by Davide Rossi and Lorenzo Salimbeni – 04/11/2020

Source: the Adige

On 4 November 1918, the armistice signed the previous day at Villa Giusti between Italy and Austria-Hungary came into force, completing "the work begun with such heroism by our fathers", as Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy had announced on 24 May 1915 upon entering what contemporaries called the Great War, but which for the Italians was the Fourth War of Independence.

It was a conflict that crowned the auspices of irredentism, a political and cultural movement born in 1877 among the people of Trieste, Istria and Trentino who had gathered in Naples for the funeral of Senator Paolo Emilio Imbriani, consecrated in 1882 with the hanging of the protomartyr Guglielmo Oberdan (born Wilhelm Oberdank but intimately Italian, thus differentiating Italian patriotism from the Teutonic one). Blut und Boden with racist overtones) and perfected in the death on the battlefield of the Dalmatian Francesco Rismondo, the Triestine Carlo Stuparich, the Polesano Giovanni Grion and many other young subjects of the unredeemed lands who fled to Italy at the outbreak of hostilities so as not to wear the Habsburg uniform, but rather to foment interventionism and then fight in the ranks of the Royal Army. And like them Nazario Sauro, Damiano Chiesa, Fabio Filzi and Cesare Battisti, who, however, were taken prisoner by the Austrians, recognized and condemned to death as deserters and traitors.

The "natural borders" delineated by the Alps and predicted by Dante Alighieri were ultimately reached, including not only Trentino to the north, but also the predominantly German-speaking Alto Adige, and trying to occupy as much land as possible on the eastern front before the armistice came into force. In this way, an attempt was made to limit the consolidation of power in the hands of the Slovenian and Croatian national councils that were emerging, hoping for the annexation of the mixed-language and multicultural regions of the former Austrian Littoral (Gorizia, Trieste and Istria) to the new State of the South Slavs, which would be formed around the old Kingdom of Serbia. Already during the conflict, the units of the Imperial-Royal Army made up of Slovenes and Croats were among the most tenacious defenders of the Isonzo line (and were therefore specifically deployed here) during the offensives that the Italian troops unleashed from June 1915 to the autumn of 1917. In the preceding decades, the authorities in Vienna had granted favours and recognition to the Slavic loyalists who lived in those same lands where Italian separatism was gaining more and more strength; the war would only have made it easier to take this strategy of the Divide and conquer.

The Navy, which had not been able to compete in the open sea with the Kriegsmarine in such a way as to redeem the defeat of Lissa in 1866, it had obtained prestigious successes thanks to the incursions of the MAS which had sunk the battleships Vienna e Santo Stefano, but wanted to bring its bases to the eastern Adriatic coast, with particular reference to Dalmatia, even though here the Italian community now represented the majority of the population only in Zadar, having been reduced to a minimum in the remaining coastal towns. An edict of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1866 had given the green light to the cancellation of the Italian language and culture in Dalmatia, which quickly became instead the hotbed of the most vigorous Italophobic Croatian nationalism.

On November 4, the commander of the Royal Navy fleet Paolo Thaon di Revel pretended not to have received the armistice instructions correctly and therefore had his marines occupy islands and stretches of the Dalmatian coast well beyond the time the armistice came into force, after having had two raiders sink the battleship Viribus Unitis, moored at the naval base of Pola, on the night of October 30, in order to ensure the conquest of the stronghold from the sea. On the eve of the conflict, the Austro-Hungarian flagship had transported the bodies of the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife, assassinated in Sarajevo, to Trieste; at the end of the war, the same vessel sank, paradoxically after having joined the fleet of a new State just a few hours earlier. In the disintegration of the Danubian monarchy, Emperor Charles I had, in fact, granted independence and donated his war fleet to the newly formed Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, which included the imperial provinces inhabited mainly by Slavs.

Unlike Czechoslovakia, which arose in similar circumstances, this state was not recognized by the Entente powers, since the Yugoslav nationalist diaspora had already reached an agreement in Corfu on 20 July 1917 with the Karađorđević dynasty in exile from Serbia occupied by the Austro-Hungarians and Bulgarians, that after the war the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes would arise. The latter also absorbed the Kingdom of Montenegro, even though it was an ally of the Entente (linked to Italy by the figure of Queen Elena) and a civil war had broken out between independentists and those in favour of annexation. Belgrade thus became an unexpected interlocutor in the definition of the new Italian eastern border, although between December 1915 and February 1916 the court, the government and the remains of the Serbian army had been brought to safety in Puglia by the Italian fleet, which had carried out a powerful amphibious operation, starting from the Albanian coast. It was an epic retreat that Gabriele d'Annunzio celebrated with theOde to the Serbian Nation. However, on 24 October 1918, in light of the subsequent Balkan events, the Poet published on Corriere della Sera la Sernaglia Prayer (a town in the Treviso area devastated by the fighting along the Piave) which ended by proclaiming “Our victory, you will not be mutilated”, with specific reference to the lands disputed between Rome and Belgrade.

What France, England and the now vanished Tsarist Russia had promised Italy on 26 April 1915 with the London Pact had in fact been called into question by the unexpected implosion of the Habsburg Empire, by the sympathies gathered by the nascent Kingdom of the Southern Slavs and by the principle of self-determination of peoples included among the 14 points in the name of which President Woodrow Wilson had brought the United States into the war. Also Fiume, a port in the Hungarian portion of the Habsburg Empire that Italy had not requested, appealed to self-determination to demonstrate its Italianness, first with its Deputy Andrea Ossoinack in the Parliament of Budapest, then with the proclamation drawn up on 30 October 1918 by the Italian National Council created to deal with the aspirations of annexation to the new Yugoslav state expressed by the Croatian minority of the city's population.

Despite these prospects that would have contributed to conditioning the Italian post-war period (d'Annunzio's expedition to Fiume, Italy's subordinate role in the balance of the Peace Conference, consequent discontent among veterans, government instability, foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento and revolutionary threats of the red two-year period), that 4th November the victory bulletin written by Armando Diaz sanctioned the end of over three years of human, material and economic sacrifices for the young Savoy State. The Neapolitan general had great merit in materially and morally reorganising the troops after the defeat of Caporetto and in grafting the Boys of '99 among the exhausted veterans of the 12 battles of the Isonzo, in which his predecessor Luigi Cadorna bled the Italian brigades dry in the assault on the Austrian trenches in the stony Karst. It is also necessary to underline that such tactics, which today seem crazy, were put into practice on all fronts by all the contenders, but on the other hand the Generalissimo Piedmontese had prepared the defensive fortifications on Monte Grappa and on the Piave, after the risk run in the spring of 1916 (strafexpedition or Battle of the Plateaus). Well aware of this situation, Vittorio Emanuele III at the Peschiera conference stood up to the allies of the Entente who intended to tie the sending of reinforcements to the Italian front after Caporetto to the achievement of a defensive line further back than that of the Piave. Thus that 4th November also sanctioned the victory of Sabre which, after having healed the colonial defeat of Adua suffered by his father Umberto I with the conquest of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, now sealed the efforts for the unification of Italy made by his grandfather Vittorio Emanuele II.

That day the Italians of the eastern Adriatic won, who, after having contributed with volunteers to all the wars of the Risorgimento, finally achieved annexation to Italy, despite the awareness that the port fortunes of Trieste and therefore of its hinterland were closely tied to the Central European hinterland, and not to the boot. November 4, 1918 was a victory for the revolutionary trade unionists, the republicans, the Garibaldians who went to fight as volunteers in France against the Germans as early as 1914, and the Mazzinians who, following the example of Garibaldi and Mazzini, had put aside their monarchical prejudices to join forces towards a shared objective, after having threatened during the Radiant Days of May “Either war or republic”. It was a total war that also involved women: the workers who took the place of men in factories and in transport, the Red Cross nurses and the Carnic porters, the mountain women who defied sniper fire to carry heavy panniers of food and ammunition on their shoulders to the Alpine troops on the front line also won.

On November 4, 1918, the whole of Italy won, which was finally united and which paradoxically today seems almost ashamed to celebrate this victory.