Imperial Bullfrog

ITALY (see cover)

The bullfrog has protruding eyes and makes a loud, guttural noise, as if he owned the frog pond. He feeds on any living animal matter which he can swallow, and is in turn devoured by creatures stronger than he, such as snakes, fishes, herons, alligators, etc.--Encyclopaedia Britannica and other sources.

This week Benito Mussolini of the protruding eyes and loud, guttural noise went to Brennero to confer with Adolf Hitler. It was the sixth time the two dictators had met since World War II began. To this conference they brought not only their Foreign Ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Count Galeazzo Ciano, but also the chiefs of their high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Ugo Cavallero. WThat they planned the world would soon know, for each previous meeting has marked a new stage of the war. For the present all that Berlin and Rome announced was "complete agreement."

Much had happened since they last met, January 20. Mussolini's legions had miserably failed to conquer Greece. Hitler had rescued them. Mussolini's legions had been chased out of Egypt and westward across half of Italian Libya. Hitler had rescued them. The France that Mussolini declared war against had become a friend of Hitler's. Hitler's Air Force had taken Crete, astride the eastern Mediterranean.

Hitler may present Crete to Mussolini, as he has presented him with the puppetries of Croatia and Montenegro and with a bit of Dalmatia, but such generosity costs Hitler nothing because Mussolini is a puppet of Hitler's. Well might the two dictators reach complete agreement; Mussolini can no longer say No.

One year ago this week Benito Mussolini entered the war crying: "Our conscience is absolutely clear!" So saying, he staked his country's independence in a game of war for Empire. He lost the game. For although the Bullfrog of the Mediterranean might devour lesser organisms (except those, like Greece, that stuck in his throat), he was firmly locked in the alligator-jaws of Nazi conquest. Were he a man to be amused by his own misfortune, he might laugh gutturally at the paradox of his position: If his ally wins the war, Italy may rule an empire of sorts, but Germany will rule Italy. If his enemy wins the war, Italy may at least rule Italy.

No Imperialists. The Italian people followed Mussolini to war reluctantly. Their reluctance arose from their centuries-old indifference to imperialism. Through the Renaissance they had a deep-rooted and passionate love for their own paese. It took another 300 years to extend this local patriotism to love of their country, their peninsula. In the 72 years since Italy began acquiring an empire the Italian people have usually remained stolidly bored by the process.

Fascist cries of "Nice!, Savoy!" in the Senate in 1938 derived from a deal made by Napoleon III and King Vittorio Emanuele I of Sardinia in 1859, when Napoleon promised to help liberate northern Italy from Austria in return for Nice and Savoy. The war aroused such enthusiasm throughout Italy that Napoleon ducked out of it, taking his prize, while Garibaldi and his Red Shirts conquered Sicily and Naples for Vittorio Emanuele.

In 1866 Vittorio Emanuele set a precedent which has been followed in Italy: as Prussia and Austria went to war, he picked Austria as the loser and attacked from the south. He was soundly trounced at Custozza, but he got Venetia in the peace settlement. When France was prostrate in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 he annexed the Papal State, which Napoleon had protected. The peninsula was at last united. Proclaimed Vittorio Emanuele: "It only remains to make our country great and happy."

To be great Italy must have an army, a navy and colonies. But the people who had fought so valiantly for freedom did not care to fight for strange lands; they could not love the African desert as they loved Lombardy and Tuscany. As poor, backward Italy staggered under the weight of military expenditures, her people went off, not to carve out an empire, but to labor in the Western Hemisphere to make enough money to return to Italy to die. Yet the imperial dream persisted.

It persisted even though France grabbed Tunisia from under Italy's nose in 1881, even though the Ethiopians massacred an Italian Army at Aduwa in 1896. By purchase and painful conquest Italy mastered an area in Africa about twice the size of Pennsylvania, called it Eritrea. In 1911 Italy declared an unprovoked war against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, got Tripoli in the settlement and kept Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands provisionally.

No Victories. The imperial dream kept Italy on the fence for nine months of World War I, while crafty Premier Antonio Salandra bargained with both sides.

On April 15, 1915 Italy presented to the Central Powers her conditions for entering the war on their side. All but one of the conditions were rejected, and Italy signed the Treaty of London on April 26, declared war on Austria May 24. World War I gave Italy another great defeat to place beside Custozza and Aduwa: Caporetto.

The Treaty of London, if it had been kept, would have given Italy part of Dalmatia, hegemony over Albania, colonial expansion in Africa and influence in the Near East. Instead, she got only slivers of African territory from the Allies, had to buy, then steal Albania, and waited for May 1941 to get her share of Dalmatia.

It is necessary to have the courage to say that Italy cannot remain forever shut up in one sea, even if that sea be the Adriatic. . . . There are other seas that may interest us. . . . Treaties are transactions which represent agreements, points of equilibrium. No treaty is eternal.--so said Mussolini, dreaming of expansion in 1923. Benito Mussolini was a man in whom the imperial dream was an obsession. Italy would grow strong through Fascism, then Italy would conquer an empire. Not only bits of Africa would be hers; she would rule Mare Nostrum and its shores. Italian ships would ply back & forth between Italy and Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco; to the east they would sail to the gates of Islam, which would recognize Italy as its protector. Italian settlers would occupy all the fertile shores of Mare Nostrum, and Mare Nostrum would be Italian forever.

But in his dream of empire Benito Mussolini made the mistake of believing that bulging eyes and a loud, guttural noise could imbue the Italian people with the spirit of empire. In the Treaty of Lausanne he clinched Italy's hold on the Dodecanese and Rhodes. He rattled his saber at Greece, occupied Corfu, withdrew reluctantly with a 50,000,000-lire indemnity. He made an agreement with Yugoslavia which gave Italy title to Fiume. He bribed King Zog of the Albanians away from Yugoslavia, which had grubstaked Zog after World War I.

The Manchurian Incident in 1931 taught Mussolini two things: 1) the League of Nations offered its members no real protection; 2) Britain would condone aggressive wars as long as they did not affect her commercial interest. Thereupon, still lured by the image of empire, he whipped his people into the Ethiopian War, sent them to Spain and another historic defeat at Guadalajara. Intervention in Spain was far from altruistic: if Franco lost, Italy would be sitting in the Balearic Islands, astride France's shipping lanes to Africa; if Franco won, France would have another unsatisfied colonial power at her back door. Before the Spanish Republic had been liquidated, the Duce's Fascist claque was yelling for Corsica and Tunisia, for Nice and Savoy. But he has not got them yet.

We prefer to be feared rather than loved, and we care not if we are hated, because we have nothing but contempt for those that hate us.--so said Mussolini in 1938, still dreaming of expansion, but wiser after 15 years, reconciled to the fact that the road to empire was paved with hate.

Benito Mussolini's great crime has been the winning of contempt for a people who are brave but peaceful. His great weakness has been his inability to bend their will to his, or his will to theirs. His great mistake has been his failure to understand them. To him it must be a sore reflection that after 22 years of constant harangue he has not convinced them that imperialism is preferable to peaceful emigration. When at last he drove them into a major war they were ill-prepared and ill-equipped and they had no stomach for it.

When she failed to conquer Greece and Egypt, Italy lost her war. Only Mussolini and his God know whether he dared admit that to himself. But he had to choose which side to surrender to. He chose to surrender to Germany. German troops and the Gestapo poured into Italy, German bureaucrats took offices in the Government Buildings of Rome. In his heart, if not in his aging head, Mussolini knows that now he is only a Gauleiter in Dictator's clothing. Since then he has done his master's bidding, taken the crumbs that his master has dropped him, managed his Empire for his master's aggrandizement.

No Athlete. After more than 18 years of dictatorship, Mussolini is no lusty athlete, as newsreels have so often pictured him, but a sick, neurotic old man of 57. He has had stomach ulcers for years, has used no meat, tea, coffee, hard liquor or tobacco. There is a suspicion abroad that both his heart and brain have been affected by syphilis. Coincidence-seekers have even connected his reported ailments with European events, viz:

When Germany took the Rhineland Mussolini had an attack of ulcers. When Hitler conducted his blood purge Mussolini began losing his hair (and he has grown bald since then). When Hitler grabbed Austria, Mussolini had a heart attack. When Germany and Russia signed their Non-Aggression Pact, Mussolini was fitted for glasses (and he does wear glasses now). When Germany invaded Poland, Mussolini couldn't sleep.

Whether or not these reports were true, certain it is that no official explanation has ever been given his abrupt withdrawal from Italy's Army maneuvers in August 1939. During the weeks of crisis that followed, Mussolini espoused a strange new policy: silence. He has broken silence publicly only nine times since then, and those speeches were short, bitter. Last month he failed to make his habitual appearance on the Palazzo Venezia on the anniversary of the birth of Fascism.

Last April Correspondent John T. Whitaker reported that in the spring of 1939 Mussolini suffered a stroke. He was confined to his bed for five weeks, his face partially paralyzed and his left eye affected. Since then, said trustworthy Correspondent Whitaker's trustworthy sources, the Duce has suffered from paranoia. Paranoia is often characterized by delusions of grandeur.

No Friends. Last week Benito Mussolini purged the last of his Big Black Shirts: Achille Starace, who had been Chief of Staff of the Fascist Militia since 1939 and for seven years before that was Secretary General of the Fascist Party. By removing him from his post (nothing was said about what had become of him) Benito Mussolini got rid of one more power which might threaten the power of the Duce. Before Starace, many an old-time Fascist had been relegated to oblivion or death: Hero Italo Balbo to the Governor Generalship of Libya and then to mysterious death in his airplane; Soldiers Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani to retirement; Loudmouthpiece Roberto Farinacci to an unknown fate in Albania. Each of these men possessed great influence over some segment of the Italian people, from royalty to hoi polloi. With the purging of Starace, Benito Mussolini had cut himself even more adrift from connection with the 43,500,000 Italian people.

As he smiled unctiously at Adolf Hitler at Brennero he must have remembered the day, almost seven years ago, when he rushed an Army into the Brenner Pass and frightened Young Dictator Hitler out of grabbing Austria. In those seven years the ridiculous little man whom Mussolini belittled had become the conqueror of Europe. Yet even victorious Dictator Hitler was a prisoner of his conquests: he must conquer new worlds to be safe in the world he has conquered. And his prisoner, Aging Dictator Mussolini, must help him to conquer them.

Last week, in the hour of Axis victory, the two dictators, with their Pooh-Bahs and generals, doubtless talked of new worlds to conquer: the Near East and Africa lay before them. With the fall of Crete and the alignment of France with Germany, the Mediterranean had become no longer safe for Great Britain. But it was a hollow hour for Benito Mussolini. His archenemy Britain had been driven from Mare Nostrum at last. Now Mare Nostrum was German.

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