1
I have a peculiar affection for Verona and certain things in Verona.
Italians must forgive us English this little streak of impertinent
proprietorship in the beautiful things of their abundant land. It is
quite open to them to revenge themselves by professing a tenderness for
Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for instance, with a peculiar and
personal indignation that I saw where an Austrian air bomb had killed
five-and-thirty people in the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old
place, a place that have very much of the quality of a very pretty and
cheerful old woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a
special pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,
the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I confess a
ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say, has retired into a
case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof of thick iron plates; no
aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough to smash that covering; there he
will smile securely in the darkness until peace comes again.
All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort of
idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been making over
England. These raids do no effective military work. What conceivable
military advantage can there be in dropping bombs into a marketing
crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic propaganda by the Central Powers to
which they seem to have been incited by their own evil genius. It is
as if they could convince us that there is an essential malignity in
Germans, that until the German powers are stamped down into the mud
they will continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the
thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for half a
century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the way of her
colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground for her
business enterprise, France had come near resignation on the score of
Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great outrage of the
war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities. A great and simple
wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war itself, had it been
fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would have made no such deep and
enduring breach as these silly, futile assassinations have down between
the Austro-Germans and the rest of the civilised world. One great
misdeed is a thing understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the
consciousness of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a
national sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German
the power to attack other nations any more for ever....
Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to hurt and
terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed suffered from this war
far more than any other town in Italy. Her trade has largely ceased;
she has no visitors. I woke up on my way to Udine and found my train at
Venice with an hour to spare; after much examining and stamping of my
passport I was allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the
refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand Canal.
There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of the old crowd
of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay to stare at me the
better. The empty palaces seemed to be sleeping in the morning sunshine
because it was not worth while to wake up....
2
Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to have made
nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in England or provincial
France. People speak of Italy as a poor country, but that is from a
banker's point of view. In some respects she is the richest country on
earth, and in the matter of staying power I should think she is
better off than any other belligerent. She produces food in abundance
everywhere; her women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption
of food production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any
other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported labour;
the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to America, north and
south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south of France. The cessation of
this emigration has given her great reserves of man power, so that she
has carried on her admirable campaign with less interference with her
normal economic life than any other power. The first person I spoke to
upon the platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on my
return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a day in
Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass road that goes
down into France. “You see hundreds and hundreds of new Fiat cars,” he
remarked, “along here--going up to the French front.”
But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of thousands of
shells piled high to go to Italy....
I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic sturdiness
or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy is not merely
fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion but she is doing
a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing in fighting at all.
France and England were obliged to fight; the necessity was as plain as
daylight. The participation of Italy demanded a remoter wisdom. In the
long run she would have been swallowed up economically and politically
by Germany if she had not fought; but that was not a thing staring her
plainly in the face as the danger, insult and challenge stared France
and England in the face. What did stare her in the face was not merely a
considerable military and political risk, but the rupture of very close
financial and commercial ties. I found thoughtful men talking everywhere
I have been in Italy of two things, of the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the
question of post war finance. So far as the former matter goes, I think
the Italians are set upon the righteous solution of all such riddles,
they are possessed by an intelligent generosity. They are clearly set
upon deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand the plain necessity
of open and friendly routes towards Roumania. It was an Italian who set
out to explain to me that Fiume must be at least a free port; it
would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade of Hungary off from the
Mediterranean. But the banking puzzle is a more intricate and puzzling
matter altogether than the possibility of trouble between Italian and
Jugo-Slav.
I write of these things with the simplicity of an angel, but without an
angelic detachment. Here are questions into which one does not so much
rush as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and banking are dry distasteful
questions, but it is clear that they are too much in the hands of
mystery-mongers; it is as much the duty of anyone who talks and writes
of affairs, it is as much the duty of every sane adult, to bring his
possibly poor and unsuitable wits to bear upon these things, as it is
for him to vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the simple ostensible
spectacle of Italy recovering the unredeemed Italy of the Trentino
and East Venetia, goes on another drama. Has Italy been sinking into
something rather hard to define called “economic slavery”? Is she or is
she not escaping from that magical servitude? Before this question has
been under discussion for a minute comes a name--for a time I was really
quite unable to decide whether it is the name of the villain in the
piece or of the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine,
or a pestilence or a delusion--the name of the _Banca Commerciale
Italiana._
Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and vigorous an economic
development as Italy is very different from the banking we simple
English know of at home. Banking in England, like land-owning, has
hitherto been a sort of hold up. There were always borrowers, there were
always tenants, and all that had to be done was to refuse, obstruct,
delay and worry the helpless borrower or would-be tenant until the
maximum of security and profit was obtained. I have never borrowed but
I have built, and I know something of the extreme hauteur of property of
England towards a man who wants to do anything with land, and with
money I gather the case is just the same. But in Italy, which already
possessed a sunny prosperity of its own upon mediaeval lines, the banker
has had to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and helpful. These
are unaccustomed attitudes for British capital. The field has been far
more attractive to the German banker, who is less of a proudly impassive
usurer and more of a partner, who demands less than absolute security
because he investigates more industriously and intelligently. This great
bank, the Banca Commerciale Italiana, is a bank of the German type: to
begin with, it was certainly dominated by German directors; it was a
bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave now into the whole
fabric of Italian commercial life. But it has already liberated
itself from German influence, and the bulk of its capital is Italian.
Nevertheless I found discussion ranging about firstly what the Banca
Commerciale essentially _was_, secondly what it might _become_, thirdly
what it might _do_, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to
it.
It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up with
politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over Venetia there are
agricultural banks which are said to be “clerical.” I grappled with this
mystery. “How are they clerical?” I asked Captain Pirelli. “Do they lend
money on bad security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever
to anti-clericals?” He was quite of my way of thinking. “_Pecunia non
olet_,” he said; “I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira note.”...
But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany; she wants easy
money for development, cheap coal, a market for various products. The
case against the Germans--this case in which the Banca Commerciale
Italiana appears, I am convinced unjustly, as a suspect--is that they
have turned this natural and proper interchange with Italy into the
acquisition of German power. That they have not been merely easy
traders, but patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their
early “pull” in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German
political influence against the development of native Italian business;
that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but members of
a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls. The German is a
patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a limb, the worshipper of a
national effigy, the digit of an insanely proud and greedy Germania, and
here are the natural consequences.
The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: “We do not like
the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always over the Alps.
Whatever increases German influence here threatens Italian life. The
German is a German first and a human being afterwards.... But on the
other hand England seems commercially indifferent to us and France has
been economically hostile...”
“After all,” I said presently, after reflection, “in that matter of
_Pecunia non olet_; there used to be fusses about European loans in
China. And one of the favourite themes of British fiction and drama
before the war was the unfortunate position of the girl who accepted a
loan from the wicked man to pay her debts at bridge.”
“Italy,” said Captain Pirelli, “isn't a girl. And she hasn't been
playing bridge.”
I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile
cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in Italy is
going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it will become more
and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I would trust Italy to make
and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana Italian. I believe the Italian
brain is a better brain than the German article. But still I heard
people talking of the implicated organisation as if it were engaged in
the most insidious duplicities. “Wait for only a year or so after the
war,” said one English authority to me, “and the mask will be off and it
will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more.” They assure me that
then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian and Allied
enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good understanding of
Italians and English poisoned, entirely through this organisation....
The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this last sort
of talk as “suspicion mania.” So far as the Banca Commerciale Italiana
goes, I at least find that easy enough; I quote that instance simply
because it is a case where suspicion has been dispelled, but in
regard to a score of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel
suspicion. This war has been a shock to reasonable men the whole world
over. They have been forced to realise that after all a great number
of Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the
non-German world; that in a great number of cases when one does business
with a German the business does not end with the individual German. We
hated to believe that a business could be tainted by German partners or
German associations. If now we err on the side of over-suspicion, it is
the German's little weakness for patriotic disingenuousness that is most
to blame....
But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-smelling
among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German. Certain things are
necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy must get them. The Italians
want intelligent and helpful capital. They want a helpful France.
They want bituminous coal for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap
shipping. The French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important
for civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for Great
Britain that these needs should be supplied than that individual British
money-owners or ship-owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting
upon high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining
and shipping is in the national interests--for international
interests--rather than for the creation of that particularly passive,
obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere
profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France
and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the
well-being of the common man in Britain.
3
I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and reached
Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The place was as full as
ever; we had to wait for a table. It is notable that there were still
great numbers of young men not in uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza
and Verona; there was no effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The
whole crowded place was smouldering with excitement. The diners
looked about them as they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be
expressing sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection
of the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business of
flitting white sheets among the little tables.
“To-night,” said my companion, “I think we shall declare war upon
Germany. The decision is being made.”
I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I forget the
precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in uniform, who had been
dining at an adjacent table and whom I had not recognised before as a
writer I had met some years previously in London, suddenly joined in our
conversation, with a slightly different explanation. I had been carrying
on a conversation in slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into
English.
But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as
daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first that
direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds of the three
northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional enemy is Austria, and
this war is not primarily a war for any other end than the emancipation
of Italy. Moreover we have to remember that for years there has been
serious commercial friction between France and Italy, and considerable
mutual elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are
resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really friendly
and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It has been an
extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that instead of boldly taking
over her shipping from its private owners and using it all, regardless
of their profit, in the interests of herself and her allies, her
government has permitted so much of it as military and naval needs have
not requisitioned to continue to ply for gain, which the government
itself has shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in
Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity in
relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal in Italy.
They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign in which this
British slackness with the individual profiteer, is represented as if
it were the deliberate greed of the British state. This certainly
contributed very much to fortify Italy's disinclination to slam the door
on the German connection.
I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from
England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same way
as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our shipping
interest. “I pay as well as you do,” I said; “the shippers' blockade of
Great Britain is more effective than the submarines'. My food, my coal,
my petrol are all restricted in the sacred name of private property.
You see, capital in England has hitherto been not an exploitation but
a hold-up. We are learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman
has been here and given Italy assurances....”
In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is imperative
that English readers should understand clearly how thoroughly these
little matters have been _worked_ by the enemy.
Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the Italian
lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an Italian, and also
brought out the latent English of a very charming elderly lady opposite
to her. She had heard a speech, a wonderful speech from a railway train,
by “the Lord Runciman.” He had said the most beautiful things about
Italy.