Page - 67 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Military Accords 67 it was the opportunity to pounce on its ally and disable it militarily. In actual fact, the Ottoman troops and the Libyan rebels took care of this in any case, because Italy was forced to deploy more than 100,000 soldiers and suffered heavy losses in weapons and armaments. The Ottoman Empire did ultimately relinquish Libya, as war had broken out in the meantime in the Balkans, but this in no way reduced Italian involvement. The result was that Italy was for some time neither a full-value ally nor a full-value oppo- nent. And this undoubtedly had consequences, about which Rome, Berlin and Vienna should actually have known. The relationship between the allies Austria-Hungary and Italy was ambivalent across the decades. All in all, it was in fact worse and more defined by resentment than the relationship between Italy and the third partner in the alliance, the German Empire.135 Yet it would be wrong to cultivate the view of the war years and to emphasise the neg- ative judgement that above all Conrad von Hötzendorf handed down. The Chief of the Italian General Staff, Alberto Pollio, Conrad’s ‘opposite number’, was a consistent advocate of the Triple Alliance. And Conrad knew it. For Pollio, it was inviolable that in the event of a German-French war an Italian army would deploy with the German Western Army and as such participate in the victory over France. As far as Austria-Hun- gary was concerned, Pollio surprised the German military attaché in Rome, Major von Kleist, at the end of April 1914 with a statement to the effect that Italy would perhaps not deploy even larger forces in the west because it might be required to come to the aid of the Austrians against Serbia with several army corps, i.e. at least 50,000 soldiers, in order that the Imperial and Royal Army would be able to field sufficient forces against Russia. Even the cooperation of the fleets of Austria-Hungary and Italy was more or less agreed on.136 Nevertheless : this was put to the test in July 1914 and it was not the Italian soldiers who were to play the decisive role but rather the politicians. The Dual Alliance treaty was published in 1888  – though without the passage on the period of validity. As a result, everyone must have been aware of its significance. The Triple Alliance treaty remained secret. Parts of it were made public during the war, but the full text of the treaty was only published in 1920. Almost more important than the treaties themselves were the related agreements and accords, though above all the general staff accords and military supplement treaties. The Military Accords Looking at the beginning of the war in 1914, it appears not only that everything had gone in accordance with the alliance automatism and the agreements made previously, but also that even the military strategy had been elaborated and agreed upon in detail. Nothing of the sort was the case. The military planning was the weak point of all the