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

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: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ 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

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• 0:00Tom Holland?

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• 0:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. They're brilliant at alliances, they're brilliant at managing power, they're brilliant, of course, at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership. And of course, we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyds to be ready when you are. Because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters, backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality.

• 1:16Tom Holland?

  Based on Lloyds' internal customer data from March 2026.

• 1:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spent all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.

• 1:45Tom Holland?

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• 2:13Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:38Tom Holland?

  Our vigil is ended. Our exhortation 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 spouting from the veins of Italy. We are the last to join this struggle and already the first are meeting with glory. The slaughter begins.

• 3:22Tom Holland?

  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 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 Gabriele de Nuncio with a frankly lunatic peroration. And he's addressing at my eyes at dawn on the 26th of May, 1915.

• 4:05Tom Holland?

  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 larger scale? So Dominic, are you a fan of Donunzio?

• 4:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I absolutely despise Donunzio, 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.

• 5:00Tom Holland?

  But I'll tell you, someone who likes it.

• 5:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, go on.

• 5:02Tom Holland?

  Is Benito Mussolini, an Italian journalist who may go on to better things in due course.

• 5:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Higher things, exactly. Yes. And actually, we will be talking about Donunzio and Benito Mussolini, who learns a lot from Donunzio 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

• 5:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 6:03Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I mean, it's completely cynical, isn't it?

• 6:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, 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 defence of their native land. They think the principle is on their side, that their native land is encircled by enemies. I mean, this could be the French, could be the Germans, could be the Austrians, whoever, 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

• 6:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 7:09Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's amazing book, isn't it?

• 7:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a wonderful book.

• 7:12Tom Holland?

  I mean, I've got to be honest, it's the only book on the topic I've read, but I felt, having read it, I didn't need to read anymore.

• 7:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 7:30Tom Holland?

  Yeah, there's a meat grinder. Let's jump into it.

• 7:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 any exist, will at this point turn the podcast off, you might say Italy is an invented country. People have made it up.

• 8:01Tom Holland?

  Well, I think that is harsh.

• 8:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you think that's harsh?

• 8:04Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are some historians who genuinely would argue that.

• 8:07Tom Holland?

  I know. But I mean, the notion of Italy goes back to the Roman period.

• 8:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course it does.

• 8:12Tom Holland?

  And so that is something that obviously is lurking in the minds of lots of enthusiasts for a greater Italy, I think.

• 8:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Italy didn't exist until the 1850s, 1860s. There's a process of unification called the Risorgimento, 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 are

• 9:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  we, what dialect are we going to speak and so on and so forth.

• 9:08Tom Holland?

  What national dishes are we going to invent?

• 9:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, we did a whole episode on this with friend of the show, John Dickey, 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 Italy's 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, an amputation, alien to nature, law and logic.

• 9:47Tom Holland?

  And Dominic, what sharpens that sense is the fact that on the other side of that border is Austria.

• 9:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Tom Holland?

  The Austro-Hungarian Empire. And that is the former imperial mistress of Venice and other regions of Italy.

• 10:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Tyrell 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.

• 10:34Tom Holland?

  Maybe Gaul, maybe Romania.

• 10:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  They say, we'd like the peninsula of Istria.

• 10:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we would like the coast of Dalmatia. So there are Italian speakers in all of these areas that belong to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the nationalist slogan is Unredeemed Italy, Italia Iredenta. And it's from that expression that we get irredentism. So this idea that there is 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 urban intellectuals, all of this kind of thing.

• 11:18Tom Holland?

  And as you said, it's, it, there is a parallel in Germany.

• 11:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, rather like the Germans, the Italians feel they've, 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 Holland bingo. The example of the Roman Empire is, 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 rivalry between the French and Italians in North Africa.

• 12:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And as a result of that, the Italians sign a very implausible alliance in 1882. First of all, with, well, with Germany, that's not so implausible, but Austria, but with Austria as well.

• 12:14Tom Holland?

  That's mad.

• 12:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 12:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Adua 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.

• 13:07Tom Holland?

  Yeah, because in Rome at this point, they're building an enormous monument on the Capitol, 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 able to resurrect.

• 13:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 13:43Tom Holland?

  And that's not completed, I think, until 1911. So just before, before the outbreak of the war.

• 13:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a monstrosity, actually, isn't it? It's a wedding cake.

• 13:51Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 only have a very vague sense of what the state is. Their horizons are bounded by the locality, by the village,

• 14:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  by the farm, all of this. And only a tiny fraction of the population gets to vote. So in 1913, eight 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 of the moment. And at the top is the king, Victor Emmanuel III.

• 15:04Tom Holland?

  So he's the grandson of the monument guy.

• 15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 15:17Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He fancies himself as an amateur photographer. That's his, his passion. He has loads of power under the Italian constitution, so he can call parliament, 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, 19, let's go to 1914, when the First World War begins. At this point, his prime minister is a man called Antonio Salandra. And Salandra is a conservative lawyer from a rich family, landowning family in Puglia,

• 16:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 16:15Tom Holland?

  Oh, thank God. It's so good to have an enormous moustache back on the rest of history.

• 16:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, of course.

• 16:20Tom Holland?

  Haven't had one for a while.

• 16:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, Italy was going through all kinds of internal ructions, massive strikes, unrest, talk of socialist and anarchist revolution and whatnot. So Salandra was distracted.

• 16:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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."

• 17:08Tom Holland?

  Become more powerful. I mean, that would be mad.

• 17:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, they don't. And they say, "Hmm, we might accept you attacking Serbia if you gave us the South Tyrell." And the Austri-- the Germans actually said to the Austrians, "Would you think about it?" And the Austrians 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.

• 17:44Tom Holland?

  But I guess it's kind of against the spirit, if not the letter.

• 17:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 alliances with them. And the Italians said, "Well, you took us for granted. You didn't consult us. You've got stuck in. There's also good reasons for Italy to stay out. Our 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

• 18:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  one out." Fine. Just a week later, the marquis of San Giuliano sends Celandra 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."

• 18:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the same day, so the 9th of August, the Marcus of Sangilliano starts to send out informal messages to London. If we were to change sides, would you? Yeah, just, just wondering. Meanwhile, they say to the chief military commander, General Cadorne, who we'll 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 greater attack on France. And they've been turned back at the river Mann, the Battle of the Mann. And Salandra says to his cronies, we should use this historic cataclysm to, and I quote, "complete and enlarge

• 19:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  the fatherland." And, you know, 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.

• 20:05Tom Holland?

  Sacral, sacral poor behaviour.

• 20:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it is. That they, 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.

• 20:18Tom Holland?

  And stabbing them in the back.

• 20:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much the better.

• 20:21Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, we're 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, Salandra expects that to happen. And in fact, he doesn't mind because he's already eyeing up, you know, the Adriatic coast.

• 21:02Tom Holland?

  Are the Austrians kind of alerted by this, to the possibility that they might jump ship?

• 21:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, they definitely are. They can sort of feel it coming, but they're not going to buy off the Italians by giving them, you know, big chunks of their empire.

• 21:16Tom Holland?

  I'm just wondering if they're starting to beef up their defences.

• 21:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they are. But of course, don't forget, in this, in this period of time. This is the point that we talked about in our very first First World War series.

• 21:25Tom Holland?

  But the Russians are coming, aren't they?

• 21:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Russians are coming and Tom, you will recall that there's the tremendous battle for the city of Prozimosh.

• 21:33Tom Holland?

  Of course, how could I forget?

• 21:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Tom Holland?

  Where?

• 21:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  The fortress city of Prozimosh. Great to have that back on the show. So, late February 1915, Slandra'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 South Tyrol, we'd like Trentino, we'd like Trieste and Goryzia, 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 Rhodes, Kos, 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.

• 22:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  At this point, the Austrians are actually saying to them, okay, 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.

• 22:40Tom Holland?

  And this whole kind of getting into bed with people for money, how does this go down with people in London and Paris?

• 22:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I'm sorry to say, Tom, that it reinforces existing stereotypes of Italian behaviour among the policymakers 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 for 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

• 23:23Tom Holland?

  Moral sexual behaviour.

• 23:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 will 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 that badly. And actually, do you know what? If the Ottoman Empire falls apart,

• 24:04Tom Holland?

  You can have that as well.

• 24:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can have a bit of Turkey as well.

• 24:07Tom Holland?

  Go for it.

• 24:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Celandra asks his regional governors, "What do the 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.

• 24:50Tom Holland?

  All that gas and rats and mud and stuff.

• 24:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 25:12Tom Holland?

  Is there nothing they don't know?

• 25:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, Gabriele Donunzio. So Donunzio, we did a whole episode on him back in 2022 called The First Fascist, with his biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett.

• 25:36Tom Holland?

  Oh, yeah. The Pike. Brilliant book.

• 25:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. Now,

• 25:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Donuncio, 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.

• 25:54Tom Holland?

  I mean, we've been talking about moustaches.

• 25:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Tom Holland?

  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, fatally fascist, flamboyant, let's fly on a plane kind of a moustache.

• 26:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 26:28Tom Holland?

  Gives us all hope.

• 26:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 26:46Tom Holland?

  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.

• 26:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 27:20Tom Holland?

  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.

• 27:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 27:33Tom Holland?

  Although he is quite keen on kind of ancient dreams of empire as well, isn't he?

• 27:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. It's the sort of fusion of the two.

• 27:38Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so that's how he's the proto-fascist.

• 27:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 nineteen fifteen, he opens a letter in Paris that has been lying around for weeks and it's laying kind of 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 eighteen sixty. And they're going to inaugurate a monument and they want Donanzio to come and give a talk. And he thinks, well, this is it.

• 28:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 third of May nineteen fifteen. He crosses the Italian border for the first time in five years. He is met by colossal crowds. He's, he's a sort of Lucy Hughes Hallidon, 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.

• 28:52Tom Holland?

  Your vibe.

• 28:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like when we arrive in a, to do a Restless History tour, surely that's the.

• 28:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  He gets to Genoa, massive crowds, and he gives the first, there'll be a lot of blood curdling speeches. He is the first of a series of mad speeches. We shall not let Italy be dishonored. 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 kid's book about the First World War. I still actually find shocking every time I look at it.

• 29:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Cause it's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount in favour of fighting and killing. Blessed are the twenty 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.

• 30:11Tom Holland?

  And people complain, don't they? And he kind of basically says. You know, if it's if it's wrong to incite people to violence, then so be it.

• 30:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Tom Holland?

  I plead guilty. Brilliant. Let's have more of it.

• 30:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, thirty three 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 Donencio, who's obsessed with Nietzsche, the sort of Darwinian idea of struggle and

• 30:53Tom Holland?

  Will to power.

• 30:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  The will to power.

• 30:55Tom Holland?

  Hates George Eliot.

• 30:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Does Mussolini hate George Eliot?

• 30:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, despises her.

• 31:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, why? Doesn't like Middlemarch?

• 31:03Tom Holland?

  Uh, 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 realised that's a problem. He's always going on about it.

• 31:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey. 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 nineteen fourteen, he sort of sensed the way the wind was blowing and he decided to completely change his mind.

• 31:28Tom Holland?

  I mean, I guess that's that's the mark of a good journalist, right?

• 31:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose, yes. I suppose that's one way of looking at it, but I didn't think we'd be into rehabilitating Mussolini.

• 31:38Tom Holland?

  Well, I'm not.

• 31:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  His journalistic acumen.

• 31:40Tom Holland?

  I mean, newspapers have been known to kind of jump on bandwagons before.

• 31:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  They have indeed. So he found some new newspaper and he sets up his own political movement, Mussolini, arguing for war. With some French and British allied funding, by the way. And he calls it the leagues of revolutionary action, the fasciatiioni rivoluzionaria. Fasci, meaning kind of bands 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 Donencio. And Donencio gives these impassioned speeches to vast crowds. Gets a train to Rome, he arrives in Rome, a hundred thousand people are waiting, massive crush, massive crowds. Gives 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.

• 32:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. Selandra has done this deal with the allies, but he doesn't have a majority. And Rome is awash with rumours that he will fall from power. And he will be replaced by the liberal leader, who is a man called Giovanni Giolitti. Giolitti has been Prime Minister four times already, and he does not want to enter the war.

• 33:03Tom Holland?

  So he's not a Donunzio fan?

• 33:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not a Donunzio fan. I think it would have been a lot better if Giolitti had become Prime Minister and Italy hadn't entered the war. Anyway. The next day, the 13th, Selandra 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 Giolitti as Prime Minister and Giolitti 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 Giolitti, up with the war, all this thing. And Donunzio is going around the city, giving these bonkers speeches. The treachery is blatant. We don't only breathe in its horrid stench, we feel its appalling weight. I tell you, there is treason here in Rome. We're being sold like a herd of diseased cattle.

• 33:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Donunzio, again a prefiguring of fascism, he says to the crowds, form squads, lie in wait, seize them. By which he means Giolitti and the anti-war politicians, capture them and all this.

• 34:03Tom Holland?

  Didn't Mussolini call him the John the Baptist of fascism?

• 34:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he did. Well, he absolutely is the John the Baptist of fascism. If Donunzio 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.

• 34:18Tom Holland?

  He goes on to set up his kind of mad regime in Fume, doesn't he, after the war?

• 34:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does, which is a massive prefiguring of Mussolini, actually, where he calls himself the Duce. So anyway, he's giving these crazy speeches, blood will flow, but blood will be blessed, all this kind of thing. And the crowds getting more and more impassioned. Giolitti, the anti-war politician, goes to see the king and he says, I can't take office against this backdrop. You know, there'll be a nationalist rebellion, there could be civil war, I don't want to do it. And so on the sixteenth, the king reinstates Celandra as prime minister. And the king says to parliament, I think you're just gonna 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

• 35:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  prostitute the sacred trembling body of the nation to the foreigner. I mean, that rhetoric is so kind of nineteen tens. Or the nation will overthrow parliament, overturning the benches of the moneylenders, purifying the dens of the pimps and pandas with iron and fire.

• 35:24Tom Holland?

  I mean, it is amazing, the kind of, the twisting of language from the New Testament to promote war.

• 35:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Donunzio. 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 in, this giant crowd into a frenzy. He says, the old order must be totally destroyed, 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, he says again and again, he calls it the Holocaust, that's one of Donunzio's favourite words. He says, let's drive out the anti-war politicians.

• 36:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 36:25Tom Holland?

  Like Sala, or the second triumvirate.

• 36:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Then at the end, I mean, this is also, it feels very Roman, he takes out a sword that had belonged to one of Garibaldi's 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.

• 36:44Tom Holland?

  Now that is what you call a A far right speech.

• 36:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 37:05Tom Holland?

  So the cliche of 1914 is that the crowds in London and Berlin and whatever are terribly enthusiastic and baying for blood.

• 37:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Tom Holland?

  Which, as we saw when, 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.

• 37:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 are 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.

• 38:00Tom Holland?

  Right, I'm not, 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, the stereotype of how the First World War breaks out, which is not true.

• 38:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 38:13Tom Holland?

  Capitals full of baying is true in Rome.

• 38:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, 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, Donanzio gives yet another insane speech. The honour of the fatherland, he says, is saved. Our troops will march on the river Isanzo, 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

• 38:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Slandra publicly embraces his supreme military commander, General Codorna, before Codorna gets on his train to the cheers of the crowds to head north to the war. 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 Donunzio had predicted, the river Issonzo will indeed run red with blood.

• 39:24Tom Holland?

  But whose blood, Dominic?

• 39:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  But whose blood? Exactly. Because if Slandra and Donunzio think this is going to be a triumphant story of Italian glory and Italian victory, they are in for a heck of a shock.

• 39:36Tom Holland?

  Well, we will find out just how big a shock after a break.

• 39:44Tom Holland?

  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 a-changing. And Dominic, I guess we're living in changing times now, with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer are rosy? So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was Prime Minister in the previous oil crisis?

• 40:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  It didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath, to be honest. And actually, he and Keir Starmer, 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.

• 40:28Tom Holland?

  But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain. And that, of course, is where The Times and The Sunday Times come in.

• 40:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 41:19Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Men in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not?

• 41:28Speaker 05

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 41:35Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:53Speaker 05

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• 42:04Speaker 06

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• 42:08Speaker 05

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• 42:38Tom Holland?

  Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest Is 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.

• 43:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Tom Holland?

  And meanwhile, you mentioned General Cadorna, General Luigi Cadorna. 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 Udine 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. Cadorna, 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.

• 43:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dead right. You're dead right. He ticks every box. He's got an absolutely colossal moustache.

• 44:04Tom Holland?

  Oh, do you think? I looked at it. I thought it was not quite as big as it could be.

• 44:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 44:09Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I was disappointed.

• 44:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's because you've been brutalised and desensitised.

• 44:14Tom Holland?

  By the Russians' moustaches.

• 44:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of like Paul Von, what's it, General Von Rendkamp's moustache or whatever, these colossal moustaches. And I think actually, if you were to see Cadorna's moustache in the wild, as it were.

• 44:26Tom Holland?

  Yeah, probably.

• 44:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  If a goal hanger producer turned out with that moustache.

• 44:29Tom Holland?

  Oh, for sure.

• 44:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  You'd raise an eyebrow.

• 44:31Tom Holland?

  For sure. I mean, by the standards of Dom Johnson's Oswald Mosley moustache.

• 44:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 44:36Tom Holland?

  It's much larger than that.

• 44:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Tom Holland?

  But it's not as big as a Russian general on the Eastern Front in 1914. That's all I'm saying.

• 44:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  No one will know what any of this means, but that's fine. Let's just explain who Cadorna 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, Cadorna 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,

• 45:25Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which he published in 1898. And basically, because he's published this, he will never back down from the ideas within it.

• 45:33Tom Holland?

  So he has not absorbed the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War?

• 45:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of, indeed, of, yeah, of any recent war.

• 45:41Tom Holland?

  Or indeed of the events on the Western Front?

• 45:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Alpine Passes leading to Austria. The right flank of the army will capture Trieste and then Lubiana and then Zagreb. Now, what is not taken into 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, Codorna is saying to his political bosses, "With a fair wind, we will reach, quote, 'the heart of the Habsburg monarchy,' which

• 46:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  is to say Vienna, by the autumn. We'll be there. We could, 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.

• 47:04Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's not cheer up the Austrians up, who've been completely useless so far in the war, haven't they? To find that they've got an enemy who are even worse than them.

• 47:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 47:18Tom Holland?

  Martial competence, yeah.

• 47:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So Codorna's initial target, he says, well, first, the first thing we'll do is we will cross the river Sotcha.

• 47:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or Esoszo, so Sotja in Slovenian, Esoszo in Italian, which goes through the valleys of western Slovenia, quite close to the border. I was actually there last summer, this part of the world.

• 47:41Tom Holland?

  It's very beautiful, isn't it, Slovenia?

• 47:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Incredibly beautiful.

• 47:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, a brilliant place. I should be doing an advert for the Slovenian Tourist Board.

• 47:48Tom Holland?

  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.

• 47:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's gorgeous and it's, they've turned the whole thing basically into a First World War sort of tourist attraction. So there are military cemeteries, there's amazing like trench networks and forts. You can roam around to your heart's content in the most, it's a lot better than the Western Front, it's much more beautiful. It's brilliant, actually. I really recommend it and everything is really lovely. Nice weather, nice people, great.

• 48:19Tom Holland?

  But a very different scene back in 1915, right?

• 48:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, 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 Sotja or the Esoszo, and above it, the jagged kind of limestone highlands of what is called the Karst or the Karso.

• 48:51Tom Holland?

  I mean, that's what you want to see when you are launching a full frontal attack.

• 48:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  A jagged limestone highland.

• 48:58Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 49:05Tom Holland?

  But at least it's flat.

• 49:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 49:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah, limestone shards in your eye. That's not what you want.

• 49:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, these shards would kill people half a mile away.

• 49:45Tom Holland?

  Oh, God.

• 49:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 49:51Tom Holland?

  Do you remember in the previous series, I asked why the, um, why the people didn't try and outflank the bottom of the Western Front by invading Switzerland?

• 49:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 49:59Tom Holland?

  And I guess that this is the explanation, isn't it?

• 50:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, don't go through mountains.

• 50:03Tom Holland?

  No.

• 50:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Cadorna, General Cadorna 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.

• 50:35Tom Holland?

  Hmm.

• 50:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in two years, he, 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. Seems a lot to me, especially with this already disorganized army.

• 50:53Tom Holland?

  I mean, 217 generals, that's a lot of generals.

• 50:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's, yeah, I feel that Italians probably have too many generals.

• 50:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's like the Royal Navy now with about 700 admirals and three ships.

• 51:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's kind of on brand though for the Italians to have loads of generals there, isn't it?

• 51:06Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of gold braid, a lot of nice hats and feathers and stuff, I imagine.

• 51:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 Hützenendorf, the Austrian Supreme Commander.

• 51:45Tom Holland?

  Is he the guy who who is besotted with, what's his name, Gina?

• 51:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gina, that's why he started the war.

• 51:51Tom Holland?

  And he basically starts the First World War just to impress her.

• 51:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he started the First World War to impress Gina von Rininghaus, who is ironically Italian.

• 52:00Tom Holland?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 52:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, remember Conrad von Hützenendorf 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.

• 52:26Tom Holland?

  Is Gina impressed?

• 52:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Must be very impressed.

• 52:29Tom Holland?

  Even though he's fighting the Italians, her own people?

• 52:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think by this point she's gone native a bit.

• 52:34Tom Holland?

  But it's still tragic that the one thing he gets right is against Gina's countrymen.

• 52:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 52:41Tom Holland?

  It's a tragedy there.

• 52:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  So what he does is Conrad von Hützenendorf, 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 Isonzó, the most senior South Slav officer in the Imperial Army.

• 52:58Tom Holland?

  And Dominic, who is he and how do you pronounce his name?

• 53:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is a name to conjure with, Tom, he is General Svetozar Borovevich. So General Borovevich 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.

• 53:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  And because he's a South Slav, yeah, because he's basically the Bodmen's War, will become Yugoslavia. He's really invested in this campaign because he's defending Slavic territory. He doesn't want to see the Italians.

• 53:42Tom Holland?

  No.

• 53:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Kind of seize all this. And most of his men, or at least a lot of his men are Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians. So they're also fighting for land that feels like theirs. So they're really invested in this. General Paul von Hindenburg, German walrus. He said of the Austro-Hungarians, they fought the Russians with their head, but fought the Italians with their whole soul.

• 54:05Tom Holland?

  And I guess that's because they're not actually really Austro-Hungarians, as you said. They are Slavs defending a Slav homeland.

• 54:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. But also Borovic is a smart guy, like he's one of the generals who's learned the lessons of 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 a hundred 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 Assonzo, 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 to the east of Italy.

• 54:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 it's, I've given an example, an account by an Italian officer called Renato di Stolfo. And he's describing an attack on a mountain called Monte Sami Kelly. Di Stolfo 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.

• 55:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  They draw their swords, there's a band, they're shouting Savoy, which is their kind of war cry, the House of Savoy. They start to go off uphill. They're all carrying backpacks that are 35 kilograms in weight.

• 55:53Tom Holland?

  What are they taking?

• 55:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pots, I don't know.

• 55:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pasta?

• 55:59Tom Holland?

  Are they eating pasta by this point? Or isn't that invented by Americans in 1958?

• 56:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  In 1964, yeah. Yeah, invented in St Louis, Missouri. Isn't that the way with all Italian dishes?

• 56:12Tom Holland?

  I gather so. That's what I vaguely remember.

• 56:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, but 35 kilograms, you know when you check into a plane?

• 56:18Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I know.

• 56:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the maximum is 23 or something.

• 56:22Tom Holland?

  I wouldn't want to be charging Austrian machine gun placements, you know, with limestone shards going everywhere.

• 56:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  You've got the weight of two suitcases, two full suitcases on your back, staggering up this line. It's raining, soon the sun's going to come out and then you'll be steaming or whatever.

• 56:37Tom Holland?

  What the hell are they taking?

• 56:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 their hands and knees to take cover. And Distolfo said, "In a whirl of death and glory, within a few moments, the epic Garibaldiian 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 back to where they started. And this is the story of the entire first Battle of the Assonzo. It takes two weeks. The Italians make about two yards and they take 15,000 casualties. That's the first Battle of the Assonzo.

• 57:23Tom Holland?

  And how many, how many are there going to be over the course of the war?

• 57:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's going to be 11 more of them. You would think if you were General Codorna, 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, you know, produce results." So he feels under pressure. And so less than two weeks later, he launches the second Battle of the Assonzo, again in the Sotcha Valley. Same story, up the hill they go, cut down by Austrian machine guns.

• 58:07Tom Holland?

  And they haven't advanced at all?

• 58:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, barely. I mean, you know, if you've got really into the weeds of this, you'll find they've actually captured.

• 58:14Tom Holland?

  A village or something.

• 58:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  A village, a hill here, a hill there. But on the, 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 were 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 Virgilio 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 of the Western Front last time. The Italian trenches are awful. They are far worse than anything on the Western Front.

• 58:54Tom Holland?

  Because they can't dig down deep enough, really for them to be effective.

• 58:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  They can't dig down. You can't bury the bodies.

• 59:01Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the bodies are just hanging around. The stench was unbearable, says Bonamore. We're squatting among our own and enemy corpses. Basically, this 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 Oppasota River on the fourteenth of August, gives you a sense of what it's like. So the Italians started with an artillery bombardment at three 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, fell 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.

• 59:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're exposed to the Austrian guns. The Austrians fire at them and kind of rake them with shrapnel. But that goes on till midday. And then at midday, their officer says, okay, 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. Bonamore, 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 for it, we should try

• 1:00:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  to sneak away. And so they start to sneak away. The first four men who tried 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, and the Austrians have kind of gone to bed or whatever, they manage to stumble down the hill. And Bonamore says 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

• 1:01:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  the Austrians 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. You're 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, you know, enough, get your dead and go back down. And as the Italians were collecting

• 1:01:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  all their dead, the Austrians came out from behind the machine guns to help them, to bring them stretchers and cigarettes. And the Italians gave them some of their feathers from their plumed hats as nice souvenirs.

• 1:02:01Tom Holland?

  God, they're still wearing plumed hats after all this?

• 1:02:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:02:13Tom Holland?

  So here is the question. It's been agitating, Callum, our producer.

• 1:02:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Tom Holland?

  How come the Austrians actually lost more?

• 1:02:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 going, 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.

• 1:02:50Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 1:02:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they are, they are, they are the massive underdogs here, even though they're at the top of the hill.

• 1:02:55Tom Holland?

  But this slightly recalibrates the, the strategy then, because it does suggest that, that albeit bloodly, it is working. And if the Austrians are as outnumbered as they seem to be.

• 1:03:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  One day it will work.

• 1:03:09Tom Holland?

  One day it would work. I mean, you can kind of see.

• 1:03:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Cudorna's mentality.

• 1:03:13Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  General Cudorna's spin doctor joins us now on the 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.

• 1:03:22Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:03:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Cudorna agrees to launch a third Battle of the Assonzo, and it starts with a huge bombardment in October the 18th. Not enough, as always, to break the Austrian defences or destroy their barbed wire. The Italians advance through driving rain. Two weeks, it's really wet, 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.

• 1:04:14Tom Holland?

  So the tide of war is turning.

• 1:04:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, now you would think at this point Cudorna would surely change tactics, but no, he's got, he looks at the calendar, he says, well, it's probably time for, 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 with frostbite, they can't put their boots on. Their hands are all purple and misshapen with the cold. Lots of Italians by now have started to shoot themselves to get out of the war.

• 1:04:56Tom Holland?

  So, given the choice, you would rather be fighting at the Battle of Luce than in this battle?

• 1:05:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:05:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  British visitors who went to the Italian camps, they couldn't get over the toilet conditions, that 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 excreta and soiled paper.

• 1:06:06Tom Holland?

  It sounds like a kind of Bidica discussing Italian toilet arrangements in 1897 or something. They're always very sniffy about that.

• 1:06:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or a columnist in the Daily Telegraph, whose children have just been to Glastonbury. And is appalled by that. When he went to see it, 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. Four hundred thousand 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 a hundred and thirty officers and six thousand soldiers.

• 1:07:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And by the end of nineteen fifteen, having been reinforced several times, they have lost a hundred and fifty-four officers and four thousand two hundred and seventy-six men killed, wounded and missing. So almost the entire, you know, the entire pre-war contingent.

• 1:07:18Tom Holland?

  And so by the end of the year, the Italians have actually lost more than the Austrians, do you think?

• 1:07:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, they have. And just to look ahead, in the next two years, they fight another eight battles on the Assozio. And basically, the twelfth of them, the Italians just crack completely and the Austrians end up winning it. And this is at a place called Cobberid, 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.

• 1:08:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then the Austrians themselves then fell apart. The Italians rallied at the river Piave and then they beat the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto in November nineteen eighteen. 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 six hundred and eighty-nine thousand people killed in battle, as well as probably about six hundred thousand civilians and another million Italians seriously wounded.

• 1:08:32Tom Holland?

  As well.

• 1:08:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, didn't exactly develop 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, for we didn't get what we wanted.

• 1:09:09Tom Holland?

  And so this will feed into feelings of resentment that will help to incubate fascism?

• 1:09:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely. So one of the people who feels cheated is one of the worst men in history, Gabriele Donanzio. And he has all the through the war, he's been reveling in the war. I mean, he was nicknamed the poet of slaughter and he loved that nickname. And when the war ends, because they don't get the Istrian port of Rieka, or Fiume as the Italians called it, he seizes it himself with a paramilitar group and he names himself the Duce. And that is 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 Assonzo, who rose to become a corporal, who was badly wounded but survived to tell the tale. And that man was Benito Mussolini.

• 1:09:56Tom Holland?

  Okay, Dominic, well, next week we will be leaving the killing fields of the Assonzo 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. Restless History Club members, of course, can hear both those episodes and the remaining

• 1:10:36Tom Holland?

  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 therestishistory.com and sign up there. So, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We will be back soon. Bye-bye.

• 1:10:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ciao, arrivederci.