Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [197]
Behind the scenes both the Italian government and the Allies were looking for a way for Italy to come back. The Italians were shaken that the other powers seemed prepared to carry on without them. Clemenceau added pressure when he announced that the Austrian delegates had been invited to come to Paris by the middle of May. The members of the Italian delegation who remained in Paris sent Orlando urgent warnings that Italy’s position was deteriorating rapidly. The United States was holding up a badly needed credit of $25 million. Britain and France were saying his withdrawal freed them from their obligation to respect the Treaty of London. They had gone ahead and divided up the African colonies. Only Lloyd George was hinting at a possible compromise.57
On May 5, the Italians announced that Orlando and Sonnino were returning. “Orlando looks very white and worn and says very little and without much pep,” reported the American Seymour. “He looks ten years older. Sonnino is unchanged in appearance and preserves some truculence of manner, but is not aggressive.”58 The secretariat set about adding the words “Italy” and “Italian” by hand to the German terms.
The issue that had caused the rupture was still, however, a long way from being settled. Wilson was cool to any further negotiations with the Italians. “It is curious,” he said, “how utterly incapable these Italians are of taking any position on principle & sticking to it.” One faint hope, which House promoted, was that the Italians and the Yugoslavs might cut through the difficulties by dealing directly with each other. On May 16, the two sides came to House’s suite at the Crillon, and, in a type of negotiation that became commonplace in the 1990s, sat in separate rooms while the Americans dashed back and forth between them. When Clemenceau asked Orlando the next day what had happened, his answer was gloomy: “Nothing. It is impossible.” The fact that House was trying to bridge the Italian and American positions may have contributed to Wilson’s growing antipathy to his old friend.59
The main part of the Peace Conference wound down in an atmosphere of mutual irritation. Wilson inveighed to Baker about the greedy Italians. The French complained that Italy was now trying to take over Austrian railways that French money had paid for. Clemenceau shouted: “France will resent it. She will not forget it. I don’t expect fairness from you.” When several French soldiers were lynched by nationalist mobs in Fiume, he loudly denounced the “peuple d’assassins” at the Council of Four. The Italians reserved their main venom for Wilson. When an assistant remarked to Sonnino, “Wilson seems affable this morning,” his superior replied, “Who knows what new offers, what new blackmail have been contrived?” Orlando had become convinced, he said in his memoirs, that “Wilson had his own personal engagement with the Yugoslavs; what it was I don’t know but there it was.” The Italian press carried stories that Wilson had been bribed by the Yugoslavs or that he had a Yugoslav mistress. Sonnino and others believed rather that he was in the grip of American financial interests who wanted to develop the Adriatic for themselves, perhaps using the Red Cross as their cover.60
Before Wilson finally left for home at the end of June after signing the Versailles treaty, the Italians backed down very slightly by not insisting on quite all the territory promised them by the Treaty of London. But on Fiume they were as obstinate as before. Orlando and Sonnino were playing a dangerous game. Their main opponent, Wilson, would probably be out of office in eighteen months. On the other hand, Italian democracy might not last that long. As Orlando told Lloyd George, “I must have a solution. Otherwise I will have a crisis in parliament or in the streets in Italy.