The World Decision | Page 5

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."
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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 na?veté, 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.
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