Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [183]
Having bribed Italy to join the war with the promise of territory, Britain and France were outraged when their new ally continued to show what Lloyd George called “that huxtering spirit.” When Italian armies moved rapidly at the end of the war to occupy all the territory, and more, that Italy had been promised around the Adriatic, Pichon, the French foreign minister, complained at length to the British ambassador that the Italian troops were deliberately provoking trouble with the local Slav population. “They would relish bloodshed as it would enable them to keep hold of territory which would certainly not be given to them by any Treaty of Peace.” 9
The likelihood, indeed by December 1918 the certainty, that Serbia would form some sort of state with the South Slav peoples of Austria-Hungary, was a fresh source of strain between Italy and its allies. Britain and France, for their own reasons, were sympathetic to the new state. Surely Italy could see that in the changed circumstances it no longer made sense to claim South Slav territory. After all, the promises had been based on the assumption that Austria-Hungary would still exist at the end of the war. It had made sense to deprive an enemy of its ports and naval bases. It did not make sense now to do the same to a friendly nation. “Every effort should be made,” the British War Cabinet concluded, “to persuade Italy to take up a reasonable attitude on these questions.” Clemenceau talked several times to Orlando to try to persuade him to give up the Treaty of London. 10
The Italian government was not prepared to do so. Public opinion in Italy would have made it difficult. While liberals, faithful to the spirit of the great Giuseppe Mazzini, had hoped for the liberation of oppressed peoples, especially those under the tyranny of Italy’s own former oppressor, most Italians saw the Croats and Slovenes as enemies who had fought loyally for Austria-Hungary and would probably do so again given the chance. When Italian forces moved in to occupy Croatia and Slovenia at the end of the war, they acted more as conquerors than as liberators. And were the Serbs any more trustworthy? General Pietro Badoglio, second-in-command of the Italian army, warned his government that the Croats and Slovenes, who were cleverer than the Serbs, would end up dominating them. Consequently he drew up an elaborate plan, which Sonnino and Orlando approved in December 1918, to destroy Yugoslavia and cement Italian control over the eastern side of the Adriatic by stirring up conflict among the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and between peasants and their landlords. In Bosnia, Badoglio suggested, religious divisions could be used. He already had agents in place. Even ordinary Italian soldiers could do their bit by seducing the “susceptible” local women. 11
The Italian navy had much the same attitude. It was furious when the Habsburg emperor, in one of his last acts, turned over his Adriatic navy and the huge naval base at Pula (Italian: Pola) to a provisional Yugoslav committee. The following day an Italian torpedo boat darted into Pula and sank the dreadnought Viribus Unitis, the pride of the Austrian navy, killing its Yugoslav captain and crew. After strenuous Italian objections, the remainder of the fleet was surrendered to the Allies, and Italian forces occupied