Page - 779 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Operation ‘Loyalty to Arms’ 779 had been killed or wounded on both sides. The dead account for around a third of the statistics. And the strategy of bleeding dry continued. Here, the British analysts noted that while the Imperial and Royal troops showed far greater war weariness than the Germans, they were very far from breaking or even showing any noticeable signs that morale was sinking. While there were deserters, compared to what had happened at the front in Russia, these were merely individual cases. The soldiers who were taken prisoner also kept their composure and usually made a good impression, regardless of whether they were Germans, Hungarians or of southern Slav origin.1818 It was only among the Czechs that it was believed that similar symptoms could be observed as had previously been displayed in Russia. The Chief of the Italian General Staff, Cadorna, was said to have claimed, however, that he would prefer troops from the German Em- pire as opponents, since they fought less fanatically. The Austrians, he said were above all focussed on killing their opponents.1819 And from this, no-one was excluded. In the eyes of the western Allies, the only means of making the Italian style of war- fare more effective was to support the Italians to a greater degree than before, and in particular to also intervene more intensively with their own troops. As early as January 1917, the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General W. R. Robertson, was presented with Italian requirements and plans for a joint offensive, but since Flanders and France took priority, the British General intended only to ‘make a note of the matter.1820 At a meeting of the Allied statesmen in Paris on 24 July, the option was then however sketched out by the British Prime Minister Lloyd George of conducting a joint offensive by the Allies against the Austro-Hungarian front. It was the ‘soft un- derbelly’, which appeared to be behind these deliberations. There, as the others also felt, the outcome of the war might possibly be decided. For the Allies, the Mediterranean area was quite clearly becoming increasingly at- tractive. After the first deliberations, which were still vague, Lloyd George, in light of the anything but satisfactory development of the war situation for the Allies, again proposed that the front in France should be held only to the extent that the Germans were unable to pull away troops, but otherwise, to focus all efforts on the other fronts in order to prise the allies of the German Empire, which were indeed its weak points, out of the alliance.1821 However, the French saw nothing in this idea that might conform to what they had envisaged. And so, this proposal also ran into the sand. In the search for a new strategic approach, the German Supreme Army Command had however also begun to turn its attention to Italy. Clearly, it was in the air. In Decem- ber 1916, the Chief of the Operations Division, Major Georg Wetzell, who at that time was new to the post, went through all the possibilities in a memorandum for the First Quartermaster General, General Erich Ludendorff, and saw the deployment of larger German troop formations in Italy as a highly interesting opportunity of finding a way out of the impasse in the west. Ludendorff showed only disinterest. Half a year later, in