Traditionally there has been much cheap sniping at Italy’s strategic planning in 1915: unduly ambitious, naïve, megalomaniacal. Staff plans for warfare were undeniably disconcerting. The prime peculiarity was a lack of precise planning or analysis. In the first draft of plans for war against Austria-Hungary, a mere 8-page summary that Cadorna presented in August 1914, the strategic objectives of the future campaign were sketchily alluded to; there was no trace of any precise schedule. In other respects, Cadorna was much more acute. He rightly predicted a long and expensive war and did his utmost to persuade ministers to mobilize Italian industry forthwith and bring it under state control. His intuitions were frustrated, however, by the civilians’ total aloofness from military matters. Never as in the period of Italy’s neutrality was the absence of a coordination mechanism between politicians and generals felt so disastrously. Roberto Bencivenga, at that time already attached to Cadorna’s secretariat, eloquently testified to the lack of any collaboration between cabinet and army Staff. Worse, the top military brass were deliberately kept in the dark about political decisions.

In the summer of 1914 it had been more than forty years since the last major European war. That period had witnessed unprecedented economic growth and the flourishing of culture. Lasting peace was conducive to prosperity, technological progress, and social change. Between the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 trams appeared on the streets of European cities, and the bigger capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Budapest – acquired underground metro lines. New factories were built and the urban proletariat grew so rapidly that politicians began to vie for its support. Although the European powers pursued overseas campaigns, the latter’s impact on the daily life of Europeans was limited to articles in the morning press. Nor were peace and development the sole preserve of the West. In Central and Eastern Europe, too, war was not within living memory for the vast majority of citizens.