H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PASSAVANTI

 G.: So, Passavanti again. S.: With medals enough to make a corridor clink. G.: Yes, and very likely shot at not by Germans in the immediate sense, but by Austro-Hungarians on the Italian front. S.: Which raises the language question. G.: Naturally. “Austro-Hungarian” is political before it is philological. S.: So not all those bullets came speaking German. G.: Quite. The Austro-Hungarian army was a Babel in uniform. German was important, especially among officers and as command language, but the ranks contained all sorts: Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenes, Slovenes, Croats, Italians from the empire’s own disputed margins, and others besides. [en.wikipedia.org], [scilog.fwf.ac.at] S.: So the shot that wounded Passavanti might have been fired by someone speaking German, or Czech, or Hungarian, or Slovene. G.: Exactly. The bullet itself was more consistent linguistically than the empire that launched it. S.: Dry enough already. G.: It is a dry subject. Then there is the alliance question, which is your real excitement. S.: Because Italy in the Great War fights with Britain against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and later, in the war you prefer to call by its proper vulgar title, the “phoney” one and after, Italy fights against Britain. G.: Yes. And I do not find this extraneous at all. S.: I do. G.: That is because you are too attached to map-colouring. States change alignments with disconcerting regularity. The interesting thing is not that they do, but how people continue to talk as if names guaranteed moral continuity. S.: “The Allies,” for instance. G.: Exactly. “The Allies” is context-dependent to a ludicrous degree. In 1915 it includes Italy with Britain and France against Austria-Hungary. In 1940 “the Allies” excludes Italy, because Italy has joined Britain’s enemy. Same phrase, different moral weather. S.: Whereas “the Axis” is rigid. G.: More rigidly designated, yes. It names a later formation with less contextual drift, though even there practice complicates the mythology. S.: So “ally” in the plural is a movable feast. G.: Exactly. One should always ask: allied with whom, when, and against whom. S.: Then Passavanti’s heroism is caught in the middle of shifting nouns. G.: Splendidly put. In the Great War he is heroic against an enemy some parts of which—politically and strategically, not personally—will later stand in a very different relation to Italy. S.: That is what strikes me as odd. G.: It is only odd if one expects national loyalty to carry a stable transhistorical semantic content. It never does. S.: Britain did rather better. G.: Britain remained more institutionally continuous, yes. The United Kingdom stayed on the same broad side in the two wars. England, if you like, remained “true to herself,” though that phrase always sounds as though a county were writing memoirs. S.: France is another case. G.: Only after Vichy, yes. France complicates herself by internal rupture, occupation, Free French legitimacy, and all the rest. But Britain retained the external continuity more visibly. S.: Italy did not. G.: No. Italy entered the Great War on the Entente side in 1915 after discarding the Triple Alliance obligations. In the later war, Fascist Italy joins Germany and becomes Britain’s enemy. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So Passavanti fights bravely in one alliance system and then his country later chooses another. G.: Exactly. Which does not retroactively unmake his courage. S.: No, but it changes the atmosphere in which one reads it. G.: Certainly. Heroism is never read outside the grammar of alliances, even when the man himself fought under simpler verbs: advance, hold, wound, return. S.: He was badly wounded in 1917, you said. G.: Yes. The most clearly described wound I found is at Pozzuolo del Friuli in October 1917, where he was gravely wounded in the eyes and yet continued to fight. The wider citation covers wounds and mutilations from September 1916 to October 1918. [nlm.nih.gov], [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com] S.: So definitely Great War. G.: Entirely. Italy enters in 1915, so all his First World War wounds are after 1914 and squarely within the Great War. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: And the enemy on that front. G.: Principally Austria-Hungary, with later German involvement more visibly after Caporetto, but the front is the Italian front against Austria-Hungary with German reinforcement in the catastrophic 1917 phase. [en.wikipedia.org], [encycloped...online.net] S.: So when I ask whether the man who shot him spoke German, the answer is: possibly, but not necessarily. G.: Exactly. The Austro-Hungarian army was multilingual. German was important, but not exhaustive. Officers often spoke German; many ordinary soldiers did not have it as their first language. [en.wikipedia.org], [scilog.fwf.ac.at], [spartacus-...tional.com] S.: Then there is your father’s business. G.: Yes. The Great War did not improve commercial life in England, as one may have noticed. S.: It collapsed after the Great War. G.: Quite. Or was badly damaged by the conditions following it. Which is why these alliance-games are not purely academic to me. Wars reorder not just maps but livelihoods. S.: Then in the next war you yourself are in the so-called “phoney” one. G.: Yes, though I have always thought the phrase stupidly misleading. S.: The OED agrees it is at least contemporary. Earliest evidence 1939, in Nation of New York. G.: Good. So the barbarism is documented early enough to annoy us properly. The OED’s earliest citation is 1939, and the entry is revised in 2006. [oed.com] S.: So not Churchill’s invention. G.: No, journalistic, as most bad labels are. S.: Yet the period was real enough. G.: Very real, and phoney only from the point of view of those who think nothing counts as war until shells fall near enough to improve prose. Britain and France had declared war on Germany in September 1939, but on the Western Front there was that months-long strange stillness before the great movement of 1940. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So “phoney war” names a real war badly. G.: Exactly. A common habit. S.: But Italy was not yet in against Britain. G.: Not until June 1940. Fascist Italy was not militarily involved during the phoney period in the western sense. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today] S.: Which means that for a while Britain and Italy are neither allies nor enemies in the second war. G.: Quite. Political relations have an awkward grammar in transitional months. Neutrality, previous alliance, future hostility, all overlap. S.: This is what I mean by extraneous. G.: And this is why I say it is not. It shows how misleading it is to speak as though “ally” or “enemy” were timeless predicates. S.: You want a pragmatics of alliance. G.: I do. The word “ally” functions indexically with history attached. “The Allies” in 1917 and “the Allies” in 1941 are not identical designations, though they overlap. Context does enormous work. S.: Whereas “Axis” is more historically fixed. G.: Yes, because it is coined for a particular configuration, not inherited across multiple wars. Though even there, if one pressed, one would find awkward edges and dependent participation. S.: Then Passavanti is a good case because he is undeniably heroic, but the language of sides around him shifts under one’s feet. G.: Precisely. A hero may remain a hero while the semantics of his country’s alliances alter disastrously. S.: He later goes to Fiume too. G.: Yes, which already places him in another highly charged nationalist theatre, half-heroic, half-performative, wholly uncomfortable. S.: Which makes the alliance business even stranger. G.: Not stranger, only more Italian in the interwar way. S.: That is unfair. G.: It is also historical. S.: Let us go back to Austria-Hungary. The empire collapses; its soldiers had many languages; the monarchy dissolves; the shot comes from a multilingual army that soon ceases to exist. G.: Exactly. Which is why asking “was it German?” is both understandable and insufficient. Politically, he was fighting the Central Powers on the Italian front. Sociolinguistically, the man on the other side might have been anything from a German-speaking Austrian officer to a Czech or South Slav conscript. S.: So the enemy as state was clearer than the enemy as tongue. G.: Well put. S.: Then the Great War alliance. Italy had been in the Triple Alliance before 1915 with Germany and Austria-Hungary. G.: Yes, but treated the treaty as defensive and then joined the Entente after the Treaty of London in 1915. Britain, France, and Russia offered territorial inducements at Austria-Hungary’s expense. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So one could say that Italy was first allied with those she later attacked. G.: One could, and historians do, though one must always add “under a different treaty structure and strategic moment.” S.: And later, in the war you object to calling phoney. G.: The one that begins in September 1939, yes. There Italy first remains out, then joins Germany, and so becomes Britain’s enemy. S.: Which makes the phrase “Britain’s ally, Italy” context-sensitive almost embarrassingly so. G.: Precisely. One must index it by year as carefully as one indexes “the present king.” S.: Then perhaps “ally” is an occasion-sensitive relational expression. G.: Thank heaven you have finally said something properly analytic. S.: I do try. G.: Yes. Ally(a,b,t,w): a is allied with b at time t in war-context w. S.: Hideous, but true. G.: The truth often is. S.: Then “the Allies” abbreviates a set-valued function of time and war-context. G.: Excellent. Do not say that in public. S.: Why not. G.: It would improve political journalism and ruin several memoirs. S.: And “Axis.” G.: A historically narrower set, less context-variant across the relevant war, though still requiring care about dates and degrees of belligerency. S.: Then your point about Britain remaining true to herself is really a point about institutional continuity of side. G.: Exactly. Not moral self-congratulation pure and simple—though the British are never wholly innocent of that—but the relative continuity that Britain remains on the anti-German side in both wars, unlike Italy. S.: France is interrupted by 1940 and Vichy. G.: Yes. France becomes internally split in status, allegiance, and legitimacy in a way Britain does not. S.: Then Passavanti’s life straddles these discontinuities. G.: It does. Great War hero against Austria-Hungary; later legionary at Fiume; then, in the later period, a figure whose heroism belongs to a nationalist repertoire that survives changing diplomatic geometries. S.: So when one says “he fought against those who would later be his country’s allies,” one must specify which “those.” G.: Exactly. States, not persons. Regimes, not bullets. Germany later as ally in the Fascist period; Austria no longer as Austria-Hungary, because that empire is gone. History is rude to nouns. S.: You enjoy that sentence. G.: I wrote it for the occasion. S.: Then the phoney war again. Why does the phrase offend you so much. G.: Because it trivialises the real strategic and human seriousness of a declared war before the spectacular land movements begin. War had begun; only public expectation had been disappointed theatrically. S.: So it is phoney only to those who think war must always look like newsreel climax. G.: Precisely. There was naval warfare, mobilisation, planning, blockade, air incidents. The stillness was not peace. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: And you were in the service world of that period. G.: Yes. Which is one reason I dislike the lazy label. One may be in a war whose drama has not yet found the language journalists crave. S.: Passavanti’s wounds, by contrast, required no rhetorical improvement. G.: Quite. Gravely wounded in the eyes at Pozzuolo del Friuli is sharp enough. [nlm.nih.gov], [academic.oup.com] S.: And if the shot came from a multilingual Habsburg conscript, then even the enemy side is less tidy than nationalist prose would like. G.: Exactly. Great wars expose how political labels simplify human plurality. S.: Then a man from Terni may be shot by a Czech-speaking subject of an emperor while fighting for Italy with Britain on one side, and twenty years later Italy will stand with Germany against Britain. G.: Yes. That is history, not contradiction. S.: It still feels odd. G.: It should. History ought to feel odd before one has lied it into continuity. S.: You are severe on continuity today. G.: Only on false continuity. S.: Then the final lesson from Passavanti. G.: That courage in battle is not invalidated by later diplomatic rearrangements, but our descriptions of the sides must be temporally exact if we are not to turn history into patriotic nursery speech. S.: That is rather good. G.: Keep it, but do not improve it. S.: Too late. Then perhaps this. “Ally” changes its extension with war-context and date; “Axis” is comparatively rigid; bullets are less linguistic than armies; and heroes remain, unfortunately for political theorists, more stable than the names of the camps for which they fought. G.: Splendid. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Umbrian, with one eye on Fiume and the other on the OED.