Italy was not in a good humour. She was well aware that in the countries
of her Allies there was a marked tendency to underestimate her
overwhelming triumphs of the last days of the War. Perhaps those
exploits would have been more difficult if Austria's army had not
suffered a deterioration, but still one does not take 300,000 prisoners
every day. Some faithful foreigners were praising Italy--and she
deserved it--for having persevered at all after Caporetto. That disaster
had been greatly due to filling certain regiments with several thousand
munition workers who had taken part in a revolt at Turin, and then
concentrating these regiments in the Caporetto salient, which was the
most vulnerable sector in the eastern Italian front. How much of the
disaster was due to the Vatican will perhaps never be known. But as for
the uneducated, easily impressed peasants of the army, it was wonderful
that all, except the second army and a small part of the third,
retreated with such discipline in view of what they had been brooding on
before the day of Caporetto. They had such vague ideas what they were
fighting for, and if the Socialists kept saying that the English paid
their masters to continue with the War--how were they to know what was
the truth? The British regiments, who were received not merely with
cigars and cigarettes and flowers and with little palm crosses which
their trustful little weavers had blessed, but also with showers of
stones as they passed through Italian villages in 1917, must have
sometimes understood and pardoned. Then the troops were in distress
about their relatives, for things were more and more expensive, and
where would it end? In face of these discouragements it was most
admirable that the army and the nation rallied and reconstituted their
_morale_.