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By Root 1084 0

fastens itself to trivial objects. In Italy in 1919 it also received a prod from an extraordinary figure—Gabriele D’Annunzio— who made Fiume his cause. He was short, bald, ugly and immensely charming. When he spoke to crowds, his oratory wove them into a single obedient mass. “Will you sacrifice your lives?” he would ask, and they would shout back “Yes!” That was what he expected. He was a leader, a duce before Mussolini; a superman, in the words of Nietzsche, with whom of course he agreed. D’Annunzio was also a great poet, playwright and filmmaker. His physical courage, his contempt for ordinary politicians and his devout nationalism spoke to his countrymen. His flouting of convention, his sense of drama and his passionate love affairs made him a romantic hero throughout Europe. Even at sixteen, when to sell his first book of verse he started the rumor that he was dead, he understood publicity. His life fed the legend: his mistress, the actress Eleonora Duse, waiting on the shore with a great purple robe as he emerged naked from his evening swim; the study, cluttered with beautiful and exotic objects, where the artist held his séances; the sudden flights from his creditors.

When Italy entered the war, D’Annunzio, then fifty-two, joined a cavalry regiment. He fought, however, where and as he pleased, at the front, in submarines and in the air. (He also took leave whenever it suited him.) He lost an eye but won medals for bravery. His most celebrated exploit came in August 1918, when he swooped over Vienna in his plane, filling the skies with leaflets in the Italian colors calling on Austria to surrender. In a war with few individual heroes, he stood out. Italy needed heroes.

D’Annunzio took up Italy’s claims with enthusiasm. It was he who coined the phrase “the mutilated victory” and in January 1919 he published an inflammatory “Letter to the Dalmatians” in Mussolini’s newspaper. The letter castigated the Allies, the “enfeebling transatlantic purgatives offered by Dr. Wilson” and the “transalpine surgery of Dr. Clemenceau,” and boasted of Italy’s valor during the war. “And what peace will in the end be imposed on us, poor little ones of Christ? A Gallic peace? A British peace? A star-spangled peace? Then no! Enough. Victorious Italy—the most victorious of all the nations—victorious over herself and over the enemy—will have on the Alps and over her sea the Pax Romana, the sole peace that is fitting.”39 (Although his writings were on the Vatican’s Index, D’Annunzio reveled in Catholic imagery.)

While the clamor for Fiume and the rest of Italy’s demands in the Adriatic mounted in Italy, the Peace Conference was preoccupied with other matters. Between February 14 and March 14, Wilson was back in the United States. Orlando too went home, where he made a bland speech to the Italian parliament that gave the impression that all was well in Paris. (When he mentioned Fiume, his audience rose to their feet with a cry of “Viva Fiume!”40) It was not until April, when tensions were still running high over the German terms, that the peacemakers got down to dealing with the borders between Italy and Yugoslavia.

At a meeting of the Council of Four on April 3, Lloyd George asked the Italians to explain their position on the Adriatic. Orlando did so at great length with the familiar arguments. He rejected a proposal to make Fiume a free state under the League of Nations. When the Yugoslavs were invited to present their views that afternoon, Orlando said stiffly that he would not attend because he did not care to deal with enemy nations. Over the next weeks, a series of private meetings between the Italians and their allies produced little but bad feeling. Rumors circulated that Orlando was thinking of walking out of the Peace Conference. On April 13, as the Council of Four tried to decide when to invite the German delegates to come to Paris, Orlando demanded that the Italian questions be settled first. “Italian public opinion is very excitable. I am doing what I can to calm it; but the consequences of a disappointment of this kind would