Read The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 for Free Online

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