The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (5 page)

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.
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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.
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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’.