PARIS 1919 (55 page)

Wilson was prepared to accept an injustice to the Germans of the Tyrol but he would not accept Italy's claims where they ran up against those of the Yugoslavs. Outside the cities, the population along the eastern side of the Adriatic was almost entirely Slav: about 750,000 Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bosnians. Nevertheless, the Italians wanted to move the old border with Austria-Hungary between fifty and one hundred kilometers east into what is today Slovenia and Croatia, and south down the Dalmatian coast toward Split (Italian: Spalato). The result would take in the whole of the Istrian peninsula, including the naval base at Pula and Austria-Hungary's two major ports of Trieste and Fiume, with their railway links to central Europe; several key islands at the northeast end of the Adriatic; and chunks of Dalmatia around the cities of Zadar (Italian: Zara) and Šibenik (Italian: Sebenico). Italy also wanted Albania's port of Vlorë in the south. With these gains, Italy would dominate the Adriatic, and the new state of Yugoslavia would be left with a short coast, no decent port and only one railway line between the sea and the interior. This was precisely what Italy intended.

The Italians did not, of course, use that argument in Paris. They talked of strategic needs and they called on history. “The whole of Dalmatia was united to Italy in the centuries of Rome and Venice, for its own good fortune and the world's peace.” They pointed to the Venetian lions, the Catholic churches, the Roman columns dotting the piazzas along the coast, the persistence of the Italian language despite Austrian oppression. They talked of the fearful injustice if Italians were made subject to “semi-barbaric” Slavs.
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Disturbing stories, however, were reaching Paris: tales of deportations of Slav nationalists, of arbitrary arrests, of Slav newspapers closed down and Yugoslav railway lines cut. A British officer sent a furious note to Balfour: “Dalmatia was being starved and the Italians only supplied food to those who signed a declaration of loyalty to Italy.” Hoover, in charge of the Allied relief effort, reported that the Italian authorities were holding up food shipments in Trieste and that on February 22 they had suddenly stopped all communications to the interior. “This not only isolates the Jugo-Slavs but cuts off the principal railway into Austria and CzechoSlovakia.” Wilson agreed with Hoover's conclusion that “the stoppage of American foodstuffs to starving people cannot be used as a political weapon” and accepted his recommendation that the United States retaliate by withholding aid to Italy. The issue poisoned Italian-American relations for the rest of the Peace Conference.
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Initially the Americans, with support from the British and French, encouraged Italy and Yugoslavia to work out their own border. The Yugoslavs were more than willing, they said, to compromise. Perhaps Wilson could arbitrate any areas of disagreement. The Italian delegation was appalled. Orlando confided to an American that “though the Southern Slav proposal embarrassed him horribly, he could not find a good reason for refusing it.” In an interview with Wilson, he “moaned and wept, said that the Southern Slavs had taken him by the throat, but finally promised to give a reply as soon as he had been able to consult the King and his colleagues in Rome.” When Wilson was on his way back to the United States in February, the Italians rejected his arbitration, claiming that they had done so only because the Yugoslavs, “in a brutal manner,” had published the proposal prematurely.
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It was clear from the moment the Peace Conference opened that the Italians were in no mood to compromise with the Yugoslavs or anyone else. They refused to let anything affecting Italy's borders go to committees of experts. Clemenceau complained after a meeting in March: “This afternoon Orlando inflicted on us an interminable discourse to lay out Italy's demands and to indicate which frontiers he thought were necessary and just.” And then “we had to submit to a second speech, no less boring from Sonnino.” The covenant of the League of Nations and the German peace terms were worked out with scarcely a murmur from the Italians. (Orlando later argued, unconvincingly, that this was because Italy felt excluded.
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)

Italy's tactics were irritating, transparent and frequently inept. It opposed Yugoslavia's claims to territory from Bulgaria and Hungary and supported Rumania over the Banat. It sold arms to Hungary, and even signed a secret agreement with the government of the despised Béla Kun. Foolishly, Sonnino pushed Greece closer to Yugoslavia by refusing to consider Greek claims in Albania and by trying to hang on to the predominantly Greek Dodecanese islands along the coast of Asia Minor, which it had been occupying since the end of the Balkan wars. Sonnino petulantly refused to receive Venizelos when the Greek prime minister asked for an appointment. On committees the Italians were invariably anti-Yugoslav and doggedly uncooperative. If pressed, they usually claimed that their government had not given them instructions. Eyre Crowe from the British Foreign Office remonstrated with an Italian diplomat, who said merely, “You would not talk to us alone when we came to London in December, and you will not talk to us or make arrangements with us in Paris, and consequently we are not going to express any opinions on these questions.”
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When the Italian demands finally came up for decision in April, the other powers were markedly less sympathetic. Bismarck's famous remark that Italy's appetite was invariably bigger than its teeth was quoted appreciatively. “The Italians,” wrote Balfour wearily, “must somehow be mollified, and the only question is how to mollify them at the smallest cost to mankind.” By now, the Italian delegates were desperate. Orlando was convinced, or so he said, that a secret society had pledged to kill him if he returned to Italy without Dalmatia. The nationalist press was campaigning ferociously for Italian control of the Adriatic, and politics was moving out of the council chambers onto the streets. The rapidly growing Socialist party, now dominated by radicals, sent out its squads, and the nationalist right its
fasci di combattimenti.
When Leonida Bissolati, a prominent opponent of Italy's demands, tried to speak at a huge League of Nations rally in La Scala in Milan, rabid nationalists, including Mussolini, were in the audience. An Italian journalist reported on a scene that was to become increasingly familiar:

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.
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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 Su
ak 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Public opinion often 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.”
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(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!”
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) 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 be very grave.” His government would probably fall if he could not report progress. His audience was sympathetic but unmoved. As Lloyd George said, “I am convinced that it is in the general interest to summon the German delegates straightaway and thus to prepare ourselves to negotiate with the only enemy state which is still standing.” Wilson's suggestion, which was accepted, was to put off the summons to the Germans for a couple of days. In the meantime he undertook to have discussions with the Italians. Orlando accepted grudgingly. He was very bitter at what he saw as a betrayal by Clemenceau and especially Lloyd George, whom he described to House as a “slippery prestidigitator” and not a gentleman.
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