Week 32

 

We have touched before on the idea of treating various aspects of the War through the lenses of epidemiology. The Italian High Command seemed to share this point of view; for Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna the main vehicle of contagion were the relations between the front troops at war and the civilian world back home. Those relations – that could not unfortunately be entirely forbidden – had to be limited as much as possible. Cadorna had been educated as a professional soldier in a professional army (professional was the administrative structure and the commands; not the moderately sized standing Italian Army) under a strict distinction between military world and civilian world, to conceive military education as a life commitment entirely alternative^1 to that of ordinary existence. Now in charge of millions of men that were far from his ideal of soldier, men that lacked not only military formation (the Italian Army was for the largest part made of conscripts who had had at times less than four weeks of training) but any form of military habits and ethos as he conceived them; he felt necessary to provide the men with the equivalent of a crash course on the field. Discipline was the main ingredient to replace a civilian state of mind with the mindset of a soldier (the idea of a soldier as one men with two minds that managed to function independently from each other according to the varying external stimuli was promoted by the Head of the Physio-Psychological Office of the High Command, Father Agostino Gemelli) and punishment the way to ensure discipline and regulation. Contacts between the soldier at the front and the world back home compromised this process, causing confusion and distress in the men (the idea of being stuck in the middle of “two lives” appears frequently as a way of defining their situation in the letters and memorials of the more literate soldiers) and ultimately making them unable to serve to the fullest of their capabilities. This was true of any form of contact, even those than involved no unpatriotic sentiment – and Cadorna was in fact always wary of excessive liberality with licenses (the Italian soldier had right to 15 days once a year; a measure that, already rather short, was frequently subject to delays) and essentially accepted them as a necessary evil. And by all means the men (understandably) displayed the worst behavior and lowest morale in the periods immediately before and after a license.

If we add to this that, in the mind of the High Command, the country was not a “safe” environment for the soldier, that could there enter contact with any form of defeatist ideas or talk politics, especially the socialist one, and then bring back such contagion to be spread into the trenches. Even careless remarks could damage the soldier's morale (a true fact to be fair) with people back home, especially during the first over-enthusiastic weeks, asking “naive” questions about the quality of the food, the housing, or when were they going to take Trieste... Questions anyways, that the soldier would not have been allowed to answer.

The general prophylactic action of the High Command was therefore: to limit to a minimum the direct and indirect contact among soldiers and the country on one hand; to extend the Army's control over the country fighting the most dangerous ideological pathogens in order to establish the safest possible environment for the soldier's military mind. Among the vectors of contagion that required the action of control of the High Command there was the postal service.

Most works discussing correspondence during the Great War have the habit of prefacing their findings with an observation that only a small fraction of the total correspondence has actually been examined; that plenty still lies around in folders and archives, that most has been lost. That's in fact true. And could not be otherwise, since the number of letters exchanged between the front and the “country” is a rather staggering amount – especially for a nation, like Italy was, that does not feature the highest literacy rate. From May 24^th 1915 to December 31^st 1918 1,536 million letters were sent to the front and 2,213 million letters were sent back from the front; roughly 3 million letters sent every day (to these we should add 245 million letters exchanged within the front during the entire conflict, to get to a number close to two letters per day per each active soldier) growing from the 1,600,000 of the early months of the 1915 Summer to a peak value of 4,280,000 letters per day in June 1917. Of course, we are going to limit our analysis to a few examples.

The whole amount of letters to the front had to go through the concentration office of Bologna; for the first two weeks of war even those from the front were collected there but it was immediately apparent that the office could not handle both flow directions. Soon a second office was established closer to the front, in Treviso under control of the Information Service of the High Command, to oversee the flux of letters and postcards towards the nation (for certain periods of time the Post and Telegraph Ministry had provided special franchise postcards and envelopes for standard correspondence with the front).

The immediate intent of the Army authorities was to be able to establish a maximum of control over correspondence. And in principle almost all forms of communication were subject to censorship (the “special powers” decree passed on May 23^rd 1915 had removed postal secrecy among others); even if the actual amount of examined letters may have been much lower than the total for obvious reasons [see in regard A. Monticone's Plotone di esecuzione discussing the correspondence of military men subject to court martial – also consider the military instructions (Apr. 1918) recommending for the amount of correspondence controlled to be brought up at least to 50%]. We know for instance that in a few circumstances the Information Service – overburdened with excessive amounts of untreated letters – took the extreme measure of destroying them.

Nonetheless the original aspirations of the High Command had been even more ambitious: to pass under censorship all the letters exchanged within the country, including those among civilians (as it would be allowed by the nationwide validity of the special decrees – possibly under civilian censorship though). It was soon realized that such a measure was impossible. Already in July 1915 the controls were limited to correspondence with the front and that with foreign countries; but for those the margin of intervention was extended considerably. If in the beginning only information concerning military matters (troops movements, etc.) would be considered a violation; soon any statement “susceptible of perturbing public tranquility or otherwise compromise public interest” as well as being negative towards the Army authorities came to be included in those to be censored (generic complaints or requests to the families for foodstuff or clothing could be enough to warrant the authorities' intervention). The censor would then note down the statements, erase a few lines or stop the letter altogether; then inform either the local Commands for minor punitive measures or just as “need to know” or directly the Information Service of the High Command, which in turn could defer the correspondence to the Justice Department, that would determine whether the responsible was to be subject to punishment – or in case of civilians, civilian authorities being informed (in the case of civilians in war zones, the initiative would originate with military authorities, that had sort of wrestled control over the prefects from the Ministry of Interior).

In addition to this the High Command suggested that the police authorities at least subjected to censorship civilian correspondence among “suspect” individuals as well as coming from areas notoriously “subversive” - in doing so, they remarked the importance of not disclosing the censorship (censored correspondence was usually delivered if deemed acceptable with a “censorship stamp”) action in order not to rise alarm within the nation. If you ever tried this, envelopes are sort of designed to make tampering apparent, so that was done – if at all – only in very special surveillance cases. Otherwise the regular censorship proceedings were applied.