Our secret service succeeded in learning exactly the time that the enemy would start his drive. Following sound war strategy, our supreme command decided to surprise the enemy, and just a few hours before the enemy was ready to move a deluge of every description fell on his front lines as well as the supporting lines behind. His plans were smashed. He threw bridges across the Piave, but every one was destroyed. The Montello, which was once the key of that front and which the enemy intended to take and use as a pincher against our army, we held with dogged tenacity. There were oscillations for a few miles, but the battle raged on without a stop. Our counter attacks came back always, again and again and again. Thus after the first three days the enemy felt that this time the Italians were like an unbreakable wall which they could not scale or batter down!
Near Zenzon the adversary succeeded in crossing the river as far as Monastie of Treviso, but a rapid counter attack of a few of our brigades threw him back on the Piave again. It turned into a disaster for the enemy, as the river, flooded, washed away bridges and soldiers toward the sea. On the twenty-third of June, five days after the beginning of the big battle, our supreme command assured Italy that our resistance was bound to hold. I felt that it was a sure sign that victory was at hand. I believe to this day that the Battle of the Piave was one of the most decisive of the whole World War.
The enemy suffered loss beyond reckoning. About 100,000 Hungarians were sacrificed on the Piave. That brought about deep resentment in Budapest. Among the people of the various races in the Austrian Empire there began discussions about the burdens that each nationality in that empire had to suffer. From them—the enemies—each nationality felt that its treatment was becoming intolerable.
News leaked out to us from Austria-Hungary. It was clear that internal difficulties there were growing every moment. The enemy’s army, however, was still holding together and under the goad of necessity was sharpening the work of oppression on our two provinces which still remained under the weight of occupation and misfortune.
It was at this time, right after the spirit of exhilaration of victory, that I observed strange tendencies in the Italian political world. Evil activity was at hand. It needed to be exposed and suppressed. It was cloaked under the appearance of humanitarianism. It was planning to give a series of national rights to peoples who never had the consciousness and the dignity of nations—to peoples who had been for more than a century instruments of oppressing the Italian elements under Austria, under the instigation of the despotic empire. The sun of our victory was rising, but to be a complete victory, a victory that would carry our soldiers on the road to Vienna, it must not falter through false sentimentality.
This crisis was sufficient to inspire many great men still under the influence of antiquated and rusted democratic ideas to start discussions about the problems of racial differences. They always tended to favor our worst enemies. The spirit of our nationalism was attacked and dwarfed by sophisticated and pernicious applications of sentiment, irritating to our deepest feelings and to our most legitimate susceptibilities. Voices of the Italians began to say that every time Italy was on the verge of living its hour of joy, glory and victory there were always those who soiled the moment, and this often not in good faith.
Summer went by, and in October, 1918, our supreme command, with fifty-one Italian divisions—to which were added three British, two French divisions, one American regiment and a few Czecho-Slovakian volunteers—determined to make a decisive and final drive on the Austrian front.
The strategic plan was a very wise one. The enemy’s front was pierced at Sernaglia; our army rushed through the break. We started a surrounding movement, one to the left toward Trento, and one to the right toward Udine and the lower Piave. The ardent dash of our soldiers and the ability of our officers brought these movements to full success and crumbled to pieces the whole front of the enemy. The War Bulletin states the enormous number of prisoners, guns and war material that fell into our hands.
The army of Austria-Hungary was defeated. Its navy had suffered tremendous losses. We landed at Triest. We occupied Trento.
The final victory was not only a victory of a war. I saw more than that. It was a victory for the whole Italian race. After a thousand years we, awakened, were again giving a tangible proof of our moral and spiritual valor. We were living again on warlike tradition. Our love of country had bloomed again. We felt our formidable weight in the future of a new Europe. New generations of Italians rejoiced, for the Italian cities were once again rejoined to the country. Trento and Triest, as our race had wished so long, now were within the borders—the natural borders which Dante had prophesied and defined in the fourteenth century.