THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE 1914 - 2014
THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE 1914 - 2014
Today, Sunday 2nd March 2014, there was a table tennis tournament in Meolo, a town half-way between here and Venice, so I set out on the bike about 1.30 but didn't arrive until just before 3pm even though Meolo is only about 15km from here. The tournament was already finished, in fact my club, San Dona, had already gone but it wasn't a problem because I had enjoyed the bike ride. I cycled on the road past Musile di Piave and then turned left towards the mountains which were visible even though it was a dull, overcast yet dry day. Yesterday had been incredibly wet, torrential downpours and I had to endure a good soaking on the way back from college. I turned left and cycled inland to Fossalta di Piave. At last I had found the town where Ernest Hemingway sustained his wounds. There wasn't much in Fossalta, just some houses, some basic services and a small railway station. The countryside around Fossalta was all churned up mud and deep puddles so it was a landscape recognisable as a Great War site but there were no war graves and no war memorials although I did find one just outside Meolo which is where I headed to next.
I passed a contemporary piece of artillery at Meolo which had been left there in 1988 as a war memorial to three divisions of combined arms that had fought at this site in 1918. Most of the men had been Sardinians as a plaque with hundreds of names of the dead revealed. There had been a major engagement outside Meolo. The town itself was unremarkable, rather ugly, with squat concrete buildings poured into moulds and multiplied throughout the town. I made my way to the sports hall then drank some water and left the town just as some local people poured out of a mini-van and started an impromptu disco in the town centre, such is Italy.
My first practical contact with the Great War, as it came to be known, was working for the Somme Association in Belfast some years after my graduation. The Somme Association is dedicated to historical research on the First World War, finding war graves and even the identities of war dead. There is still a great deal of information about the war which has been unexamined, uncollected and even ignored. My designation was researching the encounter at Mametz Wood, a segment of the Battle of the Somme, fought at the eponymous river on the 7th of July 1916 between British and German forces. One of the British soldiers at Mametz Wood was Robert Graves, a Welsh fusilier, who said that not one branch of the trees in the wood was left unbroken. The assault was expected to last a few hours but in the event it went on for five days. Ulstermen were also at the battle, in fact the 36th (Ulster) Division, came out of the encounter with some credibility since it managed to secure most of its objectives on the first day but with the loss of 5,500 officers and men. In total 60,000 British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the infamous black day of the British army and the greatest loss of life in its entire history. A further two divisions of troops were raised in Ireland, the 10th Division (which saw action at Gallipoli and the middle east) and the 16th Division composed of volunteers from the south and from Ulster. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland, although there was an abortive attempt to do so in 1918, for it was considered too controversial at a time when political divisions in Ireland were widening. Before the war Lord Edward Carson, who in another guise had been prosecution lawyer at the trial of Oscar Wilde, had raised a private army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to defend Ulster against perceived rebels and republicans. Cynical commentators saw the war as a pretext to stall or crush nationalists representing minorities within the borders of greater empires in western, central and eastern Europe. All the great empires had their difficulties in fact the war was sparked by the assassination of the heir presumptive to the Hapsburg Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on the 28th of June, 1914, when the Archduke and his wife were both killed by Serbian nationalists. Later the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin gave Carson and others the excuse they needed to urge bloodletting and sacrifice in the name of the British Empire which, if anything, had proved its ethical superiority to the Germans.
Today I am at another famous Great War river, the Piave in Veneto, north-east Italy. There are few signs of the battle fought here in 1917. The town, San Dona di Piave, was totally destroyed during the fighting yet it rose again like a phoenix from the ashes. There’s a blue steel bridge across the river to a suburb, Musile di Piave. Across the bridge there’s a statue of an Italian Bersaglieri (a kind of elite infantryman who wore a black feather spray in his hat. The Bersaglieri were first formed in Piedmont, elite light infantry armed with rifles since the Piedmont army lacked decent cavalry.) Beside the statue there’s an inscription fiume sacra alle patria (this river is sacred to the fatherland). Opposing trenches formed up on either side of the river and stretched for miles. Austro-Hungarian forces had overwhelmed the Veneto after Italian defeats at the river Isonzo, where no less than eleven grueling battles were fought. At the famous battle of Caporetto, 1917, the Italian army was all but destroyed. In total 500,000 Italian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Today both Caporetto and the Isonzo are in Slovenia, a consequence of further re-drawing of boundaries after 1945. In fact Italy had only entered the war in 1915, its delay a consequence of previous territorial disputes with its allies, the Central Powers. Eventually the Italians changed sides and joined the Entente Cordial which consisted of Britain, France and Russia. The encirclement of Germany and its ally the Hapsburg Empire was complete. In Italy the government including former leader Giovanni Giolitti opposed intervention but many intellectuals including many Socialists such as Benito Mussolini, Leonida Bissolati and Ivonoe Bonomi supported the idea of intervention and eventually Nationalists and Socialists were won over by the idea. The Italian government then began to probe who might offer the Italians the best deal for intervention. Nationalists proposed war as a solution to Italy’s internal quandaries for its standard of living lagged behind other parts of Europe and there was also the incessant problem of the south which constantly required outside intervention. Were there not, in fact, two Italys rather than one?
Ultimately the Italians intervened in the war which did not go exactly as they had planned. The army largely consisted of peasant conscripts from the south who lacked the formal education required to understand the causes of the war or the war aims of Italy’s Cabinet (which hoped to gain some provinces in the north east close to the border with the Hapsburg Empire far from the tropical heat of Amalfi, Napoli or Sicilia.) Italy’s Socialists were split between those who opposed the war and members of the party like Benito Mussolini who supported intervention. This minority was to be crucial and was the kernel of the future fascist party which came to power after Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922. When the Italians finally declared war on the central powers the front line was largely confined to Italy's northern border with the Hapsburg Empire. Thus began the war the Germans call the Gebirgskrieg and in English 'the Winter War'. Some of the highest battles in history were fought on the front line, sometimes above 12,000 feet, between Italian mountain soldiers or Alpini and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts replete with artillery lifted and dragged up the mountains.
Presently the advance of global warming means that the ice in the highest regions is melting and exposing material and the bodies of soldiers which must be quite shocking to tourists or skiiers enjoying an apre piste in the highlands. Aside from the Great War the most important local issue was the bonificamente which means land reclamation in Italian. The Museo Bonifici in San Dona di Piave testifies to this reclamation, an initiative first promoted by Mussolini in the 1930s. Land between San Dona di Piave and Jessolo on the coast was reclaimed from the Adriatic which also helped to make the region more sanitary since it had been traditionally plagued by malarial conditions in the coastal swamps.
For many Italians Mussolini is still an ambivalent figure not simply a politician who kept the trains on time or dealt with the mafia, in fact Mussolini ceased intervening in Sicilian affairs after some initial efforts. He also dragged Italy into the conflict that became WW2. The museum has a Great War room mostly consisting of rusted bayonets, swords, rifling lacking its wooden stock, antique machine guns, bombs looking like cartoon bombs surreally plump and with rigid, angular metal tails and old helmets washed down from the foothills of the Alps where most of the fighting took place. There’s also a panorama, a triptych portraying the destruction of the town. There’s a second, much smaller room dedicated to WW2 which resembles the Great War room except the weapons have evolved. No great battles occurred here as in the Great War, the major events were political. For instance, the execution in the main square of eleven martyrs who opposed local fascists.
I found further evidence of the Great War one day when I cycled to Noventa di Piave, for I had been told that there was a famous mall there filled with designer clothes outlets. In fact it is one of the biggest such outlets in Italy. I also found a little exhibition dedicated to Ernest Hemingway who arrived in the area in 1917 from America in order to serve as a medical orderly. One evening Hemingway was apparantly searching for wounded soldiers at Fossalta di Piave when he was hit by shrapnel from a trench mortar. Lifting a comrade onto his back, he staggered fifty metres and was then hit by machine gun fire. He fell into a dug out but was later rescued and transferred to Milan for convalescence. Out of his experiences at the Battle of the Piave Hemingway crafted his anti-war testament A Farewell to Arms and stories like In Another Country. The exhibition contained some useful facts, some items formerly owned by the Hemingways and some original film, photographic and audio material but lacked the punch that made Hemingway's own writing so memorable.
The Great War is memorialised in the Veneto but its consequences are not so easy to summarise. The old order of 1914 was certainly shattered forever but the experiment initiated by the Bolsheviks in Russia was a monument to futility like the war itself. Reactionaries everywhere detested the advent of the war and still do for the greater policy sustained after 1815 of the countries of the ancien regime was avoidance of general conflict. This could only lead to disaster since all the leaders of those countries were members of an extended family bound together by an alliance resisting political and social transformation. Greater entities were broken down into national units and Europe became a patchwork quilt of nation states after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Visionaries like John Maynard Keynes advised their countries against a vindictive peace settlement but Keynes was ignored and the Treaty guaranteed that there would eventually be further violence. Society had had to come to terms with the further mechanisation of warfare and entered the era of the tank, aircraft, aerial bombardment and chemical warfare. Social stagnation evaporated and revolutionary legislation like universal suffrage became common everywhere in the developed world. The war galvanised the European cultural avante garde, banishing the realist art movements that had proliferated in the nineteenth-century, it even made poetry popular and relevant again. Most of all the Emperors had fallen and their Empires had been trampled down. It was now the turn of fascism to be the new face of reaction in Europe.
Paul Murphy, San Dona di Piave, 2014
Today, Sunday 2nd March 2014, there was a table tennis tournament in Meolo, a town half-way between here and Venice, so I set out on the bike about 1.30 but didn't arrive until just before 3pm even though Meolo is only about 15km from here. The tournament was already finished, in fact my club, San Dona, had already gone but it wasn't a problem because I had enjoyed the bike ride. I cycled on the road past Musile di Piave and then turned left towards the mountains which were visible even though it was a dull, overcast yet dry day. Yesterday had been incredibly wet, torrential downpours and I had to endure a good soaking on the way back from college. I turned left and cycled inland to Fossalta di Piave. At last I had found the town where Ernest Hemingway sustained his wounds. There wasn't much in Fossalta, just some houses, some basic services and a small railway station. The countryside around Fossalta was all churned up mud and deep puddles so it was a landscape recognisable as a Great War site but there were no war graves and no war memorials although I did find one just outside Meolo which is where I headed to next.
I passed a contemporary piece of artillery at Meolo which had been left there in 1988 as a war memorial to three divisions of combined arms that had fought at this site in 1918. Most of the men had been Sardinians as a plaque with hundreds of names of the dead revealed. There had been a major engagement outside Meolo. The town itself was unremarkable, rather ugly, with squat concrete buildings poured into moulds and multiplied throughout the town. I made my way to the sports hall then drank some water and left the town just as some local people poured out of a mini-van and started an impromptu disco in the town centre, such is Italy.
My first practical contact with the Great War, as it came to be known, was working for the Somme Association in Belfast some years after my graduation. The Somme Association is dedicated to historical research on the First World War, finding war graves and even the identities of war dead. There is still a great deal of information about the war which has been unexamined, uncollected and even ignored. My designation was researching the encounter at Mametz Wood, a segment of the Battle of the Somme, fought at the eponymous river on the 7th of July 1916 between British and German forces. One of the British soldiers at Mametz Wood was Robert Graves, a Welsh fusilier, who said that not one branch of the trees in the wood was left unbroken. The assault was expected to last a few hours but in the event it went on for five days. Ulstermen were also at the battle, in fact the 36th (Ulster) Division, came out of the encounter with some credibility since it managed to secure most of its objectives on the first day but with the loss of 5,500 officers and men. In total 60,000 British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the infamous black day of the British army and the greatest loss of life in its entire history. A further two divisions of troops were raised in Ireland, the 10th Division (which saw action at Gallipoli and the middle east) and the 16th Division composed of volunteers from the south and from Ulster. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland, although there was an abortive attempt to do so in 1918, for it was considered too controversial at a time when political divisions in Ireland were widening. Before the war Lord Edward Carson, who in another guise had been prosecution lawyer at the trial of Oscar Wilde, had raised a private army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to defend Ulster against perceived rebels and republicans. Cynical commentators saw the war as a pretext to stall or crush nationalists representing minorities within the borders of greater empires in western, central and eastern Europe. All the great empires had their difficulties in fact the war was sparked by the assassination of the heir presumptive to the Hapsburg Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on the 28th of June, 1914, when the Archduke and his wife were both killed by Serbian nationalists. Later the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin gave Carson and others the excuse they needed to urge bloodletting and sacrifice in the name of the British Empire which, if anything, had proved its ethical superiority to the Germans.
Today I am at another famous Great War river, the Piave in Veneto, north-east Italy. There are few signs of the battle fought here in 1917. The town, San Dona di Piave, was totally destroyed during the fighting yet it rose again like a phoenix from the ashes. There’s a blue steel bridge across the river to a suburb, Musile di Piave. Across the bridge there’s a statue of an Italian Bersaglieri (a kind of elite infantryman who wore a black feather spray in his hat. The Bersaglieri were first formed in Piedmont, elite light infantry armed with rifles since the Piedmont army lacked decent cavalry.) Beside the statue there’s an inscription fiume sacra alle patria (this river is sacred to the fatherland). Opposing trenches formed up on either side of the river and stretched for miles. Austro-Hungarian forces had overwhelmed the Veneto after Italian defeats at the river Isonzo, where no less than eleven grueling battles were fought. At the famous battle of Caporetto, 1917, the Italian army was all but destroyed. In total 500,000 Italian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Today both Caporetto and the Isonzo are in Slovenia, a consequence of further re-drawing of boundaries after 1945. In fact Italy had only entered the war in 1915, its delay a consequence of previous territorial disputes with its allies, the Central Powers. Eventually the Italians changed sides and joined the Entente Cordial which consisted of Britain, France and Russia. The encirclement of Germany and its ally the Hapsburg Empire was complete. In Italy the government including former leader Giovanni Giolitti opposed intervention but many intellectuals including many Socialists such as Benito Mussolini, Leonida Bissolati and Ivonoe Bonomi supported the idea of intervention and eventually Nationalists and Socialists were won over by the idea. The Italian government then began to probe who might offer the Italians the best deal for intervention. Nationalists proposed war as a solution to Italy’s internal quandaries for its standard of living lagged behind other parts of Europe and there was also the incessant problem of the south which constantly required outside intervention. Were there not, in fact, two Italys rather than one?
Ultimately the Italians intervened in the war which did not go exactly as they had planned. The army largely consisted of peasant conscripts from the south who lacked the formal education required to understand the causes of the war or the war aims of Italy’s Cabinet (which hoped to gain some provinces in the north east close to the border with the Hapsburg Empire far from the tropical heat of Amalfi, Napoli or Sicilia.) Italy’s Socialists were split between those who opposed the war and members of the party like Benito Mussolini who supported intervention. This minority was to be crucial and was the kernel of the future fascist party which came to power after Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922. When the Italians finally declared war on the central powers the front line was largely confined to Italy's northern border with the Hapsburg Empire. Thus began the war the Germans call the Gebirgskrieg and in English 'the Winter War'. Some of the highest battles in history were fought on the front line, sometimes above 12,000 feet, between Italian mountain soldiers or Alpini and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts replete with artillery lifted and dragged up the mountains.
Presently the advance of global warming means that the ice in the highest regions is melting and exposing material and the bodies of soldiers which must be quite shocking to tourists or skiiers enjoying an apre piste in the highlands. Aside from the Great War the most important local issue was the bonificamente which means land reclamation in Italian. The Museo Bonifici in San Dona di Piave testifies to this reclamation, an initiative first promoted by Mussolini in the 1930s. Land between San Dona di Piave and Jessolo on the coast was reclaimed from the Adriatic which also helped to make the region more sanitary since it had been traditionally plagued by malarial conditions in the coastal swamps.
For many Italians Mussolini is still an ambivalent figure not simply a politician who kept the trains on time or dealt with the mafia, in fact Mussolini ceased intervening in Sicilian affairs after some initial efforts. He also dragged Italy into the conflict that became WW2. The museum has a Great War room mostly consisting of rusted bayonets, swords, rifling lacking its wooden stock, antique machine guns, bombs looking like cartoon bombs surreally plump and with rigid, angular metal tails and old helmets washed down from the foothills of the Alps where most of the fighting took place. There’s also a panorama, a triptych portraying the destruction of the town. There’s a second, much smaller room dedicated to WW2 which resembles the Great War room except the weapons have evolved. No great battles occurred here as in the Great War, the major events were political. For instance, the execution in the main square of eleven martyrs who opposed local fascists.
I found further evidence of the Great War one day when I cycled to Noventa di Piave, for I had been told that there was a famous mall there filled with designer clothes outlets. In fact it is one of the biggest such outlets in Italy. I also found a little exhibition dedicated to Ernest Hemingway who arrived in the area in 1917 from America in order to serve as a medical orderly. One evening Hemingway was apparantly searching for wounded soldiers at Fossalta di Piave when he was hit by shrapnel from a trench mortar. Lifting a comrade onto his back, he staggered fifty metres and was then hit by machine gun fire. He fell into a dug out but was later rescued and transferred to Milan for convalescence. Out of his experiences at the Battle of the Piave Hemingway crafted his anti-war testament A Farewell to Arms and stories like In Another Country. The exhibition contained some useful facts, some items formerly owned by the Hemingways and some original film, photographic and audio material but lacked the punch that made Hemingway's own writing so memorable.
The Great War is memorialised in the Veneto but its consequences are not so easy to summarise. The old order of 1914 was certainly shattered forever but the experiment initiated by the Bolsheviks in Russia was a monument to futility like the war itself. Reactionaries everywhere detested the advent of the war and still do for the greater policy sustained after 1815 of the countries of the ancien regime was avoidance of general conflict. This could only lead to disaster since all the leaders of those countries were members of an extended family bound together by an alliance resisting political and social transformation. Greater entities were broken down into national units and Europe became a patchwork quilt of nation states after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Visionaries like John Maynard Keynes advised their countries against a vindictive peace settlement but Keynes was ignored and the Treaty guaranteed that there would eventually be further violence. Society had had to come to terms with the further mechanisation of warfare and entered the era of the tank, aircraft, aerial bombardment and chemical warfare. Social stagnation evaporated and revolutionary legislation like universal suffrage became common everywhere in the developed world. The war galvanised the European cultural avante garde, banishing the realist art movements that had proliferated in the nineteenth-century, it even made poetry popular and relevant again. Most of all the Emperors had fallen and their Empires had been trampled down. It was now the turn of fascism to be the new face of reaction in Europe.
Paul Murphy, San Dona di Piave, 2014
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