Читать книгу Mussolini as revealed in his political speeches (November 1914-August 1923) - Benito Mussolini - Страница 9

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Speech delivered at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna, 24th May 1918.

On this occasion the principal speaker was the Editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, who had recovered his physical efficiency after severe wounds received on the Carso, and had a real influence in securing victory because of the encouragement he gave to the spirit of resistance within the country.

Bologna was then a stronghold of the opponents of war, on account of the net of political and syndicalist organisation stretching throughout the province, and of Socialist supremacy in the communes and dependent administrations. It is, unfortunately, well known that the State had by then ceased exercising any authority other than merely formal in this province.

A mark of Socialist power, which proves also the profound anti-national feeling of the defeated politicians who to-day stammer so many lying excuses, is offered by the absolute prohibition of manifestations calculated to glorify the Italian Army.

Mussolini’s speech at the “Comunale” temporarily reunited the sane sections of Bologna to the rest of Italy, then in great anxiety for her fate and future.

Combatants and Citizens! Will you allow me to pass over without unnecessary delay the polemics which preceded my coming to this city? If, as says our great poet Carducci, “one does not seek for butterflies beneath the arch of Titus,” one does not seek for them either beneath the arches of this, our ancient and magnificent town of Bologna, especially as one would probably not find butterflies at all, but bats dazed and frightened by this glorious May sunshine.

The form of my speech will not surprise you. In those days, three years ago, all the Italy that was conscious of life and possessed of will-power, the only Italy which has a right to transform her chaotic succession of events into history, burned with an intense ardour—our ardour. I have noticed now for some time that there are opportunists who are trying to open a door for eventual responsibilities and who are carefully and laboriously cataloguing the reasons why Italy could not remain neutral.

Destiny and Will. Very well! I admit that there has been fatality, I admit this compulsion, which was the result of a number of causes which it is useless to dwell upon, but I add that at a certain moment we imprinted the mark of our will upon this concatenation of events, and to-day, after three years, we are not penitent of what we have done. We leave this weak, spiritual attitude to those who seek applause, seats in Parliament, and personal satisfaction; those who thoroughly despise, as I do, all parliamenteering and demagogism, are far away from all this.

What Machiavelli says in chapter vi. of the Principe, about those who, by their own inherent qualities, attained the position of princes, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, can be applied not only to the individual, but to the nation. “And examining,” says the Florentine Secretary, “their lives and actions, one does not see that they had other fortune than that of the opportunity which gave them the material and enabled them to shape it as seemed best to them; and without that opportunity the virtue of their souls would have been lost, and without that virtue the opportunity would have come in vain.”

As to the Italian people in that glorious May, it can be said that without the opportunity of the war the virtue of our people would have been lost; but without this virtue the opportunity of the war would have come in vain.

I have found an echo of the thought of Machiavelli in the book of Maeterlinck, the great Belgian poet, the poet who, perhaps, more than any of his contemporaries, has given expression to the most delicate and complex movements of the human soul. Maeterlinck in his book Wisdom and Destiny admits the existence of a mechanical, external fate, but says that a human being can react against it. “An event in itself,” he says in chapter viii. of this book, “is pure water which the fountain pours out over us, and which has not generally in itself either taste, colour or perfume. It becomes beautiful or sad, sweet or bitter, life-giving or mortal, according to the soul which receives it. Thousands of adventures, all of which seem to contain the seeds of heroism, continually happen to those who surround us, whilst no heroism arises when the adventure is over. But Christ met a group of children in his path, an adulteress, a Samaritan, and three times in succession humanity rose to divine heights.” The war has been as a jet of pure water for our nation. It has been deadly for Spain, for instance, but life-giving to us. We desired it. We chose. Before making our choice we argued and struggled, and the struggle sometimes assumed the aspect of violence; but we won, and now we are proud of those days, and are glad to think that the memory of the crowds which filled the streets and squares of our cities disturbs those who were defeated and those who even to-day, by the most insidious means, try to extinguish the sacred flame and the faith of our people. They accepted this war as one accepts a heavy burden, and their leader, followed by the curses of the people, withdrew, like an old feudal lord, to his remote native country, and we can only wish that he will always remain there.

Enough of Old Age! But, as I am never tired of repeating, we young men made one fatal mistake then, which we have paid for bitterly; we entrusted this ardent youth of ours to the most grievous old age. When I say old age, I do not establish merely a chronological fact. I think some people are born old, that there are those at twenty who are in a mental and physical decline, whereas some men—the marvellous Tiger of France, for instance—at seventy have all the vibration and fire of virile youth. I speak of the old men who are old men, who are behind the times, who are encumbrances. They neither understood nor realised the fundamental truths underlying the war.

Besides the people, the meaning of this war in its historical aspect and development has been perceived by two classes of men: the poets and the industrial world. By the poets, because with their extreme sensitiveness they grasp truths which remain half veiled to the ordinary person; and by the industrial world, because it understands that this war is a war of machines. Between the two let us also put the journalists, who have enough of the poet in them not to belong to the industrial world, and are enough of the industrial world not to be poets. And the journalists have often forestalled the Government. I speak of the great journalists who keep their ears open, on the alert to catch vibrations from the outside world. The journalist has sometimes foreseen what those responsible, alas! have recognised too late.

Quality versus Quantity. This war has so far been one of quantity. Now, it is realised that the masses do not beat the masses, an army does not vanquish an army, quantity does not overcome quantity. The problem must be faced from another point of view—that of quality. This war, which began by being tremendously democratic, is now tending to become aristocratic. Soldiers are becoming warriors. A selection is being made from the armed mass. The struggle, now carried on almost exclusively in the air, has lost the characteristics it had in 1914.

The first novelist who foresaw the problems of the war of quality was Wells. Read his book The War on Three Fronts. It is in this book that he advised the exploitation of the “quality” of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. Because, whereas the Germans only work in close formation, only give good results through the automatism of the masses, the Latin feels the joy of personal audacity, the fascination of risk, and has the taste for adventure; which taste, says Wells, is limited in Germany to the descendants of the feudal nobility, while with us it is to be found also among the people.

Another truth which those responsible realised late was that, in order to win the armies, the people must be won, that is to say, that the armies must be taken in the rear. This would be difficult where Germany was concerned, as she is ethnically, politically and morally compact. But we are face to face with an enemy against whom we could have acted in this way from the very first. We ought to have penetrated the mosaic of the Austrian State.

A Great People. Among the peoples who cannot be taken in the rear by surprise, is ours. My praise is sincere. The people in the trenches are great, and those who have not fought are great. For deficiency you must look among those old men of whom I spoke just now.

I have lived among our brave soldiers in the trenches and listened to them talking in their little groups. I have seen them during their bad times and in epic moments of enthusiasm. And when, after the sad 24th October, there was a certain distrust of them, I would not allow it, because it seemed to me impossible that the soldiers, who had won battles in circumstances more difficult than those prevailing in any other theatre of war, had become all at once weak cowards, who fled at the mere crackling of a machine-gun. And it was not so, because if it had been, no river would have stopped the invading forces, and if we stopped them on the Piave, it means we could have resisted also on the Isonzo. (Applause.)

I was reading in the train last night a book of poems written in the trenches by a Captain Arturo Arpigati. The literature of the war is the only readable literature, but it must have been written by men who have really been at the front. In this verse I recognised my one-time fellow-soldiers, the humble and great soldiers of our war. Here it is:

Col vecchio suo magico sguardo

il Dovere, nume d’acciaio

gli inconsci anche soggioga.

benché ne balbettino il nome,

ecco, essi, la madre difendono

ed è la madre di tutti;

e sono essi la Guerra,

e sono essi la Fronte,

sono essi la Vittoria;

dai loro elmetti ferrei

spicca il volo la gloria:

essi martiri e santi,

sono l’eroica Patria, essi. I Fanti!^[2]

But the highest praise of the people in arms is contained in the thousand bulletins of the Supreme Command. The unarmed also deserve praise, both those in cities—inevitably nervous and restless by reason of the association of thousands of human beings and the contact of thousands of temperaments—and those in the country. From the Valle Padana to the Tavoliere delle Puglie, from the vine-clad hills of Montferrat to the plains of the Conca d’Oro, the houses of the peasants stand empty, and with the houses the stables. The women have seen the father and the son depart together, the thoughtful territorial of over forty and the adventurous youth. It is useless to expect from the humble people of the proletariat a highly developed sense of nationality. It cannot possess what we have never done anything to cultivate. From the people who have exchanged the spade for the gun we simply ask for obedience, and the Italian people, the people of the country and of the factories, obey. A sad episode, some signs of restlessness are not enough to spoil this picture. It had been said that we should not hold out six months; that at the announcement of the names of the dead the families would rebel; that the sight of the maimed at the street corners would rouse the people to action. Three years have now passed—three long years. The mothers of the fallen take a sacred pride in their grief. The maimed do not ask to be called “glorious,” and refuse to be pitied. Food is scarce, but the people still resist. The troop trains go to the front adorned with flowers as in the May of 1915. The dignity and peace in the towns and in the country is simply marvellous! The national crisis, which lasted from August to October of 1917, and which is summed up in the two names of Turin and Caporetto, has been in a certain sense salutary. It was the repercussion of the great crisis which hurled Russia into the abyss.

2. As of old, Duty, of the steel hand, enchains even the ignorant by the magic of her glance. While as yet they can barely stutter her name, lo! they defend their mother, who is the mother of all.

And they are the war, and they are the battle front, and they are the victory. Glory is reflected from their steel helmets.

They, the soldiers, are the martyrs and saints and the heroic country.

The Russian Tragedy. Was there any definite motive in the Leninist policy which led Russia to make the “painful, forced and shameful Peace of Brest”? Yes! there was. The massimalists really believe in the possibility of revolution by “contagion.” They hoped to infect the Germans with the massimalist bacillus. They did not succeed; Germany is refractory. The very “minoritaries” are far from proclaiming themselves Bolshevists. And more, these “minoritaries,” who ought to represent the fermenting yeast, are continually losing ground. In three elections there have been three overwhelming defeats. The “majoritaries” triumph. They are the same now as in the August of 1914, accomplices of Pangermanism. They want to win. After Brest-Litowsk the Socialists lay low; after the Peace of Bucharest they kept silence.

We have seen what have been the results in Russia of the Leninist gospel, we have seen how the German Socialists, who accepted “neither annexations nor indemnities and the right of the people to decide their own fate,” have interpreted this doctrine. The Germans took possession of 540,000 square kilometres of territory in Russia with a population of fifty-five millions; then they went on to Roumania and plundered her. If the Peace of Brest-Litowsk was shameful for Russia, the Peace of Bucharest was not. The Roumanians were taken in the rear, and could not resist.

In the meantime, Cicerin, the Commissioner of Foreign Affairs, made the wireless work. A cynic might remark that if the Roman Republic had a Cicero in a critical hour of her history, Russia has a Cicerin, whom, contrary to the former, nobody takes seriously, because it is impossible to take seriously those who do not know how to take up arms in the defence of their own rights.

The Russian experiment has helped us enormously, both from the socialist and the political points of view. It has opened many eyes which had persistently remained closed. It must be realised that if Germany wins, complete and certain ruin awaits us. Germany has not changed her fundamental instincts. They are the same as those which Tacitus describes to perfection in his Germania in these words: “The Germans do not live in villages, but in separate houses, set wide apart the better to protect them against fire. To shield themselves from the cold, they live in underground dwellings covered with manure or clothe themselves in the skins of small animals, of which they have a great number. Strong in war, but persistent drunkards and gamblers, armed with spears and well supplied with horses, they prefer to gain wealth, when it suits them, by violence rather than by the working of their lands.”

In his De Vita Julii Agricolæ this Roman writer notes a contrast between the Germans and the Britons nineteen centuries ago which is still the same to-day, that is, that while the Britons fight for the defence of their country and their homes, the Germans fight for avarice and lust. These same tribes, driven once to Legnano, have resumed their march beyond the Rhine and are preparing once more to take up the offensive against us. But the “lust” of which Kuhlmann speaks will not carry the Germans beyond the Piave.

We are on our Feet. According to German calculations, the Italian nation, as the result of Caporetto, ought to fall into a state of chaos. Instead, it is on its feet. What vicissitudes may not this last phase of the war bring with it? Will Germany, who has not been able to beat us by ourselves, beat the formidable combination of nations which faces her?

We are one with France, whose soldiers have performed wonders of heroism. And this France, which we knew so little, because we had looked for her only in the cabarets of Montmartre, not frequented by Frenchmen at all but by adventurers from all over the world, has written for us the most splendid pages of heroic deeds. She has known how to rid herself of insidious dangers, to give the death-blow to the plotters of treachery, both great and small, and to make the rifles of the executionary squadrons crackle, a sound which, to one who loves his country, is sweeter than the harmonies of a great opera. Also we, in Italy, must act inexorably where traitors are concerned, if we are to defend our soldiers from attack from behind. Where the existence of the nation and of millions of men is involved, there cannot and must not be a moment’s hesitation about sacrificing the lives of one, ten or a hundred men.

We are one with England, who repeats the words of Nelson, “England expects that every man this day will do his duty.”

And we are one with the United States. This is Internationalism, the real, true and lasting Internationalism, even if it has not got the formulas, dogmas and chrism of Socialism made official. It is in the trenches, where soldiers of different nationalities have crossed six thousand leagues of ocean to come and die in Europe.

You must allow me to be optimistic about the outcome of the war. We shall win because the United States cannot lose, England cannot lose, France cannot lose. The United States has a population of 110 millions; one single levy can produce a million recruits. America, like England, knows that the wealth of society is at stake.

As long as we are in this company there is no danger of a ruinous peace. Not to arrive at the goal of peace means to be crushed; but when we arrive there, we, too, can look the enemy in the face and say that we, too, small, despised people, army of mandolinists, have held out to the end, wept, suffered, but resisted, and have thus the right to a just and lasting peace!

Convalescence. I am an optimist, and see the Italy of to-morrow through rose-coloured spectacles. Enough of the Italy of the hotel-keeper, goal of the idle with their odious Baedekers in their hands; enough of dusting old plaster-work; we are and we wish to be a nation of producers.

We are a people who will expand without aiming at conquest. We shall gain the world’s respect by means of our industries and our work. It will be the august name of Rome which will still guide our forces in the Adriatic, the Gulf of the Mediterranean, and in the Mediterranean, which forms the communication between three continents.

Those who have been wounded know what convalescence means. There comes a day when the surgeon no longer takes his ruthless but life-giving knife from the tray, no longer tortures the suffering flesh. The danger of infection is over, and you feel yourself re-born. A second youth begins. Things, men, the voice of a woman, the caress of a child, the flowering of a tree—everything gives you the ineffable sensation of a return. New blood surges through your veins, and fills you with a feverish desire to work.

The Italian people too will have its convalescence, and it will be a competition for reconstruction after destruction. The flag of the disabled is a symbol of a change in their moral and spiritual life. Just think that certain rascals thought to take advantage of them for their infamous speculations. But the disabled answered: “We will not lend ourselves to this shameful game, we do not intend to accept from your charity and sympathy help which would humiliate us.” And they do not curse their fate, they do not complain, even if they are without an arm or a leg; even those who have lost the divine light of their eyes hold their peace. In vain the enemy hoped to profit by the state of mind of these people. They reply to this by saying that all they had they gave for their country, and to-day they do not wish to be a burden upon her, and so they work and train themselves, and give further proof of their devotion to the sacred cause.

The Returning Battalions. I no longer see relegated to some far future time the day upon which the banners of the disabled will precede the torn and glorious standards of the regiments. And around the standards will be collected the veterans and the people. And there will be the shadow of our dead, from those who fell on the Alps to those who were buried beyond the Isonzo, from those who stormed Gorizia to those who were mowed down between Hermada and the mysterious Timavo, or upon the banks of the Piave. All this sacred phalanx we sum up in three names: Cesare Battisti, who wished deliberately to face martyrdom, and who was never so noble as when he offered his neck to the Hapsburg executioner; Giacomo Venezian, who left the austere halls of your Athenæum in order to go and meet his death upon the road to Trieste; and Filippo Corridoni, born of the people, a fighter for the people, and who died for the people on the first rocky ridges of the Carso.

The returning battalions will move with the slow and measured tread of those who have lived and suffered much and who have seen innumerable others suffer and die. They will say, we shall say:

“Here upon the track which leads back to the harvest field, here in the factory which now forges the instruments of peace, here in the tumultuous city and the silent country, now that the duty was done and the goal reached, let us set up the symbol of our new right. Away with shadows! We, the survivors—we, the returned, vindicate our right to govern Italy, not to her destruction and decay, but in order to lead her ever higher, ever on, to make her—in thought and deed—worthy to take her place among the great nations which will build up the civilisation of the world to-morrow.”