PARIS 1919 (57 page)

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.” Lloyd George asked, “And if not, who do you see taking your place?” Orlando replied, “Perhaps D'Annunzio.”
⁶¹

On June 19 the Orlando government finally fell, but Sonnino and two others stayed on to sign the Treaty of Versailles on Italy's behalf. Orlando in later years took pride in the fact that he was not a signatory; in fact, he argued, Wilson had effectively excluded him from the Peace Conference with his appeal to the people of Italy. Although Italy had taken little part in drawing up the treaty, it did not do badly: it had a permanent seat on the League of Nations council, the Tyrol and a share in the reparations from Germany. That was not the view in Italy, however. As the British ambassador wrote to a friend: “They are I am sorry to say very sore and depressed here. Not less perhaps because they feel that their own representatives have in many ways mismanaged things.”
⁶²

The government of Francesco Nitti, which succeeded Orlando's, was preoccupied with Italy's internal problems. Where it could settle outstanding foreign issues, it was more than willing to do so. The new foreign minister, Tommaso Tittoni, met Venizelos and worked out an agreement between Italy and Greece over Albania and the Dodecanese. There was even some movement on the Adriatic. In August 1919, Tittoni agreed with Lloyd George and Clemenceau that Fiume should become a neutral city under the League and that the whole of Dalmatia should go to Yugoslavia. The proposal was sent off to Wilson, by now back in the United States, but before an answer could come back, D'Annunzio decided to settle the matter his own way.

Various groups, some in the military, as well as veterans' associations, fascists and anarchists, had been plotting more or less openly all summer to seize Fiume. D'Annunzio, who was engrossed in a new love affair, was finally persuaded to lead them. On the evening of September 11 (chosen because he thought the number eleven lucky), he set off with about two hundred men. The next day, as the soldiers sent to stop him joined his force, he marched triumphantly into Fiume. The Italian military command withdrew without a murmur, the other Allied forces more reluctantly. The city, at least the Italian parts, went wild. That evening D'Annunzio made the first of his dramatic speeches from the balcony of the governor's palace.

For the next fifteen months, Fiume was caught up in a mad carnival of ceremonies, spectacles, balls and parties. The town's buildings were covered with flags and banners, its gardens ransacked for flowers to throw at the parades. In a fever of nationalism and revolution, fueled by drink and drugs, priests demanded the right to marry and young women stayed out all night. The city reverberated, said observers, with the sounds of love-making. A hospital was set aside to treat venereal diseases.
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Volunteers and the merely curious from all over Italy and Europe dodged the ineffectual Allied blockade: E.F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist artist; the young Arturo Toscanini, with his orchestra; Guglielmo Marconi, the developer of the wireless; opposition politicians from Rome; gangsters and prostitutes; war aces with their planes; and Mussolini. Modern pirates on commandeered boats darted in and out of Fiume to seize supplies up and down the Adriatic. Armed men wandered the streets in uniforms of their own design. “Some had beards, and had shaved their heads completely,” reported Osbert Sitwell. “Others had cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out of their foreheads, and wore, balanced on the very back of the skull, a black fez.” Most alarmingly for the Italian government, many of its own officers, from war heroes to distinguished generals, threw their lot in with D'Annunzio.
⁶⁴

D'Annunzio's oratory reached new heights. Fiume was sacred, the city of liberty, from which he would lead a crusade, to liberate first Dalmatia, then Italy, and finally the world. He made contacts with the Bolsheviks, with Egyptian nationalists, with Croats unhappy with the new Yugoslavia, and with Sinn Fein. Wild rumors, some of them true, came out of Fiume, of assassins dispatched to kill Nitti and Tittoni. And in Italy there were equally disturbing reports of planned military coups and armed uprisings. By the summer of 1921, large sections of northern Italy had become virtually ungovernable as fascist squads battled their left-wing and democratic enemies.
⁶⁵

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, his women and his cocaine. He disapproved of Italy's growing friendship with Germany and died in 1938 in mysterious circumstances. A young German woman from the Tyrol who had worked as his assistant and mistress left the house abruptly and was next heard of working in the office of Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
⁷⁰

Sonnino, whose stubbornness had threatened to destroy the Paris Peace Conference, never replied to his critics and never spoke publicly again in Italy. He died at the end of 1922; his only request to the state he had served for so long was to be buried in a sarcophagus cemented into a cliff below his beloved house on the coast of Tuscany.
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Orlando outlived almost everyone and went on to play a part in the overthrow of the fascists in 1944. He died, a revered senator, in the democratic Italy of 1952.

23

Japan and Racial Equality

IN THE SPRING OF 1919, the French press was temporarily distracted from the Italian crisis by an intriguing question. Was Prince Kimmochi Saionji, the distinguished statesman at the head of the Japanese delegation, in Paris at all? He had scarcely been seen and it was rumored that he was seriously ill or had even gone back to Japan. Stephen Bonsal, House's ubiquitous eyes and ears, argued that this was typical Oriental behavior, that the prince preferred to stay in seclusion and “pull the wires that made the manikins dance.”
¹

Westerners dealing with Japan tended to fall back on stereotypes about the mysterious East. So much about Japan was curious, including its status in the world. Was it a major power or not? And was it entitled to have the same number of delegates as the other Great Powers? There were arguments both ways. Japan was very new on the world scene and until 1914 had confined its attentions to nearby East Asia. Even though it had declared war on Germany, it had not made a major effort on the Allied side. On the other hand, it did have one of the world's three or four biggest navies (depending on whether the German one was counted), an impressive army and a very favorable balance of trade. In the view of Borden, the Canadian prime minister, there were “only three major powers left in the world: the United States, Britain and Japan.” When the League of Nations finally came into existence, Japan had the dubious honor of being ranked fifth in terms of contributions expected.
²

The Great Powers simply could not be consistent. At the insistence of Britain, Japan's ally, they gave Japan five delegates to the Peace Conference, just like themselves, but in the Supreme Council the Japanese were generally ignored or treated as something of a joke. “To think,” said Clemenceau in an audible aside to his foreign minister during one meeting, “that there are blonde women in the world; and we stay closed up here with these Japanese, who are so ugly.”
³
When it was decided to expedite business by setting up the Council of Four, Japan was not included. The excuse given, and it was just that, was that the Japanese delegation, unlike those of the other Great Powers, was not headed by a prime minister or president.

The Japanese delegation was like Prince Saionji—distinguished but retiring. Although the fashionable Hôtel Bristol was filled with experts covering everything from naval to labor questions, the Japanese representatives on the various bodies of the conference played, as one British commentator put it, “mainly a watching part.” It did not help that many spoke only rudimentary English or French. When, on one committee, the chairman asked the Japanese member whether he voted aye or nay, “Yes” came the reply. In any case, Japan was like Italy; it had certain goals in Paris, but not much interest in anything else. “They were the one-price traders of the Conference,” wrote Wilson's press officer, Baker; “they possess the genius—perhaps the oriental genius—of knowing how to wait.”
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The most public figures in the Japanese delegation were two experienced diplomats, Baron Nobuaki Makino, who had been foreign minister, and Viscount Sutemi Chinda, who was ambassador to Great Britain. House found them “silent, unemotional, watchful,” and there were little jokes among the other peacemakers about how similar they looked. The two mikados, the Americans called them. But there were significant differences between the two men. Makino was a liberal who liked Wilson's new diplomacy and supported the League of Nations. Unfortunately, since his English was not very good, he failed to communicate this. Chinda's English was better and he appeared a hard-liner when awkward questions came up. All the Japanese delegates were tightly controlled from Tokyo, except Prince Saionji, who was too eminent to control.
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And he was in Paris, although he had arrived late, at the beginning of March. When Japan realized that Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando were leading their own delegations to Paris, its government hastily decided to send him, to compensate for not having sent their prime minister (whose political position was too shaky to risk the journey) or the foreign minister (who was too sick). Saionji's appointment was an indication that Japan took the conference seriously. The government also hoped that, if Japan did not gain everything it wanted at the conference, his prestige would protect it from attacks from its enemies and from riots such as those that had followed the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
⁶
In Paris, Saionji chose to remain in the background, facilitating his colleagues' work through informal personal meetings much as he would have done in Japan.

On April 15 Bonsal paid a courtesy call on the elusive prince in his apartment near the Parc Monceau. He was renewing an old acquaintance, but his call was also an attempt to mend fences between Japan and its allies; relations had become rather strained. He was greeted by two formidable Japanese detectives, then led through a series of rooms to the inner sanctum. “A subdued, an almost religious light pervaded this room and some seconds elapsed before I caught sight of a tall, slim, and rather emaciated figure in Japanese dress advancing with outstretched hands toward me. . . . His countenance was as serene as that of the Great Buddha at Kamakura looking out to sea.”
⁷

The two men chatted amiably about past times in Japan and old friends. They touched on the problem of Russia and the Bolshevik government but they carefully stayed away from the tensions between Japan and the West—except for one oblique and highly telling exchange. Bonsal asked about an experiment that a Japanese foreign minister had conducted in the 1890s, when he had tried to graft cuttings from abroad onto a dwarf pine tree from the Ise shrine, the most sacred in the state-approved Shinto religion. The prince brought him up to date: “He grafted on the sacred stem shafts and cuttings of pines from Norway and from Scotland, from Russia and from California. As a result of these shocks there were temporary setbacks, but soon the noble Shinto type of pine from Ise prevailed.”
⁸

The prince knew well what message he was conveying. In his lifetime he had seen his country transformed from an insignificant collection of islands in the north Pacific into a major power. It is still difficult for the Japanese, let alone outsiders, to grasp the magnitude of that change. What had been an inward-looking nation ruled by a feudal nobility had been made into a modern power with all the underpinnings: an industrial economy which by 1919 was fast coming to rival that of France; a military that had exchanged its steel swords and pikes for machine guns and battleships; and an infrastructure of railways, telegraphs, schools and universities. The feudal lords, like the prince himself, had become diplomats, politicians and industrialists; their retainers had joined the army or the police.

The prince was a complex, enormously subtle man, as much a hybrid as his nation. His journey to Paris had been one not just of miles but of centuries. He was born in 1849, into a Japan still largely isolated from the outside world. His long family tree, kept with the utmost care, showed marriages with the other great houses and even the imperial family itself. By contrast, the Tokugawa clan, which had ruled Japan since the 1600s in the name of an impotent emperor, were vulgar parvenus. He had the usual education for a boy of his class: classical literature, in Chinese as well as Japanese; calligraphy; the traditional instruments and the cultivation of tiny, perfect bonsai trees. He also shocked his elders when he learned to ride, something considered demeaning for one of his rank. If things had gone in their customary procession, he would have lived out his life in the stifling, enclosed world of the old court, with an honorary position and a wife selected from among the small number of suitable girls. He would never have traveled abroad, because that was forbidden and, more important, unthinkable. He would never have enjoyed real power, because that lay in the hands of the military nobility.
⁹

The Japanese have a myth that their islands are balanced on the back of a giant turtle; when the turtle moves, earthquakes result. In 1853 an earthquake of a different sort came. An aggressive American sailor, Commodore Matthew Perry, acting on behalf of the American government, appeared in Tokyo Bay demanding the opening up of trade between Japan and the United States. His expedition was followed by British, French and Russian gunboats bearing similar demands for trading privileges, for the right for their citizens to enter Japan, and for diplomatic relations. Japan's ruling circles argued for the next decade and a half over whether to refuse the impudent foreigners or try to cope with them, but the hard-line isolationists could not withstand an aggressive, expanding West. Even among the nobility, young radicals urged the Tokugawa rulers to open up to the outside world and let them travel abroad. Echoes of the debate made their way to the quiet, secluded court in Kyoto, and the young Saionji took the side of the radicals. He decided that he, too, would go abroad if he could.

In 1868 reforming nobles seized power from the old Tokugawa regime in the name of an old schoolmate of Saionji, now the Meiji emperor. Saionji fought on their side in the brief civil war that followed. When he returned to court, he caused a new scandal by appearing in Western dress with his hair cut short.
¹⁰
The Meiji Restoration (the misleading name given to the coup) saw the start of an extraordinary national effort as young Japanese were shipped abroad by the hundreds to study and Western experts were paid handsomely to come to Japan so that their brains could be picked. The government slogan summed up the goal: “Enrich the nation and strengthen the army.” Japan chose Britain as a model for its navy, Prussia for its army and its constitution, the United States for its banking system and the world at large for its economy.

Saionji turned down offers of comfortable government jobs and set off to see the world. In 1870 he arrived in France, where he was to spend the next ten years. He took a degree in law at the Sorbonne, where one of his friends and classmates was the young Clemenceau, who remembered him as “amiable” and “impetuous.” He met the Goncourt brothers and Franz Liszt. He loved the French, their culture and their liberal traditions. He even spoke French in his sleep. To the end of his life he drank Vichy water and used Houbigant cologne, which had to be imported specially for him.
¹¹

The elegant figure who arrived back in Japan was charming, ironic and slightly detached in his manner. He was also deeply puzzling to his fellow Japanese. One critic fell back on three English words to describe him: “intelligence, indolence, and indifference.” For all his pride in his family, he never bothered to get married, although he had long liaisons with mistresses. (When he came to Paris in 1919, he brought a young woman nearly fifty years younger than himself; she was sent away because she was indiscreet.) He never had to worry about material wealth; a younger brother became head of one of Japan's enormous new industrial combines and as a matter of course provided for him.
¹²

Saionji served the new Japan as a diplomat, foreign minister and then, in the 1900s, as prime minister. In 1913 the new emperor made him a
genro,
a term inadequately translated as “elder statesman.” While
genro
had no official role under the new Japanese constitution, they wielded enormous influence, especially over the formation of new governments and foreign policy. In times of crisis, a word from the
genro
was usually enough to decide an issue. In American terms, it would have been as though William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt had not only chosen Wilson as president but kept an eye on his policies.

Saionji's country was an amazing success story before 1914: it was the only Asian nation both to resist the Western imperialists and to join them. Its gross domestic product—the total value of all goods and services— increased almost three times between 1885 and 1920, mining and manufacturing by almost six times. Such rapid change brought strains as well as rewards; many Japanese looked back nostalgically to a simpler past. But Saionji urged his countrymen to look forward to a liberal democratic future and warned against relying on military strength alone. The warning was needed because as Japan grew more powerful, there were influential voices raised to argue that it must impose its will on its neighbors, by force if necessary.
¹³

In the years before 1914, force seemed to be paying off, as Japan won a string of military victories, the first over China in 1895, when it acquired Taiwan and a dominant position in Korea. In 1902, in a tribute to Japan's growing power, Britain abandoned its long-standing hostility to alliances. The Anglo-Japanese naval alliance, still in effect in 1919, was a sign, especially to the Japanese, that Japan had arrived on the world scene. In 1904 Japan took on the formidable power of Russia in Manchuria, defeating its armies on land and sinking not one but two of its fleets. In the peace signed in 1905, Japan gained extensive rights in Manchuria. A few years later, in 1910, it formally annexed Korea, thus confirming what the world had conceded anyway. (A sad little delegation of Koreans appeared at the Peace Conference to ask for their independence.)

The other powers watched with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. By 1914, for example, a quarter of the world's cotton yarn exports were Japanese.
¹⁴
The British grew concerned about Japanese dominance of markets in China and India. The United States worried about its interests in Asia, which included not only the China trade but also its new possession, the Philippines. Among Asians, though, Japan was an inspiration, proof that it was possible to defeat the Western imperialists. Even the Chinese, who had most to lose from a strong Japan, saw hope in the Japanese example. Thousands of young Chinese sailed across the north Pacific to study in Japanese universities.

In all Asia, only Japan itself was skeptical of Japanese power. The war with Russia had been almost too much for the fledgling modern economy to bear. Was it worth it? What did the other powers think of Japan's victory? The Japanese could not help but see that the Western world was slow to accept them as equals. One leading statesman complained bitterly to a German friend, “Of course, what is really wrong with us is that we have yellow skins. If our skins were as white as yours, the whole world would rejoice at our calling a halt to Russia's inexorable aggression.”
¹⁵