WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY
As the autumn deepened we found our Red Cross work ending. This
work had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper offices
in Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the big
war. For days and days we had been riding in motor cars along
the line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances had
hauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches of
the front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had
snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the
first aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--most
of which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon or
the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how
to fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope,
and how to duck when a shell comes in. Also we had stood god-father
to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and
was for ever being "continued in our next." And it was all--riding
along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along
trenches, and ducking from the shells--all vastly diverting. We
had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of
felicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almost
finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal
and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came
to Paris and tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temptation;
"beyond the Alps lies Italy," as a copy book sentence has lure in
it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught
us; and we started.
So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in
Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn
day, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green
hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The two
Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting
outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from
Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.
As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about
the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have
to vote. So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinois
congressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us,
in uniforms ourselves, after a fashion, but looking conspicuously
civilian, and incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea-green
hunting outfit looked more soldierly than we. For although
we wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissioned
officers--commissioned as Red Cross Colonels--and although we wore
Parisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that they
humped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at the
shoulders. A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform
without looking like a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling the
tunics our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and enviously at the
slim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their god-like
effects. For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and a
fat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! So we paced the
platform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiers
of France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked by
us, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were. For the
American Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those latitudes
as it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swinging
through Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies,
a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a million
dollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of Northern
Italy choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!
Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italian
cities, from Venice to Naples. Under that flag the American Red
Cross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian
relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Cross
uniform which made the soldiers' eyes bug out there at the border
in the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy. But we
three unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strange
country.
[Illustration: A fat man can't wear the modern American Army uniform
without looking like a sack of meal]
Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa. And coming direct
from Paris, where men out of uniform were few, the thing that
opened our mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw. There
were worlds and worlds of men in Genoa; men in civilian clothes.
The streets were black with men. Straw hats, two piece suits, gay
neck-ties--things which were as remote from France as from Mars,
figures that recalled the ancient days of one's youth, before the
war; days in New York, for instance, where men in straw hats and
white crash were common. These things we saw with amazement in
Genoa! And then our eyes caught the flashy bands on their arms--bands
that indicated that these men are in the industrial reserves, not
drafted because they are doing industrial war work. But for all of
these industrial reservists there was an overplus of men in Genoa.
It is a seaport and there were "the market girls and fishermen, the
shepherds and the sailors, too," a crowd gathered from the world's
ends, and we sat under the deep arches before a gay cafe, listened to
New York musical hits from the summer's roof gardens, and watched
the show. In that day--only three weeks before the German invasion--the
war was a long way from Genoa. At the next table to us an American
sea-faring man was telling an English naval officer about the
adventures of three sailing ships which had bested two submarines
three days before in the Mediterranean; some Moroccan sailors were
flirting across two tables with some pretty Piedmontese girls,
and inside the cafe, the harp, the flute and the violin were doing
what they could to make all our hearts beat young! A picture show
across the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and a
vaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from
the spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmic
swish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music. Here
and there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning;
but uniforms and mourners were uncommon. The war was a tale that
is told.
But the next day in Rome the war moved into our vision again. But
even if Rome was more visibly martial than Genoa, still it was not
Paris. One could see gay colours upon women in Rome; one might see
straw hats upon the men, and in the stores and shops the war did
not fill every window as it filled the shop windows of Paris. Rome
was taking the war seriously, of course, but the war was not the
tragedy to Rome before the invasion that it was to France.
Yet there was to me a change in Rome--from the Rome one knew who
had been there eight years before--a change stranger and deeper
than the change one felt in coming from Rome to Paris. This new
Rome was a cleaner Rome, a more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome.
Something had been happening to the people. They wore better
clothes, they seemed to live in cleaner tenements; they certainly
had a different squint at life from the Romans of the first decade
of this century. One heard two answers to the question that arose
in one's heart. One group said: "It is prosperity. Italy never has
seen such prosperity as she has seen during the past ten years.
There has been work for everyone, and work at good wages. So you
see the working people well-clad, well-housed, clean and contented."
Another answered the question thus: "The Socialists have done it.
We have had plenty of work in other years; but we have worked for
small wages, and have lived in squalor. We still work as we always
have worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay in
many ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguards
thrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activities
of capital. The Socialists in government have forced many reforms
in housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profits
of labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better things
rather than in fear of worse!" One may take his choice of answers;
probably the truth lies between the two. Prosperity has done something;
socialism in government has done something, and each has promoted
the other!
But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably. It has paralysed
the tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in the
world. But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted.
Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful,
eager, half-starved for every good thing in life, expatriated,
living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension,
detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world at
home, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid
concerning life's real interests--the mother and daughter who in
the old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe,
flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from
Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the
seasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that precious
pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see
Rome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done for
democracy at any rate!
And the passing of this "relic of old dacincy," the shabby genteel
of the earth from Rome--even if the passing is a temporary social
phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the
working class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class as
Kansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upper
class, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it is
elsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king is
training his son to run for president. The high caste Romans have
an Austrian pride, that "goeth before destruction." For politically
their power is sadly on the wane. They are miserably moth-eaten
compared to our own arrogant princes of Wall Street or even compared
to the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out at
the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them. One feels
vaguely that these Italian nobles are passing through a rather
mean stage of decay. For a time during the latter part of the last
century and during the first decade of this century, the Italian
noblemen tried to edge into business. They lent their names
to promotion schemes, and the schemes, upon the whole, turned out
badly, and the people learned to distrust all financial schemes
under noble patronage; so the nobility is going to work. A few
strong families remain--the present royal house of Savoy is among
the strong ones.
Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to the
King, who in the King's absence at the front with his soldiers, was
a sort of acting king on the job in Rome. The automobile took us
into the first court of the Royal Palace. Now the Royal Palace--save
for a few executive offices--has been turned into an army hospital
and we saw doctors and nurses dodging in and out of the innumerable
corridors, and smelled iodoform everywhere. A major domo, in scarlet,
who seemed in the modern disinfected smell of the place like the
last guard of mediaevalism, greeted us as we alighted from our
car; a great, powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on his
scarlet broadcloth. He showed us into a passage where the minister
waited who was to take us to the Duke. The minister led us down a
long stately gallery, out of the twentieth century into the fifteenth,
where at the end of the gallery a most remarkably caparisoned
servant stood at attention. He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable
vividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth. But we
could have passed that easily enough. The thing that held us was
his blue plush knee breeches. It didn't seem fitting that a man in
this age of work and wisdom should wear shimmering blue plush knee
breeches for everyday. He was a big fellow and puffy. And the
scarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave the place an olden
golden air. But alas! The twentieth century burst in. For he bowed
us to an elevator--a modern Chicago elevator inspected by an accident
company, guaranteeing the passengers against injuries! From the
elevator we were emptied into a nineteenth century corridor, guarded
by a twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him into
a waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown
and gold decoration--but modern enough--and walled in old tapestry.
The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless
leisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed
standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and
bases of this furniture were great--unbelievably great, rococo
gilded legs--legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheening
agony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves to
dropping to the floor in distress.
Henry nudged me as our Kansas eyes bugged out at the Byzantine
splendeur and whispered: "Bill, what this place needs is a boss
buster movement. How the Kansas legislature would wallop this
splendeur in the appropriation bill! How the Sixth District outfit
would strip the blue plush off our upholstered friend by the
elevator and send him shinning home in a barrel. Topeka," sighed
Henry, deeply impressed, "never will equal this!"
[Illustration: He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness,
a cutaway coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth]
In this room we met a soldierly young prince, in a dark blue dress
uniform, with a light blue sash across his shoulder. He shook hands
with us. And he wore gloves and didn't say, "Excuse my glove," as
we do in Kansas! But he was polite enough for the Grand Duke himself;
indeed we thought he was the Grand Duke until we saw Medill and the
minister stalking through another door, saw the minister formally
bowing and then we found that we had been moved into another room--a
rather plainly furnished office room, such as one might find in
New York or Chicago when one called on the head of a bank or of an
industrial corporation. We had left the "days of old when knights
were bold," and had come bang! into the latest moment of the twentieth
century. We were shaking hands rather cordially with a kindly-eyed,
bald-headed little man in a grey VanDyke beard, who wore a black
frock coat, rather a low-cut white vest, a black four-in-hand rather
wider than the Fifth Avenue mode, striped dark grey trousers, and
no jewelry except a light double-breasted gold watch-chain. He was
the Duke of Genoa, who to all intents and purposes is the civilian
ruler of Italy while the King is with the army. We found four chairs
grouped around a sofa, and we sat while the duke, with a diffidence
that amounted to shyness, talked with us about most unimportant
things. The interview was purely ceremonial. It had no relation
to the passports we were asking from his government to visit the
Italian front, though this request had made the visit necessary.
Several times there were pauses in the conversation--dead stops
in the talk, which court etiquette required the Duke to repair. We
didn't worry about them, for always he began to repair these gaps
in the talk rather bashfully but kindly, and always the subject
was impersonal and of indifferent interest. He made no sign that
the interview was over, but we knew, as well as though a gong had
struck, when to go. So we went, and it seemed to me that the Duke
put more real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his welcome.
It was half-past five. He had been at work since eight. And perhaps
it was fancy, but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italian
eye a determination to knock off and take a half holiday.
We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean as General Pershing's
or Major Murphy's in Paris, or President Wilson's in Washington.
Then it came to us that the king's job, after all, is a desk job.
The king who used to go around ruling with a sceptre has given
place to a gentleman in a business suit who probably rings for his
stenographer and dictates in part as follows: "Yours of even date
received and contents noted; in reply will say!" We carried away
an impression that the lot of royalty, like the policeman's lot,
"is not a happy one." Talking it all over, we decided that in the
modern world there is really any amount more fun running a newspaper
than being a king, and for the size of the town, much more chance
of getting things done. It did not fall to me because of an illness,
but a few days later it fell to Henry and Medill to see a real king
at Udine. He was living in a cottage a few miles out of town in a
quiet little grove that protected him from airplanes. Now Henry's
nearest brush to royalty was two years ago when in the New York
suffrage campaign his oratory had brought him the homage of some of
the rich and the great. Kings really weren't so much of a treat to
Medill, who had taken his fill of them in childhood when his father
was minister to England. But nevertheless they lorded it over me
when they saw me because the king wasn't on my calling list. But
they couldn't keep from me the sad fact that they had started out
to make the royal call without gloves--hoping probably to catch
the king with their bare hands--and had been turned back by the
Italian colonel who had them in charge. Henry once sang in the
cantata of "Queen Esther," and Medill insists that all the way
up to the royal cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath the
song: "Then go thou merrily, then go thou merrily, unto the king!"
and also: "Haman, Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured one
in all the king's dominions!" just to show that finical colonel
who took them back to Udine for gloves that Wichita was no stranger
to the inside politics of the court. However, gloves seemed to be
the only ceremonial frill required, and they went to the king's
business office as informally as they would go to the private room
of a soap-maker in Cincinnati. They found the king a soft-spoken
little man. Henry said he looked very much like the mayor of
Kansas City, and was equally unassuming and considerate. He asked
his guests what had become of the Progressive party, and they
pointed to themselves as the "captain and crew of the Nancy brig."
Then they talked on for a time about many things--such as would
interest the Walrus and the Carpenter. Then the accounts of the
visit changed. This is Henry's: "Well, finally after Medill began
cracking his knuckles and the king began crossing and recrossing
his legs, I saw it was time to go. I knew how the king felt. Every
busy man has to meet a lot of bores. I sit hours with bores who
flow into the Wichita Beacon office, and I began to appreciate just
how the king felt. So I cleared my throat and said: 'Well Medill,
don't you think we'd better excuse ourselves to his majesty and
go?' The king put up his hand mildly and said: 'O please!' and the
colonel in charge of the party gulped at my sympathy for the king;
but I was not to be balked, and we all rose and after shaking
hands around, the colonel led us out. And I didn't know that I had
committed social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when we
were in the corridor: 'Oh you republicans--you republicans, how you
do like to show royalty its place!'" Medill has another version.
He declares that Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as he
could, then he rose and cried: "O King! live for ever, but Medill
and I must pull our freight!" This version probably is apochryphal!
The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: "Well, how
in the dickens was I to know that a king always gives the high sign
for company to leave!"
This Italian king is a vital institution. He could be elected
president. For he is a mixer, in spite of his diffident ways. When
the army in Northern Italy was hammering away at the Austrians, the
king was with the soldiers. One gets the impression that he is with
the people pretty generally in their struggle with the privileged
classes. For he has lived peaceably with a socialist cabinet for
some time. He is wise enough to realize that if the aristocracy is
crumbling, the institution of royalty will crumble with aristocracy
if royalty makes an ally of the nobility. So the king and the
Socialists get along splendidly. Now the Socialists in Italy are
of several kinds. There are the city Socialists, who are chiefly
interested in industrial conditions--wages, old age pensions,
employment insurance, and the like; a group much like the Progressive
party in the United States of 1912. We saw the works and ways of
these Socialists in every Italian town that we visited. Either they
or the times have done wonders. And at any rate this is the first
time in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generally
reached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into the
middle classes. Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the land
question, and they have had smaller success than their industrial
brethren. We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. Our road
took us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertile
acres lying in a wide beautiful plain. We passed through half
a dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. None
of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here.
The people in these towns are peasants--and look it. They are the
peasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of the
Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Along
the dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules
tandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart's approach.
The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The
mules took their way. Carts passed and repassed each other on the
road. Autos whizzed by. Still the drivers slept. They were ragged,
frowsy, stupid looking. They all wore colour, one a crimson belt,
another a blue shirt, a third a red handkerchief about his head.
They would make better pictures than citizens, we thought. In Rome
and Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures. All
day going to Frascatti and coming home we passed these beggarly
looking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which stands proudly upon
a great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acres
stretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. Villages flashed
in the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards and
the tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye and
soothed the soul. We stood looking at it for a long time. With us
were some high officials of the Italian government.
"A wonderful landscape," said Henry to our hosts.
"In all the world there is no match for it," said Medill.
"It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops year
after year!" explained our host.
"Signor," said a friend of our host, "they tell me that this land
yields seven per cent net."
"Yes," replied our host. "I was talking to a man in the agricultural
department about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent."
"What's this land worth an acre?" This question came from me, who
has the Kansas man's seven devil lust to put a price on land.
"Well--I don't--" Our host looked at his Italian friends. They gazed,
puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another. The discussion
developed a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land.
With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price
of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of
the compass. Finally our host explained: "The truth of the matter
is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men.
Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for from
three hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy."
And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian
Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages,
the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land
and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving
vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of
a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet
losing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer,
which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the
land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden,
vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no
capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the
tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where
labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was
a disheartening problem.
Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on the
front, and there we saw another side of the shield. From Udine in
Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian army
at that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians.
Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up the
green soft mountain sides that face Italy. These roads have been
made since the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them furnish
approaches to the Alpine heights. They are hard-surfaced, low-graded,
wide highways gouged into the mountain side. Two automobiles may
pass at full speed anywhere on these roads. And all night they were
alive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front. Women help
the men mend the roads. We saw few Austrian prisoners at work on
the Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front line
trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line,
and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians--work
that old men and women cannot do. Whenever we threaded our way up
a mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled
with deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches,
and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with great
rooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain top after
mountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians. That
Gibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans.
But they had few guns in their fortress. They showed us emplacement
after emplacement without a stick of artillery in it. They had told
the French and the English of their plight, and a few artillery
companies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need. There
was no central council of the allies then. Every nation was running
its own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the four
thousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar
are German military strongholds that will have to be conquered with
our blood and iron. Probably no battle line in the world today is
more interesting than the Italian front was in the autumn of 1917.
The south face of the Alps often is green and beautiful, but generally
the northern faces of those mountains are bleak and rugged and
steep. The battle line ran a zig-zag course through the mountains,
now meeting in gulches, now scurrying away up to mesas, again
climbing to the top of the barren heights. We stood one sunny day
on a quiet sector of the Pasubio. We were with the Liguria brigade,
the 157-158th infantry. Through a peep-hole in the trench we looked
across a gulch to another mountainside and saw there the Austrian
trenches, not 200 yards away. Before them lay the ugly scar of
brown rusted barbed wire, and just below the wire, sprawled out
on the white limestone of the steep mountainside, lay fifty dead
Italian soldiers who had vainly charged into the machine guns up
that formidable slope. They had lain there for weeks. It was the
grisliest sight we had seen during our adventures.
Medill and Henry went to another lookout, leaving me with the Italian
soldiers in the trench. Their luncheon came up, a fine rich soup,
with bread cubes in it, some potatoes and vegetables. It looked
palatable and was good. There was enough, but not plenty. As we
sat in the trench waiting for Henry and Medill, one of the heroes
beside me, after thinking it all out carefully, burst forth with
this:
"I livea in Pittsburgh."
It was plain to his comrades that he had put his meaning through
to me. They clearly were impressed by his prowess. This cheered
him up. He went on to further linguistic feats.
"Is, I live-a there five year."
That also got over and his comrades realized that he was a polyglot.
Then in a joyous spirit of over-confidence, he waved the oriflamme
of speech in our faces.
"Is, my papa he live-a in Brooklyn. He keepa da butcha shop and
is maka da roast bif. Is, my papa's brodder he live-a in Brooklyn
too. He keepa da saloon and is maka da jag!" Then we shook hands
as fellow Americans.
In another hour we had wormed our way through the tunnels to the
other side of the peak, and had scrambled down the mountainside
to the general headquarters. Never since Hannibal's day were more
interesting brigade headquarters established. They were niched
into the mountain side about 4,000 feet above a gorge below. The
sleeping quarters and offices were half tunnelled into the hillside.
The diningroom was mounted on a platform overlooking the gorge below.
Across the gorge a quarter of a mile away an aerial tram ran. That
morning two airplanes--an Italian plane and an Austrian--met out
by the tram wire in a battle. It could be seen as easily from the
diningroom platform as if it had been half down the block; yet the
airmen were 4,000 feet in the air. We had luncheon at the brigade
headquarters, and it was made a gala occasion. Some one had brought in
an Austrian cow which was brigade property and we had real cream.
Otherwise it was a war dinner. We had hors d'ouvres--thin sliced
dried ham, sausages, and sardines--a delectable paste with parmesian
cheese on it, roast beef and brown potatoes, salad and broiled
chicken, and then the chef d'ouvres, the cream upon a charlotte
russe! After that came cheese and coffee. Chianti and a cider
champagne were served. The mess was proud of itself, as it should
have been. But it seems sad to think how soon that Austrian cow
went home. For within three weeks from the time we sat there, the
general had surrendered in the gulch below the air-tram wire and the
Germans had come with their big guns to fill the vacant emplacements!
We spent one night on our journey along the Italian front at Vicenza,
and there, although the place was jammed full of soldiers, we left
the war behind to stroll by moonlight over the beautiful mediaeval
town. There is a fine square there--not so broad as the square at
St. Mark's where the tourists used to feed the doves, but to me
it seemed as beautiful. For upon the square was the famous arcade
which Palladio erected around the city-hall of the place. It stood
beautiful and gloomy before us in the moonlight, one of the world's
real bits of architecture. As Americans we had a special interest
in the arcade because it was typical of the best of Palladio's
work and our own Thomas Jefferson, studying it, had reproduced
it and Americanized it in some of the buildings of the University
of Virginia, buildings that have had a distinct influence upon
American architecture! A number of Palladio's other works we saw
that night, softened and glorified by the moonlight. And we saw
also an old French house, not twenty-five feet wide, but a gem of
French architecture erected before the discovery of America. Finally
we went back and stood by the statue of Palladio and listened to the
low rumble of the guns on the front and wondered what the Germans
would do with such a lovely thing as this Vicenza if by any chance
they ever took it. That day we had looked down from a mountain-top
upon an Austrian town lying peacefully in the valley below us
directly under the Italian guns. The guns of the Austrians and the
Italians were smashing away at each other from the mountain-tops
over and across the town.
"You could pulverize that town easily enough," Henry said to the
Italian who was taking the Americans through the trenches.
"Oh, yes," he answered. "But it's a beautiful little town! Why ruin
it?" His theory was that if the Italians took it they would want
it whole and would want the loyalty and respect of the people of
the town; if they did not take it, why smash a beautiful little
town just to be smashing?
The German theory, of course, is exactly opposite to this. They
would smash the town, if they were to take it, to put fear into the
hearts of the inhabitants and command obedience; and if they knew
they could not take it they would smash it to cripple the enemy that
much! We of the Allies desire respect and loyalty that come from
reason. The Germans demand unreasoning obedience and denied that,
they destroy. One philosophy is Christian; the other Babylonian.
But the devilish strength of the German philosophy came to us
more forcibly in Italy than it came elsewhere because of certain
contrasts. They were contrasts in what might be called public
wisdom. The Germans take better care of their poor than some of
the Allies. The Germans know that poverty is a curse to a nation,
and during the past generation they have done much to alleviate
it. And in alleviating poverty they have kept their poor docile;
and they go into battle feeling that they have something to fight
for. In the allied countries too often we have let the devil take
the hindermost. As we rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan we
wondered, looking at the farms and the farmers along the road, why
those farmers should be asked to die for a country that kept them
in so low an estate. And yet they were better off than the farmers
of Southern Italy. But in socializing industry the Italian farmer
has been forgotten, and when the press came upon the Italian
front, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay down their arms,
deluded by a German spy ruse so simple that it should have fooled
no intelligent soldier. But they were not intelligent. Their
intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations,
and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy! You
cannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousand
years' sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier who
is even half awake!
As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a curious experience.
There entered our compartment at twilight one of the carabinieri!
We had been looking with admiration at the carabinieri for days.
They were well-set-up soldiers, apparently of a picked grade
of men, who wore wide cocked hats, like those worn by the British
troops in the American revolution. The cocked hats of the Italian
carabinieri are as wide as their handsome shoulders and they
make striking figures. This one who entered our compartment was
drunk--grandly, gorgeously and sociably drunk. He wanted to talk
to us. He tried Italian and we shook our heads. Then Medill tackled
him in French and he shook his head. Then Henry squared off and
gave him the native Kansas English--with appropriate gestures. But
the Italian sighed amiably and it was clear he was balked. Then
he looked up and down the outer corridor of the car, came in, shut
the door and smiled as broadly as his cocked hat.
"Sprecken sie Deutsch?" he asked, and Medill answered, "Seemlich!"
When it was apparent that two of us understood German he opened up.
He had to talk slowly, but he was willing to make any sacrifice
to get conversation going. He rambled along in a maudlin way, and
finally picked up an illustrated paper containing an account of
the Turin riots, which angered him, and then and there being, that
Italian soldier told us in German the story of what he called der
grosser rebellion! To talk German in an allied country today is
as much as one's life is worth. For a soldier to talk German is a
crime; for a soldier to tell three foreigners about a riot in his
country, which he, as a soldier behind machine guns had to suppress,
killing hundreds, was mighty near to treason. And we gasped. We
thought he might be testing us out as potential spies. So we shut
up. But he ambled on, and slowly, as the liquor overcame him, he
ran down and went sound asleep with the offending paper in his arms.
Perhaps he was one of those Germans wearing the Italian uniform who
in the German drive three weeks later gave commands to the ignorant
peasant regiments to lay down their arms and surrender! At least
it was reported in Europe that thousands of them abandoned their
works under the command of German spies!
When we arrived at Milan we found there waiting for us a note
from the Gilded Youth, whom we had met coming over on the boat
from America. And it brought back our everlasting love affair. It
is curious how that love affair kept projecting itself into the
consciousness of two middle-aged men who reasonably may be supposed
to have passed out of the zone of true romance. But the memory of
the hazel eyes of the Gilded Youth as he gazed at the pretty face
of the young nurse there in the moonlight at Landrecourt, with
such exaltation and joy, kept bobbing back into our minds as we
saw other lovers in other lands, married and single, crossing our
paths. And there was the Young Doctor, diffident and reticent, who
had his heart set on the girl, and the contest furnished us with
a deathless theme for speculation. And here at Milan came this
letter--just a note forwarded from Paris--telling us that the Gilded
Youth could "stand and wait" no longer; he was going to hit back.
He had quit the Ambulance service for aviation. And he was in
a training camp near Paris. We wondered how many times during his
training he would slip across the sky to Landrecourt to visit his
true love. The one-horse buggy had been the only lover's chariot
known to Henry and me, and we remembered how a red-wheeled cart
used to lay out the neighbours in the heroic days of the nineties.
So in our meditative moments we considered what a paralysing
spectacle it would be for the neighbours to see a young man come
swooping down upon his lady love's bower in an airplane and Henry,
who was betting on the Gilded Youth as against the Doctor, began
taking even money again!
[Illustration: We thought he might be testing us out as potential
spies]
Milan we found today is an industrial town, entirely modern,
dominated not by the cathedral as of old, but by the spirit of the
new Italy. They took us to a luncheon given by the American chamber
of commerce. We heard nothing of their antiquities, and little
of their ruins. We had to fight to get time to see the cathedral,
whose windows are boarded up or filled with white glass; but the
Milanese were anxious to have us see their great factories; their
automobile works, their Caproni airship plant and the up-to-the-minute
organization of industrial efficiency everywhere. Here in Milan
we saw thousands of men out of uniform, but wearing the ribbon
arm-band of the industrial reservists. We fancied these Milanese
were bigger, huskier men than the men in the south of Italy, and
that they looked better-kept and better-bred. They certainly are a
fierce and indomitable people. The Austrians don't raid the Milanese
in airships. They said that once the Austrians came and the next day
the Milanese loaded up a fleet of big Capronis with 30,000 pounds
of high explosives, sailed over Austria and blew some town to atoms.
So Milan has never been bothered since as other border towns of
Italy have been bothered by air-raiders. The days we spent in Milan
were like days in a modern American industrial city--say Toledo,
or St. Paul or Detroit or Kansas City.
Turin is similarly modern and industrial, though not so beautiful
as Milan. In Turin we saw the scene of the riot--the "grosser
rebellion," which our carabinieri friend told us about. Signor
Nitti, now a member of the Italian cabinet, who entertained us
in Rome, told the Italian parliament--according to the American
newspapers--that the millers caused the riot. The bread ration
did not come to Turin one morning, and the working people struck.
Nitti says the millers were hoarding flour and caused the delay.
The strike grew general over the city. Workers wandering about
the town were threatened with the police if they congregated. They
congregated, and some troops from a nearby training camp were called.
The troops were new; they were also friends of the strikers. They
refused to fire. Then the strikers built barricades in the streets
and in a day or so the regular troops came down from the mountains
with machine guns, fired on the barricades and when hundreds were
hit the rebellion was quelled. And Signor Nitti says it was all
because some profit hog stopped the ordinary flow of flour from the
farmer to the consumer of bread! There is, of course, the other
side. They told us in Turin that boys in their teens were found dead
back of the barricades with thousand lire notes in their pockets,
and that German agents came during the first hours of the strike
and spread money lavishly to make the riot a rebellion. Probably
this is true. The profiteer made the strike possible. It was an
opportunity for rebellion, and Germany took the opportunity. Always
she is on hand with spies to buy what she cannot honestly win.
Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to France. Yet the
journey had been well worth while. We came home with a definite
and hopeful impression about Italy. The Turin riot, bad as it was,
was not an anti-war riot. It was directed at the bad administration
of the food controller. Italy then was not an invaded country, as
France was, and had no such enthusiasm for the war, as a nation
has when its soil is invaded. Italy has that enthusiasm now for the
war. We saw that her man-power was hardly tapped. She has millions
to pour into the trenches. She needs and will need until the end
of the war, iron and coal. She will have to borrow her guns and her
fuel. But she has almost enough food. We found sugar scarce; butter
scarce, and bread sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants. We
found two meatless days a week besides Friday and found the people,
as a rule, observing them. We found the industries of the nation
turned solely toward the war. Italy realizes what defeat means.
The pro-Austrian party which was strong at the beginning of the
war has vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope has lost
his interest in peace!
But all these things are temporary; with the war's passing they
will pass. The real thing we found was an awakening people, coming
into the new century eager and wise and sure that it held somewhere
in its coming years the dawn of a new day. That really is the
hope of the war--an industrial hope, not a political hope, not a
geographical hope, but a hope for better things for the common man.
It is a hope that Christianity may take Christendom, and that the
fellowship among the nations of the world so devoutly hoped for,
may be possible because of a fellowship among men inside of nations.