SAVED ITALY IN GREAT WAR

Evening Star, Issue 22147, 30 September 1935, Page 13

SAVED ITALY IN GREAT WAR

Among ihe soldiers of the Great War, few deserved better of their nation and generation than General Armando Diaz, the saviour of Italy after the ,disaster of Caporetlo (says the London ‘Daily Telegraph’); We have had' to wait since the close of the war and seven years after his own dyalb before receiving the authorita- ,.' i' account of his work. - The biography, entitled simply

‘ Diaz,’ written by General Alberti Baldini, iwhich Messrs Humphrey To'ulhnin published, is an excellent translation and does something to atone for the delay. It is a very workmanlike production. * There is nothing sensational in its contents, in the sense of material which is likely to excite violent controversy ; but it presents an admirable picture of a noteworthy achievement and a singularly well-balanced character. Diaz was suddenly called to the supreme command , on November 9, 1917, at a time in which, as the result of a fortnight’s fighting on the Lsonzo, Italy's army had been depleted by some 660,000 men—3oo,ooo casualties and 350,000 scattered as fugitives and stragglers. ' Few men can ever have kept their heads better in an hour of catastrophe than Diaz did then. One of the most significant proofs of this is that he resolutely put his foot down

against all proposals for the wholesale removal of officers, for which hi* own commanders as well as the public Wore calling out. There is one incidental remark of General Baldini which has a bearing on matters much in the public eye at present. He is referring to Diaz’s strength of mind in ignoring suggestions from his superiors—whether his own Government or the Interallied Council of War—and observes " bow much evil can be conveyed in a simple question from ap authoritative source.” “When on the morning of Adowa the commander of an advance-guard battalion heard his superiors ask ‘ if by any chance he was afraid,’ he rushed head foremost up to the Abyssinian camp, thus provoking the battM he had not desired—and the subsequent disaster. 1 ! After the war General Diaz became Mussolini's first War Minister in the earliest Fascist Administration*