King had promised to meet them. The way led past one of the two Austrian
embassies in the Piazza Venezia--a danger spot throughout the agitation;
but this afternoon the crowd streamed by without swerving, intent on
better things. On the Quirinal Hill, between the royal palace and the
Consulta, where the diplomatic conferences are held, the people packed
in again. The roofs of the neighboring palaces were lined with spectators
and every window except those of the royal palace was filled with faces.
On the balcony above the palace gate some footmen were arranging a red
velvet hanging. Then the royal family stepped out from the room behind.
The King, with his little son at his side, stood bareheaded while the
crowd cheered. On his other side were the Queen and her two daughters.
King Victor, whose face was very grave, bowed repeatedly to the cheering
people, but said no word. The little prince stared out into the crowd
with serious intensity, as if he already knew that what was being done
these days might well cost him his father's throne. The people cried
again and again,--_"Viva Italia, viva il re"_; also more rarely, _"Imperio
Romano!"_ At the end the King spoke, merely,--_"Viva Italia, mi!"_
Perhaps the presence of the German and the Austrian Ambassadors,
who that very hour were at the Consulta vainly trying to arrange a
bargain, restrained the King from saying more to his people then.
Possibly he felt that the occasion was beyond any words. His face was
set and worn. The full passion of the decision had passed through him.
His people had desired war, and he had faithfully followed their will.
Yet he more than any one in that crowd must know the terrible risk, the
awful cost of this war. Those national aspirations for which his country
was to strive,--Trent and Trieste, Istraia and the Dalmatian coast, in
all a few hundred miles of territory, a few millions of people,--the
well informed were saying would cost one hundred and fifty thousand
Italian soldiers a month, to pick the locks that Austria had put along
her Alpine frontier! No wonder the King of Italy met his people after
the great decision in solemn mood.
* * * * *
The crowd melted from the Quirinal Square in every direction, content.
Some stopped to cheer in front of the Ministry of War, which these days
and nights was busy as a factory working overtime and night shifts.
People were reading the newspapers, which in default of more vivid news
contained copious extracts from the "Libro Verde." Yet the "Green Book"
was not even now completed!
The politician had spoken, the poet had said his fiery word to the
people, the piazza had hurled its will, Parliament had acted and gone
its way, the army staff was hastening north. Yet the Austrian Ambassador
and his German colleague had not taken the trains waiting for them outside
the Porta Pia with steam up. It was a mystery why they were lingering on
in a country on the verge of hostilities, where they were so obviously
not wanted any longer. Daily since Parliament had voted they had been at
the Consulta--were there now in this solemn hour of understanding between
the King and his people! Singly and together they were conferring with
Baron Sonnino and the Premier. What were they offering? We know now that
at this last moment of the eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real
gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic pertinacity and Teutonic
dullness of perception made her first real offer--the immediate cession
and occupation of the ceded territories she had set as her maximum, a
thing she had refused all along to consider, insisting that the transfer
be deferred to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." I do not know
that if she had frankly started the negotiations with this essential
concession, it would have made any real difference. I think not. Her
maximum was insufficient: it nowhere provided for that defensible
frontier, and it was but a meager satisfaction of those other aspirations
of nationality which she despised. It still left a good many Italians
outside of the national fold, and it still left Italy exposed to whatever
strong hand might gain control on the east shores of the Adriatic. At all
events, in this last moment of the eleventh hour, if the ambassadors had
been authorized to yield all that Baron Sonnino had begun by asking, it
would not have kept Italy from the war--now.
Elsewhere I have dealt with the legal and strategic questions involved
in the "Green Book." These diplomatic briefs, White or Yellow or Orange
or Green, seem more important at the moment than in perspective. They
are all we observers have of definite reason to think upon. But nations
do not go to war for the reasons assigned in them--nothing is clearer
than that. Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case, they are
but the intellectual counters that men use to mask their passions, their
instincts, their faiths. According to the briefs both sides should win
and neither. And the blanks between the lines of these diplomatic briefs
are often more significant than the printed words.
While Baron Macchio and Prince von Bülow, the Ballplatz and
Friedrichstrasse, Baron Sonnino and his colleagues were making the
substance of the "Green Book," the people of Italy were deciding the
momentous question on their own grounds. The spirit of all Italy was
roused. Italian patriotism gave the answer.
* * * * *
"_Viva Italia!_" the boy conscript shouted, leaning far out of the
car window in a last look at the familiar fields and roof of his
native village. "_Viva Italia!_" the King of Italy cried, and his
people responded with a mighty shout,--"_Viva Italia!_" What do they
mean? In the simplest, the most primitive sense they mean literally
the earth, the trees, the homes they have always known--the physical
body of the mother country. And this primal love of the earth that
has borne you and your ancestors seems to me infinitely stronger,
more passionate with the European than with the American. We roam:
our frontiers are still horizons.... But even for the simple peasant
lad, joining the colors to fight for his country, patriotism is
something more complex than love of native soil. It is love of life
as he has known it, its tongue, its customs, its aspects. It is love
of the religion he has known, of the black or brown or yellow-haired
mother he knows--of the women of his race, of the men of his race,
and their kind.
Deeper yet, scarce conscious to the simple instinctive man, patriotism
is belief in the tradition that has made you what you are, in the ideal
that your ancestors have seeded in you of what life should be. Therefore,
patriotism is the better part of man, his ideal of life woven in with
his tissue. Men have always fought for these things,--for their own
earth, for their own kind, for their own ideal,--and they will continue
to give their blood for them as long as they are men, until wrong and
unreason and aggression are effaced from the earth. The pale concept
of internationalism, whether a class interest of the worker or an
intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot maintain itself before
the passion of patriotism, as this year of fierce war has proved beyond
discussion.
Italian patriotism, which in the last analysis Italy evinced in
making war against Austria, was composed of all three elements. Italian
patriotism is loyalty to the Italian tradition, hence to the Latin ideal
which is fighting a death battle with the Teutonic tradition and ideal.
Teutonism--militaristic, efficient, materialistic, unimaginative,
unindividual--has challenged openly the world. Italy responded nobly
to that challenge.
VI
_The Eve of the War_
Rome became still, so still as to be oppressive. Her heart was
elsewhere,--in the north whither the King was about to go. Rome, like
all the war capitals, having played her part must relapse more and more
into a state of waiting and watching, stirred occasionally by rumors and
rejoicings. The streets were empty, for all men of military age had gone
and others had returned to their normal occupations. Officers hurried
toward the station in cabs with their boxes piled before them. And the
sound of marching troops also on the way to the station did not cease at
once.
Saturday, the 22d of May, I took the night express for Venice. The
train of first- and second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled
with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north
in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons
in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as
secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless
task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to
the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking
needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and
so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military
zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would
the declaration come? In another week? I settled myself comfortably
in my corner opposite a stout captain who rolled himself in his gray
cloak and went to sleep. Other officers wandered restlessly to and fro
in the corridor outside, discussing the coming war. It was a heavenly
summer night. The Umbrian Hills swam before us in the clear moonlight
as the train passed north over the familiar, beautiful route. If
Germany should strike from behind at Milan, exposing the north of
Italy? One shuddered. After Belgium Germany was capable of any attack,
and Germany was expected then to go with her ally.
One thing was evident over and above the beauty of the moonlit country
through which we were rushing at a good pace, and that was the remarkable
improvement in Italian railroading since my last visit to Italy a dozen
years before. This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked roadbed,
which accounted in part for the rapidity and ease of the troop movements
these last months. The ordinary passenger traffic had scarcely been
interrupted even now on the eve of war. The terrors of the mobilization
period, thanks to Italy's efficient preparation, were unfounded. It spoke
well for Italy at war. It was a sign of her economic development, her
modernization. Even Germany had not gone into the business of war more
methodically, more efficiently. Italy, to be sure, had nine months for
her preparation, but to one who remembered the country during the
Abyssinian expedition, time alone would not explain the improvement.
The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna were under military
control, the quays patrolled, the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed
with soldiers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in the straw
of the cattle cars on the sidings, also long trains of artillery and
supplies. Shortly after daylight the guards pulled down our shutters
and warned us against looking out of the windows for the remainder of
the journey. A childish precaution, it seemed, which the officers
constantly disregarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields of the
flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men in civilian black leaned
over and firmly pulled down the shade. Italy was taking her war
seriously.
At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going north to Udine
and--beyond. The almost empty train rolled into the Venetian station
only an hour late. The quay outside the station was strangely silent,
with none of that noisy crew of boatmen trying to capture arriving
_forestieri._ They had gone to the war. One old man, the figure of
Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor of the gay tribe, took me
aboard and ferried me through the network of silent canals toward the
piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the waterways, the windows of the
palaces were tightly shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting.
"The Austrians," Charon laconically informed me. It would seem that
Venice had been almost an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was
left at her flight. But within the little squares and along the winding
stony lanes between the ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens
and soldiers--and very much herself for the first time in many centuries.
The famous piazza recalled the processional pictures of Guardi. Only the
companies of soldiers that marched through it on their way to the station
were not gorgeously robed: they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on
their backs. The bronze horses were being lowered from St. Mark's, one
of them poised in midair with his ramping legs in a sling. Inside the
church a heavy wooden truss had been put in place to strengthen the arch
of gleaming mosaics. There was a tall hoarding of fresh boards along the
water side of the Ducal Palace, and the masons were fast filling in the
arches with brick supports. Venice was putting herself in readiness for
the enemy. Even the golden angel on the new Campanile had been shrouded
in black in order that she might not attract a winged monster by her
gleam. From many a palace roof aerial guns were pointed to the sky, and
squads of soldiers patrolled the platforms that had been hastily built
to hold them.
Out at San Niccolo da Lido, where I supped at a little _osteria_
beneath the trees, a number of gray torpedo boats rushed to and fro
in the harbor entrance, restless as hunting dogs straining at the
leash. That night Venice was dark, so black that one stumbled from
wall to wall along the narrow lanes in the search for his own doorway.
War was close at hand: the menace of it, a few miles, a few hours
only away, across the blue Adriatic, at Pola. In order to understand
the significance of frontiers an American should be in Venice on the
eve of war.
* * * * *
Some hours later I awoke startled from a heavy sleep, the
reverberation of a dream ringing in my ears. It was not yet dawn.
In the gray-blue light outside the birds were wheeling in frightened
circles above the garden below my balcony. Mingled in my dreams with
the disturbing noise was the song of a nightingale--and then there came
another dull, thunderous explosion, followed immediately by the long
whine and shriek of sirens at the arsenal, also the crackle of machine
guns from all sides. Now I realized what it meant. It was war. The
Austrians had taken this way to acknowledge Italy's defiance. The enemy
had threatened to destroy Venice, and this was their first attempt. Above
the sputter of the machine guns and the occasional explosions of shrapnel
could be distinguished the buzz of an aeroplane that moment by moment
approached nearer. Soon the machine itself became visible, flying oddly
enough from the land direction, not from the Adriatic. It flew high and
directly, across Venice, aiming apparently for the arsenal, the Lido,
the open sea.
It was an unreality, that little winged object aloft like a large
aerial beetle buzzing busily through the still gray morning sky, heading
straight with human intelligence in a set line, bent on destruction. The
bombs could not be seen as they fell, of course, but while I gazed into
the heavens another thunderous explosion came from near by, which I took
to be the aviator's bomb, distinguished by the sharpness of its explosion
from the anti-aircraft bombardment. Other guns along the route of the
enemy took up the attack, then gradually all became silent once more.
Only the cries of the frightened birds circling above the garden and the
voices of the awakened inhabitants could be heard. From every window and
balcony half-dressed people watched the flight of the monoplane until it
had disappeared in the vague dawn beyond St. Mark's.
In another half-hour the sirens shrieked again and the machine gun
on the roof of the Papadopoli Palace just below on the Grand Canal
began to sputter. This time every one knew what it meant and there
was a large gathering on the balconies and in the little squares to
witness the arrival of the hostile aeroplane. It was another monoplane
coming from the same land direction, flying much lower than the first
one, so low that its hooded aviator could be distinguished and the
bands of color across the belly of the car. It skirted the city toward
the Adriatic more cautiously. Later it was rumored that the second
aeroplane had been brought down in the lagoons and its men captured.
Thereafter no one tried to sleep: the little Venetian bridges and
passages were filled with talking people, and rumors of the damage
done began to come in. Eleven bombs in all were dropped on this first
attack, killing nobody and doing no serious harm, except possibly at
the arsenal where one fell. I was at the local police station when
one of the unexploded bombs was brought in. It was of the incendiary
type containing petroleum. Also there had been picked up somewhere in
the canals the half of a Munich newspaper, which seemed to indicate,
although there was nothing of special significance in the sheet, that
the monoplane was German rather than Austrian. Yet Germany had not yet
declared war on Italy. But was it not the German Kaiser who had threatened
to destroy Italy's art treasures? Were not the German armies in Flanders
and France making war against defenceless, unmilitary monuments?
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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?
* * * * *
The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light.
But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds,
there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again
bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like
flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic
aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic
without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the
poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust.