ITALY: Business of Empire

A scant 14 years ago, the Kingdom of Italy was as confused, irresolute and radical-ridden as are France and Spain today. The years have dignified and tempered Benito Mussolini, and he has dignified and tempered the Italian people. As empires crumble other empires rise, and buoyant empire-builders invariably have clear consciences. Italians are not ashamed but proud and happy about Ethiopia. A significant sign of this is the sort of picture post cards they send each other. Today no cards in Italy are selling quite so fast as the joyous new series called “For you, Little Blackface!” These buoyant cards show a little white Italian boy in Fascist uniform kissing and being kissed by an Ethiopian pickaninny. The empire-building Italian moppet then merrily delouses his Ethiopian charge with a hose, instructs him, inculcates Fascist discipline, helps him get started with an Italian plow and finally starts the “fun-after-work” called by Fascists Dopolavoro.

Thus the attitude of Italians toward conquered Ethiopia is Christian in its readiness to collaborate with and convert the heathen, and Roman in its drastic finality. The features of Benito Mussolini in the prime of his conquest are those of an Augustan Caesar. “It is our peace,” he told his victorious legions, “Roman peace.”

The pax Romana over Ethiopia has always been envisioned by the Dictator as something to be attained and consolidated in a matter of some 25 years, if indeed Ethiopian savages can be brought to civilized citizenship so soon. Last week Il Duce, with his plans and hopes for the new Italian Empire spreading decades ahead, indulged at Rome in no bombast or boasting, received with Augustan calm an amazing series of capitulations to Italy and to Fascism.

Capitulations. In Buckingham Palace a gloomy session of His Majesty’s Privy Council on Ethiopia last week was cut to 15 minutes. King Edward then signed an Order in Council officially lifting Sanctions from Italy on July 15, so far as Britain is concerned.

The British Minister to Addis Ababa, heroic Sir Sidney Barton, was in London last week on a “leave” from which His Excellency is most unlikely to return to Ethiopia. He was bidden to Buckingham Palace and decorated by His Majesty with the Order of Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire for having withstood a hot siege of the British Legation by Ethiopians who proved themselves savages of the most ferocious type as soon as their Emperor fled his country (TIME, May 11).

Meanwhile the heavy British concentration of war boats in the Mediterranean —3. purely British Sanction against Italy never ordered or authorized by the League —was last week lifted by Sir Samuel Hoare, the new First Lord of the British Admiralty, who as Foreign Secretary so nearly ended the Italo-Ethiopian war by the Hoare-Laval Deal (TIME, Dec. 23). Today most blame for the British fleet’s failure to intimidate Italy is laid to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Punch cartoons him recumbent on a lounge chair beside which in a glass case is a British warship sarcastically named H. M. S. Unriskable— i. e., Squire Baldwin sent into the Mediterranean on his own responsibility the greatest British show of naval might since Scapa Flow and then, when Benito Mussolini failed to quail under the menace of their guns, the Prime Minister himself quailed, dared not risk a single British ship. According to David Lloyd George last week Stanley Baldwin not only quailed but showed himself to be a “rat,” doubtless the most vivid description ever applied by a former British Prime Minister to the actual occupant of No. 10 Downing Street.

Out of the Mediterranean were ordered H. M. S. Nelson and Rodney as the Home Fleet upped anchor for home. The British Far East Squadron upped for Singapore, and the Admiralty buzzed with plans to hold now those British North Sea maneuvers which were originally scheduled to give Adolf Hitler pause before they were canceled in the effort to bluff Benito Mussolini.

France Toadies— Another capitulator was new French Premier Leon Blum, whose activities last week caused the robust Chicago Daily News to headline: “FRANCE TOADIES TO IL DUCE, GETS ZERO FOR HER PAINS.” As Fascism is anathema to Socialist Blum and to the 72 Communist Deputies who are his Cabinet’s indispensable supporters, it was toadying indeed when Premier Blum hastily canceled, as of July 15, the Anglo-French accord under which British war boats could use French naval bases in the Mediterranean in case of an Italo-British war. This accord was reluctantly signed by France because the British Admiralty claimed that, without it, Britain could not be secure against defeat by Italy in what Romans have called for more than two millenniums Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”). Its cancellation therefore strengthened Dictator Mussolini mightily and gave him a whip hand, with which to force Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia to cancel similar naval “Sanctions accords” with Britain.

Just outside Italy on the French frontier, huge warehouses overflowed with goods for instant shipment to Italy after the last stroke of midnight, July 15. Most ludicrous was the sight of British banking agents in Rome being coolly told by Fascist functionaries that perhaps British money may be permitted to help finance the civilization of Ethiopia but that Italian capital may prove sufficient.

Belligerent Rights. It was part of the Hoare-Laval Deal that withdrawal of British war boats from the Mediterranean would be followed by similar reduction to peace strength of the Italian garrisons in Libya facing the British positions in Egypt which Il Duce crammed with troops to call the Baldwin bluff. Last week a Rome press spokesman confirmed: “We want to see the British ships actually leave.” This week Italy emptied Libya of 40,000 troops, announced that it will leave its Libyan air force of 100 bombers and its border fortifications intact.

Meantime, no Italian delegation was sent to the Montreux Conference on the question of permitting Turkey to fortify the Dardanelles (TIME, July 6). Last week at Montreux an astonishing scene occurred as Rumania’s greatest statesman, Foreign Minister Nicholas Titulescu, who did more than anyone else to help Britain line the Balkans up for Sanctions, suddenly blew up in rage at what he loudly called the British Government’s “two-faced attitude!”

Dr. Titulescu has been telling the Rumanian Government of Premier Tatarescu that despite all appearances Rumania could rely upon Britain as being basically true to her incessant promises to support “Collective Security.” Instead, last week at Montreux, the British delegation stickled for what they called their “belligerent rights” in the Dardanelles, although the French and Greeks sharply reminded British Lord Stanley that the Briand-Kellogg-Pact-Renouncing-War-As-an Instrument-of-National-Policy “terminated belligerent rights.” In the middle of a heated row tall Dr. Titulescu stalked in, denounced the British for “blowing now hot now cold” and rushed off to catch the next train for Bucharest “to calm Rumanian opinion.”

A cynicism of the week much relished by the Montreux diplomats was a British proposal to be allowed to take through the Dardanelles 15,000 additional tons of war boats “for humanitarian purposes.” Asked Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff: “What is the meaning of humanitarian?”

“Oh,” replied Lord Stanhope, “it means to help British citizens in the event of an earthquake.”

Austrian Surprise. Italy was raised definitely out of the “wop” class in 1934 when German moves to seize Austria, culminating in the Nazi assassination of plucky little Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, caused Benito Mussolini to hurl Italian forces up to the Austrian frontier, warn Adolf Hitler by telephone to keep hands off and assume the protectorship of Austria, which Italy has maintained ever since.

That something new and hot was brewing in Vienna appeared when Vice Chancellor Prince von Starhemberg was drooped from the Cabinet and Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg journeyed to Italy to confer in secret with the Dictator on his farm (TIME, June 15). So anxious were Britain and France to find out what this meant that their Foreign Ministers pressingly invited Dr. Schuschnie to meet them in Geneva at the last session of the League, an invitation which he refused.

Vienna correspondents had only just begun to suspect what was in the pot last week when it was dished out, to the surprise of all Europe. “Chancellor Hitler is giving way to Premier Mussolini on Austria,” came the first news smuggled out of Vienna to the London office of the New York Times. “Hitler quite suddenly has reversed his whole policy toward Vienna.”

In Paris the famed pro-League and pro-Blum French Correspondent Mme Genevieve Tabouis winced in anguish: “The Central European Powers are consolidated again, with Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Franz Josef replaced by Chancellor Hitler and Premier Mussolini! Austria is lost to France and Great Britain.”

These hysterics were produced when a pact between Chancellor Schuschnigg and Chancellor Hitler was arranged last week by that most ominous go-between Lieut. Colonel Franz von Papen. In the first years of the World War, while military attache at the German Embassy in Washington, he was charged by the U. S. Secret Service with paying for the projected blowup of the Welland Canal. It was von Papen who went between Hitler and von Hindenburg, with the ultimate result that an Austrian-born painter of picture post cards became Dictator of Germany. To escape assassination by Nazi radicals who hate him, swank Franz von Papen became Minister in Vienna (TIME, Aug. 20, 1934), has intrigued there ceaselessly ever since. His family are big in German industry, and big Austrian industrialists recently sat up all night in his legation with Dr. Schacht, president of the Reichsbank. as the pot simmered (TIME, June 29). One day last week Adolf Hitler slipped out of Berlin, ensconced himself near Austria’s frontier among the motto-encrusted sofa cushions of his snuggery at Berchtesgaden, and von Papen laid before him the whole Deal, as concocted by Mussolini and Schuschnigg, Schacht and von Papen. The German Dictator decided to sign.

Dictators Together. Next night Chancellor Schuschnigg went to the microphone in Vienna and dished the Deal in verbose German—the ideal language in which to express several conflicting ideas at once with nebulous luminosity. His bare fact was that Austria and Germany had made a pact. The Schuschnigg broadcast simply did not get down to brass tacks, and neither did subsequent official announcements. A so-called “summary,” but not the text of what had been signed, was issued, and officials admitted that this summary did not cover “secret” clauses which exist in the pact. Trying to guess, the world press lashed itself into reams of rhetoric—eminent News Pundit Edwin L. James asking seven rhetorical questions and peppering his profound analysis with ifs.

From the standpoint of Benito Mussolini, however, the secret Pact of Berchtesgaden served potent notice upon Europe— by the mere fact that it had been made— of an approach to each other of the two most powerful men in Central Europe today, Hitler and Mussolini. It was notice to Britain, France and the League of Nations that Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia must receive official diplomatic recognition; that the “war guilt” under which Germans and Italians chafe must be erased in tribute to their “honor”; and that other wishes of these dictators must be granted—or else. . . .

Last week Britain, France and Belgium had invited Italy to sit later this month at Brussels on a conference as to what is to be done, if anything, about Germany’s violation of the Locarno Pact by remilitarizing the Rhineland (TIME, March 16). After the Vienna broadcast it was sharply announced in Rome that Germany must be invited to Brussels and must accept before Italy will even consider sitting in, and Il Duce tagged on a few more things he wants before sending an Italian diplomat even to talk about Locarno.

Such was the strength of the position Dictator Mussolini was felt to have built up for himself, with the new Pact as a symbol of the drawing together last week of the might of two dictators, that of secondary importance were the treaty’s terms.

The Berchtesgaden Pact, hints the official summary, is to end for 25 years the possibility that German troops might be sent into Austria, pledges Germany not to interfere directly in Austrian politics; envisions amnesty for Nazis now in Austrian jails (excepting Nazi terrorists sentenced for such crimes as murder); and, most important, is to restore normal economic intercourse between Austria, whose industriesare flat broke, and Germany, who would like to have them get busy making munitions for the frantically rearming Fatherland.

All this is wrapped in much verbosity dear to Teuton hearts. A basic ambiguity has always been that to Germans the very name of Germany is so closely related to that of Austria that the words and ideas are fluid and merge if one “thinks in German.” Thus the late great Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria gave his life in maintaining its “independence” from Germany (TIME, Aug. 6, 1934), and yet he gave Austria a new Constitution with these words: “We Austrians are German and have a German country!”

Article LXI of the Weimar Constitution is constructed entirely on the hypothesis that Austria is already German, its mystic words being, “German Austria, after its Anschluss (union) to the German Reich, shall receive the right of voting representation in proportion to its population. Until that time the representatives of German Austria shall have a consulting voice.”

One of the beauties of the Pact of Berchtesgaden is that its authors simply feel they know what it means and are well pleased if any foreigners do not. Habsburg supporters of Archduke Otto were at first wild with fury last week, taking the Pact to mean that their candidate will not be restored as Emperor of Austria for 25 years. Then some of them took to looking wise and asking mysteriously: “Or does it not mean something else, perhaps the opposite?”

War in Rain. Following Italy’s successful war to conquer the Ethiopian Empire in a single dry season, there began the war of pacification which may well last years. With it came the awful rains which turn much of Ethiopia yearly into a swamp.

In Wallega Province, 150 miles from Addis Ababa, five Italian planes bearing “peace envoys,” a general, a priest, a major and twelve Italian airmen of lesser rank alighted and were rushed by Ethiopiansfrom ambush. Overwhelmed by the screaming savages, every Italian had his genitals ruthlessly hacked off, died weltering in blood and agony. Had Colonel Lindbergh been thus butchered, the effect in the U. S. would scarcely exceed that produced in Italy by announcements that one of the victims was crack Fascist Ace Major Antonio Locatelli.

Promptly at Addis Ababa drastic measures were decreed by ruthless young Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani. He sent out Galla tribesmen, who have gone over to Italy, to avenge the massacre. Ahead of them roared Italian bombers. Well knowing that Addis Ababa newshawks were sure to pump the U. S. and British Legations full of lurid stuff, some of which would go out over their radio transmitters and leak out in Washington and London, the Viceroy forbade diplomatic transmitters to so much as squeak for 15 days. He told the diplomats to hand any messages they wanted to send to the Italian commercial station, which censors everything. Filled was the world with Ethiopian rumors, according to which mud-wallowing savages cut Ethiopia’s only railway during the week. It was discovered by Viceroy Graziani that the British Legation radio continued to send, in defiance of his ban, the first show of British spunk against Il Duce in weeks.

Caesar and Anna Maria. Anything but happy was Benito Mussolini as he worsted 52 nations as their delegates voted in Geneva to lift Sanctions (TIME, July 13). Above all else Il Duce is a family man in the most virile Italian sense, and he grew irritable and depressed as Italy’s greatest doctors told him that his soft-eyed little daughter Anna Maria might never romp again with her favorite puppy. Stricken with infantile paralysis, she lay at Tivoli, and out to Tivoli every night in his racing car during the crisis of her illness drove Dictator Mussolini, in his eagerness slithering around turns at breakneck speed.

From Berlin, where she had been hobnobbing with Hitler, Goring and Goebbels, rushed the eldest and favorite child of Il Duce, his daughter Edda, Countess Ciano, wife of Italy’s Foreign Minister. As any good Italian family would, Papa Mussolini and Mama Mussolini, Edda and the elder boys, Bruno and Vittorio, sat up with 7-year-old Anna Maria during the whole of her two worst nights. As she rallied, down with whooping cough came 9-year-old Romano Mussolini.

By last week the doctors had ceased to shake their heads. In Rome the worried frown of the Dictator lifted. He again greeted visitors with crisp, magnetic cordiality, and Benito Mussolini appeared really touched when the Rome corps of correspondents at a press conference presented a doll which he promised to take that night to convalescent Anna Maria. Of recent years Mrs. Mussolini, who used to live in Milan, now lives in Rome with Mr. Mussolini, except in summer when she takes the children to the country.

At news of the butchery in Ethiopia last week Il Duce went himself to call upon Rome relatives of the 15 dead. For the rest he was a Trojan, working furiously on the organization of his Ethiopian conquest. Italian, decreed Il Duce, shall be compulsory in all Ethiopian schools. He ordered eight permanent bases in Ethiopia for “police aircraft”—a force of 300 planes distinct from the military craft of the Viceroy which are to wheel ceaselessly over the Ethiopians, as British Royal Air Force ships keep the fear of God and Stanley Baldwin ever present in savage breasts along India’s northwest frontier. It was positively declared in Rome that Dictator Mussolini is keeping faith with Sir Samuel Hoare and other Britons whom he considers above the “rat” class by not planning to raise in Ethiopia a great conscript army of blacks for disturbance of the African balance of power.

Il Duce planned last week that some 200,000 white Italian troops and workmen will be offered inducements to settle permanently in Ethiopia as pioneers and bring out their families from Italy. As heroes, Fascist soldiers not caring for Ethiopia can return to Italy. But should too many return, Il Duce makes no secret that Fascist discipline will send other young empire-builders out.

Italian heavy industry was shifting rapidly last week from war to peace, the leader as usual being Greatest Italian Industrialist Senator Giovanni Agnelli of Turin, who might be called both the Ford and the Krupp of Italy. His famed Fiat works is already out with a brand new little car cheaper than any ever before sold in Italy ($675). When His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff accepts a Fiat, as he periodically does, the dignity of Tycoon Agnelli does not permit him to kneel even in the Sacred Presence, and Fiat publicity men snap pictures galore, soon show the world the Pope riding in their car. Perhaps nothing is more significant in Italy than that Agnelli of Fiat gives the Fascist salute when he encounters the Dictator, and that no Fiat camera clicked when Benito Mussolini recently accepted one of the cheap new post-War-cars. “It would be unthinkable.” explained Fiat’s awed publicity department, “for the Head of the State and Leader of the Party to be made use of for purposes of publicity. We have no photograph of the Head of the State in one of our new cars, certainly not!”

World’s Greatest People. Today ebullient Italians of the mass cheerfully boast from one end of Italy to the other that they are “the world’s greatest people.” As a crowning glory for Marshal Badoglio, who conquered Ethiopia, became briefly its first Viceroy and receives a viceregal salary for life, Il Duce is to consolidate the ministries of War, Navy and Air. which he himself now holds, under the great Marshal. According to intimates, Benito Mussolini now intends to carry on with only the title “Duce and Premier,” whereas he has held as many as nine posts in his own Cabinet. In giving other Italians a real chance at the Cabinet, Italy’s victorious Dictator is said to feel that “Fascism now gives itself to its triumphant people!”