Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing up plans to transport forces to Germany, a nation he assumed would be his ally. Nine months later, after protracted secret negotiations with both groups of combatants, Italy switched allegiance and entered the war on the side of France and Britain.
Foreign observers concluded that the Italians were, in Asquith’s words, ‘voracious, slippery and perfidious’. Such judgments, apart from being unduly self-righteous (all the combatant countries hoped for territorial gains), failed to take account of the fact that the Great War was made up of a number of overlapping smaller conflicts.
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