Italy at War and the Allies in the West | Page 4

if you please, the passengers on the New York-Boston trains being
ordered to keep their windows darkened because enemy submarines
have been reported off the coast.) In this war remoteness from the
firing-line does not assure safety. Spezia, for example, which is a naval
base of the first importance, is separated from the firing-line by the
width of the Italian peninsula. Until a few months ago its inhabitants
felt as snug and safe as though they lived in Spain. Then, one night, an
Austrian airman crossed the Alps, winged his way above the Lombard
plain, and let loose on Spezia a rain of bombs which caused many
deaths and did enormous damage.
Even the casual traveller in Italy to-day cannot fail to be struck by the
prosperity which the war has brought to the great manufacturing cities
of the north as contrasted with the commercial stagnation which
prevails in the southern provinces of the kingdom. In the munition
plants, most of which are in the north, are employed upward of half a
million workers, of whom 75,000 are women. Genoa, Milan, and Turin
are a-boom with industry. The great automobile factories have
expanded amazingly in order to meet the demand for shells, field-guns,
and motor-trucks. Turin, as an officer smilingly remarked, "now
consists of the Fiat factory and a few houses." The United States is not
the only country to produce that strange breed known as munitions
millionaires. Italy has them also--and the jewellers and champagne
agents are doing a bigger business than they have ever done before.
As the train tears southward into Tuscany you begin to catch fleeting
glimpses of the men who are making possible this sudden
prosperity--the men who are using the motor-trucks and the shells and
the field-guns. They don't look very prosperous or very happy.

Sometimes you see them drawn up on the platforms of wayside stations,
shivering beneath their scanty capes in the chill of an Italian dawn.
Usually there is a background of wet-eyed women, with shawls drawn
over their heads, and nearly always with babies in their arms. And on
nearly every siding were standing long trains of box-cars, bedded with
straw and filled with these same wiry, brown-faced little men in their
rat-gray uniforms, being hurried to the fighting in the north. It
reminded me of those long cattle-trains one sees in the Middle West,
bound for the Chicago slaughter-houses.
Rome in war-time is about as cheerful as Coney Island in midwinter.
Empty are the enticing little shops on the Piazza di Spagna. Gone from
the marble steps are the artists' models and the flower-girls. To visit the
galleries of the Vatican is to stroll through an echoing marble tomb.
The guards and custodians no longer welcome you for the sake of your
tips, but for the sake of your company. The King, who is with the army,
visits Rome only rarely; the Queen occupies a modest villa in the
country; the Palace of the Quirinal has been turned into a hospital. The
great ballroom, the state dining-room, the throne-room, even the
Queen's sun-parlor, are now filled with white cots, hundreds and
hundreds of them, each with its bandaged occupant, while in the
famous gardens where Popes and Emperors and Kings have strolled,
convalescent soldiers now laze in the sun or on the gravelled paths play
at bowls. In giving up their home for the use of the wounded, the King
and Queen have done a very generous and noble thing, and the Italian
people are not going to forget it.
If Rome, which is the seat of government, shows such unmistakable
signs of depression, imagine the stagnation of Florence, which has long
been as dependent upon its crop of tourists as a Dakota farmer is upon
his crop of wheat. The Cascine Gardens, in the old days one of the
gayest promenades in Europe, are as lonely as a cemetery. At those
hotels on the Lung' Arno, which remain open, the visitor can make his
own terms. The Via Tornabuoni is as quiet as a street in a country town.
The dealers in antiques, in souvenirs, in pictures, in marbles, have most
of them put up their shutters and disappeared, to return, no doubt, in
happier times.

There is in the Via Tornabuoni, midway between Giacosa's and the
American Consulate, an excellent barber shop. The owner, who learned
his trade in the United States, is the most skilful man with scissors and
razor that I know. His customers came from half the countries of the
globe.
"But they are all gone now," he told me sadly. "Some are fighting,
some have been killed, the others have gone back to their homes until
the war is over. Three years ago I had as nice a little business as a man
could ask