The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit of the Italian Ambassador at Paris to Rome. Why had he taken that long journey home for such a brief visit, consumed in conferences with the ministers? And Prince von Bülow had rallied to his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger. Rome was seething with rumor.

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The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the Government. They were honest,—that everybody admitted,—and they were experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,—and concealed the bills. But Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least he was avowedly neutralista, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically, with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige. A clever American, long resident in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the political powers to make his words significant, told me,—"The country does not know what it wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he comes we shall know whether there will be war!" That was May 9—a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in Rome the same week—and we knew, but not as the political prophet thought….

Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thunder to come out of this stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian Granatieri, ordinarily stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile. I read the word "Socilismo" scrawled in chalk over the walls and half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the fields.

Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war. "We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national doubt of Calabria, Sicily,—the weaker, less certain members of the family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi, which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government. No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the quid pro quo they would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security without jeopardizing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom of patriots if ever in her history.

The Salandra Government kept admirable order during these dangerous days, suppressing the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That was the wise way, until they knew themselves which road to take and had prepared the public mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occupied somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of authority against popular ebullitions is always a marvel to the American. To the European mind government means power, and power is exercised practically, concretely, not by writs of courts and sheriffs, but by armed troops. The Salandra Government had the power, and apparently did not mean to have its hand forced by the populace….

The young officer at Genzano had no doubt that war was coming, nor had the handsome boy whom we at last ran to ground in an old Franciscan convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise" his regiment had received "to go first." His mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as he spoke, but like a Latin mother she made no protest. If his country needed him, if war had to be…. On our way back to Rome across the Campagna we saw a huge silver fish swimming lazily in the misty blue sky—one of Italy's new dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers everywhere in their new gray linen clothes—tanned, boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows, scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy. The night was broken by the sound of marching feet, for troop movements were usually made at night. The soldiers were going north by the trainload. Each day one saw more of them in the streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio and Prince von Bülow were as busy as ever at the Consulta on the Quirinal Hill, and rumor said that at last they were offering real "compensations."

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The shops of Rome, as those of every city and town in Europe, were hung with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the "Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under German persuasion. The discrepancy between the two maps was obvious and vast. On the bulletin boards there were many news items emanating from the "unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste, chronicling riots and the severely repressive measures taken by the Austrian masters. The little piazza in front of the newspaper office was thronged from morning to night, and the old woman in the kiosk beside the door did a large business in maps.

And yet this aspect of the Italian situation seems to me to have been much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers—no great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed Italians! No; it was rather a high point of propaganda—as we should say commercially, a good talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism, which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naïveté, go to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent and Trieste?