7 - In the wake of war

Summary

Just when we’ve learned how to make war, the war has ended.

Italian soldiers after the battle of Vittorio Veneto

For all the participants in the war, the transition to peace was a lengthy and difficult process. Every country experienced its own variants of the same general pressures: soldiers keen to get home, politicians concerned about post-war majorities, diplomats under pressure to forge a lasting peace that would solve the ills in the international system and in their own circumstances that had got their countries into the war in the first place. For Italy, the transition from war to peace was particularly difficult. Her perspective on peacemaking was fundamentally out of joint with the ‘nationalities principal’ that President Woodrow Wilson intended to foster and with the new international order that he proposed to shape, and to make matters more awkward it went along with an increasingly unstable domestic situation The war had sharpened appetites in the foreign and colonial ministries, among the interventionists and nationalists, and amongst the rural and urban working classes. Far from dying down when the fighting formally ended on 4 November 1918, the emotions and desires that it had engendered took on new vigour.

The government in Rome had serious problems to resolve. Something had publicly to be said about the disaster at Caporetto, but if criticisms bit too deeply a conservative officer corps might retreat back to the nineteenth century and focus its loyalty on the throne. At Versailles, Italian diplomats and statesmen were expected to gain the promised territorial rewards and more, enhancing Italy’s ‘security’ in circumstances in which eastern and south-eastern Europe in particular were in a state of apparently uncontrollable flux. At home the country wanted demobilisation, but for technical, political, and military reasons that was no easy matter. The war might be over but its aftermath would shape Italian national life for the next four years and beyond.