dismantled Zoska being loaded on to a flat-bed wagon at Haidenschaft railway station the Repair Officer had told us that she would be away at the Fliegeretappenpark in Marburg for a fortnight at least. A largely peasant country, the Danubian Monarchy had never been too flush with skilled craftsmen at the best of times, and the policy of recklessly drafting every man in sight in 1914 for the war that was to have been over by Christmas had not helped matters, now that a high proportion of Austria-Hungary’s potential airframe fitters and engine mechanics were either fully occupied building railways in Siberia or lying picked clean by the crows in the fields of Poland. The Monarchy’s aircraft-repair parks were desperately short of hands. Seventy- and even eighty-year-old retired cabinet-makers were being conscripted into the factories to build airframes. Two years into the war it seemed that only the bureaucracy of the rear areas was able to meet its manning levels. Despite the ever-swelling number of procurement agencies and their insatiable demand for people to staff them, there was as yet no visible shortage of manpower in the ministries and in the munitions factory administrations—one of which was already known as “the House of Lords” because of the number of sons of the aristocracy who had been safely tucked away there for the duration.
But even if the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe on the South-West Front had been up to complement in men and aircraft, our strength would still have been inadequate for the trials that loomed ahead of us that summer of 1916. For as July turned to August we stood on the brink of one of the most haunting, if most obscure, tragedies of the twentieth century: the battles of the Isonzo. I say “battles” because there were in fact no less than eleven of them between the summer of 1915 and October 1917, when the Italian lines finally collapsed at Caporetto. That last battle would take place further up the river though, along the stretch that ran through the mountains between Flitsch and Tolmein. The previous ten battles had been fought for two blood-soaked years on one of the tiniest battlefronts of the entire First World War—the mere thirty kilometres or so between Gorz and the sea—a front so minute that a man with powerful binoculars, standing on Monte Sabotino at one end of it, could clearly see men moving on the hills above Monfalcone at the other.
Looking back on those dreadful, now almost forgotten events, I suppose that there was never a clearer illustration—not even Verdun or Passchendaele—of the aphorism that for its first three months or so the generals ran the First World War, after which the war ran the generals. Certainly, when the Kingdom of Italy changed sides in May 1915 and declared war on its former Austrian ally, its politicians and people had expected an easy and rapid victory against our sclerotic old empire, already engaged in desperate and not very successful campaigns against Russia and Serbia. A “jolly little stroll to Laibach”—even to Vienna itself—was confidently predicted in the Italian newspapers. But before they embarked upon this adventure the Italian politicians might have been advised to look elsewhere in Europe and see that, if nothing else, barbed wire and the machine gun had put an end once and for all to jolly little strolls, whether to Vienna, Berlin, Paris or anywhere else.
They might also have done well to consult their maps, because the fact is that in the summer of 1915 Italy was quite exceptionally ill-placed for a war against Austria. Everywhere along that four-hundred-kilometre frontier, from Switzerland to the Adriatic, topography favoured the defenders and hindered the attackers. As for the High Alps west of Lake Garda, forget it: in the entire three and a half years this awesome wilderness of peaks and glaciers never saw anything more serious than belts of barbed wire staked across the great silent snowfields, or ski patrols exchanging shots down the echoing ice-valleys. Nor was the terrain much more favourable among the mountains east of the Adige. The fighting of 1916—17 in the Dolomites was certainly bitter as the two armies grappled with one another for control of that chain of fantastically shaped mountain peaks east of the Marmolada. Sappers tunnelled through the rock for months on end to lay mines which permanently altered the shape of several mountain-tops. Men fought and died by the thousand in those savage battles above the clouds to capture ridges about which, before the war, even the most intrepid of rock climbers would have thought twice before scaling. Probably as many perished from avalanches and frostbite as from enemy action. But, for all its epic qualities, the war in the mountains of the South Tyrol was still a small-scale business; for even if the Italians had succeeded by some stupendous effort in dislodging our armies from the first ridge of the Alps, they would only have found themselves facing a second, even higher ridge, with nothing beyond it more vital to the Central Powers than the shuttered-up tourist hotels of Innsbruck.
That left the easternmost sector of the Austro-Italian Front: the stretch along the valley of the Isonzo from the Carnic Alps southwards to the Adriatic, along the western edge of what is now Yugoslavia. So it was that a lonely, picturesque, fast-flowing mountain river which hardly anyone had ever heard of became to all intents and purposes the entire Austro-Italian Front: a miserable little parody of the more grandiose destruction taking place on the Western Front, a winding ribbon of smashed villages and silent forests of pine and chestnut reduced to vistas of blackened stumps. Eighty kilometres it ran, winding down from the Alps at Malborgeth through Flitsch and Caporetto and Tolmein to reach the Adriatic at Monfalcone where, in the summer of 1916, the trench lines ran across the Cantieri Navale shipyard and the rusting, bullet-pocked hulk of a half-finished ocean liner still sat forlornly on the slipways, stranded in the middle of no man’s land.
By the time I arrived there in July 1916, the Isonzo Front had already claimed perhaps three hundred thousand lives in five successive battles. Yet the worst was still to come. True, the Julian Alps were not quite as high as the Dolomites. But the mountains through which the Isonzo wound its way north of Gorz were every bit as difficult and unprofitable for an attacking army. So that left only the somewhat lower-lying country to the south: the twenty or so kilometres between the Vippaco Valley and the sea, where the river curves westward then south around the edge of the Carso plateau. Even this was murderously difficult terrain for an attack (as events were to show), but it had something which—from the Italian point of view—no other sector of the front possessed: a worthwhile objective. For only twenty or so kilometres down the Adriatic shore from Monfalcone lay the city of Trieste: largest commercial port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, home to 120,000 ethnic Italians and, ever since the 1870s, largest single item on the shopping-list of Italia irredenta.
Thus, like your own Sir Douglas Haig on the Somme that fateful summer, the Italian Commander-in-Chief Cadorna was presented with a fait accompli, locked into a situation not of his choosing: he had to attack somewhere, and the lower Isonzo happened to be both the only place where he could attack and the only one where there was some worthwhile strategic reason for doing so. His own stubborn and self-opinionated temperament did the rest. So for the next fourteen blood-soaked months, like a man compelled to keep picking at the same infected scab, Cadorna battered away obsessively at that tiny front, throwing men’s lives at it by the hundred thousand and then, when they were all dead, flinging a hundred thousand more. It was the same dismal, pitiful story as on the Western Front in those years: gains measured in metres and losses measured in tens of thousands; endless reinforcement of failure; blind stupidity mistaken for determination; utter strategic bankruptcy. In the years since, I have often heard people in this country mock the Italian Army for running away at Caporetto. To me though, who saw something of what they suffered in offensive after grinding, futile offensive, the wonder is that they stuck it as long as they did, division after division of peasant soldiers herded forward to their deaths, always without adequate artillery support, usually ill-fed and often without proper gas masks or wire cutters or even decent boots on their feet.
Individual obsession on the part of one military commander is destructive enough; but on the Isonzo Cadorna’s manic insistence on attack was mirrored in a sort of military folie a deux by his Austrian counterpart, General-Oberst Svetozar Boroevic, Freiherr von Bojna, commander of the 5th Army’s sector on the lower Isonzo. Old Boroevic was by no means the classic Habsburg military dolt: he had the reputation of being an able staff officer and was one of the very few Austrian generals to have emerged with any credit from the Galician campaign in the autumn of 1914. But he too was a remarkably stubborn man. Known to his officers as “der Bosco,” his long-suffering troops characterised him less flatteringly as “der Kroatische Dickschadel”—“the Croatian Numbskull.” The trouble with Boroevic was that whereas Cadorna had a thing about attack, he himself suffered from an equal and opposite mania for defence. Not a centimetre of ground was to be given willingly, be it never so worthless or costly to hold. And if the Italians took ground from us, why, then we were to counter-attack immediately, regardless of cost, to recapture it. It was a recipe for disaster: a long-drawn-out, miserable, grinding disaster which in the end claimed the lives (I imagine) of nearly a million men.
I suppose that for connoisseurs of human destructiveness the Isonzo Front could never quite rival the baroque horror of Verdun or the Ypres Salient; Austria and Italy were not major industrial powers, so neither was ever able to run to the extravaganzas of high explosive that were being staged in France: millions of shells raining down for months on end until the very tops of the hills were blasted down to bare rock. Likewise the two armies involved were not quite as combative as their more northerly neighbours; that is to say, while a German or French infantry battalion in 1916 would still fight on after losing nine men out of ten, its Italian and Austro-Hungarian
