April 1 is a traditional holiday in the West, April Fool's Day. The Italian government www.biquge.info choosing this day to announce the fulfillment of the Triple Alliance Agreement between Germany, Austria and Italy, seems to add a touch of humor to this ruthless war. Almost from the first day of the war, Italy had been preparing for the war, and they were able to maneuver between the two camps, either turning a blind eye to the German and Austrian urgings and pressures, or ignoring the temptation of British and French interests, in order to repeatedly increase the price of Italy's participation in the war. Since Italy was separated from Austrian rule and had an inherent territorial conflict with Austria-Hungary, the Entente could offer favorable terms that Germany and Austria could not offer, and if the Entente achieved an advantage on the battlefield, even if it was only a potential advantage, Italy would eventually join the Entente camp.

Unfortunately, the Italians did not fulfill their wishes, except for the situation at the beginning of the war, which was more confusing, the German-Austrian alliance has always occupied an obvious military advantage, and Germany basically defeated Britain and France and suppressed Tsarist Russia with the help of one another, and the successive accession of Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria made the strategic pattern of the Central Powers camp stronger. After entering 1915, Britain was too busy to take care of itself, France's defeat was assured, Tsarist Russia could not stand alone, the United States originally favored the Allies in political strategy and arms trade, and seeing that the situation was not good, it also changed its diplomatic position on the grounds of abiding by neutrality, and the Italians knew that it was difficult to get benefits from the side of the Allies, so they changed their previous coldness and began to actively move closer to Berlin.

Since Bismarck stepped down, Germany's top leadership has been criticized for its performance in the field of diplomacy, but this does not mean that Kaiser Wilhelm II and his important ministers are completely incapable of political diplomacy, but more because their diplomatic wisdom is still very naïve in front of the political diplomats of the old powers, so they have repeatedly failed in direct dialogue. Now that the military victory of the Central Powers is in the bag, the conditions offered by the German top leadership for Italy's entry into the war are naturally much inferior to those offered by the German top brass than at the beginning of the war -- there is no need to think about the remnants of Morocco, the British and French colonies in Africa, close to the Italian colonies and not so rich in resources, can cede some of them, and the ships and ships included in the war reparations by Britain, France, and Russia will be given priority selection by Germany and Austria, and the rest can be distributed to Italy as appropriate.

The condition was that Italy attacked southern France by land, attacked and blocked the Anglo-French Mediterranean routes from the sea.

After Germany and France announced the armistice talks, it was rumored that Tsarist Russia also intended to make peace with Germany and Austria, and the Italian government was worried that it would miss the last opportunity to enter the war, so it decisively accepted the memorandum of participation in the war proposed by Germany, and notified the diplomatic envoy stationed in Berlin overnight. On March 31, Germany and Italy signed a memorandum, followed by a memorandum of understanding between Austria and Italy, which was more symbolic than practical, at the active suggestion of Italy. Early the next morning, the Italian Prime Minister issued a declaration of war on France on behalf of the king.

As soon as the declaration of war was announced, the Italian navy immediately proceeded with admirable efficiency, and their warships captured many of the French ships under sail with little effort, because the French on board thought that the Italian navy had come to escort them out of good intentions, and they even took the warning guns of the Italian warships as a salute, until the heavily armed Italian soldiers boarded the ships, many of whom were baffled.

In the Alps, on the Italian border with France, the Italian army had already received secret orders from the Roman high command to fight, and after the government issued a declaration of war, they did not hesitate to cross the border and attack the French lines, which they thought had long been non-existent. Since the German-French armistice agreement was only valid for Germany and France, and Italy did not participate in the war at the time of the armistice, the French could only rely on a small number of troops deployed in the Franco-Italian border area to resist the Italian army's behavior of taking advantage of the situation, but the progress of the war surprised people from all over the world living in this era, and the Italian army, the high-spirited chicken thief, was actually severely repaired by the weakened rooster of the French border guards, who were seriously under-armed.

In a few days, the Italian army that had entered the territory of France had captured only a few insignificant villages and towns, and then stopped in front of the French old fortresses, fortresses, and hastily laid defensive lines, with thousands of casualties, a loss of little in comparison to any battle since the outbreak of the war. Despite the unfavorable offensive, the Italian High Command's military liaison officer in Berlin triumphantly offered the Germans credit, claiming that the Italian army's military operations had succeeded in pinning down hundreds of thousands of French troops on the Italian-French border, making it impossible for them to move to the frontal front of the German-French confrontation.

During the brief three-day ceasefire, German and French military and diplomatic representatives engaged in a fierce war of words in Lyon, giving the impression that the weaker side was seeking peace with the adversary, but that the war had been moved from the front line to the negotiating table. The negotiating capital of the French lies in the army with more than a million remnants, in the Alps, where the modern war machine is still difficult to cross, in the remaining strength of the French fleet, in the loyal support of the African colonies for the French regime, and as long as the French persist in this war at any cost, they can even move the government agencies to Algeria on the other side of the Mediterranean!

Problems that could not be resolved by negotiations had to be handed over to artillery and bayonets. Taking advantage of the three-day cease-fire period, the German General Staff adjusted its offensive strategy, from the original three-way march to two wings, and the left flank heavy army group invested more than 400 armored fighting vehicles and 500,000 troops, with the support of the German fleet, launched a fierce attack on the last few port cities on the west coast of France, and it only took a little more than a week to put Palanti, Léon, and Bayonne into the German-occupied zone; The main force on the right flank concentrated nearly 1,000 armored fighting vehicles, with more than 700,000 troops of three corps, advanced along the Rhône valley to the southern coast of France, in Valence, the two sides fought fiercely for five days, the Germans crushed the last fresh force of the French army at the cost of 100,000 casualties, and then conquered Pierrelatte and Avignon, and the German advance force was able to see the blue Mediterranean Sea in the distance.

At the same time as the ground forces launched a large-scale offensive, the German aviation unit also showed the world the three-dimensional power of modern warfare, the Zeppelin group successively bombed Marseille, Nice and other southern French ports during the day, with the majestic momentum of dark clouds to deter the French military and civilians, with the completion of the construction of military airfields around Lyon, the German long-range bombers began to fly over the Rhone River Valley, plus Italy, Austria-Hungary and Germany joined forces in the Mediterranean to form a powerful allied fleet, French ships stationed at the military ports of Marseille and Nice had to be withdrawn ahead of schedule to the port of Algiers in North Africa.

Sensing that the French capital ships had left the southern ports, the Allied fleet unscrupulously launched an artillery bombardment and blockade of the French mainland. On April 13, the Confederate fleet attacked the port of Nice, and the Italian and Austro-Hungarian dreadnought groups turned the beautiful and pleasant coastal city into a pile of rubble with merciless artillery fire. A day later, Cannes became the second French port to be razed to the ground. The sea passage between mainland France and the colonies in North Africa was also greatly restricted by the movement of the Allied fleet.

On 17 April, the French, who had collapsed on the verge of collapse, returned to Lyon, this time with the arrogance characteristic of the Gauls, but with no confidence in the negotiations, while the Italian and Austro-Hungarian diplomats were given a seat at the table. The armistice lasted again until 25 April, and as night fell, French negotiators signed a truce on harsh terms, but at least saved the French Third Republic from destruction. The war on the Western Front, which lasted for nearly nine months, came to an end, nominally losing one-sixth of its territory and nearly half of its colonies, including the Ardennes Mountains ceded to Germany and Corsica ceded to Italy, and the actual situation was much worse - France had to pay Germany, Austria and Italy war reparations of up to 18.5 billion francs, equivalent to 3.7 times the reparations of the Franco-Prussian War, and until the reparations were paid, the German army would continue to occupy Paris and the area east of Paris. There were also the northern and western coasts of France, which meant that the northern industrial regions, centered on Paris, and the eastern regions, rich in coal and iron ore, would provide the German war machine with a variety of industrial products and strategic resources for a long time to come. In addition, Germany forcibly obtained from the French the right to use important military ports such as Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, Saint-Nazaire, and Nantes for thirty years.

With the signing of the armistice, the French army had not collapsed, but the French giant had collapsed, and the economically struggling Russian Empire could no longer receive a franc of assistance from its French allies, and out of distrust of Britain, Nicholas II's army generals and powerful dignitaries were almost unanimous in agreeing that Russia should withdraw from the war in time. At the end of April, the tsar's envoy arrived in Berlin. At this time, the German army had already occupied the rich Russian Poland region, they had no appetite for the land in the Russian hinterland, the armistice was conditional on the establishment of a reliable military buffer zone for East Prussia, and the independence of Lithuania was a condition acceptable to the Russian rulers, and the two sides quickly reached an armistice, but according to the German-Austrian alliance agreement, the formal peace between the two sides also required an armistice agreement between Russia and Austria-Hungary, and the contradictions and conflicts between St. Petersburg and Vienna have been going on for a long time. The armistice negotiations unsurprisingly turned into a protracted tug-of-war, but unlike on the Western Front, the already insufficient coffers of Russia and Austria-Hungary had been exhausted by the war, and the military population was not in favor of fighting again, so the parties on the Eastern Front invariably suspended military operations during the negotiations.

One of the two allies withdrew directly from the war, and the other had no intention of fighting again, and the British Empire fell into an unprecedented isolation situation, and the German army had begun to assemble a large number of transport ships in Flanders and northern France. Seeing that an armistice and peace were the order of the day, King George V instructed the government to negotiate with the Germans, and although the terms of the armistice offered by the German government were not as harsh as those for France, there were many articles on land cession, reparations, disarmament, and acceptance of Irish independence.

(End of chapter)