Italy and the World War
by Page. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. 8vo, xiv+422 pp. Maps. $5.00.
MR. PAGE has given us an interesting, accurate, and judicially balanced history of Italy’s important share in winning the war. Writing with the skill and sympathy of an accomplished narrator, he examines carefully all the known facts; traces first the story of the unification of Italy and the conflicting political tendencies in Europe that drew Italy into the entanglements of the Triple Alliance in 1882; then analyzes the much discussed Pact of London, and shows how the Italian people, acting with true idealism, first freed their country from the entangling triple agreement, cut away, as with a surgeon’s knife, the German control of banks and industries, fought down the pro-Teutonic neutrality of the Giolittian party, and finally, under the popular leadership of the King, entered the War, in May, 1915.
Of all this Mr. Page, American Ambassador to Italy, had intimate personal knowledge; for, as the official representative of that great neutral, the United States, it was his duty to observe, and his privilege to know, the diplomatic moves made by the various European powers while Italy was steadily preparing to enter the war on the side of the Allies. No book on Italy’s part in the war, published in England, in France, or in Italy, — and there have been many such written since the Armistice, by writers who are obviously prejudiced by their own national aspirations, — gives so impartial a statement of the relative importance of the varying forces, Italian and Allied, which helped Italy win ‘Our War,’ as she called the campaign on the Venetian front.
The help which the Italians in turn rendered to the Allies is picturesquely presented by one whose military observing began when, as a boy, he saw the forces of the Confederacy march forth to battle. His sympathetic study of the Italian people has enabled him to produce an unbiased study of the Italian campaign, conducted independently of the single command under Foch, yet necessarily of far-reaching influence on all parts of the Allied fronts.
His account of the military situation that led up to the disaster at Caporetto, and of the remarkable rebound of Italian fighting morale after that depressing event, together with the true story of the relative importance of French and English aid in checking the Austrian, is at once dramatic and accurate, and prepares the way for a clear understanding of the fine patriotism which enabled Italy, during the latter phases of the war, to weld the nation together into that infrangible mass against which the Austrian violence and intrigue hurled itself in vain. Thus it was that on November 4, after forty-one months of costly and bloody warfare, General Diaz was able to write, in his final war-bulletin, that the disrupted military forces of the Austrian hegemony were ‘reascending in disorder and without hope, those valleys down which they came in such arrogant security.’
Italy is not imperialistic, but she aspires to racial unity and to frontiers safe from military invasion. Why she fought for this end, how she fought for it and in what measure she has been successful in obtaining it, are happily related in this interesting volume.
G. L.