CHAPTER V
ASHES AND EMBERS
THE flame of war flickered and went out. But the years 1919 and 1920 that immediately followed the end of the war seemed to me the darkest and most painful periods of Italian life. Dark thunderclouds hung above our unity. The progress of Italy’s unification was threatened. I watched the gathering storm.
Already disquieting events had menaced our national life. They were due to political happenings, even more than to an economic crisis. I point to the movement of the Sicilian Gasei in 1894 and the bloody demonstration in Milan in 1898. But these manifestations of rebellion were localized. Not one of them bore in it the virile germs of dissolution or of separatism. But I assert that the episodes of 1919 and 1920 had in them bacilli which if not treated heroically are deadly for the life of a civilized nation.
Everything was discussed again. We Italians opened the box of political problems and took apart the social clockwork. We pawed over everything from the crown to parliament, from the army to our colonies, from capitalistic property to the communistic soviet proposal for the federation of the regions of Italy, from schools to the papacy. The lovely structure of concord and harmony that we combatants and the wounded had dreamed that we would build after the luminous victory of October, 1918, was falling to pieces. The leaves were falling from our tree of idealism.
I felt that we were left without any cohesive force, any suggestive heroism, any remembrance, any political philosophy, sufficient to overcome and stop the factors of dissolution. I sensed the chills and heats of decay and destruction.
Already in January, 1919, the Socialists, slightly checked during the war, began, the moment the ink was drying on the armistice, their work of rebellion and blackmail. From Milan the socialistic municipality sent a special mission of help to the so-called brothers in Vienna. Sickly internationalism put forth its buds in this morbid springtime. At Triest the socialist Pittoni played an important part in the reorganization of the delivered city. In many Italian cities poor children of the old enemy Austrian and Hapsburg capital were asked to take precedence. It was a provoking sentimentality. A desire was already clear in the minds of subversives and of Liberal-Giolittians; it was to strike out of our memories the sense and feeling of our victory.
I knew those who whipped up our degeneration. They were German and Austrian spies, Russian agitators, mysterious subventions. In a few months they had led the Italian people into a state of marasmus. The economic crisis existing in every corner of the world could not be expected to spare Italy. The soldiers, like myself, returning from the war, rushed to their families. Who can describe our feelings? Such an imposing phenomenon as the demobilization of millions of men took place in the dark, without noise, in an atmosphere of throwing discipline to the winds. There were, for us, the troubles of winter and the difficulties of finding new garments and adjustments for peace.
We suffered the humiliation of seeing the banners of our glorious regiments returned to their homes without being saluted, without that warm cheer of sympathy owed to those who return from victorious war. Now it again appeared to me and to my friends as if there was in everybody an instinct to finish the game of the war, not with the idea of real victory but with content that we had lost as little as possible. Ears and spirits were ready to listen to words of peace, of humanity, of brotherhood between the nations. At night before sleep came I used to meditate and realize that we had no dam to stop this general decay of faith, this renunciation of the interests and destiny of a victorious nation. The sense of destruction penetrated very quickly and deeply the spirit of all classes. Certainly the central government was no dike to prevent the flood of weakness.
Politicians and philosophers, profiteers and losers—for at least many had lost their illusions—sharks trying to save themselves; promoters of the war trying to be pardoned; demagogues seeking popularity; spies and instigators of trouble waiting for the price of their treason; agents paid by foreign money in a few months threw the nation into an awful spiritual crisis. I saw before me with awe the gathering dusk of our end as a nation and a people.
With my heart in tumult and with a deep sense of bitterness corroding my soul, I could smell the danger. Some audacious men were with me—not many. My action was at first tied to the urgent duty to fight against one important and dark treason. Certain Italians, blinded and having lost their memories, were led on by some complicity and selfish desires among the Allies. These Italians were actually setting themselves against the mother country. Dalmatia, Italian in its origin, ardent as a saint in its faith, had been recognized to be ours by the pact of London; Dalmatia had waited for the victorious war with years of passion, and holding in its bosom still the remains of Venice and of Rome, was now lopped off from our unity. The politics of renunciation, helped by foreigners, galloped forward. Wilson was the distiller or supporter of theoretical formulas. He could not comprehend Italian life or history. By his unconscious aid this treason to us was nourished. Fiume, the sacrificed town, whose people called desperately for Italy in its manifestations in the public squares, who sent pleading missions to our military chiefs, was occupied by corps of international troops. We were about to lose another war trophy—the Austrian navy. Sesana, twenty kilometers from Triest, was discussed as a possible frontier!