Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [184]
The nationalists had still more arguments. Italy could not leave scattered Italian communities to the mercies of the Slavs. The press carried alarming, and untrue, stories of Italian women and children being murdered in the cities of Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. “Yugoslav oppression cuts the throats of the Italian population in Dalmatia and terrorizes them.” Learned professors asserted that “what in Dalmatia is not Italian is barbaric!” The Italian military commander in Dalmatia was kinder: “This population is fundamentally good, good as simple and primitive people are. But the simple and primitive peoples are also extremely sensitive and suspicious and violent in their impulses.” Italy’s civilizing mission was clear. Italian newspapers ran photographs of local peasants going to church with the explanation that they were on their way to pay homage to the commander of the Italian forces, or of queues for food which, it was said, were Slavs lining up to demand that Italy stay.13
As 1918 came to an end, in Rome, Genoa and Naples enthusiastic crowds turned out on pro-Dalmatia days. The American ambassador believed that the government was behind the demonstrations. Sonnino said firmly, the ambassador reported, that Italy must put its safety in the Adriatic above all else and that meant controlling territory, not protection by a League of Nations. “Even the police required that people whom they protected should shut their doors in the evening so as at least to keep out intruders until the police could be summoned.” Sonnino, like Orlando, thought Wilson’s ideas foolish. “Is it possible to change the world from a room, through the actions of some diplomats? Go to the Balkans and try an experiment with the Fourteen Points.” 14
The Italian government did its best to bring its allies around to its way of thinking. In London in December 1918, Orlando told the British and the French that the Yugoslavs were carrying out “a veritable persecution” of Italians; Italian soldiers were being attacked, Italian women molested for wearing the Italian colors. He was firmly opposed to recognizing the new Yugoslav state. Britain and France reluctantly acquiesced. They felt obliged to respect the Treaty of London, but they did so resentfully. As Robert Cecil wrote to Britain’s ambassador in Italy, “the fact is that the greediness of Italian foreign policy in all directions is leading Italy into serious difficulties. . . . The Yugoslavs have claimed far more than is their just due, but Sonnino’s stubbornness and the extravagant nature of Italy’s claims have had as a result that it is now literally true that Italy has not a friend in Europe except ourselves, and she is doing her best to make her isolation complete.”15
That left the Americans. Wilson may have been shaky on some of the details of Italy’s claims (apparently he thought at first that Trieste was a German city), but he knew where he stood on principles. He had made it clear that the United States was not bound by secret agreements. (The American president had been shown the Treaty of London during the war, although he later persuaded himself that he had never seen it.) His legal experts argued, and he agreed, that when Italy had sought armistices with the Central Powers on the basis of the Fourteen Points, it had implicitly accepted that these superseded the