ITALY: Sicilian Games

Premier Mussolini during his Ethiopian campaign, not wishing to arouse public apprehension by returning so many Italian wounded to the homeland, hospitalized them on the Isle of Rhodes. In the Spanish adventure, apparently less afraid of public reaction, he has been quietly slipping his wounded “volunteers” into Naples harbor, consigning them to nearby base hospitals.

Last week, his hospitalizing activities received much unwanted publicity. The Italian hospital ship Helouan caught fire, burned to the water’s edge in Naples harbor as tens of thousands lined the quays and wharves to watch the spectacular blaze. Fortnight ago, the Helouan had dumped 650 moppets from Rightist Spain at Genoa, where, cheering “Viva Il Duce —Arriba Espana,” they were rushed away to refugee camps. Only a skeleton crew remained aboard the hospital ship tied up in Naples. Hundreds of tourists, including Dennis Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia returning from a Papal audience, were prevented from boarding the U. S.-bound Conte di Savoia until the fire burned out.

Il Duce received the news in Sicily, where he had gone to review Italy’s annual war games. On a triumphal tour of the island, he told cheering Sicilians that “the lush old days of the Roman Emperor Augustus” were the only fitting comparison with the Fascist regime. To the crowd jam-packing the public square of Syracuse he shouted that Italy was “ready for any struggle, prepared for any sacrifice & determined to snatch victory” at any cost. Then, remembering the recent improvement in Anglo-Italian relations, he stood on the prow of a dummy destroyer erected in Messina’s flag-strung streets, minimized the importance of the war games with a wish to “dispel untimely & absurd alarms darkening the horizon, because my journey to Sicily has ends that are purely peaceful & constructive.”

Down the coast went Mussolini to join King Vittorio Emanuele III, Crown Prince Umberto, and a coterie of Italy’s best military brains as the war games got under way near Marsala with fifty thousand “Red” troops trying to capture the island from a “Blue” defense force.

With II Dute disparaging the significance of the Sicilian maneuvers, General Melchiade Gabba, directing the games, indiscreetly revealed that “Sicily was selected for the maneuvers deliberately to put the island’s strategic importance in evidence. The new situation in the Mediterranean and Africa has shifted Italy’s centre southward, thereby making Sicily the centre of gravity.”

At week’s end, as his soldiers & mules tugged at gun carriages under a sizzling Sicilian sun, Il Duce broke his strenuous trip with a swimming party at Syracuse. The barrel-chested Duce, nattily decked out in blue trunks, stood on a rock and umpired a free-style race among Cabinet members and undersecretaries.