Home > Authors Index > Robert Herrick > World Decision > This page
The World Decision, a non-fiction book by Robert Herrick |
||
Part 1. Italy - Chapter 1. Italy Hesitates |
||
| Table of content |
Next > |
|
|
________________________________________________
_ Part One. Italy Chapter I. Italy Hesitates Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge" of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army--boots and food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhat cynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war; that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity to concede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heard much, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral until the conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the best opportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May: "I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!" The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her "sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna, there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance, which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza having prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a complete misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motives that led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close range, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in a declaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of the matter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action was complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simple and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulses stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to the modern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of the Teutonic danger. _"Fuori i barbari"_--out with the barbarians--has lain in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a fresh heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded France, by the Lusitania murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a moving force than this personal antagonism was the spiritual antagonism between the Latin and the German, between the two visions of the world which the German and the Latin imagine and seek to perpetuate. That in a large and very real sense this world agony of war is the supreme struggle between these two opposed traditions of civilization--a decision between two competing forms of life--seems to me so obvious as to need no argument. In such a struggle Italy must, by compulsion of historical tradition as well as of political situation, take her part on the side of those who from one angle or another are upholding with their lives the inheritance of Rome against the pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty against the dead weight of physical and material strength. * * * * * One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the atmosphere of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight months became evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life. Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during the last generation the German has established himself in all favorable sites, were thick with signs of sale. In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building, cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there, Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself. And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton business. Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton, the quays piled with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It took a large credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian wants. Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the trainload. Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff, was held at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government decided to accept the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legitimately destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating England's perplexity in the cotton business, especially with a nation that might any day become an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this delicate moment. The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making money out of Italy's neutrality, and _neutralista_ sentiment was naturally strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt they did their best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed of their pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined opposite me on the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his class as well as any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But first we must be ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable, which the American finds so hard to understand. * * * * * And this was the prevailing note of Rome those early days of May--a dull, passive acceptance of the dreaded fate which had been threatening for so many months on the national horizon, ever since Austria plumped her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid debates, no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not much public interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with its terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting, one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if more normal in its daily life than Naples in spite of the absence of those tourists who gather here at this season by the tens of thousands, was equally acquiescent and on the surface uninterested in the event. The explanation of this outward apathy in the public is simple: nobody knew anything definite enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of news published anywhere. The journals are all personal "organs," and anybody can know whose "views" they are voicing. There was the "Messagero," subsidized by the French and the English embassies, which emitted cheerful pro-Ally paragraphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio," founded by the German party, patently the mouthpiece of Teutonic diplomacy. There was the "Giornale d'Italia" that spoke for the Vatican, and the "Idea Nazionale" which voiced radical young Italy. And so on down the list. But there was a perfectly applied censorship which suppressed all diplomatic leaks. So one read with perfect confidence that Prince von Buelow had driven to the Consulta at eleven-fifteen yesterday, and having been closeted with Baron Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, or with the Premier, Signor Salandra, or with both, for forty-seven minutes, had emerged upon the street smiling. And shortly after this event Baron Macchio, the Austrian Envoy, arrived at the Consulta in his motor-car and had spent within the mystery of the Foreign Office twenty or more minutes. The reader might insert any fatal interpretation he liked between the lines of this chronicle. That was quite all the reality the Roman public, the people of Italy, had to speculate upon during weeks of waiting, and for the most part they waited quietly, patiently. For whatever the American prejudice against the dangers of secret diplomacy may be, the European, especially the Italian, idea is that all grave negotiations should be conducted privately--that the diplomatic cake should be composed by experts in retirement until it is ready for the baking. And the European public is well trained in controlling its curiosities. It was sufficiently astonishing to the American onlooker, however, accustomed to flaming extras and the plethoric discussion in public of the most intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness the acquiescence of emotional Italians in this complete obscurity about their fate and that of their children and their nation, which was being sorted behind the closed doors of the Consulta. Every one seemed to go about his personal business with an apparent calm, a shrug of expressive shoulders at the most, signifying belief in the sureness of war--soon. There was little animation in the cafes, practically none on the streets. Arragno's, usually buzzing with political prophecy, had a depressing, provincial calm. Unoccupied deputies sat in gloomy silence over their thin _consommations_. Even the 1st of May passed without that demonstration by the Socialists against war so widely expected. To be sure, the Government had prudently packed Rome and the northern cities with troops: soldiers were lurking in every old courtyard, up all the narrow alleys, waiting for some hardy Socialist to "demonstrate." But it was not the plentiful troops, not even a lively thunderstorm that swept Rome all the afternoon, which discouraged the Socialists: they too were in doubt and apathy. They were hesitating, passing resolutions, defining themselves into fine segments of political opinion--and waiting for Somebody to act! They too awaited the completion of those endless discussions among the diplomats at the Consulta, at the Ballplatz in Vienna, and wherever diplomacy is made in Berlin. The first of May came and went, and the _carabinieri_, the secret police, the infantry, the cavalry with their fierce hairy helmets filed off to their barracks in a dripping dusk, dispirited, as if disappointed themselves that nothing definite, even violence, had yet come out of the business. So one caught a belated cab and scurried through the deserted streets to an empty hotel on the Pincian, more than half convinced that the Government meant really to do nothing except "negotiate" until the spirit of war had died from the hearts of the people. Yet much was going on beneath the surface. There were flashes to be seen in broad daylight. The King and his ministers at the eleventh hour decided not to attend the ceremonies at Quarto of the unveiling of the monument to the Garibaldian "Thousand." Now, what could that mean? Did it indicate that the King was not yet ready to choose his road and feared to compromise himself by appearing in company with the Francophile poet D'Annunzio, who was to give the address? It would be a hard matter to explain to Berlin, to whose nostrils the poet was anathema. Or did it mean literally that the negotiations with reluctant Austria had reached that acute point which might not permit the absence of authority from Rome even for twenty-four hours? The drifting, if it were drifting, was more rapid, day by day. There was a constant troop movement all over Italy, which could not be disguised from anybody who went to a railroad station. Italy was not "mobilizing," but that term in this year of war has come to have a diplomatic insignificance. Every one knew that a large army had already gone north toward the disputed frontier. More soldiers were going every day, and more men of the younger sort were silently disappearing from their ordinary occupations, as the way is in conscript countries. It was all being done admirably, swiftly, quietly--no placards. The _carabinieri_ went from house to house and delivered verbal orders. But all this might be a mere "preparation," an argument that could not be used diplomatically at the Consulta, yet of vital force. There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit of the Italian Ambassador at Paris to Rome. Why had he taken that long journey home for such a brief visit, consumed in conferences with the ministers? And Prince von Buelow had rallied to his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger. Rome was seething with rumor. * * * * * The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the Government. They were honest,--that everybody admitted,--and they were experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,--and concealed the bills. But Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least he was avowedly _neutralista_, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically, with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige. A clever American, long resident in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the political powers to make his words significant, told me,--"The country does not know what it wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he comes we shall know whether there will be war!" That was May 9--a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in Rome the same week--and we knew, but not as the political prophet thought.... Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thunder to come out of this stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian _Granatieri_, ordinarily stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile. I read the word "_Socilismo_" scrawled in chalk over the walls and half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the fields. Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war. "We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national doubt of Calabria, Sicily,--the weaker, less certain members of the family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi, which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government. No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the _quid pro quo_ they would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security without jeopardizing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom of patriots if ever in her history. The Salandra Government kept admirable order during these dangerous days, suppressing the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That was the wise way, until they knew themselves which road to take and had prepared the public mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occupied somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of authority against popular ebullitions is always a marvel to the American. To the European mind government means power, and power is exercised practically, concretely, not by writs of courts and sheriffs, but by armed troops. The Salandra Government had the power, and apparently did not mean to have its hand forced by the populace.... The young officer at Genzano had no doubt that war was coming, nor had the handsome boy whom we at last ran to ground in an old Franciscan convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise" his regiment had received "to go first." His mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as he spoke, but like a Latin mother she made no protest. If his country needed him, if war had to be.... On our way back to Rome across the Campagna we saw a huge silver fish swimming lazily in the misty blue sky--one of Italy's new dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers everywhere in their new gray linen clothes--tanned, boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows, scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy. The night was broken by the sound of marching feet, for troop movements were usually made at night. The soldiers were going north by the trainload. Each day one saw more of them in the streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio and Prince von Buelow were as busy as ever at the Consulta on the Quirinal Hill, and rumor said that at last they were offering real "compensations." * * * * * The shops of Rome, as those of every city and town in Europe, were hung with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the "Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under German persuasion. The discrepancy between the two maps was obvious and vast. On the bulletin boards there were many news items emanating from the "unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste, chronicling riots and the severely repressive measures taken by the Austrian masters. The little piazza in front of the newspaper office was thronged from morning to night, and the old woman in the kiosk beside the door did a large business in maps. And yet this aspect of the Italian situation seems to me to have been much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers--no great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed Italians! No; it was rather a high point of propaganda--as we should say commercially, a good talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism, which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naivete, go to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent and Trieste? I am not attempting to write history. I am guessing like another, seeking causes in a complex state of mind. We shall have to go back. Secret diplomacy may be the inveterate habit of Europe, especially of Italy. The new arrangement with the Allies has never been published, probably never will be. One suspects that it was made, essentially, before Italy had broken with Austria, before, perhaps, she had denounced her old alliance on the 5th of May at Vienna. And yet, although inveterately habituated to the mediaevalism of secret international arrangements, Italy is enough filled with the spirit of modern democracy to break any treaty that does not fulfill the will of the people. The Triple Alliance was really doomed at its conception, because it was a trade made by a few politicians and diplomats in secret and never known in its terms to the people who were bound by it. Any strain would break such a bond. The strain was always latent, but it became acute of late years, especially when Austria thwarted Italy's move on Turkey--as Salandra revealed later under the sting of Bethmann-Hollweg's taunts. It was badly strained, virtually broken, when Austria without warning to Italy stabbed at Serbia. Austria made a grave blunder there, in not observing the first term of the Triple Alliance, by which she was bound to take her allies into consultation. The insolence of the Austrian attitude was betrayed in the disregard of this obligation: Italy evidently was too unimportant a factor to be precise with. Italy might, then and there, the 1st of August, 1914, very well have denounced the Alliance, and perhaps would have done so had she been prepared for the consequences, had the Salandra Government been then at the helm. There is another coil to the affair, not generally recognized in America. Austria in striking at Serbia was potentially aiming at a closer envelopment of Italy along the Adriatic, provision for which had been made in a special article of the Triple Alliance,--the seventh,--under which she had bound herself to grant compensations to Italy for any disturbance of the Balkan situation. Austria, when she was brought to recognize this commission of fault,--which was not until December, 1914, not seriously until the close of January, 1915,--pretended that her blow at Serbia was chastisement, not occupation. But it is absurd to assume that having chastised the little Balkan state she would leave it free and independent. It is true that in January Austrian troops were no longer in Balkan territory, but that was not due to intention or desire! They had been there, they are there now, and they will be there as long as the Teutonic arms prevail. It is a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as Austria moved against Serbia. The response she must have known also, but she had not the power to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on her right under the seventh clause of the Triple Alliance to open negotiations for "compensations" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans, and finally with the assistance of Berlin compelled the reluctant Emperor to admit her right. These complexities of international chess, which the American mind never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in shop windows, as I studied them for hours in default of anything better to do in the drifting days of early May. The maps will show at a glance that Italy's northern frontiers are so ingeniously drawn--by her hereditary enemy--that her head is virtually in chancery, as every Italian knows and as the whole world has now realized after four months of patient picking by Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks. And there is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question was not as important as it has since become. The east coast of the Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might be left to the rude peoples of Montenegro and Albania. But it has come into the world since then. Add to this that the Italian shore of the Adriatic is notably without good harbors and indefensible, and one has all the elements of the strategic situation. All fears would be superfluous if Austria, the old bully at the north, would keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well enough for over thirty years. But would Austria play fair with an unsympathetic ally that she had not taken into her confidence when she determined to violate the first term of the Triple Alliance? All this may now be pondered in the "Green Book," more briefly and cogently in the admirable statement which Italy made to the Powers when she declared war on Austria. That the Italian Government was not only within its treaty rights in demanding those "compensations" from Austria, but would have been craven to pass the incident of the attack on Serbia without notice, seems to me clear. That it was a real necessity, not a mere trading question, for Italy to secure a stronger frontier and control of the Adriatic, seems to me equally obvious. These, I take it, were the vital considerations, not the situation of the "unredeemed" Italians in Trent and Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum of concession which she finally offered to Italy's minimum of demand, insisted upon taking the sentimental or knavish view of the Italian attitude: she would yield the more Italianated parts of the territory in dispute, not the vitally strategic places. Nor would she deliver her concessions until after the conclusion of the war--if ever!--after she had got what use there was from the Italians enrolled in her armies fighting Russia. For Vienna to regard the tender principle of nationalism is a good enough joke, as we say. Her persistence in considering Italy's demands as either greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of imagination. The Italians are sentimental, but they are even more practical. It was not the woes of the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Government to reject the final offering of Austria, and to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather the very practical consideration of that indefensible frontier, which Austria stubbornly refused to make safe for Italy--after she had given cause, by her attack upon Serbia, to render all her neighbors uneasy in their minds for their safety. So much for the sentimental and the strategical threads in the Consulta negotiations. It was neither for sentiment nor for strategical advantage solely that Italy finally entered the war. Nevertheless, if the German Powers had frankly and freely from the start recognized Italy's position, and surrendered to her _immediate_ possession--as they were ready to do at the last moment--sufficient of those national aspirations to safeguard national security, with hands off in the Adriatic, Italy most probably would have preferred to remain neutral. I cannot believe that Salandra or the King really wanted war. They were sincerely struggling to keep their nation out of the European melting-pot as long as they could. But they were both shrewd and patriotic enough not to content themselves with present security at the price of ultimate danger. And if they had been as weak as the King of Greece, as subservient as the King of Bulgaria, they would have had to reckon with a very different people from the Bulgars and the Greeks--a nation that might quite conceivably have turned Italy into a republic and ranged her beside her Latin sister on the north in the world struggle. The path of peace was in no way the path of prudence for the House of Savoy. * * * * * Lack of imagination is surely one of the prominent characteristics of the modern German, at least in statecraft. Imagination applied to the practical matters of daily living is nothing more than the ability to project one's own personality beneath the skin of another, to look around at the world through that other person's eyes and to realize what values the world holds for him. The Prince von Buelow, able diplomat though they call him, could not look upon the world through Italian eyes in spite of his Italian wife, his long residence in Rome, his professed love for Italy. It must have been with his consent if not by his suggestion that Erzburger, the leader of the Catholic party in the Reichstag, was sent to Rome at this critical juncture. The German mind probably said,--"Here is a notable Catholic, political leader of German Catholics, and so he must be especially agreeable to Italians, who, as all the world knows, are Catholics." The reasoning of a stupid child! Outwardly Italy is Catholic, but modern Italy has shown herself very restive at any papal meddling in national affairs. To have an alien--one of the "_barbari_"--seat himself at the Vatican and try to use the papal power in determining the policy of the nation in a matter of such magnitude, was a fatal blunder of tactless diplomacy. Nor could Herr Erzburger's presence at the Vatican these tense days be kept secret from the curious journalists, who lived on such meager items of news. No more tactful was it for Prince von Buelow to meet the Italian politician Giolitti at the Palace Hotel on the Pincian. There is no harm in one gentleman's meeting another in the rooms of a public hotel so respectable as the Palace, but when the two are playing the international chess game and one is regarded as an enemy and the other as a possible traitor, the popular mind is likely to take a heated and prejudiced view of the small incident. Less obvious to the public, but none the less untactful, was the manner in which the German Ambassador tried to use his social connection in Rome, his family relationships in the aristocracy of Italy, to influence the King and his ministers. He might have taken warning from the royal speech attributed to the Queen Mother in reply to the Kaiser: "The House of Savoy rules one at a time." He should have kept away from the back stairs. He should have known Italy well enough to realize that the elements of Roman society with which he was affiliated do not represent either power or public opinion in Italy any more than good society does in most modern states. Roman aristocracy, like all aristocracies, whether of blood or of money, is international in its sympathies, skeptic in its soul. And its influence, in a decisive question of life and death to the nation, is nil. The Prince von Buelow was wasting his time with people who could not decide anything. As Salandra said, with dignified restraint in answer to the vulgar attack upon him made by the German Chancellor,--"The Prince was a sincere lover of Italy, but he was ill-advised by persons who no longer had any weight in the nation"--as his colleague in London seems to have been ill-advised when he assured his master that Englishmen would not fight under any circumstances! The trouble with diplomacy would seem to be that its ranks are still recruited from "the upper classes," whose gifts are social and whose sympathies reflect the views and the prejudices of a very small element in the state. Good society in Rome was still out on the Pincian for the afternoon promenade, was still exchanging calls and dinners these golden spring days, but its views and sympathies could not count in the enormous complex of beliefs and emotions that make the mind of a nation in a crisis. Prince von Buelow's motor was busily running about the narrow streets of old Rome, the gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably open,--guarded by _carabinieri_,--but if the German Ambassador had put on an old coat and strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a little marble-topped table in some obscure cafe, or had traveled second or third class between Rome and Naples, he might have heard things that would have brought the negotiations at the Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the other. For Italy was making up its mind against his master. * * * * * Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's, and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild, empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Buelow ever spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts the newer city? Probably not. * * * * * Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German. When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine barrier and poured himself lustfully out over the fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally a place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages since then his lust has changed its form: now it is economic privilege that he seeks for his people. In order to maintain that level of industrial superiority, of material prosperity, to which he has raised himself, he must "expand" in trade and influence. He must have more markets to exploit and always more. It is the same lust with a new name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely was written for nations as well as for individuals. But our modern economic theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the belief: "Thou shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism--the survival of the fittest, materially, which he is applying to the world--Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will. And the non-Germanic world--the Latin world, for it _is_ a Latin world in varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany--rejects the theory and the practice with loathing--when it sees what it means. * * * * * What makes for the happiness of a nation? I asked myself in the mellow silence of ancient Rome. Is it true that economic conquest makes for strength, happiness, survival for the nation or for the individual? This Italy has always been poor, at least within modern memory--a literal, actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make her rich, to support her growing population according to the modern standards of comfort. The Germans despise the Italians for their little having. Yet the Italian peasant--man, woman, or child--is a strong human being, inured to meager living and hardship, loving the soil from which he digs his living with an intense, fiery love. And poverty has not killed the joy of living in the Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly laborious lives which the majority lead, the privations in food, clothing, housing, the narrowness,--in the modern view,--of their lives, no one could consider the Italian people unhappy. Their characters, like their hillside farms, are the result of an intensive cultivation--of making the most out of very little naturally given. A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these, not to be despised in the _kaiserliche_ fashion even as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making the Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic opportunity--the want of coal and factories and other sources of wealth--has kept most of these people close to the soil, where one feels the majority of any healthy, enduring race should be. Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with little, and able to wring the most out of that little. It has cultivated them intensively as a people, just as they have been forced to cultivate their rock-bound fields foot by foot. There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition, all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now fighting.... * * * * * I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany has been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless exponent of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state depends primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has exalted an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical appeals. She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death in order that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her citizens at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her inferiors in the science of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more abhorrent when dressed out with the phrases of Christianity! All modern states are more or less tainted with the same delusion--ourselves most, perhaps, after Germany. "We have all sinned," as an eminent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as well as England and Germany." It is time to revise some of the fundamental assumptions of political philosophers and statesmen. Let us admit that peoples may be strong and happy and contented without seeking to control increasingly those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on the earth's surface, without cutting one another's throats in an effort for national expansion. The psychology of states cannot be fundamentally different from that of the individuals in them. And the happiness of the individual has never been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his economic prosperity. Because the Latin soul divines this axiomatic belief, because the Latin world admits a larger, finer interpretation of life than economic success, all civilization waits upon the great decision of this war. * * * * * Suddenly in the calm of these drifting, hesitant days, when nobody knew what the nation desired, there came a bolt of lightning. I have said that the German people lack imagination by which to understand the world outside themselves. They do not cooerdinate their activities. Otherwise, why commit the barbarism of sinking the Lusitania, just at the moment when they were straining to keep Italy from breaking completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first woke to her own mind at the shock of the Lusitania murders.... The news came to me in my peaceful room above the Barberini Gardens. The fountain was softly dripping below, the spring air was full of the song of birds as another perfect day opened. The warm sunshine reached lovingly up the yellowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the little, old, familiar things of a long past, which pull so strongly here in Rome at the human heart, were moving in the new day. The life of men, so troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May morning, with the suave beauty of ideals that for centuries have coursed through the blood of Italy.... Luigi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad who brought the morning coffee and newspapers, was telling me of the horrid crime. With his outstretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he said the words, then, dropping the paper with its heavy headlines, cursed it as if it too symbolically represented the hideous thing that Germany had become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We shall fight them, the swine!" A few days afterward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on some Alpine pass. Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was typical of all Rome, all Italy. The same burst of execration and horror was in every mouth. "Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-German sheet that was appearing in Rome: it got a new significance as it hung in the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry of the street. I am not simple enough to believe that the sinking of the Lusitania of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no more than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough to sacrifice themselves simply for their moral resentments. But this fresh example of cynical indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at the critical point of decision for the Italian people, had much to do with the rousing of that war fury without which no government can push a nation into war. First there must be the spirit of hate, a personal emotion in the hearts of many. It must be remembered also that Italy had felt with the entire civilized world the outrage of Belgium. It has even been rumored that one of the hard passages between Italy and her German allies was the condition that Germany wished to attach to any Austrian concessions, by which Italy at the peace conference should uphold Germany's "claims" to Belgium. No one knows the truth about this, but if true it is in itself an adequate explanation of the failure of the negotiations. And now the Lusitania came with a fresh shock as an iterated example of German state policy. It proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men what the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world. The Latin has been cruel and bloody in his deeds, like all men, but he has never made a cult of inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of statecraft. Italians, prone to hate as to love, prone especially to hate the Teuton, those aliens who have lusted after their richness and beauty all these centuries, felt the Lusitania murders to the depths of their souls. It was like a red writing on the wall, serving notice that in due season Germany and Austria would tear Italy limb from limb because of her "treachery" in not abetting them in their attack upon the peace of the world. Prince von Buelow and Baron Macchio might as well have discontinued their daily visits to the Consulta after the 7th of May. Whatever they might have hoped to accomplish with their diplomacy to keep Italy neutral had been irretrievably ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a boot-heel on stone, can set off a powder magazine. The Lusitania was a goodly sized match. If the King and his ministers were waiting for the country to declare itself, if they wanted the excuse of national emotion before taking the final irrevocable steps into war, they had their desire. From the hour when the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came over the wires, Italy began to mutter and shout. The months of hesitation were ended. There were elements enough of hate, and Germany had given them all focus. "Fuori i Barbari!" I bought a sheet from the old woman who went hurrying up the street shouting hoarsely,--"Fuori i Barbari!" ... "Fuori i Barbari!" ... "Barbari!".... _ |
||