The Italian third line between Flitsch and Tolmein ran along
one of these ridges, called Krasji. One of the crags was occupied by an
antiaircraft battery under Lieutenant Carlo Emilio Gadda, 5th Regiment of
Alpini. No more eccentric character fought on the front. Later in life, he
became modern Italy’s most original writer of fiction, the author of
labyrinthine (and virtually untranslatable) novels that manage to be
confessional and evasive, playful and melancholy, learned and rawly emotional
all at once. His work weaves rich patterns of neurotic digression; the
narrative escapes from a compelling, intolerable memory or emotion by fastening
onto some unrelated motif which meanders helplessly back toward the source of
pain, obliging the next brilliant deviation.
Born in Milan in 1893, Gadda broke off his studies in
engineering to volunteer in 1915. He was an unhappy son of the repressed middle
class, one of many in his generation for whom the war meant escape from
claustrophobic homes, protective mothers, dull prospects and the general
powerlessness of young men in a world ruled by grey beards and wing-collars.
Idealistic, upright and naïve, distracted ‘to the point of cretinism’ as he
said of himself, Gadda kept his real views on the war hidden from fellow
officers and his men. For he was privately scathing about incompetent
commanders, politicians and ‘that stuttering idiot of a King’. Nor was he
sentimental about the other ranks; their low cunning (furberia) and lack of
discipline would, he feared, lead the country to fail its first great test
since unification. Yet he loved the comradeship and heroism of war, and dreaded
returning to the muddles of civilian life. By October 1917, he had seen action
in the Alps and on the Carso.1 He was perching on a crag above the Isonzo in
October 1917 because he wanted to be there; he had let another officer take the
spell of leave to which he was entitled.
Looking north, towards the enemy, Gadda would have seen the
Italian first line on the opposite ridge, roughly two kilometres away. The
second line was a thousand metres below, on the valley floor. On the map, it
all looked convincing enough. In fact, the lines were extremely vulnerable.
Word came down the wire from sector HQ at 02:00 on 23 October that enemy
artillery fire would commence at once, beginning with gas shells. It did not
happen; the sector stayed quiet all day, which Gadda and his 30 men – who had
only recently arrived on their crag – spent in strengthening positions along
the eastern ridge, leading to Krn. The weather had been bad for days, and that
night the temperature dropped below zero.
They are awoken at 02:00 on the 24th by the ‘very violent’
bombardment of Flitsch, four or five kilometres north. Dawn breaks in thick fog
and sleet, and is followed by enemy fire of pinpoint accuracy. Gadda realises
that the Austrians want to break the telephone wire linking the batteries along
the ridge. They soon succeed. The fog partly disperses, though it still shrouds
the first and second lines. The men peer into it. No sounds reach them. Gadda
interprets the eerie silence as proof that the Genoa Brigade, in front of them,
is putting up a poor show. He worries about hitting his own forward lines if he
opens fire in the fog. Several nerve-straining hours later, they hear machine
guns further along their ridge towards Flitsch and glimpse men a few hundred
metres away: either the Italians retreating or the Austrians giving chase.
Around 15:00, the small-arms fire is drowned out by massive
detonations from the Isonzo valley, at their backs. This fills the men with
dread. (The Italians are blowing up the munitions dumps and bridge at Caporetto
before withdrawing.) Then silence settles again. (They do not know it, but
their divisional commander has just ordered all the troops in their sector to
fall back. Too late! The only bridges over the Isonzo have been blown or
captured.) That night, the men lie down beside their machine guns, expecting
the enemy to storm the ridge at every moment.
Further south, around Tolmein, zero hour on the 24th loosed
an attack with several prongs. The main thrust was directed against high ground
west of the Isonzo. Two German divisions and an Austrian division radiated out
of the bridgehead and over the river, striking up the steep flanks and spurs
that lead to the high ridges. Again the initial bombardment was highly
effective, smashing the Italian cordon around the bridgehead. By nightfall,
despite stiff resistance at some points, the attackers had captured the summits
that Krafft identified as keys to Italian control.
North of Tolmein and east of the Isonzo, an Austrian
division overran the fragile lines below the summit of Mount Mrzli, which the
Italians had tried so hard to capture since 1915. With Badoglio’s artillery
standing silent, the Italians were rolled back towards the valley bottom, where
six German battalions advanced on both sides of the river, meeting little
resistance. By noon, the rain had turned to sleet and the Germans occupied
Kamno, a hamlet halfway to Caporetto.
Around midday, between Kamno and Caporetto, the Germans
clashed with a platoon of the 14th Regiment, 4th Bersaglieri Brigade. One of
the Italians involved in that firefight, Delfino Borroni, is the last Italian
veteran of the Twelfth Battle, still alive at this time of writing. His
regiment reached Cividale on the 22nd and marched through the rainy night to
the second line. They got to Livek, overlooking the Isonzo, very early on the
24th. Wet and hungry, the men found a store of chestnuts in one of the
buildings and roasted them over a fire. Corporal Borroni (b. 1898) gorged
himself, and had to run outside at the double. As he crouched in the bushes,
trousers round his knees, the commanding officer called his platoon to fall in.
‘Fix bayonets, boys, we’re going down!’ They crept towards the valley bottom in
the darkness and waited for several hours, wondering what was going on.
Eventually the Germans loom out of the mist. In Borroni’s memory, they are a
grey swarm, a cloud. With the advantage of surprise, the Italians take them all
prisoner: a detachment of some 80 men. The next German unit arrives at noon
with machine guns and forces the Italians back up the hill to Livek.
At 12:15, as Borroni and his men are ducking the machine-gun
fire near Caporetto, Cadorna is still asking how many guns the Second Army can
spare for the Third Army, to parry the expected thrust on the Carso.
The enemy reaches the edge of Caporetto at 13:55. A few
Italian officers try to stem the flood of troops retreating through the town.
Those with rifles are pulled out of the crowd; the rest are allowed to go on
their way, so as not to clog up the streets. When the men see this, they start
throwing away their rifles. They look as if they hate the war more than the
enemy. At 15:30, the retreating Italians blow the bridge over the Isonzo.
Caporetto is captured half an hour later, along with 2,000 Italian prisoners.
When German bugles sound in the main square, the Slovene citizens pour onto the
street ‘to welcome their German liberators’
The right flank of the force that attacked westwards out of
Tolmein at 08:00 was formed by the Alpine Corps, a specialist mountain unit of
division size, comprising Bavarian regiments and the Württemberg Mountain
Battalion. The WMB included nine companies, staffed and equipped to operate
autonomously.
During this tumultuous day, the Supreme Command receives
essential information after hours of delay or not at all. By late morning, word
reaches Udine through Capello’s headquarters that the enemy has attacked out of
Tolmein. During the afternoon, dribs of news indicate that the Isonzo valley
has been occupied and the hills west of Tolmein are falling like dominoes.
Along the front, telephone lines go dead or are answered by guttural voices.
Staff officers are in denial, and corps commanders start to trade blame.
Capello orders his reserves to the front, unaware that any fresh forces will
arrive too late to make a difference. (The speed of the enemy advance is still
unimaginable.) Several divisions collapse. In some places, the reserves push
their way to the line against a current of abusive comrades. Almost nothing of
this is known at the Supreme Command, where Cadorna telegraphs all Second Army
units: ‘The great enemy offensive has begun.’ The Supreme Command puts its
trust in the heroic spirit of all commanders, officers and men, who will know
how to ‘win or die’. But the Second Army officers do not know how to win, and
the men do not want to die.
In Rome, parliament debates a Socialist motion for an
official inquiry into alleged secret foreign funding of pro-war newspapers in
1914 and 1915. In the words of a Socialist deputy, ‘The country has the right
to know if the hands of those who are responsible for the war, who incited it
and urged it on, are filthy not with blood, but with money.’ In the late
afternoon, the minister of war, General Giardino, takes the floor. The chamber
is packed. Instead of defending the interventionist press, however, Giardino
argues against an unrelated proposal to demobilise some of the older draft
classes. After reading out parts of Cadorna’s bulletin about enemy preparations
for an attack, he warns that this is not the time to reduce strength. The enemy
is poised to exploit dissension. ‘Let them attack,’ he perorates, ‘we are not
afraid.’ The deputies thunder approval. (The next day, Corriere della Sera
reports that the delirium in parliament was like the heady days of May 1915.)
Back at his ministry, Giardino finds an urgent telegram from Udine: the enemy
are attacking Caporetto, they have taken thousands of prisoners and huge
quantities of weapons.
Around 18:00, Gatti sees Cadorna ‘serene and smiling’ amid
the tumult at the Supreme Command, still half-convinced the real attack will
follow on the Carso. He reviews the daily bulletin, which claims that the enemy
has concentrated his forces on the front for an attack which ‘finds us strong
and well prepared’ – a phrase that makes Gatti wince. The Italian guns are
responding with ‘violent salvoes’.
Cadorna does not know that the batteries have been silent
all day. By 22:00, the scales are falling from his eyes. The Italians have been
forced back to Saga and Kolovrat. Maybe 20,000 men have been captured. It is
unlikely that the line can be held. He orders Capello to prepare the withdrawal
of all forces on the Bainsizza plateau. Then he retires to take a strategic
decision: should the Second Army retreat? Instead of assessing the situation on
its merits, he lets hope persuade him that all may not be lost. He defines
three new defensive lines, west of the Isonzo. On paper they look viable; in
reality, even a highly disciplined army would be challenged to build secure
positions while retreating through mountains. In a separate order, he instructs
Capello and the Duke of Aosta to strengthen the defences on the River
Tagliamento.
By now, some 14 infantry regiments and many battalions of
alpini and bersaglieri have succumbed. As one of the staff officers milling
around the Supreme Command, picking up snippets of news each more appalling
than the last, Gatti cannot believe what he hears. ‘Monstrous,’ he writes
helplessly in his diary, ‘inconceivable’. Surely he will wake tomorrow and find
it is all a dream.
The skies cleared overnight, as wind thinned the fog and low
cloud. Very few telephone lines were still working. Cadorna took solace in
writing to his family: ‘If things go badly now, how they’ll pounce on me. What
a wonderful country this is! Let God’s will be done.’ At 07:00, he ordered a
withdrawal from Mount Korada, south of Tolmein. This was a strategic position,
protecting the Bainsizza line and blocking enemy access to Friuli. He still
hesitated to order a general retreat to the Tagliamento; he knew how fragile
the rear defences were, and feared that the Third and Fourth Armies, and the
Carnia Corps, might be cut off. At 08:30 he took Gatti aside. This might look
like the Austrian attack in Trentino in spring 1916, he said, but it was much
more serious. ‘Napoleon himself could not do anything in these conditions.’ He
blamed the soldiers. ‘My personal influence cannot reach two million men,’ he
protested. ‘Not even Napoleon could do that, in his Russian campaign.’
In the north, the Krauss Corps pressed westwards to the pass
of Uccea and south to join up with the Germans at Caporetto. Italian forces
east of the Isonzo were trapped, whether they knew it or not. The night passed
quietly for Lieutenant Gadda and his gunners on their crag, except for
occasional explosions and flares in the valley behind them. Lacking information
and orders, Gadda did not know what to think or do. Yesterday’s bombardment of
their ridge was heavy, but he had survived much worse on the Carso. Their
munitions were almost exhausted, so they could not expect to resist for long.
Or might they use the fog to trick the Austrians into thinking the ridge was
strongly defended? Gadda and his men could not know it, but they were victims
of a perfect application of the Riga tactics. Isolated and confused, they could
be left to surrender in their own time while the enemy pressed ahead.
Around 03:00 on the 25th, a messenger brings orders to
retreat across the Isonzo. Caporetto has fallen: it is in enemy hands. Gadda
leads his men down the mountain an hour later, carrying all their equipment, in
complete darkness. ‘My heart was broken,’ he wrote later. Italian positions on
the surrounding ridges are in flames. They pass groups of men from the Genoa
Brigade with no officers, and hundreds of mules abandoned or killed in
yesterday’s shelling. They reach the river around 11:00 and see Italian troops,
unarmed, on the far side of the river, apparently heading for Caporetto. Can it
still be in Italian hands after all, or has it been recaptured? His unit of 30
has grown to a thousand or so. Enemy troops are converging towards them, they
have to cross the river which runs through a steep gorge, and is in spate, five
or six metres wide and very fast, barring the way. Their dream of pushing
Italy’s frontier beyond ‘this cursed Isonzo’ returns to mock them.
Ranging along the bank, they find a rickety bridge of planks
lashed together with telephone wire, swaying over the torrent with a metal
cable as railing. It would take all day to file across. He moves upstream,
hoping the enemy has not broken through further north, towards Flitsch.
Soldiers coming the other way tell him the next bridge upstream has been
dropped. He cannot bear to believe them, and harangues them for spreading
defeatist rumours. Then he sees the blown bridge and leads his men back to the
plank bridge, their only hope.
There are troops in black uniforms on the far side of the
river, moving up from Caporetto. His heart leaps: ‘Look! Reinforcements!’ Then
he hears machine-gun and rifle fire, and realises the appalling truth: the
Germans are on both sides of the river. Some soldiers try to cross the plank
bridge and are targeted by machine guns concealed across the valley. The
Italians throw their rifles away and cross the planks to surrender, obeying
German officers who direct the movement of men with whistles, like football
referees. The heap of rifles, machine guns, cartridge clips and ammunition
belts at the water’s edge rises higher. Even if they hid until nightfall,
Gadda’s unit would not be able to cross ‘the terrible, insuperable Isonzo’. It
would be pointless to hold out, childish even. With a heavy heart, he orders
his men to put their guns beyond use. They walk the plank one by one.
The prisoners are marched to Caporetto. The Germans treat
them correctly; there is no brutality. A drunken Italian soldier drops his
bottle of wine at the edge of the village, staining the dust crimson. Gadda and
a fellow officer manage to steal some shirts and a uniform from abandoned
houses. Later, he will wish he had stuffed his pockets with biscuit from an
abandoned wagon. The Germans are setting up offices, using captured Italian
staff cars as well as their own to move along the valley. Groups of soldiers
wander around, German and Italian, some of them drunk. Dead men and mules
litter the streets. It is a fine warm afternoon. Two whores stop them and ask
for introductions to the German officers. Gadda’s gallant comrade asks the
girls what plans they have now. ‘Italians or Germans,’ they say, ‘it is all the
same to us!’ Their carefree answer mortifies Gadda, who realises that the day’s
evil has not yet been drained.
Soon he is on his way to prison camp in Austria, ‘marching
from midnight to 8 a. m.: horror, extremely sleepy and exhausted … The end of
hope, annihilation of interior life. Extreme anguish for the fatherland.’
Capture is, above all, shameful. Over the next year, as he slowly starves,
disgrace feeds on him. Reflecting endlessly on the defeat, he blames it on the
Italian generals and their lack of foresight. Yet Gadda feels that prison is a
justified punishment; the army has not risen to meet history’s challenge.
Marches, battles and retreats haunt his sleep. He imagines family and friends
reproaching him: ‘You let them get past … ’
During the morning of the 25th, an image of disaster emerged
from the information reaching the Supreme Command: breakthroughs all along the
front; morale collapsing; thousands of men making their way to the rear. The
first towns west of the mountains were already threatened. Defence on the hoof
was not working. Cadorna’s best if not only chance of avoiding catastrophe was
to pull back the Second Army to a line far enough west to regroup before the
enemy reached them. Capello advised a general retreat to the River Torre or the
Tagliamento. When Cadorna disagreed, Capello took himself off to hospital in
Padua. Next morning, he offered to return; Cadorna declined: he had enough on
his plate without an ailing and probably sulking Capello. Where the two men saw
eye to eye was in blaming many regiments for not doing their duty. Late in the
afternoon, Cadorna wrote to his son:
The men are not fighting. That’s the situation, and
plainly a disaster is imminent … Do not worry about me, my conscience is wholly
clean … I am very calm indeed and too proud to be affected by anything that
anybody can say. I shall go and live somewhere far away and not ask
anything of anyone.
By the end of the second day, the Central Powers controlled
the Isonzo north of Tolmein. Mount Stol and the Kolovrat–Matajur ridge were on
the point of falling. In the south, Badoglio had apparently abandoned his
divisions after, or even before, they disintegrated, putting the middle Isonzo
in jeopardy. The Duke of Aosta continued to prepare a retreat, moving his heavy
batteries westward.
Still Cadorna procrastinated. He painted an encouraging view
in the daily bulletin, claiming falsely that Saga had not fallen and that the
enemy had made headway further south because Italian interdiction fire had been
negated by fog. Then he telegraphed the government: ‘Losses are very heavy.
Around ten regiments have surrendered without fighting. A disaster is looming,
I shall resist to the last.’ Before this grim message reached Rome, the
government lost a vote of confidence by 314 to 96 votes. The Socialists and
anti-war Liberals had brought Boselli down. Cadorna predicted correctly that
the new prime minister would be his main enemy in the cabinet, Vittorio
Orlando.
Meanwhile soldiers streamed westwards, throwing away their
rifles and chanting ‘The war’s over! We’re going home! Up with the Pope! Up
with Russia!’ Around midnight Cadorna, Porro and the King were in a car
together, returning to Udine from the front, when thousands of troops enveloped
them, singing the ‘Internationale’ as they passed. Cadorna turned to his
deputy: ‘Why doesn’t someone shoot them?’ Porro shrugged.
The fine weather, the enemy advance, the Italian rout, and
Cadorna’s hesitancy all persisted throughout the 26th. Survivors of the Second
Army were in full retreat; vast numbers of men funnelled through the few roads
leading westwards, throwing away their weapons, burning whatever could not be
carried, blowing up bridges and looting as they went: ‘infantry, alpini,
gunners, endlessly’, as one of them remembered. ‘They move on, move on, not
saying a word, with only one idea in their head: to reach the lowland, to get
away from the nightmare.’ The hillsides below the roads were littered with
wagons that had tumbled off the roads; ‘The horses lay still, alive or dead,
hooves in the air.’
Civilians joined the stampede; the roads were clogged with
carts, often drawn by oxen, piled high with chattels. The British volunteer
ambulance unit watched the ‘long dejected stream’ pass along the road to Udine
all day: ‘soldiers, guns, endless Red Cross ambulances, women and children,
carts with household goods, and always more guns and more soldiers – all going
towards the rear’. A British Red Cross volunteer saw how ‘the panic blast ran
through the blocked columns – “They’re coming!”’ The command made no apparent
effort to control the movement or clear the roads for guns and troops.
