INTERNATIONAL: Plot, Pounce

The vivid staccato name of Garibaldi is synonymous with revolution and romance.* Last week it seemed that a new Garibaldi, a grandson of the Liberator, had arisen to wade in glory. He is Colonel Ricciotti Garibaldi, Italian World War hero, officer of the Legion of Honor. For some months he has resided at Paris, the swashbuckling idol of expatriate Italian and Spanish antiFascists. Last week he put in the field 400 armed companions disguised as mountaineers who assembled in Southern France and attempted to march in force across the Spanish border.

Midnight March. The field commander for Colonel Garibaldi was that famed Catalonian patriot, Colonel Francisco Macia. For years he has striven to foment a revolution which should set his native Cataloniaf free from the dominance of Madrid. Last week he rode at midnight toward the Spanish frontier with a glad heart. Were not the invading 400 patriots equipped with rifles, machine guns, a medical corp, and even a strong box heavy with newly designed and minted Catalan money? All was prepared. . . .

Suddenly operatives of the French Secret Police, re-enforced by French infantry, pounced—arrested Colonels Garibaldi and Macia and most of their supporters.

Double-Cross. Following these wholesale arrests, the fruit of a year and more of sleuthing by the French police, the Spanish Government expressed its gratitude and its relief at this nipping of the plot upon French soil.

The French police, calmly industrious, continued to investigate. They discovered documents which appeared to brand Colonel Garibaldi as an agent provocateur employed by the Italian Secret Service. His role has been to pose as an anti-Fascist and thus keep his employers informed of what plots were going forward among the Italian and Spanish foes of Dictators Benito Mussolini and Primo de Rivera.

Allegedly the Spanish Government, warned by II Duce, held troops in readiness to pounce upon the invading army of Colonel Garibaldi and Colonel Macia last week, if it had ever crossed the frontier. In that event the “invaders” would have been shot, instead of reposing as they now do safe in French jails.

Parisian Ire. The semi-official Parisian journals fulminated last week against Signer Mussolini for having, in their opinion, deliberately caused his agents to egg on a plot which might well have embroiled France and Spain if it had gone much further.

The French press saw, likewise, the hand of Dictator Mussolini in attacks by Fascists mobs, last week, upon the French consulates at Tripoli and Benghazi in Italian Tripolitania. Though the Italian Foreign Office “apologized,” the impression lingered that Fascists are being roused to a fighting mood against France, represented as the fertile republican ground upon which plots are hatched against Fascism.

Garibaldi v. Garibaldi. Colonel Ricciotti Garibaldi, rushed to Paris by the French police, was confronted there by his brother, Sante Garibaldi, rabid antiFascist, who shouted: “Traitor! How could you drag into the mire our family name, our glory and our honor?”

“Mussolini led me into a trap, brother!” cried the Colonel, “I have taken Fascist gold, it is true; but I have not betrayed our cause, the cause of Liberty. . . . Have faith in me, piccolo mio, I have never sought to do anything but save the cause. . . . What I received from Fascism, I used to further the cause of anti-Fascism.” Radiant, Sante Garibaldi cried: “Ha! Then, Ricciotti, I can deny everything?”

“No,” replied the Colonel. “Do not deny anything. . . . We must not now antagonize the French Secret Service. . . . Say to the newspapers that I can and will clear myself when the time comes.”

*Because famed Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian patriot, (1807-1882), “The Liberator,” passed almost the whole of his dynamic existence in fomenting revolutions and championing lost causes both in Italy and throughout South America.

He it was who fired the inhabitants of the numerous petty 19th Century Italian states with the ideal of the union which was crystallized into the Italian Kingdom by Count Cavour and Vittorio Emanuele II.

He it was who espied a young Brazilian girl through his telescope as he approached her country, fell instantly in love, and upon landing won her to be his wife by a courtship consisting of the single exclamatory sentence: “Thou oughtest to be mine!”

†The captaincy-general of Catalonia, comprising the four provinces of Barcelona, Gerona, Lerido and Tarragona, embraces almost all that is modern and industrially productive in Spain. Its people speak by preference not “Spanish” but “Catalan” and very generally favor secession from the rest of Spain.