Military history

TWO

‘We Two Alone’

It is always the case that the one who is not

your friend will request your neutrality, and

that the one who is your friend will request

your armed support.

     MACHIAVELLI, The Prince (1532)

How the Government Plotted against Peace

Italy was pulled into the First World War by two whiskery men in frock coats and an anxious, weak-willed king. They were not alone: interventionist passion surged around the higher echelons of society, making up in noise what they lacked in popular support. Yet, without a conspiracy in the highest places, Italy would have stayed neutral.

Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino were like-minded conservatives and old friends who knew they were backed by an élite of northern industrialists and politicians which supported rearmament and military expansion around the Adriatic Sea. When Salandra finally let parliament debate the international situation, in December 1914, deputies were not allowed to query the government’s foreign policy or the army’s readiness. The cabinet was not informed about the twin-track negotiations with London and Vienna until 21 April 1915. Five days later, without forewarning parliament, the Prime Minister committed Italy to fight. The deputies rubber-stamped his decision after the fact. With the King’s support, he had carried out a coup d’état in all but name.

This process, without parallel in other countries, split the country. Many nationalists believed the war would heal this rift. Instead the fractures widened under the pressure of terrible carnage, undermining morale in the army and on the home front. There would be no equivalent of the French union sacrée. Parliament too was damaged. After granting the government decree powers, the Chamber of Deputies became a cipher. The Socialists, who tried to preserve a watchdog role, could be cowed or sidestepped when the need arose. Historian Mario Isnenghi argues that the interventionist campaign of 1914–15 created a new political force, the ‘war party’, cutting across traditional loyalties, scornful of institutions and elected majorities, convinced that they alone represented the nation’s true identity and interests. This force proved to be durable; parliamentary life had scarcely revived in 1922 when Mussolini’s accession – overwhelmingly supported by the chamber – subverted and then destroyed Italy’s liberal institutions. In short, the events of spring 1915 struck a blow from which the country would not recover for 30 years.

Early in 1914, Prime Minister Giolitti resigned when part of his coalition crumbled away. Still the most powerful leader in parliament, he persuaded the King to replace him with Antonio Salandra, a lawyer from a rich landowning family in Puglia. Giolitti meant Salandra to be a stopgap while he reshuffled the pack of his actual and potential supporters. His legendary skill at manipulating the blocs of deputies into viable majorities gave every reason to expect his swift return to power. Yet the lawyer from Puglia was more resolute and devious than Giolitti realised.

The constitution gave the monarch overarching power. He appointed and dismissed government ministers; summoned and dissolved parliament; retained ultimate authority over foreign policy; and commanded the armed forces. He could issue decrees with the force of law, and declare war without consulting parliament. But Victor Emanuel III was reluctant to wield this power. Very short in stature and ill-favoured, he did not cut a regal or martial figure. One of his cruel nicknames was sciaboletta, or ‘little sabre’; he could not wear a full-length sword, and cartoonists drew the tip of his scabbard resting on a little trolley. When the war started, he wanted to cut the figure of a soldier king, but really preferred coin-collecting and photography. One close observer thought he was ‘too modern’; in ordinary life he would have been a republican or socialist by temperament, for he had little faith in the future of the monarchy. Insecure and naïve, he was easily led by forceful personalities. Making matters worse, he was in a nervous depression in 1914, precipitated by fear of losing his adored wife’s love. Rumour had it that he was considering abdication.

His views on the national question were moderate, like Giolitti’s; he thought Italy should have part of the south Tyrol and Friuli as far as the River Isonzo, but not Bolzano or Gorizia, let alone Trieste. He would probably have accepted a peaceful solution with Austria if Salandra had not panicked him into believing that the alternative to war was revolution. The real revolution was Salandra’s own.

When the Habsburg heir was assassinated in Bosnia at the end of June, Salandra was distracted by the aftermath of workers’ protests, known as ‘red week’, in which strikers paralysed most of Italy’s cities and were attacked by troops and police. His foreign minister, Antonio di San Giuliano, was a Sicilian aristocrat who felt little hostility to Austria. He knew Giolitti had warned the Austrians that Italy would not support an attack on Serbia, something that looked increasingly likely as Vienna blamed Belgrade for the assassination. Neither Austria nor Germany involved their ally in their summits. Italy was not invited to the all-important talks at Potsdam on 5 July, when Kaiser Wilhelm gave Vienna the fatal ‘blank cheque’, promising to back any action against Serbia. When they prepared an ultimatum to Belgrade, setting conditions intended to be unacceptable, they kept the text secret from Italy. This violated the letter of the Triple Alliance.

San Giuliano told Vienna on 10 July that Italy would expect all of Italian-speaking south Tyrol as ‘compensation’ for the slightest Austrian gain in the Balkans. Although they ignored the warning, the Central Powers were confident of getting Italian support. Inside the bubble of their belligerence, the élites in Vienna and Berlin missed a crucial change in Italy during July: the opinion-making classes ceased to accept the idea of fighting alongside Germany and Austria. Several factors encouraged wishful thinking. San Giuliano’s ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna exaggerated their government’s loyalty to the Alliance. The coincidental call-up of three Italian classes during July was probably misinterpreted. The German general staff did not understand that their opposite numbers in Italy were under civilian control, so may have overrated the pledge by Italy’s new chief of the general staff, General Luigi Cadorna, to respect the army’s existing commitments. This mightily reassured the Germans, because Cadorna’s predecessor, General Pollio, had been a zealot for the Alliance. He even wanted the three allied armies to agree on joint operations and planning, and called on the Allies to ‘act as a single state’ – a goal none of them would dream of embracing.

In 1912, the demands of the Libyan campaign led Pollio to rescind Italy’s old commitment to send six corps and three cavalry divisions to Germany if France attacked. A year later he partly restored the pledge, offering two corps. The following April, he stunned the German attaché in Rome by raising the commitment to three corps. This force, he said, would tie down as many French troops as possible while German forces were engaged further north. Then he mused whether Italy should send a separate force to help Vienna, if Serbia attacked Austria when France (perhaps backed by Russia) attacked Germany. While the attaché reeled at the thought of Italian troops fighting for the Habsburg empire, Pollio added an even more heretical thought. ‘Is it not more logical for the Alliance to discard false humanitarian sentiment, and start a war which will be imposed on us anyway?’ Field Marshal Moltke and General Conrad von Hötzendorf, Pollio’s opposite numbers in Berlin and Vienna, could not have expressed the Central Powers’ catastrophic fatalism more pithily.

‘I almost fell off my seat,’ reported the attaché. ‘How times have changed!’ He wondered if Pollio was too good to be true; maybe he was really angling for Trento and Trieste? But there was no ulterior motive. Giolitti and Salandra might also have fallen off their seats if they had been in the room. Whether Pollio had cleared his proposals with the minister of war – his superior in peacetime – is unclear. The wretched communications between the government and general staff would not improve under his successor.

In addition to the usual veneration of Prussia, Pollio had married an Austrian countess. There was even something Viennese about the man himself: handsome, charming, cultured, the author of well-received military histories. He was no genius; his plan to occupy Libya in 1911 took no account of the Arab population, and assumed the Turkish garrison would head for home rather than retreat to the trackless interior. These were grievous mistakes; the Libyan campaign cost almost 8,000 casualties and soaked up half the gross domestic product that year, and not much less in 1912. Yet he had a penetrating and unorthodox mind. Immune to anti-Habsburg feeling, he believed the Alliance was in Italy’s best interest and wanted it to work. Moltke had assured Conrad, whose suspicion of Italians matched his loathing of Serbs, that Pollio should be trusted. Even so, they chose not to inform him fully about Germany’s plans for a lightning strike against France and Russia.

One of Moltke’s advisors, tasked to study the Italian situation, reported in May that Pollio was an excellent fellow, ‘a great mind and a trustworthy man’, but he faced internal resistance. The King would be led by his government; France still had many friends in Italy; the historic feud with Austria was not forgotten, and Italy’s ambitions in the Adriatic were still lively. ‘How long will his influence last?’ Death answered the question a mere month later. On 28 June, Pollio boarded a train to Turin where a new field mortar was to be tested. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot in Sarajevo a few hours earlier; when Pollio was told, early next morning, he showed no concern. Next day, he was taken ill with myocarditis and died early on 1 July, carried off by a heart attack. His demise seemed so uncannily timed to harm the Central Powers that Germany suspected foul play. While the Italian officer corps generally supported the Triple Alliance, none of the senior generals shared Pollio’s dedication. The Germans knew this, and from mid-July urged the Austrians to reach an understanding with Italy over territory. In vain.

When Cadorna became chief of staff at the end of July, Berlin’s relief was short-lived. Rome’s signals were being received at last. On 30 July, Austria’s ambassador in Berlin reported that a ‘state of nervousness’ was palpable for the first time, due to fear ‘that Italy in the case of a general conflict would not fulfil its duty as an ally’. By August, the German high command was putting the best face on a bad situation. Moltke told the government in Berlin that a demonstration of Alliance unity mattered more than Italy’s material contribution. A token force would be enough. Yet Berlin would not lean on Rome, judging that it would be counterproductive unless the Austrians made a positive gesture. The Austrians still deluded themselves that resolute action against Serbia would bring Italy to heel. Italy wanted Austria’s promise of ‘compensation’ before it would consider supporting the Central Powers, while Austria wanted proof of support before it would consider giving any territory – and even then, the south Tyrol was out of the question.

By this point, Italian forces were concentrating towards the French border in accordance with Pollio’s plans. On 31 July, Cadorna sent the King a memorandum on the deployment towards France and ‘the transport of the largest possible force to Germany’. Meanwhile San Giuliano told the cabinet that, in present conditions, Italy could not fight. No one told the King, who approved Cadorna’s memo the following day. By now the Austrians knew they had sparked a European war, and they told the Italians that they could expect compensation if they supported their allies. Conrad cabled Cadorna to ask how he intended to co-operate. Too late! It was 1 August, and the wider conflict had begun. Next day, without even informing Cadorna, the government declared neutrality. It was five days after Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, two days after Russia mobilised, and one day after Germany declared war on Russia.

When he heard the news, Cadorna went to Salandra, who confirmed that fighting France was out of the question. ‘So what should I do?’ the Chief of Staff asked. Salandra said nothing. ‘Prepare for war against Austria?’ ventured Cadorna.

‘That’s right,’ said the Prime Minister.

Cadorna began a massive re-deployment to the north-east. The switch had to remain low-key, or the Austrians might lash out preemptively – or so Salandra claimed to fear, even though Austria’s border with Italy was practically undefended and the Austrians were in no position to divert forces from Serbia and Galicia.

San Giuliano’s case for not joining Austria and Germany was solid. Apart from the matter of compensation, the Alliance was a defensive treaty and Austria was the aggressor against Serbia. (Austria’s 23 July ultimatum was, he said grandly, ‘incompatible with the liberal principles of our public law’.) Moreover, Austria and Germany had violated the Alliance by excluding Italy from their discussions. These objections could have been finessed if the public had roared support for the Triple Alliance, but opinion was broadly anti-Austrian. The government and industry feared the effects of a British naval blockade if Italy joined the Central Powers. Italy depended on Britain and France for raw materials and foodstuffs, and almost all of Italy’s coal arrived with other imports through routes controlled by the British navy.

For these reasons, and out of respect for British military power, as well as a feeling that Britain’s position on the sidelines during July was like Italy’s own, the Italians wanted to see which way London would jump. Britain’s entry into the war on 4 August calmed those senior figures who had wondered if it was rash not to support the Central Powers. Looking further ahead, the government feared that whether or not the Powers defeated the Allies, Italy was unlikely to get what it wanted. San Giuliano summed up the conundrum: if Austria fails to win convincingly, it will not be able to compensate us, and, if it does win, it will have no motive to do so. The best course was to wait and watch.

Germany urged Austria to offer enough territory to swing the Italians on-side, or at least stop them joining the enemy. Any concession could be revoked after victory. With late-imperial arrogance, 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 uttered the only phrase for which he is still remembered: sacro egoismo, ‘sacred egoism’. This principle, he said, must guide foreign policy. His enemies pounced on the phrase; national interests should be decisive, but calling them ‘sacred’ was a nationalist twist, and branding them as ‘egoism’ appealed to those who saw politics as a mystical arena where national identities were locked in struggle.

Sidney Sonnino became foreign minister in early November, pledging to uphold ‘vigilant neutrality’. Raised as a Protestant by his converted Jewish father and Scottish or Welsh mother, Sonnino was an outsider in Italian politics. He served two brief terms as prime minister before 1914. A taciturn man with no penchant for ideas, he never apologised and certainly never explained. Nevertheless, he rose in the war to become Catholic Italy’s most important civilian leader. At this stage, his and Salandra’s real objective could not be admitted. Parliament and the public wanted neutrality, as did the Church, and the army was not ready for war.1 Even so, the Socialists smelled a rat; by early November, the party newspaper Avanti! tagged Salandra as ‘the minister for war’.

Berlin sent a senior figure to try to persuade Italy to stay neutral. Prince Bernhard von Bülow, a former chancellor, was convinced the Central Powers had mishandled their former ally. Germany should have foreseen Austria’s refusal to take the Italians seriously. This was true, but he arrived with nothing but his good offices, seeking concessions without anything up his sleeve. Franz Josef refused to give up the south Tyrol, but he was very old; the Italians should wait calmly and let nature take its course. Bülow did not see that this was impossible. Europe was being torn apart by a war without precedent; whatever the outcome, and even if the fighting only lasted a few months or a year, as most people still expected, the prewar order would not be restored. Many middle-class Italians were convinced that they must strike, now or never.

In January, Sonnino itemised Italy’s demands to Vienna. Trentino and Friuli as far as the River Isonzo should be transferred to Italy, while Trieste should be autonomous and neutralised, with no occupying forces. Pretending not to hear, the Austrians said that compensation should only involve Albania, in which Italy did indeed want a stake, as shown by its occupation of the port of Valona (now Vlorë) in December. As Austria did not control Albania, the retort was doubly irrelevant. Bülow did not help by suggesting the Italians would be satisfied by getting a fraction of the south Tyrol, because they accepted that Trieste was Austria’s lung. The Austrians suspected the German mediator had gone native.

Early in February, Giolitti went public with his misgivings. Italy could, he said, obtain ‘a good deal’ of what it wanted without fighting. His statement was mere common sense to most Italians:

I certainly don’t consider war to be a blessing, as the nationalists do, but as a misfortune that must only be faced when the honour and great interests of the country require it. I do not think it is legitimate to take the country to war because of feelings about other peoples. Anyone is free to throw his own life away for an emotion, but not the country.

Italy’s vital interests were not at stake: the Trentino would drop into its hands sooner or later, the Isonzo would become the north-eastern border and a compromise would be found for Trieste. Why, then, go to war? For Salandra and Sonnino, however, vital interests required mastery of the Adriatic. The south Tyrol, the Isonzo valley and Trieste were only the start; they wanted Istria and Dalmatia, virtual control of Albania, and a strong role in the Balkan hinterland. Austria would never grant these demands; even the Allies might balk at them.

That Giolitti, with all his acumen, did not grasp the scale of Salandra’s and Sonnino’s ambition gives a measure of their secrecy, and how far from mainstream opinion they wanted to take the country. If they could turn the Adriatic into an Italian lake, they would ensure Balkan and Mediterranean markets, expunge the failures in Africa, and vault into a seat at Europe’s top table. Victor Emanuel came to accept that, if parliament stood in the way, it should be bypassed. This freed Salandra from accountability to a broadly hostile chamber. On 15 February, Sonnino notified Vienna that military action in the Balkans without prior agreement on compensation had violated the Triple Alliance. This message was purely for the record, clearing the way to seek counteroffers from the Allies. An envoy was despatched to London the next day.

The opening of parliament in late February 1915 triggered pro-and anti-war rallies around the country. By putting his head above the parapet after the Socialist Party had split over the war, Giolitti became the leading neutralist and the target of ferocious attacks. The press shrieked that neutrality was ‘suicide’. Under this pressure, his judgement lapsed. After receiving Salandra’s assurance that war was conceivable only as a last resort and he would keep Sonnino on a tight leash, Giolitti urged his followers to trust the government. Nagging ill health, as well as a temperamental inability to ride the nationalist storm, explain his gullibility.

Sonnino told Salandra that 1 March should be the deadline for Austrian offers. On that date, the general staff announced a ‘red alert’, putting the army on a war footing without the publicity of a mobilisation. Sonnino warned that the Allies were making headway against Turkey (a hopeful reading of the Allied operations in the Dardanelles); this was worrying because he and Salandra wanted a piece of Turkey for themselves. Also, Bulgaria and Greece might intervene at any moment, while ‘in London’, he added testily, ‘we haven’t even opened negotiations!’

Their proposal to the Allies was secretly presented in London on 28 February. Italy’s reward for joining the Allies should be the south Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass; Trieste and Gorizia; Istria; Dalmatia and most of its islands; Valona, in Albania (which should become ‘a small neutralised Muslim autonomous state’), and the Dodecanese Islands, between Greece and Turkey, which Italy already occupied. The coast south of Kotor bay should be ‘neutralised’. Acceptance of Italy’s interest in the balance of power throughout the Mediterranean should be respected. Italy should receive territory if the Ottoman Empire were to be dissolved. It wanted a British war loan of £50 million and war indemnities.

News of the proposal reached Berlin and Vienna, whose agents kept them better informed than the Italian cabinet. Nudged again by Germany, the Austrians finally stirred themselves to offer the Trentino and a border on the Isonzo, after the war. When Italy insisted that the territory had to change hands at once, the proposals withered on the table.

The Allies, meanwhile, were unhappy with three of Italy’s demands: for Dalmatia, for the Montenegrin and Albanian coast to be ‘neutralised’, and for a Muslim Albanian statelet. Salandra took stock in a candid letter to Sonnino. They were heading for an open rupture with the Central Powers without the King’s consent or any agreement with the Allies. The country did not support them, and the army would not be battle-ready before the end of April, or probably later. They should apply the brakes; neither the King nor parliament was ready to take a clear position, so they should keep parleying with the Central Powers, ‘pretending we believe a favourable outcome is possible’, until the army was ready and they had agreed terms with the Allies. In the end, he wrote, ‘we two alone’ would have to decide when ‘to play this terrible card’.

The Allies answered formally on 20 March. Dalmatia was the sticking point: the Russians objected that Italy’s claims would lead to war with Serbia in future. What Rome called strategic self-defence, Russia denounced as expansion. Sonnino, who always denied any imperialist motive, argued that the western Adriatic coast was indefensible against the deep harbours and myriad islands of the eastern Adriatic. He explained to the British ambassador that military supremacy in the Adriatic had become Italy’s main incentive to join the Allies. As Salandra was telling Bülow the same thing, the Central Powers knew where Italy stood. Vienna took this as confirming that negotiations were pointless; if Austria could only buy Italy’s neutrality by abolishing itself as an Adriatic power, there was nothing to discuss.

Salandra believed the Allied failure to force the Dardanelles in mid- March had given Italy extra leverage. So it proved when British and French diplomats urged Russia to let Italy have ‘effective control of the Adriatic’. It was, they said, a price worth paying. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, argued that Italy’s intervention ‘probably would, in a comparatively short time, effect the collapse of German and Austro-Hungarian resistance’. A fortnight later, he predicted that it would be the turning point of the war, partly by bringing Romania and Bulgaria off the fence into the Allied camp. (To colleagues in London, he also argued the benefit of preventing a future single ‘great Slav power’ – meaning Russia – from controlling the eastern Adriatic.) Italy’s terms should be accepted without delay. The French were just as enthusiastic; they had poured money into the pro-war campaign, bankrolling Mussolini’s new newspaper and paying off the demagogic poet D’Annunzio’s debts in Paris.2

The Russians were truculent. Italy had ducked the worst of the war, they complained, and Austria-Hungary could now be beaten without its help. They themselves – having come into the war because of Serbia – wanted the Serbs to have free access to the Adriatic after the war. Besides, Dalmatia had more than half a million Slavs and only 18,000 Italians: how could Rome justify its claim? Privately, the British élite was just as contemptuous; ministers felt the Italians had ‘blackmailed’ them. Prime Minister Asquith remarked that ‘Russia is quite right, but it is so important to bring Italy in at once, greedy and slippery as she is, that we ought not to be too precise in haggling over this or that.’ Elsewhere he referred to ‘that most voracious, slippery and perfidious Power’. This abuse was matched by his navy minister, Winston Churchill, who described Italy as ‘the harlot of Europe’. Admiral Fisher, Britain’s irascible First Sea Lord, scorned the Italians as ‘mere organ- grinders! No use whatever.’ To Lloyd George, they were ‘the most contemptible nation’.

With rumours circulating that Austria and perhaps Germany were about to reach a separate peace with Russia, Salandra and Sonnino were on tenterhooks. Would they intervene too late to grab their portions of territory? The outlook was not improved when Austria – yielding to German pressure, abetted by bad news from the Eastern Front – agreed on 27 March to cede the south Tyrol (without Alto Adige), make Trieste autonomous, withdraw to the Isonzo, approve the occupation of Valona, and discuss Gorizia. Sonnino rejected this offer – which exceeded his demands in January – as ‘dubious and absolutely inadequate’. Fearing that he might have overpriced Italy’s support, he dropped the demand for Spalato (now Split), Dalmatia’s biggest city, which the proposal had called ‘the seat of glorious Latin civilisation and fervent Italian patriotism’. The Allies called on him to let Dalmatia be neutralised. He refused.

The new German Chief of Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, urged Conrad to withdraw from the Trentino at once. This would keep Italy neutral and could be revoked after the war. If the Central Powers lost, the territory would go anyway; the urgent thing was to disperse the ‘negative constellation’ looming over their heads. No, rejoined Conrad, this would not satisfy the ex-allies, who were planning a big offensive against the ‘heart of the monarchy’. He was right on both counts. Although unwilling to buy off the Italians, Conrad and his government were too disengaged and contemptuous to wonder what would happen if the traitors in Rome got a better offer elsewhere. Italy kept the illusion alive by not breaking off negotiations.

The Russians finally accepted that Dalmatia south of Split might be neutralised under Serbian sovereignty. Grey announced the good news on 10 April. With the major issues resolved, the diplomats focused on the detail. Salandra, meanwhile, instructed Italy’s regional governors to prepare secret reports on popular attitudes to fighting Austria. The result was an extraordinary snapshot of public opinion. In general, people were only ready to accept the prospect of war if it was a struggle for national survival against foreign invaders. Most people’s neutralism was spontaneous and passive. Anti-war feeling was strongest among peasant farmers, for whom war was a calamity like famine or plague. Even for middle-class Italians, who provided most of the pro-war passion, strong feelings about Trento and Trieste were the exception. In most places, only the intellectuals were pro-war; business leaders were not.

Neutralist opinion was strongest in the south, including Salandra’s home province of Puglia. In parts of Sardinia, the peasants and workers openly criticised the warmongers. In Naples, the governor reckoned that 90 per cent of all social classes were anti-war. As another governor pointed out, nobody had invaded their homeland, the south had no historic scores to settle, the previous year’s harvest had been poor, and the European war had blocked emigration – the traditional escape from poverty. The south was suffering already; why should anyone want an unnecessary war? In the north, the Socialists gave a backbone to neutralism, yet a broader vein of anti-Austrian feeling offset this. Only in Bologna did the governor warn that failure to intervene might create unrest. (So much for the danger of revolution.) At the same time, the governors reported high levels of trust in the government – thanks above all to the policy of neutrality which it was about to overturn! If war were declared, people would do their duty. This was the bottom line: the masses would fight.

With the Allies piling pressure on Rome, the final wrinkles were ironed out. As signed on 26 April, the Treaty of London stated that, in exchange for committing all its resources to fighting the enemies of France, Great Britain and Russia within 30 days, Italy ‘will receive’ all of south Tyrol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, Dalmatia down to Trogir, near Spalato, plus most of the islands further south to Dubrovnik. This unconditional promise, not to be found in the Allies’ other secret treaties, was a measure of Italy’s importance.3

These lands were home to some 230,000 German-speaking Austrians and up to 750,000 Slovenes and Croats, far outnumbering the 650,000 native Italians. Additionally, Italy would get Valona, giving her control over the Straits of Otranto, gateway to the Mediterranean; sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands; and a guaranteed interest in a province of Turkey if the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. If Britain and France enlarged their African colonies, Italy would be ‘equitably compensated’ with territory for its own colonies: Libya, Eritrea and Somaliland. The loan of £50 million – later described by one of Sonnino’s advisors as ‘derisory’ – was reckoned enough to underwrite the short triumphant campaign that everyone expected.

The treaty pledged its signatories to secrecy. On 1 May, Sonnino called on the cabinet to repudiate the Triple Alliance, so that Italy could seal an agreement with the Allies – an agreement that ministers did not know was already in his pocket. The repudiation followed on 4 May. Next day, the poet D’Annunzio gave a well-trailed, bloodcurdling speech in Genoa. Even though Salandra kept the King and his ministers away from Genoa, the portent was clear to everybody. Cadorna hurried to Salandra’s office. ‘But this means immediate war!’ he said. ‘Yes indeed,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘we have to go to war by the 26th of this month.’

‘What! But I don’t know anything about it!’

‘Well, you should hurry up …’

In a last bid to avert war, the Vatican persuaded Vienna to reiterate its offer of 27 March, bolstered with German guarantees. But the Austrians were flushed with recent success over the Russians and more interested in crushing Italy than bargaining. Berlin, too, had lost interest; the German foreign minister wished they only had enough troops ‘to rebuff those knaves’. After the first clash, he said, they would scamper away to southern Italy and the people would overthrow the government that had pitched them into a senseless war.

alt

Territory promised to Italy by the Allies in April 1915

The mood in Rome was so volatile that the Austrian embassy was cordoned off by cavalry and infantry with bayonets fixed. After a long absence, Giolitti returned on 9 May for the opening of parliament on the 12th. The interventionists, both those few who knew about the Treaty of London and the many who did not, saw Giolitti’s reappear ance as a threat. But he was hailed by a majority of the deputies in parliament, who hoped he would restore the opposition’s unity and focus. He told a journalist, off the record, that the ministers responsible for bringing Italy to this pass should be shot. There was no good reason to fight; Austria’s last offer was acceptable;4 Sonnino claimed to be saving the monarchy when it was not in danger.

Giolitti gave the King and Salandra the benefit of his views. The army was incapable of attacking and winning; the Central Powers were far from beaten; the war would last longer than people realised; parliament would not support the London terms; Italy’s calculations drew contempt from both sides. (‘Our new allies will be pleased for themselves, but they will despise us.’) The government should let the deputies overturn its promise to the Allies, then resume talks with Austria. Giolitti did not realise that Italy was bound by a state treaty, over which parliament had no authority to arbitrate. Salandra and the King chose not to inform him. He had overrated the King and now, again, he underrated Salandra, who pushed back the opening of parliament to 20 May and on the 13th, persuaded the entire cabinet to tender its resignation.

It was a brilliant move. Historians still interpret it as proving the weakness of his position. In reality, Salandra was daring the neutralists to take the reins of government in an atmosphere of pro-war hysteria and incipient violence. He believed the neutralists were too divided to accept the challenge; by backing down, they would destroy their credibility. His gambit fooled almost everyone. Cadorna, out of the picture as ever, was shocked. Again he sought out Salandra. ‘What are we doing?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ said Salandra demurely. ‘I may not even be prime minister any longer. Anyway I cannot give you orders.’

‘But the whole army is on the move,’ Cadorna protested. ‘Austria is wide awake to everything.’

Salandra agreed, and shrugged: ‘I cannot let you prepare for a war that may not happen.’

‘What! Should I call off the mobilisation?’ asked Cadorna, referring to the eight corps that he had quietly mobilised on 23 April, and started moving to the north-east on 4 May.

‘Yes.’

‘But, Excellency, consider what a disaster it will be if Austria beats us to it! Do you really think it is possible to stop the mechanism just like that? At least let me continue the measures in hand; let the mobilisation take its course.’

‘No,’ said Salandra, ‘I cannot do that.’ He was determined to break the will of the anti-war deputies, whatever the military cost.

Incredibly, Italy was at war within a fortnight of this conversation. The last months of neutrality could have been used as cover to initiate a discreet mobilisation, allowing Cadorna to explode across the border when war was declared. While this could not have ensured a quick victory, it would have hugely increased Italy’s chances of breaking through and seizing Trieste in 1915.

Any appetite Giolitti had felt for a showdown was spoiled when Victor Emanuel argued that the honour of the monarchy was pledged to fulfilling the Treaty of London. If the King and Prime Minister were set on war, he could only oppose them by rallying the opposition into a force that would shout as loudly as its opponents. For this, he lacked both the nerve and the populist skills at a moment when the inter ventionists, unaware of the Treaty of London, thought Italy might still opt to stay out of the war. The historian George Trevelyan saw ‘hundreds of thousands of good people of all classes’ filling the streets of Rome and other cities, ‘intoning with a slow and interminable repetition, “Death to Giolitti, Death to Giolitti.”’ Bands of students chanted ‘Up with war!’, ‘Up with D’Annunzio!’ Theatres put on anti- neutralist sketches. The press screamed for war. Mussolini, the turncoat warmonger, accused both Giolitti and the government of ‘sabotaging the Nation’s spiritual preparation for war’. Giolitti decided it was impossible to accept the King’s invitation to form a new government. On the 16th, the King rejected Salandra’s resignation. The government was reinstated and Giolitti stumped home to Piedmont, complaining about Salandra (‘it has all been a trick, in true Puglian style’).

Salandra was reinstated and the King threatened to abdicate if parliament opposed intervention. A right-wing commentator described the pending decision in the typical apocalyptic terms that made sober debate impossible:

Either Parliament will defeat the Nation and take up its trade prostituting Her sacred trembling body to the foreigner, or the Nation will overthrow Parliament, overturning the benches of the moneylenders, purifying the dens of the pimps and panders with iron and fire.

On 20 May, parliament ratified the decision to go to war. Two days later, it bound and gagged itself by authorising the government to issue decrees with the force of law on any issues concerning ‘defence of the State, maintenance of public order and the urgent needs of the national economy’. The Socialist bloc found itself alone in opposing the bill; resistance from the liberal and Catholic blocs had melted away. Even Filippo Turati, the Socialist leader, sounded beaten: ‘Let the Italian bourgeoisie have its war … there will be no winners, everyone will lose.’

On 23 May, Italy’s Ambassador Avarna in Vienna – who privately fumed against Salandra’s ‘swinish and faithless’ policy – told the Austrian government that Italy would be at war with Austria-Hungary from midnight.5 ‘It is the last war of independence’, trumpeted the Corriere della Sera. ‘Generous Italian blood prepares to trace the fulfilment of our destiny with indelible lines.’ In Rome, Cadorna embraced Salandra before cheering crowds at the railway station and set off for his headquarters in Udine. The weather was fine and clear, though still cold in the mountains.

alt

Neutrality was a façade behind which Salandra had played both ends against the middle, a means to something else – but what? Irredentism was the ostensible goal, invaluable for motivating patriots and as a label for Italy’s war aims. ‘Trento and Trieste!’ was the cry that went up from columns of new recruits, the names daubed on troop trains, not ‘Dalmatia and Valona!’ Italy’s plunge to war was decided by a blend of great power ambition and Salandra’s belief that a short, victorious war would seal his premiership. For Salandra was not obsessed by territory. He later denied having ever believed that Italy would benefit from gaining Dalmatia or the Tyrol north of Bolzano; they were to be bargaining chips after the war.

His project was something else; he wanted to move Italian politics permanently to the right by building a new anti-Socialist bloc of northern industrialists and southern landowners, who both wanted markets abroad and civic discipline at home. A genuine reactionary, Salandra aspired – as he put it in memoirs that were written, admittedly, under Fascism – to purge liberalism of its democratic ‘dross’. In today’s terms, he was a neo-conservative, promoting business over social justice while launching military adventures abroad. As has often been observed, intervention was a response to internal pressure, meant as a solution to internal problems. The crisis caused by ‘red week’ in June 1914 was formative for his premiership, and the advent of the European war a few weeks later was an opportunity that he could not pass up. For ‘only a war, with a phase of compulsory peace on the labour front and the militarisation of society, would permit the hierarchical reorgan isation of class relations’. The same analysis was made long ago by Italy’s great liberal thinker, Benedetto Croce; intervention, Croce argued, was meant to supplant the liberal order with an authoritarian regime, ‘a modern plutocracy, unencumbered with ideologies and scruples’.

It was not only élite politicians with ulterior motives who feared standing aside when Europe’s fate hung in the balance. Events themselves strengthened the belief that Italy’s whole history made war inevitable. When two members of the Garibaldi family died fighting with the French army in December 1914, their funeral in Rome drew 300,000 mourners. The interventionists could argue that their cause fulfilled Italy’s republican tradition as well as its national aspirations. In other words, even if fighting Austria proved to be a colossal mistake, it was a necessary mistake, one that self-respecting patriots should be ready to commit.6

The interventionist camp was diverse and potentially fractious, what with its neo-conservatives, industrialists wanting new markets as a valve for chronic over-production, doctrinaire nationalists committed to ‘Greater Italy’, cultural chauvinists, devotees of renewal through bloodshed, proto-fascists shrieking for expansion to accommodate the fertile Italian ‘race’, democratic anti-imperialists, syndicalist revolution aries, and Mazzinian idealists. While they bridged their differences to get Italy into the war, their rivals were incapable of such discipline. The Socialists and the Vatican could not make common cause; Giolitti could not forge an anti-war front; nobody could turn neutrality into stirring rhetoric. Italy was full of citizens who did not want to intervene, yet no way existed to leverage their opposition. It is a problem as old as politics, and still intractable.

In the end the Allies wanted Italy in the war more than the Central Powers wanted it out. One way and another, Austria helped to ensure the outcome that its Chief of Staff always thought was unavoidable. The Triple Alliance was damaged past repair by Austria’s refusal to compensate Italy after annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. Excluding Italy during July 1914 finished it off. Although the Germans leaned on their allies to make a better offer, they were not surprised by Italy’s stance. After all, Moltke had never counted on Italian support; there were no detailed plans for joint mobilisation – just as there were no German–Austrian plans for simultaneous mobilisation against Russia, Serbia and Italy.

Bülow looked back sadly at the whole saga. He bitterly regretted that Germany had not leaned harder (‘we have been the horse instead of the rider’). The weird inevitability that overhung the July crisis affected the Powers’ treatment of Italy. They acted as if Rome’s disloyalty was automatic. Even though Vienna’s attack on Serbia released Italy from its obligations, Italy might have been deterred from joining the Allies by an early compromise over Trentino and Trieste. Germany saw more clearly than Austria, perhaps because its vision was not blurred by loathing. But Vienna easily absorbed Berlin’s fitful pressure. Half a dozen years earlier, when he was chancellor, Bülow had admitted that Italy might not stand with its two allies in a European conflagration. Yet, in his view, there was no question of the Italians attacking Austria-Hungary; they lacked strength or boldness for that. In May 1915, the Italians discovered this boldness.

Two and a half years later, after the disaster of October 1917, a staff officer who served Cadorna loyally throughout the war confided some angry thoughts to his diary. Italy’s involvement in the war now looked ill-starred, tainted by falsehood from the outset.

This whole war has been a heap of lies [wrote Colonel Gatti]. We came into the war because a few men in authority, ‘the dreamers’, flung us into it. They could not accept that you don’t do politics by dreaming. Politics is reality. You don’t stake the future of a nation on a dream, a yearning for reinvigoration. It is idiotic to imagine that war can be a means of healing.

The chief spokesman of this dreaming – this idiocy – was not a politician at all, or even a soldier. It was, as we shall see, a famous poet.

Source Notes

TWO ‘We Two Alone’

1 a coup d’état in all but name: Salvatorelli [1950].

2 Isnenghi argues that: Isnenghi [1999], 17.

3 he wanted to cut the figure: Bosworth [2007], 170

4 little faith in the future of the monarchy: Martini, 393.

5 the pledge by Italy’s new chief: Rusconi, 150.

6Is it not more logical’: Quotations and details about Pollio and the Triple Alliance are from Rusconi, 27–41.

7 Italy wanted Austria’s: Rusconi, 93.

8the transport of the largest possible force’: Rusconi, 90.

9 ‘So what should I do?’: Rocca, 52.

10incompatible with the liberal principles’: Rusconi, 83.

11 Italy depended on Britain and France: Zamagni, 210.

12This may not be heroic’: Rusconi, 96, 97, 94.

13Their famous lightning strike’: Rusconi, 100

14a hundred journalists’: Rusconi, 106,

15complete and enlarge the fatherland’: Rusconi, 104

16 predicted with only partial exaggeration: Rusconi, 91.

17 the retort was doubly irrelevant: Rusconi, 121

18a good deal’: Rusconi, 122.

19 Why, then, go to war?: Rusconi, 143–4.

20 ensure Balkan and Mediterranean markets: Rochat & Massobrio, 177.

21 neutrality wassuicide’: Rusconi, 127.

22 a candid letter to Sonnino: Monticone [1972], 63–4.

23 he predicted that it would be the turning point: Rothwell, 23.

24 the Italians had ‘blackmailed’ them: Mantoux, vol. I, 477.

25Russia is quite right’: Asquith to Venetia Stanley in spring 1915. Cassar [1994].

26the harlot of Europe’: Rusconi, 24, 25.

27the most contemptible nation’: Rothwell, 86.

28wretched “pound-of-flesh” convention’: Wickham Steed, vol. 2, 66.

29 disperse thenegative constellation’: Rusconi, 146.

30 Salandra, meanwhile, instructed Italy’s regional governors: Monticone [1972]. Salandra later denied that he had ordered the 55 reports; they were, he claimed, part of a neutralist plot to keep Italy out of the war. Gibelli, 29

31 This unconditional promise, not to be found: Rothwell, 30.

32 home to some 230,000 German-speaking Austrians and up to 750,000 Slovenes and Croats: Nicolson, 161; Kernek, 264.

33 one of Sonnino’s advisors asderisory’: Sforza [1944], 44.

34But this means immediate war!’: Rocca, 66.

35 the port of Fiume was assigned to: Mantoux, vol. I, 66.

36 He told a journalist, off the record: Rusconi, 137.

37Salandra lied to me!’: Rusconi, 137

38What are we doing?’: Rocca, 68

39 Trevelyan saw ‘hundreds of thousands’: Trevelyan.

40it has all been a trick’: Rusconi, 140.

41Either Parliament will defeat the Nation’: Isnenghi & Rochat, 136.

42 decrees with the force of law: Procacci [2006], 286.

43 Salandra’s ‘swinish and faithless’: Rusconi, 139.

44 He later denied having ever believed: Mack Smith [1978], 215.

45 building a new anti-Socialist bloc: Procacci [1992].

46 purge liberalism of its democraticdross’: Rusconi, 147.

47 a solution to internal problems: Giuliano Procacci, 229.

48only a war, with a phase of compulsory’: Procacci [1992].

49a modern plutocracy, unencumbered’: From Croce’s History of Italy from 1871 to 1915, cited by Rusconi, 147.

50 proto-fascists shrieking: Alfredo Rocca, the ideologist of Italian radical nationalism, quoted by Tranfaglia.

51 no German–Austrian plans: Palumbo [1983].

52we have been the horse’: Rusconi, 141.

53 lacked strength or boldness: Rusconi, 50.

54This whole war has been’: Rusconi, 13.

1 Many in Rome still saw the Habsburg dynasty – led by ‘His Apostolic Majesty’, the Emperor – as the mainstay of Catholic values. The leader of the Catholic bloc in parliament, Paolo Boselli, who became prime minister in 1916, even claimed that Austria’s aggression against Serbia had not nullified the Triple Alliance.

2 On 1 May, accused by a British journalist of having betrayed the Yugoslavs with this ‘wretched “pound-of-flesh” convention’, the French foreign minister protested that ‘Italy put a pistol to our heads. Think what it means. Within a month there will be a million Italian bayonets in the field, and shortly thereafterwards 600,000 Romanians. Reinforcements as large as that may be worth some sacrifice, even of principle.’

3 Probably at Russia’s insistence, the port of Fiume was assigned to ‘Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro’. This provision would return to poison the peace settlement in 1919.

4 He mistakenly believed this offer included Gorizia and some Dalmatian islands. When the journalist corrected him, Giolitti went red in the face and shouted, ‘Salandra lied to me! Just like a Puglian!’

5 Italy’s decision not to declare war on Germany – hoping against reason to avoid fighting Austria’s dreaded ally – was its first violation of the terms of the Treaty of London, and cost the government in Allied goodwill. When German troops were captured on Italian soil, in the Dolomites, the government turned a blind eye. Rome declared war on Berlin in August 1916, after capturing Gorizia.

6 Alfredo Panzini, a professor from Pesaro, caught this mood in his diary: ‘We know that three-quarters of parliament do not want war, and three-quarters of the nation too: they endure it as an ananke [force of destiny]. But it really is an ananke: (continued opposite) everyone feels this … It is a terrible moment. A nation that isn’t provoked, is not attacked, indeed is being flattered, has to find the strength to throw itself into such a conflict!’ (11 May 1915)

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