An anniversary
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.
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.