Dominic Sandbrook

For the first few weeks, the Italians go extremely slowly.

They capture only a few villages and a few small towns.

They lose 20,000 men in the first few weeks.

They show absolutely no sign of having any conception of how they're going to take on machine guns and barbed wire and all this kind of thing.

And Cadorna, General Cadorna with his nice moustache and whatnot, he looks at this and he says, well...

I'm obviously not going to rethink my tactics because my tactics are excellent.

What I should do is just start sacking generals.

So in two years, he launches what Mark Thompson calls a rolling purge of his officers.

In two years, he sacks 217 generals, 255 colonels, and 355 battalion commanders, which seems a lot to me, especially with an already disorganized army.

I mean, 217 generals, that's a lot of generals.

Yeah, I feel the Italians probably have too many generals.

It's kind of on brand, though, for the Italians to have loads of generals there, isn't it?

There's a lot of gold braid, a lot of nice hats and feathers and stuff, I imagine.

Yeah.

Now, while the Italians are sacking their generals and basically trudging very slowly up these hills...

The Austrians have been moving reinforcements to the front.

Now, as we said, people will recall the Austrians have had an absolutely shocking start to the war.

They made an absolute spectacle of themselves against Serbia and basically ended up losing to Serbia, which is insane given that that was the point of the whole war.

Then they had a nightmare against Russia on the Eastern Front.

You will recall a very, very fine moustache belonging to Franz Konrad von Hützendorf wearing