Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  As he approached it, Fiume was in uproar. The departure of the grenadiers for Ronchi hadn’t ended the turmoil in the city. Members of the Autonomist Party had been beaten up in the streets. There had been anti-British demonstrations, suppressed only when an officer trained a Lewis gun on the protestors. The planned march from Ronchi was no secret. Giovanni Comisso, serving with the garrison in Fiume, overheard girls chattering excitedly about the return of their boyfriends in the Sardinian Brigade. Throughout the day of 11 September, according to Father Macdonald, “a strange spirit of unrest seemed to pervade the town … a bubbling over of a long pent-up excitement, and the expectation of Signor d’Annunzio’s arrival.”

  D’Annunzio was expected at dawn. One of the Italian warships in the harbour, the Dante Alighieri, was under orders to sail at first light, but its crew were all ashore, ignoring the sirens summoning them on board, detained, according to one source, by the kisses of female members of “Young Fiume” playing at being sirens of a different sort, “sealing their ears with the wax of their kisses.” A young man came up to Comisso at a party in Fiume and asked to borrow his revolver, explaining that he had heard there would be a revolution in the morning.

  At 11 p.m., Captain Host-Venturi informed the officers of the Legion that d’Annunzio was on his way, and led them in reciting an oath pledging themselves to defend Italian Fiume at all costs. At 3 a.m. a group of legionaries marched out of the city, ostensibly for a session of physical training, in fact to meet d’Annunzio’s approaching column. Other legionaries were standing by to seize the Allied command post. As the sun rose all the bells in the city were rung and the Fiuman-Italians, few of whom had been to bed, poured out into the streets.

  Delayed by the missing trucks, d’Annunzio was still many miles off. No one in Fiume knew where he was or whether he would come. The morning dragged by. Host-Venturi gave up hope, and attempted to disperse the crowds, but no one wanted to go home.

  And then, at last, came the advent of “the necessary hero”; of “He who must come.” Crowds, who had poured out of the city to welcome the marchers, began to flood back into it, singing hymns and patriotic songs, with the armoured cars of the Arditi following behind. D’Annunzio deferred his own arrival until the film crew had come up: this was a show he was staging for a world audience.

  He rode into town standing up in an armoured car, wearing the uniform he had abjured earlier in the year, his medals flashing. Lorries full of Arditi followed, all on their feet and yelling “Fiume or Death!” They were welcomed by Fiuman-Italians wild with patriotic ardour and lack of sleep. Women and children were waving laurel branches. D’Annunzio’s followers describe “ovations without end” and “thousands hailing us as saviours.”

  The column passed the Allied barracks; the machine guns mounted in the windows remained silent. D’Annunzio, according to one of his aides, “almost disappeared beneath a rain of flowers and laurels: his motor car became a living pyramid: soldiers, citizens clambered onto it from all sides, yelling, weeping, crushing around the condottiero, who was kissed, on his face and his hands, by a thousand mouths.” He was to call this his Sacra Entrata—his sacred entry.

  So astonishing was the success of the march that contemporary observers and subsequent historians alike have found it literally incredible. The rulers of the newborn nation of Yugoslavia assumed that the Italian government must surely have secretly authorised the coup. American and British diplomats came to similar conclusions. Father Macdonald was convinced of it.

  In fact the regular army’s failure to stop d’Annunzio seems to have been the result not of a conspiracy, but of a muddle. Afraid to provoke a general mutiny, the generals hesitated. As d’Annunzio’s column moved towards his troops, General di Robilant, in command of the Italian Third Army, wrote to Nitti: “I am not certain I could induce our soldiers to open fire against colleagues shouting ‘Viva l’Italia, Viva the Army, Viva Italian Fiume’.” Even the very high-ranking were unsure what was expected of them. Di Robilant wrote later that various circumstances—the fact that the government agents shadowing d’Annunzio had been withdrawn a few days before the coup; the fact that the “Fiumanised” grenadiers had been stationed so dangerously close to the city at Ronchi instead of being withdrawn from the area altogether—“created in me the grave suspicion that something … had been organised by the government for ends which I could not imagine by myself and which I did not wish to hinder.” His inaction in turn appeared to others evidence that d’Annunzio had protectors in high places and should therefore be allowed to pass unchallenged.

  And so those who might have moved against d’Annunzio, seeing others fail to do so, drew back. While they did so he made Fiume his.

  The Sacred Entry accomplished, feeling his fever after a short night on a row of tables, d’Annunzio made straight for the town’s best hotel and went to bed for the afternoon, leaving it to others to decide how the newly emancipated city was to be governed.

  While he slept, his followers merged with Host-Venturi’s Legion and overran Fiume, taking over the Governor’s Palace and the telephone exchange, forcing their way into public buildings while the Italian troops of the Allied command stood by and allowed them to do so. All the Allied flags, except that of Italy, were lowered. The insignia of the Hungarian monarchy were hacked off the carved furniture in government offices. Arditi, looking to one observer “superhumanly beautiful” with their black and silver uniforms, their battle-hardened features and their sweeping forelocks, stood guard at each crossroads and in every piazza. Many of the Italian troops in the city deserted their posts and joined d’Annunzio’s following. Meanwhile Guido Keller, representing d’Annunzio, had a meeting with Grossich, the president of the Italian-dominated National Council of Fiume, and easily persuaded him to welcome the new order. It was resolved that the poet should be asked to accept the role of the city’s “Commandant.” The National Council would continue to be responsible for the day-to-day government of the city, but they would be subject to d’Annunzio who would have his own administration, known as “the Command,” and his own cabinet of ministers.

  When he was wakened towards evening to be told that he was to rule the city, d’Annunzio is said to have exclaimed, “Who? Me?” This could have been play-acting. But it is conceivable that he had never looked beyond his seizure of Fiume to the power that might follow it. The drama of the Sacred Entry was exactly to his taste. The excited crowds, the air full of flung flowers, the stern elation of the fighting men, the dancing, the armed women in their party clothes: it was on this moment of Dionysiac liberation that he had fixed his eyes. He spoke the language of ecstasy and conflagration, not of five-year plans.

  Fiume’s Governor’s Palace, which d’Annunzio soon made his headquarters, forms the upper side of a sloping semi-circular piazza, a perfect auditorium. The palace, a nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance building constructed as a symbol of Hungarian power, has a grand balcony, some twenty feet deep, which became, for the next fifteen months, d’Annunzio’s pulpit, his rostrum and his stage.

  Awakening from his nap, d’Annunzio arrived at the palace in a car covered with flags and flowers, with Arditi riding on its running boards, its boot, its bonnet. The piazza was packed tight with people. There were more people on the rooftops, or hanging out of the windows of the houses around. Every balcony was hung with banners. Arditi perched precariously on the ledges along the palace’s façade. D’Annunzio was still tremulous with fever and visibly exhausted but his ringing voice seemed to echo off the walls as he presented himself to his people. “Italians of Fiume,” he began. “Here I am.” He repeated himself insistently. “Here I am … Here is the man…Ecce Homo.” He was the new Messiah, the god of a new cult, and this was his epiphany.

  He pledged himself to stay in Fiume while he still had breath. He brought out the banner he had carried to the Timavo, the banner with which he had draped Randaccio’s coffin and which he had spread on the Capitol that summer. He called upon the crowd to conf
irm the vote of the plebiscite of the previous October, when they had resolved to become a part of Italy, intoning questions to which they answered, in an ever-increasing crescendo of hysterical noise: “Yes!” “Yes!” He climaxed with the declaration that Fiume was for ever reunited with Mother Italy. “The crowd,” wrote Comisso, “was totally carried away.”

  Giovanni Giuriati, driving to Fiume from Trieste that night in a late dash to catch up with events, kept passing troops marching the same way by the light of the full moon. He stopped and asked an officer: “Have you orders to go and fight d’Annunzio?” and was told: no, orders were of no account, all the men he saw were going to join d’Annunzio in liberating Fiume. They were all singing. “They were like crusaders in sight of Jerusalem.”

  In Fiume the cafés and restaurants were overflowing. Flags waving, orators shouting—their voices drowned out by the roars of the crowd, officers carried shoulder-high, hats and handkerchiefs thrown, women dancing as though possessed. Arriving after midnight Giuriati thought the main square looked like the crater of a live volcano, “a tumult of sound and movement, a whirlwind, an uproar which took you by the throat.” Sirens wailed, bells rang. “The crowd was frightening—a force of nature, a cyclone unchained.” There was jubilation: there was also violence. Some French soldiers who had taken refuge in a brothel were dragged out and killed, and so was the prostitute who had sheltered them.

  By noon the following day, after a long tête-à-tête with d’Annunzio, General Pittaluga had handed over the government of Fiume, telling the other Allied commanders present in the city that he was “yielding to superior force.” He then left town in a hurry by car. Some of his men obeyed orders and followed, but a substantial number of his younger troops deserted, and remained in Fiume. Of the officers commanding Italian ships in the harbour one obeyed orders and sailed away, but the two others submitted to d’Annunzio. That afternoon the Italian high command in the region (based only a few miles away in Abbazia—now Opatija) asked the British and French contingents to withdraw from Fiume on the grounds that their presence would be a hindrance should it become necessary to blockade or even bombard the town. Judging that this bizarre situation was probably best treated as an internal Italian affair, they agreed to do so. D’Annunzio was left in undisputed possession of his little city-state.

  No one was certain what would happen next. D’Annunzio appointed Giuriati his prime minister. Host-Venturi, leader of the Legion of Fiume, would be his military chief. Guido Keller was his “Action Secretary.” Giuriati believed that, although the Italian government would ostensibly disown them, it would be secretly glad of what they were doing and would find ways of covertly supporting them. D’Annunzio foresaw conflict. But come what may, he announced that they would resist “to the last drop of blood” any attempt to drive them from Fiume. He instructed his Command to begin preparing for the expected influx of thousands of volunteers.

  Nitti, handed a telegram with the news as he sat in Rome’s parliament, was visibly beside himself with rage, pounding the table with his fist. Only days earlier General Diaz had assured him that a “high sense of discipline” obtained in the army, and any orders would be “obeyed in perfect obedience.” Now the army’s failure to stop d’Annunzio signalled a degree of insubordination that posed a real threat to the stability of the state. The ground beneath Nitti’s feet, as he put it, had been mined. He looked to General Badoglio to deal with the problem.

  Badoglio, mimicking d’Annunzio’s own strategies, had a plane overfly Fiume, dropping leaflets announcing that those soldiers who did not return to their units within twenty-four hours would be considered traitors. D’Annunzio was undaunted. Out on his balcony again he told his followers they were not deserters; the deserters were those who had failed to stand by Fiume. “The true army of Italy is here.” They roared out their devotion. “I have overcome,” he wrote exultantly to Albertini. “I have everything in my power. The soldiers obey only me. The city is tranquil. There is nothing to be done against me.”

  Fiume’s wharfs are massive, its harbours deep, but it is possible to walk from one side of the city centre to the other in thirty minutes. D’Annunzio liked to tell the story of the Venetian Doge outraged on being shown a terrestrial globe and finding that Venice showed barely the size of a falcon’s eye. Little Fiume, he implied, could, like Venice, have a world-historical destiny. For the time being though, it was cramped and encircled. There were still Allied troops based in Susak just across the river, and more in Abbazia, the resort which had been the seaside playground of the Hungarian nobility throughout the belle époque, and whose palatial pastel-coloured hotels were visible over the bay. One of d’Annunzio’s officers tapped into their telephone lines and overheard the generals in charge of the two bases agree that d’Annunzio was “crazy” and his legion a gang of “delinquents.” But surrounded though it might be by scoffers, d’Annunzian Fiume was proving magnetic.

  Thousands of Italian soldiers—whole battalions—deserted their posts and flocked to Fiume, stowing away on trains, chugging down the coast in little MAS boats, or walking over the Carso to join him. Sailors mutinied and steered their ships there. Fighter pilots flew in with their planes. Léon Kochnitzky, arriving in Fiume a few days after the Sacred Entry, describes the scene on the train. As they cross the armistice line there are no soldiers to be seen but then, as they approach their destination, “fake railway men shake off their fancy dress, uniforms come out of suitcases, young men black with soot burst out of the tender.” As the train drew into the station the stowaways all let out the war cry d’Annunzio himself had taught them “Eia, Eia, Eia! Alalà!” Along with the young soldiers, a cosmopolitan host of artists, intellectuals, revolutionaries and romantics were drawn to Fiume as to the one bright light in the dreariness of post-war Europe.

  Of the thousands who poured into the city over the following weeks, few could have articulated precisely what they were doing there, and those who did would put forward wildly differing accounts of their motives. The Fiuman-Italian merchants and industrialists who dominated the National Council favoured the city’s annexation to Italy because they believed that as part of a Greater Italy they could resist Yugoslav attempts to take over the lucrative traffic in and out of the harbour, and re-establish Fiume’s prosperity. Many of them were patriotic Italians, but their primary interests were local and practical. In the instability of post-war Europe they sought safety, and a way to do business.

  Most of the incomers had much larger aims. For irredentists like Giuriati, Fiume was only the first step. Inspired by the glorious “march of Ronchi,” Italians at home would clamour for a more expansionist policy and Italians in Dalmatia would rise up and insist on their Italian identity. Nitti’s government would fall. Caution and parsimony would be cast aside. Diplomatic negotiations would give way to violence. Italy would be great again, and those who had laid claim to Fiume would be hailed as the heroic instigators of this glorious revolution.

  The first programme was simple, with realistic, achievable aims. The second was wildly ambitious, and wildly subversive. There were others, though, even wilder. Some of the new arrivals in Fiume were looking to found, not a newly independent Fiume, not a Greater Italy, but a new world order. Others simply sought excitement. Kochnitzky spoke for many when he described his state of mind: “There was nothing anywhere in the world but gold, iron and blood. The very light of heaven is venal. [his English]” In the general mood of dreariness and disenchantment, d’Annunzio’s action was thrilling: “Behold, a beacon had been lit at the end of the Adriatic.”

  Within days of taking over the city, d’Annunzio was obliged to close it. He had more volunteers than he could feed. On 23 September he published a proclamation asking all regular Italian troops to stay at their posts. Those who had already joined him, he averred, had done something marvellous. “The blessed smile of the dead” shone upon them. But the rest must stay with the regular army and defend the armistice line against the Yugoslavs—that way,
too, they would be serving the cause of the City of the Holocaust.

  The weather was as beautiful as it always ought to be in September. The sea was warm, the hills behind the town covered with vines, the shops—initially anyway—full of luxuries, and the cafés, despite the blockade, still serving coffee with cream. Fiume faces the sea. Its pink and white stone, the scallops and ogees of its remaining Gothic windows, its narrow pedestrian streets and paved squares, all bear the stamp of Venice. Grand mountains rise behind it. The glittering bay, dotted with islands, is its prospect. “The city was stupendous,” wrote Comisso. “My youth was at its peak, summer was closing slowly, with glittering sunsets over the sea.”

  The legionaries, now joined by around 9,000 new recruits, were a motley bunch of dandies. There were so many officers that a high proportion had no troops under their command, and were free to spend their nights playing cards, their days strolling in the sun down the stone-flagged Corso with its pretty Venetian clock tower, or arguing about politics in the cafés. These superfluous officers were much decorated. One of d’Annunzio’s first actions on arriving in the city was to present medals to all those who followed him there. Vividly aware of the potency of what the historian David Cannadine has called “Ornamentalism,” he bound his followers to him with honours and titles, anthems and ceremonies glorifying their exploits. His officers’ uniforms were swagged with gold braid, their chests adorned with a rainbow of ribbons.