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The part which Italy has played during the war just ended, the great value of her contribution to the Allied cause, and the great sacrifices which that contribution has involved for her, have been often and admirably stated.  But I doubt whether, even yet, these things are fully realised outside Italy, and I will, therefore, very shortly state them again.

When war broke out in August 1914, Italy declared her neutrality, on the ground that the war was aggressive on the part of the Central Powers, and that, therefore, the Triple Alliance no longer bound her.  By her declaration of neutrality, she liberated the whole French Army to fight in Belgium and North-Eastern France, and rendered our sea communications with the East substantially secure.  Bismarck used to say that, under the Triple Alliance, an Italian bugler and drummer boy posted on the Franco-Italian frontier would immobilise four French Army Corps.  The Alliance disappointed the expectations of Bismarck’s successors.

But if Italy had come in at this time on the German side, she might well have tilted swiftly and irremediably against us that awful equipoise of forces which, once established, lasted for more than four years.  There would have been small hope that France, supported only by our small Expeditionary Force and faced with an Italian invasion in the South-East, in addition to a German invasion in the North-East, could have prevented the fall of Paris and the Channel Ports, while Austria, freed from all fear on the Italian frontier, perhaps even reinforced by part of the Italian Army, could have turned all her forces against Russia.  Or alternatively, part of the Italian Army might have attacked Serbia through Austrian territory, with the probable result that Rumania and Greece, as well as Bulgaria and Turkey, would have been brought in against us in the first month of the war.

At sea our naval supremacy would have been strained to breaking point by the many heavy tasks imposed upon it simultaneously in widely-separated seas.  Our communications through the Mediterranean would, indeed, have been almost impossible to maintain.

Many bribes were offered to Italy at this time by the Central Powers in the hope of inducing her to join them—­Corsica, Savoy and Nice, Tunis, Malta, and probably even larger rewards.  But Italy remained neutral.

In May 1915 she entered the war on our side, in the first place to free those men of Italian race who still lived outside her frontiers, under grievous oppression, and whom Austria refused to give up to their Mother Country, and, in the second place, because already many Italians realised, as Americans also realised later, that the defeat of the Central Powers was a necessary first step towards the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere and the building of a better world.  Italy entered the war at a time when things were going badly for us in Russia, and looked very menacing in France, and when she herself was still ill-prepared for a long, expensive and exhausting struggle.  The first effect of her entry was to pin down along the Alps and the Isonzo large Austrian forces, which would otherwise have been available for use elsewhere.