ing results, though considerable progress was made. The handicap of bad weather continued, and delayed each of the two short, sharp blows dealt by Cadorna before winter closed down. In four days' heavy fighting in Oct. and three days' still fiercer struggle at the beginning of Nov., the Duke of Aosta punched out a big salient on the northern half of the Carso, driving the Austrians back to their last line of trenches and occupying the important position of Faiti Hrib. In each of these three actions the attack was broken off as soon as it slowed down. The second and third were in fact only preparatory actions, not offensives on the grand scale. Previous experience had shown that more men and more guns and shells were necessary for a successful attack on a wide front; and it had now become an axiom that only with a wide front of attack was success possible. Cadorna was ready to strike another blow if the weather had let him, but winter came early with heavy mists and much rain, and in Dec. he decided that he must reserve his strength for the following year.
The early advent of winter put a stop to other operations, in the mountain zone, which had borne considerable fruit. Good progress had been made in the region of the Fassa Alps, towards the Val d'Avision, and in Oct. an attack N. of Pasubio gained a wide stretch of high plateau which gave additional depth to the Italian defensive position and freed some 10 m. of the Vallarsa road from direct observation and worrying fire. Both here and in the Fassa Alps bad weather put an end to active military operations in the middle of Oct.; and an attack in the Asiago uplands, which was planned for the middle of Nov., had to be given up owing to the heavy snows that came a few days before the date was fixed.
The year had seen much heavy fighting, and both sides had suffered severely. The Italian casualties were nearly 120,000 dead, 285,000 wounded and 78,000 prisoners. The bulk of the latter were taken in the first days of the Austrian offensive in May, when the front lines, too full of troops, were overwhelmed, and a number of detachments were cut off in isolated mountain positions. The Austrian losses were also heavy. The Straf- expedition is said to have cost about 100,000 men. The Italian offensives on the Julian front, from Aug. to Nov., yielded more than 40,000 prisoners to the attacking forces, and the list of killed and wounded during these months came not far short of 100,000. If the territorial gains at the end of the year's fighting were not great, Cadorna's continued attacks, following upon the costly failure of the Austrian offensive in May, had done their work in occupying an increasing number of the enemy's troops and wearing down his powers of resistance. The Italian casualty list, as was the rule with the attackers, greatly exceeded that of the Austrians, but the advantage of man-power lay with the Entente, and the policy of attrition was generally, though not universally, accepted as indicating the only road to victory. No other policy, certainly, was open to Cadorna while the plans of the Allies were based upon this idea. His role was clearly marked out: he had to hammer when he could, with what means he could collect from month to month as the output of guns and munitions increased and fresh troops were trained, keeping always in view as an essential aim that of attracting to his front, and wearing out, the maximum number of enemy forces. Judged from this standpoint, the Italian effort in 1916 was of the greatest value to the Allied cause. Some 35 Austrian divisions, with their march battalions, were pinned to the Italian front; and Ludendorff in his Memoirs refers to the impossibility of detaching any Austrian troops from the Italian front to assist in other operations, notably to continue the opera- tions against Rumania.
Although Cadorna was strongly opposed to the dispersal of his forces in petits paquets and had resisted the suggestion of an expedition to Libya to quell the rising which had reduced the Italian occupation to a few points on the coast, the impor- tance of the Balkan front had not been lost sight of by the Italian Government. In March a strong force was dispatched to strengthen the Italian position at Valona. The Austrian attack on the Trentino caused two divisions to be recalled to
Italy almost at once. It is worthy of note that the Albanian expedition was dispatched at a time when Italy was being criticized in the British and French press for her supposed refusal to cooperate in the Allied operations towards the Balkans. That cooperation was only delayed. When the situation on the Italian front permitted, fresh troops were sent to Albania, and in Aug. a strong force arrived in Salonika under the command of Gen. Petitti di Roreto to take part in the Allied advance upon Monastir. Early in Oct. an Italian column occupied Argyrokastro and before November the Italians were in touch with the left wing of the Allied forces based upon Salonika.
Up to the end of 1916, except in the case of the Balkan campaign, the question of military cooperation between the Allies had been confined to the timing of the individual efforts, on each front, so as to minimize the advantage possessed by the Central Powers by their possession of the interior lines. The suggestion was now put forward that a wider meaning should be given to the word cooperation, that an Allied force should join the armies of Italy in an attempt to " knock out " the weaker of the two enemy Powers and so hasten the end of the war. The idea had been the subject of discussion in Italy in 1916, but the formal proposal was made Jan. 1917, during the Allied Conference held in Rome. The chief work of this conference, on the military side, was the organization of a line of communications through Italy to Salonika, via the south Italian ports, a route which greatly lessened the dangers from submarine attack, and at the same time made a much smaller demand upon the diminishing tonnage of the Allies; but the question of a joint offensive on the Italian front was also discussed. The French and British general staffs were against the proposal which came to be known as " Cadorna's plan," but it appealed to Mr. Lloyd George, who was in favour of Allied troops and heavy guns being sent to Italy, in order to add that extra weight to the attack which, to judge from the experience of 1916, would lead to important military successes. In spite of Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy, the French and British military authorities decided that they could not spare the men and guns asked for, but they offered to send 300 heavy guns for an immediate offensive, on condition that they were returned to the French front by the month of April, in which it had been decided to launch a general offensive. This offer was refused by Cadorna, on the ground that the season was not suited to an offensive on his front, and that the guns would have to be returned at the moment when they would be most useful. The discussion and rejection of Cadorna's plan gave rise to many rumours, among them the report that he had asked for " a million men or nothing." This legend found consecration even in serious commentaries published after the war.
Cadorna's actual proposals, embodied in a memorandum written after the Rome Conference, were as follows: If the Allies would send at least 300 heavy guns he would make two attacks, on the Trentino and Julian fronts his own artillery was insufficient for this double offensive and so find the enemy's weak point. He had the advantage of interior lines, and would move his reserves of guns and men from the Venetian plain according to the development of the two actions. If, on the other hand, the Allies would send a minimum of eight divisions in addition to the heavy guns, he would concentrate upon the Julian front and attack from Tolmino to the sea, with the object of breaking through towards Laibach. Such an attack, in Cadorna's view, would have had decisive results. He believed that Austria could not recover from such a blow.
The plan was tempting, but it did not commend itself to the Allied commands. French and British military opinion was against any further diversion of effort from the western front, for there was the chief enemy, upon whose defeat the result of the war depended. Great things were hoped from the offensives which had been planned for the spring, and it was not realized that Russia's active military contribution to the Allied cause, so valuable in the past, was practically ended; still less was it foreseen that before the finish of the year the Russian front would cease to exist at all. It was realized that Cadorna was
