The depression caused in Hungary by the defeat on the
Piave may be estimated by the speech in which Dr. Wekerle, the Premier, on Friday week tried to reassure the Hungarian Parliament. He said that seventy Austro-Hungarian regiments were engaged and lost one hundred thousand men, including twelve thousand prisoners. The Italians have been quick to point out that Dr. Wekerle's state- ment implied a loss of fifty per cent. for the seventy regiments. They add that the enemy really employed forty-two divisions instead of eighteen, reckoning four regiments to a division, and that if he lost fifty per cent. of his effectives, his losses must have exceeded two hundred thousand men. The Italians captured over nineteen thousand prisoners, so that Dr. Wekerle gravely under- rated the losses under this head. We are left to wonder what the Hungarian public believed the losses to be, if Dr. Wekerle hoped to console his countrymen by saying that the losses did not exceed one hundred thousand.
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