Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  Severely wounded in the fighting on the Carso plateau and several times decorated for valor, Mussolini, a patriot above all things, saw what he regarded as the fruits of Italy’s victory being swept away from her in 1919 by a wave of communism that covered all of Northern Italy and threatened all private property rights. As a protest against this he organized the Fascisti or anti-Communist shock troops. The history of their activities in the next two years has been told very often.

  Now Mussolini stands at the head of an organization of 500,000 members. It comprises men of almost every trade in Italy, several hundreds of thousand workers disgusted with the communism, having turned to the Fascisti as an armed force who might do something for them. Fascism thus enters its third phase. First it was an organization of counterattackers against the Communist demonstrations, second it became a political party, and now it is a political and military party that is enlisting the workers of Italy and invading the field of labor organizations. It is dominating Italy from Rome to the Alps.

  The question is now, what does Mussolini, sitting at his desk in the office of the Popolo d’Italia and fondling the ears of his wolfhound pup, intend to do with his “political party organized as a military force”?

  Italy’s Blackshirts

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  June 24, 1922

  MILAN.—The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old potshot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. Banks and large commercial houses, who contributed the funds that launched the Fascist movement as a protective measure against a threatened Communist revolution, have withdrawn their support and the mass of the Italian press have turned solidly against the Fascisti. Meanwhile the Fascisti, solidly organized, are forming themselves into a political party and by a constant series of outrages, keeping Italy in a state of class war.

  On June 1 the Fascisti, as a demonstration of their strength, decided to capture the city of Bologna. The excuse was that the Prefect of Bologna was too friendly to radicals. Benito Mussolini, the renegade Socialist, ex-editor of Avanti, the Socialist newspaper of Milan, duelist, war hero and present member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, gave the order for the occupation of the city from Rome. 15,000 Fascisti, averaging twenty years of age, “took” the town, burned the telegraph and post offices, beat up any- and everyone that objected to their seizure of Bologna and then withdrew, announcing that the next time they gave a demonstration they would be 50,000 instead of 15,000, and that they would kill instead of beating up.

  It is that sort of demonstration, repeated in hundreds of other Italian towns, that has cost the Fascisti their old-time popularity. Trouble stirred up by Fascisti, with the consequent lack of political stability, is what is keeping the lira at its present low rate. That hits the businessmen in their pocketbooks and they would willingly pay more than they subscribed to found the bourgeois shock troops in order to buy them off now. In many cases they are now paying them blackmail to keep them from making trouble.

  Their continued lawless tactics cost the Fascists a very real popularity too. After the war it was impossible for the wife of a merchant, a manufacturer, or a professional man to go about in any public places in northern Italy without being liable to insults of various kinds, from having her hat torn off and her face scratched to being hissed as a “borghese.” Anyone buying a first- or second-class seat in an Italian train was never sure that they would not be thrown out of it by some worker with his dinner pail who had decided that he would ride first class on a third-class ticket. Gangs of hoodlums would swarm into a train as it stopped in some northern Italian town and after throwing the “borghese” out of the first-class compartments would gaily enter and ride a few stations, cutting all the red plush out of the seats as souvenirs.

  When Benito Mussolini organized the Fascisti as a sort of Ku Klux Klan against this sort of terrorism, he was enthusiastically supported. The Fascisti were formed from all the excitement-loving youths of the middle- and upper-class families and set about a counter-campaign of terrorism against the workers. Wearing their black silk shirts, open at the neck, their black puttees, army breeches and black fezzes, and armed with clubs and revolvers, they fought some very gay battles with the workers and did some very effective raiding. The workers realized that the millennium, when a man could ride first class on a third-class ticket, was still some distance off and settled down to work again. It looked as though the whole business was settled and that the Fascisti could go home and put their black silk shirts into mothballs.

  A hitch came in the arrangements when the Fascisti refused to consider the matter settled. They had a taste of killing under police protection and they liked it. They enjoyed hunting live Communists much more than going to school or working in their fathers’ offices—and they intended to keep right on. So the Fascisti have kept on fighting, burning, pillaging anything resembling communism they could find. And as all of northern Italy is tinged with communism in one shade or another, the Fascisti have taken on a lifetime job.

  The Fascisti leaders, seeing their well-organized gang, have developed political ambitions and want to make a solid political party of their followers. The politicians of other parties fear this and would do anything to break up the movement. Meanwhile the Communists, tiring of the fact that the Fascisti make no closed season on them, have organized Arditi del Popolo, or People’s Shock Troops. These are being put into red shirts to oppose the Fascisti black shirts and are being trained in street fighting. The businessmen are hoping by stopping their money supply to choke the Fascisti, and the government has formed a special corps called the Guardia Regia, made up of men from the mountains of Abruzzi and the South, to fight both sides in case of a civil war. The whole business has the quiet and peaceful look of a three-year-old child playing with a live Mills bomb.

  A Veteran Visits the Old Front

  The Toronto Daily Star

  July 22, 1922

  PARIS.—Don’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened in the night in the mud at Paschendaele or of the first wave working up the slope of Vimy, do not try and go back to verify them. It is no good. The front is as different from the way it used to be as your highly respectable shin, with a thin, white scar on it now, is from the leg that you sat and twisted a tourniquet around while the blood soaked your puttee and trickled into your boot, so that when you got up you limped with a “squidge” on your way to the dressing station.

  Go to someone else’s front, if you want to. There your imagination will help you out and you may be able to picture the things that happened. But don’t go back to your own front, because the change in everything and the supreme, deadly, lonely dullness, the smooth green of the fields that were once torn up with shell holes and slashed with trenches and wire, will combine against you and make you believe that the places and happenings that had been the really great events to you were only fever dreams or lies you had told to yourself. It is like going into the empty gloom of a theater where the charwomen are scrubbing. I know because I have just been back to my own front.

  Not only is it battlefields that have changed in quality and feeling and gone back into a green smugness with the shell holes filled up, the trenches filled in, the pillboxes blasted out and smoothed over and the wire all rolled up and rotting in a great heap somewhere. That was to be expected, and it was inevitable that the feelings in the battlefields would change when the dead that made them both holy and real were dug up and reburied in big, orderly cemeteries miles away from where they died. Towns where you were billeted, towns unscarred by war, are the ones where the changes hit you hardest. For there are many little towns that you love, and after all, no one but a staff officer could love a battlefield.

  There may be towns back of the old Canadian front, towns with queer Flemish names and narrow, cobbled streets, that have kept their magic. There may be such towns. I have just come from Schio
, though. Schio was the finest town I remember in the war, and I wouldn’t have recognized it now—and I would give a lot not to have gone.

  Schio was one of the finest places on earth. It was a little town in the Trentino under the shoulder of the Alps, and it contained all the good cheer, amusement and relaxation a man could desire. When we used to be in billets there, everyone was perfectly contented and we were always talking about what a wonderful place Schio would be to come and live after the war. I particularly recall a first-class hotel called the Due Spadi, where the food was superb and we used to call the factory where we were billeted the “Schio Country Club.”

  The other day Schio seemed to have shrunk. I walked up one side of the long, narrow main street looking in shop windows at the fly-speckled shirts, the cheap china dishes, the postcards showing about seven different varieties of a young man and a young girl looking into each other’s eyes, the stiff, fly-speckled pastry, the big, round loaves of sour bread. At the end of the street were the mountains, but I had walked over the St. Bernard Pass the week before and the mountains, without snow caps, looked rain-furrowed and dull; not much more than hills. I looked at the mountains a long time, though, and then walked down the other side of the street to the principal bar. It was starting to rain a little and shopkeepers were lowering the shutters in front of their shops.

  “The town is changed since the war,” I said to the girl, she was red-cheeked and black-haired and discontented-looking, who sat on a stool, knitting behind the zinc-covered bar.

  “Yes?” she said without missing a stitch.

  “I was here during the war,” I ventured.

  “So were many others,” she said under her breath, bitterly.

  “Grazie, Signor,” she said with mechanical, insolent courtesy as I paid for the drink and went out.

  That was Schio. There was more, the way the Due Spadi had shrunk to a small inn, the factory where we used to be billeted now was humming, with our old entrance bricked up and a flow of black muck polluting the stream where we used to swim. All the kick had gone out of things. Early next morning I left in the rain after a bad night’s sleep.

  There was a garden in Schio with the wall matted with wisteria where we used to drink beer on hot nights with a bombing moon making all sorts of shadows from the big plane tree that spread above the table. After my walk in the afternoon I knew enough not to try and find that garden. Maybe there never was a garden.

  Perhaps there never was any war around Schio at all. I remember lying in the squeaky bed in the hotel and trying to read by an electric light that hung high up from the center of the ceiling and then switching off the light and looking out the window down the road where the arc light was making a dim light through the rain. It was the same road that the battalions marched along through the white dust in 1916. They were the Brigata Ancona, the Brigata Como, the Brigata Tuscana and ten others brought down from the Carso to check the Austrian offensive that was breaking through the mountain wall of the Trentino and beginning to spill down the valleys that led to the Venetian and Lombardy plains. They were good troops in those days and they marched through the dust of the early summer, broke the offensive along the Galio-Asiago-Canoev line, and died in the mountain gullies, in the pine woods on the Trentino slopes, hunting cover on the desolate rocks and pitched out in the soft-melting early summer snow of the Pasubio.

  It was the same old road that some of the same old brigades marched along through the dust of June of 1918, being rushed to the Piave to stop another offensive. Their best men were dead on the rocky Carso, in the fighting around Goritzia, on Mount San Gabrielle, on Grappa and in all the places where men died that nobody ever heard about. In 1918 they didn’t march with the ardor that they did in 1916, some of the troops strung out so badly that, after the battalion was just a dust cloud way up the road, you would see poor old boys hoofing it along the side of the road to ease their bad feet, sweating along under their packs and rifles and the deadly Italian sun in a long, horrible, never-ending stagger after the battalion.

  So we went down to Mestre, that was one of the great railheads for the Piave, traveling first class with an assorted carriageful of evil-smelling Italian profiteers going to Venice for vacations. In Mestre we hired a motorcar to drive out to the Piave and leaned back in the rear seat and studied the map and the country along the long road that is built through the poisonous green Adriatic marshes that flank all the coast near Venice.

  Near Porto Grande, in the part of the lower Piave delta where Austrians and Italians attacked and counterattacked waist-deep in the swamp water, our car stopped in a desolate part of the road that ran like a causeway across the green marshy waste. It needed a long, grease-smearing job of adjustment on the gears and while the driver worked, and got a splinter of steel in his finger that my wife [Hadley] dug out with a needle from our rucksack, we baked in the hot sun. Then a wind blew the mist away from the Adriatic and we saw Venice way off across the swamp and the sea standing gray and yellow like a fairy city.

  Finally the driver wiped the last of the grease off his hands into his over-luxuriant hair, the gears took hold when he let the clutch in and we went off along the road through the swampy plain. Fossalta, our objective, as I remembered it, was a shelled-to-pieces town that even rats couldn’t live in. It had been within trench-mortar range of the Austrian lines for a year and in quiet times the Austrian had blown up anything in it that looked as though it ought to be blown up. During active sessions it had been one of the first footholds the Austrian had gained on the Venice side of the Piave, and one of the last places he was driven out of and hunted down in and very many men had died in its rubble- and debris-strewn streets and been smoked out of its cellars with flammenwerfers during the house-to-house work.

  We stopped the car in Fossalta and got out to walk. All the shattered, tragic dignity of the wrecked town was gone. In its place was a new, smug, hideous collection of plaster houses, painted bright blues, reds and yellows. I had been in Fossalta perhaps fifty times and I would not have recognized it. The new plaster church was the worst-looking thing. The trees that had been splintered and gashed showed their scars if you looked for them and had a stunted appearance, but you could not have told in passing, unless you had known, how they had been torn. Everything was so abundantly green and prosperous-looking.

  I climbed the grassy slope and above the sunken road where the dugouts had been to look at the Piave and looked down an even slope to the blue river. The Piave is as blue as the Danube is brown. Across the river were two new houses where the two rubble heaps had been just inside the Austrian lines.

  I tried to find some trace of the old trenches to show my wife, but there was only the smooth green slope. In a thick prickly patch of hedge we found an old rusty piece of shell fragment. From the cast-iron look of the smoothly burst fragment I could tell it was an old bit of gas shell. That was all there was left of the front.

  On our way back to the motorcar we talked about how jolly it is that Fossalta is all built up now and how fine it must be for all the families to have their homes back. We said how proud we were of the way the Italians had kept their mouths shut and rebuilt their devastated districts while some other nations were using their destroyed towns as showplaces and reparation appeals. We said all the things of that sort that as decent-thinking people we thought—and then we stopped talking. There was nothing more to say. It was so very sad.

  For a reconstructed town is much sadder than a devastated town. The people haven’t their homes back. They have new homes. The home they played in as children, the room where they made love with the lamp turned down, the hearth where they sat, the church they were married in, the room where their child died, these rooms are gone. A shattered village in the war always had a dignity, as though it had died for something. It had died for something and something better was to come. It was all part of the great sacrifice. Now there is just the new, ugly futility of it all. Everything is just as it was—except a little worse.
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br />   So we walked along the street where I saw my very good friend killed, past the ugly houses toward the motorcar, whose owner would never have had a motorcar if it had not been for the war, and it all seemed a very bad business. I had tried to recreate something for my wife and had failed utterly. The past was as dead as a busted Victrola record. Chasing yesterdays is a bum show—and if you have to prove it, go back to your old front.

  Sinclair Lewis’s Horsebacking

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  August 5, 1922

  They are telling a story in Paris on Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street, that is unconfirmed by Mr. Lewis, but that has a strange ring of truth about it.

  According to the story, Lewis on a recent visit to London, where he was working on a new novel to appear this fall, expressed a desire to ride in Rotten Row. He was astonished at the shortness of the Row and said as much to the groom that was accompanying him.

  The groom, who had been eyeing Lewis’s seat in a grieved and pained manner for some time, drew himself up in disgust.

  “Well, sir,” he said very haughtily over the top of his stock, “You cawn’t expect the bloomin’ prairies ‘ere sir.”

  The Great “Apéritif” Scandal

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  August 12, 1922

  PARIS.—The great “apéritif” scandal that is agitating Paris has struck at the roots of one of the best-loved institutions of France.