The White War

by Mark Thompson

  Ominously, D’Annunzio weighed in. Since the ‘stench of peace’ had offended his nostrils at the end of October 1918, the warrior-poet had been spoiling for a new melodrama to keep normality at bay. He published an ‘open letter to the Dalmatians’ in Mussolini’s newspaper (Albertini’s wobbly liberalism had made the Corriere uncongenial), championing maximal demands against ‘that mishmash of southern Slavs’. Meanwhile the Italian land-grab continued apace. In February, they blocked the transport of American food aid to Yugoslavia, Czecho slovakia and Vienna. According to the outraged Americans, this led to ‘acute starvation’. Threatened with the stoppage of American aid to Italy, Sonnino backed down. But the press continued to campaign for Fiume and officials still obstructed American aid to Yugoslavia. This ugly atmosphere made compromise more difficult.

  Orlando raised the stakes again on 1 March, during a visit home. Italy was loyal to the Treaty of London, he told parliament, but it would not be deaf to appeals from Fiume, ‘that most Italian city, the jewel of the Quarnero’.1 This purple pledge brought deputies to their feet, crying ‘Viva Fiume!’ Fiume could not be allowed to ‘lose its nationality and its independence’. His tone with Italy’s allies was rather different; he told House that Fiume was ‘not very important’ in itself, but ‘as a symbol’ it was ‘vital to his continuance in office’. Moreover, ‘we want to, we must, keep the Adriatic as a mare clausum, a closed sea’. It was typical of the man to blur a political plea with a nationalist ultimatum.

  By April 1919, work on the Germany treaty was so advanced that the government in Berlin had to be invited. Orlando refused to proceed with German business before Italy’s claims had been settled. Lloyd George tried to put him in his place; Britain, he said, ‘had twice as many dead as Italy’. Orlando rightly countered that, in proportional terms, ‘Italy’s losses were heavier’.2 Realising that Orlando was not to be brushed off, Lloyd George slyly remarked that he would accept any solution agreed by Orlando and Wilson. As Clemenceau took the same position, Wilson and Orlando were alone with each other. When they met on 14 April, Wilson proposed that Fiume should become a free port with ‘very considerable autonomy’, under the Yugoslav customs regime. Orlando shook his head. It was, Wilson reported, a difficult meeting. Two days later, playing his customary destructive role, the King urged Orlando to stand firm.

  The crunch came on 19 April, Easter Saturday, when Orlando made his case to the other three. Italy’s border must ‘coincide’ with ‘the natural frontier that God has given her’. In the north, the border should reach the Brenner Pass; in the north-east, it should reach beyond the Isonzo valley, the Julian Alps, the Carso, Trieste and Istria to a depth of 40 kilometres from the coast. This would give Italy even more Slovene territory than was promised in 1915. He demanded Fiume in the name of self-determination and the promised segment of Dalmatia in the name of Italy’s strategic security, as well as its ancient Italian identity. If this all brought ‘100,000 foreigners’ into Italy, he added, so be it. The real number of German-speakers in Austrian South Tyrol was nearly 250,000. Adding the 750,000 Slovenes and Croats, around a million non-Italians would be roped inside Victor Emanuel’s kingdom.

  Wilson made it clear that part of inland Istria, Dalmatia and Fiume (with its ‘tiny island’ of Italians) all had to go to Yugoslavia. The former Habsburg nations could not be treated as enemies. The Austrian navy had indeed attacked Italy from bases in the eastern Adriatic, but the Yugoslavs had neither means nor motive to pose any such threat. As for Fiume, the Yugoslavs had no other viable port for merchant shipping.

  Sonnino said that Austria had offered them some Dalmatian islands in 1915 (he was lying); how could they now accept worse terms? Clemenceau said testily that it was ‘impossible’ to have the Treaty and other territory as well. Lloyd George added that the demand for Fiume was ‘wrong’ and appealed to their sense of proportion. In this charged atmosphere, Wilson stated flatly that the Treaty of London could not be reconciled ‘with the peace that we wish to establish’. After the meeting, he suspended a US$50 million loan to Italy ‘until the air clears – if it does’.

  The quarrel escalated on Easter Sunday. Grotesquely, Orlando said that nothing would be more fatal to the peace of the world than denying him Fiume. Unless he got it, he would abandon the Conference and refuse to join the League of Nations. Stung, Wilson said Orlando’s position was ‘unbelievable’. With much hand-wringing, Orlando protested that he was ‘acting for right and justice’ and would ‘brave all the consequences’ of sticking to his position, ‘up to and including death’. He stood up, walked over to the sealed window and wept. Faced with this operatic moment, the statesmen froze. Only Wilson went across to the distraught Orlando, and suggested that provisional acceptance of the London terms might be possible.

  Despite this gesture, Wilson had no thought of climbing down. He set out his case in a statement for the press: Italy should not get Dalmatia, the offshore islands should be demilitarised, and minority rights should be guaranteed. Fiume ‘must serve as the outlet of the commerce, not of Italy, but of the land to the north and northeast’. Lloyd George and Clemenceau warned him not to throw a stick of dynamite into the conference. Wilson disagreed; a ‘moment of agitation will be followed by a depression in morale, with a feeling of hopelessness’.

  Wilson released his statement on 23 April. Next morning, Orlando announced his departure for Rome (where he wished to be anyway for the opening of parliament). Radiating wounded dignity, he said that Wilson’s statement had ‘cast doubt’ on his authority. In Rome, he found the city walls plastered with posters demanding Dalmatia and Fiume. The mayor told cheering crowds that Italians would never barter their national honour or insult the blood of their heroes. Streets that had been named in honour of Wilson the Liberator a few months earlier were renamed. Even the ‘democratic interventionists’ were angered by Wilson’s high-handedness. D’Annunzio joined the show with a series of anti-Allied diatribes. His highly quotable insults to Wilson were picked up by hostile newspapers in the United States. (Probably these were the attacks that made Wilson ‘white with anger’, according to his worried wife.) Sonnino paid French newspapers 30 million francs to support Italy’s claims. When one of Sonnino’s juniors tried to impress Clemenceau with this outpouring, the old man pulled out a list of the journalists and the sums they had received.

  Lloyd George laughed at Orlando’s assumption that the conference would grind to a halt in his absence: ‘They always believe that we people of the North bluff the way they do.’ Ironically, Italy’s victory had helped to destroy the continental balance of power that had given Rome such leverage in the past. Britain and France settled the fate of Germany’s African colonies behind Orlando’s back; they also took decisions over German reparations. Lloyd George told an Italian official that his prime minister should not bother to return if he would not give up Fiume.

  The odd couple reappeared in Paris on 6 May. When Orlando took his seat, the others ‘acted as though he had never been away’, as Wilson told his wife. People agreed that Orlando looked worse, grey and weak. Lloyd George had worried that he would demand full execution of the Treaty of London; this would split the Big Three and lead to ‘catastrophe’. In the event, the Italians had nothing new to suggest. Clemenceau foresaw all this on 19 April, predicting that if the Italians left the conference, ‘they will soon come back to cold reality. All the friends of Italy will be alienated from her; they will suffer the effects of it – Italy, too, I fear … We would suffer greatly from it; Italy would perhaps suffer even more.’

  How did the astute Sicilian come to overestimate his power so badly? He wanted to offer the public ‘a compensation for the enormous sacrifices of war’, no doubt, and a distraction from economic chaos.3 Some American delegates may have led him to think that Wilson sympathised in his heart and would eventually give way. Perhaps he did not know that Wilson’s regional experts strongly opposed any compromise over Fiume, or that some Italians from Fiume, brought to Paris to plea
d for annexation, privately told the Americans that the local Italians were against joining Italy, for economic reasons. Certainly he misunderstood Wilson’s resolve, and to some extent the Allies’ priorities. He took revenge in his memoirs, calling Wilson a spontaneous hypocrite who preached the general good as a cover for political trickery.

  Orlando missed something more important about Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister: his American faith in divine providence and liberal progress, and in himself as their agent. In Orlando’s view, Wilson had swallowed several toads and now strained at a gnat. He seemed unaware that, while the Big Four all bent the rules to suit their interests, only he wanted to trample on the principles of a just peace at the expense of a new national state in Europe, not out of strategic necessity (as could be claimed of French demands vis-à-vis Germany), but to satisfy nationalist vanity and political convenience. For Wilson, Yugoslavia’s birth proved that anti-imperialist ideals could prevail: it was self-determination in action. He was adamant that the infant must be protected. A jotting on the back of a map of Italy, in mid-April, warning what would ensue if Fiume went to Italy, shows this consideration weighing on him:

  At the very outset we shall have followed the fatal error of making Italy’s nearest neighbors on her east her enemies, nursing just such a sense of injustice as has disturbed the peace of Europe for generations together with playing no small part in bringing on the dreadful conflict through which we have just passed.

  This set Orlando apart from Clemenceau and his rapacious claims on the Rhineland. The other difference was that France was, after all, France. Allied condescension was no secret. ‘It seems to the Italians that they are not quite being treated as equals,’ Lloyd George observed. Rather than adapt, they became more obstinate.

  Perhaps, too, they paid a price for incurable political incorrectness. As early as mid-November, when the delegations assembled in Paris, an Italian diplomat confided to an American that ‘self-determination is applicable to many regions but not to the shores of the Adriatic’. Despite himself, the American was impressed by the other man’s indifference to ‘all the shibboleths and slogans which are resounding through the world today’. Amusing in doses, the Italians’ refusal to pay even lip-service to higher ideals became repellent in the long run.

  Finally, Orlando failed to reckon with Wilson’s skilful timing. Did he notice that the President had one eye on his own electorate during their April showdown? By publishing his manifesto, Wilson sought to renew American faith in his principled leadership. The symmetry in their positions, with each man playing to his own public, escaped Orlando altogether.

  With Orlando back on board, the Council of Four shelved further discussion of the Adriatic. By mid-May, Clemenceau thought the Italians were trying to save face. House organised ‘proximity talks’ between the Italians and the Yugoslavs; Wilson said he would accept any solution freely agreed. Now the Yugoslavs would not accept the Treaty of London line.

  When the Big Four met on 26 May, Orlando agreed to give up Fiume in exchange for everything in the Treaty of London. When Wilson attacked the Treaty, Clemenceau advised Orlando not to insist on complete implementation. Under this pressure, the Italians cracked and the elements of a solution emerged: Fiume would be a separate state under the League of Nations, administered by a multinational council, with a plebiscite after 15 years; Zara and Sebenico would be free ports under Italian sovereignty or mandate; most of the islands would go to Yugoslavia. On 6 June, Orlando wobbled again, provoking Wilson’s contempt: ‘His mind seems to me completely unstable.’ Another variant was discussed and rejected. It was hopeless.

  When Orlando duly fell from power on 19 June, Sonnino was dislodged from the foreign ministry at last. Yet the knot was tied too tightly for a new government to loosen it, and time ran out: the Paris conference ended on 28 June with no solution.4 In mid-September, D’Annunzio led a band of war veterans to occupy Fiume. When the Italian general commanding the Allied garrison let him enter, a weird experiment in pastiche state-building began. As volunteers flocked to D’Annunzio, the government in Rome dithered. When the aged Giolitti became prime minister once again in June 1920, he withdrew from Albania: a bold move that built confidence with Yugoslavia. Not until November, when Wilson’s Democratic Party lost the presidential election, compelling the Yugoslavs to accept that they would have to cope without Washington’s help, did the conditions emerge for a bilateral settlement. The Treaty of Rapallo (November 1920) gave Italy a generous eastern frontier: the Julian Alps and the Carso, with a wide buffer zone beyond, halfway to Ljubljana; all of Istria, Zara, and several Adriatic islands. Fiume became a free state.

  From his toy throne, D’Annunzio declared war on Italy: the logical outcome of his egomania. ‘Either Fiume will be Italian or I too will leave Fiume’, he raved, ‘dead, wrapped in the flag of Giovanni Randaccio’. The government had no choice but to ring down the curtain on the self-styled ‘Italian Regency of the Quarnero’. A well-placed shell from a battleship, directed at the bard’s palace, drove him away. After a pro-independence party won the first free elections, Italian nationalists made Fiume ungovernable. They took over the municipal reins in 1922 and handed power to Mussolini’s regime a year later. Formal annexation followed in 1924. For Italy to own Fiume, it had to become the world’s first fascist dictatorship.

  Italy’s new borders enclosed at least 300,000 Slovenes, 200,000 Croats, and nearly 250,000 German-speaking Austrians: a total of some 750,000 non-Italians. Added to the 650,000 Italians, the extra population totalled around 1,400,000. Initially, the new minorities were treated with sensitivity but, by late November 1918, Orlando was complaining to Badoglio that the military government in Trieste was too lenient towards the ‘Yugoslavs, clericals and socialists’ who were ‘conspiring against us’. Badoglio laid schemes to subvert Yugoslavia, mentioned above, and Trieste became a laboratory of proto-fascist misrule.

  An American journalist reported that the liberated territories ‘were treated like conquered provinces, which indeed they were. The majority of the population was certainly hostile to Italy. Hundreds of persons were therefore arrested for this hostility, defined as treason, and for spreading discontent and for imaginary plots.’ After the Slovene cultural centre in Trieste was burned down in July 1920, ‘beatings, pillagings, burnings, were daily events’ in the occupied territories. Nationalists in Rome crowed that Trieste had shown how to deal with ‘the new enemy that stabs the nation in the back’. Slovenes and Croats suspected of ‘philo-Yugoslavism’ or ‘Slavophilia’ were interned – a recourse that had been used with civilians in the war zone and would soon be extended countrywide, along with other forms of repression, against the enemies of Fascism.

  Under Mussolini, the same treatment was meted out to Germans in the Alto Adige, Greeks on the Dodecanese Islands and the French minority in the Aosta valley. ‘The abolition of personal rights and of freedom of speech, of the press and of association, the dissolution of non-Fascist associations and transference of their property to Fascist organisations, absence of impartiality in lawsuits, despotism of the police, a reign of terror against suspects, the suppression of free elections.’ Place names were Italianised and war veterans were sent to live in the occupied areas. School reforms were designed to ‘denationalise the racial minorities’. These policies were later relaxed in the Alto Adige, to avoid antagonising Austrian and German Nazis. The Slavs had no such defence; in the 1990s, a bilateral Italian– Slovenian commission agreed that the Fascist regime had ‘attempted to realise a programme of complete destruction of the Slovene and Croatian identity’. In 1931, Corriere della Sera reported on the ‘atmosphere of war’ along the north-eastern border. ‘No Italian who remains faithful to the principles that animated the makers of Italy in the last century’, lamented the anti-fascist historian Gaetano Salvemini, in exile, ‘can record without a feeling of grief and shame that Croatian and Slovene youths in Italy today are sentenced to life-imprisonment or death because they struggle for
the same ideals.’

  The Italians paid a monstrous price for eastern Friuli, Trieste, Istria, the Trentino and Alto Adige. The nineteenth-century wars to unify the peninsula – the first three wars of independence – cost fewer than 10,000 lives. The war to annex these final territories killed 689,000 Italian soldiers: more than the total of Austro-Hungarian dead, missing and wounded on the Italian front (estimated at 650,000), and more, also, than the Habsburg Italian population that was ‘redeemed’ by the victory. Another million were seriously wounded, including 700,000 disabled veterans. Adding the estimated 600,000 civilians who died due to the hardships of war, the Italian death toll reached 1.3 million – around three times the number that would perish in the Second World War.

  The price was also political. Orlando’s and Sonnino’s zero-sum strategy in Paris dealt a fatal wound to Italy’s liberal system, already battered by the serial assaults of wartime. By stoking the appetite for unattainable demands, they encouraged Italians to despise their victory unless it led to the annexation of a small port on the other side of the Adriatic, with no historic connection to the motherland. Fiume became the first neuralgic point created by the Paris conference. Like the Sudetenland for Hitler’s Germany and Transylvania for Hungary, it was a symbol of burning injustice. A sense of jeopardised identity and wounded pride fused with a toponym to produce an explosive compound.