Reflections of a stormy petrel

Before World War One was won, there was a long and grim period during which Germans and Austrians, having destroyed Russia, threw everything they had against Italy, France and Britain, hoping to destroy them in turn. After a catastrophic defeat on the river Isonzo, called the battle of Caporetto, the remains of the Italian Army retreated to the river Piave and the huge mountain Monte Grappa, and stopped there, resolute to hold that line or die trying. A Neapolitan popular musician, E.A.Mario, wrote the song that spoke for those men, "The Legend of the Piave," which immediately became a kind of second national anthem:


(The singer is Mario himself.)

25 years later, the glory and purpose of the Piave and Mt.Grappa had mutated into an abyss of disgrace, treachery and beggary. Italy was shattered, occupied by enemy armies, and starving. Having entered the war on the wrong side through a mean and disgusting calculation of advantages, it had to break out of one disastrous alliance without being able to expect any sympathy from the other side.
The city of Naples rebelled against occupying German forces on September 28, 1943. After four days of ferocious fighting, the Germans were forced to withdraw, and the Allies walked into Italy's largest city without having to fire a shot. However, Naples, at the centre of a war zone and a devastated economy, soon found itself close to starvation, while full of comparatively well-paid American and allied troops. I’m sure you can see what came next. There was not much violence of any sort – except for a Moroccan unit that made itself notorious across Italy – but plenty of what one might call commercial exchange.
The daughters of middle-class families, clean, elegant, polite and pretty, were very popular with servicemen. Also, they had no colour prejudice – before the war, Italian colonists in Ethiopia had infuriated Mussolini, who was a genuine racist, by associating happily with local girls – and I have the impression that black American servicemen were delighted with the opportunity to buy the “services” of these segnorine. The whole matter was terribly painful to the girls and their families, and as the situation improved they did their best to pretend it never happened; but they were not allowed to. These well-brought-up young ladies did not have the “professional habits” which allow regular prostitutes to avoid pregnancies, and when the inevitable baby boom took place, many of the children turned out to be of an unexpected colour. I don’t think anything much happened – people just wanted to get the whole thing over with, and Naples is a seaport and has always been full of people of every sort anyway – but, this still being Naples, they wrote a song about it.



And what is the punch-line? That the author of the music was the very same E.A.Mario again.

95 years ago, Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Allies. Although the country had been nominally a German and Austrian ally since the previous century, in reality there was no love lost between them; the Austrians especially described Italy, in private memos, as an enemy country, and the bad feeling about the treatment of Italian minorities in Dalmatia, Istria and Trent kept simmering on the Italian side. More importantly, two major outrages had alienated Italy from her nominal allies: Austria's unilateral annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, which went against Italian interests and was not even announced, let alone discussed, beforehand; and, more importantly, the German invasion of neutral Belgium at the start of the war. After that major crime - garnished with widespread and widely reported war crimes against Belgian and French civilians - there never was any hope that Italy;s alliance with Germany might hold; the choice was merely between neutrality and open war against her former allies.

Italy entered the war with few illusions. It had had almost a year to observe what was happening between the nations already at war, and see the horrendous bloodshed at the Marne, at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, and the swift hardening of battle lines into bristling rows of trenches reaching from sea to sea. Everyone knew that there would be hundreds of thousands of dead and that the war would last years. Indeed, to a contemporary mind the question is why Italy would want to intervene at all; and we are not surprised that, until the very dawn of intervention, most of the Italian public was said to be against it.

It is more significant, however, that public opinion seems to have changed as soon as war was declared. The majority of the Italian public supported the war through every change of fortune to ultimate victory. They would rather Italy had been spared the scourge of war, but they did not think the war as such was wrong, and once Italy was in, they would support its aims. The truth is that Germany's bullying, almost terroristic behaviour had made her defeat a moral cause that nearly everyone supported, and even if Italy had not resolved to enter the war against her, she would still have cheered and even supplied volunteers to the countries that did.

The effect of the war was largely negative. Italy was swindled out of the rewards she expected for the war, and scapegoated in the name of Woodrow Wilson's hair-splitting and bookish notions of international justice. The country fell into a tailspin which led her to the rule of an adventurer with no character or principles, and to another and much more disastrous war. And that is probably the main reason why, when we remember the 600,000 young Italians who never came back from the front, our emotion is mainly one of sadness and waste.

It is often said that the armies and the generals in World War One were not prepared for the effect of then-modern technology on warfare - that is, the way it made defence prevail over offence and turn the war into a long and bloody slogging match. And I do not say that is wrong. But that really reflects on the ability of humans to extrapolate from the past; because they could have seen it coming, if they had been far-sighted enough. We should remember that one of the features of military development in the nineteenth century is the development of the general staff, as a sort of "university" counterpart of the already invented "high school" of the various war schools. Every general who led in the war, with the possible exception of the worse-trained and worse-promoted specimens in the Austrian and Russian armies (where court and aristocracy had roles that the rest of the West had abandoned for over a century), had studied war at a very high level of competence. It was not that they were too ignorant of modern war to see it coming.

And yet. All through the early to middle nineteenth century, beginning with the last few years of the Napoleonic age, every clash between great European powers had tended to produce battles that were frightful slogging matches dominated by artillery and won, if at all, at the price of rivers of blood on both sides: Wagram (1811), Borodino (1812), Waterloo (1815), Navarino (Turkey vs. England, France and Russia, 1827), Sebastopol (Russia vs. Turkey, Britain, France and Sardinia, 1856), Solferino-San Martino (France and Sardinia vs. Austria-Hungary, 1859), Volturno (Garibaldi vs. the king of Naples, 1860), and the whole bloodstained American four years of war - where Jules Verne, of all people, drew attention to the importance and impact of massed artillery. If I understand correctly, even the monstrous Chinese Tai-Ping convulsion of 1858-1868 had a similar character. If war schools had paid attention to the tendency of war between great powers as a whole, they could have extrapolated that the next great war would have been a slogging match between armies tens of millions strong, dominated by artillery and machine guns, and where every assault would have cost unimaginable amounts of lives.

So why was this conclusion not drawn? I should imagine, for two reasons. After 1865, and until the generation that could remember Sebastopol, Solferino and Antietam had died out, wars between great powers practically ceased. Any time that Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Italy or the USA had an issue with each other, they found ways other than war to settle them. And then the last few wars of great powers had been untypical. In 1867, Prussia had overwhelmed Austria-Hungary in a single day at Sadowa (Koeniggraetz), thanks both to the excellence of Prussian staff work and to the appalling indiscipline of the top Austrian officers, who paid no attention to the instructions of their own commander in chief, Benedek, because he was a commoner. (Benedek was then punctually scapegoated for the defeat he could not have avoided; which insured that Austria-Hungary would learn nothing from the awful lesson of Sadowa, and end up being battered in World War One by both Russia and Italy.) Had the Austrians had less feckless leaders, the battle would have been a lot closer - and might well have turned into another slogging match. Then in 1870-71, the Prussians overcame the French, again thanks to brilliant staff work, with comparatively little bloodshed - indeed, in the first clash at Metz, they emulated Napoleon's breathtaking feat of Ulm in 1805 by forcing the surrender of a whole army with no fighting at all. In 1877, the Russians overcame the Turks in a manoeuvred campaign that began on the Danube and ended at the gates of Istanbul (and only stopped because the British had threatened to intervene on Turkey's side). Finally, in 1904-5 Japan stunned the world by handing the Russian Empire the most comprehensive defeat it had suffered by land and sea in three centuries. In all these campaigns, the losing side grossly underrated the victors, and were practically complicit in their own defeat.

So the picture given of the campaigns of 1867, 1870-71, 1876-77, and 1904-05, was grossly misleading in terms of the larger trends of the time. All those campaigns were exceptions. And they tended to be reinforced as (misleading) examples, by a more insidious influence. Between 1865 and 1914, Western armies were not at rest. They scarcely ever faced each other, but each of them was busy, often almost constantly, in colonial campaigns (I count the American Indian wars as colonial campaigns). Indeed, at no time before or since has the West, as a whole, been so militarized and so continuously committed to military expansion. And these campaigns were fought consistently against opponents that were both technologically and organizationally inferior; the defeats occasionally incurred by Western armies, Little Bighorn, Isandhlwana, Adua, were due to underrating the enemy (an inevitable occasional by-product of the enemy being effectively inferior), rather than to the enemy being in any way systematically able to establish its superiority. Isandhlwana was followed by Rorke's Drift. Indeed, the only colonial war where an European power really found itself with its back to the wall was the Indian Mutiny of 1859, when the British found themselves fighting an army they had trained and organized themselves. Western generals were not so stupid as to assimilate these clashes with war on European opponents; but they insidiously tended to build up the habit of thinking of war as a matter of brilliant manoeuvre and strategic resource, the war of Frederick II of Prussia and of Napoleon in 1805; rather than what had actually been brewing in the "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution - a clash between cannon and machine guns turned out by the million by factories whose like the world had never before seen.

No group of countries ever went to war with a more thoroughly and carefully studied approach to war fighting and its subsidiary features than the European powers in 1914. Every one of them had vast war schools attached to their staff headquarters, where the wars both of the past and of the present were constantly being discussed, analyzed and pondered upon. And no group of countries ever failed more disastrously in understanding the war they were actually called to fight. Both the Germans in their arrogant expectation to be able to overwhelm first France, then Russia, then Italy, by brilliant and audacious coordinated manoeuvering - an expectation that led their strategy again and again, and well into 1918 - and the Allies, led by the French, and committed until well into 1917 to a strategy of great conclusive battles, simply failed to see what lay in front of their eyes. When Russia fell, she fell to internal subversion - a radical revolutionary backed by Germany; otherwise, the republican government of Kerensky was quite willing, and the Russian public quite ready, to fight as far as the Urals. When Germany fell, she fell because she was overwhelmed; after the collapse of Austria and Turkey, she simply lacked the forces to oppose the Italian and Allied forces released by that victory. Decisive victories - the collapse of Russia, the rolling back of the German front throughout the summer and autumn of 1918 - were achieved when the paradigm of the manoeuvred war ending in a single great battle was abandoned. The exceptions were Allenby's conquest of Palestine in 1918, a glorified colonial campaign, and the Italian triumph in October 1918, achieved against an enemy at the end of its strength. And even so these victories were decisive not so much for themselves, as for piling up the pressure against Germany beyond the point where the German public and political leadership felt they could bear it. Meanwhile, ten million people had died; and the horrors of the immediate post-war conflict, were at least as many were to die in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere, were yet to come.

The study of war had failed. It had provided no sensible strategy to survive and win the next war. Why? Possibly because of the inborn optimism of the human heart - the strategists preferred to pay attention to the positive examples of brilliant manoeuvre and decisive battles of annihilation provided by the recent past, than to the darker underlying trends. But there might be a deeper reason.

One of the deeper lessons of the Prussian triumphs of 1867 and 1871 was the immense importance of staff work. Everyone had noticed that, with troops at a roughly equal level of efficiency and courage, the Prussians/Germans had proved infinitely superior in all the functions of command and coordination. In the words of a contemporary military genius, they had consistently got there fastest with the mostest men. And this was the lesson everyone took home. In the decades that followed, every European army set up a staff headquarters on the Prussian-German model, dedicated to studying war at the highest possible level of scientific insight. Now, what this new kind of military organization promised to politicians, citizens, soldiers, was this: if you follow our discipline sufficiently well, you will - like the Prussians in 1867 and 1871 - win wars, bloodily perhaps, but swiftly and decisively. The new doctrine of war is the way to win wars, not by luck or application, but by academic discipline. Since this was the claim that validated their whole work, the high priests of the new science of war could not easily challenge it. The Allies only abandoned the paradigm of the war of manoeuvre and the final battle of annihilation in the last year of war, when Foch put in place the alternative strategy of small, varied, continuous blows at various parts of the front. The Germans, who had invented it, could not abandon it at all; and in the end, it meant their defeat.

EDITED IN I would also add that the German military's unbroken obsession with the doctrine of the decisive battle, which had shaped their whole war-fighting effort from the assault of 1914 to Ludendorff's final gambles, may also have had a pernicious effect on later politics. As everyone knows, the myth of the "undefeated army" was the main leaven of right-wing politics in the post-war Reich, and eventually gave a major boost to the rise of the war veteran Hitler. But the myth of the "undefeated army", looking at it from the point of view of this essay, seems an almost inevitable by-product of the doctrine of the decisive battle. The German generals were defeated without a battle, without an Austerlitz or a Waterloo, without the final denouement that their doctrine led them to expect. From that to feeling that they had not been defeated at all was a very short step indeed; and the Allied negotiators were to find already before Versailles that both military and civilian German leaders were very convinced of that indeed.