Irredentism
I'm currently in the middle of Mark Thompson's history The White War about the Italian front in World War One. This is less a military history and more a political history of how a newly unified Italy tried to forge a national identity through a series of foreign misadventures, culminating in the ill-advised attack on Austria in 1915. There is much here on how bourgeois nationalists, who resemble modern neocons in many ways, promoted a war that the working classes and peasantry were, at least initially, uninterested in.
The actual war with its repeated Isonzos and the massive reverse at Caporetto is striking in its savagery. Save for the first day of the Somme the Western Front seems like a walk in the park by comparison. In France and Belgium at least the Allies learned and developed new tactics and technology. However, there was no such improvement of the offensive art in Italy. The Italian soldier was caught between the Austrians, whose captives died in droves, so discouraging being taken prisoner, and their own generals, who revived the Roman practice of decimation. And so they fought and fought and died and died.
The slaughter was such that there are at least a dozen incidents where the Austrians stop firing and shouted at the charging Italians to return to their lines lest they all be massacred. Such a thing was almost unknown on the Western Front. The Austrians were no less ruthless than the Germans, but even so the level of extermination triggered something in the Austrian soldiers--a rising of the gorge that meant they could not help themselves but offer their enemies a chance to save themselves.
The actual war with its repeated Isonzos and the massive reverse at Caporetto is striking in its savagery. Save for the first day of the Somme the Western Front seems like a walk in the park by comparison. In France and Belgium at least the Allies learned and developed new tactics and technology. However, there was no such improvement of the offensive art in Italy. The Italian soldier was caught between the Austrians, whose captives died in droves, so discouraging being taken prisoner, and their own generals, who revived the Roman practice of decimation. And so they fought and fought and died and died.
The slaughter was such that there are at least a dozen incidents where the Austrians stop firing and shouted at the charging Italians to return to their lines lest they all be massacred. Such a thing was almost unknown on the Western Front. The Austrians were no less ruthless than the Germans, but even so the level of extermination triggered something in the Austrian soldiers--a rising of the gorge that meant they could not help themselves but offer their enemies a chance to save themselves.