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In the spring of last year in Rome I sat talking with an Italian friend of mine who is devoted to England and the English among whom he lived for a time before the war. We looked out from his apartment down to the whole vista of the Via d’Impero with its broken arches, its tall columns, its majestic panorama of the ruins and relics of a civilisation which once reached across the world, even as far as Britain. There was a blue sky overhead. Every stone looked stereoscopic in this Italian light. We were alone together, it seemed, in the very heart of ancient Rome, and vibrations from the past touched our spirit. This friend of mine is very knowledgeable about the ancient glory of his race and all its art and life, but after some discussion on these things he spoke about modern problems and the strain between Italy and England—those old friends.

“It seems to us Italians,” he said, “and especially to those of us who are the most friendly to England, that you have gone a little mad! We are very sorry about it but we don’t understand.”

“In what way are we particularly mad?” I asked politely.

“Your foreign policy has been inexplicable,” he said. “It has no definite line or logic. Your Government says one thing on Monday and another thing on Wednesday. On Monday you take the French view. On Wednesday you say kind words to Germany. On Tuesday you challenge Mussolini, but on Saturday your Prime Minister sends him a private letter assuring him of cordial good-will. It is all very strange, and meanwhile you are making enemies of all the powers who are most dangerous to Great Britain and the British Empire.”

He went back a little in history, to the Italian war in Abyssinia. It was not his purpose to defend that adventure, but to recall the extraordinary behaviour of British diplomacy. Our statesmen, he said, rode a very high horse in leading the way to Sanctions when they knew—they must have known—that France had signed a secret treaty with Mussolini giving him a free hand. How then could Sanctions work? Mr. Anthony Eden fell off his high horse with a bump and did not look dignified. England went to the verge of war, looking very fierce, but had no intention of making war. It was a game of bluff, surely. But how does bluff succeed when one’s cards are weak and liable to be called? England was bluffing with a weak hand. Neither France nor anyone was willing to go to war to stop the conquest of Abyssinia. They wouldn’t even go as far as restricting the supplies of oil to Italy because they knew effective sanctions would lead to war. Why then adopt a policy which was bound to fail from the beginning? Surely that was a little mad? But now that Abyssinia is a fait accompli why pretend that Haile Selassie is still Emperor? Why refuse to recognise the Italian possession? It was irritating without being effective. It prevented friendship with Mussolini who was anxious to make a friendly arrangement in the Mediterranean—that vital highway for British communications with Egypt and India.

My Italian friend—a most good-natured fellow and very humorous when not very serious—offered me another cigarette and took one himself. It was very pleasant under the blue sky of Italy, looking down the triumphal way of Roman Emperors; but I felt a little uneasy in my mind.

“We Italians,” said my friend—“at least those of us who happen to be a little intelligent!—are startled by the almost deliberate way in which England is advancing down the road to ruin for herself, and perhaps for all of us. It is that road, for instance, which goes to Geneva and the support of an illusion called “Collective Security.” The bottom has fallen out of the League of Nations. Why go on sleeping in that bed? France, by some insane miscalculation, hangs on to her pact with Soviet Russia, and through France England is linked up with that lunatic asylum governed by a despot with homicidal mania. Some of your politicians—poor dears!—still claim Russia as one of the allies of democracy against the Dictator States. Madre di Dio! Is that intellectual insincerity or a form of madness? There is no life insurance in that policy for Great Britain. Why have your leaders rejected all offers of German friendship, preferring this left-handed alliance with Russia, whose best generals have all been executed and whose social state is miserable? How is it that you are making enemies of the Arab world by your actions in Palestine? Why do your intellectuals support the Communists and Anarchists in Spain? I do not understand. As an old journalist I do not understand!”

“What is Mussolini’s game?” I asked, trying to turn the tables on him. “Why is he stirring up the Arabs by false propaganda? Why is he pouring troops into Libya? Why are Italian submarines doing acts of piracy in the Mediterranean? Is he out for Egypt, by any chance?”

My Italian friend laughed at these questions which seemed to amuse him very much.

“There is nothing in all that!” he said. “Il Duce is a man of considerable intelligence. Naturally as long as England is hostile and unfriendly he will stir up trouble wherever possible. We don’t believe for a second that he has ambitions regarding Egypt. But he is getting as many cards into his hand as he can pick up—for bargaining purposes. He wants to make a good bargain and not a bad war.”

This laughing philosopher was incredulous about the piratical possibilities of Italian submarines in the Mediterranean where—before the Nyon agreement—British ships were reporting torpedo attacks.

“There is one clear proof,” he told me, “that those pirate submarines are not Italian. If Italian submarines fired on a British ship they would hit it. These pirates always miss. They can’t be Italian!”

But as Mr. Winston Churchill pointed out some time later in the House of Commons it was remarkable that when Signor Mussolini signed the Nyon agreement—Mr. Anthony Eden’s most successful effort—piracy stopped in the Mediterranean, as though the very terror of his name had sent them to their hiding-places.

In Rome I talked with another friend, not Italian but very English, and in his way very important as a friendly link between the two countries. From his windows there was a glorious view of the Eternal City, but our minds were turned towards England and its troubles in the world.

“Our foreign policy has gone mad!” said my friend.

So he also thought that! It was a disturbing echo of the other conversation.

“We have missed the tram time after time,” he said to me. “Will another tram come along—by the grace of God?”

“What tram?” I asked. “On what lines does it run?”

For an hour he talked, not without emotion, though he is a man with a placid manner as a rule, and a pleasant sense of humour, and an old-fashioned dignity.

“We have gone from one blunder to another,” he argued. “Every step in our foreign policy has been in the wrong direction. The Abyssinian war might never have happened if we had given Mussolini fair warning of our objections before he had sent out his troops. There was no mention of Abyssinia at the Stresa Conference before that happened, although our Government had been urged to raise the question by our Ambassador in Rome. Mussolini took silence for consent.”

While he was talking I looked out of his windows over the roofs and domes of Rome, and for a moment my mind lost the thread of his arguments. He was talking about Hitler’s Germany.

“When Hitler came into power Germany hadn’t rearmed. We might have granted them equality of arms on a low scale and by degrees. They were willing and eager to accept that. Time after time Hitler offered terms of friendship to England and France which would have secured European peace. They were rejected or ignored.”

“Where is peace now?” asked my friend with a little faint sigh as he watched a wisp of bluish smoke from his cigarette rising to the painted ceiling in this room in Rome where he is well known and well beloved.

There was no hostility in Rome to any English man or woman though foreign relations were strained between us. I found the Italians were charming and courteous as usual and there was no outward or visible sign of the strain they have suffered and are suffering because of drastic taxation for the costs of Empire which as yet yields no fruit of victory. The economists in our country tell us that Italy is on the verge of bankruptcy, that they are reaching the end of their tether in internal credit and gold reserves, that soon they must seek a foreign loan, or collapse. Their penury is not visible in the streets. The Italian men look better dressed than ours or, at least, wear “parade suits” after working hours, very smartly cut and very well pressed.

There was no sign of poverty in the Pincio gardens where most mornings I sat for a while with a friend at one of the little tables of the Casina delle Rose smoking cigarettes over a cup of coffee under a blue sky and a warm sun, though it was late autumn, watching the nurses and children, and this little pageant of Italian life. Good-looking cars drove up and out of them stepped pretty ladies, elegantly dressed, coming to sit in this garden café for a morning apéritif. Round the Row, like our own in Hyde Park, came the lucky people who ride horses, chatting and laughing and making a pleasant picture in the dappled sunlight under the autumn trees. They did not look poverty-stricken.

Rome has become more splendid under the rule of Mussolini. He is building new sports grounds for the training of his youth, who look well fed and high spirited as they march into the great new stadium—the Mussolini forum—outside the city where many figures of naked and glorious youth, carved out of white marble, stand heroic and dazzling-white under the blue sky of this new Italy which is dynamic, self-conscious, urged towards new adventures of Empire by that astonishing man who has in his restless mind secret ambitions, ruthless of other people’s rights if they stand in his way.

If, he says, the British Empire is weak and decadent, if it will not defend what it has, if by all its blunders—they are mad those English!—it is beaten in retreat in many parts of the world—in the Far East, in Europe, in Asia—Italy, which once was Rome, will stretch out its hand for some of those possessions.

On the walls of ancient palaces, built by order of those Romans whose law prevailed over the known world, there are maps, inlaid with marble of different colours, of the old Roman Empire, East and West. For four hundred years Britain was theirs. For more than that Gaul was theirs. Once Egypt was theirs. The wheel of fate runs in its endless cycles. Perhaps Egypt will be under Roman rule again one day. If those English are hard pressed——