Seite - 798 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

798 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein was equally misguided when it came to the overall conduct of the war. From September to December, the military in fact sequestered up to 70 per cent of the 105,000 goods wagons and 40 per cent of the open goods wagons belonging to the Austro-Hungarian railway companies.1866 For this reason, the 85,000 covered wagons were not available that were needed to supply the Austrian half of the Empire  – let alone Hungary. After it had reached the Piave River, the German 14th Army was transported back. Once again, locomotives and wagons were needed to secure the transport of soldiers and war equipment, while in the storehouses in the cities and larger towns in the Habsburg Monarchy, there was hardly any coal to be found, no flour, no potatoes, and almost no other food. It was here that the catastrophe loomed. War against the USA Italy had indeed been driven to the edge of the precipice. At first, there was not much more that the new Chief of the General Staff, Armando Diaz, could do than gather to- gether the ruins of his army. His predecessor, Cadorna, had been a man who had made decisions unilaterally. Diaz wanted to involve his staff more closely. He named General Pietro Badoglio and the former Italian Defence Minister, Gaetano Giardino, as his deputies, and attempted to restore order to the work of the Italian Supreme Command. The officer corps also needed reassurance, since what had already been regarded as an exception in the Imperial and Royal Army for a long time, prominent individual cases notwithstanding, was the norm for the Italians : officers were rigorously dismissed on even the slightest suspicion of failure in their duty. This procedure had already begun in the summer of 1915, and continued until the late autumn of 1917 : from brigade commanders upwards, during the course of the war, 669 high-ranking Italian officers, including four army commanders, were dismissed, and usually in an unpleasant man- ner.1867 This was now to come to an end. Almost more important was the need to lift the morale of the soldiers again. Gradually, the troops who had fled in vast numbers were brought back, and attempts made to discipline them with a mixture of obduracy and understanding. Summary executions on the one hand and an improvement in liv- ing conditions on the other, leave and better provisions, led the Italian soldiers to bow to the inevitable once more. The newspapers played their part in the reinforcement of morale, and since money was clearly able to contribute significantly to increasing the level of commitment, money was indeed invested. From the autumn of 1917, the edi- tor of Il Popolo d’Italia, Benito Mussolini, received the respectable sum of 100 British pounds per week in order to continue writing in favour of the war.1868 At the Allied conferences at Rapallo and Peschiera, Italy was granted immediate assistance by the Entente. Italy did not just need soldiers. The deep crisis in the Italian