WesWorld

- I found this and thought it might be useful to post it as some background information. Written by H.G. Wells as war correspondant extraordinaire rather than his sci-fi guise. Sorry for the format.

THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)
I. THE ISONZO FRONT
1
My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So far I had
had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet day and the
sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my experience of actual
warfare. But my bedroom at the British mission in Udine roused perhaps
extravagant expectations. There were holes in the plaster ceiling and
wall, betraying splintered laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb
that had burst and killed several people in the little square outside.
Such excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine keeps
itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which come raiding
the Italian coast country at night very much in the same aimless,
casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid England, apparently
because there is nothing else for them to do, find it easier to locate
Venice.
My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of the
plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful willows
beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and suchlike lush
crops. Always quite soon one came to some old Austrian boundary posts;
almost everywhere the Italians are fighting upon what is technically
enemy territory, but nowhere does it seem a whit less Italian than
the plain of Lombardy. When at last I motored away from Udine to the
northern mountain front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the
white-faced inn at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic
of Venice and bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign
control. It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no
Napoleon.
And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of a
modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made, railways
pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the villages swarmed
with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile was threading its way
and taking astonishing risks among interminable processions of motor
lorries, strings of ambulances or of mule carts, waggons with timber,
waggons with wire, waggons with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons
discreetly veiled, columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries _en route._
Every waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were
coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia had
been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had been crossed
and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for several miles; all
the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding up to make good these
gains and gather strength for the next thrust. The roads under all this
traffic remained wonderful; gangs of men were everywhere repairing the
first onset of wear, and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world
for road metal; her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian
plain you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.
One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and above the
steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry, lorry, lorry that
passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree tops, house roofs, or the
solid Venetian campanile of this or that wayside village. Once as we
were coming out of the great grey portals of that beautiful old relic of
a former school of fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly
bright yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but
Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange among
the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese mandarin in painted
silk would be. They are the most individual of things, all two-wheeled,
all bright yellow and the same size it is true, but upon each there are
they gayest of little paintings, such paintings as one sees in England
at times upon an ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present
a scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream
landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now much
out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I have passed
strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept of them.
Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old cathedral,
built upon the remains of a very early basilica, standing in a space in
a scattered village. But across this dusty space there was carried the
head of the upstart Maximinus who murdered Alexander Severus, and
later Aquileia brought Attila near to despair. Our party alighted; we
inspected a very old mosaic floor which has been uncovered since the
Austrian retreat. The Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian
successors are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was
the Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my historical
memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon _en route_ for
contemporary history.
By devious routes I went on to certain batteries of big guns which had
played their part in hammering the Austrian left above Monfalcone across
an arm of the Adriatic, and which were now under orders to shift and
move up closer. The battery was the most unobtrusive of batteries; its
one desire seemed to be to appear a simple piece of woodland in the eye
of God and the aeroplane. I went about the network of railways and paths
under the trees that a modern battery requires, and came presently upon
a great gun that even at the first glance seemed a little less carefully
hidden than its fellows. Then I saw that it was a most ingenious dummy
made of a tree and logs and so forth. It was in the emplacement of a
real gun that had been located; it had its painted sandbags about it
just the same, and it felt itself so entirely a part of the battery that
whenever its companions fired t burnt a flash and kicked up a dust. It
was an excellent example of the great art of camouflage which this war
has developed.
I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a tree,
into which I clambered with my guide. I was able from this position to
get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian eastern front. I was in
the delta of the Isonzo. Directly in front of me were some marshes
and the extreme tip of the Adriatic Sea, at the head of which was
Monfalcone, now in Italian hands. Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge
of the Carso, of which the Italians had just captured the eastern half.
Behind this again rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which
the Austrians still held. The Isonzo came towards me from out of the
mountains, in a great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles away
where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and prosperous town
of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the great curve was Sagrado
with its broken bridge. The battle of Goritzia was really not fought at
Goritzia at all. What happened was the brilliant and bloody storming
of Mounts Podgora and Sabotino on the western side of the river above
Goritzia, and simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and
a magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the Carso.
Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the Austrians were
so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains to the north-west of it
and of the Carso to the south-east, that they made no fight in the town
itself.
As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little
injured--compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought
through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in by
an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road bridge had
suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted about by shell bursts
and interwoven with young trees and big boughs designed to screen the
passer-by from the observation of the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo.
Here and there were huge holes through which one could look down upon
the blue trickles of water in the stony river bed far below. The driver
of our automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in
the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At Sagrado
the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no effort had been
made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one crossed by a sort of
timber switchback that followed the ups and downs of the ruins.
It is not in these places that one must look for the real destruction
of modern war. The real fight on the left of Goritzia went through the
village of Lucinico up the hill of Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more
than a heap of grey stones; except for a bit of the church wall and the
gable end of a house one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one
place among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand
piano. Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and
cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless, treeless
planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the Carso to the right
(south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and Doberdo are destroyed beyond
the limits of ruination. The Carso itself is a waterless upland with but
a few bushy trees; it must always have been a desolate region, but now
it is an indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian
trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty thorny
vileness of man's invention, worse than all the thorns and thickets of
nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the wounded have been
cleared away; but about the trenches and particularly near some of the
dug-outs there was a faint repulsive smell....
Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of order.
The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-French front
that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I doubt if he can
touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All the way up to San
Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were making one of those carefully
graded roads that the Italians make better than any other people. Other
swarms were laying water-pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither
roads nor water, and before the Italians can thrust farther both must be
brought up to the front.
As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its presence
felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some workmen, in a
little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand. One heard the report
and turned to see the fragments flying and the dust. Probably they got
someone. And then, after a little pause, the encampment began to spew
out men; here, there and everywhere they appeared among the tents,
running like rabbits at evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and
probably in connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come
over. They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes
that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and releases
a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of high explosive
that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into red dust and smoke. But
these things are now to be seen on the cinema. Forthwith the men working
on the road about us begin to down tools and make for the shelter
trenches, a long procession going at a steady but resolute walk. Then
like a blow in the chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere
close at hand....
Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort of thing
was going on that morning....
2
This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy. From the
left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round to the Swiss
boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else in the world; it
is warfare that pushes the boundary backward, but it is mountain warfare
that will not, for so long a period that the war will be over first,
hold out any hopeful prospects of offensive movements on a large scale
against Austria or Germany. It is a short distance as the crow flies
from Rovereto to Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Italians,
therefore, as their contribution to the common effort, are thrusting
rather eastwardly towards the line of the Julian Alps through Carinthia
and Carniola. From my observation post in the tree near Monfalcone I saw
Trieste away along the coast to my right. It looked scarcely as distant
as Folkestone from Dungeness. The Italian advanced line is indeed
scarcely ten miles from Trieste. But the Italians are not, I think,
going to Trieste just yet. That is not the real game now. They are
playing loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the Central
Powers, and that is to be achieved striking home into Austria. Meanwhile
there is no sense in knocking Trieste to pieces, or using Italians
instead of Austrian soldiers to garrison it.
II. THE MOUNTAIN WAR
1
The mountain warfare of Italy is extraordinarily unlike that upon any
other front. From the Isonzo to the Swiss frontier we are dealing with
high mountains, cut by deep valleys between which there is usually no
practicable lateral communication. Each advance must have the nature of
an unsupported shove along a narrow channel, until the whole mountain
system, that is, is won, and the attack can begin to deploy in front
of the passes. Geographically Austria has the advantage. She had the
gentler slope of the mountain chains while Italy has the steep side,
and the foresight of old treaties has given her deep bites into what is
naturally Italian territory; she is far nearer the Italian plain
than Italy is near any practicable fighting ground for large forces;
particularly is this the case in the region of the Adige valley and Lake
Garda.
The legitimate war, so to speak, in this region is a mountaineering war.
The typical position is roughly as follows. The Austrians occupy valley
A which opens northward; the Italians occupy valley B which opens
southward. The fight is for the crest between A and B. The side that
wins that crest gains the power of looking down into, firing into and
outflanking the positions of the enemy valley. In most cases it is the
Italians now who are pressing, and if the reader will examine a map of
the front and compare it with the official reports he will soon realise
that almost everywhere the Italians are up to the head of the southward
valleys and working over the crests so as to press down upon the
Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino the Austrians are still well over
the crest on the southward slopes. When I was in Italy they still held
Rovereto.
Now it cannot be said that under modern conditions mountains favour
either the offensive or the defensive. But they certainly make
operations far more deliberate than upon a level. An engineered road or
railway in an Alpine valley is the most vulnerable of things; its curves
and viaducts may be practically demolished by shell fire or swept by
shrapnel, although you hold the entire valley except for one vantage
point. All the mountains round about a valley must be won before that
valley is safe for the transport of an advance. But on the other hand a
surprise capture of some single mountain crest and the hoisting of one
gun into position there may block the retreat of guns and material
from a great series of positions. Mountain surfaces are extraordinarily
various and subtle. You may understand Picardy on a map, but mountain
warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle may go on for weeks or months
consisting of apparently separate and incidental skirmishes, and then
suddenly a whole valley organisation may crumble away in retreat
or disaster. Italy is gnawing into the Trentino day by day, and
particularly around by her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised
to see a sudden lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns
and prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack, but
that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under her continual
pressure.
Such briefly is the _idea_ of mountain struggle. Its realities, I
should imagine, are among the strangest and most picturesque in all this
tremendous world conflict. I know nothing of the war in the east, of
course, but there are things here that must be hard to beat. Happily
they will soon get justice done to them by an abler pen than mine.
I hear that Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be
imagined more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering
than this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the Austrian.
To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.
Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto there have
been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads are often still in
the making, and the automobile of the war tourist skirts precipices and
takes hairpin bends upon tracks of loose metal not an inch too broad
for the operation, or it floats for a moment over the dizzy edge while
a train of mule transport blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's
heart (which is "only evil continually") speculates upon what would be
the consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart. Down
below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look far too
small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a fallen man
of letters. And at the high positions they are too used to the
vertical life to understand the secret feelings of the visitor from
the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose writings are well known to all
English students of military matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is
making of a great mountain system east of the Adige.
"Let me show you," he said, and flung himself on to the edge of the
precipice into exactly the position of a lady riding side-saddle. "You
will find it more comfortable to sit down."
But anxious as I am abroad not to discredit my country by unseemly
exhibitions I felt unequal to such gymnastics without a proper rehearsal
at a lower level. I seated myself carefully at a yard (perhaps it was a
couple of yards) from the edge, advanced on my trousers without dignity
to the verge, and so with an effort thrust my legs over to dangle in the
crystalline air.
"That," proceeded General Bompiani, pointing with a giddy flourish of
his riding whip, "is Monte Tomba."
I swayed and half-extended my hand towards him. But he was still
there--sitting, so to speak, on the half of himself.... I was astonished
that he did not disappear abruptly during his exposition....
2
The fighting man in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most wonderful
of all these separate campaigns. I went up by automobile as far as the
clambering new road goes up the flanks of Tofana No. 2; thence for a
time by mule along the flank of Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the
vestiges of the famous Castelletto.
The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked; they are
worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs
of sallow grey, with the square jointings and occasional clefts and
gullies, their summits are toothed and jagged; the path ascends and
passes round the side of the mountain upon loose screes, which descend
steeply to a lower wall of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh
and desolate-looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars
of old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through
which passes the road of the Dolomites.
As I ascended the upper track two bandages men were coming down on led
mules. It was mid-August, and they were suffering from frostbite.
Across the great gap between the summits a minute traveller with
some provisions was going up by wire to some post upon the crest. For
everywhere upon the icy pinnacles are observation posts directing the
fire of the big guns on the slopes below, or machine-gun stations, or
little garrisons that sit and wait through the bleak days. Often
they have no link with the world below but a precipitous climb or a
"teleferic" wire. Snow and frost may cut them off absolutely for weeks
from the rest of mankind. The sick and wounded must begin their journey
down to help and comfort in a giddy basket that swings down to the head
of the mule track below.
Originally all these crests were in Austrian hands; they were stormed
by the Alpini under almost incredible conditions. For fifteen days, for
example, they fought their way up these screes on the flanks of Tofana
No. 2 to the ultimate crags, making perhaps a hundred metres of ascent
each day, hiding under rocks and in holes in the daylight and receiving
fresh provisions and ammunition and advancing by night. They were
subjected to rifle fire, machine-gun fire and bombs of a peculiar sort,
big iron balls of the size of a football filled with explosive that were
just flung down the steep. They dodged flares and star shells. At one
place they went up a chimney that would be far beyond the climbing
powers of any but a very active man. It must have been like storming the
skies. The dead and wounded rolled away often into inaccessible ravines.
Stray skeletons, rags of uniform, fragments of weapons, will add to the
climbing interest of these gaunt masses for many years to come. In this
manner it was that Tofana No. 2 was taken.
Now the Italians are organising this prize, and I saw winding up far
above me on the steep grey slope a multitudinous string of little things
that looked like black ants, each carrying a small bright yellow egg.
They were mules bringing back balks of timber....
But one position held out invincibly; this was the Castelletto, a great
natural fortress of rock standing out at an angle of the mountain
in such a position that it commanded the Italian communications (the
Dolomite road) in the valley below, and rendered all their positions
uncomfortable and insecure. This obnoxious post was practically
inaccessible either from above or below, and it barred the Italians
even from looking into the Val Travenanzes which it defended. It was, in
fact, an impregnable position, and against it was pitted the invincible
5th Group of the Alpini. It was the old problem of the irresistible
force in conflict with the immovable object. And the outcome has been
the biggest military mine in all history.
The business began in January, 1916, with surveys of the rock in
question. The work of surveying for excavations, never a very simple
one, becomes much more difficult when the site is occupied by hostile
persons with machine guns. In March, as the winter's snows abated, the
boring machinery began to arrive, by mule as far as possible and then by
hand. Altogether about half a kilometre of gallery had to be made to the
mine chamber, and meanwhile the explosive was coming up load by load and
resting first here, then there, in discreetly chosen positions. There
were at the last thirty-five tons of it in the inner chamber. And while
the boring machines bored and the work went on, Lieutenant Malvezzi was
carefully working out the problem of "il massimo effetto dirompimento"
and deciding exactly how to pack and explode his little hoard. On the
eleventh of July, at 3.30, as he rejoices to state in his official
report, "the mine responded perfectly both in respect of the
calculations made and of the practical effects," that is to say, the
Austrians were largely missing and the Italians were in possession of
the crater of the Castelletto and looking down the Val Travenanzes from
which they had been barred for so long. Within a month things had been
so tidied up, and secured by further excavations and sandbags against
hostile fire, that even a middle-aged English writer, extremely fagged
and hot and breathless, could enjoy the same privilege. All this, you
must understand, had gone on at a level to which the ordinary tourist
rarely climbs, in a rarefied, chest-tightening atmosphere, with wisps of
clouds floating in the clear air below and club-huts close at hand....
Among these mountains avalanches are frequent; and they come down
regardless of human strategy. In many cases the trenches cross avalanche
tracks; they and the men in them are periodically swept away and
periodically replaced. They are positions that must be held; if the
Italians will not face such sacrifices, the Austrians will. Avalanches
and frostbite have slain and disabled their thousands; they have
accounted perhaps for as many Italians in this austere and giddy
campaign as the Austrians....
3
It seems to be part of the stern resolve of Fate that this, the greatest
of wars, shall be the least glorious; it is manifestly being decided
not by victories but by blunders. It is indeed a history of colossal
stupidities. Among the most decisive of these blunders, second only
perhaps of the blunder of the Verdun attack and far outshining the wild
raid of the British towards Bagdad, was the blunder of the Trentino
offensive. It does not need the equipment of a military expert, it
demands only quite ordinary knowledge and average intelligence,
to realise the folly of that Austrian adventure. There is some
justification for a claim that the decisive battle of the war was fought
upon the soil of Italy. There is still more justification for saying
that it might have been.
There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one could
have foretold it. And it did so completely surprise the Italians as to
catch them without any prepared line of positions in the rear. On the
very eve of the big Russian offensive, the Austrians thrust eighteen
divisions hard at the Trentino frontier. The Italian posts were then in
Austrian territory; they held on the left wing and the right, but they
were driven by the sheer weight of men and guns in the centre; they lost
guns and prisoners because of the difficulty of mountain retreats to
which I have alluded, and the Austrians pouring through reached not
indeed the plain of Venetia, but to the upland valleys immediately above
it, to Asiago and Arsiero. They probably saw the Venetian plain through
gaps in the hills, but they were still separated from it even at Arsiero
by what are mountains to an English eye, mountains as high as Snowdon.
But the Italians of such beautiful old places and Vicenza, Marostica,
and Bassano could watch the Austrian shells bursting on the last line of
hills above the plain, and I have no doubt they felt extremely uneasy.
As one motors through these ripe and beautiful towns and through the
rich valleys that link them--it is a smiling land abounding in old
castles and villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio's architecture
and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted buildings--one feels that
the things was a narrow escape, but from the military point of view it
was merely an insane escapade. The Austrians had behind them--and some
way behind them--one little strangulated railway and no good pass road;
their right was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back. In
front of them was between twice and three times their number of first
class troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had surmounted
that last mountain crest they would have come down to almost certain
destruction in the plain. They could never have got back. For a time
it was said that General Cadorna considered that possibility. From the
point of view of purely military considerations, the Trentino offensive
should perhaps have ended in the capitulation of Vicenza.
I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This tour of the fronts has
made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins. I can bear no
more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin,
or suchlike modern German city. Anxious as I am to be a systematic
Philistine, to express my preference for Marinetti over the Florentine
British and generally to antagonise aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over
that sunlit land as one might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.
On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a big
gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the hillside
to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile last attacks.
Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo d'Astico recovered, and
across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone with the Italian trenches
upon its crest and the Austrians a little below to the north. A very
considerable bombardment was going on and it reverberated finely. (It
is only among mountains that one hears anything that one can call the
thunder of guns. The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded
merely like Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me
extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the shells
burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over Castelletto above
Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the position of the Austrian
frontier. I doubt if the English people realise that the utmost depth to
which this great Trentino offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the
flower of the Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters
and the intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was
about six miles.
III. BEHIND THE FRONT
1
I have a peculiar affection for Verona and certain things in Verona.
Italians must forgive us English this little streak of impertinent
proprietorship in the beautiful things of their abundant land. It is
quite open to them to revenge themselves by professing a tenderness for
Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for instance, with a peculiar and
personal indignation that I saw where an Austrian air bomb had killed
five-and-thirty people in the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old
place, a place that have very much of the quality of a very pretty and
cheerful old woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a
special pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,
the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I confess a
ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say, has retired into a
case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof of thick iron plates; no
aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough to smash that covering; there he
will smile securely in the darkness until peace comes again.
All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort of
idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been making over
England. These raids do no effective military work. What conceivable
military advantage can there be in dropping bombs into a marketing
crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic propaganda by the Central Powers to
which they seem to have been incited by their own evil genius. It is
as if they could convince us that there is an essential malignity in
Germans, that until the German powers are stamped down into the mud
they will continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the
thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for half a
century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the way of her
colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground for her
business enterprise, France had come near resignation on the score of
Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great outrage of the
war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities. A great and simple
wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war itself, had it been
fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would have made no such deep and
enduring breach as these silly, futile assassinations have down between
the Austro-Germans and the rest of the civilised world. One great
misdeed is a thing understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the
consciousness of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a
national sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German
the power to attack other nations any more for ever....
Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to hurt and
terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed suffered from this war
far more than any other town in Italy. Her trade has largely ceased;
she has no visitors. I woke up on my way to Udine and found my train at
Venice with an hour to spare; after much examining and stamping of my
passport I was allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the
refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand Canal.
There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of the old crowd
of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay to stare at me the
better. The empty palaces seemed to be sleeping in the morning sunshine
because it was not worth while to wake up....
2
Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to have made
nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in England or provincial
France. People speak of Italy as a poor country, but that is from a
banker's point of view. In some respects she is the richest country on
earth, and in the matter of staying power I should think she is
better off than any other belligerent. She produces food in abundance
everywhere; her women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption
of food production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any
other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported labour;
the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to America, north and
south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south of France. The cessation of
this emigration has given her great reserves of man power, so that she
has carried on her admirable campaign with less interference with her
normal economic life than any other power. The first person I spoke to
upon the platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on my
return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a day in
Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass road that goes
down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds of new Fiat cars," he
remarked, "along here--going up to the French front."
But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of thousands of
shells piled high to go to Italy....
I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic sturdiness
or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy is not merely
fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion but she is doing
a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing in fighting at all.
France and England were obliged to fight; the necessity was as plain as
daylight. The participation of Italy demanded a remoter wisdom. In the
long run she would have been swallowed up economically and politically
by Germany if she had not fought; but that was not a thing staring her
plainly in the face as the danger, insult and challenge stared France
and England in the face. What did stare her in the face was not merely a
considerable military and political risk, but the rupture of very close
financial and commercial ties. I found thoughtful men talking everywhere
I have been in Italy of two things, of the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the
question of post war finance. So far as the former matter goes, I think
the Italians are set upon the righteous solution of all such riddles,
they are possessed by an intelligent generosity. They are clearly set
upon deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand the plain necessity
of open and friendly routes towards Roumania. It was an Italian who set
out to explain to me that Fiume must be at least a free port; it
would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade of Hungary off from the
Mediterranean. But the banking puzzle is a more intricate and puzzling
matter altogether than the possibility of trouble between Italian and
Jugo-Slav.
I write of these things with the simplicity of an angel, but without an
angelic detachment. Here are questions into which one does not so much
rush as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and banking are dry distasteful
questions, but it is clear that they are too much in the hands of
mystery-mongers; it is as much the duty of anyone who talks and writes
of affairs, it is as much the duty of every sane adult, to bring his
possibly poor and unsuitable wits to bear upon these things, as it is
for him to vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the simple ostensible
spectacle of Italy recovering the unredeemed Italy of the Trentino
and East Venetia, goes on another drama. Has Italy been sinking into
something rather hard to define called "economic slavery"? Is she or is
she not escaping from that magical servitude? Before this question has
been under discussion for a minute comes a name--for a time I was really
quite unable to decide whether it is the name of the villain in the
piece or of the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine,
or a pestilence or a delusion--the name of the _Banca Commerciale
Italiana._
Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and vigorous an economic
development as Italy is very different from the banking we simple
English know of at home. Banking in England, like land-owning, has
hitherto been a sort of hold up. There were always borrowers, there were
always tenants, and all that had to be done was to refuse, obstruct,
delay and worry the helpless borrower or would-be tenant until the
maximum of security and profit was obtained. I have never borrowed but
I have built, and I know something of the extreme hauteur of property of
England towards a man who wants to do anything with land, and with
money I gather the case is just the same. But in Italy, which already
possessed a sunny prosperity of its own upon mediaeval lines, the banker
has had to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and helpful. These
are unaccustomed attitudes for British capital. The field has been far
more attractive to the German banker, who is less of a proudly impassive
usurer and more of a partner, who demands less than absolute security
because he investigates more industriously and intelligently. This great
bank, the Banca Commerciale Italiana, is a bank of the German type: to
begin with, it was certainly dominated by German directors; it was a
bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave now into the whole
fabric of Italian commercial life. But it has already liberated
itself from German influence, and the bulk of its capital is Italian.
Nevertheless I found discussion ranging about firstly what the Banca
Commerciale essentially _was_, secondly what it might _become_, thirdly
what it might _do_, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to
it.
It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up with
politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over Venetia there are
agricultural banks which are said to be "clerical." I grappled with this
mystery. "How are they clerical?" I asked Captain Pirelli. "Do they lend
money on bad security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever
to anti-clericals?" He was quite of my way of thinking. "_Pecunia non
olet_," he said; "I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira note."...
But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany; she wants easy
money for development, cheap coal, a market for various products. The
case against the Germans--this case in which the Banca Commerciale
Italiana appears, I am convinced unjustly, as a suspect--is that they
have turned this natural and proper interchange with Italy into the
acquisition of German power. That they have not been merely easy
traders, but patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their
early "pull" in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German
political influence against the development of native Italian business;
that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but members of
a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls. The German is a
patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a limb, the worshipper of a
national effigy, the digit of an insanely proud and greedy Germania, and
here are the natural consequences.
The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: "We do not like
the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always over the Alps.
Whatever increases German influence here threatens Italian life. The
German is a German first and a human being afterwards.... But on the
other hand England seems commercially indifferent to us and France has
been economically hostile..."
"After all," I said presently, after reflection, "in that matter of
_Pecunia non olet_; there used to be fusses about European loans in
China. And one of the favourite themes of British fiction and drama
before the war was the unfortunate position of the girl who accepted a
loan from the wicked man to pay her debts at bridge."
"Italy," said Captain Pirelli, "isn't a girl. And she hasn't been
playing bridge."
I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile
cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in Italy is
going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it will become more
and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I would trust Italy to make
and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana Italian. I believe the Italian
brain is a better brain than the German article. But still I heard
people talking of the implicated organisation as if it were engaged in
the most insidious duplicities. "Wait for only a year or so after the
war," said one English authority to me, "and the mask will be off and it
will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more." They assure me that
then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian and Allied
enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good understanding of
Italians and English poisoned, entirely through this organisation....
The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this last sort
of talk as "suspicion mania." So far as the Banca Commerciale Italiana
goes, I at least find that easy enough; I quote that instance simply
because it is a case where suspicion has been dispelled, but in
regard to a score of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel
suspicion. This war has been a shock to reasonable men the whole world
over. They have been forced to realise that after all a great number
of Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the
non-German world; that in a great number of cases when one does business
with a German the business does not end with the individual German. We
hated to believe that a business could be tainted by German partners or
German associations. If now we err on the side of over-suspicion, it is
the German's little weakness for patriotic disingenuousness that is most
to blame....
But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-smelling
among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German. Certain things are
necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy must get them. The Italians
want intelligent and helpful capital. They want a helpful France.
They want bituminous coal for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap
shipping. The French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important
for civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for Great
Britain that these needs should be supplied than that individual British
money-owners or ship-owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting
upon high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining
and shipping is in the national interests--for international
interests--rather than for the creation of that particularly passive,
obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere
profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France
and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the
well-being of the common man in Britain.
3
I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and reached
Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The place was as full as
ever; we had to wait for a table. It is notable that there were still
great numbers of young men not in uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza
and Verona; there was no effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The
whole crowded place was smouldering with excitement. The diners
looked about them as they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be
expressing sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection
of the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business of
flitting white sheets among the little tables.
"To-night," said my companion, "I think we shall declare war upon
Germany. The decision is being made."
I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I forget the
precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in uniform, who had been
dining at an adjacent table and whom I had not recognised before as a
writer I had met some years previously in London, suddenly joined in our
conversation, with a slightly different explanation. I had been carrying
on a conversation in slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into
English.
But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as
daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first that
direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds of the three
northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional enemy is Austria, and
this war is not primarily a war for any other end than the emancipation
of Italy. Moreover we have to remember that for years there has been
serious commercial friction between France and Italy, and considerable
mutual elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are
resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really friendly
and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It has been an
extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that instead of boldly taking
over her shipping from its private owners and using it all, regardless
of their profit, in the interests of herself and her allies, her
government has permitted so much of it as military and naval needs have
not requisitioned to continue to ply for gain, which the government
itself has shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in
Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity in
relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal in Italy.
They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign in which this
British slackness with the individual profiteer, is represented as if
it were the deliberate greed of the British state. This certainly
contributed very much to fortify Italy's disinclination to slam the door
on the German connection.
I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from
England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same way
as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our shipping
interest. "I pay as well as you do," I said; "the shippers' blockade of
Great Britain is more effective than the submarines'. My food, my coal,
my petrol are all restricted in the sacred name of private property.
You see, capital in England has hitherto been not an exploitation but
a hold-up. We are learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman
has been here and given Italy assurances...."
In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is imperative
that English readers should understand clearly how thoroughly these
little matters have been _worked_ by the enemy.
Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the Italian
lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an Italian, and also
brought out the latent English of a very charming elderly lady opposite
to her. She had heard a speech, a wonderful speech from a railway train,
by "the Lord Runciman." He had said the most beautiful things about
Italy.
I did my best to echo these beautiful things.
Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runciman had not satisfied
everybody. She and her husband had met a minister--I found afterwards
he was one of the members of the late Giolotti government--who had been
talking very loudly and scornfully of the bargain Italy was making with
England. I assured her that the desire of England was simply to give
Italy all that she needed.
"But," said the husband casually, "Mr. Runciman is a shipowner."
I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It was true that he came
of a shipowning family--and perhaps inherited a slight tendency to
see things from a shipowning point of view--but in England we did not
suspect a man on such a score as that.
"In Italy I think we should," said the husband of the Irish lady.
4
This incidental discussion is a necessary part of my impression of Italy
at war. The two western allies and Great Britain in particular have to
remember Italy's economic needs, and to prepare to rescue them from the
blind exploitation of private profit. They have to remember these needs
too, because, if they are left out of the picture, then it becomes
impossible to understand the full measure of the risk Italy has faced in
undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has counted
every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her place by the
side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation against a Byzantine
imperialism.
As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele into the
darkened Piazza del Duomo I stopped under the arcade and stood looking
up at the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled barn, that marble
bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the last southward fortress of the
Franco-English Gothic.
"It was here," said my host, "that we burnt the German stuff."
"What German stuff?"
"Pianos and all sorts of things. From the shops. It is possible,
you know, to buy things too cheaply--and to give too much for the
cheapness."