The Rest Is History - 672. The First World War: Italy’s Doomed Campaign (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

How did Italy enter the First World War alongside the Allies in 1915? What were they hoping to gain? And, why was their attempt to invade the Austro-Hungarian Empire one of the bloodiest campaigns of the entire war? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Italy’s entrance into the War, their disastrous efforts to carve out a corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the terrible aftermath of this brutal conflict. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years. Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England. Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it? Tom. A great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism.

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of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyd's to help make their dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 26. is ended. Our exultation begins. The border has been crossed. The cannon roars. The earth smokes. The Adriatic is as grey at this hour as the torpedo boat that cuts across it. Companions! Can it be true? We are fighting with arms. We are waging our war. The blood is sparting from the veins of Italy. We are the last to join this struggle, and already the first are meeting with glory. The slaughter begins, the destruction begins.

One of our people has died at sea, another on land. All of these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of bones, full of, blood, and their blood begins to flow. We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed. So that was the poet Gabrielle de Dancio with a frankly lunatic peroration. And he's addressing at Myra's at dawn on the 26th of May 1915. And he's absolutely ecstatic at the news that Italy's soldiers have just fired their first shots and taken their first casualties after joining the First World War. And you would think that by May 1915 he would have worked out that joining the First

World War maybe isn't a brilliant idea, but not a bit of it. He is all over it. And to quote Mark Thompson in his brilliant book, The White War on Italy's role in the First World War, has any artist played a more baleful part in decisions that led to violence and suffering on the largest scale? So, Dominic, are you a fan of Danzio? I absolutely despise Donogio, to be honest with you. I think he's one of the worst people we've ever done on the rest of history. And his lunatic rhetoric, as you correctly described it, will have terrible consequences for hundreds of thousands of young Italians. But I'll tell you someone who likes it. Yeah, go on. Is Benito Mussolini, a Italian journalist who may go on to better things in due course?

Higher things, exactly. Yes. And actually, we will be talking about Donunzio and Benito Mussolini, who learns a lot from Donizio later in this episode. But let's just explain what today's episode is all about. So we're in the middle of this great series, epic series, about the year 1915. And this is the story of one of the bloodiest, the cruelest, the most savage of all the campaigns of the First World War. And this is the attempt by the Italians to invade the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to carve out a little empire for themselves on the Adriatic. And it was fought in conditions that were unlike anywhere else in the war. So it's this sort of jagged limestone peaks and these sort of deep river valleys in what is now

Slovenia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it's also, I think, the most obviously acquisitive of the First World War's campaigns. Yeah. I mean, it's completely cynical, isn't it? You know, most people in the First World War believe, as we've talked about many times, when we've talked about this war on the show, most people believe they're fighting in defense of their native land. They think the principle is on their side, that their native land is encircled by enemies.

I mean, it could be the French, could be the Germans, could be the Austrians. and that they are fighting in defence of hearth and home. The Italians are absolutely open about the fact. They're not defending themselves at all. They're trying to attack other people. And they're fighting for conquest and for glory and for a greater Italy. And the ironic result, the blackly ironic result, is one of the greatest disasters in Italian history.

So it ends with a million Italians dead, a million wounded, and a national sense, even though they do get some territory, there's this national sense of betrayal and resentment that plays an enormous part in the rise of fascism in the 1920s. So it's an extraordinary story. It's probably not as well known in the English-speaking world as some other aspects of the First World War. But you mentioned Mark Thompson's book, The White War.

Yeah, it's an amazing book, isn't it? It's a wonderful book. I've got to be honest, it's the only book on the topic I've read, but I've felt having read it, I didn't need to read anymore. I think that's fair because there's not that many books on this in English. So let's start with Italy. I mean, as you said, Italy was not in the First World War at the beginning. It could have stayed out and it chose not to.

So why on earth has it made this decision? Yeah, there's a meat grinder. Let's jump into it. Exactly. Italy in 1915 is the sixth most populous state in Europe. It's got 35 million people. So if you think of the big guns, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Britain, France, Germany and so on. Italy is the sixth.

What Italy has in common with Germany is that it's a new country and you might say if you were being very cynical and our Italian listeners, if there any exist, will at this point turn the podcast off, you might say Italy is an invented country. People have made it up. Well, I think that is harsh. Do you think that's harsh? Yeah. There's some historians who genuinely would argue that. I know, but I mean, the notion of Italy goes back to the Roman period. Of course it does. And so that is something that obviously is lurking in the minds of lots of enthusiasts for a greater Italy, I think. So Italy didn't. exist until the 1850s 1860s. There's a process of unification called the resurgimento,

which is led by the kingdom of Piedmont, which was based in Turin, and ruled by the Royal House of Savoy. And basically by force, by diplomacy, by sort of popular nationalist feeling, the House of Savoy managed to weld together a series of territories that by this point are quite distinct. They're sort of economically distinct, they speak very different dialects, and they weld them together to create a new kingdom of Italy. So that what you have in the late 19th century is a process of basically inventing what it is to be an Italian. What do we have in common? What's Italian culture going to be? What dialect are we going to speak and so on and so forth? What national dishes are we going to invent? Right. We did a whole episode on this with Friend of the show John Dickie about the creation of

Italian identity through food. Now, one very good way of welding together a new national identity is to have a common enemy and to have a sense of unfinished business, a sense of kind of victimhood or whatever. And in its case, this comes down to its northern frontier. And when nationalists look at the map of the newly unified Italy, they say, it's in the wrong place. So one nationalist says the frontier is a metal wire planted haphazardly where nothing ends or begins, an arbitrary division and amputation alien to nature, law and logic. And Dominic, what sharpens that sense is the fact that on the other side of that border is Austria, the Austrian Empire, and that is the former imperial mistress of Venice and other regions of Italy.

Exactly. The ancestral enemy, the Austrians. And what also sharpens it is that on the other side of that border, there are some people who speak Italian. So people look at the border and they say, well, what we'd like is I'd like to get the South Tyrell. I mean, there are a lot of German speakers in the South Terrell as well. They say, well, that's never mind.

We can have them in Italy. We'd like the cities of Trieste and Gorizia. Ideally, I think I'd like, we'd like to have Slovenia. And I think a lot of modern Croatia really should be part of Italy. So they want... Maybe Gaul, maybe Italian. They'd say, we'd like the peninsula of Istria. And we would like the coast of Dalmatia.

So there are Italian speakers. all of these areas that belong to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the nationalist slogan is unredeemed Italy, Italia Irredenta. And it's from that expression that we get irredentism. So this idea that there's unfinished national business that we need to complete the nation. And this is an idea that's politically very effective in the late 19th century. It allows politicians to appeal across this newly united country to different classes, to workers in their cities, to farmers, to, to,

urban intellectuals, all of this kind of thing. And as you said, there is a parallel in Germany. Exactly. Now, rather like the Germans, the Italians feel they've united a little bit too late. They've been shut out of the scramble for foreign colonies, for example, in Africa. And if they want to be a great power, they need colonies. So they look to North Africa initially. Tom, obviously, this is Tom Horan Bingo.

The example of the Roman Empire is hanging over them the whole time. They want to basically rebuild the Roman Empire as much as possible. They look to North Africa, but to their horror, a much bigger power has already got stuck in in North Africa, and that's France. And actually, the French make it pretty obvious. They don't want the Italians getting involved. And there's a bit of a rivalry between the French and the Italians in North Africa. And as a result of that, the Italians sign a very implausible alliance in 1882. First of all, with Germany, that's not so implausible, but Austria, but with Austria as well.

That's mad. And this is basically to give them a bit more of a free hand in Africa so that the French won't attack them. And it's called the Triple Alliance. A lot of nationalists are very uneasy about it. What are we getting into bed with the Austrians for? They're our enemies. However, the upside, this allows Italy to pursue some colonial adventures.

So in Eritrea, in Somaliland, in Abyssinia, Ethiopia, and most obviously in Libya. And these go generally very badly. I mean, the Italians do make inroads, but their army consistently performs very badly. So in Abyssinia, 6,000 Italian soldiers were massacred in a single day at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. And there's still a sense when you get into the 20th century that nationalist ambitions have not been sated, that Italy still needs to prove its virility on the world stage. Yeah, because in Rome at this point, they're building an enormous monument on the capital, which is the great sacred hill of Rome.

And this is a monument to Victor Emmanuel II, who'd been the king when Italy had been united. And there's a sense, I mean, anyone who's been to Rome will immediately be able to picture it. It looks like something out of a Cecil B. de Mill film about ancient Rome. It's kind of symbolically illustrating the fusion between the unity of Italy and this kind of glorious Roman past, which it is assumed a united Italy will be a united Italy will be a unity.

to resurrect. Exactly. And that's not completed, I think, until 1911. So just before, before the outbreak of the war. It's a monstrosity, actually, isn't it? It's a wedding cake. Yeah. I think, yes, I think absolutely right that the sense of becoming a great power and building a united nation that those two things are interfused. And there's this sort of sense of unfinished business, this sense of pressure and of, um, slight disappointment, almost hanging over the Italian project as you enter the 20th century. Now, at this point, Italy is changing a lot. It's industrialising, it's building railways and schools. It is, however, a long way behind the other so-called great powers.

It's only got a very small urban middle class. The vast majority of Italians work on the land as peasants. Literacy rates are very low. Infant mortality is very high. The state, most people have only have a very vague sense of what the state is. Their horizons abounded by the locality, by the village, by the farm, all of this. And only a tiny fraction of the population gets to, vote. So in 1913, 8 million people out of 35 million people. Politics is a sort of endless, as always

in Italy, an endless sort of dance of coalition building. Politicians who are constantly kind of ditching their principles to meet the demands at the moment. And at the top is the king, Victor Emmanuel, the third. So he's the grandson of the monument guy. He is. And he is a very short man. He's very short. He's very insecure. he's a coin collector, so he's like you, Tom, collects coins. He fancies himself as an amateur photographer. That's his passion. He has loads of power under the Italian constitution.

So he can call Parliament to dismiss Parliament. He can appoint the ministers. He directs foreign policy. He commands the army. He declares war. But he doesn't like using his power. In fact, he wants politicians to do it for him. And this in the long run will get him into trouble

because he'll basically turn himself into Benito Mussolini's puppet in the 1920s and 1930s. But at this point, let's go to 1914 when the First World War begins. At this point, his prime minister is a man called Antonio Salandra. Salandra is a conservative lawyer from a rich family, land-owning family in Puglia in the south of Italy, but he's backed by the big business elites in the industrial north because he's a conservative. He's a sort of balding man with this absolutely gigantic moustache, exactly as you would, as you would want.

Oh, thank God. It's so good to have an enormous moustache back on the rest of history. It is, of course. Haven't had one for a while. He's a very ruthless and devious man, and he is the man who is basically going to act as the head of the conspiracy to drag Italy into the war against the wishes of its people. Now, when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914, team. Italy was going through all kinds of internal ructions, massive strikes, unrest, talk of socialist and anarchist revolution and whatnot. So Salandra was distracted.

But his foreign minister, who was the Marquis of San Giuliano, who was a Sicilian aristocrat, said to the Austrians, I know we're in this alliance with you, but if you attack Serbia, we will not support you. And the reason we don't want to support you, well, basically the Italians don't want to see Austria expand in the Balkans, become more powerful. I mean, that would be mad. No, they don't. And they say, we might accept you attacking Serbia if you gave us the South Tyrol. And the, the Germans actually said to the Austrians, would you think about it? And the Austrian said, hold on, we're about to enter a war to defend our empire. We're not going to start giving bits away, you know, to our random neighbours.

So the First World War starts and Italy declares itself neutral. Now, under the Triple Alliance, they didn't actually have to join the war because the Triple Alliance was meant to be a defensive pact, not an offensive one. But I guess it's kind of against the spirit, if not the letter. It is a bit. I think the Austrians and the Germans are disappointed. They say, well, this is really poor from the Italians.

On the other hand, it's the Italians. So, you know, you kind of know what you're getting into when you're selling an alliance with them. And the Italian said, well, you took us of granted. You didn't consult us. You've got stuck in. There's also good reasons for Italy to stay out. A public opinion, people don't like the Austrians.

Also, Italy imports a lot of raw materials, including, this is a terrible indictment of Italian agriculture, including food from Britain and France. So if they entered the war on the side of the central powers, the British and French would probably blockade their ports. And people would starve and that would be a right mess. And they don't fancy that. So, they say, we're going to sit this one out. Fine. Just a week later, the Marks,

of San Giuliano sends Salandra a note. And he says, I've been thinking, I think if the Allies look like they're going to win, we should actually switch sides and pile in on their side against Austria. And the Marquis has the excellent line, this may not be heroic, but it is wise and patriotic. And the same day, so the 9th of August, the Marcus of San Giuliano starts to send our informal messages to London. If we were to change sides, would you, yeah, just one day. Meanwhile, they say to the chief military commander General Kordauna, who will talk about in the second half, your plans for war against France, just shift them.

Yeah, just update them a little bit. So it's war now against Austria. Anyway, a month passes. The Germans, of course, have launched their great attack on France. And they've been turned back at the River Man, the Battle of the Man. And Salandra says to his cronies, we should use this historic cataclysm. to, and I quote, complete and enlarge the fatherland. And he acknowledges, people will say that we've been very sneaky and perfidious.

But he says, Italy's destiny should be guided by, and he uses the phrase sacro egoismo, sacred egoism. And this becomes one of the most famous phrases in modern Italian history. And that idea of sacred egoism expresses the, dare I say, the sacral quality of Italian nationalism. sacral, sacral poor behavior. Yes, it is. They believe they have a kind of divinely appointed mission to complete the unification of the nation. And if that involves taking large parts of other people's countries and stabbing them in the back.

So much the better. Yeah. So there's now a long, complicated diplomatic dance. In January 1915, Salandra sends a message to Vienna. And he says, I'd like you to give us Trento, the Trentino, this sort of area. in the north and South Tyrell. We'd like a bit of Slovenia, please. And we'd like Trieste to be neutral and autonomous.

The Austrians really like Trieste because it's their one big port. They don't want to give that away. And the Austrians say, I'm not going to give you all that. What? You meant you were an ally only recently. We're not going to give you large pits of our empire. Now, Salamtera expects that to happen. And in fact, he doesn't mind because he's already eyeing up, you know, the Adriatic coast.

Are the Austrians kind of alerted by this? to the possibility that they might jump ship. Yes, they definitely are. They can sort of feel it coming, but they're not going to buy off the Italians by giving them big chunks of their empire. I'm just wondering if they're starting to beef up their defenses. Yeah, they are, but of course, don't forget, in this period of time, this is the point that we talked about in our very first World War series.

But the Russians are coming, aren't they? The Russians are coming, and Tom, you will recall that there's the tremendous battle for the city of Prozimus. Of course. How could I forget? Yeah. Where was it? The fortress city of Pugianche.

Great to have that back on the show. So late February, 1915, Cilandra's envoys present a secret deal to the Allies in London. They say, we'll enter the war on the Allied side, and in return, here is our shopping list. We'd like the Saar Trentino. We'd like Trieste and Garizia. We'd like Istria, now Croatia. We'd like Dalmatia, so that's the coast of Croatia and the islands. We'd like a little bit of Albania.

We'd ideally like the Dodecanese islands of roads, costs, patmos and so on. And we'd like £50 million to pay for the war. Now, the Germans have got wind of this. They persuade the Austrians to make a generous counter-offer. At this point, the Austrians are actually saying to them, OK, we'll give you South Tyrol, we'll give you a bit of Western Slovenia, we will make Trieste Autonomous, we can even let you have a little bit of Albania. At this point, the Italians are feeling very greedy,

and they don't want to accept the Austrian offer. and they say to the Allies, we'd really like to get into bed with you, please. If you give us all this, we'll enter the war. And this whole kind of getting into bed with people for money, how does this go down with people in London and Paris? Well, I'm sorry to say, Tom, that it reinforces existing stereotypes of Italian behaviour among the policy makers of London and Paris.

So when they look at the map, they say, what, you want Dalmatia? There are 18,000 Italian speakers in Dalmatia. but half a million Slavs. It seems unreasonable for you to ask for this. How can this be justified? Winston Churchill said that Italy was the harlot of Europe. So Herbert Henry Asquith, the British Prime Minister, of course, a man of the most impeccable moral, sexual behaviour.

Yeah, very much a friend of the show. He described Italy as voracious, slippery and perfidious. He said, right, the excellent line. It is so important to bring Italy in at once, as greedy and slippery as she is, that we ought not to be too precise in haggling over this or that. Now, of course, this would create great problems in the future when the Italians feel they've been cheated. Because at this point, basically, the Allies say, fine, you can have everything you want. Yeah, we'll give you everything.

You can have loads of Croatia, you can have loads of Slovenia. You can actually rule a million Germans and Slavs, if you like, if you really want to do that badly. And actually, do you know what, if the Ottoman Empire falls apart, You can have that as well. You can have a bit of Turkey as well. Go for it. I think it's fair to say they don't really mean it. They're just promising anything.

And so Italy formally repudiates the Triple Alliance. So now we're in May. And the stage ought to be set for war, but there is a problem. First of all, Victor Emmanuel III, with his coins and his very short stature and whatnot, he does not really want the war. He doesn't like the idea of war at all. more importantly, the Italian people don't really want a war. So Slandre asks his regional governors, what do ordinary people think?

And the governors come back and they say, actually most people say they don't want to fight. They've had a look at the First World War and they think it's possibly not brilliant. It's probably best to sit this one out. All that gas and rats and mud and stuff. Right. And in the south, in the poorer part of the country, people are really against it. So the governor of Naples says 90% of people in the city, including all the social, classes, hate the thought of war. And basically, across the board, the people who want war are

intellectuals, poets, bad people, Tom. If there are nothing they don't know. How on earth is the Italian government going to rouse the nation for war? And the answer is by enlisting the most celebrated and colourful and controversial Italian of his generation. And this is this bloke we began with Gabrielle Donuncio. So Danuncio, we did a whole episode on him back in 2022, called The First Fascist with his biographer Lucy Hughes Hallett. Oh, yeah. The Pike. Brilliant book.

Yes. Now, Danuncio, for those people who haven't heard that episode, was the most famous Italian in the world at this point. He's a playwright and a poet. He's a dandy. He's a decadent. He's always in the gossip columns. He's a proper celebrity.

I mean, we've been talking about moustaches. Yeah. He has a brilliant moustache, but it's not a kind of military moustache, is it? It's a kind of the excitement of the new, faintly fascist, flamboyant, let's fly on a plane kind of a mustache. Exactly. The weird thing about him is, everyone says he's this sort of tremendous, he's always in and out of aristocratic women's bedrooms and stuff. He's a very short man. He's got no hair at all.

He's extremely ugly. People always comment on how terrible his teeth are. And he's so narcissistic and egotistical that he's practically sociopathic. It gives us all hope. His life is strewn with wreckage. So basically bad debts, broken homes, abandoned children. He's just a terrible, terrible person. But because he writes, I mean, the stuff when you actually read it, it's dated really badly.

It's so lush and ornate and stuff. But he's very highly rated, isn't he? I mean, Joyce thinks he's great. Proust thinks he's great. I mean, they love him. People think he's a genius. People think he's one of the authentic literary geniuses of the early 20th century. He's got off to Paris to escape his creditors, but people adore him and women in particular can't get enough of him.

Now, Donuncio is an ultra-nationalist. Donuncio has been writing about glory, national and personal, since he was a little boy. Ever since the 1880s, he's been pouring out newspaper articles, wittering on about the army and the Navy. And the Air Force, isn't it? Because he's very, very keen on planes. He never learns to fly, but he's obsessed by air power. He is. He's very much of that kind of futurist mentality where everything is about new technology and the excitement of war and all of this. Although he is quite keen on kind of ancient dreams of empire as well, isn't he?

He is. It's the sort of fusion of the two. Yeah. So that's how he's the proto-fascist. Quite fascistic. He was very keen on conquering Libya in 1911. He's been talking for ages. Let's have an empire in the Balkans. He was very keen on joining the First World War. And he actually said, I won't come home until we join the war. But I fear that the Italian political class are too weak, and we never will. And then, in March 1915, he opens a letter in Paris that has been lying around for weeks since laying unopened. And it's an invitation to come and speak at an event in May, just outside Genoa. This is the place from which Garibaldi and his volunteers had sailed to Sicily in 1860.

And they're going to inaugurate a monument, and they want Donencio to come and give a talk. And he thinks, well, this is it. This is a brilliant opportunity to come and preach my warlike message to the Italian people. So he gets on a train in Paris on the 3rd of May, 1915. He crosses the Italian border for the first time in five years. He is met by colossal crowds. He's a sort of Lucy Hughes-Hallerton, a book calls him a nationalist messiah. It's like the prophet returning to his people.

Massive crowds of sort of poets and intellectuals cheering excitedly. Your vibe. It's like when we arrive at a to do a rest of his history. tour, surely. There's the... He gets to Genoa, massive crowds, and he gives the first, there'll be a lot of blood-curdling speeches. He gives the first of the series of mad speeches.

We shall not let Italy be dishonoured, we shall not let the fatherland perish. We shall have a greater Italy, not by acquisition, but by conquest, not measured in shame, but as the price of blood and glory. I mean, nobody ever talks more enthusiastically about blood and glory than this bloke.

Next day, he goes to the monument to do the unveiling to give the speech. And the speech is meant to be all about Garibaldi. And actually, it's just all about war and how brilliant war is. He ends with this peroration that even though I've, you know, read it many times and written about it in my kids book about the First World War, I still actually find shocking every time I look at it. Because it's a parody of the sermon on the mount in favor of fighting and killing.

Blessed are the 20-year-olds, pure of mind, well-tempered in body with courageous mothers. blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they should be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall wipe away a splendid flow of blood and bind up their shining wounds. Blessed are they who return with victories, for they shall see the new face of Rome. And all this. And people complain, don't they? And he kind of basically says, you know, if it's wrong to incite people to violence,

then so be it. Yeah. I plead guilty. Brilliant. Let's have more of it. Exactly, he does. And one of the men in his audience that day is a young journalist with a very dark future. And this is a young man 33 years old called Benito Mussolini. And Mussolini had been an editor of the socialist newspaper, Avanti. He is absolutely typical of this intellectual class. He's read Marx and Engels Mussolini. He's a big fan of Italian futurist poetry. Like Danuncio, who's obsessed with Nietzsche, the sort of Darwinian idea of struggle. Will to power. The will to power. Hates George Eliot. Does Mussolini hate George Eliot?

Yeah, despises her. Wow, why? Doesn't like Middlemarch? He thinks that she's very ostentatiously given up Christianity, but she's still completely Christian. And she's an idiot because she hasn't realized that's a problem. He's always going on about it. Criky.

Well, Mussolini had always been a non-interventionist. He'd been opposed to Italy's adventures in Africa. He'd said he didn't want to join the First World War. but then in October 1914 he sort of sensed the way the wind was blowing and he decided to completely change his mind I mean I guess that's the mark of a good journalist right I suppose yes I suppose that's one way of looking at it but I didn't think we'd be into rehabilitating Mussolini well I'm not his journalistic acumen I mean newspapers have been known to kind of jump on bandwagons before they have indeed so he found a new newspaper and he sets up his own political movement Mussolini arguing for war with some French and British allied funding by the And he calls it the leagues of revolutionary action, the fasci d'adzionari, Fashchi, meaning the kind of bans or leagues, and it's from that, of course, that we get the word

fascism. Anyway, at this point, Mussolini is just in the crowd. The star is Dununcio. Dinocio gives these impassioned speeches to vast crowds. He gets a train to Rome. He arrives in Rome. 100,000 people are waiting, massive crush, massive crowds, gives us. these speeches again. Now, he's starting to denounce what he sees as the traitors, the odor of

treachery that is beginning to stifle us. And by the traitors, he means the politicians who might actually block the attempt to get into war, because right now, politics in Rome is very delicately poised. Because the same day he arrives, the 12th of May, the Italian Parliament opens for a new session. And the stakes are very high. Salandra has done this deal with the allies, but he doesn't have a majority. And Rome is awashed with rumours. that he will fall from power and he will be replaced by the liberal leader who is a man called Giovanni Giulitti.

Geolitti has been Prime Minister four times already and he does not want to enter the war. So he's not a Danunziot fan. He's not a denunciate fan. I think it would have been a lot better if Giuliety had become Prime Minister and Italy hadn't entered the war. Anyway, the next day, the 13th,

Salandra pulls off a great political coup, a great bit of political theatre. He unexpectedly resigns, along with his whole cabinet. And he's basically daring the king to appoint Geoliti as Prime Minister and Geoliti to accept the job. And he's betting that they will be put off by the mood on the streets. These huge crowds are pouring through the streets of Rome shouting death to Geolity, up with the war, all this thing. And Tenuncio is going around the city, giving these bonkers speeches.

The treachery is blatant. We don't only breathe in its horrid stench. We feel it's appalling weight. I tell you there is treason here in Rome. and we're being sold like a herd of diseased cattle. And Tenuncio, again a prefiguring of fascism. He says to the crowds, form squads, lion wait, seize them, by which he means Geolitti and the anti-war politicians.

Capture them and all this. Didn't Mussolini call him the John the Baptist of fascism? Yes, he did. Yeah. Well, he absolutely is the John the Baptist of Fascism. If Tenuncio had been left to his own devices, he would have been the John the Baptist and the Jesus of fascism. But he is outsmarted by Mussolini.

He goes on to set up his kind of mad regime in Fume, doesn't he, after the war? He does, which is a massive prefiguring of Mussolini, actually, where he calls himself the duché. So anyway, he's giving these crazy speeches. Blood will flow, but blood will be blessed, all this kind of thing. And the crowds are getting more and more impassioned. Gileiti, the anti-war politician, goes to see the king, and he says, I can't take office against this backdrop.

There'll be a nationalist rebellion. There could be civil war. I don't want to do it. And so on the 16th, the king reinstates Salandra as prime minister, and the king says to Parliament, I think you're just going to have to vote for the war. And I'll abdicate if you don't, because the king has lost his nerve himself.

As another nationalist journalist puts it in his newspaper, either Parliament will prostitute the sacred, trembling body of the nation to the foreigner. I mean, that rhetoric is so kind of 1910s. Or the nation will overthrow Parliament, overturning the benches of the money lenders, purifying the dens of the pimps and panders with iron and fire. I mean, it is amazing the kind of the twisting of language from the New Testament to promote war. Yeah, I know, I know. It's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, of all these deranged speeches, probably, I mean, I think this is one of the worst.

This is Danuncio. He goes to the Capitoline Hill, where, as you said, they've been building that giant, kind of wedding cake, this sort of symbol of Italian nationalism. And he whips his crowd, this giant crowd into a frenzy. He says, the old order must be totally destroyed. We must cast aside the politicians like rotten meat. Sweep away all the filth, into the sewer with all that is vile. He says, Italy will be reborn in fire.

He says again and again, he calls it a Holocaust. It's one of Domencio's favorite words. He says, let's drive out the anti-war politicians. Yeah, they're not just wrong. They are sick. They are diseased. We should drive them out of politics forever. Make lists.

Prescribe them. Be pitiless. Like Sulla or the second triumvirate. Right. Then at the end, I mean, this is also, it feels very Roman. He takes out a sword that had belonged to an agaribald, his lieutenants. And he says, Italy will be born again in blood. I take the sword and draw it.

I press my lips to the naked blade. I abandon my soul to delirium. Now, that is what you call a far-right speech. That is a far-right speech, exactly. The crowd goes berserk, they kind of rampage through the streets of Rome. Hundreds of people are arrested, but obviously the politicians are never going to stand up to this kind of pressure. And on the 20th of May, Italy's parliament votes for war. So the cliche of 1914 is that the crowds in London and Berlin and whatever are terribly enthusiastic.

and baying for blood. Yeah. Which, as we saw in the, you know, when we covered this was a myth. It's ironic that Rome seems to be the one capital where there is incredible enthusiasm. And this is the one capital that actually had the chance of staying out of the war. It is ironic. I suppose it's a little bit misleading. The people in the streets in Rome that day, I don't know if there's research being done,

how you would even do it on their social background or whatever. I would guess a lot of these people as young are students. they're excited. It's a day out. I think everything we know of Italians who went to the front is that they didn't know what they were fighting for. They were completely baffled and they didn't like it. But they were kind of grudgingly went along because they thought they were fighting in defence of their native country, the classic thing. Right. I'm not disputing that. I mean, that's clearly the case that the vast majority of people in Italy don't want it. But it is amazing that the kind of the stereotype of how the First World War breaks out, which is not true, capitals full of bay, is true in Rome.

Yeah, it is. I mean, I wouldn't have fancied being one of the, I mean, it would be extraordinary to see it, I suppose. This sort of impassioned, feverish, delirious atmosphere. Really, really extraordinary. And as you say, there isn't really anything quite like it in any of the other European capitals when the war breaks out. So as I said, on the 20th of May, Italy's parliament votes for war. And that evening, Donencio gives yet another insane speech. The honor of the fatherland, he says, is saved. Our troops will march on the river Isonzo, which is in Slovenia, and we will turn it red with barbarian blood.

And two days later, at the railway station in Rome, the triumphant Prime Minister Salandra publicly embraces his Supreme Military Commander General Kodona before Kodona gets on his train to the cheers of the crowds to head north to the war. And it's a beautiful day. The people are crying. They're so excited. They're crying with joy. And there'll be plenty more crying to come. And just as Danunzio had predicted, the river Isonzo will indeed run red with blood. But whose blood, Dominic? But whose blood? Exactly. Because if Salandra and Danencio think this is going to be a triumphant story of Italian glory and Italian victory, they are in for a heck of a shock. Well, we will find out just how big a shock after a break.

This episode is brought to you by the Times and by the Sunday Times. Now, if there is one thing that history, and indeed Bob Dylan, teaches us, it is that the times they are always are changing. And Dominic, I guess we're living in changing times now, what with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Kirstama are rosy? So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was Prime Minister in the previous oil crisis.

It didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath, to be honest. Actually, he and Kirstarmer, I think, are quite similar. They're from relatively humble backgrounds, and there's a slight sense of floundering, which they have in common. But their bigger point is you never really know what's around the corner, do you? Because when you look at history, the future is always pretty uncertain. But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain. And that, of course, is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in.

Yeah, and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to the Times and the Sunday Times, visit thetimes.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the rest of history. It is the 23rd of May, 1915, and in... Vienna, Italy's ambassador has turned up to tell the Austrian government that from midnight, a state of war will exist between their two countries. The ambassador does this with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

In fact, he's absolutely appalled, isn't he? He privately thinks that the Italians have been, and I quote, swinish and faithless, but he's an ambassador, so he has to do his master's bidding. Yeah. And meanwhile, you mentioned General Cardona, General Luigi Cardona. He's headed off from Rome, and he has arrived at what are going to be his headquarters in the palace of the Archbishop in Odine, in northern Italy. He's not going to be a ringing success, is he, in the forthcoming campaign.

It's a spoiler. I mean, again, we've been talking about these stereotypes that we have of the First World War and how kind of terrible the generals on both sides are on the Western Front. And we were talking in the previous episode, that's not entirely fair. Kodona, I mean, he kind of is the stereotype of a hopeless general who just keeps hurling his troops forwards and forwards and forwards, no matter how often they get gunned down. Dead right. You're dead right. He ticks every box. He's got an absolutely colossal mustache. Oh, do you think? I looked at him. I thought it was not quite as big as it could be. Really? Yeah. I was disappointed.

I think it's because you've been brutalized and desensitized by the Russians' moustaches. Yeah. Of like Paul von, what's it, General von Renncamp's mustache or whatever. These colossal moustaches. And I think actually if you were to see Codornas mustache in the wild, as it were. Yeah, probably. If a go-hanger producer turned out with that moustache. Oh, for sure.

You'd raise an eyebrow. For sure. I mean, by the standards of Dom Johnson's, Oswald Mosley, Moustache. Yes. It's much larger than that. Yeah. But it's not as big as a Russian general. on the Eastern Front in 1914.

That's all I'm saying. No one will know what only this means, but that's fine. Let's just explain who Kodona is and where he comes from. He's from Turin. He was born in 1850. He's a very driven and prickly man. Mark Thompson, his brilliant book, The White War, says he's touchy, unforgiving and unsociable with a reputation for ferocious discipline and inflexibility.

These are not things that massively endear him to us. disastrously for his men, Kordauna is obsessed by this idea of what he calls irresistible forward movement in battle. He's written only one thing in his life. And this is a pamphlet entitled Frontal Attack and Tactical Training, which he published in 1898. And basically because he's published this,

he will never back down from the ideas within it. So he has not absorbed the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War. Of any recent war. Or indeed of the events on the Western Front. Not at all. So his plan is incredibly reckless. He says the left flank of our army will go through the Alps and it'll capture the Alps. Alpine passes leading to Austria.

The right flank of the army will capture Trieste and then Ljubljana and then Zagreb. Now, what is not taking to account is Italy's army is fairly useless to be completely frank. it's half the size of the armies of France and Germany. Most of the ordinary Italian soldiers can't read and write. They can barely understand each other's dialects, and they don't have enough guns, they don't have enough artillery. However, Codona is saying to his political bosses,

with a fair wind, we will reach, quote, the heart of the Habsburg monarchy, which is to say Vienna, by the autumn. We'll be there. We will genuinely be there and done and dusted by Christmas. I mean, an absolutely ridiculous thing for him to say. The campaign starts badly, as you might expect, and it gets worse, because the Italian railways aren't really up to it.

The full mobilisation that was meant to take three weeks goes on for more than six weeks. We said that the Austrians are distracted by fighting Russia in the east. So this was Italy's moment. Italy actually outnumbered the Austrians four to one on their kind of common frontier. But because they're so slow and disorganised, they don't exploit their advantage at all. I mean, it's cheer up the Austrians up who've been completely useless so far in the war, haven't they? Yeah.

To find that they've got an enemy who are even worse than them. We're going to see the Austrians in a very different light in today's episode. The Austrians will appear to be the souls of sort of military competence. Martial competence, yeah. Exactly. So Codornas's initial target, he says, well, the first thing we'll do is we will cross the river Socha or Esonzo. Socho in Slovenian, Isonzo in Italian, which goes through the valleys of Westonzo. and Slovenia quite close to the border.

I was actually there last summer, this part of the world. It's very beautiful, isn't it, Slovenia? Incredibly beautiful. Yeah. I mean, a brilliant place. I should be doing an advert for the Slovenian tourist board. Well, if the Slovenian tourist board are listening, I would love to go. I've always wanted to go.

I keep kind of mapping out, you know, fortnights when I could go and I never do. It's gorgeous. And it's, they've turned the whole thing, basically, into a First World War sort of tourist's attraction. So there are military cemeteries, there's amazing like trench networks and forts. You can roam around to your heart's content. It's a lot better than the Western Front because it's much more beautiful. It's brilliant, actually. I really recommend it.

And everything is really lovely. Light weather, nice people, great. But a very different scene back in 1915, right? Exactly, yes. Not if you're Italian in 1915. So basically, the Italians were meant to cross this river straight away. The Austrians blew up the bridges. It took the Italians ages to get across.

By the time they get across, the Austrians are dug in on the mountains above. And this will be the focus of the campaign for the next two years. So the valley of this river, the Socha or the Azzonzo, and above it, the jagged kind of limestone highlands are what is called the cast or the casso. I mean, that's what you want to see when you were launching a full frontal attack. A jagged limestone highland. Yeah. Oh, God. Last episode we did the Western Front,

and you probably thought that sounded bad with all the mud and the lice and stuff. But at least it's flat. Yeah, this is much worse, much worse. So basically, in the summer, it is ridiculously hot. It's like the sun blazing down as you stagger up these kind of limestone hills. In the winter, it's ridiculously cold,

the wind whipping in off the Adriatic or whatever. Because it's limestone, you can't really dig proper trenches. So you can dig a sort of little gully and lie down in this gully. And when bullets and shells hit the ground, they send up showers of fragments. Yeah, limestone shards in your eye. That's not what you want. Well, these shards would kill people half a mile away. Oh, God.

Yeah, if you're standing with your back to what's going on, half a mile away, this shard will hit you in the back of the head and that's the end of you. Do you remember in the previous series, I asked why the people didn't try and outflank the bottom of the Western Front by invading Switzerland? And I guess that this is the explanation, isn't it? Yeah. Don't go through mountains. No. So for the first few weeks, the Italians go extremely slowly.

They capture only a few villages and a few small towns. They lose 20,000 men in the first few weeks. They show absolutely no sign of having any conception of how they're going to take on machine guns and barbed wire and all this kind of thing. And Codona, General Codona with his nice moustache and whatnot, he looks at this and he says, well, I'm obviously not going to rethink my tactics because my tactics are excellent. What I should do is just start sacking generals. So in two years,

he launches what Mark Thompson calls a rolling purge of his officers. In two years, he sacks 217 generals, 255 colonels and 355 battalion commanders, which seems a lot to me, especially with already disorganized army. I mean, 217 generals, that's a lot of generals.

Yeah, I feel that Italians probably have too many. generals? Yeah, it's like the Royal Navy now with about 700 admirals and three ships. It's kind of on brand though for the Italians to have loads of generals there, isn't it? Yeah. There's a lot of gold braid, a lot of nice hats and feathers and stuff, I imagine. Yeah. Now, while the Italians are sacking their generals and basically trudging very slowly up these hills, the Austrians have been moving reinforcements to the front. Now, as we said, people will recall the Austrians have had an absolutely shocking start

to the war. They made an absolute spectacle of themselves against Serbia. and basically ended up losing to Serbia, which is insane, given that that was the point of the whole war. Then they had a nightmare against Russia on the Eastern Front. You will recall a very, very fine moustache belonging to France, Conrad von Hutzendorf, the Austrian Supreme Commander. Is he the guy who is besotted with what's her name, Gina? Gina. That's why he started the war. And he basically starts the First World War just to impress her.

Yes. He started the First World War as impressed Gina von Rininghouse. who is, ironically, Italian. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Remember, Conrad from Hertzendorff had wanted to invade everybody, had demanded about 6,000 times to attack Austria's neighbours before the war finally started. By 1915, he's lost his youngest son on the Eastern Front,

and he's managed to mislay 800,000 men who've been killed, basically the entire pre-war Austro-Hungarian army. But this is the one thing that he gets right, the Italian campaign. Is Gina impressed? Must be very impressed. Even though he's fighting the Italians, her own people. I think by this point she's gone native a bit. But it's still tragic that the one thing he gets right is against Gina's countrymen.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. It's a tragedy there. So what he does is Conrad Franklin Hurststanov, he's finally learned the lessons. And he says, we're not going to attack. We're just going to be on the defensive. What we have, we hold. And he sends to defend the River Isonzo, the most senior South Slav officer in the Imperial Army. And Dominic, who is he and how do you pronounce his name?

He is a name to conjure with Tom. He is General Svetazar Borreivich. Brilliant. So General Borreouevich is one of the outstanding generals of the First World War. And he is the embodiment of Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic unity. Because he was born in Croatia to a Serbian Orthodox family. He joined the army when he was 10, went to cadet school. He was first decorated in the capture of,

Sarajevo in 1878 in Bosnia. And because he's a South Slav, yeah, because he's basically the embodiment of what will become Yugoslavia, he's really invested in this campaign because he's defending Slavic territory. He doesn't want to see the Italians. No. He doesn't have to seize all this. And most of his men, or at least a lot of his men, are Slovenians,

Croats and Bosnians. So they're also fighting for land that feels like theirs. So they're really invested in this. General Paul von Hindenberg, German walrus. He said of the Austro-Hungarians They fought the Russians with their head But fought the Italians with their whole soul And I guess that's because

They're not actually really Austro-Hungarians As you said They are Slavs defending a Slav homeland Exactly But also Borovic is a smart guy Like he's one of the generals Who's learned the lessons in the war He says, okay, what we'll do is

We'll get as high as we can We'll have five lines of barbed wire Let the Italians come when they come, wait until they're 100 yards away, only start firing then. If they ever break through, don't panic, keep your positions, I'll move up the reserves, I'll plug the gaps, we'll just stay calm, we'll let them come to us and we'll kill them all. And basically, this is what they do. So the first battle of the Asso, as it's called, is launched by the Italians on the 23rd of June, 1915.

And think of this river, it's running just inside the border of Slovenia, so in the, to the east of Italy. And the Italians throw in more than 200,000 men, which is more than twice as many as the Austrians have got. And the Italians think, well, this will go, this will be great. And actually, what happens? They charge uphill and the Austrians open fire with their machine guns, and loads and loads of Italians are killed straight away. So I'll give you an example, an account by an Italian officer called Renato di Stolfe. And he's describing an attack on a mountain called Monte Samichelle. Dyshtolfo is meant to be leading his men into battle with a pistol.

They've run out of pistols, so he only has his sword. It starts raining as soon as they set off, so they're all completely sodden and waterlogged. They draw their swords, there's a band, they're shouting, Savoy, which is their kind of war cry at the house of Savoy. They start to go off uphill. They're all carrying backpacks that are 35 kilograms in weight. What are they taking?

Potts, I don't know, pasta. Are they eating pasta by this point? Or isn't that invented by Americans in 1958? In 1964. Yeah, invented in St. Louis, Missouri. Isn't that the way with all Italian dishes? I gather so. That's what I vaguely remember.

No, but 35 kilograms. You know when you check into a plane? Yeah, I know. And the maximum is 23 or something. I wouldn't want to be charging Austrian machine gun placements. You know, with limestone shards going everywhere. You've got the weight of two suitcases, two full suitcases on your back, staggering up this lime.

It's raining. Soon the sun's going to come out and then you'll be steaming or whatever. What the hell are they taking? Anyway, they stagger up this hill. Then the Austrians start shooting at them. Most of the officers were killed straight away. The men are all scrambling around on the hands and knees take cover. And De Stolfo said, in a whirl of death and glory,

within a few moments, Arabic Garibaldian style of warfare is crushed and consigned to the shadows of history. And basically there's then another rainstorm which stops the battle and the Italian survivors sort of stagger back down the hill with their backpacks and they're backed where they started. And this is the story of the entire first battle of the Asso. It takes two weeks. The Italians make about two yards and they take 15,000 casualties. That's the first battle of the Asso.

And how many are they going to be over the course of the war? There's going to be 11 more of them. You would think if you were General Kodona, you would say, well, that didn't work. I probably won't try that again. He tries it 11 more times in the next two years or so. Well, he's written his book. He has written his book. But also, while this was happening, he was at a conference with the Allied generals, the British and the French.

And they said to him, we want you to, you know, if now you've entered the war, We've given you this money and these promises. You need to produce results. So he feels under pressure. And so less than two weeks later, he launches the second battle of the Asonzo, again in the Sochia Valley. Same story. Up the hill they go, cut down by Austrian machine guns. And they haven't advanced at all.

I mean, barely. I mean, you know, if you've got really into the weeds of this, you'll find they've actually captured a village or something. A village, a hill here, a hill there. But in the grand scheme of things, they've made no progress whatsoever. The sun has come out. It's now the height of summer. There are these amazing accounts from officers in Mark Thompson's book. There's no escaping the heat. Tongues swell, coated with thick saliva. Fingers swell and dangle clumsily from sticky hands, eyes inflamed, skin like parchment. And he also quotes an Italian officer called Vaglio Bonamore, who kept a diary in the first month

of the war. Bonamore says, you know, he describes being in one of these limestone trenches. We talked about the trenches on the Western Front last time. The Italian trenches are awful. They are far worse than anything on the Western family. Because they can't dig down deep enough, really for them to be effective. They can't dig down. You can't bury the bodies. Yeah. So the bodies are just hanging around. The stench was unbearable, says Bonomore. We're squatting among our own and enemy corpses. Basically, you can't get very deep. So when the

Austrians fire at you, lots of you end up dying, blokes are being ripped open by shells and whatnot. And he gives us a description of a single day on the Upper Sotcha River on 14th of August gives you a sense of what it's like So the Italians started with an artillery bombardment at 3 o'clock in the morning

and they set off uphill Before they even really started uphill Most of them were absolutely exhausted And some of them while they're walking Fet asleep while they were walking Which seems a bit much The sun finally comes up And they discover that they're on this hillside

They're totally exposed, no cover They're exposed to the Austrian guns The Austrians fire at them And kind of rake them with shrapnel But that goes on until midday. And at midday their officer says, OK, charge now. They start charging.

The people who've got the wire cutters are all shot down before they even get to the barbed wire. So the rest of the men then are underneath the barbed wire and the Austrian machine guns are just firing at them. Bonomori, the dead are in piles

on top of each other. Nearly all the senior officers have fallen. And basically they end up huddling for hours together, kind of underneath the Austrian barbed wire. They can't get through it. They can't go back. They're kind of stuck. They all run out of ammo and their captain says, I think we should just make a break through. We should try to sneak away. And so they start to sneak away. The first four men who try to sneak away are all shot straight away. Actually, let's not sneak away. This is a really bad idea. So they basically just stay there

under the Austrian wire until darkness comes. And then when darkness comes, when the Austrians have kind of gone to bed or whatever, they managed to stumble down the hill. And Bonamore is in his diary, what a massacre. How many young lives wasted? It's raining nonstop and we lie in the bottom of a ravine to spend the night amid the water and the cold. And the amazing detail about all this, about these battles that always sticks in my mind. It's very unusual in the story of the First World War. There are loads of stories about the Austrian saying to the Italians, go back, we won't shoot at you, you know, don't kill yourselves for nothing. So here's an example, an Austrian captain shouting to his machine gunners.

He says to them, what do you want to do? Do you want to kill them all? Let them be. And then he says to the Italians, stop, go back. We won't shoot anymore. Do you want everyone to die?

Loads of accounts of Austrians saying, Italians, go back. We don't want to massacre you. Your brave men don't get yourselves killed like this. And there's even a story from later in the year. The Austrians actually stopped firing during a battle. And they said to the Italians, go on.

Enough. Get your dead and go back down. And as the Italians were collecting all their dead, the Austrians came out from behind their machine guns to help them to bring them stretches and cigarettes. And the Italians gave them some of their feathers from their plumed hats as nice souvenirs. God, they're still wearing plumed hats after all this. They're still wearing their plumed hats. I mean, what are they thinking? So that was the second battle.

The second battle was a massive bloodbath. The Italians lost 42,000 men. The Austrians actually lost more, 50,000. So here is the question. It's been agitating Callum, our producer. Yeah. How come the Austrians actually lost more? Because they're outnumbered.

And because the Italians, when they finally do get their act together, they're able to overrun some Austrian positions. But they aren't able to do enough of that to swing the tide of the battle. But, I mean, let's not pretend that the Austrians aren't being, the Austrians are being killed too in large numbers. You know, the Austrians, they're not exactly one of Europe's great military machines. We saw how badly they performed against the Russians. they are struggling, but somehow they're clinging on, is the answer. Right. So they are the massive underdogs here, even though they're atop of the hill.

But this slightly recalibrates the strategy then, because it does suggest that, albeit bloodly, it is working. And if the Austrians are as outnumbered as they seem to be. One day it will work. One day it would work. I mean, you can kind of see. Kodon's mentality. General Kodorn has spin doctor joins us now on there.

rest of history. Yeah, but it doesn't work, though. I mean, I would say it doesn't work. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I think the fact that the Italians, despite all this, are losing fewer men than the Austrians, does put a slightly different perspective on it. But they're not always losing fewer men.

So back in Rome, Salandra, the prime minister, is becoming very frustrated. He needs a victory to show the Italian public, but he also needs a victory to appease the Allies. So in October, General Kodona agrees to launch. a third battle of the Asso and it starts with a huge bombardment in October the 18th. Not enough as always to break the Austrian

defences or destroy their belted wire. The Italians advanced to driving rain. Two weeks it's really muddy, they don't really get anywhere and that's that and at the end of that third battle the Italians lost maybe 67,000

men killed and wounded but in this case only 40,000 Austrians. So the tide of war is turning. Well, now you would think at this point, Kodona would surely change tactics, but no, he looks at the calendar, he says,

well, that's probably time for a fourth battle before the end of the year. And he's convinced the Austrians must be running out of men now. And he's not entirely wrong because in some places the Italians outnumber the Austrians

three to one. So he launches a fourth battle. At this point, it's now very cold. Lots of the Italians have got frostbite. Their feet are so swollen on with frostbite. They can't put their boots on. The hands are all purple and misshapen with the cold. Lots of Italians by now started to shoot themselves to get out of the war. So given the choice,

you would rather be fighting at the Battle of Luce than in this battle. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Because here's the test. When Allied observers went to the Italian lines, they said, oh my God, I didn't think anything could be worse than what we're experiencing, but this is absolutely awful. So in that fourth battle, by the way, the Italians lost 49,000 men, the Austrians 30,000. So again, the Italians lost more. And the conditions in the Italian trenches over the winter were absolutely appalling. They have these shallow trenches, their uniforms are in rags, a lot of them don't even have guns, their boots fall apart. They've all got typhoid and cholera.

And actually, the thing that I was about to say amuses me, It both appalls and amuses me. British visitors who went to the Italian camps so they couldn't get over the toilet conditions. They had no respect for Italian hygiene. One British visitor said the Italian camp was literally a field of filth. I had never seen such a disgusting sight, and I wondered what kind of epidemic was being bred

amidst the excretor and soiled paper. It sounds like a kind of Bidica discussing Italian toilet arrangements in 1897 or something. something. They're always very sniffy about that. Or a columnist in the Daily Telegraph whose children have just been to Glastonbury. Yes. And it's appalled by the... Yeah. When he went to see how they were getting on.

Anyway, so the year ends with the war in total deadlock at an absolutely horrendous cost. So the Italians have now lost, killed and wounded. 400,000 men. And this is a war that they chose, right? They could have stayed out. but they've thrown away the lives of all these people. And Mark Thompson gives the example of a single brigade who were called, unimprovably,

the Palenta Brigade because they wore yellow colours. And the Palenta Brigade began the war with 130 officers and 6,000 soldiers. And by the end of 1915, having been reinforced several times, they have lost 154 officers and 4,276 men killed, wounded and wounded. missing. So almost the entire pre-war contingent. And so by the end of the year,

the Italians have actually lost more than the Austrians, do you think? Yes, they have. And just to look ahead, in the next two years, they fight another eight battles on the Asso. And basically the 12th of them, the Italians just crack completely, and the Austrians end up winning it.

And this is that place called Cobarid, very pretty town actually. Caporetto, Hemingway was there towards the end of the war. This is when he writes about the Italian front, he's writing about Caporetto. And the Italian second army was completely destroyed. And the Austrians and the Germans, who have now piled in to help the Austrians, they pushed them back and they struck a hundred miles into Italy. And then the Austrians themselves then fell apart. The Italians rallied at the river Piave, and then they beat the Austrians at Vittoria, Venetian.

in November of 1918, and this was the point at which the Austro-Hungarian Empire was falling apart. And then the war ends, and at that point, the Italians have lost 689,000 people killed in battle, as well as probably about 600,000 civilians and another million Italians seriously wounded. So it goes well. Yeah, exactly developed to their advantage.

And it's this tremendous national trauma. And the thing is, for what? because at the peace conferences they are given Trieste they're given Istria they're given the Trentino and South Tyrol but they're not given a lot of the other stuff they wanted they don't get a bit of Turkey

they don't get loads of Greek islands they don't get Dalmatia they don't get an empire in the Adriatic and even though on paper they are among the winners of the First World War lots of Italians feel we've actually you know we did all that for nothing you know we didn't get what we wanted

and so this will feed into the feeling of resentment that will help to incubate fascism? Completely. So one of the people who feels cheated is one of the worst men in history, Gabriela de Dancio. And he has all the through the war, he's been reveling in the war.

I mean, he was nicknamed the poets of slaughter, and he loved that nickname. And when the war ends, because they don't get the Istrian port of Rieca, or Fume, as the Italians called it, he seizes it himself

with a paramanitary group and he names himself the duchee. And that, of course, is an inspiration for another man we've mentioned, the man who really does tap the bitterness after Italy's war, a man who had fought on the asso, who rose to become a corporal, who was badly wounded but survived to tell the tale, and that man was Benito Mussolini. Okay, Dominic, well, next week we will be leaving the killing fields of the isonzo

and heading out onto the high seas for the story of the Lusitania. In a way, a sequel, not just to this series, but to the series we did on Titanic, because it involves more death on the high seas. And then after that, we will be going to Brussels for a spy story. Or was Edith Cavell a spy? We will be exploring that. Restis History Club members, of course, can hear both those episodes and the remaining two episodes, which will be on Gallipoli. So to join them and get the full range of benefits, the only way to do that is to go to the restishistory.com and sign up there. So thank you, Dominic. Thank you everyone for listening.

We will be back soon. Bye-bye. Ciao, Rivedecchi. Hi, everybody. We are back with another absolutely colossal update about the Rest is History Festival. Well, it's massive. So on the 4th and 5th of July, we will be at Hampton Court Palace. that we have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic Royal Palace's collections, and yes, Dominic, most exciting of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for, and I'm so looking forward to it. We have medieval combat, a terrifying, brutal, yet completely thrilling sport. It is going to be an unforgettable two days.

It is indeed. And at the core of the festival of these talks, we've got some more talks to add to the lineup. So I will be talking about. talking to the brilliant Tudor historian Tracy Borman about the secrets of the six wives of Henry the 8th. I'll be talking to a friend of the show and Irish National Treasure, Paul Rouse, about whether there is an alternative universe in which islands could have remained part of the United Kingdom. We'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar, Germany, and in particular, the town of Weimar through history. And Professor Adam Smith will be telling the story of America through three presidents. And on top of all that, I'll be doing a special event with Ian Hislop about the history of satire.

And I will be on stage with Mary Beard and we will be talking about just how strange, just how alien, just how different to us Rome was or maybe it wasn't. I will be talking to Helen Castor about Elizabeth I. And we'll be discussing whether she truly was England's greatest ruler or maybe whether that title should still be claimed by Athelstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things Persian, with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to a friend of the show, Willie Dalrymple, about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome. Absolutely incredible scenes. And of course, on both days, Tom and I will be on stage doing a show together as well. So on the first day, we'll be answering all our club members' questions.

and then to close the festival, we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends of the show. So lots to look forward to. And beyond that, there is so much else that will be happening across the weekend. So think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout. And your tickets will give you full access

to explore the great Tudor Palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal Tennis Court. So that would be very exciting. There will be food and food. drink fit for a king, which sounds very enticing. I picture the very glamorous people that are our club members in their summer garb. They're on the lawn at Hampton Court Palace. They're chatting about history and delightful surroundings, sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic. And it's probably the most civilised festival there's ever been. I mean, that's what I imagine anyway. Just a

reminder, the tickets are exclusive to club members and if you are not a member, now is the perfect time to join. So head over to The Restishistory.com to sign up and grab your tickets and of course have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits. Once you have signed up to the restishistory.com, all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival and it's all very obvious. But you know what? There is a twist. If you do this, you will be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw. And that prize draw, if you win, you and three other people, it's like the golden tickets in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory,

because you will be given the chance to be upgraded to the premium experience. And the premium experience will give you, among other things, unlimited food and drink for free all day. Do not miss it. Can't wait to see you there.