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1 The Italian Front on the Soča (Isonzo)
A British officers’ military tour in 1923
Michael Relph and Nicholas J. Saunders
A unique perspective on the Soča (Isonzo) Valley’s conflict landscape in the early post-First World War years is described and analysed here through the account of a battlefield tour undertaken by five British army officers in 1923. It offers a glimpse of a short-lived period during which refugees were returning to their shattered homes, when war memory was raw, and the landscape was being transformed by battlefield clearance, the construction of cemeteries and memorials (Košir, this volume), and the re-establishing of economic activity.1 The tour was also a journey through a new political landscape, as the valley was hitherto part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was now firmly in the grip of the Italian victors of the war. An integral part of this was that sites visited by the British tour were also destinations for Italian veterans who regarded their visits as commemorative pilgrimages which reinforced the post-war process of Italianisation.
Much has been written about Great War tourism and the pilgrimages to the Western Front, to war cemeteries and memorials built in the years following the Armistice of 1918 (e.g. Edwards 2004; Iles 2006; Lloyd 1998; Miles 2017). British battlefield tourists, some travelling in organised groups, others alone, came from a broad cross-section of society – the recently bereaved, former and serving soldiers, and the relatives and friends of those who had fought and died. Each hoped to ‘renew, recreate or capture something of the war and the experiences which defined it’ (Lloyd 1998: 1).
The landscapes they visited were often surreal, created by conflict, yet being reclaimed and transformed by peace, as local inhabitants came back to ancestral lands churned and poisoned by industrialised war, and full of bodies of the dead and still lethal high explosives (Saunders 2001, 2018). These were places caught betwixt and between, where war had ended but death was ever-present, a landscape which endured in memory, and which, in many areas, would become a curious mix of memorialising heritage and tourism (Košir et al. this volume; Koren 2015; Miles 2017).
Each former war zone had its own configuration of such locations, but few could match the combination of death, destruction, and dramatic geography of the Italian Front. These battlefields were the scene of carnage and destruction between 1915 and 1918, and included high-altitude fighting on the Dolomites and Julian Alps – sometimes within glaciers, and often at the environmental limit of human endurance (Balbi 2009; Nicolis 2017; Thompson 2008). In the eastern part of this conflict zone, the Soča (Isonzo) Front saw a series of 12 battles between the Italians and the Central Powers of Austro-Hungary and Germany, which produced more than 1,750,000 casualties2 (Schindler 2001: xii; and see, Fabi 2009; Macdonald and Cimprič 2011) (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The British presence was comparatively brief, and mainly occurred in late 1917 in the wake of the Austro-Hungarian and German rout of the Italians during the twelfth battle of the Soča (Isonzo), more commonly known as the Battle of Caporetto (now Kobarid) (Dalton 2012 [1919]; Thompson 2017; Wilks and Wilks 2013).
Figure 1.1 Second Battle of the Isonzo – 20th Cavalleggeri di Roma Cavalry Regiment position on the Carso (© Wikimedia Commons/Italian army photographers 1915–1918).
Figure 1.2 Ninth Battle of the Isonzo – Italian infantry in the open after leaving their trenches (© Wikimedia Commons/Italian army photographers 1915–1918).
The British military and battlefield tourism
Soldiers have always visited former battlefields. Shaped by the post-1815 Prussian experience, the British army had sought to utilise the battlefield tour as a means of delivering military training since the nineteenth century (Caddick-Adams 2005; Hall 2005; Melvin 2005). Known in its more advanced form as a Staff Ride (as most nineteenth-century events were conducted on horseback), such tours ranged from simple tourism to a systematic and methodical evaluation of a specific military campaign, designed to elicit maximum student involvement and engagement (Melvin 2005: 60). The battlefield tour aimed to increase its participants’ understanding of military history, was a focus for remembering military predecessors, and served as a vehicle for building relationships, team spirit, and unit identity (Haycock 2005: 7). The tours originated at the Army Staff College at Camberley in southern England, and groups of participants – collectively referred to as syndicates – captured their thoughts and experiences in a unique series of evocative Battlefield Tour Reports held today in the library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC), at Shrivenham.
Temporarily suspended during the First World War, the tours restarted in 1920, though no systematic approach to their organization is evident until the late 1920s. In these initial years, student officers were allowed to explore their own areas of interest, and were not necessarily focused on areas where the British army had been present or predominant. One consequence is that the earliest surviving reports, which date from 1923, encompass a broad range of tours to Verdun, Alsace-Lorraine and the High Vosges, East Prussia, Hungary, Romania, and northern Italy. As an insightful sign of the times, as well as of their practical non-military legacy, the early reports could include additional commentary on the administrative features of an expedition, and advice for those who might follow in a syndicate’s footsteps. These included details on travel, hotel and dining arrangements, financial considerations, tipping, dress and equipment, and even laundry. The Staff College historian at the time, General Sir Alfred Godwin-Austen, commented not a little mockingly on
Individual syndicates of four or five student officers typically went to the Continent under their own arrangements, normally without the supervision of their tutors. Hallmarked by rigorous pre-tour preparation and planning, and a professional 8,000-word (or more) post-visit report, the worth of the tours was judged by the Staff College to lie in their value as a vehicle for military officers’ personal and professional development.
The field element of the project typically includes a survey of the ground together with an analysis of the battles and engagements fought there. The better reports include photographic images, accurate hand-drawn illustrations and landscape panoramas, and marked-up maps, together with their instructors’ post-tour observations. Some reports include the student officers considered and frank thoughts on the countries and the peoples visited, their local hosts, and the likelihood of a resurgent Germany and further industrial-scale conflict in Europe. A few officers, walking the ground that they had only recently fought over, also made some surprising discoveries. Charles Carrington remembered
Carrington’s find is interesting in that it demonstrates the enduring relationship between human activity and the landscape, in this case with a prior war, but it could have easily been with a medieval or prehistoric site or object (Saunders 2007: 4–9).
These battlefield tour reports have been largely disregarded by military historians, dismissed for focusing on battlefield tactics, for lacking in rigour and depth, and for tending ‘to head to France and Belgium, then on to the fleshpots of Paris or Brussels’ (Caddick-Adams 2005: 22–23). As primary sources, they appear to have been totally ignored (or simply missed) by anthropologists and cultural historians. Here, I make an initial attempt to redress the balance by analysing one report concerning a 16-day tour to the Soča (Isonzo) Valley and Asiago undertaken by five British officers in January 1923. Our aim is to demonstrate the potential of a re-evaluation of these unpublished archive sources as objects of material culture worthy of investigation in their own right (Appadurai 2008; Buchli 2002), and by their capacity to reveal glimpses of the social and cultural worlds of their creators as well as of those with whom they came into contact (Saunders 2003: 4; Taylor 2008: 297–320).
The tourists and the tour
It is seldom that there is an opportunity to understand the human actors who come together to produce an artefact, or the social network within which they, as agents, operate (Gardner 2008). The report overcomes this on the first page, which gives the officers’ names, military decorations, and regiments, as well as acknowledging their lack of Italian expertise. This latter drawback was mainly overcome in terms of language,3 but it is unclear to what extent the syndicate was aware of the battlefield tour business in the area, which offered a variety of itineraries according to cost, and was supported by multilingual guidebooks (Kavrečič 2017: 151).4 Indeed, the promotion of visits to the area to ‘both local and international tourists’ aimed ‘to establish Italy as a modern tourist destination’ (ibid.). The syndicate’s acknowledged lack of regional and local knowledge was only partly offset by their making contact with the headquarters of the Italian 11th Division at Gorizia, with whom they had discussions concerning possible future hostilities between Italy and Jugoslavia,5 and from whom they appear to have borrowed maps (Grant-Suttie et al 1923: 51–2, 54, 78).
Figure 1.3 Major Grant-Suttie’s syndicate crossing the River Piave, 9 January 1923 (© author/JSCSC Library/MoD).
A black and white photograph, showing four of the five officers crossing the River Piave on 9 January 1923, complements the introductory paragraph to give the reader a clearer image of the authors’ appearance, their dress and behaviour, and the more practical aspects of the tour (Figure 1.3). At the outset, therefore, it is possible to make a personal connection with the individuals, the world they came from, and the one they visited. As Schofield (2009: 208) says, ‘text is created as a projection of people’s views about themselves, and their place in the world’.
Mid-way through their two-year course, at the point where student officers graduated to the College’s senior division and their education switched to learning about corps and army operations in the strategic deployment of military force, the syndicate of five officers led by Major H. F. Grant-Suttie DSO MC Royal Artillery, embarked for northern Italy. Despite their relative lack of exposure to the operational level of war, their report reveals an unprecedented collection of British military knowledge and expertise, informed by a wealth of front-line experience gained largely on the Western Front. Itself an artefact of conflict, the report reflects the syndicate’s attitudes, their first-hand life-and-death war experience and, to a lesser extent, their emotions and memories of war, which inescapably influenced their approach to the tour, as well as their observations of landscape and people.
The 1922–1923 Staff College intake was notable for the quality of the students, taken that year from the top sixth of their peer group (Godwin-Austen 1927: 227). The Army List for 1923 fleshes out the men’s backgrounds to give a greater sense of depth and intimacy. Ranging in age from 32 to 39, four of the five had seen considerable service on the Western Front, earning between them five Distinguished Service Orders (DSOs) and two Military Crosses (MCs). Major Robertson, the youngest, was the holder of the DSO and two bars. Major Currey was the only member of the group not to have served in France or Belgium, having been employed in Ireland, the War Office in London, and in India during the war.
Noting that ‘this was the first occasion on which such a tour had been carried out’, the syndicate decided to limit their itinerary to visiting as many of the battlefields of northern Italy as possible in the time available. Taking The Times History of the War and the Michelin Guide to the Italian Battlefields as their guides, the group l...
