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The World Decision

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THE WORLD DECISION

BY

ROBERT HERRICK







CONTENTS


_PART ONE--ITALY_

I. ITALY HESITATES

II. THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

III. THE POET SPEAKS

IV. THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

V. ITALY DECIDES

VI. THE EVE OF THE WAR


_PART TWO--FRANCE_

I. THE FACE OF PARIS

II. THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

III. THE BARBARIAN

IV. THE GERMAN LESSON

V. THE FAITH OF THE FRENCH

VI. THE NEW FRANCE


_PART THREE--AMERICA_

I. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US?

II. THE CHOICE

III. PEACE




THE WORLD DECISION


PART ONE--ITALY


I


_Italy Hesitates_

Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"
of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict
censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining
with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was
known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army--boots and
food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhat
cynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war;
that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity to
concede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heard
much, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral until
the conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the best
opportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May:
"I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!"

The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a
tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in
America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when
suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision
and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her
"sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna,
there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war
preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance,
which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza having
prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a complete
misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motives
that led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close
range, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in a
declaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of the
matter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action was
complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simple
and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulses
stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to the
modern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of the
Teutonic danger. _"Fuori i barbari"_--out with the barbarians--has lain
in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a fresh
heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded France, by the Lusitania
murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a moving force
than this personal antagonism was the spiritual antagonism between the
Latin and the German, between the two visions of the world which the
German and the Latin imagine and seek to perpetuate. That in a large and
very real sense this world agony of war is the supreme struggle between
these two opposed traditions of civilization--a decision between two
competing forms of life--seems to me so obvious as to need no argument.
In such a struggle Italy must, by compulsion of historical tradition as
well as of political situation, take her part on the side of those who
from one angle or another are upholding with their lives the inheritance
of Rome against the pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty
against the dead weight of physical and material strength.

* * * * *

One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the atmosphere
of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight months became
evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less
vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually
seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and
spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the
line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer
resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready
money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life.
Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during
the last generation the German has established himself in all favorable
sites, were thick with signs of sale.

In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building,
cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there,
Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun
and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant
signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German
tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself.
And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton business.
Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton, the quays piled
with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It took a large
credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian wants.
Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the trainload.
Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff, was held
at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government decided to accept
the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legitimately
destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating England's perplexity
in the cotton business, especially with a nation that might any day become
an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany
through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this
delicate moment.

The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making
money out of Italy's neutrality, and _neutralista_ sentiment was
naturally strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt
they did their best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed
of their pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined
opposite me on the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his
class as well as any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But
first we must be ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted
almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great
conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a
curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable,
which the American finds so hard to understand.

* * * * *

And this was the prevailing note of Rome those early days of May--a
dull, passive acceptance of the dreaded fate which had been threatening
for so many months on the national horizon, ever since Austria plumped
her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid debates,
no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not much public
interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic
iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with its
terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament
and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting,
one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if more normal in its daily
life than Naples in spite of the absence of those tourists who gather
here at this season by the tens of thousands, was equally acquiescent
and on the surface uninterested in the event.

The explanation of this outward apathy in the public is simple: nobody
knew anything definite enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian
newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of news published
anywhere. The journals are all personal "organs," and anybody can know
whose "views" they are voicing. There was the "Messagero," subsidized by
the French and the English embassies, which emitted cheerful pro-Ally
paragraphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio," founded by the German
party, patently the mouthpiece of Teutonic diplomacy. There was the
"Giornale d'Italia" that spoke for the Vatican, and the "Idea Nazionale"
which voiced radical young Italy. And so on down the list. But there was
a perfectly applied censorship which suppressed all diplomatic leaks. So
one read with perfect confidence that Prince von Bülow had driven to the
Consulta at eleven-fifteen yesterday, and having been closeted with Baron
Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, or with the Premier, Signor
Salandra, or with both, for forty-seven minutes, had emerged upon the
street smiling. And shortly after this event Baron Macchio, the Austrian
Envoy, arrived at the Consulta in his motor-car and had spent within the
mystery of the Foreign Office twenty or more minutes. The reader might
insert any fatal interpretation he liked between the lines of this
chronicle. That was quite all the reality the Roman public, the people
of Italy, had to speculate upon during weeks of waiting, and for the most
part they waited quietly, patiently. For whatever the American prejudice
against the dangers of secret diplomacy may be, the European, especially
the Italian, idea is that all grave negotiations should be conducted
privately--that the diplomatic cake should be composed by experts in
retirement until it is ready for the baking. And the European public
is well trained in controlling its curiosities.

It was sufficiently astonishing to the American onlooker, however,
accustomed to flaming extras and the plethoric discussion in public of the
most intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness the acquiescence of
emotional Italians in this complete obscurity about their fate and that of
their children and their nation, which was being sorted behind the closed
doors of the Consulta. Every one seemed to go about his personal business
with an apparent calm, a shrug of expressive shoulders at the most,
signifying belief in the sureness of war--soon. There was little animation
in the cafés, practically none on the streets. Arragno's, usually buzzing
with political prophecy, had a depressing, provincial calm. Unoccupied
deputies sat in gloomy silence over their thin _consommations_. Even the
1st of May passed without that demonstration by the Socialists against war
so widely expected. To be sure, the Government had prudently packed Rome
and the northern cities with troops: soldiers were lurking in every old
courtyard, up all the narrow alleys, waiting for some hardy Socialist to
"demonstrate." But it was not the plentiful troops, not even a lively
thunderstorm that swept Rome all the afternoon, which discouraged the
Socialists: they too were in doubt and apathy. They were hesitating,
passing resolutions, defining themselves into fine segments of political
opinion--and waiting for Somebody to act! They too awaited the completion
of those endless discussions among the diplomats at the Consulta, at the
Ballplatz in Vienna, and wherever diplomacy is made in Berlin. The first
of May came and went, and the _carabinieri_, the secret police, the
infantry, the cavalry with their fierce hairy helmets filed off to their
barracks in a dripping dusk, dispirited, as if disappointed themselves
that nothing definite, even violence, had yet come out of the business. So
one caught a belated cab and scurried through the deserted streets to an
empty hotel on the Pincian, more than half convinced that the Government
meant really to do nothing except "negotiate" until the spirit of war had
died from the hearts of the people.

Yet much was going on beneath the surface. There were flashes to be
seen in broad daylight. The King and his ministers at the eleventh hour
decided not to attend the ceremonies at Quarto of the unveiling of the
monument to the Garibaldian "Thousand." Now, what could that mean? Did
it indicate that the King was not yet ready to choose his road and feared
to compromise himself by appearing in company with the Francophile poet
D'Annunzio, who was to give the address? It would be a hard matter to
explain to Berlin, to whose nostrils the poet was anathema. Or did it
mean literally that the negotiations with reluctant Austria had reached
that acute point which might not permit the absence of authority from Rome
even for twenty-four hours? The drifting, if it were drifting, was more
rapid, day by day.

There was a constant troop movement all over Italy, which could not be
disguised from anybody who went to a railroad station. Italy was not
"mobilizing," but that term in this year of war has come to have a
diplomatic insignificance. Every one knew that a large army had already
gone north toward the disputed frontier. More soldiers were going every
day, and more men of the younger sort were silently disappearing from
their ordinary occupations, as the way is in conscript countries. It was
all being done admirably, swiftly, quietly--no placards. The _carabinieri_
went from house to house and delivered verbal orders. But all this might
be a mere "preparation," an argument that could not be used diplomatically
at the Consulta, yet of vital force.

There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit of the Italian Ambassador
at Paris to Rome. Why had he taken that long journey home for such a
brief visit, consumed in conferences with the ministers? And Prince von
Bülow had rallied to his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger. Rome
was seething with rumor.

* * * * *

The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious
moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in
the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister
Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the
Government. They were honest,--that everybody admitted,--and they were
experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular
politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the
Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years
earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,--and concealed the bills. But
Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All
the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to
work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve
his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was
generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi
statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he
could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least
he was avowedly _neutralista_, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to
hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically,
with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige. A clever American,
long resident in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the political powers to
make his words significant, told me,--"The country does not know what it
wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he comes we shall know whether
there will be war!" That was May 9--a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in Rome
the same week--and we knew, but not as the political prophet thought....

Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thunder to come out of this
stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano
in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son
in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian _Granatieri_, ordinarily
stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little
hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their
attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent
street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses
and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile.
I read the word "_Socilismo_" scrawled in chalk over the walls and
half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk
scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were
against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not
want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the
fields.

Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war.
"We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before
the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the
North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national
doubt of Calabria, Sicily,--the weaker, less certain members of the
family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi,
which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also
the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few
weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and
more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government.
No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the
Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the _quid pro quo_ they
would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan
situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those
national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security
without jeopardizing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom of
patriots if ever in her history.

The Salandra Government kept admirable order during these dangerous
days, suppressing the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That was
the wise way, until they knew themselves which road to take and had
prepared the public mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occupied
somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of authority against popular
ebullitions is always a marvel to the American. To the European mind
government means power, and power is exercised practically, concretely,
not by writs of courts and sheriffs, but by armed troops. The Salandra
Government had the power, and apparently did not mean to have its hand
forced by the populace....

The young officer at Genzano had no doubt that war was coming, nor
had the handsome boy whom we at last ran to ground in an old Franciscan
convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise" his regiment had received "to
go first." His mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as he spoke,
but like a Latin mother she made no protest. If his country needed him,
if war had to be.... On our way back to Rome across the Campagna we saw a
huge silver fish swimming lazily in the misty blue sky--one of Italy's new
dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers everywhere in their new gray
linen clothes--tanned, boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows,
scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy. The night was broken
by the sound of marching feet, for troop movements were usually made at
night. The soldiers were going north by the trainload. Each day one saw
more of them in the streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio and
Prince von Bülow were as busy as ever at the Consulta on the Quirinal
Hill, and rumor said that at last they were offering real "compensations."

* * * * *

The shops of Rome, as those of every city and town in Europe, were
hung with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly
colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national
aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took
a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect
and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the
"Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist
map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under
German persuasion. The discrepancy between the two maps was obvious and
vast. On the bulletin boards there were many news items emanating from the
"unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste, chronicling riots and the severely
repressive measures taken by the Austrian masters. The little piazza in
front of the newspaper office was thronged from morning to night, and the
old woman in the kiosk beside the door did a large business in maps.

And yet this aspect of the Italian situation seems to me to have been
much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular
fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the
hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers--no
great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious
that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many
unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed Italians! No; it was
rather a high point of propaganda--as we should say commercially, a good
talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism,
which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The
American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite
seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naïveté, go
to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent and Trieste?

I am not attempting to write history. I am guessing like another,
seeking causes in a complex state of mind. We shall have to go back.
Secret diplomacy may be the inveterate habit of Europe, especially of
Italy. The new arrangement with the Allies has never been published,
probably never will be. One suspects that it was made, essentially, before
Italy had broken with Austria, before, perhaps, she had denounced her old
alliance on the 5th of May at Vienna. And yet, although inveterately
habituated to the mediaevalism of secret international arrangements, Italy
is enough filled with the spirit of modern democracy to break any treaty
that does not fulfill the will of the people. The Triple Alliance was
really doomed at its conception, because it was a trade made by a few
politicians and diplomats in secret and never known in its terms to the
people who were bound by it. Any strain would break such a bond. The
strain was always latent, but it became acute of late years, especially
when Austria thwarted Italy's move on Turkey--as Salandra revealed later
under the sting of Bethmann-Hollweg's taunts. It was badly strained,
virtually broken, when Austria without warning to Italy stabbed at Serbia.
Austria made a grave blunder there, in not observing the first term of the
Triple Alliance, by which she was bound to take her allies into
consultation. The insolence of the Austrian attitude was betrayed in the
disregard of this obligation: Italy evidently was too unimportant a factor
to be precise with. Italy might, then and there, the 1st of August, 1914,
very well have denounced the Alliance, and perhaps would have done so had
she been prepared for the consequences, had the Salandra Government been
then at the helm.

There is another coil to the affair, not generally recognized in America.
Austria in striking at Serbia was potentially aiming at a closer
envelopment of Italy along the Adriatic, provision for which had been made
in a special article of the Triple Alliance,--the seventh,--under which
she had bound herself to grant compensations to Italy for any disturbance
of the Balkan situation. Austria, when she was brought to recognize this
commission of fault,--which was not until December, 1914, not seriously
until the close of January, 1915,--pretended that her blow at Serbia was
chastisement, not occupation. But it is absurd to assume that having
chastised the little Balkan state she would leave it free and independent.
It is true that in January Austrian troops were no longer in Balkan
territory, but that was not due to intention or desire! They had been
there, they are there now, and they will be there as long as the Teutonic
arms prevail. It is a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as
Austria moved against Serbia. The response she must have known also, but
she had not the power to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on her
right under the seventh clause of the Triple Alliance to open negotiations
for "compensations" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans, and finally
with the assistance of Berlin compelled the reluctant Emperor to admit her
right.

These complexities of international chess, which the American mind
never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the
street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have
to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can
profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in shop windows,
as I studied them for hours in default of anything better to do in
the drifting days of early May. The maps will show at a glance that
Italy's northern frontiers are so ingeniously drawn--by her hereditary
enemy--that her head is virtually in chancery, as every Italian knows
and as the whole world has now realized after four months of patient
picking by Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks. And there
is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question
was not as important as it has since become. The east coast of the
Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might be left to the rude peoples
of Montenegro and Albania. But it has come into the world since then.
Add to this that the Italian shore of the Adriatic is notably without
good harbors and indefensible, and one has all the elements of the
strategic situation. All fears would be superfluous if Austria, the old
bully at the north, would keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well
enough for over thirty years. But would Austria play fair with an
unsympathetic ally that she had not taken into her confidence when
she determined to violate the first term of the Triple Alliance?

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