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The World Decision, a non-fiction book by Robert Herrick |
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Part 1. Italy - Chapter 6. The Eve Of The War |
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_ Part One. Italy Chapter VI. The Eve of the War Rome became still, so still as to be oppressive. Her heart was elsewhere,--in the north whither the King was about to go. Rome, like all the war capitals, having played her part must relapse more and more into a state of waiting and watching, stirred occasionally by rumors and rejoicings. The streets were empty, for all men of military age had gone and others had returned to their normal occupations. Officers hurried toward the station in cabs with their boxes piled before them. And the sound of marching troops also on the way to the station did not cease at once. Saturday, the 22d of May, I took the night express for Venice. The train of first- and second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would the declaration come? In another week? I settled myself comfortably in my corner opposite a stout captain who rolled himself in his gray cloak and went to sleep. Other officers wandered restlessly to and fro in the corridor outside, discussing the coming war. It was a heavenly summer night. The Umbrian Hills swam before us in the clear moonlight as the train passed north over the familiar, beautiful route. If Germany should strike from behind at Milan, exposing the north of Italy? One shuddered. After Belgium Germany was capable of any attack, and Germany was expected then to go with her ally. One thing was evident over and above the beauty of the moonlit country through which we were rushing at a good pace, and that was the remarkable improvement in Italian railroading since my last visit to Italy a dozen years before. This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked roadbed, which accounted in part for the rapidity and ease of the troop movements these last months. The ordinary passenger traffic had scarcely been interrupted even now on the eve of war. The terrors of the mobilization period, thanks to Italy's efficient preparation, were unfounded. It spoke well for Italy at war. It was a sign of her economic development, her modernization. Even Germany had not gone into the business of war more methodically, more efficiently. Italy, to be sure, had nine months for her preparation, but to one who remembered the country during the Abyssinian expedition, time alone would not explain the improvement. The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna were under military control, the quays patrolled, the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed with soldiers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in the straw of the cattle cars on the sidings, also long trains of artillery and supplies. Shortly after daylight the guards pulled down our shutters and warned us against looking out of the windows for the remainder of the journey. A childish precaution, it seemed, which the officers constantly disregarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields of the flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men in civilian black leaned over and firmly pulled down the shade. Italy was taking her war seriously. At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going north to Udine and--beyond. The almost empty train rolled into the Venetian station only an hour late. The quay outside the station was strangely silent, with none of that noisy crew of boatmen trying to capture arriving _forestieri._ They had gone to the war. One old man, the figure of Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor of the gay tribe, took me aboard and ferried me through the network of silent canals toward the piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the waterways, the windows of the palaces were tightly shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting. "The Austrians," Charon laconically informed me. It would seem that Venice had been almost an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was left at her flight. But within the little squares and along the winding stony lanes between the ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens and soldiers--and very much herself for the first time in many centuries. The famous piazza recalled the processional pictures of Guardi. Only the companies of soldiers that marched through it on their way to the station were not gorgeously robed: they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on their backs. The bronze horses were being lowered from St. Mark's, one of them poised in midair with his ramping legs in a sling. Inside the church a heavy wooden truss had been put in place to strengthen the arch of gleaming mosaics. There was a tall hoarding of fresh boards along the water side of the Ducal Palace, and the masons were fast filling in the arches with brick supports. Venice was putting herself in readiness for the enemy. Even the golden angel on the new Campanile had been shrouded in black in order that she might not attract a winged monster by her gleam. From many a palace roof aerial guns were pointed to the sky, and squads of soldiers patrolled the platforms that had been hastily built to hold them. Out at San Niccolo da Lido, where I supped at a little _osteria_ beneath the trees, a number of gray torpedo boats rushed to and fro in the harbor entrance, restless as hunting dogs straining at the leash. That night Venice was dark, so black that one stumbled from wall to wall along the narrow lanes in the search for his own doorway. War was close at hand: the menace of it, a few miles, a few hours only away, across the blue Adriatic, at Pola. In order to understand the significance of frontiers an American should be in Venice on the eve of war. * * * * * Some hours later I awoke startled from a heavy sleep, the reverberation of a dream ringing in my ears. It was not yet dawn. In the gray-blue light outside the birds were wheeling in frightened circles above the garden below my balcony. Mingled in my dreams with the disturbing noise was the song of a nightingale--and then there came another dull, thunderous explosion, followed immediately by the long whine and shriek of sirens at the arsenal, also the crackle of machine guns from all sides. Now I realized what it meant. It was war. The Austrians had taken this way to acknowledge Italy's defiance. The enemy had threatened to destroy Venice, and this was their first attempt. Above the sputter of the machine guns and the occasional explosions of shrapnel could be distinguished the buzz of an aeroplane that moment by moment approached nearer. Soon the machine itself became visible, flying oddly enough from the land direction, not from the Adriatic. It flew high and directly, across Venice, aiming apparently for the arsenal, the Lido, the open sea. It was an unreality, that little winged object aloft like a large aerial beetle buzzing busily through the still gray morning sky, heading straight with human intelligence in a set line, bent on destruction. The bombs could not be seen as they fell, of course, but while I gazed into the heavens another thunderous explosion came from near by, which I took to be the aviator's bomb, distinguished by the sharpness of its explosion from the anti-aircraft bombardment. Other guns along the route of the enemy took up the attack, then gradually all became silent once more. Only the cries of the frightened birds circling above the garden and the voices of the awakened inhabitants could be heard. From every window and balcony half-dressed people watched the flight of the monoplane until it had disappeared in the vague dawn beyond St. Mark's. In another half-hour the sirens shrieked again and the machine gun on the roof of the Papadopoli Palace just below on the Grand Canal began to sputter. This time every one knew what it meant and there was a large gathering on the balconies and in the little squares to witness the arrival of the hostile aeroplane. It was another monoplane coming from the same land direction, flying much lower than the first one, so low that its hooded aviator could be distinguished and the bands of color across the belly of the car. It skirted the city toward the Adriatic more cautiously. Later it was rumored that the second aeroplane had been brought down in the lagoons and its men captured. Thereafter no one tried to sleep: the little Venetian bridges and passages were filled with talking people, and rumors of the damage done began to come in. Eleven bombs in all were dropped on this first attack, killing nobody and doing no serious harm, except possibly at the arsenal where one fell. I was at the local police station when one of the unexploded bombs was brought in. It was of the incendiary type containing petroleum. Also there had been picked up somewhere in the canals the half of a Munich newspaper, which seemed to indicate, although there was nothing of special significance in the sheet, that the monoplane was German rather than Austrian. Yet Germany had not yet declared war on Italy. But was it not the German Kaiser who had threatened to destroy Italy's art treasures? Were not the German armies in Flanders and France making war against defenceless, unmilitary monuments? * * * * * I realized now the necessity of those preparations to guard the treasures of Venice, priceless and irreplaceable--why the Belle Arti had been emptied, and the Colleoni trussed with an ugly wooden framework. But little at the best could be done to protect Venice herself, which lies exposed in all her fragile loveliness to the attacks of the new Vandals. The delicate palaces,--already crumbling from age,--the marvelous facade of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color, the leaning _campanili_, the little churches filled with noble monuments to its great ones,--all were helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling from warships. Nothing could save Venice from even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such pounding as the Germans have given Rheims, or Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile blow Venice would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning thus bereaved to her ancient bridegroom. Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must expect. Great preparations for the defense of Venice have been made. The city might be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds,--the world of the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb,--the world as man is making it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters, to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never long absent, as may easily be realized from the great battle-pieces in the Ducal Palace. But war then was more the rough play of boisterous children than the slaughterous, purely destructive thing that modern men have made it. And when those old Venetians were not fighting, they were building greatly, beautifully, lovingly: they were making life resplendent. That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small, sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet. These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will. That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will to destroy. * * * * * A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the _vaporetti_ and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal. Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new condition of her peculiar life. There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms. On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic. They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes. Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua. As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely, so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady, so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge of our modern world.... That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for the cafes were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night and to Venice? * * * * * The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light. But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds, there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust. Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities, and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the Latin abhors. * * * * * There are some things in this world that can never be replaced once destroyed, and Venice is one of them. And there are some things greater than power, efficiency, and all _kaiserliche Kultur_. Such is Italy with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible youth, its treasure of deathless beauty. As I passed through the fertile fields on my way from Venice to Milan and the north, I understood as never before the inner reason for Italy's entering the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane civilization,--the love of freedom for the individual, the golden mean between liberty and license that is the Latin inheritance,--all this compelled young Italy to fight, not merely for her own preservation, but also for the preservation of these things in the world against the force that would destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has not died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum," the poet said, and at the risk of all her jewels Italy bravely defied the enemy across the Alps. This war on which she had embarked after nine long months of preparation is no mere adventure after stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it is a fight unto death between two opposed principles of life. "He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality on the greater issues of life. _ |
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