The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 Read Online Free PDF

Austria refused to believe that Italy’s decision would make a difference. Besides, giving away territory would send a dangerous signal to the empire’s other nationalities. The Germans kept pressing the Austrians to reconsider their position on the south Tyrol. Vienna answered irritably that the whole purpose of the war was to preserve the empire; it would be a nonsense to give away one of its most faithful provinces.
    On 9 August, San Giuliano broached the possibility that Italy might join the fight against Austria when it was certain of winning. ‘This may not be heroic,’ he wrote to Salandra, ‘but it is wise and patriotic.’ On the same day, he opened contacts with London. It was the start of a twin-track diplomacy that lasted for nine and a half months. Germany’s successes in France in mid-August froze these overtures.
    In terms of élite opinion, September was the decisive month. Salandra leaned toward intervention after a secret meeting on 17 September with Sidney Sonnino, who was in the Prime Minister’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ weeks before he joined the government. So, elsewhere on the spectrum, did a young Socialist firebrand called Benito Mussolini. When the Germans failed to break France’s resistance on the Marne, in mid- September, San Giuliano recognised that the Central Powers’ bid for a crushing victory in the West had failed. The balance of likely victory tipped away from the Central Powers, never to be restored, despite stunning local successes. ‘Their famous lightning strike has misfired,’ he told a journalist. ‘There is no question that our interest is for neither side to win an overwhelming victory.’ The ideal outcome, in fact – he added, humorously – would be for both Austria and France, the two historic opponents of Italian unification, to lose! Salandra said privately that Italy should use the ‘historic cataclysm’ to ‘resolve some of its principal problems’. He also remarked that the Triple Alliance was morally dead.
    Italy’s ambassadors in Vienna and Berlin did not share this view; they were exasperated by the government’s secrecy and dismayed by its perceptible shift towards the Entente. Even if Italy was not bound to support its allies, it was morally obliged to stand alongside them. They deplored the ‘enormous pressure’ from ‘the noisiest and most turbulent part of public opinion and the press’. Instead of resisting, the government and the sovereign let themselves twist in the wind whipped up by ‘a hundred journalists’, led by the Corriere della Sera . Like Giolitti, these ambassadors failed to see that Salandra was the master of this situation, not its victim. What they saw as weakness was finely calibrated judgement. He now applied shrewd pressure on the King, advising him at the end of September that the government was duty-bound to seize this chance to ‘complete and enlarge the fatherland’. He said that the South Slavs, Romania and Turkey would all profit from Austria’s defeat or diminishment in the Balkans, and predicted with only partial exaggeration that victory for the Central Powers would mean ‘servitude’ for Italy, killing the chances of redeeming the south Tyrol and Trieste, let alone expansion further afield. Whatever happened, Italy must not end up on the losing side. Noting that the general staff favoured going to war in the spring, Salandra remarked that ‘a real national war’ would do wonders for the poor morale of the army.
    In mid-October, death removed someone else who might have curbed Salandra’s appetite for war. San Giuliano, the foreign minister, had been ailing for months. Lucid to the end, he told a journalist that if Italy intervened, her fate after the war would be dismal: the Central Powers would hate her, blaming her for their defeat, while the Allies would want to forget Italy’s contribution, if any. Much of this prophecy would come true. Salandra took over the portfolio for a fortnight, during which he