PARIS 1919 (51 page)
The Italian government was not prepared to do so. Public opinion in Italy would have made it difficult. While liberals, faithful to the spirit of the great Giuseppe Mazzini, had hoped for the liberation of oppressed peoples, especially those under the tyranny of Italy's own former oppressor, most Italians saw the Croats and Slovenes as enemies who had fought loyally for Austria-Hungary and would probably do so again given the chance. When Italian forces moved in to occupy Croatia and Slovenia at the end of the war, they acted more as conquerors than as liberators. And were the Serbs any more trustworthy? General Pietro Badoglio, second-in-command of the Italian army, warned his government that the Croats and Slovenes, who were cleverer than the Serbs, would end up dominating them. Consequently he drew up an elaborate plan, which Sonnino and Orlando approved in December 1918, to destroy Yugoslavia and cement Italian control over the eastern side of the Adriatic by stirring up conflict among the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and between peasants and their landlords. In Bosnia, Badoglio suggested, religious divisions could be used. He already had agents in place. Even ordinary Italian soldiers could do their bit by seducing the “susceptible” local women.
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The Italian navy had much the same attitude. It was furious when the Habsburg emperor, in one of his last acts, turned over his Adriatic navy and the huge naval base at Pula (Italian: Pola) to a provisional Yugoslav committee. The following day an Italian torpedo boat darted into Pula and sank the dreadnought
Viribus Unitis,
the pride of the Austrian navy, killing its Yugoslav captain and crew. After strenuous Italian objections, the remainder of the fleet was surrendered to the Allies, and Italian forces occupied Pula. The next months saw increasing friction between the Italian navy and the Allies, especially the Americans, over the Italian treatment of the local Slavs. The Italians defended themselves in a lengthy memorandum which argued that nature had played a cruel trick on Italy; while the western side of the Adriatic had few harbors and no natural defenses, “a wonderful advanced barrier of reefs and islands” protected the other side. “On the east, the sea is clear and deep and mines can be used with difficulty; on the west, the waters are muddy and shallow and seem made on purpose to favour the terribly insidious work of submarine weapons.” It was quite simply a necessity for Italy to get that territory on the eastern side.
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The nationalists had still more arguments. Italy could not leave scattered Italian communities to the mercies of the Slavs. The press carried alarming, and untrue, stories of Italian women and children being murdered in the cities of Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. “Yugoslav oppression cuts the throats of the Italian population in Dalmatia and terrorizes them.” Learned professors asserted that “what in Dalmatia is not Italian is barbaric!” The Italian military commander in Dalmatia was kinder: “This population is fundamentally good, good as simple and primitive people are. But the simple and primitive peoples are also extremely sensitive and suspicious and violent in their impulses.” Italy's civilizing mission was clear. Italian newspapers ran photographs of local peasants going to church with the explanation that they were on their way to pay homage to the commander of the Italian forces, or of queues for food which, it was said, were Slavs lining up to demand that Italy stay.
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As 1918 came to an end, in Rome, Genoa and Naples enthusiastic crowds turned out on pro-Dalmatia days. The American ambassador believed that the government was behind the demonstrations. Sonnino said firmly, the ambassador reported, that Italy must put its safety in the Adriatic above all else and that meant controlling territory, not protection by a League of Nations. “Even the police required that people whom they protected should shut their doors in the evening so as at least to keep out intruders until the police could be summoned.” Sonnino, like Orlando, thought Wilson's ideas foolish. “Is it possible to change the world from a room, through the actions of some diplomats? Go to the Balkans and try an experiment with the Fourteen Points.”
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The Italian government did its best to bring its allies around to its way of thinking. In London in December 1918, Orlando told the British and the French that the Yugoslavs were carrying out “a veritable persecution” of Italians; Italian soldiers were being attacked, Italian women molested for wearing the Italian colors. He was firmly opposed to recognizing the new Yugoslav state. Britain and France reluctantly acquiesced. They felt obliged to respect the Treaty of London, but they did so resentfully. As Robert Cecil wrote to Britain's ambassador in Italy, “the fact is that the greediness of Italian foreign policy in all directions is leading Italy into serious difficulties. . . . The Yugoslavs have claimed far more than is their just due, but Sonnino's stubbornness and the extravagant nature of Italy's claims have had as a result that it is now literally true that Italy has not a friend in Europe except ourselves, and she is doing her best to make her isolation complete.”
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That left the Americans. Wilson may have been shaky on some of the details of Italy's claims (apparently he thought at first that Trieste was a German city), but he knew where he stood on principles. He had made it clear that the United States was not bound by secret agreements. (The American president had been shown the Treaty of London during the war, although he later persuaded himself that he had never seen it.) His legal experts argued, and he agreed, that when Italy had sought armistices with the Central Powers on the basis of the Fourteen Points, it had implicitly accepted that these superseded the Treaty of London. The Fourteen Points had promised that “a readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” That would give Italy part of what it wanted on its northeast frontier but not much of Istria and none of Dalmatia. In the armistice negotiations, Orlando tried unsuccessfully to get on record an Italian reservation to the effect that Italy's frontiers must also take into account security needs. The Italians later claimed that their reservation had been noted; the Americans insisted that it had not.
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Orlando and Sonnino nevertheless awaited Wilson's arrival in Europe with considerable optimism. House encouraged them to think of the United States as a friend and, as Wilson's representative, he allowed the armistice with Austria-Hungary to be drawn up in such a way that Italian troops would be occupying all the territory promised under the Treaty of London. He advised Sonnino on negotiating techniques. If Italy waited to present its demands until Britain and France had gained what they wanted, it would be hard for the Peace Conference to refuse. “I did this,” House confided to his diary, “in a spirit of sheer devilry. I shall enjoy being present when Sonnino and Orlando make their argument based upon the British and French claims.” The Italians were also receiving misleading advice from Baron Macchi di Cellere, their ambassador in Washington, a man with an extraordinary capacity to ignore the facts, who assured them that Wilson was sympathetic to Italy and its aims. “A good man,” Orlando admitted, “but absolutely inferior to the task and . . . the reason why we Italians went to the Conference in complete ignorance of Wilson's real sentiments.” The American ambassador in Rome reported, “Baron Sonnino knows about America so little that it might almost be termed nothing and I do not believe that he is greatly in accord with what is our master motive.”
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Wilson was inclined to be suspicious of the Italians, who, as he saw it, had gone into the war in a spirit of “cold-blooded calculation.” One of the first things he did on arriving in Paris in December 1918 was to send for a copy of the Treaty of London. He met Sonnino and Orlando for the first time a few days before Christmas and had a long discussion of Italy's claims in the Adriatic. The Italians thought the meeting went well. The British ambassador, who talked to Wilson the following day, had a different impression: “He is very anti-Italian. . . . He was sick to death of Orlando and Sonnino and all their ways and he particularly did not want to have any conversation with them.” With the delay in starting the Peace Conference, Wilson agreed to pay a state visit to Rome. This, sadly, only deepened the misunderstandings.
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He was received by enormous and enthusiastic crowds. “I had the impression of finding myself among real friends,” Wilson observed. He concluded, mistakenly, that the people of Italy were behind his program. “The President said,” reported his doctor, “that he felt the people of the country were primarily interested in bringing about a peace which would insure them against another war, such as they had just gone through. He felt that they had hit upon the league of nations idea as the means to the end desired.” Four months later, when his relations with the Italian government were at their worst, he was to appeal directly to the Italian people.
For his part, Orlando persisted in his optimism. “I believe in Wilson and his ideas,” he cheerfully told a friend. “I accept Wilsonianism in as much as it includes the rights and the interests of Italy.” Sonnino was more suspicious. Wilson returned the feeling; Sonnino was, he concluded, “as slippery as an eel or an Italian.” On January 13, Wilson informed Orlando that he had decided the Treaty of London was no longer valid. There the matter stood for some weeks, while the Supreme Council busied itself with the League of Nations and such difficult issues as whether the Bolsheviks should be invited to Paris.
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The Italian delegation settled in to the luxurious Hôtel Edward VII, near the Opéra. Only one delegate had been allowed to bring his wife, perhaps because he was very recently married. There was one telephone, and delegates needed Orlando's permission to use it. The delegation itself mirrored the political divisions in the government. “A little bit of Rome transported to Paris with all its attendant faults, alas” was the way one of the younger members described it. “Lack of organization, a prevalence of parliamentary alchemy (present and future) in the choice of staff, gossip and backbiting.”
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It was not, it was widely agreed, a strong or effective delegation. As Macchi di Cellere, now brought over from Washington to lend his dubious assistance, explained grandly to an American, “Italy has no propaganda of her own; she is too old a country and too proud a race.” Few of its members developed the informal contacts with other delegations that the British and the Americans did. Among the delegation's leaders, Antonio Salandra, a former prime minister, worried mainly about his health, while Orlando was affable but distracted. Sonnino remained aloof and secretive, guarding information even when it might have helped his fellow delegates. In his spare time he went for solitary walks. He refused to lobby on Italy's behalf: “To resort to such methods would be to sink to the level of the small nations which went around begging territory from world opinion.” His relations with Orlando worsened as the months went on. There were furious scenes in which the normally controlled Sonnino went purple with rage.
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Divided among themselves, the Italians were also mistrustful of their allies. “They considered,” said a British diplomat, “they were not being treated as equals by the other Powers; they were attacked and criticized on all sides; they were told what was good for them, but not taken into real discussions.” Wilson, sniffed Sonnino, was a
specie di clergyman,
the United States, in Macchi di Cellere's word, a “usurer” which wanted to dictate the peace. Toward the end of January, Wickham Steed reported that Wilson had had “a stormy interview” with Sonnino, “who seems to have lost his temper and to have gone to the length of telling Wilson not to meddle in European affairs but to stick to his American last.”
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Among the Europeans, the Italians got on best with the British. Orlando admired Lloyd George: “His Celtic blood made him like us Mediterraneans in cleverness.” And there was little to divide their two countries. That was not the case with France. Italy owed its unification to France, but there was a feeling that France had exacted a high price when it took Nice and Savoy. Both countries aspired to be Mediterranean powers, and before the war they had clashed over Tunisia and Morocco. Italy had joined the Triple Alliance partly to find allies against France. As for those measurements which so preoccupied the world's statesmen, Italy lagged behind France in steel, coal and population production.
1. Woodrow Wilson's triumphal arrival in Paris before the start of the Peace Conference. His promise to establish a League of Nations to end war and to allow self-determination for nations raised tremendous expectations in Europe and farther afield, but disillusionment soon followed.
