Nine Words and a Mountain

The Harvest Carried Over the Snowline

There are years that begin in January and years that begin earlier, on the ledger of the year before, and 1915 is the second kind: it opens with Milan carrying an almost perfect autumn across the snowline — ten matches of the qualifying Girone D, nine won and one drawn, nineteen points of a possible twenty, fifty-two goals scored and three conceded — the way a farmer carries the harvest into the barn and starts, at last, to worry about the weather. The previous chapter has already counted the thirteen against Audax Modena one by one, five for the Belgian and three for the debutant boy from Treviso, and we will not count them again; but keep the total in your pocket, because the whole tragedy of this year is arranged around it, the way a Lombard kitchen is arranged around the fire.

Louis Van Hege, the Belgian, captain and centre of gravity, was in the middle of the season of his life — twenty-two goals in twenty matches by the time the ledger was forcibly closed, the crest of an account that ran to ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight championship matches across his five Milan seasons — and around him stood a side that had learned to defend as well as it attacked, three goals conceded in a whole autumn being a figure to flatter a chess player. Milan had every reason, that January, to believe the lean years were ending. The city outside the ground believed something else was ending, and the city, for once, read the calendar better than the club.

The Month the Snow Took

The national semifinal, Girone B, opened in the new year with the sort of opponents that trim the fat from a team: Novara, Alessandria, Vigor Torino. At Novara on 10 January Milan won 2-1, Morandi and Van Hege doing the scoring; a week later Alessandria were edged by the same score at home. Then February arrived wearing white. The snowstorms of that month buried the fixture list for the better part of four weeks, and the season, like the year itself, was made to hold its breath while the plain did what the plain does under snow — waited, stamped its feet, and talked about the war.

When play resumed in March the stride had to be relearned. Beaten 3-1 at Vigor Torino on the 7th, Milan answered 2-0 in the return a week later, then took Novara 2-1 on 21 March — a match worth a footnote in gold, because the defender Marco Sala scored his first goal for the club, and it would be Sala, precisely Sala, who carried the captain's band through the wartime seasons about to descend — and closed with a goalless afternoon at Alessandria on the 28th. Four wins, a draw, one defeat; the group won; Milan among the final four of the north, with Genoa, Torino and Internazionale for company and April for a stage.

Four Goals in Five Sundays

And here, with the timing of a comedian who has read the script to the end, the plenty ran out. The team that had scored fifty-two before Christmas managed four goals in five matches of the final round. On 18 April, at the Velodromo Sempione, a 1-1 with Genoa; on the 25th a 1-1 with Torino; on 2 May the derby at Inter's field in via Goldoni was lost 3-1 — keep the date, this chapter will need it again; on 9 May Marassi administered a 3-0 without ceremony; and on 16 May, at Torino, another 1-1, Van Hege scoring in what nobody yet knew was the last championship match Milan would be permitted to complete.

Across the field in the Genoa matches stood an old familiar. Renzo De Vecchi, the Figlio di Dio, sold down to Genoa in 1913 for the record fee the registers remember as twenty-four thousand lire, faced his old club twice in that final round — the draw and the defeat — and to this day carries the title that followed in his palmares, which is more than anyone who actually finished that championship can say, since nobody finished it. When everything stopped, the table read: Genoa 7, Torino 5, Internazionale 5, Milan 3. Bottom of the four, without a win in the round, the season's account closed by force at twenty-one matches — thirteen won, five drawn, three lost, sixty-five goals scored, eighteen conceded — a ledger two-thirds glorious and one-third instructive, like most honest lives.

Nine Words

To understand the stoppage you must leave the touchline and take the tram into the city. On 26 April, in London and in secret, Italy had signed away her neutrality — Austrian lands promised in exchange for entering the war on the Allied side — and through what the rhetoric of the time called the radiant days of May the interventionist crowds filled the piazzas, nowhere more fervently than in Milan: city of the Pirelli works, of mass manufacture soon to be turned to war production, of the loudest presses in the peninsula. While Milan the team was drawing at the Sempione and losing at Marassi, Milan the city was talking itself hoarse into the Great War, and of the two campaigns the city's was always going to finish first.

The end came by wire, and the wire was nine words long: 'In seguito mobilitazione per criteri opportunità sospendesi ogni gara' — following mobilization, as a matter of expediency, every match is suspended. The record books quarrel over a single day, one ledger dating the federal telegram to Saturday 22 May while the newspapers announced the suspension on Sunday the 23rd; let them quarrel, because either way the wire outran the fixtures. The final Sunday was never played — not Milan against Internazionale at the Velodromo Sempione, not Genoa against Torino at Marassi. Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915; the guns opened on the 24th. That unplayed return derby remains one of the haunted fixtures of Milan's early history: a match that exists only as a blank line in a ledger, which is one workable definition of a ghost.

And the title of the broken year? Assigned, in time, to Genoa, leaders with the last round unplayed — but when, and by what act, is a question the archives answer in several voices at once. One tradition gives 23 September 1919; the researcher Gian Luca Mignogna has produced documents suggesting the championship stood formally vacant until it was registered to Genoa in the federation's own annuario at the turn of the 1930s; Torino and Inter challenged the award around 1920 and were turned away in 1922; Lazio, finalists of the centre and south, petition to this day for a share and have not been granted one. A championship that ended by telegram was always going to be settled by paperwork, and the paperwork, like the fog on the Navigli, has never entirely lifted.

The Mountain and the Arena

Mobilization emptied the club the way November empties a chestnut tree — branch by branch, not all at once. Piero Pirelli, president since 1909, enlisted as a volunteer officer of cavalry and went to the front, not to return until 1918 with the war over; the same Pirelli who in 1926 would build San Siro out of his own pocket, as though repaying the game for the years the war confiscated. The vice-president, Gilberto Porro Lambertenghi, went likewise; his death on the Bainsizza in the summer of 1917 belongs to a later chapter, but his leaving belongs to this one. The call to arms reached Scarioni and Lovati and reached the captain too: Van Hege went home to Belgium and its army, and the red and black would see him only rarely again — three appearances in wartime cup football, by the fullest count — before he led a Belgian eleven through charity matches in 1917 and, at Antwerp in 1920, took Olympic gold, a fine consolation for a man whose Italian seasons had ended by telegram. Even exile kept its ironies: De Vecchi soldiered at Brescia, guesting for the local club, and spent his war in liaison service, riding the motorcycle sidecar of Gino Magnani, the journalist who founded Motociclismo.

But the year's darkest line is short. Erminio Brevedan — born in Treviso on 28 November 1893, arrived from the Volontari of Venice, three goals on his October debut, five official matches in all, the last of them that lost derby of 2 May — was a sottotenente, a second lieutenant, of the 55th Infantry, Brigata Marche, a regiment whose peacetime garrison was Treviso, his own town; and the army sent him up into Cadore, among the Dolomites, where the war was fought among rock and ice at altitudes where even the echo arrives out of breath. Between 17 and 20 July 1915 his brigade fought for Monte Piana. It counted eighty-seven dead, eight of them officers, and nearly eight hundred men out of action; on the last day the bulletin recorded, among the fallen, 'Brevedan Erminio di Elia, sottotenente.' He was not yet twenty-two. He was the first Milan footballer to die in the Great War — the first name of the fourteen the previous chapter has already set in stone, ahead of Soldera who scored the first of the thirteen, ahead of the vice-president, ahead of all the rest.

And here the year composes, without any assistance from literature, its exactest image. On 17 July, the day the battle for the mountain opened, Milan were at the Arena Civica beating Ardita Juventus 2-1 after extra time in the Torneo Boggiali, a benefit tournament — the city playing while the mountain took its toll. This is not an irony to be savoured; it is a fact to be swallowed whole, like medicine. The semifinal was lost 3-0 to US Milanese, and it is hard to imagine anyone kept the cutting.

What a Sunday Could Raise

Football did not stop; it shrank to the measure of what a Sunday could raise. In August a Bergamo mixed eleven was beaten 7-0; in September nine were put past Juventus Italia and Vercellese were edged 2-1; and on 26 September, at Marassi, the game permitted itself one of its private jokes: Genoa, champion-designate of the suspended championship, thrashed 6-0 in their own home by the team that had finished bottom of the final group. The result decided nothing, avenged nothing, counted for nothing — and was for precisely that reason perfect, a sonnet written in the margin of a confiscated ledger.

In the autumn the Gazzetta dello Sport put up a cup for the city, unofficial as wartime bread, and Milan won it: Nazionale Lombardia beaten 5-0 and then 5-0 again, US Milanese beaten 2-1 and 2-0, Internazionale beaten 1-0 in October and held 1-1 in November — eleven points and first place. December closed the year in friendlies: a 1-1 at Modena on the 5th, a 5-4 taken off US Milanese two days later, seven put past Brescia on the 12th. The scores mattered less than the fact of them — a ball still moving, on grounds ringed by a city learning to read casualty lists.

But December also delivered something with a federal seal on it. The Coppa Federale, launched that month as the war's official substitute for a championship, opened for Milan on 19 December with a derby at Inter's own field in via Goldoni, won 3-0: two goals inside thirty-five minutes from Aldo Cevenini — Cevenini I, eldest of the five footballing brothers ahead of Mario, Luigi, Cesare and Carlo; scorer of twenty-six goals in forty-two league matches for Milan between 1909 and 1912; a veteran of Italy's first international of 15 May 1910, six goals to two over France; and an Inter man since 1912 — with Avanzini adding the third in the 89th minute. The war had brought the prodigal home, and he announced the homecoming as only a born derby player can: twice, against Inter, on Inter's own ground. On 26 December, St Stephen's Day, US Milanese were beaten 2-0 at the Sempione, Ferrario and Cevenini scoring in the 42nd and 43rd minutes; and the run thus begun would end on 30 April 1916 with Genoa beaten 3-1 and the cup itself in the cabinet — twelve matches, nine won, one drawn, two lost, twenty-two goals to nine, Cevenini's share ten in nine appearances — the first trophy of real weight since the three championships of the century's first years, even if no scudetto attached to it.

The club that did this was a remnant, and knew it. Marco Sala, the full-back of the March goal, wore the captain's band; the veteran Guido Moda took the coach's chair and shepherded what squad remained; the president held office from a cavalry posting. And so to the verdict, which the fog may witness. 1915 took from Milan the finish of its finest sustained season, a captain it could not replace, a president, a vice-president, and a boy from Treviso who had scored three times on the first of his five Sundays; it left behind a city cup, a federal cup begun, and a discovery worth more than either — that a football club is not the sum of its trophies but the sum of its Sundays, including, and perhaps especially, the ones that are taken away. The record books will argue forever about who owns the broken title. Nobody argues about who owns 2 May, or 20 July: the first belongs to the derby, the second to the mountain, and both, in the darker ink this story keeps for such entries, to Erminio Brevedan of Treviso, aged twenty-one, sottotenente, rossonero.