The Redoubt and the Velodrome

The Width of Lombardy

The trains went first. From 23 May 1915, when Italy walked into the Great War and the Prima Categoria of 1914-15 was halted where it stood, never to be finished, the railways were requisitioned as military transports, and carriages that had once carried half-backs to Genoa carried boys to the Isonzo instead. Milan had lived ever since in the particular silence of a footballing city whose fixture list has died, and what grew in that silence was football of the hearth rather than football of the nation: first the Coppa Federale of 1915-16, which Milan won, and then, for 1916-17, a Coppa Regionale Lombarda arranged by the regional committee for eight clubs who could reach one another without begging a seat on a train. The game shrank obediently to the width of Lombardy, and the quiet irony of that shrinkage is that the football became more intimate, not less: the same few opponents, the same short journeys, a city talking quietly to itself while history shouted beyond the Alps.

The calendar year opened at the Velodromo Sempione on 7 January with Milan beating Enotria 3-1; the return, a week later, was postponed for snow, and when it was finally played on 18 February it finished a scarcely believable 0-9 — four to Zacchi, three to Cevenini, one each to Soldera and Andreoli — and it was played at the Velodromo as well, Enotria's own field in Via Colletta having been snowed off twice, so that the nominal hosts were guests at their own undoing. A week later came the correction that football always administers to the presumptuous: Legnano 1, Milan 0, in Via Lodi on 25 February, the only defeat the final classification would ever hold against the rossoneri. Then the derby of 4 March, 1-1, Lovati scoring; US Milanese beaten 2-1 on the 11th through Cevenini and an opponent's own goal; Legnano repaid 5-2 on the 25th with three more from Cevenini; and on 1 April, in the away derby, an Inter side dismantled 4-0 — Cevenini twice, Zacchi once, and Engler turning the ball into his own net to finish the afternoon's work.

The Dairyman's Sons

Every age of Milan has its patriarch, and in the war years he was Aldo Cevenini — Cevenna, as the game knew him — a dairyman's son and, by history's appointment, Italy's first regular starting centre-forward. With the coach's chair vacant, as it remained throughout these seasons, the captain simply ran the team himself: he picked it, drove it, scolded it and then scored for it, ever-present through the twelve matches of 1916-17 with fourteen goals. Across his two spells in the shirt, 1909 to 1912 and 1915 to 1919, he would close with the extraordinary figure of 84 appearances and 83 goals in all competitions — a ratio that belongs to the age of moustaches and mud, and would embarrass most centre-forwards of any age since.

And he did not come alone. By the autumn of 1917 all five Cevenini brothers stood in Milan's squad — Aldo, Mario, Cesare, Carlo, and even Luigi, Cevenini III, Inter's own jewel, returned provisionally in rossonero for the duration, an act of fraternal contraband that only a war could license. Around the clan stood the men who kept the institution breathing: Guido Ribera in goal; Luigi Andreoli and the long-serving Marco Sala at full-back, still playing, still faithful, war or no war; Cesare Lovati, Alessandro Scarioni and Francesco Soldera in the middle; Romolo Ferrario and Armando Marini ahead of them. Even the scoresheets of the opening rounds of the same Lombard cup carry a guesting De Vecchi among the marksmen against Cremonese in the November and December of 1916. Line-ups in those years were written in pencil, amended by leave passes and troop movements, and nobody thought it strange.

A Crown Nobody Handed Over

The Lombard crown was sealed in the spring with a fixture that historians still handle with tongs: US Milanese against Milan on 13 May, which on the field finished 2-1 to US Milanese and in the official registers finished 0-2 to Milan, homologated at the desk after US Milanese were found to have fielded an irregularly registered player. The field says one thing, the register another; the table listens only to the register. Milan closed the final round with nine points from six matches — four won, one drawn, one lost — ahead of Inter and Legnano on seven apiece, with US Milanese fourth; across the whole campaign the figures read ten victories, one draw, a single defeat, forty-five goals scored and twelve conceded. And then the detail that outlives every scoreline: the trophy itself, the chroniclers note, was won but never physically awarded. Milan were champions of a cup nobody handed over — which is, if you think about it, the perfect emblem of the year: a season of substance without ceremony, of merit without silverware, played for honour in a country that had other uses for its metal.

Nor was the Lombard cup alone in its ersatz dignity. In Piedmont, Torino took the regional prize off Juventus in a playoff settled 2-0 at the desk; Genoa ruled Liguria; Modena beat Bologna 5-1 for Emilia; Pisa took Tuscany — a peninsula of little championships standing in for the big one. Milan gathered its own minor porcelain besides: the Coppa Val d'Olona and the Coppa Unione e Progresso of Monza had been collected in the autumn of 1916, and on 27 May 1917 a 3-0 over Saronno lifted the little Coppa Boneschi. Then, on 10 June at the Civica Arena, came the strangest and warmest afternoon of the year: Milan 6, Belgians 4 — a national and military selection led back to Italy, for charity, by Louis Van Hege, the Belgian who had said his goodbye the previous December and whose full accounting the last chapter has already made. He came back at the head of an improvised Belgian side and stood there while Cevenna scored three against him. For one afternoon, the war had lent him back.

The Redoubt at 2,147 Metres

Glauco Gerolamo Nulli was born in Barzanò, in the Brianza north of the city, on 4 August 1895, and he was a Milan defender — one of the boys of the Velodromo Sempione, recorded in the rossonero shirt in the friendly matches of the 1914-15 era, that last season before the lights went out. The war took him as it took the others: it made him an aspirante ufficiale, an officer cadet, and passed him through the 82nd, the 215th and the 216th Infantry before setting him down, on 17 March 1917, in the 59th Infantry Regiment 'Calabria' on the Lagorai chain in Trentino — up among the kind of mountains that a Milanese, on the clearest winter days, can persuade himself he sees from the city, blue and distant and harmless.

On 22 May 1917 he was in command of 'Ridotta A', a small fortified redoubt at 2,147 metres on Monte Colbricon, when Austrian forces in overwhelming numbers surrounded the position and called on him to surrender. His battalion commander's account and the citation of his medal agree on what happened next: reduced to a handful of survivors, Nulli answered the demand with rifle fire and hand bombs, and fought until he was struck down. He was twenty-one — the age at which a defender is still learning when not to tackle. Italy gave him the Medaglia d'argento al valor militare; some later tributes promote the medal to gold, but the citation on record is silver, and silver, one is tempted to say, is quite heavy enough. Five days after his death, his old club beat Saronno 3-0 and lifted the little Coppa Boneschi, in a Milan that did not yet know.

The Bainsizza and the Closed Gates

The mountain took the defender in May; the plateau took the marquis in August. Gilberto Porro Lambertenghi had made his playing debut for Milan in April 1907, had taken the whistle as a referee in 1909-10, and had sat as the club's vice-president since 1910-11 — eight seasons of service in blazer and boots. On 27 August 1917, a cavalry officer in the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, he was killed on the Bainsizza plateau. The club he helped govern was by then governed largely by correspondence: President Piero Pirelli, in office since 1909 and destined to remain until 1928, was himself away at the front as a cavalry officer, and would not return until 1918, while the city's industry — his own firm's works among them — ran at war tempo. A club with its president at the war, its vice-president dead in it, and its captain doubling as its coach: that was Milan in the autumn of 1917.

Then came the abyss itself. On 24 October the Austro-German blow fell at Caporetto: in under a month, roughly thirteen thousand Italian dead, some two hundred and seventy thousand prisoners, a retreat of a hundred and fifty kilometres to the Piave, and around six hundred thousand civilian refugees streaming west into Lombardy and beyond; Cadorna sacked for Diaz, the Boselli government falling to Orlando, a nation bracing for invasion. In Milan the Prefect banned the public from sporting events, and so the city's football — the new Coppa Mauro, barely a fortnight old — simply carried on behind closed doors at the Velodromo Sempione, while the Gazzetta dello Sport turned its letters page over to the soldier-sportsmen writing home from the front. Across the whole war the club would lose fourteen of its own, players and members both: Erminio Brevedan the first of them, on Monte Piana in July 1915, then Canfari, Colombo, Moda, Rovelli, Giuseppe Soldera, Gaslini, Calderari, Forlano, Wilmant, Azzolini, and the two who fell in this terrible year, Nulli and Porro Lambertenghi — a roll the sources count slightly differently, as though no hand in Milan was steady enough to make it final. The chroniclers say no Italian club sent more of its own men to the front than Milan. It is not a primato anyone parades; it is part of the patrimony all the same.

The Engineer's Cup

The Coppa Mauro deserves its paragraph. It was named for Francesco Mauro, the engineer who, exempt from military service, was serving as vice-president and interim regent of the entire Italian federation; it began on 7 October 1917 with seven Lombard clubs — Milan, Internazionale, Legnano, US Milanese, Nazionale Lombardia, Enotria Goliardo and Saronno — classified as a First Category competition, the regional committee approving its regulations and lending its referees while declining formal patronage: bureaucracy survives everything. Milan had warmed up with a 4-1 friendly over Enotria at Via Colletta on 30 September, the last such afternoon before Caporetto changed the terms, and had already, on 1 January and 8 April, lent the Velodromo to representative matches got up for morale and for charity. Then the cup began, and Cevenna began with it: 4-2 away to Nazionale Lombardia in Via Baggina on 7 October; all three of Milan's goals — 15th, 27th and 41st minutes — in a 3-2 won at Legnano on the 14th; a hat-trick again on the 28th in a 3-0 over US Milanese in Via Ravizza. Two hat-tricks in a fortnight from a captain-coach in wartime: the dairyman's son delivering, you might say, on schedule.

November administered its lessons. On the 4th, in Via Goldoni, Inter won 1-0 — the first defeat of Milan's entire campaign — and on 2 December Legnano took the second, 2-1; those two stumbles, both falling in late 1917, would be the only ones all season. In between and after, the machine ground on: 3-1 at Enotria Goliardo on 11 November, 2-1 over Saronno on the 18th, 4-0 over Nazionale Lombardia on the 25th, 2-1 at US Milanese on 16 December. And on 23 December, at the Velodromo Sempione, a derby was played to which nobody was admitted: Milan 1, Internazionale 0, Marini scoring five minutes from the end, behind closed doors by prefectural decree, the city's oldest rivalry conducted in an empty arena in Christmas week, the noise of the crowd replaced by the noise of the age. The year closed on 30 December with a 2-0 over Enotria Goliardo awarded by forfeit — by then even the walkovers felt like the era signing its name.

The end of the story lies just over the year's border, and this chronicle, for once, will stop at the calendar. The year ran out with the Coppa Mauro unfinished — one fixture still owing to Milan, Internazionale matching them stride for stride, and a table already limping: decisions taken in committee rather than on the grass, Legnano the club they fell upon, protests and withdrawals behind them. The two would come out level, and level meant a playoff: a derby with a cup on it, awaited in the new year and certain to be played, like everything else that winter, in front of nobody. And when the peace finally came and the club could count its dead, the name of Glauco Nulli, defender, of Barzanò, stood in the roll of the rossoneri fallen, beside the marquis of the Bainsizza and the rest. All winter the game had insisted on itself behind the locked gates of the Velodromo; outside, quietly, the roll of honour waited.