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
Bülow 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 naïveté, 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
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