Chapter III: Part ONE: Italy (3)

Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious force. What enters into that act of decision which results in will is never wholly apparent, from the least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of government, which admits the right of the individual citizen, plain and exalted alike, to be heard and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of polling this collective will of the nation. Our electoral representative method and majority vote is surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian way. That right to vote, for which our women are so eagerly striving, as thinking men realize only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of a people is inaccurately registered, not made, by the vote. The voice of the piazza when deep enough and strong enough is as good as any other way, perhaps, of determining the collective will of a nation in a crisis; surely far better than the secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further, the reason of the piazza on any vital fundamental matter, such as war, which means life or death, is as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly surer, because the piazza, having less to lose or gain, feels and believes and acts more simply, basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy, reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atrocities committed on priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,--all deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against their friends. They responded also to the glory of Garibaldi's Thousand, who had liberated their fathers from foreign domination and made a nation out of Italy, and they responded to the great past of their people from whom the essential elements of what men know to-day as civilization has spread over the world. All these emotions were hidden in that one cry,--"Out with the barbarians!"

The voice of the piazza, with its simple unanimity, its childlike psychology, came nearer to expressing the soul of Italy than the German Chancellor can comprehend, than any sophisticated diplomat, who has associated only with "thinking" and "leading" people, can believe. The Latin soul of Italy which cursed its politician and thrilled at the words of its poet! That soul of a people which is greater than any individual, which somehow expresses itself more authoritatively through the simple people who must suffer for their faiths than through the intellectuals and the protected members of a society....

"_Viva Italia!_" the tanned conscript leaning from the car window at Subiaco shouted back to his friends and home. And the old men and girls left in the fields raised their hats as the train passed and shouted in reply,--"_Viva Italia!_" It was not English gold, nor the desire for Trent and Trieste, that brought that cry to the boy's lips!

V

_Italy Decides_

Whatever one may think of the piazza voice, whether the disposition is to sneer with the German or to trust with the democrat in its spontaneous expression, it is a matter of history now that Italy's decision had been made before the question came to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, a fortnight or more before the reluctant ambassadors of the ex-Alliance backed into their waiting trains and departed homeward across the Alps. It is a significant fact of personal psychology that the crisis of a decision takes place before action results to calm the disturbed mind. So it was with Italy. Her decision had really been taken when the Lusitania sank, when the politician, in face of this fresh outrage, advised the safer course of neutrality, which would amount to a connivance with her former associates in their predatory programme. _Traditore!_ meant but one thing--a betrayal of the nation's soul. In the light of more recent events, since Italy entered the war, there are probably many Italians who secretly wish that the safer counsel had prevailed, that, like Greece and Rumania, Italy had "preserved a benevolent neutrality" in the great war, even possibly that she had concluded to make her bed in the Teutonic camp. If the world is to be Teutonized, they would argue, why put one's head in the wolf's jaw! There are prudent people of that stripe in every nation, but since the end of May they have kept silence in Italy. And it should be forever remembered to her honor that Italy made her decision in face of Teutonic successes. If the military situation did not look so black for the Allies at the end of May as it does this December, it looked black enough with the crumbling Russian resistance before Mackensen's phalanx. Neuve Chapelle had been a costly and empty victory. There had been no successful drive in Champagne and Artois to encourage those who bet only on winning cards. There were heavy clouds in the east, merely a sad silence along the western wall. It was long past Easter, when England had boastfully expected to open the Dardanelles and the truth was beginning to appear that Constantinople might never be reached by the allied operations in Gallipoli. Italy threw in her lot with the Allies in a dark hour, if not the darkest.

The great decision which had lain in solution in the hearts of the people was evoked by events and made vocal by the flaming words of D'Annunzio, interpreted by a faithful king, who resisted the temptation to dethrone himself by calling Germany's hired man to power, and finally registered by the Deputies at Montecitorio on May 19. It was virtually made, I say, the tumultuous week that came on the resignation of the Salandra Government. What followed the return of the ministry to power was merely automatic, as peaceful as any day's routine. Parliament was called to meet on Wednesday, the 19th. The Sunday afternoon before, the piazza, and the palace and all other elements of Roman citizenship met in a great gathering of content and consecration at the foot of the Pincian Hill in the Piazza del Popolo, again the day after in the Campidolgio above the Forum. How fortunate a people are to have such hallowed places of meeting, steeped in associations of great events!

It was a warm, brilliant, sunny day, that Sunday, and in the afternoon every one in Rome, it seemed, was as near the Piazza del Popolo as he could get. The meeting was addressed by a number of well-known Romans of varied political affiliations. But the high note of all the speeches was a fervid patriotism and harmony. Rome was calm, believing that it had chosen nobly if not wisely. On the Campidolgio, D'Annunzio again sounded the tocsin of the heroic Thousand, and lauded the army which had been belittled by the followers of Giolitti. Already the troops were leaving Rome.... Then Parliament opened. The meeting of the Deputies if memorable was short. The square and streets about Montecitorio had been carefully cleared and held empty by cordons of troops. There was to be no shouting, no demonstration within hearing of Parliament. Long before midday the Chamber was crowded with all the notables who could gain admission. The proceedings were extremely brief, formal. All knew that the die had been cast: what remained was for the army to accomplish. The Premier Salandra made a brief statement summarizing the diplomatic efforts that his Government had undertaken to reach a satisfactory understanding with Austria, the record of which could be followed in the "Green Book," which was then given to the public. He informed the Chamber, what was generally known, that the Triple Alliance had already been denounced on the 5th of May, and he offered a "project of law," which was tantamount to a vote of confidence in the Government and which also gave the King and his ministers power to make war and to govern the country during the period of war without the intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some were out-and-out _neutralistas_, and some few were Socialists who had the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians must have voted for war. Had they seen a great light since the piazza raised its voice, since their leader had fallen from his high place? Possibly they had never been with Giolitti on this vital national question. At least, the fact illustrates how representative government does roughly perform the will of its people when that will is clear enough and passionate enough: the will registers itself even through unwilling instruments.

After the vote had been taken, the Chamber adjourned, and when the following day the Senate ratified, unanimously, the action of the Chamber of Deputies, Parliament was dissolved. Many of the members enlisted and went to the front. Since the end of May Italy has been autocratically governed. The decrees of the King and his ministers are law--an efficient method of governing a country at war, avoiding those legislative intrigues that latterly have threatened the concord of France.

It is noteworthy that the Italian Senate voted unanimously for war. The Senate is not an elective body. It is composed of dignitaries, old, conservative men from the successful classes of the nation, who are not easily swayed by the emotions of the piazza. From this unrepresentative body might have been expected a show of resistance to the Government's measure, if, as Giolitti and the German party asserted, there was a serious sentiment in the country in favor of neutrality which had been howled down by the mobs. It is inconceivable that such a body could have been completely cowed by rioting in the streets. The unanimous vote of the Italian Senators is sufficient refutation of the Bethmann-Hollweg slur.

* * * * *

As I crossed the Piazza Colonna the morning Parliament opened, my attention was caught by a small crowd before a billboard. First one, then another passer-by stopped, read something affixed there, and, smiling or laughing, passed on his way. In the center of the board was a small black-bordered sheet of paper, with all the mourning emblems, precisely resembling those mortuary announcements which Latin countries employ. It read: "Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself by the Devil, lamented by his faithful friends"; and there followed a list of noted Giolittians, some of whom even then were voting for war with Austria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that ebullition of the piazza disdained by the German Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have bit through the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his safety was not among the Deputies voting at Montecitorio. Later I read in a Paris newspaper that Giolitti was to spend the summer as far away from the disturbance of war as he could get, in the Pyrenees, but it was rumored in Paris that the French Government, having intimated to its new ally that it did not wish to harbor Giolitti, the Italian politician was forced to remain at home. I believe that once since the "Caro Carlo" letter he has spoken to his countrymen, a patriotic interview in which he announced that he had been converted to the necessity of the war with Austria! Thus even the politician comes to see light. But Giovanni Giolitti, as the black-bordered card said, is dead politically.

* * * * *

With the votes of Parliament the Roman part in the drama, the civil part, was ended. Rome began to empty fast of soldiers, officers, officials. The scene had shifted to the north, where the hearts of all Italians were centered. There was a singular calm in the city. One other memorable meeting should be recorded, on the Saturday afternoon following the Parliamentary decision. If popular manifestations count for anything, the dense throng in the Campidolgio and later the same afternoon before the Quirinal Palace demonstrated the enthusiasm with which the certainty of war with Austria was accepted.

There are few lovelier spots on earth than the little square of the Campidolgio on the Capitoline Hill and none more laden with memories of a long past. Led by a sure instinct the people of Rome crowded up the steep passages that led to the crest of the hill, by tens of thousands. In this hour of the New Resurrection of Italy, the people sought the hearthstone of ancient Rome on the Capitoline. About the pillars of the Cancelleria, which stands on Roman foundations, up the long flight of steps leading to the Aracoeli, even under the belly of the bronze horse in the center of the square, Italians thrust themselves. Rome was never more beautiful than that afternoon. Little fleecy clouds were floating across the deep blue sky. The vivid green of the cypresses on the slope below were stained with the red and white of blooming roses. In the distance swam the dome of St. Peter's, across the bend of the Tiber, and through the rift between the crowded palaces one might look down upon the peaceful Forum. The birthplace of the nation! Here it was that the people, the decision having been made to play their part in the destiny of the new world now in the making, came to rejoice. The spirit of the throng was entirely festal. And these were the people, working-men and their wives and mothers from the dark corners of old Rome, neither hoodlums nor aristocracy, the people whose men for the most part were already joining the colors.

The flags of the unredeemed provinces together with the Italian flag were borne through the crowd up the steps of the municipal palace to wave beside Prince Colonna, as he appeared from within the palace. Mayor of Rome, he had that afternoon resigned his position in order to join the army with his sons. Handsome, with a Roman face that reminded one of the portrait busts of his ancestors in the Capitoline Museum close by, he stood silent above the great multitude. The time for oratory had passed. He raised his hands and shouted with a full voice--"_Viva Italia!_" and was silent. It was as if one of the conscript fathers had returned to his city to pronounce a benediction upon the act of his descendants. The people repeated the cry again and again, then broke into the beautiful words of Mameli's "L'Inno,"--"_Fratelli d' Italia._"

Then the gathering turned to cross the city to the Quirinal, where the 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.

Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities, and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the Latin abhors.

* * * * *

There are some things in this world that can never be replaced once destroyed, and Venice is one of them. And there are some things greater than power, efficiency, and all _kaiserliche Kultur_. Such is Italy with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible youth, its treasure of deathless beauty. As I passed through the fertile fields on my way from Venice to Milan and the north, I understood as never before the inner reason for Italy's entering the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane civilization,--the love of freedom for the individual, the golden mean between liberty and license that is the Latin inheritance,--all this compelled young Italy to fight, not merely for her own preservation, but also for the preservation of these things in the world against the force that would destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has not died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum," the poet said, and at the risk of all her jewels Italy bravely defied the enemy across the Alps. This war on which she had embarked after nine long months of preparation is no mere adventure after stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it is a fight unto death between two opposed principles of life.

"He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality on the greater issues of life.