Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [199]
It was an appalling and embarrassing situation for the Italian government, which desperately tried to find a resolution that did not further enrage either nationalist opinion at home or its allies abroad. Nitti tried to starve D’Annunzio out by putting an embargo on Fiume, though the terms allowed the Italian Red Cross to bring in basic supplies.66 Mussolini watched and waited.
Discussions with Italy’s allies produced ever more complex proposals but little else. From Washington, Wilson firmly ruled out any solution that gave Italy control of Fiume. Lloyd George pointed out acerbically that the United States was still trying to crack the whip in Europe but refusing to take any responsibility. Britain and France hesitated to put too much pressure on Italy. “There you have a country,” said Clemenceau to Lloyd George, “where the King counts for nothing, where the army does not obey orders, where you have 180 Socialists on one side, & 120 men belonging to the Pope on the other!”67
Finally, in November 1920, Italy and Yugoslavia managed against all odds to reach an agreement. A new Italian government (Nitti had fallen in June) under the tough old realist Giovanni Giolitti wanted to restore order at home and extricate the country from damaging foreign adventures. Italy pulled its troops out of Albania, which helped to ease tensions with the Yugoslavs. For its part, the government in Belgrade badly needed to revive Yugoslavia’s trade, something that could not be done as long as the Italians were being obstructive in the Adriatic ports. When the November presidential elections in the United States put a Republican into the White House, the Yugoslavs gave up any hope of a miraculous intervention by the Americans.68 Shortly thereafter, Italian and Yugoslav delegates met at Rapallo and an astonished world learned that a treaty had been drawn up which settled the frontiers between their two countries. Italy gained virtually the whole of the Istrian peninsula, Zadar (the only town with an Italian majority on the Dalmatian coast) and a few small and insignificant islands in the Adriatic. Yugoslavia got the rest, while Fiume became a free state linked to Italy by a strip of land.
Many Italian nationalists, including Mussolini, saw the treaty as a triumph because it had, after all, kept Fiume out of Slav hands. In Yugoslavia, Croats and Slovenes complained that yet again their interests had been sacrificed by the Serbs. In Fiume itself, D’Annunzio withdrew into an embittered seclusion from which he emerged at intervals to insist that he would die rather than leave. On December 1, 1920, he declared war on Italy. The Italian military were finally stirred to action. On Christmas Eve their guns opened fire. When a shell narrowly missed him, D’Annunzio hastily negotiated a surrender, denounced the Italian people for their cowardice and “Christmas gluttony” and slunk back to Italy.69
Two years later, Mussolini showed how well he had learned the lessons of Fiume. He marched on Rome, and Italian democracy, weakened by the war and by the widespread disappointment with the “mutilated victory,” gave way with scarcely a murmur. In January 1924, Mussolini annexed Fiume to Italy; in 1940, he did his best to wipe the hated Yugoslavia off the map. In 1945, the lines moved again and most of Istria, with the exception of Trieste, went to the reconstituted Yugoslavia. Some 300,000 Italians fled west into Italy. Fiume is now Rijeka and only the older generation still remember any Italian.
D’Annunzio lived on in his usual style at state expense. He was, the new duce complained, like a rotten tooth which had to be yanked out or plugged with gold. He played little further role in public life, preferring life on his estate with his magic,