less, there was a considerable amount of desertion from the Austro-Hungarian Army. Among the deserters were numbers of junior officers, not professional soldiers, but men who in private life were lawyers, merchants, and so on. These men were all led to come over by the prospect of liberation which the propaganda held out to them. Men of other ranks were induced to desert, either in order to join relatives among their co-nationals fighting in the Italian Army, of whom news had reached them through the propaganda agency, or else by the more elementary considerations of food, comfort, and safety. It was noticeable that nearly all the deserters brought with them copies of the leaflets distributed by the Allied Commission.
That the propaganda had seriously alarmed the Austro-Hungarian authorities was made evident by reference to it in Army Orders and in the Austrian and German Press, which even reproduced some of the literary efforts, and vilified Lord Northcliffe in their most fervent manner. It even affected the minor tactics of the Austro-Hungarian Army, for it necessitated the detachment of machine-gun sections to deal with attempts at desertion en masse during the Piave offensive, which was eventually launched by the Aus-
