Benito Africanus
I
WHEN the cannon of Fascist Italy open on the margin of the Ethiopian Plateau their fire will have a twofold significance. On the one hand, it will signal the departure of a new Rome on the pathways of empire of the old. On the other, it will salute a later Cæsar, renewing the challenge of the earlier to representative democracy.Benito Africanus, his legions will hail the Duce, if victory presently crowns his eagles, but in such a triumph the liberal world will justly identify a supreme disaster.
A decade ago, when the March on Rome was still recent and the newly arrived dictator as yet an unfamiliar figure in Europe, I asked Clemenceau if France, in her turn, would have a Mussolini. ‘No, never,’ he replied with swift and sure decision. ‘You see, we French have had two Napoleons. The first, one must admit, had certain qualities, but he did us only harm because he infected us with Cæsarism. The second had no qualities whatsoever, but he did us a great service because he cured us of that disease.
‘As for Mussolini,’ the ‘Tiger’ continued, the famous sardonic gleam lighting up his eyes, ‘he has arrived because to-day our Italian friends remember only their first Cæsar. But we French will not have a Mussolini because we shall never forget our last Bonaparte.’ For Clemenceau, the Duce was merely another Boulanger, and he was scornful of the failure of the Italian democracy to deal with the post-war man on horseback as he had dealt with the pre-war pretender. Nor was he fearful of a renascent Bonapartism at home, because he believed the sun of Austerlitz had set forever at Sedan.
To-day, ten years later, it is no longer possible to share Clemenceau’s confidence in French immunity to Cæsarism. Beyond French frontiers, Fascism has found a dozen reproductions, of which National Socialism is only the most familiar, and Mussolini himself has inspired many imitators, of whom Hitler is but the most formidable. Despite this multiplication of dictators, however, Benito Mussolini still remains the symbol of the postwar revolt against that democratic ideal which in the pre-war era commanded the allegiance of all liberal and enlightened minds.
Having at long last liquidated the final vestiges of the deliquescent domestic democracy of Giolitti, the Duce is now, in his Ethiopian enterprise, challenging that international system of democracy which Woodrow Wilson undertook to establish in the League. For the moment at least, the March on Geneva has promised to be as successful as the earlier March on Rome, the anniversary of which is for Fascist Ialy what that of the storming of the Bastille is for Republican France.
With the launching of this African adventure, the surviving democracies, and particularly the British and American, have at last been driven to a reluctant recognition of the fact that what they are witnessing is not a phenomenon peculiar to Italy and Germany, and having its origin in the disappointments of victory or the despair of defeat, but something far more fundamental. In fact, they are beginning to perceive that an upheaval which they had dismissed as purely parochial may have world-wide implications almost too menacing to admit of calm appraisal.
In his famous history of the French Revolution and the First Empire, Sorel set down a novel and memorable interpretation of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. For most of the world that career has seemed almost exclusively the result of unbridled ambition and unrestrained hunger for power. Sorel, by contrast, saw the great Emperor ceaselessly driven onward, from the Po to the Danube and from the Danube to the Beresina, by the same concern which had dominated the minds and dictated the policies of all who had ruled or defended France from the first Cæsar to the last Bourbon.
That overmastering concern was for the security of France; and an identical solicitude has disclosed itself once more in the post-war era, alike in the policy of Poincaré and in the calculations of Foch. As one looks beneath the surface of contemporary Italian life, moreover, it is not difficult to discover an anxiety as controlling as that which haunted the mind of the great Napoleon and harried him from Marengo to Austerlitz and from Wagram to Moscow, until the fate which he had so long feared overtook his empire and himself in the invasion of 1814.
It is not the fear of military invasion which constitutes the key to present Italian policy. Mussolini’s dominating anxiety does not arise from the existence of an open frontier such as that which bares France to invasion across the plains extending from the Dusty Champagne to the chalk downs of Picardy, which opened the way to Attila and Hindenburg. On the contrary, from Ventimiglia to Fiume, now that the Italian frontier has been carried to the Brenner, the Alps constitute a rampart impregnable to attack.
Actually the peril to Fascist Italy comes from within and not from without the gates. Like France throughout her millennial history, modern Italy to-day seeks security, but that security is material and not military. Since the onset of the great depression, the realization of the extent and implications of the menace, not merely to national safety but to national existence as well, inherent in the exiguity of domestic resources in foodstuffs and raw materials, has grown and spread. For in these later years, in a period of nominal peace, Italy has been subjected to the experience hitherto the lot only of cities blockaded and besieged in war.
In a very real sense, therefore, this Ethiopian enterprise, which has set Europe and America by the ears, represents not so much the departure of an invading host as the sortie of a beleaguered garrison. Alongside of the ambition to win power and glory must be set the necessity to acquire food and raw materials. Behind the dream of foreign conquest lurks the fear of domestic upheaval precipitated by population pressure and by poverty in those essentials without which the masses cannot be fed and the machines supplied. Like Napoleon, as Sorel saw him, Mussolini the conqueror is in reality only Mussolini the captive.
II
To understand the contemporary Italian phenomenon — and that phenomenon has found frequent repetition outside of the Peninsula — it is essential to perceive that it results from the fusion of two explosive forces. There are present in it not merely the ambition of a dictator and the appetite of a people, long starved of the stuff upon which national pride and self-respect feed, for a place in the sun commensurate with its numbers and comparable with that of other nationalities. In addition, there is also patent the physical hunger due to the fact that within her own frontiers Italy lacks the food and raw materials requisite to ensure the existence and employment of her evergrowing population.
It is the second of these explosive forces which has, until recently, almost completely escaped the notice of the English-speaking world. The failure to reckon with it left public opinion in Great Britain and the United States bewildered and uncomprehending when Mussolini at length passed from words to deeds and sought to satisfy the double appetite of his fellow countrymen, the hunger for glory and for bread. And, because they saw only the pursuit of glory, the British and American peoples pronounced the African adventure monstrous and held the man responsible for it a menace to mankind.
Hitherto, both in America and in England, Fascism, like National Socialism, has been accepted as no more than a ground swell surviving from the great storm which was the World War. The very notion that these disturbances might represent the first waves driven on the shore by a new tempest had been dismissed as fantastic. Satisfied that mankind had found in democracy a complete and definitive solution for all the political problems of the present and of the future, Americans and Britons looked down upon Italian and German performances, serenely sure of their own security and contemptuous of the excesses and extravagances which accompanied these vagaries.
Identifying in Fascism a threefold challenge leveled at democracy, peace, and religion, the Anglo-Saxon world discovered in this detail alone sufficient warrant for the conclusion that it constituted no more than an attack of midsummer madness destined to collapse inwardly of the exhaustion consequent upon its own fury and folly. In the flaming words and exaggerated gestures of Mussolini it saw only the theatre, and appraised the Duce, like the Reichsführer who later imitated him, as an actor and not a doer. In the domestic applause which greeted the performances of both the Italian and the German dictator the Anglo-Saxons identified the proof of an immaturity which also explains the enthusiasm of children of all races for puppet shows.
When Mussolini flung back angrily at his foreign critics that for Italy democracy and peace together promised a future worthy only of a nation of organ-grinders living amid the ruins of Imperial Rome, his words were accepted as words and nothing more. When, month by month, as depression deepened and privation mounted in the Peninsula until the Dictator who had promised prosperity and glory had to advise his people to tighten their belts and hold out, the warning implicit in this admonition awakened no apprehensive echoes in Washington or London.
From a distance, the Anglo-Saxon nations beheld Fascism thrusting rifles into the hands of children and training civilian populations against the approaching arrival of hostile bombing squadrons. Again and again they heard Mussolini — and Hitler after him — preaching the duty of youth to fight and extolling the glory of the supreme sacrifice made upon the battlefield that the nation might live. But these military exercises and martial appeals were appraised as of no more lasting meaning than phrases spoken and gestures made before the footlights. Thus Fascism itself was considered as a concern not of responsible statesmen but of dramatic critics.
Dominating all else in the AngloSaxon mind, from the Armistice to the Abyssinian crisis, was the conviction that the World War had cured mankind of the disease of war. Every calculation for the future started from the assumption that for all peoples the latest struggle had demonstrated that international strife ensured universal and equal catastrophe. The problem of peace, therefore, seemed the question of providing the means to make effective a resolution which was definitive. Henceforth only accident and not design could precipitate international conflict, and solely against such accident was it necessary to guard.
Thus seated in their ivory towers in London and Washington, British and American statesmen sought to frame paper pacts and formulate moral sanctions, to devise the machinery appropriate for a world in which all peoples had with equal sincerity and finality renounced war. The conscience of mankind, the weight of world opinion, the will of peoples for peace, these were the forces which were to replace warships and soldiers, aircraft and guns, in the adjustment of international relations. The Covenant of the League, the Kellogg Pact, the several treaties of mutual guarantee, these were to constitute the charters and the constitution of a warless world.
In all this unimaginable industry in committing words to paper, only one thing was ignored. All that it was humanly possible to accomplish in exorcising the consequences of war was achieved. But, in respect of removing the causes of war, nothing, literally nothing, was done. The notion that in the modern world, at the stage which so-called civilization had now reached, and in the face of the progress already allowed in education and in science, the ancient primal impulse of hunger might precipitate another Völkerwanderung found no lodgment in any English or American mind. The idea that peoples and nations would take up arms to achieve economic equality, as they had in the past resorted to violence to acquire political liberty, was nowhere accepted.
As a consequence, the warning omens and portents of the later years went unheeded. Japan marched into Manchuria, Germany overthrew the Republic, from Italy the now familiar phrases became progressively more minatory. Yet, in the United States and England, faith in the religion of peace remained unshaken, and confidence in the eventual triumph of democracy everywhere endured undisturbed. To make war, deliberately, consciously, by design, continued to appear a sin against the Holy Ghost, a sacrilege so terrible as to be calculated to invite and to precipitate the thunderbolts of Heaven.
III
Nevertheless, in the world of 1935 two things were true. Some nations were fed and others were hungry. Nor was it less true that those peoples that were hungry had substituted dictators for democracy and no longer discovered in peace a blessing so satisfying that they were prepared to endure personal privation and national insignificance rather than compromise it. On the contrary, hungry nations everywhere were arming. Not only were they arming, but they were also consenting to new sacrifices and enduring fresh hardships in order that a larger part of their slender resources might be devoted to the multiplication of military divisions and aerial squadrons.
As far back as 1931, one hungry nation had marched to war and conquest. Confronted by the insoluble problem of sustaining seventy-five millions of people on the food supplies of the narrow islands which, all told, were smaller in area than several American states and incapable of supplying the needs of a new and clamant industrial machine, the rulers of Japan had laid violent hands upon Manchuria and defied the world to dislodge them. And to halt this act of pure aggression the world, led by the American and British democracies, had mobilized all the resources of organized peace of the postwar era. The conscience of mankind had made itself felt. The public opinion of the world had made itself heard.
All in vain, however. In Japan those who ruled and those who constituted the working masses had taken their fate in their own hands. National survival, personal existence, these things had in the eyes of both been called into question. The home fields could no longer support the domestic population. The raw materials and minerals of the islands could no longer supply national factories and foundries. Foreign doors were barred against the Japanese immigrant. Japan herself lacked the cash and credits necessary to buy abroad that without which her people could not live decently at home. Instinctively the Japanese masses supported their government; inevitably that government plunged forward on the Manchurian adventure.
From afar, assured against that want which dictated Japanese aggression by the wealth of their own vast empires in foodstuffs and essential raw materials, the British and American publics denounced as morally indefensible an enterprise which was materially inescapable. Their denunciations, however, failed to surmount the topless towers of the Japanese censorship or to shake the grim resolution of a leadership which had already accepted war as the single means to ensure national survival and was now putting the British and American governments and peoples on notice that it was prepared to fight rather than retreat.
But the British and American peoples were not prepared to fight. For them the immediate danger was slight. Japanese imperialism was operating in fields which were foreign, and far away as well. Instinctively they felt the subliminal challenge to themselves, as rich and economically self-sufficient nations, implicit in this resort to violence and defiance of law. So, not impossibly, the Romans had heard the reports of the incursion of the Barbarians in Dacia or the Parthian Marches. But to what they could not prevent they had reconciled themselves, and the news of this submission swiftly spread in the forests beyond the Rhine and the Danube and set in motion other hungry tribes.
Precisely in the same fashion, Japanese success in Asia produced repercussions in Europe. The material necessities of Italy were identical with those of Japan, her military strength was not less formidable. The will of the single dictator was not weaker than the resolution of the soldiers, statesmen, and industrialists who together had shaped Japanese destinies. Manchuria thus constituted the preface to Ethiopia. In London, in Washington, in Geneva, the truth should now have been apparent. Once more the hungry tribes were on the march. But in these several cities the news from Manchuria, and the echoes which that news produced in Central Europe, although they awakened moral indignation, failed to arouse political wisdom. As the Austrian generals condemned Napoleon’s tactics as they fled, so the Western democracies censured Araki’s ethics as they surrendered.
Mussolini observed and waited. He had never believed in the efficacy of the Geneva institution. He had never been deceived by the empty pretense of the Kellogg Pact. From the very start he had dismissed peace as the last and particular blessing of the fed and sated nations and had accepted war as the inescapable necessity of countries like his own, which were at once hungry and strong. Now he reckoned that the Japanese performance had, in the language of the street, found the post-war peace machinery ‘bunk’ and left it ‘junk.’ Meantime, at home, the pressure of economic poverty increased steadily. His task of organizing the material resources and mobilizing the spiritual resources of his people for war was completed. Under the strain of diminishing wellbeing, his hold upon his people must henceforth decline and not increase.
Looking out upon contemporary Europe, the Duce saw the moment of opportunity at hand. France, the Soviet Union, the countries of the Little Entente, fearful of the growing menace of German rearmament and National Socialist purpose, were certain to value the assurance of Italian military support in Austria more highly than the promises of paper guarantees of the Covenant and Pact, now mutilated by the thrust of the Japanese bayonet. If, as Henri Quatre had affirmed, Paris was worth the saying of a Mass, Italy, for Laval, was worth the sacrifice of a pact. Neither at Geneva nor elsewhere would the Duce have to reckon with other than moral interference from countries for whom Fascist divisions were a vital detail in their system of national security.
There remained Great Britain, and, more remote and obscure, the United States. For all practical purposes, the latter could be ignored. But as to the former two things claimed attention. In the first place, the League of Nations had become the cornerstone of British policy in the post-war period. In the second, the Ethiopian undertaking involved an invasion of a region which was at the heart of the whole British system of imperial communications. To halt a French enterprise on the White Nile, Britain had risked war in the far-off Fashoda time; would London show itself less determined now, when Italian purpose could compromise not merely the Cape-to-Cairo road but also the lifeline of imperial communications passing through Suez and Aden to Bombay and Sydney?
IV
But England was asleep, and Mussolini, supreme realist that he is, was perfectly aware of the fact. The World War had created among the masses of the British population a war phobia which from 1918 onward had continued to paralyze British statesmanship even in those relatively rare moments when that statesmanship had become vaguely aware of the forces which were stirring in the post-war world. To the British popular mind, the age of imperialism was over, the era of conquest was finished — finished because for England the hour of satiety had come. The British Empire was completed and war could only compromise a wealth it could not increase.
To defend that empire which itself represented the fruits of three centuries of unending wars of conquest, the British people no longer looked either to the efficacy of foreign alliances or to the strength of domestic arms. A simple and all-sufficient prescription for peace was for them discoverable in the persuasion of other peoples to follow an English example in renouncing war, reducing armaments, subscribing to an eternally binding oath to respect the status quo — at least where British title was involved. By innumerable wars they had built their empire at the expense of other peoples; through the renunciation of war by other nations they now planned to perpetuate it.
All the secret of British policy and thought in the post-war period lies hidden in this single circumstance. Between themselves and the appetites of nations more lately arrived at unity and strength and still inspired by the old aspirations which had dominated and directed Englishmen from the days of Clive to those of Lawrence, the English people thought to establish the impassable barrier of a collective system. Against all tardy and threatening enterprises of later imperialisms they had not only sought, but also in their own minds actually attained, the support of a world which had accepted the moral restraints and adopted the legal restrictions implicit in the Covenant of the League and the Kellogg Pact.
When, by the Treaty of San Stefano, Imperial Russia had menaced the security of the British Empire at Constantinople, a British fleet had anchored off the Golden Horn and Indian troops had been summoned to Malta. When, by Marchand’s march across the African Continent, Republican France had challenged the British prospectus of an imperial sovereignty extending without interruption from Alexandria to Cape Town, Kitchener had been dispatched from Khartum to Fashoda and the British fleet had been concentrated in the harbor of Valletta. But when, in the summer of the current year, Fascist Italy announced her purpose to conquer Ethiopia, it was not to British arms and ships but to League covenants and the Kellogg Pact that British statesmanship was forced to turn, although the menace inherent in Italian purpose was as great as that which had been implicit in the Russian or the French.
When, moreover, these engagements solemnly sworn to proved to be fresh scraps of paper and nothing else, when the United States and France rejected all suggestions that they should risk their blood and treasure or compromise their domestic peace or safety to make effective the intervention of a collective system in the interests of the security of the British Empire, then England found herself confronted by a new crisis like those of 1878 and 1898. But when, in this emergency, the faithful converts to the later gospel of Geneva urged that the British Government should, by closing the Suez Canal to Italian shipping, at one time ensure imperial safety and uphold League principles, there came from Rome the grim reminder that sanctions such as the closing of the Canal would mean war.
At that moment, too, the British Admiralty warned a hard-pressed Cabinet that the fleet was not adequate to keep open the lifeline of imperial communications which runs from Gibraltar to Suez, the General Staff reported that neither Egypt nor the Sudan could be defended against Italian forces already established in Libya and Eritrea, and finally the Air authorities announced that Malta was indefensible against an Italian air force actually greater than the British and capable of being concentrated against this vital naval base. Thus, simultaneously the moral safeguards and the military defenses of the Empire crumbled. To halt Mussolini it was necessary now to fight, but it was also patent that the opening stage of war would infallibly see the Mediterranean closed to British shipping and Egypt and the Sudan exposed to invasions beyond the strength of British garrisons to repel.
Rarely in British history has there been so grave a miscalculation of the forces actually in presence and of the strength of will behind a direct challenge as in this Ethiopian affair. Never, until too late, did those responsible for British security and British prestige face the two unwelcome but inescapable truths that only war could arrest Mussolini, and that Great Britain was hopelessly unready for war with Italy. And when the bandage did at last fall from English eyes the world witnessed the scurry of British ships hastening to reënforce the Mediterranean fleet and the scuffle of British regiments hurrying to strengthen the skeleton formations which garrisoned Malta and Egypt.
Like the Hoover Administration in the Manchurian affair, the Baldwin Government in the Ethiopian crisis had relied upon words to arrest an armed nation resolved to go forward with a campaign of conquest it had already undertaken. And, ironically enough, Sir Samuel Hoare and Anthony Eden now found themselves occupying the exposed and isolated situation which had belonged to Henry L. Stimson when the former American Secretary of State had rashly undertaken to arrest actual invasion by ethical incantation. As the United States had become the unique target of Japanese resentment in 1931, so Great Britain now became the objective upon which was concentrated the drumfire of Italian indignation.
Noteworthy beyond all else in this Fascist phenomenon was the double truth now at last unmistakable. On the one hand, it was patent that under the strain of material privation peoples would instinctively turn from democracy to dictators; on the other, it was no less evident that these dictators, under the pressure of the same impulsion, must turn from peace to war. The implications of these facts were no longer to be blinked. Manifestly mankind had passed into a new period in history in which the dreams and faiths of the post-war era could no longer stand the strain of contemporary reality, for these dreams and faiths had been based upon the twin pillars of democracy and peace.
V
Mussolini s’en va-t-en guerre, then. And, as Italian armies vanish in the rocky fastnesses of the Lion of Judah, a hush has fallen upon Europe recalling that pause which, so contemporary diarists record, followed the disappearance of the Grande Armée in the forests and marshes beyond the Niemen. But to-day, as a century and a quarter ago, it is patent that this is a pause of expectation and not of peace. Behind him in Germany, Mussolini, like Napoleon, has left a watchful and irreconcilable enemy. Defeat in battle or disaster due to weather must, therefore, produce repercussions not less explosive than those responsible for the national upheaval of 1814.
For the German people, like the Italian, under the lash of the same economic wants, have also turned from democracy to Cæsar, and the Reichsführer, like the Duce, is the captive of similar material necessities. At the end of the road, for Hitler as for Mussolini, lies the inescapable choice between domestic revolution and foreign conquest. In the words of the former one can identify the unmistakable echo of the phrases of the latter, and, in the military preparation and moral discipline of Germany, the faithful imitation of the Italian preface to the Ethiopian adventure.
Only on the assumption that Mussolini was a sham and Fascism merely a farrago of empty bombast was it ever possible to believe in the prescriptions of Wilson and the pretensions of Geneva once the March on Rome had taken place. To-day it is plain that Mussolini was not a sham, and that Fascism, beneath the delight in the theatrical, conceals the will to fight. Once the fact was disclosed that hungry peoples were so blind to the charm of liberty and to the blessing of peace that they were prepared to renounce the former and reject the latter rather than accept as definitive their material limitations, then all the post-war calculations of the English-speaking democracies were reduced to futility.
These calculations were based upon an accurate appraisal of what another war could mean to the Anglo-Saxon nations. But none of them even remotely reckoned with what peace must involve for peoples like the Japanese, the Germans, and the Italians, imprisoned between the walls constituted by their own economic poverty and the monopolistic policies of self-sufficient countries. Whatever judgment History may ultimately pass upon Benito Mussolini, it can hardly deny him recognition as the symbol of a new revolt against another inequality.
As Napoleon betrayed democracy only to find himself condemned to carry on the struggle of the French Revolution against dynastic Europe, so Mussolini, having similarly played the deserter to the socialistic cause, has found himself forced to challenge those capitalistic states which he anciently recognized as the enemies of his political faith. As Bonaparte allied himself by marriage to the Hapsburgs, so Mussolini has made his bargain with the later feudalism of finance and industry. In the end he has been no more successful than Napoleon in his attempt to escape from the destiny imposed upon him by the physical circumstances of his country.
Nor is it a mere coincidence that the Duce, like Bonaparte, should find Great Britain barring his pathway or that collision should have taken place in that region in which the future Emperor suffered his first defeat at British hands. For the Ethiopian enterprise of Fascist Italy, like the Egyptian venture of Revolutionary France, constitutes a direct and deadly threat to the security of the British Empire.
Hence the fact that, while the issues involved in the Manchurian and Ethiopian affairs were identical, the silence of Sir John Simon at Geneva in 1932 was replaced by the articulateness of Sir Samuel Hoare in 1935. As a consequence, of British concern, too, behind the Abyssinian detail lies the possibility of another Punic War. And if, like Scipio, Mussolini is to earn the title of Africanus, it may be that he will have first to triumph over a later Carthage.
So does history repeat itself in the region which Ancient Rome proudly described as mare nostrum and Fascist Italy now claims as its own.