A Chill in the Air

by Iris Origo

  Later in the day, comments are more articulate. “Macchè, there won’t be a war even now!” declares the cook, Berto, who prides himself on his political acumen. “Ci sto dietro, io, alla politica.”11 And we discover that to his mind a declaration of war is an open question. “The others won’t accept it, and we shall be where we were before.”

  After dinner we listen gloomily to the radio. F.’s discomfort has taken the form of saying: “Don’t let’s listen to England or France. We know what they’ll say, and if there was no truth in it we shouldn’t care. But now we’ve got to go through with it.” But her husband does not agree. “We might as well hear it. ‘Le poignard dans le dos’12 – that’s what will be said of us for the next twenty years.” So we listen in to both England and France. Duff Cooper’s broadcast is shrill, angry, ineffective, and his phrase about “a nation led to destruction by a single bad man” provokes laughter; but Reynaud’s short, tragic indictment is unbearably painful: “C’est l’heure que choisit Mussolini pour nous declarer la guerre! Comment juger cet acte? La France, elle, n’a rien à dire. Le monde, qui nous regarde, jugera.”13 We sit in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  JUNE 12TH

  The Germans are encircling Paris. The Italian air force has bombarded Malta; the English Turin, Genoa, and various forts in Libya.

  First air-raid alarm in Rome; we hear about it from Serao, for thirty years the legal advisor for the British Embassy in Rome and last night one of the very few to see off Sir Percy Lorraine and his staff. Brought up in the English legal tradition, passionately Anglophile and intensely proud of his CBE, the voluble, shrewd, enthusiastic little lawyer is in a state of deep distress. “I feel as if the ground is giving way under my feet,” he went on saying. “I still can’t believe it. War between England and Italy! No, anything but that!” Extremely nervous at first, glancing to see whether both the door and the windows were shut, and feeling his ground, Serao loses all caution when he begins to speak about the Germans. “Barbarians! Traitors!” He tells us how three weeks ago, on the morning after the first posters abusing England had appeared in Rome, he was rung up by the British Ambassador, Sir Percy Lorraine. “What is the law of your country with regard to the posting of bills in public places? Isn’t government authorization required?” Poor Serao, shaking in his shoes and well aware that every telephone is tapped: “Well, yes, Your Excellency. That, I understand, is the law, but of course…” – “Will you come round at once and give me a copy of the relevant passage?” He hurries round with the required information, to find the Ambassador very angry. After reading the clear and unequivocal passage: “Can you explain to me,” he asks, “why this morning Ciano assured me that the posting of such bills is not illegal?” Serao stammers, “Perhaps some oversight…” “Am I to understand”, Sir Percy inquires, “that your Foreign Minister is unacquainted with the laws of his own country?” Then, more quietly, “Well, I shall have to see what my government has to say to this.” “At this point,” added Serao, “I took my courage in both hands. ‘Your Excellency’, I begged, ‘let me speak not only as your legal advisor, but in the name of thousands of Italians, who are not inimical to England, who do not want this war. These provocations are deliberate. Their object is to force England into a declaration of war. In the name of all the Italians who detest Germany, who still believe that war with England would be a disaster, let me implore you: do not take up these provocations!” The Ambassador smiled. “I daresay you’re right”, he replied and, added Serao triumphantly, “I believe that in his dispatch my advice was quoted as that of ‘a man who has been a good friend to England for many years!’” He shrugged his shoulders sadly. “Well, it’s all over now.”

  In the evening Antonio returns from Rome with the news of an air raid there last night: nothing dropped but propaganda leaflets, but the noise deafening, as the anti-aircraft fire was unceasing, causing the only damage by their own shells, which fell all over the city. Everyone’s nerves considerably shaken and the station packed with people leaving. We are applying for twenty evacuated children.

  JUNE 15TH

  William Phillips has come up from Rome. After a second air raid last night, he does not recommend it to me as the most restful place for my accouchement. His chief occupation this week has been trying to expedite the departure of the British and French Embassies who, four days after leaving Rome, are still stuck at Ancona and Domodossola, waiting for their opposite numbers to leave London and Paris. At last, however, they have got off.

  JUNE 18TH

  At 5 p.m. yesterday, heard on the Italian radio the news of French capitulation; an hour later, from America, the text of Pétain’s dignified and moving broadcast; in the evening, Churchill’s brief statement: England will go on fighting. At 10 p.m. a special train passed through Chiusi on its way to Brenner: Mussolini on his way to Hitler, to discuss the terms of capitulation.

  JUNE 19TH

  Nowhere in the press (except perhaps in an occasional reference to Pétain) can one find any trace of chivalrous feeling, or even of decent commiseration for the vanquished. Today La Nazione’s triumphant leading article proclaims that “This is the century of Mussolini and Hitler. From now on, the old continent will begin a new history.” The writer foretells “the destruction of an iniquitous slavery,” and a return to “the true values of life”, while “the old sordid plutocracies bite the dust.”

  The reaction of our household and peasants is simpler: they are merely joyfully convinced that immediate and total peace lies ahead. “It’s all over! Mussolini will get all he wants, without making us fight for it!”

  The two leaders drive together through the beflagged streets of Munich, “a testimony,” says La Nazione, “even to the most sceptical, that the friendship of these two great men is founded on the Divine Will”. Churchill addresses the House of Commons in a speech free from recrimination, but terribly weak in its attempt to explain why so little military help was given to Poland and France. And meanwhile the merciless fighting continues. Strasbourg and Dijon are occupied in the East, Brest and St. Malo in the West, and men continue to be killed – for what?

  As, hour after hour, we turn on the radio in hope of news of an armistice, we hardly pay any attention to the news that Russia is occupying Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Japan is menacing Indo China. Banditry spreads fast.

  JUNE 21ST

  Peace terms have been proposed, under terms which enable the victors to enjoy the “full historic savour” of the occasion. The representatives meet in the forest of Compiège, and sign the terms in the railway carriage in which Foch dictated the “humiliating” peace terms of 1918 to Germany.

  JUNE 23RD

  Here comment on the terms – in private conversation, as opposed to the odious official tone – shows much sympathy for France, as well as shame or at least discomfort for Italy’s own role. “Thank heaven, at least, we didn’t actually attack France! We didn’t deal the death blow!” But for England there is nothing but contempt and hatred. She’s considered to have betrayed France, as well as her smaller allies – and is rapidly becoming, in the eyes even of educated and liberal Italians, the sort of monstrous abstraction that Hitler’s Germany has become for Englishmen: a personification of powers of evil and retrogression.

  JUNE 30TH

  Having been seized by labour pains, I hurry down to Chiusi with Antonio to catch a train to Rome. Naturally, the trains are all filled to overflowing with troops, but the kind owner of the station bar, an old friend, attempts to reassure me by pointing out that there is a dining-car on the next train. “If necessary, the baby can be born there.” I am not much attracted by this prospect, but agree that it would be preferable to standing in the passage. My baby, however, is considerate enough to delay its arrival and when at last we reach Rome, we are whisked off – in what seems almost embarrassing comfort and splendour – in the American Embassy car to the beautiful house and solicitous care of my kind godfather William Phillips who, though his wife and staff
have already left, is still waiting for orders from Washington to go home himself.

  We see many friends – all very depressed, mostly hating the intervention. But much criticism of England everywhere, even among the most anti-German.

  JULY 3RD

  My first air raid last night. The sirens began just after midnight; I was still awake and was joined by William Phillips. We sat talking pleasantly in the dark for about one hour, heard one distant burst of fire and then the all-clear signal. Altogether a singularly unalarming experience, except apparently to the lions in the Zoo, who went on roaring all night. But, as the first wail of the sirens was heard, my thoughts went to England and France.

  JULY 6TH

  This is a strange period of waiting. The Roman summer, with the city half empty and the black-out at night, is more beautiful than I have ever seen it. In the evenings we dine out under the ilex trees of Villa Taverna, shimmering with fireflies.

  JULY 7TH

  I have just seen the Italian version of the UFA documentary film La Battaglia della Manica. It is a terrible document and also, to judge by the reaction of the Roman audience, a most effective piece of propaganda. The object, throughout, is to present an overwhelming spectacle of force. We see picture after picture of the German advance; and, finally, German troops marching down the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, preceded by a brief glimpse of the Allied troops, headed by the Grenadier Guards, parading before Foch in 1918. “That was the past; this is today – and the future.”

  (“Nous sommes l’Empire à la fin de la décadence

  Qui regarde passer les grands barbares blancs!”)14

  Whereas the German film of the invasion of Poland had only been shown, three months ago, to a carefully selected audience, which received it with coldness or disgust, this film is packing the largest cinema in town. There was silence, indeed, and an occasional gasp, at the sight of the destruction of Rouen and Dunkirk, but there was also a good deal of applause: applause for Hitler reviewing his troops, applause for the entry into Paris, applause even for the German flag flying over Versailles.

  JULY 8TH

  The return of 700 members of the Italian colony in England, with the Italian Ambassador Bastianini, has given rise to a fresh outburst in the press against “revolting instances of British brutality”. The papers report stories of priests and nuns insulted and flung into prison, of large numbers of women and children imprisoned. Moreover the returning travellers give a heated account of the filthiness of their ship, the Monarch of Bermuda (which apparently had just been used as a troop ship and not been cleaned), of the two days which they were obliged to spend below deck at Glasgow, with all the portholes closed, of the lack of water and bad food, and of the deliberate rudeness of police, porters and stewards. During the last days in London many of the Italian colony, including my physician Castellani, found it necessary to sleep in improvised dormitories in the Embassy to escape arrest, and the last unfortunate Italians in the provinces had no means of escaping from the general fifth column hysteria. All this, of course, has been greatly magnified by the press, but even Castellani, with pro-English sympathies and certainly not fussy about comfort, admitted that treatment in London and accommodation provided on board was quite unnecessarily unpleasant – and in marked contrast to the excellent treatment received by the British diplomats on the Conte Rosso.

  JULY 15TH

  I have seen today a Swedish friend who has just been in prison in Florence for a fortnight for “imprudent speaking” and is now expelled from the country. She has lived and worked in Florence as a Swedish masseuse for thirty years. Undoubtedly she has not been prudent in her frank expression of anti-German feeling, although the actual remark which caused her arrest was nothing more than the expression of a hope that her country would not soon suffer the same fate as Norway. She was fetched by the police at 10 p.m., allowed to take nothing with her but the clothes on her back and ninety lire in her purse, and taken to the common women’s prison of S. Verdiana. Here she spent three nights in a tiny cell, together with a Russian woman suspected of espionage, and then was moved to a large dormitory which she shared with forty-seven other political prisoners – mostly English, a few French and one Swiss girl. None were allowed any visitors, to write any letters or to have any books. The beds were infested by bugs, the lavatories approximately clean. The food, unless eked out by what the prisoners could buy for themselves, was very poor and scanty, the manners of the nuns very harsh. After a fortnight most of the French and English were let out, and our Swedish friend at the same time, with the proviso that she must leave the country immediately. She is now waiting for the German transit visa, to return home.

  JULY 16TH

  A lunch party to meet Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London. Dark, thin, nervous, indisputably able, a certain charm of manner – “l’homme arrivé” (with a sleek, elegant little wife, once a typist of Perugia) – he is considered one of the “coming men” of the régime. I didn’t like him – I think chiefly because his conversation, although intelligent, was tarred with contempt – the contempt of the new world for the old, of the self-made man for those who have attained with ease what he has achieved with effort. Speaking of the future, he was entirely prepared to envisage the complete domination of Europe by Germany. Italy should again become, in his opinion, a tourist country, attracting the money of all the pleasure-seekers of the world. As to the Italian people: “Non troppa libertà,”15 – he apparently considers there is still too much. “Too many ideas, too much initiative, are dangerous for a people.” The successful revolutionary is turning into a Tory. As for England, he was only there for three months, at an extremely difficult time; but it was impossible not to feel that there too a preconceived resentment had falsified his perceptions. His readiness to see a slight where none was intended, his determined generalizations about British decadence and incapacity for self-sacrifice (as exemplified, for instance, by the persistence of the English week-end habit!) – all these suggested an individual class hatred, as well as national prejudice. The English, he maintained, are done for because their character is now hopelessly rotten; all that is left is corrupt and sterile. L’Inghilterra è finita.16

  It is hardly possible to overstate how universally this opinion is now held here. Daily the press and radio insistently proclaim the inevitability and immediacy of the destruction of England, her incapacity to defend herself, her lack of trained men, of munitions, of food. Churchill’s speeches are considered vain boasts, based on no foundation of fact – a cynical last attempt to bolster up the English people to meet their inevitable destruction. At the German Embassy in Rome, it is said, there are both optimists and pessimists. The optimists say that the war will be over in mid-August; the pessimists, in September.

  JULY 17TH

  Meanwhile the lull continues, the long-expected German invasion has not taken place. Every kind of rumour has sprung up again. A friend, from her castle at Palestrina, sends a note imploring me to go out there at once for the baby’s birth; she knows “for certain” that there is to be a bad bombardment of Rome tomorrow night, synchronizing with the beginning of the German invasion of England. So it goes on. Every night I listen to the BBC trying to form a picture of what is really happening in England, but it is unsatisfactory, baffling. All letters from England are a month old. What is happening? What can be happening?