One caveat: I'll deal with the Italian front only. While some considerations can probably be generalized, others will depend on the specific area, army traditions and regulations. Anyways my sources are limited to the Italian experience in World War One. Namely, A. Monticone's Plotone di esecuzione ; P. Melograni's Storia politica della Grande Guerra ; G. Rochat's L'Italia nella Prima Guerra Mondiale

 

And about those sources... of course, to answer your question in an absolute manner, one needs to find a way not only to establish what the soldiers did but also their intentions and state of mind. Which are quite difficult tasks.

Our first and probably more reliable sources (due to their necessary explanatory nature and supposed thoroughness) on the soldier's behavior during the War are military police reports and especially military court sentences (and transcriptions where available). There are a lot of them – so that even the works the I am aware dealing with the subject in detail have only covered a fraction of the available material – and there is obviously no way to know beforehand what lies withing the folders. But the main problem here is that they are very “partial” sources: they look for violations, crimes, suspicious behaviors of suspect characters. We have no soldiers on trial for “average to good behavior”. On the other hand we have decorations – even more problematic due to some periodic bias of the High Command – but again they say very little of the average man. What did the army know? What did it ignore? To what extend do those proceedings represent accurately the state of the Army?

It is not possible to provide a certain answer; but we must accept that the Army had at least some understanding of its own disciplinary status.

The second source of information is the physio-psychological office of the Army – at the time under direction of Father Agostino Gemelli. It worked under supervision of the High Command and with the clear purpose of keeping the soldiers able to service. Its reports therefore aimed at establishing the condition of the men and the ways to improve their morale, discipline and effectiveness. While it provides us with a few interesting general information, its ability to penetrate the soldier's inner world is questionable and the office itself seems at times to give up and content itself with generality.

Third source – and the most obvious one – are letters from the soldiers themselves. Letters though, were censored. And soldiers would have been aware of this: writing home of committed violations would have been reason enough for going under trial or for other disciplinary matters. This is not to say that men did not write things that they shouldn't have – thus going into trouble – but they did so most of the time for things they didn't understand were violations, or thought they could get away with. Major violations were not subject of correspondence.

And even ignoring all that, there is the major problem that fully literate soldiers were a minority in the Italian Army. And taking them as an accurate sample would be quite unjustified.

 

That said, desertion was by far the most common violation committed by the Italian men during the War, with 189,425 proceedings opened and 101,665 found guilty. What you are thinking though, would not be considered desertion. It would be much worse – effectively the worst possible violation under military legislation.

Desertion was, in short, not showing up. A guy had been sent home for his license and he had thought better to hide with uncle Vito or cousin Michele in some dilapidated cabin on the hills. Weather the storm and prey for a general amnesty after the war. Often, after a few days he changed his mind and went back – he was sentenced and put back to service – the whole process obviously very quick. The large number of not guilty was due to the fact that desertion moved to the court after 48 hours of delay – which, given the state of Italian transportation, could happen without any fault.

What you are thinking about falls under a different type of crime.

Italian military law had two extraordinary species of crimes: those most severe, committed “in presence of the enemy” and those even more severe, committed “in the face of the enemy”. Such violations were de facto equivalent to treason and the usual penalty was death; for a military court, your hints at organizing and planning such behavior would constitute an aggravating circumstance. But, in fact, if such a thing had happened – and, to the extent you describe, if it happened, the Italian Army had no notion of that – the men would have been executed on the spot; no court required and court proceedings would have been involved only in case a posthumous stripping of ranks or proclamation of dishonorable conduct was deemed necessary, in addition to the execution.

What I am hinting to, is the fact that what you are describing was a major, major violation of war legislation. Even discussing it would have been enough to warrant a life sentence. Is it to say that man didn't talk about it? No. Men did talk, when hungry, or pissed, or tired or sick. Consider the case of one M.E. - a soldier in the 1^st Artillery – who argued back at his Lieutenant that “the war was the ruination of Italy and of all the man fighting it, because those who spoke [well of the war] did not know what it was” and later added that “those in Caporetto had done well, because they were tired of the war”. The fact that he had written on a booklet words “hateful towards the Monarchy and exalting of anarchism” and that he had sold a pair of shoes and knickers weighted also against him, so that he was sentenced to twenty years in jail.

Or that of one D.C.G – soldier in the 4^th Infantry – who had repeatedly expressed his anti-patriotic sentiments to his comrades, once even praising an officer who had been caught prisoner and expressing his thought that the Austrians were “his brothers” and that, if he had been able to go back to his home, he would have written on the walls “Long live Austria!” and “Down with Italy!”.

Besides these episodes his actual good state of service prompted the court to grant him generic extenuating circumstances, resulting in life imprisonment instead of death.

Hunger, pain, sorrow, fear make men do stupid things; and even military courts understood that: under distress men could commit violations, in good faith, that was an extenuating circumstance. But, as said, organizing that in cool mind... that's another matter: I must say, even by pure statistics, if you believed to have a higher than 10% chance of one of the other men reporting you, than you had better luck keeping your head down and serving your term in the Army (no matter the fact that Italian soldiers did not have data on the actual casualty rate).

And who is to say that men would have agreed on that? No men was more hated among the others than the shirker – men had a saying, that “War was war and them who didn't run went under.” - yes, in the face of death men accepted fear. Your officer may punish you, but small acts of cowardice, losing control, failing to perform, they happened; as long as the soldier regained hold of himself soon enough, it wasn't a matter of deliberate sabotage [as Italian Marshal E. Caviglia put, “once the men break it's pointless to try to force them; you need to let them run until tired, like beasts, and then restrain them”] and no one was going to make you a coward for that. In cool mind though, men hated those who left them hanging out. To know that the man right besides you is tricking the system to stay out of trouble when you, your brother, your son, even your family at home are dying; that's not an endearing thought. And such a view point seemed to have been the majority among the troops.

Make no mistake, men who avoided military service or found themselves a safe location – maybe thanks to a conveniently placed relative – were a reality. But even there the suspicions and the stigma appears to have been more prominent than the actual phenomenon. Of course, once the war was over, the shame would wash away. But that required staying away from the front entirely – finding a place in an office. Being useful doing something that wasn't dangerous. And as those often were jobs for learned men (or at least skilled laborers), the result was a tendency of the large agrarian unqualified masses to point out the factory workers and the few exempt agrarian workers as, point in case, shirkers.