The rank and file were as colourful. All the legionaries cultivated eccentricity. “Gait, cries, songs, daggers, hairstyles, all were unusual.” They raided the abandoned depot of the Vietnamese-French troops and decked themselves out with fezzes and silver stars. They were as gaudy and hyper-masculine as a crew of stage pirates. “Infantry undid their jackets, opened their collars and revealed necks and chests bronzed by the sea wind … Everyone wore a dagger in his belt.”
There was little discipline. The soldiers who had obeyed Pittaluga and left the city were the older ones, trained to obedience. Those who remained were young, many of them still teenagers, juveniles proud to be delinquent. The Arditi’s marching song extolled youth: “Giovinezza, Giovinezza, Primavera di Bellezza” (Youth, Youth, Springtime of Beauty). Youth was splendid, wrote the futurist Mario Carli (soon to arrive in Fiume), because the young have no past and therefore none of what others might see as the wisdom of experience but which to a futurist was simply “corrosion.” Marinetti, already past thirty when he published the “Futurist Manifesto,” had exulted in being young (or youngish) and sanguinely anticipated that, in ten years’ time, he and his coevals would be hunted down, “crouched near our vibrating aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire on which our books of today are flaming” and slaughtered by those who came after them. “Injustice, strong and sane will break out radiantly in their eyes.” The slogan of the 1960s counterculture—“trust no one over thirty”—looks forgiving by comparison.
“On the verge of old age I have been reborn as the Prince of Youth,” announced d’Annunzio in Fiume. He flattered his followers by repeatedly praising their white teeth (so unlike his black and yellow ones), their “ruthless merriment,” their “marvellous purity” and their contempt for the dirty compromises of old age. His admirers returned the compliment by pretending that he was one of them. “What rapid steps, what swiftness of movement, what vivacity in his glance! He is of an age with his soldiers, he is twenty again!” wrote Kochnitzky. (The last point would not, of course, have been worth making had it been true.)
For Italians, Fiume had a sexually louche reputation. The city’s legal system—anomalous as so much about the place—was still that of Hungary, under which divorce was permitted (as it would not be in Italy until 1974). A sceptical observer reported that the city was full of deceived husbands and discontented wives, and that the only business flourishing was that of ending marriages. Like most ports it was renowned for its brothels, and even respectable Fiuman-Italian young women were, by several accounts, unusually easy-going. A young volunteer, forgetting his tact in his amazement, wrote to his fiancée: “everyone enjoys himself here … and makes love with the Fiuman girls, who are famous for being beautiful and not difficult.” Another wrote “Each soldier had his lover and lived at home with her.”
D’Annunzio himself claimed to be living with “Franciscan chastity,” and amused his officers (all fully aware of his priapic reputation) by rebuking them for their promiscuity. They could at least, he suggested, avoid going to brothels where the men would see them. He himself was writing ardently to Luisa Baccara, who would soon give up her promising career as a concert pianist to join him. Meanwhile Lily de Montrésor, resident chanteuse at one of the bars on the waterfront, entered the Governor’s Palace nightly by a concealed door to sleep with him, leaving again at dawn.
Secret agents and ambassadors alike assumed d’Annunzio must aim to make himself Italy’s ruler. A week after his Sacra Entrata he had a private meeting with Riccardo Zanella, leader of Fiume’s Autonomist Party. According to Zanella, he revealed his master plan: the annexation of Fiume to Italy, to be followed by an Italy-wide uprising, the occupation of Rome, the dissolution of parliament, the deposition of King Victor Emmanuel, and the installation of a new regime headed by himself as military dictator. “If I wanted to I could march on Rome with 300,000 soldiers,” he announced. It was probably true. The combatants’ associations, for whom he was a hero, could alone have provided at least that number of volunteers, and, in the opinion of a senior general, had d’Annunzio called the “loyal” troops in Istria to march with him on Rome they would have deserted their posts and followed him. “Nor would there have been much resistance from troops in the rest of the peninsula.” In late September a British admiral with the Allied occupying force reported pervasive rumours of an imminent Italian revolution, and the American high commissioner in Rome warned that the Italian government “cannot hold the army any longer.” General Badoglio wrote to tell his political bosses that even those of his troops who were still ostensibly loyal were “infatuated” with d’Annunzio. He urged Nitti to proclaim the annexation of Fiume, warning that the alternative might well be civil war.
Had d’Annunzio really wanted executive power he might well have found, as Mussolini did three years later, that he had only to go to Rome and get it. But while his followers all over Italy waited for him to make a decisive move, he stayed put, waiting, in his turn, for sparks from his “holocaust” to set the world alight. He declaimed and then published addresses to the people of Trieste and Venice, to the Seamen’s Union and to Italians in general, calling upon them to set the nation ablaze with the cauterising fire of armed revolt. But, for all the generals’ anxieties, no insurrection took place.
D’Annunzio vented his disappointment in a letter to Mussolini, whose Fasci had not, as he had assumed they would, risen up all over Italy in his support. The heavily edited version of this letter published in Mussolini’s journal is all heroic boasting. “I have risked all, I have given all … I am the master of Fiume … I hold Fiume for as long as I live.…” And so on, and so forth to the final “Alalà!” Mussolini would have his followers, then and throughout the fascist era, believe that the Duce of Fiume had turned to share his triumph with the Duce of the future, as though acknowledging him his companion in glory. The excised passages speak of a very different relationship. D’Annunzio upbraids all those Italians who have let him down, attacking Mussolini as being among the idlest and most craven of them all. “I am amazed at you … You tremble with fear!…You stay there chattering, while we struggle … What about your promises? Can’t you at least punch a hole in that belly that weighs you down, and deflate it?” The Fasci’s frontman is a gross windbag, almost as despicable as the “piggy” (porcino) Prime Minister against whom he has failed to rise up.
Francesco Nitti had known d’Annunzio for a quarter of a century. In Naples in the early 1890s they had both been contributors to Scarfoglio and Serao’s journal. Nitti, five years younger than the poet, had admired the latter’s immense capacity for work. He had also noticed “how methodically and assiduously d’Annunzio cultivated publicity.” There was, thought Nitti, “something artificial about everything he said or did.”
Finding that his old acquaintance’s flamboyant action threatened to undermine his administration, Nitti attempted to belittle it. He scoffed at d’Annunzio’s much-vaunted patriotism: “Italy is just the latest of the many women he has enjoyed.” He told the world that d’Annunzio had “no programme, nor true passion, nor any sense of moral responsibility.” He made fun of d’Annunzio’s made-up title, of his acting like “a little King.” He gave the name Fiume to his dog. Writing his autobiography years later he claimed that the “so-called legionaries” of Fiume included numerous government agents, that all the talk about marching on Rome was promptly reported back to him. “The matter didn’t worry me much … I never took d’Annunzio’s threats seriously.” Fiume was just a comedy, he said, and d’Annunzio a showman.
Nitti was right about the showmanship, but wrong to mock it. In Fiume, d’Annunzio was developing a new and dangerously potent politics of spectacle, from which others would learn. When Mussolini “marched” on Rome three years later, his coup was just a comedy too, a civil change of government pranked out as an armed revolution, a march headed by a leader who found it more comfortable to take the train. But as d’Annunzio had long known and repeatedly demonstrated, play-acting can ha
ve substantial consequences. His reign over Fiume outlasted Nitti’s premiership by half a year.
D’Annunzio was a man who composed whole novels in his head and then couldn’t be bothered to write them down. Noble concepts and grand gestures excited him. The quotidian business of government was less congenial. Despite all his dreams of a national theatre, he had never yet run anything larger than his own household, and no one would entrust a state’s economy to a man who had proved so spectacularly incompetent—dishonest even—in the management of his own finances. General Badoglio thought his patriotism nobilissimo, but his talent for organisation minimal. “He was just a stirrer-up of energy, an outstanding generator of mass excitement.” It was necessary to set someone else to work to run Fiume.
On 20 September, with much ceremony, Grossich formally resigned the National Council’s power to d’Annunzio, addressing him as “divine leader.” D’Annunzio, in turn, graciously invited the Council to remain in being, and to continue to undertake the daily business of government, with the proviso that all issues relating to law and order or to politics would be referred to d’Annunzio and the members of his Command.
The National Council continued to collect taxes, clean the drains and administer the law under the supervision of Giovanni Giuriati. As chief minister Giuriati served d’Annunzio loyally, effectively running Fiume on his behalf, but had no great opinion of his practical capabilities. D’Annunzio couldn’t be bothered with budgets, and he was almost equally insouciant about the law. “I was interrogated by him endlessly about legal matters,” wrote Giuriati later, “but always with a lightly ironic tone … he considered the subject beneath the altitude at which nature had placed him.” This was, after all, the superman whom no human tribunal could judge.
Nor did he have the adroitness necessary for keeping all his disparate followers onside. Four days after d’Annunzio’s arrival, Marinetti, along with one of his futurist comrades, came to Fiume. By the end of the month they were gone again, ordered out by d’Annunzio lest their republican rhetoric incense the monarchists among his supporters. Marinetti, always glad to make trouble, boasted “our mere presence in Fiume is sufficient to alarm the timid and the foolish to the point of nervous collapse.” Marinetti noted d’Annunzio’s lack of political nous: “Although he is very cunning and full of his own importance, he is guileless and forgets to act, to eliminate the spies, the indifferent, the traitors.”
A deputation of nationalists arrived in Fiume hoping to persuade d’Annunzio to march on Rome and make himself dictator of all Italy. Giuriati deflected them, not because he was opposed to such a coup in principle but because he judged it wasn’t enough to have a leader charismatic enough to trigger a revolution, “it was also necessary to have ready a dictator capable of making a new regime work.” D’Annunzio was a poor administrator, said Giuriati, he was financially incompetent. He vacillated. His decisions were arrived at impulsively and frequently too late, prompted more often by superstition than by reason. In brief, he simply wasn’t up to the job. Better perhaps to wait until a more competent leader presented himself? Three years later Giuriati became a minister in Mussolini’s first cabinet.
The American vice-consul in Trieste reported that Fiume was “completely beflagged.” Lights blazed all night. Portraits of d’Annunzio hung from the upper floors of houses all around the main piazza. Banners reading “Italy or death” were suspended over every street. The stage was dressed. The star was on. D’Annunzio was everywhere, speechifying, reviewing troops, posing on the docks alongside a destroyer, tirelessly displaying himself to the crowds who filled the streets night and day, and for the two film crews who followed his every move.
Another American observer describes him, “his beautifully cut clothes, which fit so faultlessly about the waist and hips as to suggest the use of stays, but partially camouflage the corpulence of middle age. His head looks like a new-laid egg which has been highly varnished; his pointed beard is clipped in a fashion which reminded me of the bronze satyrs in the Naples museum; a monocle conceals his dead eye. His walk is a combination of a mince and a swagger; his movements are those of an actor who knows that the spotlight is upon him.” The American thought d’Annunzio “unimpressive-looking,” but to Marinetti, he seemed “elegantissimo” in white gloves, his hands raised in an almost perpetual salute.
Every day he would appear on the balcony to address the hundreds of people—most of them legionaries or local women—gathered in the square beneath. He treated them as a conductor treats his chorus, or a priest his congregation. He gave them their cues; they responded. His speeches were repetitive—designedly so. He would ask an inflammatory rhetorical question: “To whom the victory?” and the crowds hollered out the expected answer: “To us!” He recited great Homeric lists of names—of his supporters, of the illustrious dead, of the Italian wartime victories, of the cities he proposed to “liberate.” These lists became devices whereby he slowly, notch by notch, ratcheted up the intensity of the crowd’s excitement.
Before these appearances he would spend half an hour of intense concentration in the grand saloon which opened onto the balcony. “The people stormed and howled, calling out for me.” Words and phrases flashed in his mind. His chest was tight. The very air he breathed seemed phosphorescent. “I’d let out a shout. My officers came running, flung open the doors, fanned out on either side of me like wings. At a pace as violent as a bolt fired from a crossbow I went to the balustrade.”
He would become transported by his own oratory. He describes the “maelstrom” he felt within and around him, the hallucinatory images of blood-red flags and of battle which flickered before him as he spoke. At intervals he would begin to intone the Oath of Ronchi, the vow to fight “against everybody and everything” for Fiume’s right to be Italian. The sequence of question and answer was punctuated by his war cry Alalà! and thousands of voices would cry back to him, “Eia, Eia, Eia! Alalà!’
D’Annunzio referred to these “colloquies” as his “parliament in the open air,” and the “first example of direct communication … between the people and their ruler … since Greek times.” But this was not political discussion. It was the deliberate stimulation of mass hysteria. In Fiume he was experimenting with a new medium, creating artworks for which the materials were marching men, cheering crowds, masses of pelted flowers, bonfires, stirring music—a genre which would be developed and elaborated over the next two decades in Rome, in Moscow and in Berlin.
Nitti ordered that Fiume’s electricity supply should be cut off, and began a blockade of the city. The Italian Third Army surrounded the city on its landward sides. Italian ships blocked the entrance to its harbour. But within days Nitti had realised that to be overly aggressive towards d’Annunzio, Italy’s bard and national hero, would be politically dangerous. The blockade was relaxed. Later the director of the Red Cross paid tribute to the humane and efficient way Fiume was kept supplied with food and medicines, with Nitti’s covert assistance. “He [Nitti] has always forbidden me to reveal how much he has done.” In the first months of d’Annunzio’s sojourn in Fiume, one of his most ascetic acolytes recalled with amazement that he had eaten sugared rose petals there.
D’Annunzio’s household was run with his usual profligacy. “All the members of your staff order food in profusion,” protested an official charged with the thankless task of managing the Command’s budget, “for a consumption that evidently you can not sustain.” D’Annunzio had taken over two rooms in the otherwise austere palace for his private apartments and filled them with carpets and incense burners, rows of banners, and two more-than-man-sized plaster casts of sculpted saints from Florence. His bed, according to Father Macdonald, was surrounded with massed flowers like the catafalque of a dead hero. The flowers were changed three times daily—white in the morning, pink at noon and red for evening.
Foreign journalists tended to see d’Annunzio’s great symbolic drama in conventional terms, as an ordinary debauch. A typical story from Fiume in
a London paper was headlined “Chorus Girls and Champagne.” Another English newspaper reported: “Unnameable orgies inspired by Satanic libations amid the fumes of incense.” In the words of a disapproving Italian socialist, Fiume was being transformed into “a bordello, a refuge for criminals and prostitutes of more or less ‘high life’.” A British agent reported it as “a known fact, that Gabriele d’Annunzio spends most of his evenings at the Restaurant Ornitorinco with his mistress, where he drinks numerous bottles of champagne, and from where he seldom returns before late in the morning.” D’Annunzio never drank to excess but he did like to stay up late. The Foreign Office official who filed the report noted, “D’Annunzio seems to be having the time of his life at Fiume.” That at least is true.
D’Annunzio had made no plans as to how his fast-growing horde of volunteers was to be fed. “When vile lucre was scarce,” wrote Giuriati, “he considered himself the victim of a patent injustice … The sources of revenue in Fiume were not, as in all other states in the world, taxes and loans, but colpi di mano—acts of violence.” Fiume was provisioned by piracy.
D’Annunzio established a force of raiders under Guido Keller’s command, whom he called the “Uscocchi” after the pirates who had operated in the Adriatic in the sixteenth century. They sallied out of Fiume’s harbour in motorboats and raided the depots of the Allied armies across the bay, bringing back food, weapons, horses and even sometimes hostages. They drove lorries round to the military base at Abbazia, and loaded them up with stolen boots. They seldom needed to use their weapons. Many soldiers from the blockading army, sympathising with their cause, were willing to look the other way.
Further afield, they stowed away on cargo ships. Arditi in civilian clothes would leave the city in small groups, to reconvene in a port and hide themselves on board. When the moment came they would strip off their nondescript jackets to reveal black shirts spangled with medals, and allow their fearsome forelocks to swing out from concealing caps. In most cases the crews allowed their officers to be overpowered and altered course without much argument, bringing their ships into Fiume laden with supplies.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 49