The City's Wartime Aspects
[A Rotogravure Etching of Venice Appears in This Issue Opposite Page [269]]
When the Austro-German armies swept down through the Venetian plain last October and November, leaving ruin in their wake, they were stopped at the Piave River, whose waters flow into the lagoon a few miles east of Venice. Though the Italian Army and Navy made a ring of steel around the City of the Doges, and have held the enemy at bay from that time to the present, the sounds of battle have been constantly in the ears of the inhabitants, and frequent air raids have left jagged scars on many buildings and even in the pavement of the Piazza San Marco.
Throughout the Winter of 1917-18 Venice remained a city without tourists, its population dwindling from 150,000 to about 40,000, its canals silent and almost empty of life, yet full of a new and wistful beauty. The first days of peril had brought the enemy within twelve or thirteen miles of Venice. From the Fondamento Nuovo, at the northern end of the city, the people could see the flash of guns and the bursting of shells. The roar of guns disturbed their work by day and their sleep by night.
EVACUATING THE CITY
The civilian population was a hindrance rather than a help to the defenders, so the Admiral in command (for Venice is under naval, not military authority) thought it well to arrange for the partial evacuation of the city. In conjunction with the Syndic, Count Erimani, he first asked all foreigners to remove themselves to places of safety. Then offices were opened in each of the thirty parishes, and the people were ordered to report within forty-eight hours. This census was taken, so that railway facilities for traveling might be provided for all, and that places of safety might be found for those who were too poor to go away at their own expense, and pay their way afterward.
In a few days nearly half the population, some 70,000, had gone, the majority to Florence, Rome, and other places in Central and Southern Italy, and the others to Genoa and the Riviera. Some were sent by sea to the Ancona coast. After this first rush the exodus went on more leisurely, some 3,000 leaving each day. Institutions of all kinds, offices, shops, restaurants, and cafés, closed their doors, even the Café Florian, which had been open day and night continuously for over 100 years. Banks and offices transferred their businesses to other towns.
There are no cellars in Venice, nor can the inhabitants have any dugouts in which to conceal valuables, for at a depth of two or three feet below the ground floors of all buildings water is reached. Accordingly the authorities at the Municipal Building, at St. Mark's Library, at the Ducal Palace, at the Archives, as well as at banks and insurance offices, had their documents and valuables conveyed to places of security by boat and rail.
When Italy first went into the war precautions had been taken to protect the public monuments of Venice against aerial bombardment. The Doges' Palace and the Church of St. Mark were protected by barricades of sandbags, as were all the more valuable statues throughout the city. St. Mark's gilded copper horses, beaten out by hand, the only example extant of a Roman Quadriga—
The four steeds divine,
That strike the ground resounding with their feet,
And from their nostrils snort ethereal flame—
were removed at that time from their pedestals above the main entrance to the church, and stabled under an archway on the ground floor of the Doges' Palace. When the new peril came with the invasion, however, they were conveyed by a battleship to a safer refuge in Rome. The precious equestrian statue of Colleoni, so much admired by Ruskin, with other treasures familiar to the tourist, also has been removed to a place of security. The bells of St. Mark's campanile and those of every church in the city have been taken away.
By the first weeks of 1918 the population had shrunk to less than 60,000, and at night one could walk through miles and miles of stilled and empty streets, darkened against the peril of air raids, or could travel by gondola along lonely canals rippled only by the Winter wind, with the cold moonlight silvering a deserted fairyland. Two months later the population was further reduced by sending away 20,000 women, children, and old men with a view to eliminating useless mouths to feed and preventing unnecessary slaughter. By that time Austro-German ingenuity had invented a new system of dropping bombs; instead of scattering them over the city the missiles were grouped in large numbers in a very limited space so that the destruction on that area was complete.
LIKE A DEAD CITY
An English war correspondent who visited Venice in the Winter drew this word picture:
"Shuttered palaces face each other across silent canals. A footstep ringing down those narrow alleys, which are like deep, dark slits in a close-crowded mass of many-storied houses, starts echoes that die undisturbed away. The black gondola glides through a dead city more beautiful in the silence and stillness of this war trance of hers than ever in the fullness of her vivacious life. At each corner of the narrow water lane the white-haired gondolier raises his mournful cry, but by long habit, for he knows that no answer will ring out from beyond the angle of the dark stone wall, and no tapering prow glide out to be avoided by a turn of his skillful oar.
"The Grand Canal is a green and gleaming vista of desertion. The scream of seagulls, beating its tranquil surface with their wings, is the only sound that disturbs the quiet of its reverie. A pleasing melancholy invests the deserted quays, and in remote corners of little lost canals you can almost hear the whispering of innumerable spirits of the Venice of long ago who have been drawn back to their old home by this strange peace that lies upon the city.
"Venice, without tourists, without guides, without postcard sellers and hotel touts, is a close preserve of beauty for the few who have the fortune to be here. The atmosphere and the dignity of the days when she was a ruling city are here as they have never been before in modern times, nor ever will be again."
THE WORST AIR RAID
The greatest air raid of all the forty-five which Venice had endured since the war's beginning was that of the night of Feb. 26-27, 1918. It lasted eight hours—from 10:20 to 6:15 A. M.—and there was not a single interval of more than half an hour during all that time of brilliant moonlight in which bombs were not falling on the city. There were 300 in all. Thirty-eight houses were smashed, the Royal Palace was struck, one wing of an old people's home was blown to pieces, and three churches were damaged, including that of St. Chrysostom, in which an altar with one of Cellini's last landscapes was wrecked. Fifteen bombs fell near the Doges' Palace, one barely missing the Bridge of Sighs and falling into the narrow canal which it spans. Ten bombs fell around the Rialto Bridge. About fifteen civilians were wounded seriously, including two women. Only one man was killed, thanks to the promptness with which the Venetians now take shelter.
According to the official account at least fifty airplanes took part in the raid, and some of these returned again and again, bringing fresh cargoes of bombs throughout the night. The Austrian lines are so near that the trip to the bomb bases and back again requires only twenty-five minutes, and this was the average length of the intervals between the bombardments. G. Ward Price, a war correspondent, in describing the experiences of that night, wrote:
"Suddenly another crash re-echoed throughout the city, and the din of the bombardment started once more. I followed the quickly vanishing throng through an archway, where a green light marked a place of shelter. For two hours I was part of a close-packed throng in the dark vaulted room. There were women and wide-eyed children there in plenty, tired out with the long standing, which for them lasted until dawn, but none showing alarm, though, in addition to the nerve trying din outside, a constant shower of pieces of shell and flying bits of masonry whirred and pelted and pattered down incessantly outside.
BRAVE WOMEN'S LAUGHTER
"Toward 2 o'clock I made another move toward the centre of the city. I heard the drone of an attacking airplane drawing nearer over the still lagoon, and a policeman beckoned me into the vestibule of a high palazzo in one of those narrow Venetian alleys between tall black rows of houses which are like a communication trench of masonry. All was cheerfulness in this marble anteroom, a family of young daughters laughing and chattering with their mother while the noisy night crept slowly on. Taking advantage of another lull, I reached my hotel, but not until 6 o'clock, when the dawn was well advanced, did the tumult of this eight-hour-long bombardment cease.
"And yet this morning, as one went about in the warm sunshine seeing the places which the bombs had destroyed, the people seemed untroubled enough. Troops of black-shawled girls went chattering by, and the boys were playing a sort of 'shove-halfpenny' game, using as counters the shell splinters they had found scattered about the city ways."
Since then there have been many other raids, but none so prolonged. The black-shawled women whose laughter defied the nightly peril have gone for the most part, taking with them the alert "bambini," who at that period still shouted at play in the streets. Only armed defenders are left, with those who are absolutely necessary to aid them. The muffled echo of distant guns is heard by day and the crash of bombs by night. Just outside the city is a little cemetery where are gathered the bodies of the Italian and French aviators who have died defending these shores. The marble pavement of the Piazza and Piazzetta is torn in places, and the swarming pigeons of other days have dwindled sadly, for no tourists come to feed them. In the sky over the lagoon, where the gulls once reigned supreme, airplanes now keep watch against the ceaseless threat in the direction of the Piave.