An organ moans in the great nave, and the high voices of choristers float out through the open door and surge down the long Piazza. The chugging of a motor-boat breaks into the chant, swirls it, churns upon it, and fades to a distant pulsing down the Grand Canal. The Campanile angel goes suddenly crimson, pales to rose, dies out in lilac, and remains dark, almost invisible, until the starting of stars behind it gives it a new solidity in hiding them.
In the warm twilight, the little white tables of the Café Florian are like petals dropped from the rose of the moon. For a moment they are weird and magical, but the abrupt glare of electric lights touches them back into mere tables: mere tables, flecked with coffee-cups and liqueur-glasses; mere tables, crumpling the lower halves of newspapers with their hard edges; mere tables, where gesticulating arms rest their elbows, and ice-cream plates nearly meet disaster in the excitement of a heated discussion. Venice discusses. What will the Government do? Austria has asked that her troops might cross over Italian territory, South of Switzerland, in order to attack the French frontier. Austria! "I tell you, Luigi, that alliance the Government made with the Central Powers was a ghastly blunder. You could never have got Italians to fight on the side of Austrians. Blood is thicker than ink, fortunately. But we are ready, thanks to Commandante Cadorna. It was a foregone conclusion, ever since we refused passage to their troops." "I saw Signor Colsanto, yesterday. He told me that the order had come from the General Board of Antiquities and Fine Arts to remove everything possible to Rome, and protect what can't be moved. He begins the work to-morrow." "He does! Well, that tells us. Here, Boy, Boy, give me a paper. Listen to that roar! There you are, cinque centesimi. Well, we're off, Luigi. It's declared. Italy at war with Austria again. Thank God, we've wiped off the stain of that abominable treaty." With heads bared, the crowd stands, and shouts, and cheers, and the pigeons fleer away in frightened circles to the sculptured porticoes of the Basilica. The crowd bursts into a sweeping song. A great patriotic chorus. It echoes from side to side of the Piazza, it runs down the colonnades of the Procuratie like a splashing tide, it dashes upon the arched portals of Saint Mark's and flicks upward in jets of broken music. Wild, shooting, rolling music; vibrant, solemn, dedicated music; throbbing music flung out of loud-pounding hearts. The Piazza holds the sound of it and lifts it up as one raises an offering before an altar. Higher—higher—the song is lifted, it engulfs the four golden horses over the centre door of the church. The horses are as brazen cymbals crashing back the great song in a cadence of struck metal, the carven capitals are fluted reeds to this mighty anthem, the architraves bandy it to and fro in revolving canons of harmony. Up, up, spires the song, and the mounting angels call it to one another in an ascending scale even to the star of fire on the topmost pinnacle which is the Christ, even into the distant sky where it curves up and over falling down to the four horizons, to the highest point of the aconite-blue sky, the sky of the Kingdom of Italy.
Garibaldi's Hymn! For war is declared and Italy has joined the Allies!
Soft night falling upon Venice. Summer night over the moon-city, the flower-city. Fiore di Mare! Garden of lights in the midst of dark waters, your star-blossoms will be quenched, the strings of your guitars will snap and slacken. Nights, you will gird on strange armour, and grow loud and strident. But now— The gilded horses shimmer above the portico of Saint Mark's! How still they are, and powerful. Pride, motion, activity set in a frozen patience.
Suddenly—Boom! A signal gun. Then immediately the shrill shriek of a steam whistle, and another, and whistles and whistles, from factories and boats, yawling, snarling, mewling, screeching, a cracked cacophony of horror.
Minutes—one—two—three—and the batteries of the Aerial-Guard Station begin to fire. Shells—red and black, white and grey—bellow, snap, and crash into the blue-black sky. A whirr—the Italian planes are rising. Their white centre lights throw a halo about them, and, tip and tip, a red light and a green, spark out to a great spread, closing together as the planes gain in altitude. Up they go, the red, white, and green circles underneath their wings and on either side of the fan-tails bright in the glow of the white centre light. Up, up, slanting in mounting circles. "Holy Mother of God! What is it?" Taubes over the city, flying at a great height, flying in a wedge like a flight of wild geese. Boom! The anti-aircraft guns are flinging up strings of luminous balls. Range 10,000 feet, try 10,500. Loud detonations, echoing far over the Lagoon. The navigation lights of the Italian planes are a faint triangle of bright dots. They climb in deliberate spirals, up and up, up and up. They seem to hang. They hover without direction. Ah, there are the Taubes, specks dotting the beam of a search-light. One of them is banking. Two Italian machines dart up over him. He spins, round—round—top-whirling, sleeping in speed, to us below he seems stationary. Pup-pup-pup-pup-pup—machine-guns, clicking like distant typewriters, firing with indescribable rapidity. The Italian planes drop signal balloons, they hang in the air like suspended sky-rockets, they float down, amber balls, steadily burning. The ground guns answer, and white buds of smoke appear in the sky. They seem to blossom out of darkness, silver roses beyond the silver shaft of the search-light. The air is broken with noise: thunder-drumming of cannon, sharp pocking of machine-guns, snap and crack of rifles. Above, the specks loop, and glide, and zig-zag. The spinning Taube nose-dives, recovers, and zums upward, topping its adversary. Another Taube swoops in over a Nieuport and wags its tail, spraying lead bullets into the Italian in a wide, wing-and-wing arc. The sky is bitten red with stinging shrapnel. Two machines charge head on, the Taube swerves and rams the right wing of the Nieuport. Flame! Flame leaping and dropping. A smear from zenith to—following it, the eye hits the shadow of a roof. Blackness. One poor devil gone, and the attacking plane is still airworthy though damaged. It wobbles out of the search-light and disappears, rocking. Two Taubes shake themselves free of the tangle, they glide down—down—all round them are ribbons of "flaming onions," they avoid them and pass on down, close over the city, unscathed, so close you can see the black crosses on their wings with a glass. Rifles crack at them from roofs. Pooh! You might as well try to stop them with pea-shooters. They curve, turn, and hang up-wind. Small shells beat about them with a report like twanged harp-strings. "Klar sum Werfen?" "Jawohl." "Gut dock, werfen." Words cannot carry down thousands of feet, but the ominous hovering is a sort of speech. People wring their hands and clutch their throats, some cover their ears. Z-z-z-z-z! That whine would pierce any covering. The bomb has passed below the roofs. Nothing. A pause. Then a report, breaking the hearing, leaving only the apprehension of a great light and no sound. They have hit us! Misericordia! They have hit Venice! One—two—four—ten bombs. People sob and pray, the water lashes the Rivas as though there were a storm. Another machine falls, shooting down in silence. It is not on fire, it merely falls. Then slowly the Taubes draw off. The search-light shifts, seeking them. The gun-fire is spaced more widely. Field-glasses fail to show even a speck. There is silence. The silence of a pulse which has stopped. But the people walk in the brightness of fire. Fire from the Rio della Tanna, from the Rio del Carmine, from the quarter of Santa Lucia. Bells peal in a fury, fire-boats hurry with forced engines along the canals. Water streams jet upon the fire; and, in the golden light, the glittering horses of Saint Mark's pace forward, silent, calm, determined in their advance, above the portal of the untouched church.
The night turns grey, and silver, and opens into a blue morning. Diamond roses sparkle on the Lagoon, but the people passing quickly through the Piazza are grim, and workmen sniff the smoky air as they fix ladders and arrange tools. Venice has tasted war. "Evviva Italia!"
City of soft colours, of amber and violet, you are turning grey-green, and grey-green are the uniforms of the troops who defend you. The Bersaglieri still wear their cocks' feathers, but they are green too, and black. Black as the guns mounted on pontoons among the Lagoons before Venice, green as the bundles of reeds camouflaging them from Austrian observation balloons. Drag up metre after metre of grey-green cloth, stretch it over the five golden domes of Saint Mark's Basilica. Hood their splendour in umbrella bags of cloth, so that not one glint shall answer the mocking shimmer of the moon. Barrows and barrows of nails for the wooden bastion of the Basilica, hods and hods of mortar and narrow bricks to cover the old mosaics of the lunettes. Cart-loads of tar and planking, and heaps, heaps, hills and mountains of sand—the Lido protecting Venice, as it has done for hundreds of years. They shovel sand, scoop sand, pour sand, into bags and bags and bags. Thousands of bags piled against the bases of columns, rising in front of carved corners, blotting out altars, throttling the open points of arches. Porphyries, malachites, and jades are squarely boarded, pulpits and fonts disappear in swaddling bands. Why? The battle front is forty miles away in Friuli, and Venice is not a fortified town. Why? Answer, Reims! Bear witness, Ypres! Do they cover Venice without reason? Nietzsche was a German, still I believe they read him in Vienna. Blood and Iron! And is there not also Blood and Stone, Blood and Bronze, Blood and Canvas? "Kultur," Venetians, in the Rio del Carmine; there is no time to lose. Take down the great ceiling pictures in the Ducal Palace and wrap them on cylinders. Build a high trestle, and fashion little go-carts which draw with string.
Hush! They are coming—the four beautiful horses. They rise in a whirl of disturbed pigeons. They float and descend. The people watch in silence as, one after another, they reach the ground. Across the tiles they step at last, each pulled in a go-cart; merry-go-round horses, detached and solitary, one foot raised, tramp over chequered stones, over chequered centuries. The merry-go-round of years has brought them full circle, for are they not returning to Rome?
For how long? Ask the guns embedded in the snow of glaciers; ask the rivers pierced from their beds, overflowing marshes and meadows, forming a new sea. Seek the answer in the faces of the Grenatieri Brigade, dying to a man, but halting the invaders. Demand it of the women and children fleeing the approach of a bitter army. Provoke the reply in the dryness of those eyes which gaze upon the wreck of Tiepolo's ceiling in the Church of the Scalzi. Yet not in Italy alone shall you find it. The ring of searching must be widened, and France, England, Japan, and America, caught within its edge. Moons and moons, and seas seamed with vessels. Needles stitching the cloth of peace to choke the cannon of war.