Luigi Cadorna

I was born to the trade of arms; my father, Raffaele, took Rome in 1870. In 1914 I became Chief of the General Staff, charged with shaping a swiftly swollen conscript force for the mountain frontier. Our industry lagged; our borders were rock and river. I believed that only firm discipline and sustained pressure could carry Italy over the barrier into Trieste and beyond.

On the Isonzo I struck repeatedly—twelve times—because the enemy could be levered loose only by method. The Karst is bare limestone; water runs away; a trench is cut from stone. Shells and guns were never enough. Even so, in August 1916 we forced the line and took Gorizia. Elsewhere gains were counted in a farmhouse, a knoll, a few hundred meters of cliff.

I demanded obedience. I removed hesitant subordinates. I authorized exemplary shootings and, in rare cases, decimation. I held that improvisation wasted lives more surely than orders. Critics called this rigidity; I called it the price of holding together a fragile army on barren heights against a better-supplied foe.

Caporetto in October 1917 broke the Second Army under fog, gas, and new infiltration tactics. Formations dissolved; I ordered the retreat first to the Tagliamento, then the Piave. The government dismissed me. I served on the Allied Supreme War Council thereafter, and in 1924 I was named Marshal of Italy. I kept my papers and my view: the collapse had many fathers—supply, morale, politics, surprise—but not the absence of will.