Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The men were leaving, to be replaced by boys. Osbert Sitwell, arriving in Fiume, found himself sharing a railway carriage with two sixteen-year-olds whose pockets were weighed down with volumes of d’Annunzio’s verse, who told him that if they were put off the train they would walk to Fiume over the mountains. Their heads full, not of solid iron, but of poetry and adolescent discontent, they were typical of the Legion’s new recruits—fervent, devoted, but perhaps not very useful.

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  D’Annunzio’s blind eye was hurting, as it would for the rest of his life. Worse than completely sightless, it baffled and distracted him with light flashes and blurred hallucinations.

  Keller and his wild crew were getting restless. They called d’Annunzio “Calypso,” after the nymph who kept Odysseus captive and idle for years. On 4 November, the second anniversary of the armistice, Keller, without consulting d’Annunzio, took a plane and flew by stages to Rome. Circling over the city he dropped a chamber pot full of carrots and a jeering message over the parliament building. The Vatican got a white rose addressed to St. Francis. Over the royal palace Keller let fall a bouquet of red roses addressed to the Queen and the people of Italy. The most pointed of these symbolic gifts was to have been the battered boot of an infantryman, to be dropped on the Capitol as the armistice celebrations got under way there, but the ceremony was abandoned for fear of violence. Italy was increasingly unstable.

  The messages fluttering down from a low-flying plane, the flowers, the invocation of St. Francis, the boot, the menace converted into a glittering joke—this was a d’Annunzian action. But it wasn’t d’Annunzio who perpetrated it. Falling prey to one of his periodic depressions, he had withdrawn from sight.

  There are moments when one glimpses through contemporary accounts something in d’Annunzio’s manner like the disquiet of an actor who has wandered onto the wrong stage and is obliged to improvise his way through a drama for which he never auditioned. A few days after he first took Fiume, Marinetti wrote of him: “He does not see the revolutionary and decisive greatness of his undertaking”—which may just mean that d’Annunzio saw his undertaking differently from the way in which Marinetti did, but may also be perspicacious. D’Annunzio was still the man who couldn’t be bothered to attend parliamentary sessions, for whom the mass of humanity was as uninteresting as a railway siding, who avoided gentlemen’s clubs because talk of men’s topics—business, politics, diplomacy, money—found him at a disadvantage. At the outset of the war for which he had so longed, he had written to Albertini, complaining of the monotony of warfare. In Fiume, too, he sometimes found his great adventure tedious.

  He was lonely. His legion of young men—so callow and unruly—were splendid accessories to his glorious vision, but they were trying company. Luisa was delightful, but she came and went according to her own schedule. D’Annunzio repeatedly reproached her for cancelling a visit to Fiume in order to perform. “You know you are my only delight in a joyless struggle; and yet you consider a concert more important than my spirit! I don’t understand, I can’t understand.” In her absence he felt bereft. He complained to Osbert Sitwell of “how he, who loved books, pictures and music, had remained there for months surrounded by peasants and soldiers.” The ruler of this extraordinary little state, this political laboratory in which a dozen different ideologies were being tested out, was bored.

  Giolitti was moving surely to bring an end to the Fiuman embarrassment. “The betrayal is near,” declared d’Annunzio. He further developed his famous phrase “mutilated victory.” Italy’s victory was now in agony. Her wings mere stumps, she could not fly. Her feet lopped off, she could not march. She was carried, a helpless offering, grotesquely dressed up and made up, to a shameful altar.

  On 12 November 1920, the Italian and Yugoslav governments signed the Treaty of Rapallo. Under its terms Fiume became an independent city-state linked to Italy by a strip of land. Italy gained the Julian Alps and the Carso, Zara, nearly all of Istria, and a few Adriatic islands. Italians living in the rest of Dalmatia were granted the right to Italian citizenship.

  Most of what d’Annunzio had been demanding for years had been granted, but it had been done behind his back and without his sanction. No Italian blood had drenched and sanctified the soil of the newly acquired territory. This was not a victory, but a deal. Worse, under its terms he would be obliged to hand over the government of Fiume, and leave. He was back to where he had been a year ago, at the time of the Modus Vivendi, and every bit as intransigent as he had been then.

  Again, his supporters urged him to accept the situation. Fiume was to be independent of Yugoslavia: how much more could he reasonably ask? Mussolini advised him to recognise the treaty. General Ceccherini implored him to do so. But d’Annunzio, now fixed on the unattainable, continued to call for Fiume’s annexation by Italy. His motives are hard to read between the lines of his increasingly vehement and incoherent proclamations. Certainly one of them was his reluctance to give up power. “I must maintain my prerogative,” he told one of his officers. “It is the only joy in all this tedium.” Besides, the very fact that so much had been offered seemed to distress him. He and his Legion had been offered “walkways of silver, bridges of gold,” but he refused to be bought off. Steeped now in his own rhetoric of martyrdom and purifying blood, he insisted on seeing his “sacrifice” through to its end.

  He shut himself in his room for fifteen hours at a stretch, his only companions the cockatoo Keller had given Luisa Baccara and the greyhounds whom Marcel Boulanger, visiting him earlier in the year, had been surprised to find he kept “in the most secret recesses of his palace, like the sultan who keeps a favourite hidden in his tent.” He communicated with his officials only through one favoured officer. He fired off letters to former supporters (Mussolini among them) who left them unanswered. It was said that he had attempted to fly out of Fiume, that he had shifted his quarters from the Governor’s Palace to a ship in the harbour which was kept continually under steam. (These rumours were probably based on the wishful thinking of those who wanted him gone.) He bewailed his isolation. “We are alone again, alone against all … alone, alone with our courage … Alone against a vast conspiracy.” His announcements became ever more opaque, his political position more unstable. He would die for “the cause.” He would not spill a single drop of his blood for such an ungrateful people as the Italians. He was ready to negotiate; he would never compromise.

  Dismayed by his irrationality, the Herculean General Ceccherini, whose presence had been vital in reassuring the militarists that Fiume’s cause was a legitimate one, left the city, despite d’Annunzio’s reiterated pleas.

  A last opportunity for action presented itself. Giuriati, still working for the irredentist cause, suggested d’Annunzio’s legionaries should be transferred from Fiume to Zara, where the Italian Governor Admiral Millo—as unhappy about the treaty as d’Annunzio—would support an uprising. Millo was ready. The legionaries, many of them eager for action, were singing: “Treacherous government, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you/Who sold Dalmatia/While we believed in you.”

  Once more d’Annunzio dithered until the moment passed. Giuriati arrived in Fiume but d’Annunzio kept him waiting, and when he finally granted him an appointment declared he was too busy to stage an insurrection. He was planning a ceremony to celebrate the granting of a new banner to his artillery corps. Giuriati suggested that the ceremony could perhaps be performed on board ship en route for Zara? D’Annunzio thought not. Giuriati gave up on him and left for Venice.

  Having failed his would-be collaborators, d’Annunzio sent his legionaries to occupy two islands off the Dalmatian coast, Veglia and Arbe, granted to Yugoslavia under the Treaty of Rapallo. They brought back a massive bronze bell, taller than a man, to which he had often alluded in his speeches. He had it installed in his private study and added it to his store of totemic objects: “O bronze rich with mysterious gold!”

  General Caviglia reinforced the troops of the Italian
army along the lines around Fiume, drove the legionaries off the islands, and brought further ships into the gulf of Carnaro to enforce the naval blockade of Fiume. Giolitti, whom d’Annunzio had dubbed the “slobber-lipped hangman,” was tightening his noose.

  Emerging from his clausura, d’Annunzio spoke again and again. He told his followers: “We have not suffered enough.” From his balcony, with the blockading ships visible out to sea, he compared himself favourably with Christ, who had begged that the cup might pass from him. He would never flinch. He would never yield. He would die (over and over again he said it) rather than abandon his cause.

  He was priming himself and his little army for a fight to the death, but all his rhetoric was based on a false premise. “Fraternal blood shall not be spilt,” he said, meaning that a conflict between his Legion and Italy was unthinkable. He ranted again and again about filthy Slavs, about “Croataglia” and dirty Serbian pig-keepers. But no such enemy presented itself. The ships blockading the city, the guns trained upon it, the troops mustering along the armistice line, all served Italy, the patria. D’Annunzio, the national hero, had become an enemy of the Italian state, but he seemed incapable of comprehending the fact.

  Guido Keller urged him to break through the lines of the Italian army now surrounding Fiume and march first on Trieste, then on Rome. But when Keller’s proposal was debated by d’Annunzio’s officers, one of them, a minor member of the royal family, declared that he would never “play the brigand” in Italy. D’Annunzio, it seems, was of the same mind. The Legion remained in Fiume. Keller blamed Luisa Baccara for softening d’Annunzio. Meeting her on the stairs of the Governor’s Palace, he frightened her by throwing a knife between her feet.

  It was cold now, but even in the wintry rain or late into the nights, the piazza was thronged. In the atmosphere of crisis, what little discipline the Legion had ever observed was breaking down. On 1 December, de Ambris wrote to d’Annunzio reporting that the legionaries were making themselves odious to citizens by arrogance and robberies. Their officers took no steps to control them, and refused to hand thieves over to the police.

  4 DECEMBER 1920. The feast of St. Barbara. The legend relates that Barbara’s own father cut off her head when she refused to deny her Christianity. D’Annunzio requisitioned her story for use in his propaganda. His Fiume was the maiden-martyr; Giolitti’s Rome the unfeeling parent. The blockade was becoming painful. The legionaries were hungry. D’Annunzio offered them no comfort—only exaltation. They were like wood heaped up for burning, he told them.

  5 DECEMBER. The first shipload of Italian troops left Zara in accordance with the Treaty of Rapallo, while the Italian citizens of Zara rioted, attempting to block their embarkation. In Fiume the legionaries were in a fighting mood. D’Annunzio told them that the balustrade on which he leant was now as odious to him as the bars of a cage. He wanted only to smash it, and use its stones as missiles. Someone responded by yelling that there were tons and tons of rusty iron down in the port that could be used for the same purpose. “Before you rid yourself of old iron, you should rid yourself of the old people,” retorted d’Annunzio (using the phrase “old people” as the Russian revolutionaries were using “people of the past”). His listeners took the hint. “Death to the Traitors!” D’Annunzio, working in his favourite medium of human lives and emotions, was creating a lynch mob. “We are with the Commandant. We are his faithful … Anywhere, with him! To the death!”

  6 DECEMBER. The crews of two of the blockading ships mutinied and brought their vessels, a destroyer and a torpedo ship, into the harbour at Fiume. D’Annunzio greeted the new arrivals sombrely. “Comrades, it is evening. Soon night will fall.” They had come, he told them, to die with him.

  Back in Italy his prestige was dwindling. Giolitti had, by any rational measure, negotiated a good deal for Italy at Rapallo, and he knew how to use d’Annunzio’s tools of propaganda and invective. Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, thought Giolitti’s propaganda about Fiume “extremely violent.” Gramsci summarised it: “The legionaries are represented as brigands thirsting only to satisfy the basic passions of human bestiality.” D’Annunzio was characterised as “a madman, a performer, as an enemy of the patria.” The entire campaign, thought Gramsci, was strikingly successful. By playing on stock themes, “fraternal blood coldly spilt, personal rights and liberty threatened by a horde of soldiers crazy with alcohol and greed, girlhood sullied by unbridled lust,” Giolitti had successfully shifted public opinion.

  In autumn 1919, high-ranking officers had judged it impossible to ask their men to fight d’Annunzio. A year later that was no longer the case. Even his admirers were puzzled or impatient. He received a missive signed by eighty sympathetic members of the chamber of deputies urging him to accept the Treaty of Rapallo. On the same day he issued a proclamation to his legionaries:

  Have your weapon in your hand, at all times.

  Be proud to call yourself rebels

  Spit in the face of cowards…

  Blessed are the dead.

  Giolitti set a deadline. He ordered d’Annunzio to leave Fiume, with his Legion, by 6 p.m. on 24 December, and he promised an amnesty to all those who left in time. D’Annunzio prepared to resist. He had taken as his motto “Semper Adamas” (always hard). He talked of turning Fiume into his own pyre. It was rumoured that he had ordered the fuel stores should be set alight if he were killed or captured, so that the City of the Holocaust might live up to its name and be utterly consumed behind him.

  On 21 December he summoned all his officers to a conference. They crowded into the palace’s grand salon, shouting their “Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!” as he took his place at the centre of the long table. “During those days,” wrote Comisso, “he was truly amazing … Besieged by the troops of a government intent on finishing him off … he knew, even in the bitterest moments, how to find a profound, poetic word.” He declared that Fiume was at war. Twice over that day he addressed the crowd from his balcony. Jeeringly he invited all those unwilling to die for his cause to take themselves off, to join the “amnestied deserters” on the other side. For those who remained with him, he said, a massacre awaited. “Fratricide has been ordered.”

  The Legion prepared their defences. Fishing nets were slung across the approach roads and barbed wire closed off the city streets. Carts were dragged together to form barricades. The road to Abbazia was blocked with antiquated Austrian cannon. Fiume was sealing itself off from the world.

  On 24 December, Christmas Eve, Giolitti’s troops took up positions along the frontiers of Fiuman territory and an Italian warship moved into the harbour. There were 20,000 regular troops, opposed by some 6,000 legionaries. D’Annunzio ordered his men to prepare to fight from house to house. One of his planes dropped flyers over the “brothers who besiege their brothers,” appealing to them in the names of their mothers and of Christmas, to lay down their arms. The watchword for the day was “Ungrateful Italy.”

  The hour appointed by Giolitti for d’Annunzio’s withdrawal came and went. The regular troops crossed the line, marching into Fiume along the railway tracks. D’Annunzio ordered his men to fall back on the city. This was a conflict he had never wanted, perhaps never really believed possible; a conflict not with the “vulture’s vomit” of the former Austria, or with Slavic “swineherds,” but with the army of his beloved patria.

  That evening Giovanni Comisso, dining with some fellow officers, met a woman who told him: “You shouldn’t shoot. They are Italians like us.” Comisso was irritated, partly because he, like his Commandant, was in denial about the nature of the enemy and didn’t want to hear that the opponents were compatriots and fellow soldiers (“they are just cops”), partly, as he records, because he couldn’t stand women butting in on serious manly conversations. He snapped at her. She cried. He gave her a flower. He and the other men continued to tell each other how excited they were about the imminent battle. An explosion shook the restaurant. D’Annunzio had had the bridge over
to Susak blown up. Unable to think any more about food, or flowers, or women (especially a woman who spoke the truth), the men poured out into the street. Comisso found his unit out towards Abbazia. He positioned his machine-gunners on terraces overlooking the road, and settled down to wait, listening to a woman in a nearby house singing an Arditi song. That night the fighting began.

  It lasted for three days, days which d’Annunzio called the “most glorious in human history” and the “Christmas of Blood.” He harangued his troops repeatedly, ordering them to leave if they were not happy to be slaughtered. He cried shame on the soldiers of the regular army “walking on corpses” to defeat their Italian brothers. He led the legionaries in yelled-out litanies:

  To whom the victory?

  To us!

  To whom the victory?

  To the Heroes!

  He was ecstatic. He was beyond himself. According to the director of Fiume’s main bank: “He never went near the fighting, despite declaring every half hour that he wanted to run to the line of battle and die there: his officers managed every time to stop him leaving the palace.” But he was ready for martyrdom. He would never surrender.

  Luisa was staying in the comparative safety of the mayor’s house. D’Annunzio sent her notes, reporting hour by hour on events. In the early hours of Christmas morning he wrote: “I believe the assassins [his word for the loyalist troops] will attack at 6.30. We will resist.” It wouldn’t take long. He would be able to join her for lunch.

  His optimism was unfounded. On the morning of Christmas Day the regular cavalry attacked from the hills above Fiume, unsuccessfully resisted by mounted Arditi. Torpedo boats appeared in the harbour, machine guns trained on the quays. On the outskirts of the city, Arditi fired from houses on troops crouching behind low walls. An arsenal was hit, triggering a devastating explosion. A cloud of black smoke obscured the sea. By afternoon d’Annunzio was weeping over his dead and wounded legionaries, and writing to tell Luisa that from now on he would love her better because “grief sharpens and revives love.” But for all the fire and noise, it was a half-hearted battle. Officers on both sides threw away the advantage of surprise by calling out warnings to their opponents and begging them not to advance—they didn’t want to have to shoot. Comisso gave away his revolver, saying that he couldn’t have used it at a distance because his eyesight was poor and “close-up I would have embraced my adversary.” In three days of fighting a total of thirty-three men were killed.