The presentation of the Commission on Caporetto final report to Parliament, in 1919, marked the end of Cadorna’s career and public life. But not the end of a new battle for his reputation. His monumental account of his own performance as commander, published in 1921 (War on the Italian Front), was a first rejoinder to what he saw as a campaign of vituperation with the blessing and backing of governments in Rome. This quarrelsome, bitter struggle was ended by Fascism. The regime was eager to patch up the old rifts of civil war (meaning 1914, but also 1919–1922); above all, it sought to gather as much consensus as it could. The time had come, it decided, to quell all controversy surrounding the ‘Cadorna affair’. On 4th November 1924 the former Chief was raised to the new top rank in the army. It must be said that the aged general keenly appreciated the honours bestowed on him by the new war-mongering fascist Italy. But the long civil war, setting in on the heels of world conflict, triggered a process of hypostatization, turning him into an icon, a paladin, or an insensitive, blood-thirsty criminal.

In early summer 1914 many thought the Italian army grossly unsuited to modern warfare. Cadorna himself complained that it was on the brink of collapse. The barracks were nearly deserted, the store-rooms empty, the regiments so understaffed they could not even put on basic training, while for want of officers whole companies were being placed under newly promoted sergeants. But there was another problem: the commander-in-chief’s utter distrust of his own men, and all his fellow countrymen, come to that. It was a deep-seated conviction. Italy was too liberal and permissive, lacked ‘social discipline’ (as he called a people’s propensity for strict respect of the law, social hierarchies and institutions), and this caused an unhealthy situation which inevitably corrupted the national servicemen. Unsurprisingly, his first act as head of the army in wartime was to announce implacable iron disciplinary measures to be applied with brutal severity so as to bring the unwarlike rebellious Italian people to heel.

Blame for the pointless attacks and scorn for men’s lives that the Italian commanders were so often prone to is usually set down to the evil doctrines of Luigi Cadorna’s notorious libretto rosso, probably the war’s most execrated book of regulations. Yet the red booklet was no eccentric anomaly in the prevailing military climate of Europe. Cadorna’s recommendations were consistent with the cult of the offensive, faith in the bayonet charge, and harping on moral principles as the key to victory that could be found in all international military teaching in summer 1914. The real problem was that the commander of the Italian army then proved unable to adapt to the disquieting novelties of a war based on materials and trench combat. More and more problematically, Italy’s Supreme Command went on issuing orders designed for a quite different war than was actually being experienced by the frontline troops.

Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

The inglorious twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (autumn 1917), came to be an icon of catastrophe in the national awareness. It has remained one of the most persistent memory sites in Italian culture. However, many of the revolutionary myths proved in time to be little more than legend or false reports of war. There was no betrayal, no organized subversive plot, no attempt to ‘do a Russia’, yet Caporetto still has evocative power over the collective memory, outweighing the ‘splendid recovery’ on the Piave. Not only is it the most written about (and debated) battle in the history of unified Italy, it is also the only one whose name has entered common parlance to conjure up moral and material disaster. This more than explains why it was also the culminating experience in the life of Luigi Cadorna. Not only did it end his career, it turned him into a reprobate. He who even days before had been an untouchable idol, was now tarred with the brush of incompetence, even treason, and put through the public disgrace of a court of enquiry vetting his every act of command. Unsurprisingly, Caporetto was a ghost which Cadorna tried to shake off for the rest of his days.

Cadorna frequently showed signs of psychological isolation and intolerance of discussion that were to prove a source of great complication. As the other 1914–1918 European commanders learnt by experience, leading a mass of citizen-soldiers called for reserves of diplomacy, skill in dealing with civil government, and a readiness to administer areas hitherto foreign to military life, like managing consensus and organizing propaganda. Those who adjusted to the job’s new political facets prospered, but the pure technocrats in uniform came into collision with their governments sooner or later and were deposed or were forced out by the pressure of a dissatisfied public opinion. Cadorna did not exactly shine at diplomacy with politicians: from the first weeks of his appointment, he created confrontation, tension, continual defiance and clashes. Above all, his solipsistic attitude would condition the Italian High Command in all its organization.

Few figures have been more controversial in the history of modern Italy than Luigi Cadorna. When he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, in summer 1914, he was already popular with his fellow countrymen. Since May 1915, he became an untouchable autocrat. Enjoying exceptional powers, he governed the war zone – virtually the whole of Northern Italy – with an iron fist, more and more explicitly defying government and parliament who were, he claimed, a bunch of weak, inept, radical progressives who would lead the country to ruin. He was too much of a monarchist to aspire to dictatorship, as some of his supporters actually proposed. But he sincerely believed Italy needed a strong man in command and did his utmost to achieve his purpose. Only the catastrophe of Caporetto in autumn 1917 eventually toppled him. He was relieved of his command, held to account for his performance, and turned into the scapegoat for all the woes of the Italian war: bloodbaths in the trenches, iron discipline, firing squads galore, the home territory overrun. For several years he vanished from the scene until Mussolini, firmly ensconced as dictator, decided to call him back to the public eye.

From May 1915 till the end of 1917, 200 generals commanding the major fighting units and at least 600 senior officers were sacked by Cadorna’s direct order or authorization. Though not only an Italian phenomenon, the degree of that officer purge is puzzling. Cadorna always inflexibly defended his absolutist (pre-modern) handling of the officer cadres: he would weed out any commander rumoured to be weak or cowardly, but likewise anyone who contradicted a superior or voiced doubts as to the certainty of victory, or the infallibility of the Chief. Still more draconian were his disciplinary measures against the troops. Cadorna set out to eliminate three great enemies within his army: the soldiers’ indiscipline and cowardice, indecision by the officers, and leniency by the courts. These he pursued by dint of special tribunals and ordering an extraordinarily high number of executions. ‘Discipline is the spiritual flame of victory’, ran one of his best-known circulars, issued in the first September of the war. And, particularly revealing of the supreme commander’s inflation of the discipline factor: ‘the most disciplined troops win, not the best trained’.