Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [192]
Then, at a given moment, as if an invisible baton had given the signal, the infernal symphony began. Squeaks, shrieks, whistles, grumbles, nearly human, and all the thinkable counterfeits of the wild pack’s howling made up the bulk of the sound wave; but a human, nay, a patriotic cry became distinguishable now and then and ruled the inarticulate mass with the rhythm of a brutal march. They said: “Croati no! Croati no!” meaning that they wanted no friendship with Croats or Yugoslavs; and they meant too that Bissolati was a Croat.35
Fiume above all came to stand for both the Italian nationalist program and the determination of Wilson to resist it. It was an unlikely place to have caused such a crisis. Not particularly beautiful or distinguished, Fiume was a busy little port that had acted before the war as Hungary’s outlet to the Adriatic. The population, as was so typical in central Europe, was mixed, with a small number of Hungarians, a prosperous Italian middle class and a largely Croat working class. In Fiume itself, Italians were in a slight majority but, if its suburbs of Sušak were added in, the Croats were. Before the war, the local Italians may have talked sentimentally of Italy and grumbled at the Hungarian authorities, but it was only in 1918 that reunification with the motherland became a real possibility. Gangs of young men calling themselves the giovani fiumani suddenly appeared in the cafés, demanding that their orchestras play the Italian national anthem every fifteen minutes and forcing all the customers to stand up. 36
Like so much of what was to happen in Fiume in the next two years, the events of that period at the end of the war became a matter of legend in Italy. Heroic volunteers—christened the Argonauts—braved Austrian gunfire, it was said, as they sped across the waters in fast boats to Venice to bring the Italian navy to Fiume’s rescue. The facts, as reported by the American ambassador, that five young men from Fiume had chugged across in a commandeered tugboat and that the Italian navy had fired on them by mistake, were conveniently ignored. The Italian military who now occupied Fiume under the armistice agreements were determined that it should remain Italian. Diplomatic negotiations were irrelevant, said an admiral; “such discussions were merely debates of diplomats and political men; . . . Fiume was Italian and would remain so; . . . no intermeddling could in any way damage Italian rights.” 37
There was a practical reason for Italy’s sudden attachment to Fiume. “It will be very difficult,” one of the Italian delegates in Paris explained frankly, “for us to keep up the commerce of Trieste unless we control Fiume and are able to divert its trade to Trieste.” It was as a symbol, though, that Fiume, “the jewel of the Adriatic,” was important to Italian nationalists. “Why they have set their hearts on a little town of 50,000 people, with little more than half of them Italians, is a mystery to me,” wrote House in his diary. In April 1919, when the uproar over Fiume was at its height, Orlando remarked pensively to House that it would have been better if Italy’s demands could have been settled right at the end of the war: “Fiume never would have been injected into the terms by the Italians.”38
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