Hatred Between Italians and Austrians
The implacable hatred which has developed between Italians and Austrians is illustrated by the following Italian communiqué, issued in Rome on Feb. 11, in reply to the Austrian Supreme Command's denial that the Austro-Germans were first to bombard cities from airplanes. It points out that the Austro-Germans first bombarded Udine, Treviso, Padua, Verona, Venice, Ravenna, &c., massacring defenseless and innocent populations and ruining valuable art treasures, and adds:
The Italians went to Trieste not to bombard citizens and private houses, but the hydroplane stations in which are sheltered the assassins of Venice, and the two vessels of the Monarch type which were kept by the Imperial and Royal Navy behind the dyke, in the hope that the Italian elements of the city would help to protect them and afterward enable them to set out on some heroic enterprise against the defenseless localities on the Adriatic Coast. Immediately the hydroplanes, yielding to the indignation of the whole world, ceased bombarding Venice, and immediately the two vessels of the Monarch type were removed from Trieste, our aerial raids ceased, since an understanding was proposed.
We wage war against the enemy's armed forces, and not against women, children, monuments, and hospitals. In spite of the most solemn denial issued by the Austrians of the acts which, after the first bombardments of Padua, Treviso, and Vicenza at the end of December and the beginning of January, they declared to be a question of reprisals for bombardments, carried out by Franco-British aviators on German towns, the Germans, in substance, gave to be understood what the Austrians hypocritically wished to hide, that is, that the pretext of reprisals enabled them to persevere with their nameless atrocities, which had been imposed upon them by some of their leaders having yielded to the impulses of a criminal mentality. Thus it happened that the Austrian Catholic command, bowing to the orders of the German Lutheran pastors, bombarded Catholic churches in the Italian cities. And so we see the Austro-Hungarian Government—so solicitous for peace and love between nations—sowing hatred which nothing can quench.