And Italy! Although it is only since May that Italy has stood by our
side on the battle-front, in an effort to avert from the world a new
military domination, we have known from the beginning that her heart was
with the Allies, and she was willing to stake all, when her time came,
for the same principles of humanity and freedom. A Roman friend tells me
that he heard an Italian statesman say, “Italy always meant war.” We can
well believe it. We have believed it from the first. On one of the early
days of August, when a British regiment was passing through the streets
of London on its way to Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man in
a red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with a proud step by the side
of our soldiers. He turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been living
many years in Soho. Having dug up from his time-eaten trunk the simple
regimentals of the army of the Liberator, he had come out to walk with
our boys on the first stage of their journey to France. In the person
of that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted Italy--Italy that had
known what it was to make her own sacrifices for the right, and was now
ready to show us her sympathy in this supreme crisis in our history.
But she had a trying, almost a tragic, time. For ten long months she lay
under the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies,
and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to a
Triple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point)
to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whose
emperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts to
rule even the papacy from across the Rhine.
How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies
and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy
which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption;
perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the
frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost
Oriental in his “sense of the theatre,” and knows better, perhaps, than
any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life)
played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to
grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the
old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have
said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: “Holy
Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my
honour, the nuns will do so.”