"The enemy has five divisions?" Marshal Badoglio's first reaction was that enemy reinforcements had arrived, but he quickly overturned that judgment.
The main force of the Austrian army was in Hungary. In those days, transportation in the Hungarian region was hardly convenient. Moving five divisions from Hungary to Trento was no simple matter.
By train? The railway from Hungary had not even been completed yet.
Could they be cavalry? In terms of time, cavalry could indeed make it there within a week.
But militarily, that made no sense. Unless the Vienna government had water in its brain, why would it send five cavalry divisions to Trento?
It was not that Marshal Badoglio had not suspected the frontline officers of falsifying their reports. This was an enemy that could defeat three Sardinian divisions in a single night—no matter how one looked at it, their numbers could not possibly be small!
"Has the enemy made any major troop movements?" Marshal Badoglio asked doubtfully.
"No. Aside from dispatching two regiments to reinforce Trento on May 18, they have made no other large-scale troop movements," Chief of Staff Otres answered with certainty.
It was fundamentally impossible to draw troops from the Venice region. Austria's total strength there was less than a hundred thousand men. If they had pulled five infantry divisions from it, their defensive line would have been empty long ago. How could such a thing possibly have escaped their notice?
After a moment of silence, Marshal Badoglio said with a bitter smile, "I'm afraid the enemy's reinforcements have arrived.
"Perhaps the reinforcements from Hungary were merely a smokescreen, deliberately meant to lure us into a trap. The real reinforcements came from Austria.
"The Hungarian Republic is nothing but a rabble. If the Austrian government wanted to suppress the rebellion, there was no