The World Decision by Robert Herrick

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The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_
was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the
cities. The voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial idealism,
of patriotism, that glows in the hearts of all real Italians. He tied
their heroic past with the heroic opportunity of the present. And he
did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the "aspirations." Instead,
"This is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!"

The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of his advice to choose
the safe path, must have wondered, as too many Americans wondered,
how this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by his fine figures
of birds and sea! But there was a spirit abroad in Italy that would
not be appeased with "compensations": the poet had the following of
all "young Italy."

* * * * *

D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A whole week elapsed after the
_Sagra_ at Quarto, the 5th of May, before he reached Rome--a week of
growing tumult, of anti-Giolitti demonstrations, in which his glowing
words could sink like hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay
was well considered. If the poet had seized the occasion of Quarto, he
made his appearance on the larger scene after the interest of the whole
nation had been heightened by reading his address.

I was one of the immense throng that awaited the arrival of the train
bringing D'Annunzio to the capital. The great bare place before the
terminal station was packed with a patient crowd. The windows of the
massive buildings flanking the square were filled with faces. There
were faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the National Museum,
around the flamboyant fountain, up the avenues. There were soldiers
also, many of them, inside and outside of the station, to prevent any
excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which
the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed.
The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not
rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There
was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was
natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained
a "mob" as one might find in Berlin.

The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to
shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident
merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence
of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of
throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight
figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd
broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian
where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred
and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto
and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza
Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince
von Buelow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words
from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight
air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the
throng....

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the effect of what D'Annunzio
said. His words fell like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one,
with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity that made them vibrate
through the mass of humanity. They were filled with historical allusions
that any stranger must miss in part, but that touched the fibers of his
hearers. He seized, as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance of the
liberating Thousand and recounted the inspiring incidents of that day
fifty years and more ago. As I stood in that huge crowd listening to the
poet's words as they fell into the thirsty hearts of the people,--who
were weary with too much negotiation,--I realized as never before that
speech is given to man for more than reason. The words were not merely
beautiful in themselves: they flamed with passion and they touched into
flame that something of heroic passion in the hearts of all men which
makes them transcend themselves. The crowd sighed as if it saw visions,
and there rose instinctively in response the familiar strains of the
Garibaldian Hymn.

Italy had found its voice! The poet did not speak of "compensations,"
a little more of Trent and Trieste, of a more strategic frontier. He
stirred them with visions of their past and their future. He voiced
their scorns. "We are not, we will not be a museum, an inn, a picnic
ground, an horizon in Prussian blue for international honeymoons!...
Our genius calls us to put our imprint on the molten matter of the new
world.... Let there breathe once more in our heaven that air which flames
in the prodigious song of Dante in which he describes the flight of the
Roman eagle, of your eagle, citizens!... Italy is arming, not for the
burlesque, but for a serious combat.... _Viva, viva Roma_, without shame,
_viva_ the great and pure Italy!"

That was the voice which called Italy into the war: the will that
Italy should live "ever grander, ever purer, without shame." The poet
spoke to the Latin in the souls of his hearers.

* * * * *

He spoke again a number of times. In those feverish days when the
nation was in a ferment, the restless youth of Rome would rush in
crowds to the hotel on the Pincian and wait there patiently for their
poet to counsel them. He gratified their desire, not often, and each
time that he spoke he stung them to a fuller consciousness of will.
He spoke of the larger Italy to be, and they knew that he did not mean
an enlargement of boundaries. He spoke clearly, briefly, intensely.
It was once more the indubitable voice of the poet and prophet raised
in the land of great poetry.

D'Annunzio grew bolder. He recognized openly his antagonist--the traitor.
The most dramatic of his little speeches was at the Costanzi Theater
where a trivial operetta was being given, which was quickly swept into
the wings. After the uproar on his entrance had been somewhat stilled,
he spoke of Von Buelow and Giolitti and their efforts to thwart the will
of the nation.

"This betrayal is inspired, instigated, abetted by a foreigner. It is
committed by an Italian statesman, a member of the Italian Parliament
in collusion with this foreigner to debase, to enslave, to dishonor
Italy.".... _Traditore!_ I never thought to hear the word off the
operatic stage. From D'Annunzio's lips it fell like a wave of fire
upon that inflammable audience. A grizzled, well-dressed citizen
suddenly leaped to his feet, yelling,--"I will drink his blood, the
traitor.... Death to Giolitti!"....

While the big theater rocked and stormed with passion, outside on
the Via Viminale barricades were being hastily thrown up. The cavalry,
that had been sitting their mounts all day before Santa Maria Maggiore
guarding the unwelcome Giolitti from the angry mob, had charged the
packed street, sweeping it clear with the ugly sound of horses' hoofs
on pavement and cries of hunted men and women. That was the end. The
next morning, be it remembered, the politician sneaked away, and two
days afterwards the Salandra Government returned to power. Rome, all
Italy, became suddenly calm, purged of its passion, awaiting confidently
the reopening of Parliament.

The Government had won. The people had won. The poet had beaten the
politician. For his was the voice to which the great mass of his
countrymen responded.

* * * * *

D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord
when the citizens of Rome assembled in the Piazza del Popolo and in the
Campidolgio. The poet had made himself the spokesman of the new Italy
which had found itself in the storm of the past agonizing weeks, and as
such he was recognized by the Government. The King and the ministers
accorded him audiences; he was given a commission in the army and
attached to the general staff. Wherever he appeared he was received
with acclamations, with all the honor that is accorded the one who can
interpret nobly the soul of a nation. And the poet deserved all the
recognition which he received--the throngs, the flowers, the _vivas_,
the adoration of Italian youths. For he alone, one might say, raised
the crisis from the wallow of sordid bargaining, from the tawdriness
of sentiment, to a purer passion of Latin ambition and patriotism. He
loftily recalled to his countrymen the finer ideals of their past. He
made them feel themselves Latin, guardians of civilization, not traders
for safety and profit.

* * * * *

Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to say about D'Annunzio.
German sympathizers in America as well as the German Chancellor have
sneered at the influence wielded in Italy's crisis by a "decadent"
poet. Even among American lovers of Italy there has been skepticism
of the sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a man who "is
not nice to women." A peculiarly American view that hardly needs
comment!

Is it not wiser to assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really
the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest passion in the
poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed
the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger.
Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of
the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the
heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw
with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the
Allies were fighting for, was not territorial gains or glory or even
altogether selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply, for
the existence of a certain humanity. This world war he realized is no
local quarrel: it is the greatest of world decisions in the making.
And the man himself was transfigured by it: he found himself in his
greatest passion as Italy found herself at her greatest crisis. Latin
that he is, he divined the inner meaning of the confused issues presented
to the puzzled world. He was fired with the desire to light from his
inspiration his own hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the
call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For Italy, most Latin of all
the heirs of Rome, with her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not
a winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeeming of a few lost
Italians, but a fight for the world's best tradition against the forces
of death. Once more it was "_Fuori i barbari_," as it had been with her
Latin ancestors.

It seems to me no great mystery.

In the poet's writing there are passages of a large historical
understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in
knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition.
Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold
may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the
tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first
fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to
proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the
ardor of fighting in his own manner with his weapon of inspired words
the world battle? So it seemed to me as I listened to his voice in
the stillness of that May night. The voice of Roman glory, of ancient
ideals awoke an answering passion in the hearts of the thousands who
had gathered there. "_Una grande e pura Italia ... sensa onta_." And
it would be a lasting shame for Italy to keep out of the struggle
that the allied nations were making, to take her "compensations"
prudently and shrink back within a cowardly neutrality. Better any
other fate.

So it seemed to that throng of eager, soul-hungry Italians who stood
beneath the balcony of the hotel on the Pincian and drank the poet's
fiery message like a full-bodied wine. At last they had found
themselves.

IV

_The Piazza Speaks_

"The voice of the piazza prevailed," the German Chancellor sneered
in his denunciation of Italy at the conclusion. It can easily be
imagined, the picture he made to himself, in his ugly northern office
on Friedrichstrasse, of the influence that upset all German pressure
and sent Italy into the war on the side of the Allies; that defeated
the industry of the skilled ambassador, the will of the wily politician.
The Chancellor saw one of those large public squares in which Latin
countries abound, open centers in their close-built cities, where so
much of the common life of the people goes on, now as it has for hundreds
of years. For the piazza, descending in direct tradition from the ancient
Forum, is the public hall of citizens, where they trade, gossip, quarrel,
plot, love, and hate, from the crone sunning herself in a sheltered nook
over her bag of chestnuts to the grandee whose palace windows open above
the noisy commonalty. The Chancellor saw this common meeting-ground, this
glorified street, filled with a ragged mob of "the baser quality," as on
the operatic stage, emptily vocal or evilly skulking for mischief, like
the _mafia_, the _apache_. He saw this loose gathering of irresponsibles
suddenly stirred to evanescent passion against the real benefactors of
their country by the secret agents of the Allies, "corrupted by English
gold," in the mechanical melodrama of the German imagination, marching
to and fro, attacking the shops and homes of worthy Germans, howling and
stoning, by mere noise drowning the sober protests of reflecting citizens,
intimidating a weak king, connived at by a bought government, pushing a
whole nation into the bloody sacrifice of war out of mere recklessness of
rioting--a piazza filled with the rabble minority who have nothing to lose
because they neither fight nor pay.

* * * * *

Such a picture, reflected in Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase,
is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the
real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night,
and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German
Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations"
did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince
von Buelow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's
intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for
war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the
violence of what a third-class strike in an American mill town can
produce. Such as it was the Government showed the determination and
ability to keep it strictly within bounds. Rome was filled with troops.
Alleyways and courtyards oozed troops at the first shouts from the
piazza: the danger points of the Corso, especially the Piazza Colonna
on which the Chigi Palace, the residence of the Austrian Ambassador,
fronts, were kept almost constantly empty by cordons of troops. All
told, the destruction done by the mobs could not have amounted to
several hundred dollars--a few signs and shop windows smashed, a few
pavements torn up in the Via Viminale. It is true that after war was
declared upon Austria there was some pillage of Austrian and German
shops in Milan, which has been greatly exaggerated by the German and
pro-German press; it was nothing worse than what happened in Berlin
to English residents in August, 1914. And the Italian Government
immediately took severe measures with the officials who had permitted
the disorders--removing the prefect and the military commander of
Milan.

There is no saying, of course, what might have happened had the King
offered the premiership to Giolitti, and had that astute politician
been rash enough to accept the responsibility of forming a government
in accord with his own _neutralista_ sympathies. It is more than
likely that revolution would have ensued: possibly Italy would have
entered the war as a republic. For the Italians are not Greeks, as
has been amply proved. But the King of Italy, whatever his own
sympathies may have been, showed plainly that he had enough political
understanding not to run counter to the expressed will of his people,
to deal with the "traitor." After a week of tempestuous inter-regnum,
in which the piazza expressed itself passionately, the Salandra
Government returned to power with all which that implied in foreign
policy. Then the piazza became quiet. If the piazza must shoulder the
responsibility of Italy's decision, it must be credited with knowing
marvelously well its own mind.

* * * * *

The constitution of this "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at
many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets
when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I
waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while
the dense throng of men and women pressed into the great square and
swelled like a dark pool into the adjoining streets. And I followed
with the "piazza" in its instinctive rush to the hotel on the Pincian
Hill to hear the voice of its spokesman. Again I was in the Corso when
the plumed cavalry cleared the surging mass from the Piazza Venezia to
the Piazza Colonna. I heard the people yell, "Death to the traitor
Giolitti!" and "_Fuori i barbari!_" and sing Mameli's "L'Inno." I saw
the uproar melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman nights, leaving
the cavalry at their vigil before Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the
repose of Giovanni Giolitti.

I can testify that the "piazza" was composed very largely of perfectly
respectable folk like myself. It varied more or less as chance gatherings
of men will vary. Sometimes there were more workingmen in dirty clothes,
sometimes more youths and boys with their banners, sometimes more
shouters and fewer actors. But the core of it was always that same mass
of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day
goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago,--plain men,
rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of
affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and
to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex
emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the
depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally
shy bricks at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes, but not
"riff-raff," not anarchist, nor _mafia_, nor _apache_. Nothing of that
did I see those days and nights.

The greeting to D'Annunzio was made by men of the professional and
intellectual classes I should say, having wormed my way in and out
of that vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before the poet's
hotel were composed chiefly of youths, at school or college, others
in working dress. The noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs
was that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of D'Annunzio's appearance
there. They were citizens--and their wives--who could afford to pay
the not inconsiderable price charged--and seats were at a premium.
The men around me in evening dress, who were by no means silent, came
from the "classes" rather than the masses. The crowds that hung about
the Corso and the adjacent squares were more mixed, but they held a
goodly proportion of the frequenters of the Cafe Arragno. The worst
that could be said against these casual gatherings was their youth.
It is the way of youth to vent its passion in speech, to move and not
to stand. Middle age stood on the sidewalks and watched, sympathetically.
Old age looked down from the windows, contemplatively. But both old
age and middle age consorted with youth in the great meetings of
consecration in the Piazza del Popolo and the Campidolgio, after the
will of the people had prevailed. And after all, youth must fight the
wars, and pay for them for long years afterwards--why should it not
have its say in the making of them as well as middle age and old age?
The youths in the ranks of the patient, good-natured soldiers who did
_piquet a mato_ all day and half the night in the Roman streets during
that vocal week while the piazza spoke, were openly sympathetic with
the mobs they were holding down. I knew some of the gray-clad boys.
I strolled along the lines and saw the smiles, heard the chaffing
give-and-take of citizen and soldier as the mob tried to rush through
the double ranks that cordoned the streets. There was no hatred there,
no violent conflict with authority. Each understood the other. The young
officers seemed to say to the crowd,--"You may howl all you like, you
fellows, but you mustn't throw stones or make a mess.... What's the
good! War is coming anyway in a few days--they can't talk it away!"
And the crowd replied heartily,--"You are all right. We understand
each other. You are doing your duty. Soon you will be doing something
better worth while than policing streets and saving that traitor
Giolitti's skin from us. You will be chasing the Austrians out of
Italian territory, and many of us will be with you then!" And the
young officers looked the other way when the members of the "mob"
offered the tired soldiers cigarettes and chocolate, and sometimes
slipped through the cordon on private business within the forbidden
area. Only once, once only in all the excitement did the long-haired
horsemen clatter through the streets in a serious charge, scattering
the shrieking pedestrians. That was by way of warning, possibly as
much to the Government as to the populace.

Then the decision was made, and after the Salandra Ministry, in
whom the people had confidence, had returned to power, the ministry
that had broken with Austria and refused her grudging compromises,
the piazza purred like doves and listened to long patriotic speeches
from "representative citizens." No soldiers were needed to keep order
in these immense gatherings. For all were citizens, then, piazza and
palace alike in the face of war.

* * * * *

One easily understands the German Chancellor's scorn over any irregular
expression of public opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the
streets dares to vent any emotion or will other than that suggested to
it by a strong government, above all daring to voice it passionately.
In a nation such as Germany, where the franchise is so hedged about
that even those who have it cannot effectively express their wills,
where political opinion is supplied from a central fount of authority,
where the nation goes into war at the command of the Kaiser and his
military advisers, where a war of "defense" and all other national
interests are controlled by the "high commandment," consisting at the
most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of
the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the
popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order
of the "high commandment,"--now against this enemy, now against that
one,--first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of
Americans--it is natural that a high government functionary should
despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as
merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in
the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably
corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the
close organization of Germany, no political expression whatever: all
good citizens are instructed by a carefully controlled press how to
think and feel and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the glory of
the Latin temperament that it cannot be throttled and guided like the
more docile Teuton nature, that when it feels vividly it will express
itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in international
concerns. The Latin cannot be made to march in blind obedience into
the jaws of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy had come to
feel, that Teutonic domination would be intolerable, that at all cost
the Austro-German ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradition
vindicated and made to endure. It was proved by the marvelous content,
the fervid unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy, once the
great decision had been made.

* * * * *

Since those full May weeks the world has had an example of what no
doubt the Imperial Chancellor considers the suitable method of dealing
with popular sentiment. The sympathies of Greeks and Rumanians have
been, since the opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet
their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both countries from declaring
themselves in favor of the Allies. The King of Greece has stretched
the constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality, which, if it
were not for the failure of the Allies to make impressive gains in
the first year of the war, would have doubtless cost him his crown.
The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer
acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German
agents, more successfully than Prince von Buelow, has thus far kept the
people of Rumania and Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria
is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The
piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of
Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at
least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin,
against its best interest. But the thing had all been "arranged"
between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through
"negotiation." Germany had been successful in buying the cooeperation
of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of
Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked
to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the
piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other
words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud
that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of
rule in a constitutional state and executes the will of his people--who
listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of
the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke
at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German
arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were
not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote,
as German threats too plainly showed.

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