An anniversary

[fpb]

95 years ago, Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Allies. Although the country had been nominally a German and Austrian ally since the previous century, in reality there was no love lost between them; the Austrians especially described Italy, in private memos, as an enemy country, and the bad feeling about the treatment of Italian minorities in Dalmatia, Istria and Trent kept simmering on the Italian side. More importantly, two major outrages had alienated Italy from her nominal allies: Austria's unilateral annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, which went against Italian interests and was not even announced, let alone discussed, beforehand; and, more importantly, the German invasion of neutral Belgium at the start of the war. After that major crime - garnished with widespread and widely reported war crimes against Belgian and French civilians - there never was any hope that Italy;s alliance with Germany might hold; the choice was merely between neutrality and open war against her former allies.

Italy entered the war with few illusions. It had had almost a year to observe what was happening between the nations already at war, and see the horrendous bloodshed at the Marne, at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, and the swift hardening of battle lines into bristling rows of trenches reaching from sea to sea. Everyone knew that there would be hundreds of thousands of dead and that the war would last years. Indeed, to a contemporary mind the question is why Italy would want to intervene at all; and we are not surprised that, until the very dawn of intervention, most of the Italian public was said to be against it.

It is more significant, however, that public opinion seems to have changed as soon as war was declared. The majority of the Italian public supported the war through every change of fortune to ultimate victory. They would rather Italy had been spared the scourge of war, but they did not think the war as such was wrong, and once Italy was in, they would support its aims. The truth is that Germany's bullying, almost terroristic behaviour had made her defeat a moral cause that nearly everyone supported, and even if Italy had not resolved to enter the war against her, she would still have cheered and even supplied volunteers to the countries that did.

The effect of the war was largely negative. Italy was swindled out of the rewards she expected for the war, and scapegoated in the name of Woodrow Wilson's hair-splitting and bookish notions of international justice. The country fell into a tailspin which led her to the rule of an adventurer with no character or principles, and to another and much more disastrous war. And that is probably the main reason why, when we remember the 600,000 young Italians who never came back from the front, our emotion is mainly one of sadness and waste.

Comments

I'm lazy...

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

...and cd look this up myself but what was the proximate cause of the declaration of war on Italy?
Or did the Central Powers declare war on Italy first?

And just when did Benito do his turnaround on the war. I seem to remember he was advocating the sabotage of Italian troop and supply trains as late as 1914.

Re: I'm lazy...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There was no occasional cause of the declaration of war. The Italian government negotiated with the Allies and entered the war when it reached an agreement they deemed suitable. At first, they only declared war on Austria-Hungary; it was only after several months that Turkey and Germany received their declarations of war. It just occurred to me that, if the Italians had not declared war on Germany, there might have been no disaster of Caporetto - because the German troops could not legitimately have been sent to the Italian front - and then, given that the Austrians were by their own admission near collapse in October 1917, they might have been knocked out of the war before 1918 and the war itself might have lasted less. Ah well.

Mussolini was a serious pacifist and internationalist during the Libyan War (1911-1912), and he even had to escape to Austria to avoid being imprisoned for sabotage activities. However, the German aggression against Belgium seems to have caused a major personal crisis: he broke with the Socialist Party and started his own pro-war newspaper. My interpretation of his personal history is here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/290645.html - plus an interesting anecdote here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/435921.html