Destiny and Will. Very well! I admit that there has been fatality, I admit this compulsion, which was the result of a number of causes which it is useless to dwell upon, but I add that at a certain moment we imprinted the mark of our will upon this concatenation of events, and to-day, after three years, we are not penitent of what we have done. We leave this weak, spiritual attitude to those who seek applause, seats in Parliament, and personal satisfaction; those who thoroughly despise, as I do, all parliamenteering and demagogism, are far away from all this.
What Machiavelli says in chapter vi. of the Principe, about those who, by their own inherent qualities, attained the position of princes, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, can be applied not only to the individual, but to the nation. “And examining,” says the Florentine Secretary, “their lives and actions, one does not see that they had other fortune than that of the opportunity which gave them the material and enabled them to shape it as seemed best to them; and without that opportunity the virtue of their souls would have been lost, and without that virtue the opportunity would have come in vain.”
As to the Italian people in that glorious May, it can be said that without the opportunity of the war the virtue of our people would have been lost; but without this virtue the opportunity of the war would have come in vain.
I have found an echo of the thought of Machiavelli in the book of Maeterlinck, the great Belgian poet, the poet who, perhaps, more than any of his contemporaries, has given expression to the most delicate and complex movements of the human soul. Maeterlinck in his book Wisdom and Destiny admits the existence of a mechanical, external fate, but says that a human being can react against it. “An event in itself,” he says in chapter viii. of this book, “is pure water which the fountain pours out over us, and which has not generally in itself either taste, colour or perfume. It becomes beautiful or sad, sweet or bitter, life-giving or mortal, according to the soul which receives it. Thousands of adventures, all of which seem to contain the seeds of heroism, continually happen to those who surround us, whilst no heroism arises when the adventure is over. But Christ met a group of children in his path, an adulteress, a Samaritan, and three times in succession humanity rose to divine heights.” The war has been as a jet of pure water for our nation. It has been deadly for Spain, for instance, but life-giving to us. We desired it. We chose. Before making our choice we argued and struggled, and the struggle sometimes assumed the aspect of violence; but we won, and now we are proud of those days, and are glad to think that the memory of the crowds which filled the streets and squares of our cities disturbs those who were defeated and those who even to-day, by the most insidious means, try to extinguish the sacred flame and the faith of our people. They accepted this war as one accepts a heavy burden, and their leader, followed by the curses of the people, withdrew, like an old feudal lord, to his remote native country, and we can only wish that he will always remain there.
Enough of Old Age! But, as I am never tired of repeating, we young men made one fatal mistake then, which we have paid for bitterly; we entrusted this ardent youth of ours to the most grievous old age. When I say old age, I do not establish merely a chronological fact. I think some people are born old, that there are those at twenty who are in a mental and physical decline, whereas some men—the marvellous Tiger of France, for instance—at seventy have all the vibration and fire of virile youth. I speak of the old men who are old men, who are behind the times, who are encumbrances. They neither understood nor realised the fundamental truths underlying the war.
Besides the people, the meaning of this war in its historical aspect and development has been perceived by two classes of men: the poets and the industrial world. By the poets, because with their extreme sensitiveness they grasp truths which remain half veiled to the ordinary person; and by the industrial world, because it understands that this war is a war of machines. Between the two let us also put the journalists, who have enough of the poet in them not to belong to the industrial world, and are enough of the industrial world not to be poets. And the journalists have often forestalled the Government. I speak of the great journalists who keep their ears open, on the alert to catch vibrations from the outside world. The journalist has sometimes foreseen what those responsible, alas! have recognised too late.
Quality versus Quantity. This war has so far been one of quantity. Now, it is realised that the masses do not beat the masses, an army does not vanquish an army, quantity does not overcome quantity. The problem must be faced from another point of view—that of quality. This war, which began by being tremendously democratic, is now tending to become aristocratic. Soldiers are becoming warriors. A selection is being made from the armed mass. The struggle, now carried on almost exclusively in the air, has lost the characteristics it had in 1914.
The first novelist who foresaw the problems of the war of quality was Wells. Read his book The War on Three Fronts. It is in this book that he advised the exploitation of the “quality” of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. Because, whereas the Germans only work in close formation, only give good results through the automatism of the masses, the Latin feels the joy of personal audacity, the fascination of risk, and has the taste for adventure; which taste, says Wells, is limited in Germany to the descendants of the feudal nobility, while with us it is to be found also among the people.
Another truth which those responsible realised late was that, in order to win the armies, the people must be won, that is to say, that the armies must be taken in the rear. This would be difficult where Germany was concerned, as she is ethnically, politically and morally compact. But we are face to face with an enemy against whom we could have acted in this way from the very first. We ought to have penetrated the mosaic of the Austrian State.
A Great People. Among the peoples who cannot be taken in the rear by surprise, is ours. My praise is sincere. The people in the trenches are great, and those who have not fought are great. For deficiency you must look among those old men of whom I spoke just now.