I realized now the necessity of those preparations to guard the treasures of Venice, priceless and irreplaceable—why the Belle Arti had been emptied, and the Colleoni trussed with an ugly wooden framework. But little at the best could be done to protect Venice herself, which lies exposed in all her fragile loveliness to the attacks of the new Vandals. The delicate palaces,—already crumbling from age,—the marvelous façade of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color, the leaning campanili, the little churches filled with noble monuments to its great ones,—all were helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling from warships. Nothing could save Venice from even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such pounding as the Germans have given Rheims, or Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile blow Venice would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning thus bereaved to her ancient bridegroom.
Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must expect. Great preparations for the defense of Venice have been made. The city might be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds,—the world of the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb,—the world as man is making it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters, to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never long absent, as may easily be realized from the great battle-pieces in the Ducal Palace. But war then was more the rough play of boisterous children than the slaughterous, purely destructive thing that modern men have made it. And when those old Venetians were not fighting, they were building greatly, beautifully, lovingly: they were making life resplendent.
That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small, sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet. These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will. That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will to destroy.
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A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the vaporetti and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal.
Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new condition of her peculiar life.
There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms. On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic. They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes.
Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua. As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely, so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady, so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge of our modern world….
That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for the cafés were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night and to Venice?
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