The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson Page B

asked for reinforcements on the 2nd, but Cadorna was non-committal. By the time extra forces arrived on the afternoon of the 5th, the Austrian crisis was past.
    On the southernmost sector, around Monfalcone, the Italian mood was gloomy. The first efforts to drive the Austrians off Mount Cosich and the neighbouring heights (Hills 85 and 121) failed badly. Even worse, the counter-attacks created panic. The Italians were taking steady high losses from the machine guns across the valley. The First Battle found Private Giani Stuparich near the Rocca, on the brow of a hill overlooking the bare, rocky valley. (Today the hillsides are thickly wooded, and a motorway passes along the valley.) He spent his days crouching behind a dry-stone wall reinforced with sandbags, facing a jumble of wire, nauseated by the stink of shit; for the men defecated in the open – anywhere, just to be safe from snipers – turning the pine- scented hillside into a dunghill. The constant rain churned the red clay into soapy, clinging muck. At night, he curled up in the muck and sank into sleep that was violent and black, like death.
    The Austrians repelled four attacks on Hill 121. A fifth attempt fails when the company assails the wrong part of the line, where there are no gaps in the wire. Nothing goes well, and the forced passivity is a burden. When their commanding officer asks for volunteers to blow a hole in the enemy wire, Giani and his brother Carlo step forward. There is six days’ leave for the team that succeeds, but they are not after this reward; they are Habsburg Italians, volunteers from Trieste. ‘We are in this war because we wanted it; how can we hide behind silence?’ That night, they creep towards the enemy lines carrying gelignite tubes. Unusually, the party succeeds in breaching the wire, but the gaps are repaired before the Italians can exploit them. Giani’s spirits sink when the Austrians bombard Monfalcone; at this early stage of the fighting, the targeting of civilian areas shocks the idealistic volunteer.
    The first full-scale attack against Cosich began at 02:30 on 30 June, in torrential rain. Austrian counter-battery fire silenced the Italian guns. Yet the dawn assault was not abandoned, as another veteran recalled: ‘All at once the cry goes up, with nothing human about it, “Savoy! Savoy!” – which the valleys echo up to the sky, as if invoking God’s witness to their martyrdom. But a wall of iron stops them, a cloud of fire envelops them.’ 
        

       
    The last veteran of the first battle on the Isonzo was alive and well in a leafy suburb of Rome in 2004. Born in December 1894, Carlo Orelli was conscripted on 24 May 1915 and sent off to the Carso after notional training. Nearly 90 years later, he sat in sharp sunlight beside the opened shutters of his bedroom window. He was very still under his dressing gown, silk scarf and cloth cap; only an index finger moved, tracing a pattern on his leg. His blue eyes were filmy. 
    Orelli was a Socialist, but in the debate over intervention that raged in Italy in 1914–15, he switched sides, like Mussolini. ‘Supposedly it was all secret, but everyone knew the war was coming.’ The troop train left from Naples.
It was a lovely day, I remember it well. A great blue sky. We thought we were going to the front to take Trento and Trieste, which were under Austria. We had gone to war to conquer those territories, which were Italian. Austria had taken them from us. Then we would go forward, forward … We expected a short war, not one that would last so many years.
     Words came awkwardly, in short breaths, as memories surfaced.
    Was it a war of conquest or liberation? ‘Liberation,’ he said firmly. ‘We were not taking what was theirs.’ Were the troops eager for war? ‘Not enthusiastic, no! They thought it was a fine thing to reconquer our lands, le terre nostre , but they weren’t prepared for what faced them at the front.’
    He was a non-commissioned