaflets, but no press reports of our own.

Far from producing counter-propaganda, the Austrian newspapers were part of the problem; Boroević warned that journalism about the ‘miserable internal state of Monarchy’ amounted to enemy propaganda. The Army High Command went further: the normal language in the newspapers was indistinguishable from enemy propaganda: namely, ‘self-determination’, ‘persecution’ and ‘demands of oppressed peoples’. Little could be done: the machinery of government was too decayed for censorship to be effective.

Increasingly, morale could only be raised by appealing to nationalist emotion, which begged the question of why the men should fight for the empire at all. A divisional commander on the Piave reported in mid-July that ‘mental and physical depression’ gripped his soldiers, ‘regardless of nationality, rank or intelligence’. Few men’s morale was proof against the combination of nationalist agitation at home, shortages on the front, and enemy propaganda. Desertions increased over the summer, usually to the interior. A staff officer, inspecting a corps in the Tenth Army in September, found no enthusiasm.

Most of the men are apathetic, but they will fulfil their duty bravely and unflaggingly … The longing for peace is widespread … Efforts of the company commanders to put heart into the ranks by patriotic instruction are unsuccessful largely because of news from the hinterland.

By July, many non-German regions of the empire were shearing away. Separatist goals were promoted by emerging leaders from Poland to Slovenia. Even token reference to the dynasty was often lacking at public rallies. The German ambassador estimated that two-thirds of people in Vienna believed the Allies would win the war. Morale at the front had been partly cordoned against this encroaching gloom, but there was now a feedback loop: troops demoralised by news from home would desert and spread news of disillusion at the front. Morale had depended on junior officers who by this stage were more likely than their men to sympathise with the nationalist arguments raging across the empire.

The 56 divisions now in Italy had a fighting strength of less than 37 divisions. In August, General Arz informed the German high command that the empire could only stay in the war until the end of the year; the army would then be needed to resolve ‘internal political questions’. On 8 August, the Allies took the initiative in France: following a French counter-offensive on the Marne, British forces broke through near Amiens. A string of victories brought the end of the war into sight. At the end of the month, Foch asked Diaz to support the operations in France by attacking across the Piave. Diaz refused: his army was not ready. Orlando agreed, but changed his mind by mid-September when it dawned that the Allied breach of the Hindenburg Line meant that German defeat was close. His impatience mounted along with Allied pressure, and Orlando pressed Diaz to plan an attack in early October, or by the end of October at the latest. Diaz found Orlando’s advice confusing and unreliable. He insisted that it would be reckless to attack in the near future. Senior commanders were told to expect the final push in spring 1919.

Sonnino suspected that dread of ‘doing a Cadorna’ was making Diaz – whom he admired – overly cautious. For his part, the Foreign Minister saw that Bulgaria’s collapse at the end of September and Ottoman Turkey’s imminent capitulation had shifted the balance: with their south-eastern flank wide open and the Allies poised to attack, the Central Powers would not hold out much longer. If the Italians were left digging in for the winter while the Allies drove the Germans out of France and Belgium, their negotiating position would be feeble. If they were to win the territory pledged in 1915, they had to defeat the Austrians once and for all, knocking them out of the war.

Diaz awoke to these realities when Austria and Germany sought a rapid negotiated end to the war in the first week of October. Within a few hours of each other, first Vienna and then Berlin asked Wilson for an armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points. When Wilson made no answer, Karl announced that the empire would become a confederated monarchy. He tried to win time and favour by proclaiming that the Austrian half of the empire would be a federation where every ‘ethnic group’ formed its own ‘state community’. It was too vague, too little, and much too late to save his inheritance by magically reconciling dynastic survival with national self-determination.

Diaz prepared to attack in the second half of October. His plan was ready by 9 October. When they met three days later, Orlando was smarting from his latest interrogation by Allied leaders in Paris; Clemenceau, easily irritated by the Italians, was galled by their inaction. Diaz issued the first orders for the offensive. By now, Germany was corresponding with Wilson; a peace based on the Fourteen Points was infinitely preferable to full-scale defeat and occupation. On the 14th, Wilson said any armistice must guarantee Allied military superiority and democratic government in Germany. A few days later he answered Karl’s request; ‘certain events of utmost importance’ had overtaken the tenth of the Fourteen Points; instead of ‘autonomous development’, the peoples of Austria-Hungary would decide their own future.

The Italians were worried to learn on 19 October that Austria was working on a proposal to sue for peace on the basis of a unilateral retreat from Italian territory. This would steal their thunder, and Orlando – now so vexed by the chief of staff’s prudence that he wondered if he could replace him – telegraphed Diaz at once: ‘Between inaction and defeat, I prefer defeat. Get moving!’ Wilson fuelled the fire under Diaz with a statement on 21 October supporting the Habsburg Slavs’ bid for independence. Diaz decided that zero hour would be 03:00 on the 24th.

Orlando busied himself wringing renewed British and French commitment to the Treaty of London. Statements were splashed in the press, but Washington would not be drawn; the Department of State said only that ‘Italy was entitled to the irredenta and also entitled to establish proper strategic boundaries.’ Orlando’s government explained coolly that this meant American support for its claims to the whole of the south Tyrol, Trieste, Istria and the Albanian coast. As the infantry on Grappa moved to the jump-off trenches and the gunners on the Piave waited in their pits, the government knew that the dividend of victory was still uncertain.

The plan of attack centred on the upper and middle Piave. Diaz would punch through the enemy lines around the road to Vittorio Veneto and Sacile, splitting Boroević’s Sixth and Fifth armies, deployed respectively on the northern and southern halves of the Piave. This would make the Austrian positions on the Asiago plateau and Mount Grappa untenable.

Of Diaz’s 57 infantry divisions and four cavalry divisions, including three British, two French and one of Czechoslovak volunteers, some 33 would be committed in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The spearhead would be the Eighth Army, comprising 14 divisions under General Caviglia. Its right flank would be protected by the Tenth Army: two British and two Italian divisions, under Lord Cavan. To its left, the small Twelfth Army (one French and two Italian divisions, under a French general) would secure the Piave below Mount Grappa and cross the river at the same time as the Eighth Army. Grappa itself was the responsibility of General Giardino’s Fourth Army, which had to support the Twelfth Army with counter-battery fire. The other armies in the battle, the Sixth on the Asiago plateau (six divisions, including one British and one French) and the Third on the southern portion of the front, were to await developments.

Much depended on the river. Even if the Piave behaved itself, infantry columns made easy targets, silhouetted against expanses of shingle. When Diaz drew up his operational orders on 12 October, the river was running high. Under mounting pressure to move, he made a crucial decision: the attack would start on Mount Grappa instead of the Piave. Strengthened with three extra divisions and 400 extra guns, the Fourth Army would drive the Austrians off Grappa and then thrust northwards up the valley of the River Brenta, enveloping the Austrian force on the Asiago plateau. The operation on the Piave would begin overnight, less than 24 hours after Giardino’s attack in the mountains.

The Allies started with every advantage. Apart from infantry strength, their superiority in guns and aircraft had increased since June. Boroević decided to cede ground where he must, in the hope of counter-attacking later. This was a desperate gamble; if morale was as fragile as he suspected, the second and third lines and reserves might crumble when the enemy overwhelmed the first line. But there was no alternative. On 17 October, his order of the day exhorted the army to fight for ‘an honourable peace’. Privately anticipating a catastrophe, he laid plans for an orderly retreat with mobile rearguard protection. A dynastic loyalist to the end, his priority was to preserve his forces so that they could defend the empire against its internal enemies after the armistice. And these enemies were multiplying: on the 23rd, hours before the Italians attacked, several Hungarian units refused to go up the line, and two Bosnian companies mutinied.

The Battle of Vittorio Veneto, October–November 1918

Attacking on schedule, the Fourth Army quickly ran into trouble. Giardino had less than a week to prepare an operation for which no studies existed, and the Austrian positions on Mount Grappa were strong. Boroević had expected the attack to begin on the high ground, and Italian artillery had been shelling the Austrian lines on Grappa for days, so there was no surprise. When more rain fell on the 24th, Diaz had to delay the Eighth Army’s attack – by 48 hours, as it turned out – which deprived Giardino of support on the right. Worst of all, the Italian tactics were primitive: infantry units were spread evenly, regardless of terrain, and advanced in lines. The fighting degenerated into a bloodbath, in Cadorna’s worst style. Austria’s initial resistance let Karl hope that all might not yet be lost. But he was not a fantasist; on the 26th, he informed Wilhelm that he would have to seek an armistice and a separate peace.

After six days’ hard fighting, Giardino had ‘no success’ to show for nearly 25,000 casualties: two-thirds of the Italian losses in the battle. Fortunately, operations on the Piave were going to plan after a delayed start. A British corps commander had proposed that the Papadopoli islands, a shingle archipelago south of the Montello, should be occupied before the main attack. This was done on 23 October,2 leaving the Tenth Army well placed for the next stage. Still, the island was separated from the Austrian lines by the main channels of the river, almost a mile wide, brimming and raging after days of rain. There was little that Cavan could do but wait.

Eventually, under cover of night on the 26th, the Tenth Army moved in strength across to the islands. Norman Gladden, a private in the 11th Northumberland Fusiliers (23rd Division) who had survived the Somme and Passchendaele, was among the troops waiting on the western shore. Over his shoulder, he saw ‘thousands of gun flashes coalescing to form a continuous blaze of light along the bank’. In front, the pontoon bridge was a frightening sight.

A string of small boats had been thrown across the river in such a way that the powerful current tended to force them closer together, and they supported a planked gangway, which was roped across their gunwales. Over this bridge the assault troops had to pass, regulated by an Italian boatman to ensure that the structure should not become overloaded at any point. We were to proceed at three-pace intervals. I saw a steel-helmeted figure mount the bridge and stride slowly forward; and another, and another. The gangway stood some feet above the water and in the darkness seemed to be hung high in the air. The flaming horizon beyond threw the dark figures into relief, while shrapnel shells stabbed the darkness above.

The Austrian forward positions on the far shore were thinly manned behind the wire entanglements, and half-heartedly defended after a shattering bombardment by British gunners. A British divisional history recorded that ‘Not many Austrians stayed to fight, the majority, surprised and dismayed at the failure of the wire to hold up the attack, streamed back inland in disorder, almost too fast to give the riflemen and Lewis gunners much chance to shoot them down.’ Further north, protected by a ferocious barrage, the Eighth and Twelfth Army engineers threw 11 pontoon bridges across the river. During the night of 26–27 October, the Piave tore most of them down; Austrian artillery demolished the rest. A few Eighth Army units that had crossed the river were trapped in bridgeheads between Grappa and Montello, helpless to assist Giardino. The Twelfth Army was no better off.

In this predicament, the role of spearhead fell to the British divisions of the Tenth Army, not an outcome that has won much recognition from Italian historians. Cavan sent these divisions beyond the river at dawn on the 27th. The troops’ mood lightened as they moved eastward in the morning sunshine, meeting little resistance. ‘A new carefree attitude was taking control. We were no longer the frightened troops nailed to the earth by a storm of steel. We were advancing into enemy-held territory, victors at last.’ The Austrian 7th Infantry Division apparently panicked at the sight of the British (whose presence during the preparations had been carefully concealed), and the disarray spread to adjacent divisions. Some reserve units refused to move up when ordered.

Caviglia was stuck; high water as well as accurate Austrian shelling stopped him from enlarging his bridgehead. As had been agreed for this eventuality, he lent a reserve corps to the Tenth Army; this was sent southwards to use Cavan’s bridges. The Italian–British force crossed overnight; the northern bridgeheads of the Eighth and Twelfth Armies were linked during the 28th and extended against a patchy defence. Major Blašković’s battalion, deployed opposite a French bridgehead, was encircled and captured when a Hungarian regiment on their flank ran forward waving white rags. His men, filthy and pot-bellied with hunger, were a pitiful sight beside the smart, well-fed poilus.

That morning, Boroević reported to the high command that resistance by non-German troops was weakening and incidents of mutiny were increasing. ‘He was informed that the government had asked President Wilson for an Armistice, and commented that this news would hardly raise morale.’ Diaz’s original plan was taking shape: the Allies were moving towards Vittorio Veneto and Sacile, the axis that should split the Austrians. To protect his Sixth Army, Boroević ordered four reserve divisions to prepare to engage the enemy. One division refused to budge; the other three took up positions on a stream called the Monticano, between the Piave and the Livenza. He also feared the envelopment of the Fifth Army, which had not been tested because the Duke of Aosta’s men were still on the right bank, though crossings were now imminent. So he ordered the Fifth to withdraw to the Monticano line. Here the empire made its last stand.

Late in the day, Lord Cavan ordered his divisions across the Monticano. Except for an Italian battery, the British lacked artillery support; it took the whole of 29 October to knock out Austrian machine guns above the steep riverbank and in isolated farms. The issue was settled by nightfall, and Boroević ordered a retreat to the River Livenza, a few kilometres further east. He had urged the high command to tell the Italians that Habsburg forces would pull back behind the 1866 border, unilaterally evacuating the Veneto. (Preparations for this contingency had been in hand since 14 October, when the high command ordered the armies in Italy to send all inessential equipment and infrastructure to the interior of the empire.) General Arz, conceding that the army in Italy was finished, ordered Boroević to withdraw at once, as a token of goodwill. Cavan’s forward units saw the sky light up as the Austrians burned their ammunition dumps. In Austrian accounts the retreat was dreadful but not headlong; ‘a semblance of order’ was ‘maintained by sheer force of habit, a march into nothingness’.

Back on the Piave, the bridgeheads were enlarged all along the river. The final stage of the battle began on the 30th, with Italians pouring across the river in strength. Allied heavy guns crossed as well, which cheered the advance units, though resistance faded so quickly that artillery support was superfluous. Civilians emerged from their cottages, their faces taut with starvation, to cheer the Allies. In the morning, cyclists and bersaglieri of the Eighth Army occupied Vittorio Veneto, some 16 kilometres beyond the Piave. Later that day, forward units reached the River Livenza.

As per Diaz’s plan, divisions of the Eighth and Twelfth Armies swung northwards, forcing the Austrians to withdraw from the Grappa massif or be encircled. The manoeuvre succeeded; with the Fourth Army advancing at last, the Austrian Eleventh Army was exposed on the Asiago plateau. That night, it withdrew from front-line positions. The Sixth Army turned this tactical retreat into a rout. Over the next three days, the British 48th Division took more than 20,000 prisoners for the loss of 26 killed and 129 wounded.

Let us pick up the story of Jan Triska, the Czech artillery officer, who returned from home leave in mid-September. On 30 October, with the Italians less than 10 kilometres away, Jan’s regiment prepared to retreat. For the first time ever, the men were ordered to fall in, in national groups. A second shock followed: the officers canvassed views on the future of the empire. Who was for the Emperor? Sixty hands went up. Who was for a republic? Eighty-six hands. And who wanted a national state of their own? Some forty Czechs raised their hands.

On the last day of October, the Italian line moved steadily eastwards. Cavan’s 23rd Division liberated Sacile. Austrian rearguards tried to delay the Allies as huge numbers of soldiers made for the River Tagliamento, abandoning everything, burning the bridges as they went. Writing to his wife, Diaz allowed himself, for once, to exult. It was, he said, ‘Caporetto in reverse’. Victory was assured. ‘I have won the war more by the strength of my heart and nerves than by any intellectual gifts, and I feel stronger, more balanced, than all of them’ – meaning the politicians who had carped at his caution.

A woman on the road from Conegliano to Vittorio Veneto was seen shouting triumphantly ‘Now it’s goodbye, Caporetto, and good riddance!’ Across the empire, nations emerged or re-emerged into history. Karl refused on principle to approve the use of force against the separatists.

The Italians were in no hurry to reach an armistice, and Karl’s negotiators were not received at Padua until the 31st. General Badoglio treated his opposite number, General Viktor Weber von Webenau, with cold formality. That morning, representatives of the American, British, French and Italian governments – the ‘Big Four’ – had met in Paris to discuss armistices with Germany and Austria. They agreed that the Italians, acting on behalf of the Allies, should occupy Habsburg territory along the eastern Adriatic, according to the Treaty of London. Some good historians have accused Italy’s partners of missing a crucial opportunity; instead of handing the Italians control over the territory pledged in the Treaty of London, they should have raised the Treaty’s incompatibility with Wilson’s principles. It is an unhistorical objection, for the Central Powers were still undefeated and the Allies were still bound by the Treaty, which Wilson himself would not dispute before a full-dress peace conference. It may be that Wilson’s envoy in Paris, Colonel House, ‘knew literally nothing about the Adriatic and cared even less’, in the bitter judgement of one of these historians; this does not mean his decisions on the last day of October were wrong or cynical.

While the talks continued in Paris and Padua, the Allies attacked the rearguards and retreating columns. The road from Sacile to Pordenone was packed with Austrian troops ‘in headlong retreat … bombarded, bombed and machine-gunned from the air’. The future Marxist critic Ernst Fischer, commanding a half-battery of howitzers on the Piave, observed the Allied planes strafing the highway with a sharp eye: ‘Under the impact of the hail of metal the road puckered like the skin of a freezing man.’ They were freezing, too, unable to sleep for cold. Next day, Lieutenant Hugh Dalton of the Royal Artillery – who would serve as chancellor of the exchequer in the great reforming Labour government after the Second World War – saw the ditches full of dead men and horses. ‘The loss in wrecked and abandoned material of every kind had been immense.’ People were already eating the dead horses.

Elsewhere, the last Habsburg governor of Trieste received a cable from Vienna at 19:30 on the 31st, announcing that Austrian rule on the Adriatic Sea was over. He left by train the following day, shortly before Diaz ordered a general advance along the whole length of the front.3 By 2 November, the Asiago plateau was completely in Italian hands. Advance units crossed the Tagliamento in the afternoon. Several Tyrolean regiments – the last Habsburg units still fighting – surrendered. Boroević telephoned the high command: as it had become impossible to ‘defend our borders’, what should he do? He was ordered to move as many intact units as possible to the hinterland so they could be transferred to their new national states.

At the Villa Giusti, Badoglio handed over Italy’s terms for an armistice. The Austro-Hungarians must stop fighting at once; the imperial army must be reduced to 20 divisions and surrender half its artillery; all the occupied territories (corresponding to the Treaty of London) must be evacuated within a period to be decided by the Allies; all German troops must leave the empire within 15 days; all Allied prisoners of war must be liberated at once; and the Allies must have free use of all imperial transport networks. The terms were nonnegotiable and the Austrians had until midnight on 3 November to accept.

In the echoing halls of the Schönbrunn palace, Karl conferred late into the night with his prime minister, foreign minister, and chief of staff. He was especially troubled by the prospect that the Allies would use their freedom of movement to attack Germany from imperial territory – an eventuality he had promised to forestall. Arz advised him to accept as the only way to save hundreds of thousands of lives. This was an appeal he could not resist, but he still wanted his government’s approval. Some form of assent was obtained, and the commanders at the front were informed; rashly, they were ordered to cease hostilities at once. At this point, early on 3 November, the high command was unaware of an Italian stipulation that the ceasefire should come into effect with a 24-hour delay, so their forward units could be informed. General Weber realised the discrepancy would be disastrous for Austrian troops, but the high command refused to amend the order. In desperation, Weber asked Badoglio to suspend hostilities immediately. His request was brushed aside, and the Italians signed the armistice at 15:20. It would come into force at 15:00 on 4 November.

As if bent on confirming, with its last breath, every accusation of haughty negligence towards the common people, the Habsburg élite had bungled the armistice. The Italians had 24 hours to round up unresisting Austrian soldiers who believed the war was over. Some 350,000 prisoners were taken in the last day of the war. One-third of this haul were German Austrians; 83,000 were Czechs and Slovaks, 60,000 were South Slavs, 40,000 were Polish; tens of thousands more were Romanian, Ruthenian and even – 7,000 of them – Italian. One of the Czechs was Jan Triska. At 07:00 on 3 November, his brigade was called by the high command. Italy had agreed an armistice, and all hostilities on the south-western front should halt with immediate effect. Nobody told them the Italians were still fighting, and Jan awoke on 4 November as a prisoner. Civilians lined the roads to hit and spit at them as they were marched to the rear. By 11 November, the Italians held 430,000 Habsburg prisoners. Their harsh treatment led to some 30,000 deaths, as needless as any on this front. Conditions for the soldiers who escaped capture were not much easier; the roads and railways away from the front were in pandemonium, food was nowhere to be had, and newly formed Yugoslav militias barred the retreating troops from towns and villages in Slovenia.

The Austrians kept their word and emptied their POW camps. When retreating Habsburg troops met Italians coming the other way, there was no hostility; indeed, ‘we talked to them as to old friends’. The Italians’ official reception was often less friendly. As Carlo Salsa’s train thundered into Padua station, the returning prisoners embraced each other: ‘We’re in Italy! Italy! Viva l’Italia!’ But soldiers with bayonets refused to let them off the train. Former prisoners were interned for weeks in poor conditions, and interrogated on the reason for their capture. The Supreme Command wondered at one point if they might not be sent directly to Libya, prolonging their punishment and populating the colonies in one stroke.

After three days and nights ‘on the gun’ behind the Piave, Gunner Blackburn and his mates had been idle since 28 October. ‘It was hard for any of us to realise that the enemy had gone.’ There was very little information from the front, and ‘Nobody seems to know what is going to happen.’ The men played cards and went ratting with stray dogs. Civilians began to return to the village: ‘How they will manage to exist is their problem.’ On 2 November, there were ‘strong rumours of peace, the Italians are marching up and down the village, singing and shouting’. On the 3rd, curiosity overcame four of the Tommies. Deciding they ‘were out of the war, as far as this front is concerned’, they ventured across one of the pontoons. The Austrian first line was eerily intact, as if the men had vanished at a touch: ‘On the parapet were rifles laid in a row, just as they had been left, alongside them were heaps of expended cartridge cases. The machine guns were still in position, the belts of ammunition still in the guns.’ In a nearby field, they saw 32 battery horses in teams of eight, with their drivers still mounted, all killed by the bombardment. Other dead had already been collected and buried in graves so shallow that their boots stuck out. There was not another living soul anywhere in the wide landscape.

The Battle of Vittorio Veneto meant something to Italians that cannot be found in a summary of operations. It brought the balm of victory and the promise of peace. Piero Pieri, the war veteran and historian, would hail it as a masterly breakthrough, ‘our purest glory’. The Italians had defeated an Austrian army in a straight fight – something that eluded them during the Risorgimento. More than this: ‘After fifteen centuries, an Italian army drove back and destroyed a larger and completely foreign army.’ Along with the empire, victory had destroyed the myth that Italians were incapable of waging war. A joke going around at the time caught the infantry’s rueful pride: ‘Just when we learned how to fight – the war is over!’

Boroević’s postwar life was to be sad and brief. Denied permission to live in Yugoslavia, he survived in destitution in southern Austria, ‘longing for death’ as he told a friend. According to legend, he lived on gifts of food from veterans. The Yugoslavs refused to pay his pension, supposedly because he had ordered his retreating army to occupy Ljubljana in November 1918. He died in May 1920.

When I compare my fate with that of my good German comrades [he wrote in the last weeks of his life] I cannot help but be envious. They were all able to save their fatherland from catastrophe. I could not. The Yugoslavs, whose kingdom would not have emerged if I had not fought the battles on the Isonzo, cannot forgive my role in prolonging the war … I am likewise a stranger to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Thus, for now, I have no country and am living for the sixth year out of my military chest.

Diaz’s Victory Bulletin, issued on 4 November, exaggerated the strength of enemy forces and minimised the Allied contribution. It became a sort of national scripture, displayed in barracks as a bronze relief cast from the metal of Austrian guns and fixed to the walls of schools for pupils to learn. When people read its artful boast that ‘the remains of what was once one of the most powerful armies in the world’ were in retreat, they could not know that ‘once’ meant a long time ago. (On 9 November, Orlando suppressed a draft communiqué by Diaz that described the ‘disastrous condition’ of the Austrian army in its last days.) This false account of the last battle was not contested by the military, whom it flattered, or the journalists, who were still censored and self-censoring. Within a few years it merged seamlessly with Fascist glorification of the war. Under Mussolini, historians who knew better wrote that Italy had defeated the Austrians ‘alone’.

The 24 hours of grace were used to put Italian boots on as much territory as possible around the northern Adriatic and in the Alto Adige. At 16:20 on 3 November, an Italian destroyer nosed into the bay of Trieste. An officer in Austrian uniform led the ship through the mines guarding the harbour towards the quay, packed with excited citizens.4 The officer was Lieutenant Guido Tedaldi, an Italian from one of the Adriatic islands. Someone asked if he would not rather change his uniform. No, he said, he had to redeem this one, by making it serve the fatherland. Redemption was the word of the day. Standing at the prow of the Audace was the tall, corpulent figure of General Petitti di Roreto, who would be Trieste’s first Italian governor. ‘From today’, he cried, ‘our dead are dead no longer!’ The crowd roared ‘Viva l’Italia! Welcome! At last!’ A band played the royal march of the House of Savoy. ‘In the name of His Majesty the King of Italy, I take possession of the city of Trieste!’ the general declared.

Trento was liberated on the same day, and the first patrols entered Udine and Gorizia, closely followed by refugees who had been counting the hours before they could go home. A lady from Gorizia described the scene:

… such ruins were unimaginable … Munitions boxes, heaps of stones, rags, furniture, stoves … The windows are all barricaded with sandbags or bricks and you can still see the machine guns poking out of the garret windows. Barbed wire, bits of furniture, piles of wreckage, stones, block the street to the city centre. The square in front of the cathedral looks like a rubbish tip. The shops have all been gutted, everything tossed on the ground in complete confusion; a heavy-calibre shell has destroyed our house. The only movement, the only sign of life, is the rats. They rush about the streets by the dozen, outside the houses, between your legs.

Even making all haste, by 15:00 on 4 November the army was far short of the Brenner Pass. On the Adriatic, when the armistice came into force, the line of control ran short of Monfalcone, let alone Trieste. The problem was not resistance – Austrian authority melted at the touch, like snowflakes; it was mechanical. Diaz had no means to get his men far enough forward in the short time available. As long as the Italians were merely advancing, however, rather than fighting, the armistice did not oblige them to stop. Valentino Coda, a volunteer from Genoa who became the first Fascist deputy in parliament, spoke to joyful crowds in Trento: ‘The dream has come true, our hundred-year effort has been crowned, and exultant Italy gathers you to her breast.’ Pressing beyond Trento, the first troops in the Alto Adige passed Italian prisoners of war on the long road home, looking like ghosts, smiling and weeping. A unit of the 75th Alpino Division reached the Brenner Pass on 7 November. Two days later, the last Austrian troops made their way north across the pass. On the 10th, an Italian battery climbed to the summit and ran the national flag up an improvised flagpole. The Italians stood on their ‘natural border’ at last.

Torpedo boats overloaded with infantry were sent from Venice to the ports of Pola, Zara and Sebenico. Facing no resistance, a single platoon could ‘occupy’ a town. Warships docked at the larger Dalmatian islands and the Albanian port of Valona. Troops even landed at Cattaro (Kotor), down in Montenegro. South of Istria, the Italians were ‘received with open hostility’ except in Zara, the only city with an Italian majority. Nonetheless, they behaved like masters with inalienable rights of conquest. An admiral claimed the title ‘Governor of Dalmatia’. An American envoy warned that Italy’s bullying attitude threatened ‘to produce an open collision with the Yugoslavs … the population is in no way hostile to a joint landing of the Entente forces but only to the Italians being allowed to act alone’. Yugoslav leaders begged the Allies to land forces of their own in Dalmatia. A few units were sent, including an American regiment. As they came under Diaz’s command, these units could hardly address the problem. Indeed, Italian commanders learned to send American platoons ahead, in order to defuse anti-Italian feeling. The Americans were then withdrawn overnight and replaced with Italians.

Fatefully, in mid-November, Orlando authorised the occupation of Fiume, a port between Trieste and Zara that had been developed as a Hungarian alternative to Austrian Trieste, 70 kilometres away. With good connections to central Europe, the port had grown rapidly. By the end of the nineteenth century, imperial buildings lined the harbour-front. Italian immigration was encouraged, to dilute the Croat pop ulation; by 1910, two-thirds of the old town (with 25,000 inhabitants) was Italian. The wider urban area remained over whelmingly Croat. Before the war, Fiume had not figured prominently on the irredentists’ wish-list; the Treaty of London granted it to the South Slavs, as a guarantee that they would not be deprived of a modern port.

By an ancient prerogative – preserved through centuries of Habsburg rule, like many other constitutional flora and fauna – Fiume was a ‘corpus separatum’, a distinct entity within the empire. On this basis, local Italian leaders claimed the town’s right to self-determination in mid-October. When the Hungarian authorities abandoned Fiume at the end of the month, local irredentists staged a plebiscite on the city’s future and proclaimed its annexation to Italy. This was the situation when a Sardinian brigade disembarked on 17 November, shoring up the self-proclaimed authorities and ensuring that the issue of Fiume would envenom the Paris conference in 1919.

The government approved a plan drawn up by Badoglio to break Slovene and Croat resistance in the occupied territories, and subvert the fragile Yugoslav state with black propaganda and paid agents. Orlando and Sonnino hoped to weaken the Yugoslav authorities-in-waiting while justifying Italy’s occupation. Inland, the Italians ignored the demarcation line agreed in the armistice. The 83rd Company of Engineers marched on and on, beyond the Carso, stopping at a little village where they erected an obelisk with a Latin inscription, expressing the White Man’s Burden of Italian greatness: ‘Consul Aulus Postumius reached this point 2,000 years ago. Today Italy returns with her civilisation.’5 Other units pushed further eastwards still, and were only deterred from occupying the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, when Serbian army units threatened to attack.

The Americans and French were troubled. To clip Italian pretensions, France made Fiume the logistics base of the Allied Armies of the Orient. Indignant at this bid to loosen their grip on Fiume, the Italians refused to comply. The quarrel spiralled up to the highest level, and the Allies sent a quartet of admirals to investigate. Foch resolved the matter shortly before Christmas: the Yugoslavs should control Ljubljana and the Italians, Fiume. The Yugoslav state had already been proclaimed, thanks in part to Italy’s threatening posture in the Adriatic, driving the Slovenes and Croats into the arms of Serbia, accelerating the very process of state-formation that Sonnino wanted to abort. Sonnino dedicated himself to preventing the new state’s recognition by the Allies while suffocating it with an economic blockade. The United States recognised Yugoslavia nonetheless in February 1919, while Britain and France delayed doing so merely ‘to please the Italians’, as Clemenceau put it. By then Italy’s leaders had squandered their credit with the other Allies, mismanaging their role at the Paris conference so spectacularly that Cadorna’s campaigns look almost judicious by comparison.

Source Notes

TWENTY-SIX Resurrection

1 Allied support: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 34–5.

2 ‘extravagant fervour’: Captions at the Royal Fusiliers Museum in the Tower of London.

3 ‘red tiled roofs, pale pink’: Blackburn.

4 ‘absolute joy’: Arthur, 103.

5 ‘we found the troops getting pelted’: L. I. L. Ferguson.

6 ‘flatter than you would think’: Acland.

7 ‘a mighty expanse of water’: Gladden, 67.

8 ‘some seven miles long’: Gladden, 29.

9 ‘played in the waters’: Acland.

10 ‘we could sit around’: Gladden, 38.

11 men who were judged less reliable: Schindler, 278.

12 he devolved more operational decision-making: Procacci [2000], 76.

13 no objection to the formation: Gratton, 24.

14 An internal report in November: Gian Luigi Gatti, 55.

15 ‘The best system for fighting: Gian Luigi Gatti, 71.

16 ‘the conviction of the absolute’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 69.

17 ‘the flower of the Italian’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 122.

18 ‘Every movement in civic life’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 72.

19 ‘our growing superiority’: Gian Luigi Gatti, 133.

20 exhibited around the country, while propaganda: Procacci [1989b].

21 ‘a profound transformation’: Labita.

22 ‘To be or not to be’: Orlando [1923], 123.

23 united in dedication to a supreme purpose: Procacci [1999], 323.

24 a war of political adventure turned: Minniti, 25.

25 The press bayed for strong government: Procacci [1999], 309.

26 158 pro-war deputies formed: Pieri [1965], 171.

27 A man from Viterbo got three months: Procacci [2006], 302.

28 Industrial action continued throughout June: Procacci [1999], 138.

29 a gesture that backfired: Procacci [1989a] and Procacci [1989b].

30 ‘repression of dissent’: Corner & Procacci.

31 ‘anyway everyone knows’: Labanca, Procacci, Tomassini, 31.

32 ‘the arrival of the Austrians’: Corner & Procacci.

33 an incident at a primary school: This episode occurred in October 1917, just before or after Caporetto. Franzina [2003], 13.

34 ‘military model’: Procacci [2006], 284.

35 not much different from the Bourbon tyrants: Monticone [1982], 37.

36 Dallolio, an effective Under-Secretary: Isnenghi & Rochat, 300.

37 Francesco Nitti, a deputy: Forsyth, 67–8.

38 by no means inevitable: L. Segreto quoted by Zamagni, 221.

39 pricing policy was slack: Forsyth, 85.

40 industries had incentives: Zamagni, 35, 221, 223, 225.

41 aeronautical industry grew: Toniolo, 129.

42 ‘now looked upon Italian war aims’: Rothwell, 158.

43 ‘made no mention whatever of our aspirations’: Sonnino, 252.

44 ‘it is perfectly hopeless trying to get Sonnino’: Seymour [1928], vol. 3, 287, 286, 290.

45 urged by the American ambassador: Zivojinovic, 95.

46 ‘More and more the war has ceased’: Lippmann.

47 ‘the completion of her national unity’: From a speech in February 1918. Orlando [1923], 122.

48 ‘most cynical’ of all the secret treaties: H. W. Massingham, ‘The Diplomacy of the Knock-out Blow’, The Nation, 9 February 1918. Quoted by le Cornu.

49 his ‘paltry masterpiece’: Sforza [1944], 46.

50 refused to sanction the use of propaganda: Sforza [1944], 49

51 persuaded Albertini to help organise: Mack Smith [1978], 214.

52 ‘inexplicable and grievous misunderstanding’: Orlando [1923], 174–5.

53 ‘The Italians and Yugoslavs are’: Cornwall [2000], 290.

54 only one in every thousand: 3,800 from a total of 3,800,000. Melograni, 529.

55 Wilsonian ideals filled a vacuum: Melograni, 526 ff, quoting Harold Lasswell, World Revolutionary Propaganda: a Chicago Study (New York: Knopf, 1939), 114–15.

56 ‘All branches of the Slav race’: Cornwall [2000], 265, 323.

57 ‘a free and united Yugoslav state’: Cornwall [2000], 338

58 Orlando probably encouraged this: Mack Smith [1978], 215.

59 ‘consonant with the principles’: Mamatey 314; Lederer.

60 Boroević did not believe: Bauer, 111.

61 Some 200,000 Hungarian soldiers had deserted: Bernardi, 115.

62 ‘mass rallies at which oaths for unity’: Cornwall [2000], 213.

63 ‘no longer moved by incessant’: Cornwall [2000], 281.

64 Boroević openly criticised the shortages: Blašković, 396.

65 ‘For this, gentlemen, could well be’: Bernardi, 128.

66 despite everything, Habsburg morale ran high: Schindler quotes General August von Cramon, chief German liaison officer with the Austrian army: ‘The troops’ offensive spirit was the best.’ Schindler, 283.

67 may have been time-expired: Blašković, 396.

68 The Austrian gunners only had the advantage: Dalton, 206–7.

69 ‘Hold your positions, I implore you’: Bernardi, 129.

70 the German high command stepped in: Bauer, 122.

71 ‘the only proper national battle’: Minniti, 69.

72 ‘the mountains were bare’: Neža Rejec, quoted by Fortunat Černilogar, 217.

73 ‘a mass of famished barbarians’: Horvath-Mayerhofer, 153.

74 ‘heterogeneous masses’: Türr.

75 images of ‘Italia’ had from the start: This was observed by Robert Musil, the Austrian novelist, then serving in the Trentino. His sentence continued, ‘who actually does not look Italian at all’. Musil [1999].

76 civilian morale rose: Cornwall [2000], 398.

77 ‘most rapes were carried out’: Ceschin [2006b], 179.

78 people believed that time was on their side: Cornwall [2000], 361.

79 ‘an air of utter emptiness’: Gladden, 200, 202.

80 when the war was already over: Most of this information comes from Procacci [2000], a ground-breaking study.

81 shrank from 650,000 to 400,000: Cornwall [2000], 406.

82 The average body weight: Cornwall [2000], 406.

83 ‘We have been officially notified’: Cornwall [2000], 278.

84 normal language in the newspapers: Cornwall [2000], 286.

85 ‘Most of the men are apathetic’: Cornwall [1997].

86 German ambassador estimated: Cornwall [2000], 429.

87 ‘internal political questions’: Rothenberg [1976], 214, 215.

88 Foch asked Diaz to support: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 90–1.

89 ‘certain events of utmost importance’: This reply was sent by Secretary of State Lansing on 19 October 1918. Albrecht-Carrié [1938], 350.

90 Orlando’s government explained coolly: Zivojinovic, 66.

91 were to await developments: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 129.

92 ‘an honourable peace’: Schindler, 296.

93 on the 26th, he informed: Falls. 177.

94 ‘no success’: This is the judgement of the official Italian war history. Wilks & Wilks [1998], 160.

95 British corps commander had proposed: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 189.

96 ‘A string of small boats had been’: Gladden, 166–7.

97 Gordon Highlanders, rowed by Venetian gondoliers: Dalton, 242.

98 ‘not many Austrians stayed’: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 147.

99 not an outcome that has won much recognition: Gladden, 157; Wilks & Wilks [1998], 147, 153–4; Falls, 173.

100 ‘A new carefree attitude was’: Gladden, 178.

101 Some reserve units refused: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 151–2.

102 ‘He was informed’: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 152.

103 since 14 October, when: Primicerj, 50.

104 the army in Italy was finished: Rothenberg [1976], 217.

105 ‘a semblance of order’: Fischer.

106 Civilians emerged from their cottages: Testimony of Lt. Col. Alberto Genova and Capt. Alberto D’Isidoro, in Genova, 27.

107 ‘Caporetto in reverse’: Gratton, 510.

108 ‘Now it’s goodbye, Caporetto’: Minniti, 24.

109 Karl refused on principle: Rothenberg [1976], 216.

110 ‘knew literally nothing’: Mamatey, 360.

111 ‘in headlong retreat’: Dalton, 256.

112 Austrian rule on the Adriatic Sea: Fraccaroli, 76.

113 last Habsburg units still fighting: Rothenberg [1976], 217.

114 ordered to move as many intact units: Primicerj, 243.

115 ‘the last possible moment’: Sondhaus [2000].

116 even – 7,000 of them – Italian: Deák. Research into the tens of thousands of Habsburg Italians who served in the Austrian army began only recently. Its latest fruit is Roberto Todero’s study of Triestine Italians who fought for the Empire: Dalla Galizia all’Isonzo. Storia e storie dei soldati triestini nella Grande Guerra (Udine: Gaspari, 2006).

117 the Italians held 430,000 Habsburg prisoners: Wilks & Wilks [1998], 172.

118 ‘we talked to them as to old friends’: Fischer.

119 Supreme Command wondered at one point: Cortellessa, 25–6.

120 ‘After fifteen centuries, an Italian army’: Pieri [1986], 324–6.

121 the myth that Italians were incapable of waging war: Pieri [1965], 198.

122 ‘Just when we learned how’: Pieri [1986], 151.

123 ‘When I compare my fate’: Bernardi, 193.

124 Victory Bulletin, issued on 4 November: See O’Brien [2004] for an excellent explication, 157–9.

125 he had to redeem this one: Fraccaroli, 71.

126 ‘such ruins were unimaginable’: Lucio Fabi in Medeot, 109.

127 ‘The dream has come true’: Baldi.

128 ‘received with open hostility’: Lederer

129 a plan drawn up by Badoglio: Lederer, 71–75.

130 marched on and on, beyond the Carso: Testimony of Capt. Alberto D’Isidoro, quoted in Genova, 480.

131 France made Fiume the logistics base: Lederer, 58, 68, 205.

1 D’Annunzio’s finest exploit was his flight over Vienna in August 1918, when his squadron dropped 150,000 leaflets on the astonished citizens. When the news reached the occupied Veneto, civilian morale rose.

2 First across the channel to Papadopoli was a battalion of Gordon Highlanders, rowed by Venetian gondoliers.

3 One of the last Austrian tourists in Trieste was Field Marshal Conrad, who had been sacked from his last command (in the Trentino) after the disastrous Battle of the Solstice. As always, he enjoyed himself in Trieste by sea-bathing and sketching. He did not leave until 29 October – ‘the last possible moment’, as he told a friend. Was he savouring memories of his first visit to the city as a young man, when he had been ‘filled with a sense of joy and freedom’?

4 Among the crowd was Trieste’s great novelist, Italo Svevo.

5 In 229 bc, Aulus Postumius led a Roman army around the northern Adriatic to wage war against Queen Teuta of Illyria. Victory gave Rome control over much of the eastern Adriatic.