CHAPTER V

ASHES AND EMBERS

The flame of war flickered and went out. But the years 1919 and 1920 that immediately followed the end of the war seemed to me the darkest and most painful periods of Italian life. Dark thunderclouds hung above our unity. The progress of Italy’s unification was threatened. I watched the gathering storm.

Already disquieting events had menaced our national life. They were due to political happenings, even more than to an economic crisis. I point to the movement of the Sicilian Gasei in 1894 and the bloody demonstration in Milan in 1898. But these manifestations of rebellion were localized. Not one of them bore in it the virile germs of dissolution or of separatism. But I assert that the episodes of 1919 and 1920 had in them bacilli which if not treated heroically are deadly for the life of a civilized nation.

Everything was discussed again. We Italians opened the box of political problems and took apart the social clockwork. We pawed over everything from the crown to parliament, from the army to our colonies, from capitalistic property to the communistic soviet proposal for the federation of the regions of Italy, from schools to the papacy. The lovely structure of concord and harmony that we combatants and the wounded had dreamed that we would build after the luminous victory of October, 1918, was falling to pieces. The leaves were falling from our tree of idealism.

I felt that we were left without any cohesive force, any suggestive heroism, any remembrance, any political philosophy, sufficient to overcome and stop the factors of dissolution. I sensed the chills and heats of decay and destruction.

Already in January, 1919, the Socialists, slightly checked during the war, began, the moment the ink was drying on the armistice, their work of rebellion and blackmail. From Milan the socialistic municipality sent a special mission of help to the so-called brothers in Vienna. Sickly internationalism put forth its buds in this morbid springtime. At Triest the socialist Pittoni played an important part in the reorganization of the delivered city. In many Italian cities poor children of the old enemy Austrian and Hapsburg capital were asked to take precedence. It was a provoking sentimentality. A desire was already clear in the minds of subversives and of Liberal-Giolittians; it was to strike out of our memories the sense and feeling of our victory.

I knew those who whipped up our degeneration. They were German and Austrian spies, Russian agitators, mysterious subventions. In a few months they had led the Italian people into a state of marasmus. The economic crisis existing in every corner of the world could not be expected to spare Italy. The soldiers, like myself, returning from the war, rushed to their families. Who can describe our feelings? Such an imposing phenomenon as the demobilization of millions of men took place in the dark, without noise, in an atmosphere of throwing discipline to the winds. There were, for us, the troubles of winter and the difficulties of finding new garments and adjustments for peace.

We suffered the humiliation of seeing the banners of our glorious regiments returned to their homes without being saluted, without that warm cheer of sympathy owed to those who return from victorious war. Now it again appeared to me and to my friends as if there was in everybody an instinct to finish the game of the war, not with the idea of real victory but with content that we had lost as little as possible. Ears and spirits were ready to listen to words of peace, of humanity, of brotherhood between the nations. At night before sleep came I used to meditate and realize that we had no dam to stop this general decay of faith, this renunciation of the interests and destiny of a victorious nation. The sense of destruction penetrated very quickly and deeply the spirit of all classes. Certainly the central government was no dike to prevent the flood of weakness.

Politicians and philosophers, profiteers and losers—for at least many had lost their illusions—sharks trying to save themselves; promoters of the war trying to be pardoned; demagogues seeking popularity; spies and instigators of trouble waiting for the price of their treason; agents paid by foreign money in a few months threw the nation into an awful spiritual crisis. I saw before me with awe the gathering dusk of our end as a nation and a people.

With my heart in tumult and with a deep sense of bitterness corroding my soul, I could smell the danger. Some audacious men were with me—not many. My action was at first tied to the urgent duty to fight against one important and dark treason. Certain Italians, blinded and having lost their memories, were led on by some complicity and selfish desires among the Allies. These Italians were actually setting themselves against the mother country. Dalmatia, Italian in its origin, ardent as a saint in its faith, had been recognized to be ours by the pact of London; Dalmatia had waited for the victorious war with years of passion, and holding in its bosom still the remains of Venice and of Rome, was now lopped off from our unity. The politics of renunciation, helped by foreigners, galloped forward. Wilson was the distiller or supporter of theoretical formulas. He could not comprehend Italian life or history. By his unconscious aid this treason to us was nourished. Fiume, the sacrificed town, whose people called desperately for Italy in its manifestations in the public squares, who sent pleading missions to our military chiefs, was occupied by corps of international troops. We were about to lose another war trophy—the Austrian navy. Sesana, twenty kilometers from Triest, was discussed as a possible frontier!

I said then that never in the life of any nation on the day after victory had there been a more odious tragedy than that of this silly renunciation. In the first months of 1919, Italy, led on by politicians like Nitti and Albertini Salvemini, had only one frantic wish that I could see—it was to destroy every gain of victorious struggle. Its only dedication was to a denial of the borders and soil extent of the nation. It forgot our 600,000 dead and our 1,000,000 wounded. It made waste of their generous blood. These leaders wanted to satisfy foreign impulses of doubtful origin and doctrines brewed of poisons. This attempt at matricide of the motherland was abetted by Italians of perverted intellect and by professional socialists. Toward both, later on, the Fascist revolution showed so much forbearance that it was more than generosity.

I was snatched up in this fight against the returning beast of decadence. I was for our sacred rights to our own territories. Therefore I had to neglect in a degree the petty internal political life that was floundering in bewilderment and wallowing in disorder. On the international playground the stake was higher. One had to remain on the field to save what could be saved. As to internal politics, I knew very well that a strong government would quickly put in order the Socialists and the anarchists, the decadents and wreckers and the instigators of disorder. I knew at first hand their soul. It has always been the same at all times, in all ages—it is the spirit of coward wolves and ferocious sheep.

And thus one day, a few months after the Armistice, I saw at Milan a fact more disquieting and more important than I thought possible. I saw a Socialist procession, with an endless number of red flags, with thirty bands, with ensigns cursing the war. I saw a river in the street made of women, children, Russians, Germans, and Austrians, flowing through the town upward and downward from the popular quarters to those of the centre, and finally dispersing at one of the most central points of the town, at the amphitheater of the Arena. They had had numerous meetings. They clamored for amnesty for the deserters! They demanded the division of the land!

Milan was then considered, more than now, the city where the pulse of the working nation could be felt. Milan, where I had labored with ideals, had experienced in 1914 and in the first months of 1915 epic days for the war. The city always had a strong and gallant spirit. In it citizenship was more active than in many other parts of the country. It had known how to prepare itself with dignity to sustain war effort. And now, after the triumph, even this town, the town of the 10,000 volunteers, seemed to yield itself to a disease.

This procession I said was an evidence of the deep mire in which all the classes of the population were sinking, especially those belonging to the _populari_. As the procession passed through the streets the bourgeois—the shopkeepers, the hotel keepers—hastily closed their windows and doors. They pulled down the roller blinds.

“There,” said I, “are eyes closing with the weariness of anxiety and fear.”

Naturally enough, the revolutionists, observing their effect, puffed up with new braggart triumph. Not a single force, _interventista_ or any other, set foot in the street to stop the irresponsibles. The beloved tricolor flag of Italy was taken as a mark. It was hastily taken off balconies!

I remember an episode in the shame of those days; a woman, a school-teacher in the popular quarters, ran to the defense of the Italian flag. Risking her life, she stood with blazing eyes against a herd of communists. You may be sure that in the period of redemption and resurrection, when we stood upright again, the golden medal for valor was bestowed on this woman of saintly courage.

The _Popolo d’Italia_, of which I was the founder and editor, lived then its life of intense polemics. Every day was a battle. The little street of Via Paolo da Conuobio was constantly blocked by police or by detachments of _carabinieri_ and soldiers. All the staff were guarded whenever we appeared in public. One could understand that the government was anxious about us. The authorities wanted to control all that the _Popolo d’Italia_ was doing and to curb all agitation for virile methods in the political struggle. The censorship was re-established exclusively and solely for the _Popolo d’Italia_. Through a back-door channel a disgusting Socialist deputy tried also to bring about an inquiry. His proposal was ridiculed out of the door.

I wrote, on the next day after the Procession of the Defeat of Milan, an article the title of which was taken from a famous polemical book of Giordano Bruno—“Against the Return of the Beast.”

That article was published in the _Popolo d’Italia_ on the eighteenth of February and ended in these precise words:

If the opposition to a war that is not only finished but was victorious is now a pretext for an ignoble doubt, then we who are not ashamed to have been _interventiste_, but feel the glory of our position, will shout to the heavens, “Stand back, you jackals!” No one shall separate the dead. They constitute a sacred heap, as big as a gigantic pyramid that touches the skies, a heap that belongs to nobody; nobody can give or take away from the dead. They do not belong to any party; they belong to the eternal motherland. They belong to a humanity too complex and too august to be put into any wine club or into the back room of some co-operative. This political stew is supremely ignominious. Must we be forced to defend our dead from filthy profanation? Oh, Toti! Roman! One man! Thy life and thy death is worth infinitely more than the whole Italian socialism! And you files on parade—innumerable heroes that wanted the war, knowing how to want war; who went to war knowing what was war; who went to death knowing what it meant to go to death—you, Decio Raggi, Filippo Corridoni, Cesare Battisti, Luigi Lori, Venezian, Sauro, Rismondi, Cantucci—you thousands and thousands of others that form the superb constellation of Italian heroism—don’t you feel that the pack of jackals is trying to rummage your bones? Do they want to scrape the earth that was soaked with your blood and to spit on your sacrifice? Fear nothing, glorious spirits! Our task has just begun. No harm shall befall you. We shall defend you. We shall defend the dead, and all the dead, even though we put dugouts in the public squares and trenches in the streets of our city.

That was a warning blast—a trumpet call. Many, hit in the face, fled. Some around us, trembling, thought of the danger that they might get into on account of such a polemic. But some others—not many—gathered around the old banner of my newspaper.

It was necessary to organize our resistance, to take care in discussions of international character, to strengthen our position on the front of internal politics, to be guarded from false friends, to fight false pacifists and to confound the false humanitarians. We had to make a general assault upon all that bundle of various degenerate tendencies;, diverse in their appearance but absolutely identical in their utter failure to understand the logical and absolute meaning of the victory in war.

Our delegation in Paris was in a sorry strait. The ability and the injustice of some of the Allied statesmen had almost strangled it. Owing to our internal situation, it was impossible for our delegation to take a firm stand with feet well-planted. The regions to be restored to Italy were in a state of restlessness that made many of us anxious.

What a grave moment! An action of a handful of us on the public square was not sufficient; there were so many different fronts where one had to fight. We who were to defend Italy from within had to create one more unbreakable unity of strength, a common denominator of all the old pro-war partisans and loyalists, of all those who felt, like myself, desperately Italian. Then it was that I decided, after days and nights of reflection, to make a call through the medium of my newspaper for a full stop in the stumbling career toward chaos.

And on the twenty-third of March, 1919, I laid down the fundamental basis, at Milan, of the Italian _fasci di combattimento_—the fighting Fascist programme.

The first meeting of the Italian battle Fascists took place on the Piazza S. Sepolero in Milan. It was in a hall offered to us by the Milan Association of Merchants and Shopkeepers. The permission was granted after a long discussion among the managers of the association. Common sense prevailed in the end; a guaranty was given that no noise or disorder would occur. On that condition we got what we wanted.

The meeting was of a purely political character. I had advertised in the _Popolo d’Italia_ that it would have for its object the foundation of a new movement and the establishment of a programme and of methods of action for the success of the battle I was intending to fight against the forces dissolving victory and the nation.

I prepared the atmosphere of that memorable meeting by editorials and summonses published in the _Popolo d’Italia_. Anyhow, the ones that came were not numerous. One of my fighting friends of good will was in the hall and he took the names of those who were willing to sign up. After two days of discussion, fifty-four persons signed our programme and took the pledge to be faithful to the fundamental basis of our movement.

I speak of movement and not of party, because my conception always was that Fascism must assume the characteristics of being anti-party. It was not to be tied to old or new schools of any kind. The name Italian Fighting Fascisti was lucky. It was most appropriate to a political action that had to face all the old parasites and programmes that had tried to deprave Italy. I felt that it was not only the anti-socialist battle we had to fight; this was only a battle on the way. There was a lot more to do. All the conceptions of the so-called historical parties seemed to be dresses out of measure, shape, style, usefulness. They had grown tawdry and insufficient—unable to keep pace with the rising tide of unexpected political exigencies, unable to adjust to the formation of new history and new conditions of modern life.

The old parties clung in vain to the rattling programmes. These parties had to make pitiful repairs and tinkerings in an attempt to adapt their theories as best they could to the new days. It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of socialism. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism.

In a word, I felt the deep necessity of an original conception capable of placing in a new period of history a more fruitful rhythm of human life.

It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilization.

To this end—through every day’s observation of events and change, morning and evening, in vigor and in weariness—I aimed all my strength. I had a perfect and sure consciousness of the end I was driving at. This was my problem—to find the way, to find the moment, to find the form.

Those discussions over which I presided and dominated strengthened some of my conceptions that still conserve to-day the freshness of the original idea. Later, in this review of my life until now, I shall take up some of the details of the evolution of our plans. At our meetings there were present various elements—syndicalists, old interventionists, demobilized officers still in uniform, and many _arditi_, those brave grenade-and-knife shock troops of the war.

The Italian _arditi_ were a creation of the war. The idea was born in Garibaldi’s impetuous, fighting vigor and dash, and finds its remote origin in the heroic city militias that flourished in many parts of Italy at the happy time of the townships—the communes. The _arditi_ rendered first-class service during the war. They were our troops of assault, of the first rush. They threw themselves into the battle with bombs in hands, with daggers in the teeth, with a supreme contempt for death, singing their magnificent war hymns. There was in them not only the sense of heroism but an indomitable will.

This typically Italian formation lived on after the war. The first fighting Fascisti were formed mostly of decided men. They were full of will and courage. In the first years of the anti-socialist, anti-communist struggle, the _arditi_ war veterans played an important role. I was several times nominated their chief and still hold the title of honorary president of the _Arditi_ association, which has assumed now a purely relief character, with the idea of maintaining intact its spirit of civic and military virtues.

Those who came to the meeting for the constitution of the Italian Fascisti of Combat used few words. They did not exhaust themselves by laying out dreams. Their aim seemed clear and straight-lined. It was to defend the victory at any price, to maintain intact the sacred memory of the dead, and the admiration not only for those who fell and for the families of those who were dead but for the mutilated, for the invalids, for all those who had fought. The prevalent note, however, was of anti-socialist character, and as a political aspiration, it was hoped a new Italy would be created that would know how to give value to the victory and to fight with all its strength against treason and corruption, against decay within and intrigue and avarice from without.

There are some who profess not to understand what Fascismo had as its intent, and some who believe that it grew without a gardener. I was certain at the time that it was necessary to fix, without any possibility of equivocation, the essential brand of the new movement. For this reason I made three planks for our platform. The first was the following:

The meeting of the twenty-third of March sends its first greeting and reverent thought to the sons of Italy who died for the greatness of their country and for the freedom of the world; to the mutilated and to the invalids, to all those who fought, to the ex-prisoners who fulfilled their duty. It declares itself ready to uphold with all its energy the material and moral claims that will be put forward by the associations of those who fought.

The second declaration pledged the Fascisti of Combat to oppose themselves to the imperialism of any other countries damaging to Italy. It accepted the supreme postulates of the League of Nations regarding Italy. It affirmed the necessity to complete the stability of our frontiers between the Alps and the Adriatic with the claim of annexation of Fiume and of Dalmatia.

The third declaration spoke of the elections that were announced for the near future. In this motion the Fasci di Combattimento pledged themselves to fight with all their means the candidates that were milk-and-water Italians, to whatever party they belonged.

Finally we talked of organization—the organization that would be adapted to the new movement. I did not favor any bureaucratic cut-and-dried organization. It was thought wise that in every big town the correspondent of the _Popolo d’Italia_ should be the organizer of a section of the Fasci di Combattimento, with the idea that each group should become a centre of Fascist ideas, work and action. The first expenses—amounting to a few thousand lire—were covered by the feeble resources of the _Popolo d’Italia_. A central committee was formed to guide the whole movement.

It is amusing for me to recall that this meeting remained almost unnoticed. The stupid irony of the Socialists and the narrow-minded incomprehensiveness of the Italian Liberal party could not grasp its significance.

The _Corriere della Sera_, that great liberal newspaper, dedicated to this news about twenty lines in its columns!

The internal situation in Italian politics and Italian policy continued to be nebulous and full of uncertainty.

Disillusion and the shattering of ideals could be noticed, even among those who had fought. A sense of weariness dominated all classes—every one. The Church, which had put herself apart during the great European conflict, now started activity in order to have her voice listened to at the peace negotiations and to have a say about all the questions that interested the nations that had taken part in the war.

So far as our national life was concerned, the Church limited her action to the creation of the Partito Popolare—the so-called Popular, or Catholic, party. It was faithful to some important programme points regarding the family and religion and the nation. It represented at that time an attempt to stop the prevalent diffusion of those Bolshevik ideas of socialistic parliamentary systems that were then disintegrating Rome and the provinces. But the Partito Popolare itself ran off the rails and jumped the fences; it tried to compete with the Socialists themselves. Of little and doubtful patriotic faith, it ran square against the Fascisti and the _interventisti_. The Popular party, along with the others, was too much in a hurry to close the parenthesis of the war.

Political riots, disturbances and strikes took place alternately in a kind of sickly rotation in every Italian city.

It is necessary for me to review the conditions which we faced. Orlando, president of the council, was incapacitated by temperament to dominate the internal situation, just as he was unable to be a master in foreign affairs. His work was contradictory, full of false sentimentality and failure to comprehend the real interests of Italy. Not knowing French, and ignorant of the treaties concluded with the Allied nations, Orlando, in spite of the presence of Sonnino, was a disastrous influence during the peace negotiations at Versailles. Wilson, so far as Italy was concerned, was ambiguous—so much so that on the twenty-third of April the Italian delegation had to leave Paris. It returned on the fifth of May—a dubious situation. In June, after a vote of the chamber, the Orlando cabinet retired. In the meantime—also in June—serious clashes took place at Fiume between French sailors and Italian soldiers.

Never did Italy have a man so damaging to the Italian interests and programmes as he who came next—Nitti.

He was and remains a personality that is the negation of any ideal of life and of manly conflict. He has a fairly good knowledge of finances. He is impudent in his assertions. He is intensely egocentric. He always wants to play the most important part in cabinets, whether he is president of the council or simply a minister.

His first act when he came into power was the granting of an amnesty. This amnesty was followed by two others. The first had a character of general principle and I approved it, but by granting the two others Nitti committed a great moral crime, for he abolished the difference between those who wore the ensigns of valor in sacrifice and those who had basely betrayed the nation during the war and even had gone over to the enemy!

All the work of Nitti was fish-bait for the approbation of the Socialists. He conceived the ambition of holding the presidency of a future Italian republic. His measures, which wore demagogic dress, did not prevent disorders or devastations sometimes brought about with the cost of lives. He never would face Bolshevism and the dissolutive forces in the open field. He had a decree issued and signed by the King establishing the price of bread; he had it withdrawn on the next day and replaced by another decree, also signed by His Majesty.

There was no point in the national life that he failed to bring up for discussion. All this puffed up the Socialists. They laughed in their sleeves as they foresaw a strong political success for them at the elections. The elections had to take place under the proportional system! The Socialists would become, through the election battle, masters of Italian political life!

It seemed to me that the season was our summer of torment and resolve.

In June, 1919, the Treaty of Peace with Germany was consummated at Versailles. The event for Europe was the end of a nightmare. The continual disillusionments, the reservations and the protests of Germany and the diatribes between the Allies constituted a permanent danger and a reason for anxiety for many nations. The conclusion of the treaty was therefore for them a liberation.

For Italy, on the contrary, it was a complete shattering of ideals. We had won the war; we were utterly defeated in the diplomatic battle. We were losing—except Zara—the whole of Dalmatia, our land by tradition and history, by manners and costumes, by the language spoken and by the ardent and constant aspirations of the Dalmatians toward the mother country. Fiume, most Italian of cities, was contested. The colonial problem was resolved for us in an absolutely negative way. To a nation like ours, powerful and prolific, that has a need of raw materials, of outlets, of markets and of land, on account of the exuberance of its population, only some insignificant rectifications of frontiers were granted when the glut of colonial spoil was passed around.

I could feel the discontent oozing down through our masses and infecting the _combattenti_ themselves. Once more Italy, who had thrown into the conflict men, means, patrimony and youth, went out of a peace settlement with empty hands and manifold disillusions.

The Nitti government, with its continuous note of pessimism, was doing no better than to describe our situation as near to bankruptcy, economic as well as political! Nitti himself, his newspapers and his acolytes, tried to make the Italian people believe that the Versailles Treaty was for us the best result obtainable. A sense of humiliation had crawled over our whole peninsula, but many there were who did not want to resign themselves to accept the tragic facts. No one knows better than I that many meditated, in sullen silence, most desperate actions.

The government was watching the turn of the psychological tide, while in the practical field it did not know what to do except to prepare and revise the mechanism of an election law by a vicious proportional system. In the field of destruction it reached an unbelievable decision to demobilize the aviation camps, and to cap the climax, in August, 1919, the report of the Commission of Inquiry on the painful episode of Caporetto was published.

I thought to myself, “This is fat on the fire!” The _Avanti_, a socialist newspaper that for the time being was published in three editions—one at Turin, one at Rome and one at Milan—had started a ferocious campaign against the army. On account of a strike of typographers, the _Avanti_ was the only newspaper published in Rome for two months! During street demonstrations, officers, merely because they were in uniform, were insulted and assaulted. Charity toward the dignity of the nation prevents my presentation of episodes that now make the worst blackguards blush. The few Fascist! that had accomplished an act of faith in March, 1919, now met in all their work enormous difficulties. They were isolated, attacked, spied upon, sometimes by the subversives, sometimes by the government.

Every day in the _Popolo d’Italia_ I wrote about the painful bath of fire of the _combattenti_, about the inflamed pride of the volunteers, about the necessity of concord, about the sordid hostility of the government that did not feel the beauty and the greatness of the sense of patriotic heroism. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet, who lived in Rome, wrote that his approbation “of my good shots was trembling with admiration.”

Victory was losing her laurel leaves every day in spite of all. The national parliament was discussing and approving the new election laws. Disorders and blackmailing of the government were on the daily calendar. The debates had a character of pettiness and gossip and the flavor of a base world that knew nothing of war, virtue or heroism.

“Elections! Elections! Elections!” thought I. “These constitute the only subject that is able to rise to its feet in the Italian parliament!”

Incidents had taken place at Fiume between Italians and French sailors, and the population of that city did not hide its growing hostility toward the Allies. The latter therefore planned to have the city garrisoned by a mixed corps of their troops. So Fiume, a city purely of virile Italian stamp, had a mosaic of troops. It was the summit of inefficiency and, what is more, of stupidity.

D’Annunzio, who was trembling in his solitude, told me that he contemplated with grim brooding the taking of Fiume by force. There was no other way of salvation. Everything seemed to be lost. There were only a handful of men with the poet. But they were the most trustworthy elements of our army. They were old volunteers. They were Fascists who felt once again in the incandescent atmosphere of the streets of Rome and other cities the poetry of the war and of the victory. They started, armed, from Ronchi.

The occupation of Fiume, at the moment when the English sailors were getting ready to evacuate it, was rapid and startling. The government, as soon as it knew the truth, wanted to rush to offset the raid. It meditated a blockade, it sent thunder against the rebels. But D’Annunzio and his legionaries, having prepared their action in silence, now threw down a gauntlet of audacious challenge to the Nittian triflings.

Gabriele d’Annunzio, before starting from Ronchi, wrote me the following letter:

_Dear Companion:_ The dice are on the table. To-morrow I shall take Fiume with force of arms. The God of Italy assist us!

I arise from bed with fever. But it is impossible to delay. Once more the spirit dominates the miserable flesh.

Sum up the article that the _Gazetta del Popolo_ will publish; give the end in full.

Sustain the cause without stint during the conflict.

I embrace you,

11 September, 1919. Gabrielle d’Annunzio.

The Italian atmosphere, so long checked and humiliated, exploded like Vesuvius after the announcement of the new D’Annunzio gesture. Again we heard the tune of high sentiments of fraternity and of enthusiasm. Again we felt the spirit of May, 1915. The best of our manhood felt the breath of poetry that came from this sacred liberation carried on in the face of the policy of the Nittian government.

The Fascisti were amongst the ardent legionaries of Fiume, while at home they were leading resistance against the defeatists, old and new. The Italian colonists all over the world—these colonists who had followed with anxiety and with unspeakable fright the negotiations of Versailles—sent money in great quantity for D’Annunzio’s expedition. Fiume felt an intuition of its salvation. There were manifestations of frantic enthusiasm. Audacity had repaired injustice; the city was strongly held, so that it could resist by force of arms and with courage all the Nittian or international interference.

The president of the council, Nitti, in parliament on this occasion, took an ignoble attitude. He summoned up the dangerous idea of protest by a general strike. By his ambiguous language he invited the classes which leaned toward socialism, and especially the Socialists and radicals themselves, to agitate for street demonstrations against D’Annunzio’s enterprise.

Nitti, after conversations with Trumbic, the Jugo-Slav minister, saw all his tangled and slimy net of humiliating understandings going to pieces through the will of a few brave boys.

Nitti thought and acted only as a consequence of physical fear. Attacked full front and exasperated in his mad and miserable dream, he plotted with every means to overcome the resistance of the Fiumean legionaries. The soldiers were declared deserters. The city was blockaded so that economic pressure would squeeze the spirit of the citizens. Parliament was closed and the elections were fixed for November 16, 1919, under the troublesome proportional system.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by Brown Brothers._ Commander Gabriele d’Annunzio. ]

The elections re-established, for a moment, an apparent truce. Every party wanted to measure the masses and the groupings. The Socialists, who were speculating on the misfortunes of the war and were pointing to the danger of another war due to the D’Annunzian enterprise, were the favorites. The Church, which in politics always has an ambiguous attitude, urged on the activity of the priests in the villages so that the Partito Popolare, which had been created originally by the lay Catholics, in service of the church policy, might play the preponderant part in parliament. The Liberals, Democrats and some radicals built up a block that passed under the name of the Forces of Order. They were changeable forces, without any ideal base and without precise aims. They were another grouping among groupings whose futilities I had observed for years.

I wanted the Fascisti to try alone the chance of the elections. We did not ally ourselves with any other party, even with the nearest to them—the Nationalists. The atmosphere was against us, but it was necessary to count our own heads. It was necessary to know, even through the means of elections, what point had been reached by the Italian nation in moral disintegration and in moral reawakening as a victorious nation. I created an electoral committee with little means, but with ample courage. I ordered meetings for the principal towns of Italy and especially in Milan.

I remember so vividly the meeting on the Piazza Beligioioso. How typical it was! The place was a lonesome corner of old Milan, where from a camion that was used for a tribune on a dark night, by the light of torches, I addressed a big, closely pressed crowd. They were people not only from Milan but from other towns. The Fascisti of Bologna, of Turin, of Rome and of Naples had in fact sent their representatives in order to have precise rules and sure orders for the impending electoral battle.

I made on this occasion some declarations of principles that still stand in the Fascist line. They have served me as a guide in all my political actions.

I said that revolutions were not to be denied _a priori_; that they might be discussed. I said that the Italian people could not copy Russian Bolshevism. We have in the history of our political struggles our own elements of greatness of concept. These have given to the spirit of the time all the strength of their Italian genius and the qualities of their Italian courage.

“If a revolution,” said I, “has to take place, it is necessary to make one typically Italian, on the magnificent dimensions of the ideas of Mazzini and with the spirit of Carlo Pisacane.”

I had already in my mind, clear and strong, the concept of complete rebellion against the decrepit old state that did not of itself know how to die.

The elections of the sixteenth of November took place and the Fascisti were beaten. I faced, and all of us faced, complete defeat. Not one of us had the necessary votes to become a member of parliament. Some Nationalists saved themselves in Rome and were later excellent interpreters of the national idea in the wallow of general bewilderment. At Milan, I was a long way off from the number of votes necessary to be elected. It was tragic, our record, but in the passage of time it is amusing and may be remembered by all losers.

Our uneasiness was now profound. The crowd was anti-Fascist. Under the skin of the population a sad illusion was being fed; in their minds a dark hope was stirring. The coming of Bolshevism! The plan for seizing the means of production, the installation of the soviets in Italy!

The _Avanti_ had already published the general scheme and its details. My defeat did not bother me out of any personal consideration. It gave me a clear and precise idea of the desperateness of our situation. The Socialist newspaper wrote on that occasion a short notice about me: “A dead body has been fished up from the Naviglio.” It was said in this note that in the night, in the modest Naviglio canal that cuts Milan in two, a dead body had been picked up. According to the documents they said it could be identified as the dead body of Benito Mussolini—his political corpse. They did not say that its eyes were gazing ahead.

Amidst the general feast of their victory the Socialists did not forget to imitate a regular funeral. This parade passed through the streets with a coffin, surrounded with burning candles. There were ribald psalms on the air. The strange procession, however, showed the distress and shoddiness of its ranks; it passed up and down the city of Milan—a city that had become now the absolute property of the Socialists. The procession passed under the windows of my house, where my family was living in anxiety amidst the general anxieties and with violence trembling in the air. I have not forgotten the episode, but I always see it in its frame—the frame of the misery and of the threadbareness of the paraders.

The elections had given 150 seats to the Socialists in parliament. They were themselves frightened by their staggering success. The situation was saved by the South of Italy—always more faithful to men than to organized mass parties.

The victory, of course, swelled up in most Socialists a desire to dominate. It distended their impudent abuse of power. Enormous processions with red flags, howling in the streets, strikes called not for protest but for celebration, occupied a whole week.

At Milan a crowd of 30,000 demanded that the red flag should be exposed on the Municipal building. During the cock-crowing over victory, all institutions, rules and regulations and orderly life were upset.

Nobody thought about work. That last of all! Only an audacious handful formed by Fascisti, _arditis_ and Fiumean elements resisted the intoxication. An incident was provoked because of this. Bombs were thrown, a few were killed and many wounded. A commission of Socialist members of parliament, headed by Filippo Turati, marched up the stairs of the Prefetura, the governor’s office of Milan, to claim my arrest and the arrest of the Fascisti chiefs.

That was an episode of political partisanship useless and evil. The authorities showed weakness and fear. They wanted to give satisfaction to the Socialists. But my clear and straight-lined political action did not suffer from this abuse of power. Having been let out after only one day of imprisonment, I consulted with my associates as to the whole work before us. What should we do now? How could we act before the damage to Italy became irreparable?

The electoral tragedy had broken up our central committees. Many of us had been arrested; many, threatened, had disappeared. Little by little, calm having been restored, I rewove at the _Popolo d’Italia_ the fabric of our cause and tried to build again the structure of our organization. In various meetings I explained the gravity of the Italian situation. I spoke independently of the particular attitude of the Fascisti.

The victory of the Socialists was a danger, not so much because of the fact itself as because of the phenomenal retreat to their holes of all the weak and the incapables which followed the day after the Socialist victory. That victory crushed the Liberals and the Democrats. For some time a low furtive literature of propaganda had spread stories about disquieting episodes in the defeated German and Austrian countries. This literature spun narratives about professors obliged to become servants and scullions, Russian princesses engaged as ballet dancers, generals who were selling matches on the streets. All this put together with the Socialist victory produced a wave of fright in all classes, and I could see a serious fact of corruption and political paralysis. The old parties had been beaten by pussyfoot socialism. That socialism had no aim. It was victorious only through cowardice in the others and because of the general uneasiness in the population. Certainly it did not win on any declaration of a great faith.

I did not fold under the smallest edge of my flag. From my editor’s office that was getting barer and barer, to my readers that were getting fewer and fewer, I addressed the most bitter and severe exhortations to resist, resist, resist.

I made a little fortress out of the editor’s office. The newspaper was sequestrated and censored every day; but notwithstanding difficulties and lack of means, I succeeded in keeping the little paper alive. I was throttled by the skinny hand of poverty. I could have sold out, but I held on.

So that I might be completely withdrawn from circulation, various messengers of the Nittian government came to me advising me to go and study the autonomous republics of Southern Russia. I understood the double game. They acted with me as they acted with D’Annunzio when they advised him to try the flight from Rome to Tokio. But D’Annunzio was now still resisting at Fiume, and I, with my newspaper, was renewing and reassembling the dispersed ranks of the Fascisti. I held meetings constantly. Not for a moment did I cease my activity. It cannot be said that I failed to look the triumphant beast in the face.

One day, just after the elections, I had to go personally because of postal regulations to the money-order window of the main post office in Milan. I was to receive some considerable contributions that Italians from oversea colonies were sending for the Fiume enterprise. In the huge buildings of the Central Post Office one could still see visible signs of the elections—the murmur of the discussions, the stenciled inscriptions on the walls were all there. I presented myself with my brother, Arnaldo, at the window of the money-order office.

The Bolshevik clerk, with evident irony, said I had to make myself known. He did not know any “certain Benito Mussolini.” A short discussion arose that attracted other Bolshevik elements, who amused themselves by affirming that nobody knew Benito Mussolini. The development of this discussion, impudently provoking, was stopped by an old clerk of the post office, a faithful servant of the state who certainly was not intoxicated by the Socialist success.

He said, “Pay this money transfer. Do not be silly. Mussolini has a name that is not only known now here but will be known and judged all over the world.”

I have never learned the name of this gentleman. He was straight and fair.

Some symptoms of reaction against the Socialist victory were to be noticed now. One day at the editor’s office of the newspaper, facing the anxieties of my associates and the doubts of some half-hearted ones in my service, I felt it necessary to disclose my own hopes and faiths:

“Don’t fear. Italy will heal herself from this illness. But without our watchfulness it might be deadly. We will resist! Resist! I should say so! Indeed, within two years I will have my turn!”