Yet Mussolini’s response during these crucial months was more complex than that of a Mazzinian democrat rallying to the defence of national territory against foreign invasion. In reality, he continued to adhere to an enlarged version of Italy’s expansionist war aims, as indicated by his unaltered support for Sonnino. During the terminal crisis of the Boselli government Mussolini insisted on 27 October that ‘Sonnino must stay. He represents the ideal continuation of our foreign policy.’ We read that ‘the substitution of Sonnino would amount to a leap into the abyss . . . a triumph for the external enemies’ (OO, IX: 301-3). When Sonnino was reconfirmed at the end of the month Mussolini wrote that this represented ‘a guarantee for us’ and ‘a bitter disappointment for our enemies’ (OO, X: 11-13). On 27 November 1917 the Bolshevik government published the secret treaties which had bound Tsarist and then post-February revolutionary Russia to its allies. Over a month later Mussolini, who till then had said nothing about the published treaties, defended the Pact of London. A French socialist parliamentarian, Aime Moutet, had recently challenged Italy’s territorial pretensions beyond Trento and Trieste, arguing that the Pact of London represented the basis for future wars. Mussolini dealt case by case with Italy’s territorial claims, justifying them all (OO, X: 179-81). An exception to this was Fiume, though this is most likely because Italian acquisition of that city was not contained in the Pact of London, and could not, therefore, have been contested by Moutet.
Moutet was just the beginning. On 7 January 1918 Mussolini misinterpreted the content of Lloyd George’s 5 January speech to the Trades Union Congress, seeing in its terminology (that Italians had a right to be reunited with those of the same race and language) a de facto confirmation of Italy’s claims to the ‘Italian’ territories of the Pact of London. For Mussolini, the five cities which had to ‘return to Italy’ were ‘Trento, Gorizia, Trieste, Fiume, Zara’ (OO, X: 204-6). On 8 January he corrected his assessment of the previous day, reminding readers that Britain had entered the war on the basis of the sanctity of treaties, particularly the 1839 accord which guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium. With such loyal allies, he argued, ‘how can one doubt that . . . the peace of tomorrow will be the one we want?’ (OO, X: 207-9). The hint, clearly, was that the peace would be based on Britain’s loyalty to the treaty with which Italy entered the war as Britain’s ally in 1915. On 13 January Mussolini stated that in both Lloyd George’s and Wilson’s speeches
Austria-Hungary ‘has had a lot of good things said about it. Too good perhaps’ (OO, X: 223-6). That same day he revealed the extent of his concern over Italy’s declining position in the world by coming out of semi-anonymity. Since 15 June 1917 he had been signing his articles with the sole letter M, as we have seen. But the gravity of the situation after Caporetto compelled him to intervene with the full force of his political persona, and thus use his full surname. He argued that it was necessary for the American and British leaders to clarify what they meant so that the ‘bad feeling which disturbs the [Italian] national conscience is rapidly eliminated’. He went into a philological analysis of the ninth point of Wilson’s speech which, as we have seen, had referred to a ‘readjustment’ of Italy’s borders along lines of nationalities. The Italian translation had come out as sistemazione which Mussolini then compared to the French translation, reajustement. He noted a significant difference between the two terms: the Italian one implying a ‘sorting out’ of Italy’s territorial ambitions, the French one reducing Italy’s ‘fundamental problem of life or death’ to ‘a secondary, almost incidental question’. In challenging Lloyd George’s assertion that the Italian-speaking populations of the Balkans had a right to be reunited with those of the same race and language, Mussolini argued that the British Prime Minister did not say where those populations were to be found, and hence did not clarify Italy’s territorial claims. For Mussolini, then, Italy’s borders were to expand ‘from the mountains to the Adriatic’ to incorporate those populations (OO, X: 227-9). Wherever there were Italians there was Italy.
How could Mussolini reconcile this position with his support a few months later for the pro-nationalities Pact of Rome? In an article of 30 March 1918 he inveighed against the nationalist imperialists for continuously putting democracy on trial as a concept alien to war, whereas there was no need, in his view, to presume such an antithesis, since ‘the policies of Lloyd George are imperialist and democratic’ (OO, X: 415-18). Renzo De Felice saw this article as ongoing proof of Mussolini’s still democratic conception of the war, but his quotation from the piece removes all references to imperialism (De Felice, 1965: 399). The practical application of Mussolini’s concept was evident in articles of 22 and 24 January 1918 in which he pointed out that if a policy of fraternization with the Balkan peoples was not pursued, Italy would have to prepare itself for ‘great or small [territorial] renunciations’ (OO, X: 261-3, 267-9). More explicit again was an article of 15 February: ‘The Pact of London cannot be realized without a defeated Austria; and Austria cannot be disastrously beaten without a synchrony between military action and the political struggle of the nationalities oppressed within’ (OO, X: 327-9: see also 276-9, 321-5, 332-5, 339-41; XI: 88-90). This, it should be noted, was also the strategy of the Pact of Rome. Giovanni Amendola, a member of the Italian delegation, noted that ‘not only was the Pact of London not undervalued or suppressed, but we actually managed to convey the concept of its usefulness for all nationalities in as much as it committed the Entente to fighting to the end against Austria- Hungary’ (Amendola, 1919: 21). While it was never an official accord, the Pact of Rome’s ambiguous strategy was reflected in government policy. At the same time as Orlando was giving his blessing to the agreement, Sonnino was informing the American government that the Pact of London was unchanged (Vivarelli, 1991, I: 213). On 8 September 1918 Bissolati convinced the Italian cabinet to recognize the Yugoslav national movement. This was made public in Italy on 25 September and with the full approval of Mussolini (OO, XI: 373-7). It should be noted, however, that while the cabinet acknowledged the Yugoslav national movement it did not recognize Yugoslavia or a Yugoslav programme. No Yugoslav legion was formed in Italy despite the fact that 20,000 Yugoslav prisoners had volunteered to serve at the Italian front (Valiani, 1966a: 369-70).
How, though, did Mussolini and the government’s foreign policy stand in relation to the defensive war being conducted at the military level? On 3 April Ferdinand Foch received the command of allied strategic operations and in that same month, and again in July, he requested Italian offensives on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni. These were both rejected by Diaz, who was convinced that the French saw the Italian war theatre as merely complementary to their own (Cervone, 1994: 159-60). Yet while this coincided with Mussolini’s calls for defensive war after Caporetto, already in an article of 3 January 1918 Mussolini could be seen using a tactic of defence for the ultimate aim of victory, which could only be achieved by an offensive military strategy. He warned the nation thus: ‘Don’t believe for one minute that from now on our task in the world war is that of only stopping the boche from climbing down from the Altopiano or crossing the Piave. Convince yourself, rather, that we need . . . to pass in the shortest time possible from the defensive to the offensive in order to liberate our provinces before the end of the war, since it is essential that we take, through arms, this precious Italian territory from the hands of our enemies’ (OO, X: 194-6; Mussolini’s emphasis). The proximity of this statement to Moutet’s intervention in the French Parliament cannot be coincidental. Nor can it be fortuitous that on 15 January Mussolini claimed that Britain and America’s changing behaviour towards Italy was ‘due to our defeat at Caporetto’ and that Italy needed ‘to begin the war again, with desperate obstinacy’ (OO, X: 236-9). On 20 February we read: ‘It is said that to call for a maximum anti-Habsburg programme from the banks of the Piave is utopian. But we reply that it is precisely because we are on the Piave that the maximum programme is imposed on us. Either the Pact of London . . . or a peace signed on the Piave. This latter policy is, however, inadmissible, for the honour and future of Italy’ (OO, X: 339-41).
Despite the importance he ascribed to this issue, Mussolini left it aside, dedicating almost all articles between 23 February and 23 March to domestic matters (which will be discussed in the following chapter), the massive German offensive on the western front which began on 21 March (OO, X: 398-9, 402-4, 405-6, 407-9, 410-11, 412-14, 419-21, 422-3), the Congress of Rome (OO, X: 433-5, 436-9, 440-41), and the Clemenceau Czernin affair (OO, X: 424-7; OO, XI: 5-7). But, following the unexpectedly successful second German offensive in Flanders beginning 9 April, he returned to the theme of the offensive on 18 April, arguing that by continuing in what he called the ‘passive strategy’ the most the allies could hope for was ‘not to lose’ (OO, XI: 10-13). After a third surprise attack on 27 April had brought the Germans to the Marne, he briefly returned to the subject on 6 May, noting that the same critique of the ‘passive strategy’ and the continuous ‘waiting for “punches in the stomach”’ had been expounded in the French journal La Revue des Deux Mondes (OO, XI: 43), an article which he translated and reproduced in IL Popolo d’Italia. On 3 June he raised the subject with even more vigour, this time pointing to military theory to back his argument. He wrote that ‘the purely and simply defensive strategy is an imbecilic absurdity’ and that ‘the texts, the sacred texts, the extremely sacred official and unofficial texts of military schools [say] that only the offensive gives victory’ (OO, XI: 105-7). It is therefore noteworthy that during the Austro-Hungarian June offensive Mussolini was only concerned with the defensive as a tactic, never as a strategy. On 16 June he stated that ‘if our troops manage to block the enemy’s impetus in the front lines, as has happened to this point, [Caporetto] will be cancelled, and as it was for eleven times previously, victory will return to being Italian’ (OO, XI: 128-9). This could not occur solely by blocking the enemy’s forward thrust, and the following day he argued (incorrectly) that the Italian defence against the Austro-Hungarian June offensive had been marked by its transformation, within twenty-four hours, into a counter-offensive (OO, XI: 130-31). Clearly all this put Mussolini out of tune with the defensively minded High Command around Diaz. Or did it?
A number of factors militate against drawing one-sided conclusions on this issue. Diaz, like the British and French, was sure the war would not end until the following spring at the earliest. Moreover, after Caporetto he had had to reconstruct not just the morale of the army but its logistics. Then, following the Austro- Hungarian June offensive, he was over 85,000 men down and was fearful of a transfer of German troops to the Italian front. Finally, a failed Italian attack would have given the Austro-Hungarian Army a significant boost (Rostan, 1974: 220-21). But the possible long-term political repercussions of such an approach were expressed by the Italian ambassador to France, Bonin Langare, in an 8 September letter to Orlando. Clearly feeling the pressure of a French press campaign against Italian inaction, he wrote: ‘On the one hand our allies ask us to undertake an offensive to which the most competent judge, our High Command, feels unable to consent; on the other the renunciation of an offensive threatens to lead us insensitively to a military isolation which could also have the long term effect of a type of political isolation’ (quoted in Cervone, 1994: 161). Indeed, while Diaz’ stance was supported completely by Nitti, and somewhat less by Orlando, it was rejected totally by Sonnino who was concerned that Italian passivity would endanger the Pact of London during the peace negotiations (Cervone, 1994: 154-6).
In France, the tide definitively turned in the Entente’s favour after their June-August counter-attack, and on 3 September Foch ordered unceasing offensives along the whole of the western front. The Germans began retreating from the St Mihiel Salient on 8 September and in the following days were shaken by an enormous attack which saw American troops in action (Gilbert, 1994: Chs 24 and 25). On 12 September Mussolini urged those readers impatient for Italian action to ‘keep calm’, assuring them that ‘Diaz’ hour will also come’. But he could likewise not help noticing that the success of Foch’s counter-offensive on the western front ‘highlights our three-month long inaction’ (OO, XI: 351-3). Further allied successes were achieved in the Balkans and Palestine in mid- to late September. By 8 October the Hindenburg Line had been broken and twelve Belgian divisions, accompanied by one French and one British army corps, recaptured Dixmude and from there moved to the Lys. Fearing, not without reason, that the war would end with the Italian Army still on the Piave, Diaz began to move.