The White War by Mark Thompson

Italy’s contribution to the First World War is the topic of Mark Thompson’s book The White War.

Italy entered the war in 1915, after vacillating.  The king and his advisers wanted to enter on the side that would give them the greatest territorial advantage following the war. 

These cynical calculations appeared to have stained nearly all of Italy’s subsequent actions in the war, which Thompson details this exhaustively.

The book is well-written, clear, informative, and like most books on the First World War, shows the great price in human lives of the so-called Great War.