ONE
On the eve of the First World War, the Isonzo valley was securely Austrian territory. Since the Middle Ages, the river and its environs had belonged to the House of Habsburg. In 1914, the Isonzo ran through the western edge of the Austrian Littoral, the province of Kustenland. The Littoral, one of the smallest Habsburg dominions, consisted of the province of Trieste and the margravate of Istria, 938,000 subjects in all. The population of the Littoral was highly diverse, like Austria herself: by language, 46 percent Italian, 31 percent Slovene, 21 percent Croatian, and only 2 percent German-Austrian. As varied geographically as it was ethnically, Kustenland extended from the snow-capped Julian Alps to the head of the sunny Adriatic and down to the end of the Istrian Peninsula, including several scenic islands.
The province's capital was Trieste, its only large city. A natural port well positioned at the head of the Adriatic, Trieste had been established in Roman times, during the reign of Augustus. It voluntarily entered the Habsburg realm in 1382 and enjoyed modest prosperity; its more successful and much larger Adriatic rival, Venice, had for centuries been Trieste's main competitor for trade and prominence. Trieste was made a free port in the eighteenth century to help commerce, but the city's economic takeoff came with the extension of the Vienna railway in 1857. The arrival of the Siidbahn, coupled with a high Austrian protective tariff, made Trieste a major port, bringing new business and prosperity to the city; by the eve of the First World War, it was the eighth busiest port on earth. Its great shipping company, Lloyd Triestino, was world renowned. With economic expansion came jobs and unprecedented immigration. By 1914 Trieste boasted a population of 243,000 to match its new-found wealth.
The Littoral's other city was the much smaller and less bustling Gorizia, on the east bank of the Isonzo little more than twenty-five miles northwest of Trieste. It, too, had been settled in the Roman era, and had belonged to the Habsburgs since the Renaissance. It was a successful market town as early as the fifteenth century, and became a local textile center a hundred years after that. Even so, Gorizia, bounded on the west by the Isonzo and on the east by the last of the Julian Alps, was noted more for its pleasant climate and scenic vistas than for its riches. Its population, 31,000 in 1914, had not expanded greatly in past decades. The "City of Violets," in fact, was regarded as a pensioners' colony, particularly for retired Austrian Army officers, who enjoyed its comfortable Mediterranean atmosphere, relaxed charm, and affordability.
Except for the port of Pola at the tip of the Istrian Peninsula, the headquarters of Austria's fleet, the rest of the Littoral was mostly poor and agricultural, dotted with small farming villages and trading towns. At the province's southern end, Istria included numerous fishing villages living off the natural wealth of the Adriatic, as well as many peasant settlements in the peninsula's more mountainous inland region. Moving north along Istria's Adriatic coast, passing the small ports of Pirano and Capodistria, Trieste arose where the mountains disappeared. Just north of the capital, the impressive Miramare Castle jutted into the Adriatic. Commissioned in 1856 by Emperor Franz Joseph's ill-fated younger brother, Archduke Maxmilian, the magnificent Miramare was only briefly enjoyed by Maxmilian and his family before their voyage to Mexico. Beyond the castle, a dozen miles north of Trieste, lay the Carso, the unique and desolate "world of rock" that stretched to the banks of the Isonzo and the edge of Gorizia. The Carso was a plateau of naked limestone, nearly devoid of vegetation and marked by countless depressions and crevasses. The depressions, known as dolinas, were formed by centuries of chemical erosion of the rock, and served as occasional oases. There plants could take root, including vines that produced the region's sharp terrano wines.' The dolinas also offered protection against the Carso's often harsh climate. The summer months were typically pleasant, with cool, clean breezes, although the limestone could become extremely hot; indeed, many Triestine families retreated to the plateau during July and August to escape the city's lowland heat. Winter on the Carso, however, was far less welcoming. Then it was buffeted by the bora, a fierce, cold wind from the north caused by the meeting of the high pressure fronts of southeastern Europe and the low pressure of central Italy. The relatively few inhabitants of the Carso endured the annual arrival of the bora, eking out a meager existence farming the rocky fields, living off a diet of jota, a staple soup of barley, beans, pork, and whatever else might be at hand. In the half century before the war, the Austrian forestry service had made heroic efforts to make the Carso bloom, partly to moderate the effects of the bora. Despite the planting of fifteen million trees by 1914, most of them black pines, the stony Carso remained a harsh, uninviting place to live.
North of the Carso, across the Vipacco River, a tributary of the Isonzo, Gorizia lay between the limestone plateau and the Julian Alps farther to the north. On the Isonzo's west bank were Gorizia's few factories and workshops, in the shadow of Podgora hill. East of the city the heavily forested Ternova plateau, dotted by occasional villages, dominated Gorizia with mountains up to 2,200 feet. North along the Isonzo, against its current, the fashionable suburb of Salcano stood at the mouth of a considerable river gorge, with Mt. Sabotino (2,010 ft.) to the west and Mt. Santo (2,250 ft.) to the east. The latter mountain was particularly noted for a medieval monastery at its peak that overlooked Gorizia and the entire lower Isonzo. After Salcano the river passed between steep Alpine peaks and gradually narrowed. At the town of Plava, five miles upstream, the Isonzo shifted eastward, its course taking it past several quiet villages of white stucco houses with red tile roofs, perched on the river's east bank, that stood out against the green forests of the Bainsizza plateau. With peaks as high as 2,400 feet, the sparsely populated Bainsizza was the main topographical feature of the central Isonzo valley. Four miles farther north, at the town of Tolmein,just beyond the Bainsizza, the river shifted westward again, becoming the fast-running upper Isonzo, surrounded on all sides by the high Julian Alps. Tolmein and the town of Karfreit, eight miles upstream, were overlooked from the east bank by the 7,410-foot Mt. Krn, snow-capped year-round, the highest peak in the valley. The ever narrower and bluer Isonzo turned east again at Saga before reaching the market town of Flitsch, the last settlement of any size in the valley, at the foot of the imposing Mt. Rombon (7,290 ft.). Northeast of Flitsch, the river disappeared into the high Julian Alps and the snows that gave it birth.
The Littoral was one of the most beautiful and tranquil regions of the Habsburg realm, indeed of all Europe. Yet even after decades of peace, stability, and increasing prosperity, particularly in Trieste, the province was plagued by a seemingly intractable problem. Like so much of Europe in 1914, and the Habsburg lands in particular, the Littoral was sharply divided by ethnicity and nationalism. The national question loomed large in all areas of life in the Isonzo valley and Trieste. The Italian majority saw itself increasingly threatened by the province's large and growing Slav population. Trieste and Gorizia remained majority Italian, but the countryside was overwhelmingly Slav. Outside the cities, Italians outnumbered Slavs only along the lower Isonzo near Gorizia. The province's hinterland was otherwise Slovene and Croatian. The villages and countryside of the upper Isonzo were entirely Slovene, as was much of the Carso. The Istrian Peninsula was Italian only along the coast; its interior was Croatian. Even the Italians of Trieste and Gorizia felt threatened. The smaller city was by language half Italian and almost a third Slovene, with German-Aus trians making up most of the rest. The Slovene percentage was growing every year in Gorizia, but the City of Violets was not large or important enough to be a major rallying point for Italian nationalists. Trieste, however, was another matter entirely.
Trieste had always been an unquestionably Italian city, even if it was subject to Vienna rather than Rome. For centuries it had served as a distant outpost of Italian culture, the northeastern frontier of an ancient Latin civilization. Trieste had produced its share of Italian literary and artistic successes, most recently the novelist Italo Svevo; it was something of an international writers' mecca in the years before the war, receiving visits from well known literati, including Rainer Maria Rilke and more notably James Joyce, who spent several pleasant years with his family in Trieste. In 1914, the Italian majority of Trieste (65 percent of the city's population, versus 24 percent Slovene) should have felt secure. The city's elite, including the powerful mercantile class, remained solidly Italian, whereas the Slavs, mostly recent arrivals from the countryside, were confined to the proletarian and servant classes and some minor positions in the civil service. No less significantly, the Austrian government had historically favored the Italians, giving them substantial political privileges not shared by the Habsburg realm's other minorities.
Still, for many triestini the Slav threat seemed only too real. The burgeoning Slav population-the numbers of Slovenes in Trieste grew 130 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the suburbs were already majority Slav-forecast a dire future for Trieste as a uniquely Italian city. Trieste was unquestionably a Slovene city too: there were more Slovenes living in Trieste than in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia after 1918. To the city's Italian upper and middle classes, the "Slav peril" endangered their entire way of life. Their Slavophobia grew every year, with each revelation of ever increasing numbers of Slovenes leaving peasant farming for modest employment in the city, particularly after 1907, when Austria introduced universal male suffrage. The high Slav birthrate only increased Italian paranoia. The Littoral's Italians saw themselves as urban defenders of an ancient civilization imperiled by masses of primitive, priest-ridden Slav peasants.
Trieste's reality was inevitably more complex than Italian nationalist fears portrayed it. Latins and Slavs had lived side by side in the Littoral quite peaceably for centuries. The Slavs, though undeniably mostly peasants, were by no means newcomers: the ancestors of the Slovenes arrived in the Isonzo region in the early Middle Ages. More tellingly, many of Trieste's elite were Italians by language and culture, not by ethnicity. A substantial number of the city's "Italians" were, in fact, Italian-speaking Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other minorities who had assimilated linguistically and culturally with the majority Italians, often quite recently. In a typical case, the Trieste Jew Aron Schmitz transformed himself into Italo Svevo, thus becoming a successful Italian writer whose italianita was never questioned. The assimilation of the non-Slav minorities was total and enthusiastic. Indeed, many of the most ardent Italian nationalists in Trieste and the Littoral were of distinctly non-Latin descent; they compensated for their foreign origins with the zeal of converts, and were among the loudest denouncers of "Slav barbarism." Additionally, the advancement of some Slavs from the working class into the lower ranks of the province's civil service, a rise that mortified the Italians, was attributable largely to Italian arrogance. Even the lowest-paid position in the state bureaucracy required fluency in both Italian and Slovene (or Croatian): any educated Slav knew Italian, whereas few Italians could be bothered to learn Slav languages, despised as "peasant tongues" Thus the rise in the Slovene population in Trieste was a complex phenomenon, politically and ethnically. Nevertheless, the Littoral's Italian elite lived in fear of the eventual overwhelming of their Austrian province by Slavs. At the least, educated Italians wanted special state protection for their privileged economic and cultural position. In the last decade of peace, the Italian nationalists' tone grew increasingly alarmist. Many of them saw union with neighboring Italy as the only relief from the ever growing Slav threat.
For many Italians living west of the Isonzo, across the border in the Italian nation-state, the specter of Slavs overwhelming their conationals in the Littoral was simply intolerable. The possible cultural extinction of an ancient Italian city by Slovene peasants was no longer merely an internal Austrian matter; it was becoming an international issue of major proportions. Italian nationalists had always hated the Habsburgs anyway. Italy was still a very young state, dating only to 1861, and its unity had to be wrested from the Austrians step by step, and always at considerable cost. The national revolutions of 1848 to force the occupying Austrians out of northern Italy had been crushed unexpectedly and bloodily by the octogenarian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky and his army of Slavs, Germans, and Hungarians. The Italians were more successful in 1859, pushing the Austrians out of Lombardy, although only with considerable French help. In 1866, the Italians attacked the Austrians while the Prussians distracted most of the Habsburg Army in Bohemia. In the peace settlement Vienna gave Rome its last wholly Italian province, Venetia, leaving relatively few Italians under Habsburg authority. It was therefore an unshakable tenet of Italian nationalist faith that Austria was Italy's mortal enemy, and that all Italians living under Habsburg mistreatment had to be liberated.
There were other compelling reasons why Austria and all it represented were so detested by patriotic Italians of all political denominations. Unified Italy was a modern, liberal-minded nation-state, strongly anticlerical in outlook (it had occupied the Papal States in 1870, leaving the pope effectively a prisoner in his Vatican enclave). In stark contrast, Austria-Hungary was an anachronism, the last Catholic great power, a throwback to premodern Europe in an age of secularism and nationalism; it remained a highly diverse multinational empire, conservative in politics and clerical in matters of faith. For these reasons the Habsburg possession of any ethnically Italian territory was anathema to nationalists of all stripes. To them, the Austrian frontier provinces were Italia irredenta, "unredeemed Italy."
The Littoral was the nationalists' primary objective, the land most in need of redemption by Rome. It was there that italianita was most threatened. The entire province was claimed by irredentists, who saw its union with Rome as the only way to complete Italy's natural borders and to save Trieste from the Slav threat. The province's Slav majority was not worthy of consideration. Irredentist claims also included the Trentino, the southern part of the Austrian province of Tyrol. The Tyrol, overall nearly two-fifths Italian, was divided by high mountain ranges that had served as an ethnic boundary for more than a thousand years. The land south of the mountains, the Trentino, was over 95 percent Italian, whereas the territory to its north was equally German. The irredentists' ethnic claim to the Trentino was therefore very good. However, very few Tyrolean Italians desired union with Italy. Conservative and devoutly Catholic farmers, they had lived peacefully and moderately prosperously under the Habsburgs for centuries, and felt no need to be redeemed by their liberal and secular neighbor.
Even so, the political movement to unite the Littoral and the Trentino with Italy dated to the early years of the Italian nation-state. In 1877, a leading nationalist formed the Association for Italia irredenta, with the aim of agitating against Austria. More peacefully, the Dante Alighieri Society was established in 1889 to spread Italian culture and the cause of irredentism among Austria's Italian minority. In the end, the objective of both organizations-union of the Littoral and Trentino with Italy-was identical. The irredentist cause soon also had a cause celebre. In 1882 the Austrian government executed Guglielmo Oberdan, a twenty-four-year-old Austrian citizen, for attempting to assassinate Emperor Franz Joseph during an official visit to Trieste. The Triestine Oberdan (born Wilhelm Oberdank-like so many ardent nationalists from the Littoral, he was ethnically a Slav), a former student at the University of Vienna, was serving as an officer cadet in the Austrian Army when Vienna invaded Bosnia in 1878. Outraged by the invasion, Oberdan deserted and fled to Italy, becoming a devout irrendentist. He sneaked back into Austria to kill the emperor, but his plan was foiled. Franz Joseph reluctantly condoned the death sentence. Oberdan's death gave the irredentist cause its first martyr.
The idea of wresting Italia irredenta from Austrian control appealed to many Italians in senior military and civil positions, for both nationalist and strategic reasons. However, until the First World War irredentism was destined to remain a private and unofficial enthusiasm. Officially, Italy was committed to Austria's territorial integrity. More than that, the Habsburg Empire was Italy's main ally. In 1882, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin agreed to form the Triple Alliance, a defensive pact that bound the three states together militarily. Italy, afraid of being diplomatically and militarily isolated, had allied herself with her traditional enemy. The three powers even undertook considerable secret military planning to put Italian armies in the field alongside their former adversaries. Relations between the Latin and Teutonic powers, though sometimes strained, remained cordial. The only way for Italy to gain Italia irredenta was through conquest-Vienna would never part with her provinces without a fight-but there was no point in contemplating war against an ally. Up to 1914, irredentism was a strident voice in Italian national life, but always one well removed from the centers of power.
It was just as well that Rome gave little thought to winning the Littoral and the Trentino on the field of battle, for the Italian military was widely considered to be weak and ineffective. Certainly the recent record of Italian arms left ample room for doubt. Although Italian soldiers often fought bravely, the army's leadership at all levels had failed to distinguish itself in battle. In 1848, Radetzky's outnumbered, ragtag army bested the Piedmontese, and in 1859 the Italians generally performed poorly compared with their French allies and their Austrian adversaries. In 1866, the Austrians, although quickly defeated by the Prussians in Bohemia, made short work of the Italians both on land and at sea, winning stunning and unexpected victories at Custozza and Lissa. Four years later, the Italians dared occupy Rome only because the French were busy resisting the Prussian invasion of 1870. Italy's fighting record in the colonies was hardly better. An attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1896, at the height of the European scramble for Africa, led to the slaughter of several Italian brigades at Adua, the only significant defeat of a European army by a native force during the nineteenth century. The performance of the Italian Army in Libya in 19111912, although somewhat better, still left considerable doubt about the professional competence of the officer corps. The Italian military seemed consistently badly organized, poorly trained and led, and shabbily equipped. The army was far more effective at breaking strikes and suppressing peasant uprisings-missions assigned to it all too frequently-than at defeating foreign adversaries. Its performance inspired little confidence among Italy's political leadership.
The military could not convincingly claim that financial neglect had caused its poor reputation. The army and navy consumed a large proportion of Rome's finances-from 1861 to 1913, a total of 17.4 percent of state spending, a percentage that grew rapidly in the last half-decade of peace. Italian military spending, although not proportionally as high as German or French, nonetheless consumed a larger part of the budget than in several other European countries, Austria included. The last peacetime budget devoted 650 million lire to military spending, but only 150 million to education. The army was indeed poorly equipped, but this was attributable to Italy's economic backwardness, not to governmental parsimony. Italian industry staged impressive gains in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth: between 1896 and 1914, industrial output rose by nearly 90 percent, and steel production grew tenfold. That said, Italy remained an overwhelmingly agricultural country. Little more than a sixth of the workforce was employed in manufacturing and industry, whereas 60 percent lived off the land. Eighty percent of those were landless peasants, and an alarming 54 percent were casual day laborers. The North in particular had begun to industrialize impressively, but Italy on the whole remained a poor, underdeveloped country. It thus had no hope of competing with major European powers in the arms race that engulfed the continent before the First World War. Worse, Italy had depressingly few natural resources, and was overwhelmingly dependent on foreign fuels and raw materials; in a typical year, 90 percent of Italian coal was imported from Britain. Even the impressive increases in steel output amounted to little progress: Italy produced 90,000 tons of steel annually, whereas Germany and Austria together produced 20 million. Economic weakness placed strong limits on Italy's military potential.
The military and industrial bureaucracies only made matters worse. By 1898, it was evident that the army's main field gun was obsolete, and that an entirely new model was required. The domestic arms industry was small and outmoded, so the army looked for a foreign model to produce under license. The process of choosing a gun took fourteen years. The cumbersome bureaucracy further delayed the production of new guns. The industrial consortium of twenty-seven firms contracted to build the new 75mm cannon proved so awkward and slow that the army did not receive deliveries of the gun until mid-1915, seventeen years after it decided to acquire new artillery.
Yet the Italian Army's material weaknesses were perhaps not its most serious defects. The army's problems as an institution were potentially even more ominous. Italy, although a nation-state, was in truth a collection of widely varying, and often mutually hostile, regions. The economic, political, and cultural disparities between North and South appeared unbridgeable; the widespread particularism of cities and districts within regions was hardly less notable. Beyond a flag, a Piedmontese and a Calabrian, or a Venetian and a Sardinian, had little else to unite them. The Italian language was divided into so many dialects that communication was sometimes impossible. As a truly national institution, the army offered the state a unique opportunity to unite Italy and to build a loyalty to the nation that would supersede regional identity. Italy, like all continental European powers, introduced conscription by the 1870s, sending fit young men to the military for three years' mandatory service. Conscription was implemented to bring more recruits to the army, but also to foster national unity. It was to be a "school of national education" for the millions of young Italian men who passed through its ranks. The army offered the first-and frequently, the only-chance for peasants to leave the fields and see the world beyond their villages, meeting young men of other regions. The army, the only truly national institution, was well placed to help unite a very divided country.
Sadly for nationalists, the army on the whole failed to produce a united nation. In the first place, the army was barely united itself. The Royal Italian Army was an amalgam of different forces with unique traditionsPiedmontese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, and others. These regional armies were proud of their heritage, including a history of fighting each other. The marriage was not always a happy one, and the Regio Esercito was not as united as its founders had hoped. As in Italy generally, Piedmontese custom dominated the army, to the frustration of other regions. The favoritism shown toward Northern, and especially Piedmontese, officers in promotion, particularly marked in the higher ranks, was a perpetual sore point. The army did try to act as the school of the nation, but its policies were frequently cumbersome and ineffectual. It was not recruited regionally, as in most European armies, but through a complex system that placed political concerns over military ones. Each regiment drew its recruits from two different regions and sent them to a third. (The Alpini, elite mountain troops recruited in the Alpine North, were an exception.) This entailed uniting men who sometimes had little in common-if their dialects were too varied, simple communication was a problem-and dispatching them to a "safe" region of the country. For example, conscripted Sicilians were sent far from home, usually up north, while their island was garrisoned by men from distant regions; this ensured that soldiers would not be overly sympathetic to the local population, a practical consideration, given how frequently the army was called upon to quell domestic disturbances. This policy, although politically astute, did not contribute to unit cohesion and morale. It made mobilization slow and cumbersome, and the supply of replacements complicated.
The building of regimental spirit and national identity was the mission of the officer corps. Unfortunately for the army, its officers frequently were not up to the peacetime tasks assigned them. Although the army enjoyed some prestige in Italian society, it still had trouble recruiting intelligent, hardworking young men for the officer corps. Too often it got those unsuitable for other professions who were interested neither in soldiering nor in their men. Worse, the army tended to promote timeservers and bureaucrats to its highest ranks. As former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti noted on the eve of the First World War, "The generals are worth little, they came up from the ranks at a time when families sent their most stupid sons into the army because they did not know what to do with them." This judgment, though harsh and indicative of the politicians' low opinion of the army, was largely valid. Too few officers took an active interest in tactics or strategy, and fewer still seemed concerned with their men. The relationship between officers and men was invariably distant; the bourgeois officers were no more likely to show concern for their peasant recruits than their civilian counterparts were. This was worsened by the fact that the army was chronically short of professional sergeants. The NCO corps was smaller than in most European armies-Italy did not produce enough educated men of the lower middle class, the backbone of the noncommissioned ranks-with the result that most training had to be undertaken by officers, who rarely showed sufficient interest in their men. The army's nation-building mission was further complicated by Italy's high illiteracy rate-37.6 percent nationally, and far higher in the rural areas that provided most of the infantry-which made political indoctrination difficult.
Unsurprisingly, military service was widely unpopular. Many peasants and workers considered the army an instrument of political oppression, associating it more with the protection of the upper classes than with the defense of the nation against foreign threats. They also rejected its harsh discipline. Draft avoidance was a chronic problem, particularly in Sicily. In 1914, Italy's last year of peace, more than 10 percent of conscripts failed to report for duty, just short of an all-time absentee record. To sum up, the condition of the Italian military on the eve of the First World War was an unenviable one.
The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Serbian terrorists plunged Europe into an unprecedented international crisis. While Vienna and Berlin solidified their alliance, and London, Paris, and St. Petersburg discussed their common concerns, and Europe divided into armed camps, Rome was unsure how to respond to the escalating crisis. Few Italians of any political persuasion favored going to war over the Austrian-Serbian dispute, and many nationalists and irredentists were adamant that Italy not fight on the side of hated Austria. Still, the Triple Alliance committed Italy to come to her allies' side in their hour of need. Long-standing diplomatic arrangements had placed Rome in a difficult predicament. Domestic problems further complicated matters. In early June, Italy was shaken by a series of violent urban strikes and peasant uprisings. The crisis, known as "Red Week," was so serious that the army had to deploy 100,000 soldiers, many of them recalled reservists, before order was restored. By the time the cities and countryside were again tranquil, seventeen rioters were dead and more than a thousand were injured. Italy was still reeling from the shock of Red Week and its bloody aftermath when the Sarajevo crisis unfolded. Never had national unity seemed so lacking. A decision for war would have been unwise, given the country's recent domestic trauma.
Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, in office only since March, had no desire to launch a divided Italy into a major war on the side of Austria and Germany. Rome's treaty obligations seemed to dictate intervention, however. Foreign Minister Antonino di San Giuliano wanted to fight alongside Austria no more than Salandra did. He noted that the Triple Alliance treaty did not require Italy to come to her allies' aid in an offensive war, which Vienna's ultimatum to Ser bia seemed to indicate; furthermore, Article VIII of the treaty promised Italy adequate territorial compensation for any Austrian advances. On these grounds, di San Giuliano argued that Italy was not committed to backing her allies. On July 31, 1914, the cabinet decided in favor of neutrality in the impending war. The decision was formally announced on August 2, sending shock waves throughout Europe. At once, Rome had decisively shifted the balance of power in favor of the Triple Entente-France, Britain, and Russia-at the expense of her allies. It was a momentous decision politically and militarily, helping to determine the early course of the coming conflict. It was also an act of betrayal that Austria and Germany would not soon forget.
In Italy, however, the decision for neutrality was met with nationwide celebration. The threat of an unpopular war had been averted. Salandra's abandonment of Italy's allies was greeted enthusiastically by virtually all political parties and interests. Disappointment was heard from only some archconservatives, who were pro-German, and ultranationalists, who favored war for its own sake. The military was also happy not to be going to war. The army and navy both had doubts about their ability to wage war effectively. The army in particular was in a state of disarray at the highest level. The army's professional head, Chief of the General Staff General Alberto Pollio, died on July 1, as the international crisis was unfolding. His replacement, General Luigi Cadorna, did not assume his new position until three weeks later, leaving the army effectively without a high command while Europe girded for war. Upon becoming chief of the General Staff, Cadorna began to prepare the army for war against France, as the Triple Alliance had mandated. Due to the complete lack of communication between the politicians and generals that was all too common, Cadorna was not informed that the government was contemplating abandoning its allies. On July 31, the day that the cabinet opted for neutrality, Cadorna sent his war plan, which called for the dispatch of an entire Italian field army to assist Germany against France, to King Vittorio Emanuele III. On August 2, the day neutrality was officially declared, the king-as unaware as his top general of the politicians' decision-approved Cadorna's plan! The chief of the General Staff and the monarch were completely surprised when Italy formally opted for nonintervention.
As soon as Italy had formally renounced its obligation to its allies, Cadorna encouraged Foreign Minister di San Giuliano to declare war on Austria. The general saw a perfect opportunity to attack Italy's historic foe in its unprotected rear while Habsburg armies were busy fighting Serbia and Russia. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed in Rome, despite Cadorna's repeated proddings throughout August to invade Austria. This radical overnight shift in positions, from invading France to assaulting Austria's undefended border, should have given rise to doubts in Rome about Cadorna's professional judgment. Instead, Cadorna's counsel was ignored, his odd behavior overlooked. Yet the general's poor judgment was a portent of things to come. He was a typical highflier in the Italian military system, boasting good personal connections and solid career credentials. Born into a Piedmontese family with a long military tradition-his father was a successful general, famed for conquering the Vatican in 1870-the sixty-four-year-old Count Luigi Cadorna had spent virtually his entire life in uniform. He was sent at age ten to Milan's prestigious military college, and at fifteen to Turin's military academy, and was commissioned in the field artillery at eighteen. He attended and excelled at all the right schools to secure promotion, including the all-important Staff College, which opened the doors of higher command to the young officer. Like most successful products of the Staff College, Cadorna spent most of his career at headquarters and on staffs, away from field units. His experience actually commanding soldiers was therefore limited. Significantly, although Cadorna was considered an astute student of tactics, he had missed both the Ethiopian and the Libyan wars. He had never heard a shot fired in anger. This in no way hurt his career. He achieved general rank at the age of forty-eight, young by Italian standards, rising to command a division in 1905 and a corps in 1910. When appointed chief of the General Staff, Cadorna was serving as commander of the 2nd Army, one of the most senior positions in the army.
Although he was well connected in Rome, Cadorna had accumulated enemies during his career due to his personality, which was as unattractive as his short and squat stature. His temperament was cold, reserved, even harsh, wholly predictable; Cadorna was, in fact, the exact opposite of the stereotypical gregarious, extroverted, and impulsive Italian. Methodical and authoritarian in demeanor, he was a hard driver, ruthless with subordinates who did not meet his standards. He was always completely sure of himself and his decisions, and tolerated no dissent from his staff, which he ruled absolutely. He expected success and unfailing personal loyalty from those who served under him, and dealt harshly with those he felt had failed him. In all, the unappealing Cadorna represented much of the bad side of the Italian officer corps. He was undoubtedly an unfortunate choice to lead Italy in the greatest war ever seen.
Cadorna should have known that the army was sadly unprepared for war, but he was poorly informed about the real condition of the fighting forces. In truth, the army had barely recovered from the recent Libyan war, which consumed half of the government's annual revenue and required the dispatch of 100,000 troops to defeat the desert tribes. In August 1914, there were still 50,000 soldiers garrisoning Libya, and the army had not yet replaced the stocks of guns, ammunition, and other vital supplies expended in North Africa. Financial stringency meant that the army was still replenishing its depleted arsenals, and Finance Minister Rubini threatened to resign if Italy entered another conflict so soon after the Libyan war. The army lacked adequate numbers of weapons of all types, including artillery, machine guns, and even rifles. Due to the great delays in procuring new guns for the artillery, ten of the army's thirty-six field artillery regiments simply did not exist. Worse, shortages of equipment meant that of the 1,260,000 soldiers of all classes that Italy could mobilize in the event of war, only 732,000 could be equipped for battle; some 200,000 of them would not even receive uniforms. In addition, the training of reservists had always been accorded a low priority, so many reservists were woefully unprepared for combat, a serious defect, considering that the standing army totaled only 380,000 soldiers. The territorial militia, which the army depended on to flesh out its field forces, frequently was totally untrained for war. The army did not have enough officers either; in the summer of 1914 the High Command discovered the army was short 13,500 officers, a serious deficit, particularly for fighting units. The government wisely ignored Cadorna's call for a general mobilization in August and an invasion of Austria soon to follow. Despite Cadorna's fanciful planning, the army was not ready to fight.
The chief of the General Staff contented himself with a limited mobilization, including the increase of troops on the Austrian border to 142,000. He and his staff started to plan for the invasion of Austria that Cadorna was sure would eventually come. True to form, the generals did not consult with the politicians, and the politicians did not inform the army of their plans. The army's numerous weaknesses appeared insurmountable, yet the Piedmontese count was absolutely sure that victory was guaranteed if his orders were followed. To start with, he had to create an offensive strategy because all Italy's prewar planning had been defensive. Before 1914, the army had been preoccupied with an invasion from the north by France or perhaps Austria. Military planning had therefore focused on fortifications and strong defenses to repel any invaders. Plans for invading Austria simply did not exist. Cadorna therefore set about constructing a strategy to defeat the Habsburg Empire.
He assumed that the Austrian Army would be wholly preoccupied with the Russian and Balkan fronts, where in the late summer and fall of 1914 Habsburg arms were suffering notable defeats, and that Vienna could spare few troops to guard its southern border with Italy. Cadorna envisioned an invasion of Austria to coincide with Russian and perhaps also Serbian offensives, which would inflict a decisive and fatal defeat on the Habsburgs. He saw the Isonzo valley as the best avenue for his grand offensive. To be sure, the mountainous Isonzo offered difficult terrain that favored the defender, but it was also the quickest, most direct route to Trieste, as well as Ljubljana, Budapest, and Vienna. It was impossible to avoid the Alps: 90 percent of Italy's border with Austria consisted of high Alpine terrain, and the other fronts were even more forbidding to an attacker. The Carinthian and Tyrolean frontiers had even higher mountains than the Isonzo, as well as fewer roads and relatively unimportant military and political objectives. A successful invasion of the Tyrol might gain the Trentino for Italy, but a victorious drive across the Isonzo could knock Austria out of the war. Further strategic options-a Balkan intervention to save Serbia or a land ing on Austria's Dalmatian coast-appeared even less attractive. In the first place, Cadorna favored a direct assault on Austria; second, any movement across the Adriatic required close cooperation with the navy, which feared the Austrian fleet and was barely on speaking terms with the army. There was, in fact, no coordinated war planning between the army and the navy during the months before the war. Each service intended to fight its own war against Austria without consulting the other.
Cadorna's grand strategy, first drafted at the beginning of September and completed in late December 1914, called for an Italian offensive across the Isonzo by two reinforced armies, the bulk of Italy's field forces. While the 1st and 4th Armies undertook secondary supporting attacks on the Tyrolean and Carinthian fronts, respectively, the 3rd Army would attack Austrian positions on the Carso, and the 2nd Army would assault the Isonzo line from Gorizia to Flitsch. Cadorna expected little resistance and a rapid breakthrough, with the 3rd Army securing Trieste and the 2nd taking Ljubljana; Vienna and Budapest would soon be threatened. As Cadorna planned it, his offensive would redeem Italia irredenta within a week, and the Habsburg Empire would be on its knees in less than two months. He hoped to launch his victorious blow by the late spring of 1915.
Before Austria could be defeated, however, the Italian Army had to be readied for conquest. Cadorna soon learned that the army needed far more arms, munitions, and supplies than it possessed in August 1914, and he attempted to remedy the pervasive shortages of virtually all war materiel that rendered his army ineffective. In early October he made a trusted subordinate, General Vittorio Zupelli, responsible for readying the army for war in the coming year. Although the task before him was daunting, Zupelli set about fleshing out the army's ranks with trained men and arming them with modern weapons. He improved industrial productivity, fought waste, and enjoyed some notable successes; by December he intended to have an army of 1,400,000 ready for Cadorna to mobilize by the late spring. He even substantially remedied the officer shortage. Zupelli could not perform miracles-Italy's economic backwardness and Byzantine bureaucracy prevented that-but he did make notable strides toward having Italy's army ready to fight in 1915. There was still much work to be done.
While Cadorna planned for an aggressive war and Zupelli prepared the army to wage it, the Italian people watched the European catastrophe unfold from a safe distance, behind a shield of neutrality. Most educated Italians, liberal, anticlerical Western Europeans, were sympathetic to the Entente, particularly to beleaguered France. Sentiment against the Central Powers, especially Austria, ran deep. Italians generally cheered little Serbia's defiant stand against Vienna, and few greeted the possibility of a Hohenzollern-Habsburg victory with anything but gloom; a Teuton-dominated Europe would inevitably be a threat to Italy. As the opening campaigns of August and September ebbed, the Central Powers had not inflicted a total defeat on the Entente, but Belgium and much of northern France were occupied by Germany. Paris was narrowly saved at the Battle of the Marne. Austria's humiliating failure to subdue Serbia and her thrashing at the hands of the Russians in Galicia brought hope to all Italians who gleefully anticipated a Habsburg demise. Yet Russia's defeat in East Prussia evened out the odds on the Eastern Front. The casualties for both the Allies and the Central Powers were enormous: by the onset of the autumn the war had claimed more than a million dead and wounded. The vast majority of Italians were relieved not to be a party to the bloodletting.
A dedicated and vocal minority in Italy, however, wanted Rome to abandon neutrality and enter the fray. Particularly for some on the Left, the war was nothing less than a fight for progress against reaction, democracy against autocracy, freedom against Teutonic enslavement. Many radical democrats and republicans, freemasons and other political heirs of the legendary Garibaldi-the outstanding hero of the Risorgimento-ardently advocated entering the war on France's side. One of their leaders, Peppino Garibaldi, grandson of the revolutionary icon, did more than merely agitate, leading 4,000 Italians to France. The contingent enlisted in the Foreign Legion and served as a unit at the front in the autumn of 1914, distinguishing itself in battle and suffering many killed, including two of Peppino's four brothers who went to France with him. Many supporters of intervention saw in Garibaldi's deeds an example for the nation to follow. Needless to say, Italy's numerous irredentists looked forward with enthusiasm to the coming day when their nation would liberate the Littoral and the Trentino. Their ranks were swelled by several hundred Italians who fled their native Austria rather than tight Serbs and Russians. They received a warm welcome in Italy, where their message of impending doom for the Habsburg Empire was received with anticipation. Other radicals, including extreme nationalists, advocated intervention to revolutionize Italy. To these interventionists, many of them Futurist artists and writers, Italy was enslaved by a staid, unheroic bourgeois political and economic culture that needed to be cast off. War and the upheaval it produced offered the best possibility to achieve their goal, velocizzare I'Italia (speeding Italy up).
In 1914, interventionists remained a small but vocal minority. The main political parties, including the Socialists, opposed entering the war. Although they may have found little redeeming in Italy's socioeconomic fabric, the Socialists were against all "imperialist wars," and did not believe anyone-least of all the workers and peasants who filled the ranks of the army-would benefit from It- aly'sjoining the conflict on the side of the Allies. The government was inclined to agree. Neutrality offered Italy the best opportunity to protect her interests without great risks. In truth, the neutral, uncommitted position profited Rome far more than intervention could. For although a German-Austrian victory would be an alarming threat to Italy-a strong, victorious Habsburg Empire across the Adriatic, intent on avenging Italy's betrayal, was a possibility too dreadful for Rome to contemplate-an Allied victory appeared not much less threatening; a triumphant France would represent a major problem for Italy, particularly in the Mediterranean, where the Italian Navy feared French intentions. As Foreign Minister di San Giuliano expressed Italy's predicament in early September, "The ideal situation would be if Austria and France were both beaten." Neutrality represented Italy's best possible diplomatic and military position, despite what the generals and the interventionists believed.
As 1914 drew to a close, however, the mood in Italy slowly began to change. With Austria reeling from more defeats in the East, with Habsburg armies repulsing the Russians with great difficulty and suffering further setbacks in Serbia, the chance to liberate Italia irredenta had never seemed closer. One of the most strident new voices in favor of war was a that of a leading Socialist, the popular journalist Benito Mussolini. The thirty-one-year-old Mussolini had a well developed reputation for incendiary rhetoric and rabble-rousing, yet he had never been considered a nationalist, much less a warmonger; indeed, he had vehemently denounced the "imperialist" Libyan war of 1911-1912. His abrupt conversion to intervention was therefore as surprising as it was total. In November 1914 he broke party ranks and founded a newspaper, 11 Popolo d 'Italia, dedicated to espousing the interventionist and radical nationalist line. Mussolini argued that the surest and fastest way to transform Italy and bring about a revolution was by waging war: only war would unite the Italian people and bring all Italians into a single state. His rhetoric was dramatically bellicose, beginning with the November 15 premier issue of 11 Popolo d'Italia: "This appeal, this cry, is a word that I would never have uttered in normal times, but which I give out today clearly and vigorously, without reservations, and with full confidence: that one forceful and fascinating word-WAR!" Mussolini cited numerous historical antecedents of his position, including Napoleon's dictum "Revolution is an idea that has found bayonets." The renegade Socialist's militancy, with its fusion of nationalism and radicalism, soon found an audience. Mussolini's Socialist colleagues, however, were appalled by their former comrade's heresy. Mussolini was quickly expelled from the party and denounced for encouraging imperialist war. Several leading Socialists found his sudden conversion suspect, and questioned his sources of funding for his new journal. Rumors (well founded, as it turned out) spread that French interests were financing him to agitate for Italian intervention on the side of the Allies. The allegation neither diminished Mussolini's influence nor stemmed the growing tide of interventionism.
As 1914 drew to a close, the Italian government's appraisal of the international situation had also begun to change, due largely to the influence of Baron Sidney Sonnino. In October, Foreign Minister di San Giuliano, a leading advocate of neutrality, died and was replaced by Sonnino. The new minister was less inclined to neutrality. In August he had argued for honoring Italy's alliance commitments to Germany and Austria. The French victory at the Marne, which prevented a quick German victory and ensured that the war would drag on, changed Sonnino's mind, and he began to consider Italy's diplomatic options, including joining the Allies. Rome was searching for the best offer from either side, the most territorial concessions to be gained, preferably without having to tight for them. The government was acting in defense of what Prime Minister Salandra, in October, in an unfortunate and unforgettable phrase, called sacro egoisnio (sacred egotism). On December 9, Italy and Austria opened secret negotiations: Rome wanted land and Vienna wanted Italy to stay out of the war. The Austrians were desperate, their armies reeling from defeats in Galicia and the Balkans, and could not tight a three-front war. Emperor Franz Joseph and his new foreign minister, Istvan Burian, were willing to trade land for Italian nonintervention. Italy demanded the entire Littoral and the Trentino as a minimum, and also desired parts of Dalmatia and other smaller Austrian possessions. The terms were simply too high, no matter how much Vienna wanted peace. Surrendering the Trentino, which was admittedly almost entirely ethnically Italian, presented little difficulty, but the loss of the entire Littoral and much of Dalmatia was unacceptable. This was not just dynastic pride, but a practical political consideration. Burian, supported by Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Tisza, a fellow member of Hungary's ruling elite, believed that handing land to Italy as a ransom for peace would establish a dangerous precedent of extortion for the multinational Habsburg Empire: How long would it be before neutral Romania demanded Hungary's ethnically Romanian districts'? Carving up Austria-Hungary on national lines, even for a good cause, could signal the death knell of the empire. The Italian representatives left the negotiations empty-handed and frustrated.
In the new year, as Cadorna's armies girded for war and the interventionists' cries approached a fever pitch, Sonnino, supported by Prime Minister Salandra, continued to explore Italy's diplomatic options. On February 16, 1915, Rome dispatched a secret courier to London to explore the possibility of joining the Allies in exchange for generous territorial gains. Sonnino correctly assumed that the British and French would be more willing to surrender Habsburg provinces than the Austrians had been. The Italian claims to the Littoral and the Trentino presented few problems for the Allies. Rome's designs on Dalmatia and some Adriatic islands posed diplomatic difficulties, however, because not only did they have virtually no Italian populations, but they also were claimed by Serbia, Britain and France's ally. The secret negotiations continued for weeks, with the Italian and Entente delegations arguing over territorial concessions. The issue nevertheless soon became not whether Italy would join the war on the Allied side, but how high her price of admission would ultimately be.
While Sonnino's negotiators were busy arguing Italy's claims in London, at home the interventionist campaign continued to expand. In the spring, there were large demonstrations demanding war in major cities throughout Italy. Although the vast majority of Italians, peasants and workers, remained oblivious to the war fever, the interventionist cause had won many converts among the educated. War against Austria now appealed to radicals, progressives, and nationalists of all sorts. The Habsburg Empire appeared to be in its death throes, and the redemption of the Littoral and the Trentino seemed imminent. Mussolini, always provocative, publicly warned the king that he would lose his throne if he did not accept the will of the people and lead Italy to war. The interventionists did not need to worry: their militant call to arms would soon be answered, with the full approval of the monarch and the government.
On April 26. 1915, Italy signed the secret Treaty of London, which committed her to an invasion of Austria in a month's time in exchange for considerable territorial concessions: all of the Littoral, including Gorizia, Trieste, and the Istrian Peninsula; all of the South Tyrol, not just the Trentino; Slovene lands deep in the Julian Alps; a southern corner of the province of Carinthia; and northern Dalmatia and several Adriatic islands. This was beyond Italia irredenta, even more land than demanded from Vienna in December 1914; significantly, much of the promised territory was not even Italian by ethnicity. In the end, for London and Paris, Italy's claims outweighed those of Serbia or any other ally. The policy of pursuing sacro egoisino had evidently paid off, and Sonnino was justly pleased with his negotiators. The agreement was kept secret for a time, even from Cadorna. Italy formally left the Triple Alliance on May 4, but the General Staff was not informed of the treaty until the next day. Cadorna, anticipating the onset of war in May anyway, had ordered a secret partial mobilization on April 23, three days before the treaty's signing. Eight of Italy's fourteen army corps were placed on war footing, and the remaining six soon followed. Even before it was ordered by the government to mobilize for war, the army was readying for the invasion of Austria by the end of May.
The Austrian government panicked when Italy formally abandoned the Triple Alliance. Desperate to prevent an Italian invasion, on May 7 Vienna promised Rome not just the Trentino but concessions in the Littoral, including the establishment of Trieste as a free city. But it was too little, too late. The Austrians could no longer hope to compete with the Entente's generous promises of land. In an attempt to avert catastrophe, Italy's former Prime Minister Giolitti, a consistent proponent of neutrality, visited Rome on May 9 and met with Salandra and King Vittorio Emanuele. He argued that the Italian people did not want war, the army and the generals were not up to the task, the tide of the war had turned in the Germans' favor, and the war would not be brief and victorious. Giolitti's wise and prophetic counsel was dismissed. The irrevocable decision had already been made: Italy was going to war, ten months after the rest of Europe had opted for the sword. Cadorna spent the month of May making last-minute preparations and getting his armies into position for the invasion. The government was so confident of a quick victory and of Austria's collapse that it requested only a few months' financial assistance from the Allies to help finance the war effort. All the military movements did not go unnoticed, but the government did not formally declare its intentions until May 23, Pentecost Sunday. The Italian ambassador to Vienna visited the Austrian Foreign Ministry at the Ballhausplatz and informed his former allies that a state of war now existed between Italy and the Habsburg Empire.
The news was greeted with rapturous enthusiasm in Italy. Spontaneous demonstrations in support of the government's decision broke out in numerous cities. After so many months of waiting, the interventionists had gotten what they had so consistently and forcefully demanded. Mussolini announced that the declaration of war was "the victory of the people," and added that the fight against ailing Austria would be short and victorious. Gabriele D'Annunzio, the bellicose and celebrated poet and vehement interventionist, in an irredentist Sermon on the Mount promised that war with Austria would bring national transformation: "Blessed be the pure of heart, blessed be those who will return victorious, for they will see Rome's new visage, Dante's forehead crowned anew, Italy's triumphant beauty" Of course, the majority of the Italian people did not want war, a fact that Prime Minister Salandra well knew. Italy's millions of peasants and workers, who would be called upon to bear the brunt of the impending war, had no interest in diplomatic agreements and exactly which territory Rome had been promised. They shared none of the enthusiasm of the educated nationalists and radicals who jumped at the chance to fight for Italy. Regardless, within three days Italian forces would be engaging Austrian regiments on the frontiers. The hour to wrest Italia irredenta from Austrian domination, the irredentist dream born decades earlier, had finally arrived. All that remained was actually to do it.