"Blimey, it was the riding wot did it"

[fpb]

The great Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, by profession an ocean-going shipmaster and self-taught both as a general and as a political leader, had one major fault: a complete lack of good taste. He wrote a few execrable novels (at least, I think they are execrable; I could never get beyond their first terrible few pages) and had a song written for his volunteers which, until now, I had found just as uninspired. However, I have now heard it sung by Enrico Caruso. It may be that this recording was made in the dark days of 1917 as Caruso's native country was fighting to survive against Austrian invaders (the flip side is George M.Cohan's Over there!, in English and French), but mostly it is just incredible musicality that can really turn lead into gold, and a voice that, even through the inadequate medium, comes through like the thunder of the gods. Have a listen:

This really gave me goosebumps. I once heard a story about a jockey condemned for murder on very thin evidence, who, referring to the formidable advocacy of the prosecuting attorney, said: "Blimey! It was the riding wot did it." In this case, it really is.

Comments

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

Just a minor nitpick - all the suffering of both sides, and your Italian patriotism notwithstanding, "Austrian invaders" might not be the most appropriate term for what happened in 1917. That entire war was a gigantic mistake, and should never have happened. That it did happen, and that it took place in the form it did, was one of the worst failures of civilization in an already very badly deranged time.

You perhaps know the book "The White War", http://www.amazon.co.uk/White-War-Death-Italian-1915-1919/dp/0571223338

If not, I can only recommend it. I, personally, do not think the author is entirely unbiased, but the book paints a reasonably apocalyptic (and hence realistic) picture of that conflict, as well as of its sordid roots, and the highly questionable motives of those who started it.

A. (a so far passive reader of your very interesting blog)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Bullshit. Austria deliberately started a world war in order to stop the growth of opposing powers such as Serbia. They knew what they were doing, and so did the Germans. There was no mistake about it at all: as early as 1908, the commander of the Austrian Army, Field-marshal Conrad, wrote a memo suggesting a pre-emptive war against Serbia and Italy, which was at the time supposed to be an ally of Austria. The idea of the "war by mistake" was a piece of post-war German and Soviet propaganda, which serious historians no longer take seriously.

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

Yes, the bit about Conrad proposing such an action in 1908 is a well known historical fact. As well as the fact that the political establishment of the day told him in no unclear terms what exactly he could do with those plans. He was just a general, after all. Others made the actual decisions. Omitting the second part of the story is of course a nice way of painting the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a bloodthirsty war machine of some sort. Which, in order to get its way with Serbia, probably engineered the assassination of the heir to the imperial throne as well.

Yeah, right.

The truth is, as always, not nearly as black and white as the propaganda of either side would have one believe. And while the motives of A-H are of course not entirely clean (as with everyone else in that sad story), it is, even by the standards of contemporary "truth" about WW1, a stretch to claim A-H invaded Italy.

What happened in 1915 was that Italy tried an all-out invasion of Austria, after it had conveniently waited until the Austrians had already been bled white on the Eastern front. And even though the "fabled" (ha!) war machine of A-H was by then almost comatose from the losses incurred against Russia, and initially had no sizeable amounts of troops near the Italian border... the Italian invasion was an epic failure. Right up there with the worst fiascos of military history. Way to go for careful planning and competent leadership.

What followed were three years of basically totally pointless bloodshed on a gigantic scale, all along the alpine front. All in the sacred name of nationalism, so that the oppressed people of the A-H empire could finally break free from their confines.

Well, by now we all know how well that idea of "let's all have our little tribal states" worked out for the greater good of Europe. And how extremely smart it was to destroy what was basically the only really supra-national entity in Europe at the time. AH had colossal shortcomings as a state, but its dissolution created such a host of, in my personal opinion, just as nasty problems almost everywhere, that one really has to wonder why people bothered.

A.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your self-serving rubbish does not take into account the small matter of the start of the war - Austria deliberately presenting Serbia, AFTER Serbia had done everything it could to appease it, with demands that would have meant the end of Serbia as an independent State - which prove with the utmost clarity that Austria absolutely wanted war with Serbia AND with Russia. Germany backed her unconditionally, where she could have stopped her by simply saying "If you want to mess with the Russians, you are on your own". This was the third time in nine years that Germany had driven Europe to the edge of war, incresingly creating a climate of fear and anger; this time they did not intend to stop. In my view, Germany committed the crime of invading Belgium, in the full knowledge that it was a crime, exactly in order to avoid that - as a later German war leader was to say - "some schweinhund [should not] come along with a plan for negotiation." That it was a crime they were the first to admit; Bethmann-Hollweg said as much in public and officially, in the Reichstag. From that moment on, every country in the world could see only one choice; either to remain neutral, or to go to war against Germany and Austria. The two allies that the Empires gathered in the earliest days of the war never grew, whereas one by one, every major power that had originally kept out of the war came in on the allied side - Japan, China, Italy, Brazil, the USA. This was entirely because of the universal indignation at German and Austrian war methods. As for the supposed attempted invasion of Austria, your pathetic source has it arse-backwards. The Italian army started the war with 25 divisions - one-third of the Austrian force - and when Russia had already been mauled and thrown back by the Prussians at Tannenberg, relieving the pressure on Austria. Nobody in Italy imagined that the war would be short. However, by October 1917, Austria had been so hammered by continuous Italian attacks - to which, in spite of superiority in men and positions, they had been able to offer no effective response - that Berlin was informed that one more Italian push on the Isonzo would be the end of Austria; behind their last bridgeheads lay the desert of the Carso, where no defence line could be established. So much for your trash about Italian military performance. What is more, Italy managed what no other country in World War One did - survive an annihilating blow by the enemy (Germany, not Austria - it was German divisions sent to help the inept Austrians who broke through at Caporetto), recover, and crush the enemy.

Your comment about "little tribal statss" is near insane. What led to war and violence was not the existence of "little tribal states", but the foolish compaction of a number of nations into two supranational entities - the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. You may not like the fact that this ended with Serbs, Croats and Bosnians on one side, Romanians of Moldova and Russians on another, shooting at each other - but in this case as in that of the Austrian aggression against Serbia, the facts speak in a language so loud that your only recourse against it is to ignore or deliberately falsify it.

Of course, the reason why you believe those fables and ignore obvious and widely known fact is that your fables are self-serving. I do not, therefore, hope that you will ever want to have anything to do with the truth - it would damage your ego. However, you should at least have avoided one piece of claptrap so obvious that a cat could have spotted it: in late 1917, the Austrian forces WERE EFFECTIVELY invading Italy. That the invasion ended badly for them is no reason to try to pretend that it was not happening, and that Caruso singing an old patriotic song (written against an earlier generation of Austrian invaders) may have had a particularly intense feeling.

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

Well, well, well... there sure are a lot of contentious things in your reply, the main question is, where should I start.

"The Italian army started the war with 25 divisions - one-third of the Austrian force."

25 intact, well provisioned divisions that had not incurred a single casualty up to engaging the Austrians. Versus the nominally larger Austrian army that had, due to inept maneuvering and bad leadership, already lost the majority of its fieldable, pre-war officer corps (!), as well as the majority of its well-trained regular units (!). And which had, at that point, zero incentive and reason to start yet another front against the Italians. Even with the Germans having beaten back the Russians at Tannenberg, the war in the East was far from over. The last thing the Austrians needed was another front.

Which, of course was the reason why the Allies agreed to the pretty overreaching demands of Salandra for the Italian entry into the war. They saw the very real possibility to knock the main ally of Germany out of the war. That this did not work is not to the credit of General Cadorna - at least theoretically, he had the freedom to chose the place and mode of engagement. After the 23rd of May 1915, and the *Italian* declaration of war on Austria, it was the Italian Army that crossed the border in force (to me, this does not sound like an Austrian invasion, but YMMV). Due to a number of factors, the march on Trieste did not turn out as Cadorna had expected, and three years of bloody near-stalemate were the result.

If you insist on highlighting the military failures of the Austrians... well, I am not claiming that they were the masters of modern warfare. Quite the contrary, but it took some special kind of strategic anti-genius like Cadorna to make the same mistake twice vis-a-vis such weak enemies: in both the 6th and 9th battles of the Isonzo, the Austrians were basically crushed, had pulled their very last reserves to the front line... and then, the Italian attacks simply stopped.

And so on.

In any case you make a mistake if you think that I am enamoured with the performance of the A-H army, or A-H as a state. I just try to keep an even perspective.

Living in central Europe, I am just very acutely aware of what used to be, and what we now have. And, as a consequence, abhor the more extreme forms of state-building nationalism.

To me, nationalism in the form that we saw during most of the 20th century is not a constructive force. The end result of a century of mutual hatred, bigotry and intolerance is that we now successfully have achieved nation states, most of which have committed some acts of repression against some parts of their population in the process of becoming "nationally pure". And what are we doing now? Integrating all those states into a European Union, so that we can again get rid of those stupid borders? Was *that* really worth the destruction of so much diverse and organically grown culture all across the continent?

And both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are not really good counter-examples, in my opinion. The USSR was the travesty of a state; a totalitarian nightmare that differed from the Nazis in having less flashy uniforms, a different logo and slightly more competent generals. And Yugoslavia was less totalitarian, but after 1945 still a police state where no sensible discourse between the various factions could take place. Such states are not places to test how well the cohabitation of ethnically diverse populations could work.

A.

P.S. Also, one request - do remain a bit more civil, please. I have not used any sort of invective against you personally, and will not do so. So please do likewise.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When you promote a viewpoint that makes the aggressor the victim (poor Austria, it got mauled when it tried to rip the guts out of nations they had designated as enemies), I am under no obligation to treat it as anything but hypocritical bullshit. Austria was the aggressor. Germany was the aggressor's protector and the criminal-in-chief. Turkey and Bulgaria were the weaker accomplices, Turkey in particular being even nastier. (The massacre of the Armenian was an integral part of Turkish war-making.) Salandra's demands were not "overbearing"; they consisted in the confirmation of territories Italy had already conquered (Libya and the Dodecanese), a border up to the Alpine watershed - necessary for strategic reasons - and Dalmatia, which was historically Italian, plus vague promises of colonial compensation in the Turkish and colonial German empires. No more than, for instance, France demanded and got, much less in fact than what Britain got. The fact that you treat them as something exceptional only shows that your source is unbalanced and mendacious. The invasion of Belgium had already tilted Italy towards the Entente - you may not be aware that in the winter of 1914, a large and successful collection for Belgian refugees was carried out in Italy.

Italy not only had an army numerically vastly inferior to Austria's, it had limited resources - almost all our war materials had to be imported - and a simply appalling border, with the huge salient of Trentino pointing straight at Italy's most prosperous and strategic regions. That the Austrians were incompetent is not news; but being an incompetent bandit is no excuse, when you set out to be a bandit. And the reason why Italy hesitated nine months before entering the war on the Allies' side is simply that, after the battle of the Marne - which had been closely followed in Italy, and which had given rise to great elation when Paris was saved - everyone was quite aware that any war would be long and grim. Otherwise the country would have gone in a week or two after the invasion of Belgium.

The Austrian troops had one incitement to war which you do not mention - and which, to be fair, was fully shared on the other side: they hated the Italians to death. Any battalion however downhearted and disgusted could be roused to homicidal fury by a simple recital of the supposed virtues of the macaronis. This was well known long before the war, and the great poet Trilussa wrote a sarcastic poem about the "alliance" in, I think, 1911.

Your remarks about the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia do not answer anything I said. I said that any violence that happened in these countries was the result of the artificial compaction in them of wholly different nationalities. Do you dare say that is wrong?

Finally, one simply bewildered question: why on God's green earth do you place Italian in inverted commas when mentioning the declaration of war? Are you saying that nefarious forces took over the Italian commonwealth, so that the declaration was not in fact made by Italian statesmen in the name of the Italian people? Or are you simply so seized by the demon of attempted sarcasm that you do not even realize where it makes no sense?

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

Just three points:

- As far as reliance on imports to run the war is concerned, Austro-Hungary was hardly better off than Italy.

- I did not put the word "Italian" in commas, but placed asterisks round it. In plain text, this is a way of emphasizing a word, or, in that particular case, emphasizing that it was the Italians (and not the Austrians) who declared war. Personally, I do not care all that much for the reasons of a fight that happened almost a century ago; it's historical inaccuracies that nettle me. In this particular case, it was a clear-cut case of Italy starting the fighting, with the express goal of conquering territories by force that it had failed to win by diplomacy or other means. Which, as the run of history goes, is fair enough, but please do not claim that it was Italy that was attacked by evil aggressors from the outside. That in 1917 things were not looking quite as rosy as the general staff had imagined them to be in 1915, well, such are the tides of war.

- What made the Italian territorial claims problematic was that the notion of ethnically pure nation state that was being pursued was severely at odds with the demographics of some (note the "some") of the claimed territories. Claiming South Tyrol up to the Brenner made strategic sense, but it overlooked the tiny detail of those pesky german speaking natives. The same goes for large parts of Dalmatia - even back then, there was a sizeable Italian minority, not more, in large areas there. Apart from strategic considerations, the presence of such a minority is hardly a compelling reason to claim a territory for a very uni-cultural nation state - especially if one attempts to take the moral high ground against entities like Austro-Hungary. And I'm saying that as someone with Italian Dalmation ancestry. My grandmother always referred to Dubrovnik (one of the places my ancestors come from, and of which she had childhood memories) as "Ragusa", a placename that has, of course gone extinct with the locals who used it. It was only as I grew up that I realised that the place had not been called that for many long years.

A.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am going to sleep, so this is the final response. From now on this thread is closed.

You insist on not mentioning the original Austro-German aggression. Italy, like America, like Brazil, Portugal, Roumania, China, Japan, went to war against an alliance that everyone regarded as an aggressor and a warmonger, and that had earned that reputation. It is as if you wanted to argue that France and Britain assaulted Germany in 1939 - neglecting the small matter of German aggression against Poland and of years of previous German aggressions. But sure, if it makes you feel better, do ignore that little fact. Wars are not provoked; they are not pursued by an aggressor, no, sir, wars are mysterious matters that just appear at the whim of invisible fates. And I am Chinese.

Austria had coal, iron, and other minerals aplenty. Italy had and has no mineral resources at all (except for mercury and sulphur). Her population was larger, her arable land far larger. That they did not know how to make use of their resources does not excuse them; as I said, being an incompetent bandit does not excuse a bandit.

Personally, I would be glad to tie a gold ribbon around the whole South Tyroler rabble and leave it under Austria's Christmas tree one fine December morning. The fact is that Austria does not want them all that much. As one Viennese lady told me, we have all the Tyrolers we need, thank you very much. She also called them "the South Prussians" - to Austrians and south Germans, the ultimate insult. Dalmatia, on the other hand, had been Venetian - and hence Italian - since the late Roman Empire. It is true that in the country they spoke Serbo-Croat, but as soon as they inurbated themselves and rose socially, they learned Italian or at least Venetian. Admiral Tegethoff addressed his ships' crews in Italian, because that was the common language of the eastern Adriatic all the way down to Corfu. It was only in 1945 that Italian ceased to be the language of the elites of Dalmatia. And nothing of this makes Salandra's claim "overbearing".

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

I suppose that it really is for the best, to close this thread. You and I live in very, very different worlds, and - sadly - it is not to be expected that we would reach some sort of understanding, even if we went on for a long time with this.