THE SAVING OF ITALY
“Many hot inroads
They make into Italy.”
Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Sc. iv.
At the opening of the year 1917 the general situation of the World-war in Europe offered fair promise for the cause of the Entente Allies. On the Western front the immense latent resources of the British Empire were now coming effectively into play and were creating an opportunity for a really serious and formidable offensive. Tremendously reinforced in men and munitions through the powers of the Munitions and Military Service Acts, our gigantic armies inspired every observer with immeasurable hopes of victory. The soldiers themselves were full of that and fresh sanguine spirit in which the valour of the British race has always expressed itself. France was now recovering from the grievous losses of men endured in the first two years of the war; and the new Generals, men of the younger school like Nivelle and Pétain, were looking forward with no less confidence than ourselves to the results of a new Western aggressive on a larger and more effective scale.
But the Western front was only a portion of that far-flung line of embattled hosts who were holding back the great Teutonic armies from desolating the fairest regions of Western and Southern Europe. Far away across the snowy barriers of the Alps and beyond the interval of neutral Switzerland the Italian armies lay in caves and trenches stretched from the eastern frontier of the Swiss Canton Ticino right across the eastern Alps down to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. On the west of this hazardous line the Italians still held the Austrian armies to the edges of the main Alpine ridge. On the east they had pressed them in a series of heroic onslaughts through the mountains and across the deep valley of the rushing Isonzo. They had captured the high and coveted city of Gorizia, and they were threatening the suburbs of Trieste. They seemed on the eve of momentous conquests. But the very achievements of their heroic valour, so splendid to the outward eye, concealed a perilous and precarious military position.
“No one,” said Mr. Lloyd George later on at Paris, “can look at these frontier mountains without a thrill of respect for the gallantry that has stormed them in face of the entrenched legions of Austria.” Certainly no one who, like the present writer, has escaladed those peaks in days of peace. There are no greater episodes in this war than those of that titanic, gigantesque conflict amid the mighty jagged precipices and the deep gloomy abysses of the Eastern Alps.[[107]]
But the greater the effort, the greater the exhaustion. It is written large in letters of fire and blood across the history of the World-war that any excess of human loss is in itself one of the gravest of military perils. Italy poured out her blood without stint. Alone among the Allied nations she possessed one organised party—the official Socialists—genuinely opposed to the war. Taking advantage of this weakness, the Germans had made a special effort to weaken her home front. The great industrial centres of the north of Italy—Turin and Milan—had been the objective of perhaps the most sustained effort of German peace propaganda. The missionaries of this strange crusade had crossed the Alps by every mountain path and had mixed themselves among the armies, scattering their poisoned leaflets among the tired troops. Thus every preparation had been made for an easier assault. Like Hannibal when he crossed the Alps in a greater campaign, they had melted the rocks with vinegar.
The military position, indeed, was not so strong as it looked. The right wing of the Italian army was lunging forward victoriously, while the centre and left were still entangled in the mountains. These things were not clear to observers in the west of Europe; but there were English visitors with the Italian armies who became uneasily aware of them.
In the absence of any unified control it was impossible to take any effective steps to avert the coming danger. The British military chiefs had their views about the position of the Italian army; many Italians themselves had their views. But though these views were platonically interchanged there was no machinery by which they could be compared and collated, or produce any real effect on the course of the campaign. In other words, there was no central power of vision or action—no active organism that was responsible for the war as a whole, right from the North Sea to the Adriatic. As Mr. Lloyd George afterwards pointed out in the House of Commons, “there was a sort of feeling that that front was not our business.”[[108]]
This did not, indeed, prevent Mr. Lloyd George from using such opportunities as presented themselves for urging his views. In January of that year (1917) there was an important Conference at Rome between the Allied Premiers and Generals; and at that Conference the whole European situation was surveyed in one of the most candid and exhaustive discussions that had taken place up to that time. These conversations extended over the whole ground, from the political relations between Italy and her neighbouring Allies to the question of the proper strategy for the Italian frontier. Mr. Lloyd George boldly placed before that Conference his own views as to the proper campaign to be adopted in the war between Italy and Austria. He pointed out the grave dangers to which Italy was exposed; and his own characteristic remedy was a reinforced aggressive across the Eastern Alps into the plains of Austria. That proposal afterwards tentatively put forward in his Paris speech received much foolish ridicule from English critics. If those critics would follow the advice of the late Lord Salisbury, and study large maps, they would observe that the most vulnerable flank of the Central Powers was to be found precisely through that very Alpine door north of Trieste round which the battle was then raging. While Berlin is remote from the Teutonic frontiers, Vienna is dangerously exposed to attack from the south and east, and every student of European wars knows that the great captains of war, like Napoleon, have always availed themselves of that fact.
This proposal was a revival in a more modest form of Mr. Lloyd George’s earlier scheme for seeking a military decision on the Eastern front; and subsequently in his Paris speech he stoutly maintained that if there had been in January 1917 a proper unified machinery for military debate and execution the history of that year (1917) might have been different.[[109]]
But at that time both the Premiers of the Allied nations and the Generals of the Allied armies were fighting the war in water-tight compartments. It was not yet realised that the Italian front was actually a back door to the West. It required more startling events to convince the Allies that if either side broke through the line at any point, East or West, the whole line would be in peril. Until those events occurred there was not enough political or military driving power behind any proposal for unified control.
So throughout those months from August to October 1917 the military control was practically left to each set of military chiefs in his own section of the war. The communications and consultations between them were casual and uncertain; and naturally each set played for their own hand. For, other things being equal, the first duty of a soldier is the care of his own army. In our country it seemed the wisest course for the War Cabinet to leave all important military decisions to the military chiefs. The previous Government, indeed, had fortified the Generals with an Order in Council which practically gave them strategic control. It was considered best for the time being to fall in with that arrangement. There was, indeed, no alternative. “Never,” as Mr. Lloyd George said afterwards in the House of Commons, “never in the whole history of war in this country have soldiers got more consistent and more substantial backing from politicians than they have had this year (1917). . . . No soldiers in any war have had their strategical dispositions less interfered with by politicians. There has not been a single battalion, or a single gun, moved this year except with the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack ordered in any part of the battle-field by British troops except on the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack not ordered. The whole campaign of the year has been the result of the advice of soldiers.”
If the sole control of war by military authority was to be put to a decisive test, the campaign of 1917 supplied a crucial instance.
The vital need revealed by that test on the Eastern front was unity of control. But the same need was even earlier revealed on the West also.
There the year opened with smiling auspices. The retreat of the Germans from the Somme Valley and the final abandonment of the Verdun attack seemed to give the greatest hope for a successful Allied move forward against the foe. As at Waterloo, the moment seemed to have come to cry “Up Guards and at them!” Nor can it be said that there was any hesitation or lack of utmost heroism in the attack when it was delivered. On the contrary those attacks of 1917 displayed British and French valour at their highest point. But the want of co-operative effort and unified control led to a great reduction of war profits in the final balance-sheet of the year’s efforts.
Sir Douglas Haig has frankly taken the world into his confidence as to the incidents of divided counsel. In his published despatches on those great events he has spoken freely. Sir Douglas Haig himself, a discreet and moderate man, had entertained the highest hopes, and had even gone so far as to express them through public channels. He was sanguine of a complete break-through. General Nivelle, the French Commander-in-Chief, was almost equally hopeful. It is no small gain to great armies when their chieftains start out with such high expectations.
Whether those expectations would have been fulfilled if the efforts of the British and French armies had been backed by unified control it is now impossible to say. But it is quite certain that the want of unity placed every obstacle in the way of victory. There were, indeed, shadows of control—scattered, intermittent efforts to bring the great armies into some form of combined action. But these efforts lacked authority or decision. There was a military conference of Allied Generals at the end of 1916; there was even an agreement to make a combined attack in Flanders. But the decisions of that conference do not seem to have carried with them any permanent effect on the Allied war councils. Probably the swift movement of events made a mockery of such long-laid schemes. At any rate, we have the fact that General Nivelle made a separate attack in Champagne in the spring of the year, with the result that our armies had to delay their advance until that great effort was brought to a decision.
General Nivelle aimed at a great mark. He, too, aspired to break the German lines. He succeeded in part, but at a cost of life too great for France at that moment. General Nivelle had to pay the price. He ceased to be Commander-in-Chief of the French armies. His place was taken by General Pétain, with the understanding that he should adopt a less aggressive policy. The result was that the British attack was delayed, and when it took place was undertaken alone. It achieved great objects, but not so great as had been hoped. The August fighting round Lens—the September onslaughts of Haig’s armies east and north of Ypres, the assault of Passchendaele—all these battles displayed the valour of British, Canadian, and Australian troops at their highest point.
But there was no break-through. At the critical moment the British armies were checked by the mud and rain of the Flanders autumn. Heroism was literally choked in slime. The cold and gloom of winter descended on those splendid British stormers before their great task could be achieved.
Such were the fruits of divided control.
It was fated that there should blaze out a sign in the heavens even more startlingly blood-red before the forces of national and army particularism could be safely and successfully defied.
On October 24th (1917) the Italian eastern front was suddenly shaken by a hammer-blow from the German central command. A new army under the redoubtable Mackensen, secretly assembled behind the screen of the mountain ridges, took over the attack from the nerveless Austrians.[[110]] This German force made a sudden assault under cover of mist against a weak point in the Italian line. They attacked and penetrated the Second Italian Army in the neighbourhood of Tolmino on the Upper Isonzo. Only one Italian regiment gave way, probably weakened by enemy influences. But at such a critical point one was enough. It was like a small hole in a great dyke. The flood of German invasion swept in, and soon began to submerge the plain of Venetia. During the following week the Austro-German armies advanced by forced marches from the north-east and captured Cividale and Udine. The heroic Third Italian Army, conquerors of Gorizia, held on to the line of the Isonzo for a time. But they were taken in the rear, and it was necessary to command a retreat. Those brave regiments—the Alpini and the Bersaglieri—suddenly fell back, many of them preferring annihilation to retirement. The whole host rallied on the line of the Tagliamento; but in the terrible confusion of the great surprise the Italians lost 300,000 men and 2,000 guns.
Italy was now faced with a fearful peril. It was already clear that the line of the Tagliamento could not be held; it was uncertain whether any other line could be held. For if the Germans and Austrians could attain mastery of the Alps to the north every one of those river lines of Venetia would be outflanked; the whole northern plain of Italy would be invaded; the exquisite prize of Venice and the great industrial cities of Turin and Milan would fall as victims to the spear of the enemy. Southern Italy would be cut off from the Western Allies; and, indeed, the whole peninsula would be in danger, and with it our own naval hold on the Mediterranean Sea. None of the Western Allies could be indifferent to the threat of such calamities.
Mr. Lloyd George determined in a moment that Britain could not stand by indifferent. He resolved at once that he would not be responsible for a repetition of the calamities which had overwhelmed Serbia and Rumania. The year 1917 should not close as 1915 and 1916 had closed—with the head of a kingdom on a charger presented to the German Herod.
But it was necessary to act instantly. There was not a moment to be lost. Mr. Lloyd George decided to go to Italy; and he resolved to go armed with new powers of central control for the conduct of the war. He had made up his mind that it was at last necessary to relieve the Generals of their divided responsibilities by establishing a definite organism of central control.
Before starting for Italy he prepared and passed through the British Cabinet a document drawing up in a series of resolutions the constitution of a new central council for the conduct of the war. With that in his pocket he started to meet the Allied Premiers and Generals at the little seaside town of Rapallo, a gem to the east of Genoa on the Italian Riviera.
At that meeting he passed the resolutions contained in that document almost without an alteration, so ready were the French and Italians now to consent to any scheme for increasing the power of central decision.[[111]]
That was the first step in setting up the Versailles Council.
From Rapallo Mr. Lloyd George proceeded to Turin and Milan, everywhere encouraging the Italians and promising them speedy aid. He went as far as Peschiera, where he met the young Italian King, whose heroic devotion to his armies has rightly earned him the fervent love of true Italy. Mr. Lloyd George discussed fully with him all the details of the assistance that should be sent. Then with all speed he proceeded to organise and expedite the arrival of British and French reinforcements. Within a few days French and British infantry and artillery were speeding through the Monte Cenis tunnel to Italy.
For the moment, indeed, there was no need to bring the new powers of the Rapallo Conference into force. It was, at any rate, clear to every mind at this crisis that the whole front was one. It was apparent to any one who glanced at the map of Europe that the conquest of Italy by Germany would shake the whole Allied combination. It was obvious to the French, at any rate, that it might bring Germany to the back door of France.
Faced with such possibilities, British and French Generals vied with one another in helping Italy. What divisions could be spared from the Western front were spared. The young men of Western Europe marched through the vineyards and maize-fields of those beautiful plains of Northern Italy in the waning autumn to the help of the Italian armies now pressed back to the Piave. The coming of this help put new heart into the Italians. As our British boys advanced through the little white villages between Milan and the front they were greeted as crusaders. They were met by cascades of flowers from the joyful villagers, now recovering from the terror of a cruel invasion. For it was known by the Italians that the Germans were sending even Turkish and Bulgarian soldiery to the invasion of the fair Italian provinces.
So sustained and fortified—with such a sense of comradeship behind and beside them—the Italian regiments rallied. Along the line of the Piave they put up that splendid resistance which redeemed the name of Italy and inspired their people with a new strength and unity. To the north, among the mountains, they were helped by French and English battalions, thus forging between the peoples of Italy and Western Europe new links imperishable and without price.
Certainly so far the principle of unified control was justified by its results.
[107] Signor Philippo Philippi has brought from this phase of the war a wonderful photographic record which will make its glories lasting.
[108] November 20th, 1917. In the same speech Mr. Lloyd George delicately expressed the fact that we were aware of the Italian peril but unable to find any effective expression for our views.
[109] “I should like to be able to read to you the statement submitted to the Conference in Rome in January (1917) about the perils and possibilities of the Italian front this year, so that you might judge it in the light of subsequent events. I feel confident that nothing could more convincingly demonstrate the opportunities which the Allies have lost through lack of combined thought and action” (November 12th, 1917).
[110] Ludendorff’s War Memories, Vol. II, pp. 497-99. He reveals that the attack was undertaken to prevent the collapse of Austria Hungary.
[111] “In substance it was the document prepared here, discussed line by line in the Cabinet, and which I had in my pocket after the last Cabinet meeting which was held a few hours before I left” (November 20th, 1917. Mr. Lloyd George’s speech in the House of Commons).