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Italy’s claims would lead to war with Serbia in future. What Rome called strategic self-defence, Russia denounced as expansion. Sonnino, who always denied any imperialist motive, argued that the western Adriatic coast was indefensible against the deep harbours and myriad islands of the eastern Adriatic. He explained to the British ambassador that military supremacy in the Adriatic had become Italy’s main incentive to join the Allies. As Salandra was telling Bülow the same thing, the Central Powers knew where Italy stood. Vienna took this as confirming that negotiations were pointless; if Austria could only buy Italy’s neutrality by abolishing itself as an Adriatic power, there was nothing to discuss.
    Salandra believed the Allied failure to force the Dardanelles in mid- March had given Italy extra leverage. So it proved when British and French diplomats urged Russia to let Italy have ‘effective control of the Adriatic’. It was, they said, a price worth paying. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, argued that Italy’s intervention ‘probably would, in a comparatively short time, effect the collapse of German and Austro-Hungarian resistance’. A fortnight later, he predicted that it would be the turning point of the war, partly by bringing Romania and Bulgaria off the fence into the Allied camp. (To colleagues in London, he also argued the benefit of preventing a future single ‘great Slav power’ – meaning Russia – from controlling the eastern Adriatic.) Italy’s terms should be accepted without delay. The French were just as enthusiastic; they had poured money into the pro-war campaign, bankrolling Mussolini’s new newspaper and paying off the demagogic poet D’Annunzio’s debts in Paris. 2
    The Russians were truculent. Italy had ducked the worst of the war, they complained, and Austria-Hungary could now be beaten without its help. They themselves – having come into the war because of Serbia – wanted the Serbs to have free access to the Adriatic after the war. Besides, Dalmatia had more than half a million Slavs and only 18,000 Italians: how could Rome justify its claim? Privately, the British élite was just as contemptuous; ministers felt the Italians had ‘blackmailed’ them. Prime Minister Asquith remarked that ‘Russia is quite right, but it is so important to bring Italy in at once, greedy and slippery as she is, that we ought not to be too precise in haggling over this or that.’ Elsewhere he referred to ‘that most voracious, slippery and perfidious Power’. This abuse was matched by his navy minister, Winston Churchill, who described Italy as ‘the harlot of Europe’. Admiral Fisher, Britain’s irascible First Sea Lord, scorned the Italians as ‘mere organ- grinders! No use whatever.’ To Lloyd George, they were ‘the most contemptible nation’.
    With rumours circulating that Austria and perhaps Germany were about to reach a separate peace with Russia, Salandra and Sonnino were on tenterhooks. Would they intervene too late to grab their portions of territory? The outlook was not improved when Austria – yielding to German pressure, abetted by bad news from the Eastern Front – agreed on 27 March to cede the south Tyrol (without Alto Adige), make Trieste autonomous, withdraw to the Isonzo, approve the occupation of Valona, and discuss Gorizia. Sonnino rejected this offer – which exceeded his demands in January – as ‘dubious and absolutely inadequate’. Fearing that he might have overpriced Italy’s support, he dropped the demand for Spalato (now Split), Dalmatia’s biggest city, which the proposal had called ‘the seat of glorious Latin civilisation and fervent Italian patriotism’. The Allies called on him to let Dalmatia be neutralised. He refused.
    The new German Chief of Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, urged Conrad to withdraw from the Trentino at once. This would keep Italy neutral and could be revoked after the war. If the Central Powers lost,