A scrap of paper

by Emile Joseph Dillon

In France, and to a lesser extent in Great Britain, much—too much, to my thinking—has been written about the strong motives which appeal to King Victor Emanuel’s Government to abandon its neutrality and throw in its lot with the Entente Powers. It was a deplorable blunder, we are told, on the part of the short-sighted statesmen of the Consulta to have ever entered into partnership with the military States of Europe. Worse than this, it was an act of the blackest ingratitude towards France, and in a lesser degree towards Russia. But the belligerents of the Entente are generous, and Italy, if she repents and makes amends by joining hands with France and Great Britain before it is too late, will be magnanimously forgiven and lavishly rewarded. Unredeemed Italy—Italia irredenta—now under the Austrian yoke, will be presented to her at the close of hostilities. She may also take possession of Valona and supreme command of the Adriatic. But these rewards are for timely action. If she waits too long she will have waited in vain.

Exhortations of this kind are to be deprecated as mischievous. They are likely—if they produce any effect at all—to damage the cause which they are meant to further. Italy must be allowed to understand her own vital and secondary interests at least as well as the amateur diplomatists who so generously undertake to ascertain and promote them, and all of whom have an axe of their own to grind. In the eyes of the world, though not in those of her ex-allies, Germany and Austria, she has completely vindicated her right to hold aloof from her allies in a war of pure aggression, waged for the hegemony of the Teutonic race. But to pass from neutrality to belligerency, to treat the allies of yesterday as the enemies of to-day, without transition and without adequate provocation, would be in accordance neither with the precepts of ethics nor the promptings of statesmanship.

The reproach hurled at Italy for her long co-partnership with Austria and Germany appears to me to be unmerited. It was neither a foolish nor an ungrateful move. On the contrary, I feel, and have always felt, convinced that it was the act of an able statesman whose main merit in the matter was to discern its necessity and to turn that necessity into a work of apparent predilection. As a member of the Triple Alliance, Italy discharged a twofold function, national and international. She avoided a war against Austria-Hungary which, whatever the military and naval upshot, would have secured for her no advantages, political or territorial, and would have exhausted her resources financial and military. And in this way, while directly pursuing her own interests, she indirectly furthered those of all Europe. Even under the favourable conditions realized by her membership of the Alliance, it was no easy task to repress popular feeling against Austria. At one time, indeed, when Count Aehrenthal was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, an Austro-Italian war was on the point of breaking out. The late Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his protégé, Baron Conrad von Hoetzendorff, who was then, and is now, Chief of the General Staff, were strongly in favour of severing the links that bound the Habsburg Monarchy to Italy and delivering an ultimatum to the Consulta. Between their quarrel and overt war stood a solitary individual, Count Aehrenthal, who had the courage of his opinion and refused to countenance the projected breach. His resignation or a pacific settlement were the alternatives which he laid before his sovereign, and this perspective, together with his lucid exposé of the sinister results of the proposed plunge, enlisted the aged Emperor on his side, and Baron Conrad von Hoetzendorff was gently removed—for a time—from the General Staff and appointed to a different post of trust.

Another function discharged by Italy while she retained her membership of the Alliance was purely international. She continued steadfastly to cultivate cordial relations with Great Britain, turning a deaf ear to the admonitions, exhortations, and blandishments of Berlin. No competent student of international politics who has watched the growth of Italy ever since she entered the Alliance, and has had the means of acquainting himself with the covert threats, overt seductions, and finely spun intrigues by which her fidelity to Great Britain was tested, will refuse to her statesmen the palm of European diplomacy or to her Government a sincere tribute for her steadfast loyalty to her British friends. Her policy during this chequered period has been a masterpiece of political wisdom and diplomatic deftness. In the Triple Alliance her influence was, and was intended to be, of a moderating character. It was thus that it was regarded by her statesmen and employed by her diplomatists. Whenever a quarrel between one of her own allies and one of ours grew acute, Italy’s endeavour was to compose it. She was at least as much averse to war as we were ourselves, and she cheerfully made heavy sacrifices to avert it. So long, therefore, as she was treated as a fully qualified member of the Alliance, we could feel assured that European peace had a powerful intercessor among its most dangerous enemies.

That is why, before the war, I always shared the view of the statesmen of the Consulta that Italy should do nothing calculated to sever her connection with Austria and Germany. I went further than this, and maintained that it was to our interest to support her diplomatically in the Near East and elsewhere, on the ground that the stronger she became the greater would her influence for peace grow, and the more valuable the services she could and would confer upon us without impairing her own interests.[14]

But by means of poisonous insinuations diplomatic and journalistic, the Wilhelmstrasse strove hard to sow suspicion and breed dissension between her and her western friends. It was, for instance, asserted by Germany that when last the Triple Alliance was prematurely renewed, the terms of the treaty had been extended, and an agreement respecting the sea-power of the allies in the Mediterranean had been concluded by all three. This was a falsehood concocted presumably for the purpose of embroiling France, Russia, and Great Britain with Italy. Its effect upon Russia was certainly mischievous. And having ascertained from two of the allies that it was an invention, I publicly stigmatized it as such, and affirmed that the treaty had been signed without modification. And events have proved the accuracy of my information.

Another and much more insidious untruth, emanating from the same source and fabricated for a like purpose, turned upon the withdrawal of our warships from the Mediterranean, where our interests were confided to the care of the French navy. This disposition was, of course, taken with a view to the general sea-defences of Great Britain and France in case of an emergency such as that which has since had to be faced. It was certainly not directed against Italy, with whom our Government neither had nor expected to have any grounds for a quarrel. None the less, it supplied too attractive an occasion to be lost by the ever-ready Prussian, who made haste to use it in order to generate mistrust between Italy and her friends of the Entente. Sundry Italian diplomatists were initiated, in seemingly casual ways, into the “true meaning” of that “insidious” move. It was not directed against Germany and Austria, they were assured, but had Italy, and Italy alone, for its object. France, jealous of the growing power and prestige of Italy in the Midland Sea, had sought and obtained Great Britain’s assent to the concentration of France’s warships there. This innovation constituted, and was meant to constitute, a warning to Italy to slacken her speed in the Midland Sea. And I was requested to make private representations to our Foreign Office, accompanied by a request that this unfriendly measure should be discontinued. My assurances that it contained neither a threat nor a warning to Italy were but wasted breath. Information of a “trustworthy” character had been obtained—it was not volunteered, and could not, therefore, be suspected—that the initiative had been taken by France, whose dominant motive was jealousy of Italy.

To my mind this misstatement, which derived the poison of its sting from the truly artful way in which it was conveyed through “a disinterested source,” was one of the most mischievous of Prussian wiles. Italy was led to believe that the real design of the Republic was the establishment of French hegemony in the Mediterranean; that M. Poincaré, whose regrettable speech about the French steamers Carthage and Manuba, which had been detained by Italy during the Lybian campaign, stung Italians to the quick, was the promoter of the scheme, and that the shelving of M. Pichon, who was a friend of Italy’s, was its corollary.

Italy was made to feel that France’s attitude towards her was systematically semi-hostile. No one act, excepting the concentration of the French fleet in the Mediterranean, was deemed radically serious, but the endless sequence of pin pricks was construed as evidence of a disposition which was as unfriendly as seemed compatible with neighbourly relations. Among these things, the protection of Italian religious communities in the East was taken by the Germans as the text for repeated diatribes against France for her unfriendly conduct towards her Latin sister. Atheistic France, it was sneeringly remarked, insists on protecting in the East the very communities which she has driven from her own territories in Europe, not because of the love she bears them, but by reason of her jealousy and hatred of Italy.

I remember one dispute of the kind which arose about the house of an Italian religious congregation in Tripoli of Syria. All the members save one being Italians, and having demanded the protection of their own Government, were entitled to have it, in virtue of a convention on the subject between France and Italy a few years before. The French Ambassador in Rome was anxious to have the question put off indefinitely, although at bottom there was no question at all, seeing that the case had been provided for. During the negociations and discussions that needlessly went on for fully two years, Germany lost no opportunity to rub France’s unfriendliness into Italy’s memory, and to prove that Italy’s one natural ally is Austria-Hungary.