The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Old Soldier of Liberty
THE OLD SOLDIER OF LIBERTY
And Italy! Although it is only since May
that Italy has stood by our side on the battlefront,
in an effort to avert from the world a new
military domination, we have known from the
beginning that her heart was with the Allies, and
she was willing to stake all, when her time came,
for the same principles of humanity and freedom.
A Roman friend tells me that he heard an
Italian statesman say, "Italy always meant
war." We can well believe it. We have believed
it from the first. On one of the early days
of August, when a British regiment was passing
through the streets of London on its way to
Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man in
a red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with
a proud step by the side of our soldiers. He
turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been
living many years in Soho. Having dug up
from his time-beaten trunk the simple regimentals
of the army of the Liberator, he had
come out to walk with our boys on the first
stage of their journey to France. In the person
of that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted
Italy—Italy that had known what it was to
make her own sacrifices for the right, and was
now ready to show us her sympathy in this
supreme crisis in our history.
But she had a trying, almost a tragic, time. For ten long months she lay under the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies, and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to a Triple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point) to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whose emperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts to rule even the papacy from across the Rhine.
How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption; perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost Oriental in his "sense of the theatre," and knows better, perhaps, than any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life) played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: "Holy Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my honour, the nuns will do so."