MENACED TREACHERY IN

I

TALY entered the war by a declaration against Austria-not Germany on the 23d of May, 1915. Nothing in the campaigns her armies fought was more, dramatic than the fight made in her parliament and her public places to drag her into the struggle. Superficially it appeared that she was morally bound to cooperate with the Teutons. For Italy had long been a member of the Triple Alliance, which bound her to Germany and Austria. But that Alliance was essentially defensive. It provided that all should rally to the defense of any one member that might be attacked from without. It was the claim of those Italians who sought to force the war upon a hesitant Parliament and an unwilling king, that Austria's ultimatum to Serbia was in effect an aggression, an incitement to war which no one member of the Alliance had a right to offer without consultation with the others. The plea of the war party in Italy was that Austria was not attacked but was the assailant, and that as a party to a purely defensive agreement Italy was not morally obligated to come to her aid.

A second cause of complaint was that Article VIII of the Triple Alliance bound Austria to refrain from any occupation of Balkan territory without agreement with Italy and the payment to her of compensation. Austria, however, invaded Serbia without agreement with or even notice to Italy, and though demand for compensation was instantly made by the latter nation, the nature and intent of the payment were de

ITALIAN RANKS-THE GREAT DISASTER

bated so long by the Austrians that the Italians concluded it would never be paid. Finally the Italian advocates of war contended that Austrian preparations for war upon Russia were in fact a provocation to the latter nation to declare war, and that Italy could not be bound by her agreement to aid Austria against a Russian attack which she had invited.

These were the technical arguments employed to force Italy into battle. They were the pleas which Italian statesmen put forward in defense of their action against the criticism of the world. They were bitterly denounced by the Teutonic Allies as being made in bad faith, and indeed they were rather the excuses for, than the true incentives to, the action finally taken by the Italian nation. For Italy, like France, had her lost provinces. Her Alsace-Lorraine are Trent and Trieste, the one lying in the Dolomite Alps a scant forty miles north of the Austro-Italian boundary, the latter a noble port at the head of the Adriatic, which has had much to do with the decadence of the maritime glories of Venice, which it faces across that sun-lit sea. For the recovery of these lost provinces the Italian heart has yearned for half a century, and the instant action of the army when war was declared was to plunge into the craggy ranges of the Dolomites in the effort to reclaim "Italia Irredenta," as that region is called in Italy. Moreover, modern Italy has a legacy of hate against the Austrians which no formal Alliance could ever obliterate. Until 1868 the military thrall of Austria was upon the northern provinces of Italy, and Milan and Venice for years lived in sullen resentment as cities held by the enemy. The Italian is an emotional being, and though the Parliament under the control of Giolitti, a strongly pro-German statesman, held out for ten long months against war on the Allies' side, an

army of orators and pamphleteers stirred up the people to the highest pitch of excitement, and the demonstrations in favor of such action amounted almost to revolution. Gabriele d'Annunzio, poet and playwright, was a leader in this agitation, traveling from town to town, haranguing the people from

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the steps of the Roman capitol, and in the grand plaza of St. Peter's, turning out pamphlets as plenteous as the doves of St. Mark's, appealing to all that was emotional in the Italian nature until he had aroused the populace from Messina to Venice to a point that hardly brooked control. After a dissolution of the ministry there followed a campaign which racked the Italian peninsula from end to end. Every possible dramatic incident was seized upon as a rallying point for the war party. In January the body of Bruno Garibaldi, the grandson of Italy's famous liberator, was brought back from France where he had been slain, fighting bravely with the Allies. All Italy went wild with adoration for the hero, and applause for the cause in which he had fallen. His state funeral in Rome was a cortège which would have done honor to a king, and the whole city lined the narrow and historic ways. through which it passed. It was the cause, equally with the heroic and historic name, to which this tribute of a whole nation was paid. From that day there was no doubt as to the side on which Italy would land.

It has been asserted that in her final action Italy was animated by a lust for spoils, by the desire to regain Trent and Trieste, by covetousness for Albania, and an intent to make the Adriatic an Italian lake, by an ambition to have a larger slice of the Balkan pie, and a bit of the final slicing of Turkey. Probably that is true. Nations are not un

Italian line of the Tyrolian Alps

aid in the aggrandizement of their states.

But Italy was not wholly animated by mercenary motives, for she took up the cause of the Allies when, in her neighborhood at least, it was darkest. The Russians were in full retreat from Galicia when she flung down her gauntlet to Austria. It was the people of Italy, the emotions of Italy, rather than any sordid considerations that rushed her into battle. Never did secret diplomacy or the machinations of a cabinet have less to do with calling a nation to arms.

Italy now came to the aid of the Allies with an organized army of approximately 700,000 in the first line, 320,000 in the Mobile Militia, and a reserve of something like 2,000,000 in the Territorial Militia. For immediate service she could call at least one million men. She had a supply of Krupp howitzers and siege guns, and her field batteries were of the famous French 75's. King Victor Emmanuel was Commander in Chief, and while not hasty in lending his support to the declaration of war, won national applause and approbation by the gallantry with which he led his troops when once they had entered upon the struggle. The Chief of the General Staff, and Generalissimo in the field was Count Luigi Cadorna, a soldier by inheritance and service of a lifetime. He was at the time of Italy's entrance upon the war sixty-five years of age, but but manifested all the vigor and dash of a far younger man. He had studied the contour of Italy's rugged Alpine frontier until he knew it as General Hindenburg knew the Masurian Lakes

armies quickly spread over the Trentino and, on the west, crossed the Isonzo River, and reached Monfalcone within four days of the declaration of It seemed for the time as

war.

though there were to be no effective resistance by the Austrians, who had indeed been forced by the Russian menace to send to their eastern front an army of 700,000 men who had seen service-men of from thirtyfive to forty years who had recently had special training from German officers. With these troops withdrawn the opposition to the Italian advance was necessarily entrusted to troops made up of boys below nineteen and men above forty-five hastily drawn from the threatened territory which was thoroughly permeated with proItalian sentiment. As a result the Italian advance for the first two months encountered practically no effective resistance.

defending the Adriatic and during the war maintained its supremacy in that sea. Its commander was the Duke of the Abruzzi, famous the world over as mountaineer, scientist and explorer. He was well known in the United States, having led notable exploring expeditions in our Alaskan territory.

The rugged line of Alps which form Italy's northern border constitute a protection for Austria, a menace to the more southerly nation. For the boundary line gives the crests to Austria. Her troops bent on an invasion would fight downward to the gentle declivities of the Italian foothills. If the Italians on their part sought to invade Austria, their columns would have to make their way through narrow passes and tortuous defiles and up precipitous heights to the summit. With all physical conditions. against her, however, the Italians had the advantage of conducting their invasion in a land the greater part of whose inhabitants were enthusiastically friendly. For the territory about Trent and Trieste is largely peopled by Italians, whose restive state under the Austrian domination has given the territory the name Italia Irredenta or Italy Unredeemed.

The Italian strategy put briefly was:

1. To neutralize the friendly Trentino by capturing or "covering" her defenses, and cutting her line of communication with Austria proper.

2. To cover, or capture, Trieste and then move in force in the direction of the Austrian fortress of Klagenfurt and Vienna. The

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distance of the Austrian capital from the base of Italian operations a week after the war began was little more than that from New York to Providence.

It seemed at first that all this was to be yielded to Italy by default. By the end of July her commanders were satisfied with conditions in the Trentino, and her troops were attacking along the Isonzo from Tarvis to the Adriatic

-a front of not less than seventy-five miles. The river itself was a great natural defense for the Austrians. Flowing through narrow gorges, bordered by steep cliffs broken only by narrow mountain passes, it had been

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strengthened by powerful fortresses erected by the Austrians in farsighted anticipation of trouble with their Italian neighbors. All bridges had been destroyed and the season was one of flood waters. Yet to the amazement of military observers the Italians accomplished the crossing of the river in four separate places. Agile as the mountain chamois, vested with all the reckless daring of the Latin peoples, they proved to be precisely the troops needed for so desperate an enterprise.

Gorizia, a fortified camp, garrisoned by,

any

the enemy attacks

200,000 troops, and with its outlying works offering a front of sixty miles, was the immediate objective and early in August, 1915, the Italian staff announced positively that its capture was a matter of but a few days. Never were military commanders more deceived. Gorizia fell indeed to the Italian arms, but it fell in August, 1916, just a year later. The twelve months between witnessed some of the hardest and most inconclusive fighting that had taken place in battle area of the Great War. Into all the details of that year of struggle and of carnage it is impossible in this brief narrative to go. Enough to say that by the middle of December, 1915, Italy had so established herself within Austrian borders as to make any Austrian invasion of her own territory appear improbable. The Austrian line on the Isonzo she had pierced at the centre. Tolmino, Gorizia, and Trieste were all menaced by her troops, and the occupation of any one of them meant a long step on the way to Vienna. Gorizia, had suffered heavily from the fire of General Cadorno's artillery, but though the town and its forts were in ruins the defenders still maintained what all