With British Guns in Italy | Page 3

that the Triple Alliance should combine to crush
Serbia, victorious but exhausted after the Balkan Wars, Italy at once
rejected the proposal. And, under the second condition, as German
naval expansion became more and more provocative and threatening to
Britain, we were able to transfer nearly all our Mediterranean Fleet to
the North Sea, secure in the knowledge that, whatever might befall, we
should never find Italy among our enemies.
* * * * *
The part which Italy has played during the war just ended, the great
value of her contribution to the Allied cause, and the great sacrifices
which that contribution has involved for her, have been often and
admirably stated. But I doubt whether, even yet, these things are fully
realised outside Italy, and I will, therefore, very shortly state them
again.
When war broke out in August 1914, Italy declared her neutrality, on
the ground that the war was aggressive on the part of the Central
Powers, and that, therefore, the Triple Alliance no longer bound her. By
her declaration of neutrality, she liberated the whole French Army to
fight in Belgium and North-Eastern France, and rendered our sea
communications with the East substantially secure. Bismarck used to

say that, under the Triple Alliance, an Italian bugler and drummer boy
posted on the Franco-Italian frontier would immobilise four French
Army Corps. The Alliance disappointed the expectations of Bismarck's
successors.
But if Italy had come in at this time on the German side, she might well
have tilted swiftly and irremediably against us that awful equipoise of
forces which, once established, lasted for more than four years. There
would have been small hope that France, supported only by our small
Expeditionary Force and faced with an Italian invasion in the
South-East, in addition to a German invasion in the North-East, could
have prevented the fall of Paris and the Channel Ports, while Austria,
freed from all fear on the Italian frontier, perhaps even reinforced by
part of the Italian Army, could have turned all her forces against Russia.
Or alternatively, part of the Italian Army might have attacked Serbia
through Austrian territory, with the probable result that Rumania and
Greece, as well as Bulgaria and Turkey, would have been brought in
against us in the first month of the war.
At sea our naval supremacy would have been strained to breaking point
by the many heavy tasks imposed upon it simultaneously in
widely-separated seas. Our communications through the Mediterranean
would, indeed, have been almost impossible to maintain.
Many bribes were offered to Italy at this time by the Central Powers in
the hope of inducing her to join them--Corsica, Savoy and Nice, Tunis,
Malta, and probably even larger rewards. But Italy remained neutral.
In May 1915 she entered the war on our side, in the first place to free
those men of Italian race who still lived outside her frontiers, under
grievous oppression, and whom Austria refused to give up to their
Mother Country, and, in the second place, because already many
Italians realised, as Americans also realised later, that the defeat of the
Central Powers was a necessary first step towards the liberation of
oppressed peoples everywhere and the building of a better world. Italy
entered the war at a time when things were going badly for us in Russia,
and looked very menacing in France, and when she herself was still
ill-prepared for a long, expensive and exhausting struggle. The first

effect of her entry was to pin down along the Alps and the Isonzo large
Austrian forces, which would otherwise have been available for use
elsewhere.
She entered the war nine months after the British Empire, but her losses,
when the war ended, had been proportionately heavier than ours.
According to the latest published information the total of Italian dead
was 460,000 out of a population of 35 millions. The total of British
dead for the whole British Empire, including Dominion, Colonial and
Indian troops, was 670,000, and for the United Kingdom alone 500,000.
The white population of the British Empire is 62 millions and of the
United Kingdom 46 millions. Thus the Italian dead amount to more
than 13 for every thousand of the population, and the British, whether
calculated for the United Kingdom alone or for the whole white
population of the Empire, to less than 11 for every thousand of the
population. The long series of Battles of the Isonzo,--the journalists
counted up to twelve of them in the first twenty-seven months in which
Italy was at war,--the succession of offensives "from Tolmino to the
sea," which were only dimly realised in England and France, cost Italy
the flower of her youth. The Italian Army was continually on the
offensive during those months against the strongest natural defences to
be found in any