Produced by Eric Eldred, Anne Reshnyk, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Italy Hesitates
Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strictcensorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating formany months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joiningwith the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It wasknown that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army—boots andfood and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhatcynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war;that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity toconcede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heardmuch, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral untilthe conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the bestopportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May:"I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!"
The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in atight place—as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly inAmerica—naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and whensuddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decisionand broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her"sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna,there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in warpreparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance,which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. ChancellorBethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza havingprevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a completemisunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motivesthat led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at closerange, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in adeclaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of thematter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action wascomplex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simpleand inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulsesstirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to themodern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of th