Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [191]
Disturbing stories, however, were reaching Paris: tales of deportations of Slav nationalists, of arbitrary arrests, of Slav newspapers closed down and Yugoslav railway lines cut. A British officer sent a furious note to Balfour: “Dalmatia was being starved and the Italians only supplied food to those who signed a declaration of loyalty to Italy.” Hoover, in charge of the Allied relief effort, reported that the Italian authorities were holding up food shipments in Trieste and that on February 22 they had suddenly stopped all communications to the interior. “This not only isolates the Jugo-Slavs but cuts off the principal railway into Austria and CzechoSlovakia.” Wilson agreed with Hoover’s conclusion that “the stoppage of American foodstuffs to starving people cannot be used as a political weapon” and accepted his recommendation that the United States retaliate by withholding aid to Italy. The issue poisoned Italian-American relations for the rest of the Peace Conference.31
Initially the Americans, with support from the British and French, encouraged Italy and Yugoslavia to work out their own border. The Yugoslavs were more than willing, they said, to compromise. Perhaps Wilson could arbitrate any areas of disagreement. The Italian delegation was appalled. Orlando confided to an American that “though the Southern Slav proposal embarrassed him horribly, he could not find a good reason for refusing it.” In an interview with Wilson, he “moaned and wept, said that the Southern Slavs had taken him by the throat, but finally promised to give a reply as soon as he had been able to consult the King and his colleagues in Rome.” When Wilson was on his way back to the United States in February, the Italians rejected his arbitration, claiming that they had done so only because the Yugoslavs, “in a brutal manner,” had published the proposal prematurely. 32
It was clear from the moment the Peace Conference opened that the Italians were in no mood to compromise with the Yugoslavs or anyone else. They refused to let anything affecting Italy’s borders go to committees of experts. Clemenceau complained after a meeting in March: “This afternoon Orlando inflicted on us an interminable discourse to lay out Italy’s demands and to indicate which frontiers he thought were necessary and just.” And then “we had to submit to a second speech, no less boring from Sonnino.” The covenant of the League of Nations and the German peace terms were worked out with scarcely a murmur from the Italians. (Orlando later argued, unconvincingly, that this was because Italy felt excluded. 33)
Italy’s tactics were irritating, transparent and frequently inept. It opposed Yugoslavia’s claims to territory from Bulgaria and Hungary and supported Rumania over the Banat. It sold arms to Hungary, and even signed a secret agreement with the government of the despised Béla Kun. Foolishly, Sonnino pushed Greece closer to Yugoslavia by refusing to consider Greek claims in Albania and by trying to hang on to the predominantly Greek Dodecanese islands along the coast of Asia Minor, which it had been occupying since the end of the Balkan wars. Sonnino petulantly refused to receive Venizelos when the Greek prime minister asked for an appointment. On committees the Italians were invariably anti-Yugoslav and doggedly uncooperative. If pressed, they usually claimed that their government had not given them instructions. Eyre Crowe from the British Foreign Office remonstrated with an Italian diplomat, who said merely, “You would not talk to us alone when we came to London in December, and you will not talk to us or make arrangements with us in Paris, and consequently we are not going to express any opinions on these questions.”34
When the Italian demands finally came up for decision in April, the other powers were markedly less sympathetic. Bismarck’s famous remark that Italy’s appetite was invariably bigger than its teeth was quoted appreciatively. “The Italians,” wrote Balfour wearily, “must somehow be mollified, and the only question is how to