The first conference between the allies was held in Chantilly in France on the day when the First Battle of the Isonzo ended. The military leaders of the Triple Agreement analyzed the situation after a year at war: the western front was substantially unchanged while the Russian front, after the defeat of the Tsarist troops at Gorlice (in the south of present-day Poland) was in difficulty. Italy was therefore asked to continue the offensive on its front with determination so as to engage the Austro-Hungarian troops and to advance at least up to Klagenfurt and Ljubljana.
On 17th July the mobilization of the troops was finalized and the Second Battle of the Isonzo was announced to start at four in the morning of the next day along a front covering 36 kilometres. The main objective wasMount San Michele, a hilltop on the Karst to the south of Gorizia. The summit was reached on 20th July but General Svetozar Borojevic, leader of the Fifth Army, succeeded in organizing a counterattack that restored the hill to the Austro-Hungarian forces on the following day.
Further south, in the zone of Monfalcone, the Third Army suffered very huge losses in its attempt to storm Mount Cosich. The emplacements and the weapons of the enemy were well positioned while the Italian shelters were not effective. The same fate befell the southern zone of Gorizia where assaults onMount Sabotino, Calvario and Height 383 on the Plava failed completely.
On the Alto Isonzo the situation was rendered even more difficult by the climate that was characterized by heavy rains that at an altitude of 2,000 metres on Mount Nero became gusts of wind and icy water. Virgilio Bonamore, an officer of the 21st battalion of the Bersaglieri soldiers narrated how his whole group, with the exception of fifty men, descended from the peak with frozen feet (in Mark Thompson, La Guerra Bianca, Saggiatore, Milan, 2010, page 122). After a pause lasting a few days, on 14th August came the order to start again action on Mount Nero and on Mount Mrzli but after several assaults the Austro-Hungarian troops repelled the attack.
The Second Battle, remembered mainly for the battles on Mount San Michele, was the first bloodbath on a large scale for the Italian army. While in the First Battle of the Isonzo the number of casualties who were withdrawn from the battle amounted to 15,000 (of whom 3,500 men were killed while 11,500 were wounded), in this battle the casualties were three times as much. The main problem concerned the way in which attacks were conducted by Italian officers who were not yet used to the new tactics of trench warfare and to the new arms that appeared during this conflict. Assaults on enemy trenches and long fences of barbed wire for defence rendered attackers easy targets for enemy fire.
The big losses, false expectations and the ever increasing difficulties immediately undermined the morale of soldiers as can be seen from reports by men belonging to the Catanzaro Battalion and the Sassari Battalion or in the writings by Giani Stuparich. Weeks spent inside trenches, never far from the enemy, repeated efforts that seemed useless, wounded and dead men everywhere, disease, inadequate rations, the lack of potable water, nights spent on the bare ground and the frequent rain rendered the life of soldiers on the front extremely difficult.
Not that things were any better on the other side: the Austro-Hungarian troops suffered very great loses (47,000 men according to the official report) because they did not learn how to take advantage of the terrain of the Karst and its caves to seek shelter from the massive bombardments by the Italian forces. Although they had been fighting for a year, the paths and the emplacements that were built with great skill in certain places were, however, rather crude in other sections.
