The Nitti government, with its continuous note of pessimism, was doing no better than to describe our situation as near to bankruptcy, economic as well as political! Nitti himself, his newspapers and his acolytes, tried to make the Italian people believe that the Versailles Treaty was for us the best result obtainable. A sense of humiliation had crawled over our whole peninsula, but many there were who did not want to resign themselves to accept the tragic facts. No one knows better than I that many meditated, in sullen silence, most desperate actions.
The government was watching the turn of the psychological tide, while in the practical field it did not know what to do except to prepare and revise the mechanism of an election law by a vicious proportional system. In the field of destruction it reached an unbelievable decision to demobilize the aviation camps, and to cap the climax, in August, 1919, the report of the Commission of Inquiry on the painful episode of Caporetto was published.
I thought to myself, “This is fat on the fire!” The Avanti, a socialist newspaper that for the time being was published in three editions—one at Turin, one at Rome and one at Milan—had started a ferocious campaign against the army. On account of a strike of typographers, the Avanti was the only newspaper published in Rome for two months! During street demonstrations, officers, merely because they were in uniform, were insulted and assaulted. Charity toward the dignity of the nation prevents my presentation of episodes that now make the worst blackguards blush. The few Fascist! that had accomplished an act of faith in March, 1919, now met in all their work enormous difficulties. They were isolated, attacked, spied upon, sometimes by the subversives, sometimes by the government.
Every day in the Popolo d’Italia I wrote about the painful bath of fire of the combattenti, about the inflamed pride of the volunteers, about the necessity of concord, about the sordid hostility of the government that did not feel the beauty and the greatness of the sense of patriotic heroism. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet, who lived in Rome, wrote that his approbation “of my good shots was trembling with admiration.”
Victory was losing her laurel leaves every day in spite of all. The national parliament was discussing and approving the new election laws. Disorders and blackmailing of the government were on the daily calendar. The debates had a character of pettiness and gossip and the flavor of a base world that knew nothing of war, virtue or heroism.
“Elections! Elections! Elections!” thought I. “These constitute the only subject that is able to rise to its feet in the Italian parliament!”
Incidents had taken place at Fiume between Italians and French sailors, and the population of that city did not hide its growing hostility toward the Allies. The latter therefore planned to have the city garrisoned by a mixed corps of their troops. So Fiume, a city purely of virile Italian stamp, had a mosaic of troops. It was the summit of inefficiency and, what is more, of stupidity.
D’Annunzio, who was trembling in his solitude, told me that he contemplated with grim brooding the taking of Fiume by force. There was no other way of salvation. Everything seemed to be lost. There were only a handful of men with the poet. But they were the most trustworthy elements of our army. They were old volunteers. They were Fascists who felt once again in the incandescent atmosphere of the streets of Rome and other cities the poetry of the war and of the victory. They started, armed, from Ronchi.
The occupation of Fiume, at the moment when the English sailors were getting ready to evacuate it, was rapid and startling. The government, as soon as it knew the truth, wanted to rush to offset the raid. It meditated a blockade, it sent thunder against the rebels. But D’Annunzio and his legionaries, having prepared their action in silence, now threw down a gauntlet of audacious challenge to the Nittian triflings.
Gabriele d’Annunzio, before starting from Ronchi, wrote me the following letter: