Part 10 (1/2)
The ordinary pa.s.senger train for Bologna was three and a half hours late. Special trains were coming through every ten minutes from Treviso and Venice packed with refugees, going southwards. The organisation of the Italian railways at this time for clearing the refugees from the righting zone was exceedingly good. Siramo thought that, if Venice had to be abandoned, the Germans and Austrians would not damage it. I felt no such security. That night we stopped at Milan. Wild stories of ”tradimento” were in the air. It was being said, for instance, that two Generals of the Second Army had been marched through their troops in handcuffs under a guard of Carabinieri. It was also officially announced that Diaz had replaced Cadorna in command of the Italian Armies.
Next day we reached Arquata amid the tumble of the Ligurian Hills, whose sides were clothed with chestnuts and oaks and vine terraces. We found British Staff, Sanitary Sections and Ordnance already in possession. The Ordnance were occupying a large villa just outside the town. My old friend s.h.i.+eld, whom I had known at Palmanova, was there, but most of the others were new arrivals from France. They were surprisingly full of cheerfulness, as _imboscati_ are often apt to be, even when things are going badly at the Front. The Italian disaster evidently meant very little to them; they hardly realised it at all. They were the first cheerful people I had seen since the retreat began, and it was no doubt good for Siramo and myself to be cheered up. But it grated on both of us a little.
At my first interview I got the impression that the Ordnance were surprisingly efficient and would be very prompt in giving us what we wanted. But I gradually discovered that they really possessed very little of what they first promised me, and that nothing was known for certain as to when further stores would arrive. I telephoned to Ferrara that the immediate prospects were poor, and was told in reply to wait three or four days and see how much turned up. Having pestered various Ordnance officers to the limit of their endurance, I therefore decided to go away for two days.
Siramo went for two days to his family at Turin and I took the train to Genoa, arriving in the early afternoon. After lunch I set out to walk eastwards along the Cornice Road. It was a relief to my thoughts and feelings to be quite alone. The day was windy and sunless and rather cold, but the warm and audacious colouring of the Villas and the little fis.h.i.+ng villages seemed almost to draw suns.h.i.+ne out of the dull sky. I stopped at Sturla and drank two cups of coffee and ate some biscuits, and decided to walk on to Nervi. It was now near the hour of sunset and the sun, having kept invisible all day, half broke through the clouds, turning them first red and then golden. So the sky was when I came to Quarto dei Mille, with its monument looking out to sea, that historic place whence Garibaldi and the Thousand set sail for their great adventure, the liberation of Sicily and Naples, and the unification of Italy, with British wars.h.i.+ps following them, some say by chance, so that the enemies of Italy dared not interrupt their pa.s.sage.
Then said I to myself, standing all alone at Quarto, ”Italy will not be defeated, nor even mainly saved from defeat by foreign aid. The strongest and best of her children will pull her through, even though they be not all the nation. But the rest will do their share also, and will follow, when the bravest lead. How young, and how uncertain of herself as yet, is Italy! And yet, how lovable, how well worth serving!”
The Germans with their ”special gas” and with other factors in their favour, counted on breaking, not only the line of the Second Army, but the morale of the Italian people. For a moment they seemed to have succeeded. In the darkest days I talked with many whose stuffing seemed all gone. But then, with the promise of Allied help, with the sight of even a handful of new French and British uniforms, and under the spell of the oratory of their statesmen and their journalists, things began to change and Italian hearts grew brave again.
The Italians are a mercurial people. If they are more easily cast down by defeat than we British, they are more easily encouraged by even the distant prospect of victory, and they react to influences that would leave us unmoved. The coa.r.s.e insults of the enemy press were everywhere angrily quoted, and the national spirit rose to a red glow of pa.s.sion.
The Socialists Turati and Treves,--the latter the author of the famous phrase, ”nessuno in trincee quest' inverno,”[1]--who before Caporetto had criticised the war as aggressive, imperialist and unnecessary, said now that all Italians must unite and fight on to drive back the invader from Italian soil. And cool brains, such as Nitti and Einaudi, reinforced all this with logical demonstrations of the economic impossibility of a separate peace, with the enemy Powers strained to the utmost by the blockade and Italy dependent on the Allies for s.h.i.+pping, food and coal. The Germans would have done far more wisely, if, instead of attacking, they had aimed only at holding the Italian Army along its old line.
[Footnote 1: ”No one in the trenches this winter.”]
I walked on from Quarto to Nervi and, as it was getting dark, I decided to take a tram for the last few kilometres. But all the trams were standing still, the current having been switched off for several hours.
So I stood on the step of a tram and talked to the conductor about the war, and tried to cheer him up by telling him that the Germans were on their last legs, and were making their last great effort, and that the Allies had only to hold together a little longer, and throw sufficient force against the enemy here in Italy, in order to see a far bigger and more precipitate and disastrous retreat than Caporetto, and next time in the other direction. All this I not only said, but firmly believed (and it all came true within a year). At first he was very despondent, but he warmed up as I proceeded, and began to gesticulate again and regain animation and compliment me on my Italian. And then the current also was restored, and the tram moved on, and we came to Nervi, where I dined well and slept at the Albergo Cristoforo Colombo. I am not in general an admirer of palm trees, but they are sometimes impressive in the dusk, towering over one's head, as they do at Nervi, in the long mixed avenue of palms and orange trees which leads down to the station from the town.
Next morning I got up early and walked back towards Genoa along the Via Marina. The sun was s.h.i.+ning on the sea and the dark rocks, the stone pines and the great aloes and the brightly coloured villas. There was an exhilaration in the air and I was in the midst of beauty, and, for the first time for many days, I was for a little while really happy. Later on I took a tram back to Genoa, and walked up to the tall lighthouse on the further side of the town, and looked westward at the great curve of the sh.o.r.e, beyond the breakwater and the sands.
In some of the stations along the line were placards, ”Long live great old England,” ”Welcome to the valiant British Army,” ”Vive la France,”
”Vive la victorieuse Armee de Verdun.” The first of the Allied reinforcements were arriving.
At Arquata station I met an advance party of the Northumberland Fusiliers. They told me that they had been quite moved by their wonderful welcome on the way through Italy and by all the hospitality shown to their officers and men at the stations where they had stopped.
It gave me a queer thrill to see British Infantrymen again after many months, and this time on Italian soil.
After various orders and counter-orders I left Arquata for Ferrara on the 16th, with two truckloads of stores. But this was only a very small proportion of the minimum which we required.
CHAPTER XXVI
REFITTING AT FERRARA
I got back to Ferrara on the evening of November 17th, and shared a bedroom with Jeune, who had returned from leave in England, having missed all our most unpleasant experiences. Our brother officers of the Italian Field Artillery were very hospitable and courteous to us through those weeks of waiting. We could do nothing till the Ordnance sent us gun stores from Arquata, and these dribbled in very slowly, a few odds and ends at a time.
I often went out riding on the Piazza d'Arme and along the ramparts and in the country round Ferrara with Italian officers. Days were still very anxious, and the news from the Front not always good, and one rather avoided talking about the war. But one evening at dinner I succeeded in piercing the polite reserve of a little Captain who was sitting next to me. ”Italy should have made it a condition of her intervention,” he said, ”that the other Allies should have sent troops to the Italian Front. Also more guns and war material. Italy, at the beginning of her war, had many heroes but few guns. The other Allies, equally with Italy, are without statesmen. Your Lloyd George is energetic, but----! The British are not really at war with Austria. They have soft sentiments towards her and don't want her to lose too much. The Jugo-Slav propaganda was at its height, and was being encouraged in Paris and London, at the very moment when Italy was being pressed by the French and British to enter the war.
”We have made too many offensives on our own, unaided. Cadorna should have refused, but he went on and on. He sacrificed thousands of lives uselessly. He demanded too much of his troops. He did not understand them. This last disaster was caused by Croats and Bulgarians, who spoke Italian perfectly, having lived among us and taken degrees at our Universities, getting through our lines in the first confusion, dressed in Italian uniform, and sending false telephone messages and signals in our own cipher, ordering a general retreat.[1] It was men from ----,[2]
who first ran away at Rombon and Tolmino. It has been often proved in the history of our country that those men have no courage. Italians have too little unity.”
[Footnote 1: I heard this story many times and I believe this was one of the causes of the rapid increase of the first confusion. The Austrians had tried this trick without success against the Third Army on the Carso, as had the Germans against us in France. There must obviously be a certain amount of confusion already existing, if the trick is to have any chance of succeeding.]
[Footnote 2: A certain province in Italy, not his own.]
He went on to speak of economic difficulties. ”Italy is poor,” he said, ”and the Allies are rich. Yet coal costs four times as much in Italy as in France, and s.h.i.+pping is hardly to be had. Our Government has never driven hard enough bargains with the other Allies. After all, Italy came into the war as a volunteer, and not under the conscription of old treaties. But the Allies give her no credit for this. The French, since the war began, have recovered all their old 'blague.' They talk incessantly of what they have done, and despise everyone else. But look how unstable they are politically! They change their ministries, as often as some men change their mistresses. The Pope, too, is an enemy of Italy and a friend of Austria. He aims at the restoration of his temporal power. Many of the priests went about, both before and after Caporetto, trying to betray their country. Some told the soldiers that G.o.d had sent the disaster of Caporetto to show them the folly and the sinfulness of loving their corruptible country here below in poor earthly Italy, better than the incorruptible country of all good Catholics, G.o.d's eternal kingdom in the skies!”
He spoke bitterly, as was not unnatural.