April 26, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
Italy and Her Allies 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
9 
Mr. iMi'ix Fyeman fs an American, and this article was 
wriitcn by him before America had joined the Allies, 
and also be/ore the Ra'olution had taken place in Russia. 
SOME months ago, very shortly after my arrival in 
Italy, it was my good fortune to meet one clay a 
distinguished Allied diplomat— a man whose know- 
ledge of things Italian is as profound as his sympathy 
for the people is warm— who chanced to have read two 
previous articles I had written in an endeavour to give some 
idea of the state of popular (rather than ofhcial) opinion in 
France and England regarding their Allies in the -v^ir. 
■' You will find your task a good deal more diffictilt here 
than in France or England," he said ; " yet there are fairly 
well-developed veins of sentiment, and you can uncover 
them if you pcri;if>t long enough. Unless you persist, how- 
ever unless you make something more than a mere traveller's 
canvass of the situation — any impressions you may set down 
are sure to be misleading, and may even be positively mis- 
cliievous. Let me give you an example of what I mean. 
"If you were to ask a dozen Englishmen— in Rome, Naples 
or Florence, but especially in the former — how the British 
stood in tiie estimation of' the Italians, I have no tloubt that 
most of them would shake their heads and say anything 
from 'Not verv well' to 'Jolly bad.' This feeling is 
the very natural consequence of the very limited contact 
the most of these people have with the real Italians— the 
Italians especially who count in the war— and the traveller 
or writer who bases his conclusi6ns on what these ' patchily ' 
(if I mav uSe that term) informed individuals tell him is 
more than likelv to carry away and disseminate very dis- 
torted and (as Ihave said") even" mischievous impressions. 
Opinion that Counts 
" Now I happen to know that the feeling of tlic Italians 
who count — tlie Italians who brought their country into the 
war, and who irtay be depended upon to keep it there until 
the cause for which we all are fighting is finally victorious — : 
far from being suspicious and jealous of, or unfriendly to, 
the peoples of the countries to whom their own is allied, 
regard us with a frank, if not always uncritical, confidence 
that has carried them safely through the web of intrigue that 
has enveloped them from the first. But unless you are 
willing to ])ush j-ouf enquiries persistently and patiently 
enough to reach these real Italians — and they are not the 
ones whom the casual visitor to this country meets most 
frequently — you will be doing the Allies an injustice, a dis- 
tinct disservice, if you write anything based on what you 
have gathered from the ones who do not count." 
" And who are these Italians who count ? " I asked.' 
" You will find them in all parties and in all classes of 
society," was the reply ; " but the great majority of them 
are what I might call the ' middle-class intellectuals.' These 
would roughly correspond to what you in America call the 
' Progressives,' using the term as descriptive of a class rather 
than of a party. They are hardly the class that would be 
referred to in England or America as the ' back-bone,' and 
yet the corresponding ''back-bone ' class in Italy has been 
greatly stift'ened by the ' middle-class intellectuals.' These 
latter include the most progres?ive business, professional and 
military men, with a leaven of writers and students. Those 
still in civil lif.i you would not be likely to see nioch of save 
in the course of a long stay in Italy ; but at the 'Front — 
both as officers and in the ranks — you will find them in great 
numbers. Ih esc are in touch with the right sentiment in 
all parts of Italy, and after you have talked with a few of 
them you will lie able to assess at its. proper value the croaking 
behind the lines. You then need not hesitate longer in 
setting down your impressions of where Italy stands in the 
war, and what the Italians think of the people of their Allies. 
]^ut again, I beg of you, don't .stop until you have penetrated 
the ' crust of tlie croakers,' for it is that wliich you will first 
encounter. It is what lies under that crust that will decide 
the day for Italy." 
The conversations, statements and ob.servations which 
follow are the gist of a four months' stay in Italy, which is 
just drawing to a close as the spring campaign opens, and 
that country girds itself anew for fighting, at the side of 
her Alhes, the decisive stage of the war. If they- fail to 
convey the impression that her effort will be worthy Of those 
Allies — that all of Italy "which counts is committed and 
steeled to a war to a victorious finish the fault will be 
mine for not setting them down properlv, for in mv own 
mind there is no doubt on lliat Acore. 
It was an American friend of long residence in Rome-— 
I liad complained to him of the " rumours " and pessimistic 
atmosphere that prcvatir in certain circles of the capital into 
which the foreign visitor occasionally finds himself drawn 
— who endeavoured to make plain to me the attitude of the 
Italian commonly spoken of as "anti-war" or " pro- 
Germari." 
The Pro-German Party 
" The Teiescofil '^that is, pro-Germans)," he said, 
" usually owes his sympathy for the enemy (though instances 
of- those who really go that far are rare), or his opposition 
to the war, to the fact that he has, or had, either financial, 
commercial or marital bonds uniting him to Austria or Ger- 
many. In endeavouring to vindicate his attitude, however, 
he always takes higher ground. ' Prussia,' he will tell you, 
' fighting against Austria as an Ally of Italy in 1866, won 
back for the latter the province of Venezia in a war in which 
that country — on the streiigth of her by no means brilliant 
military and naval shoWfng— could never have done so alone, 
even if defeat had been avoided. ' He will also tell you 
France was the traditional enemy of Italy in the past, and 
that England — unless broken in the present war—will be- 
come Italy's enemy of the future. Moreover, he will point 
out that Italy was" bound by a solemn treaty of alhance to 
Austria and Germany, and that, even if she could not see 
her way to fight with the Central Powers, she should at lea^ 
have refrained from fighting against them. Finally, he will 
tell you that Germany's miirtary might — ranged with that of 
Austria — can crush Italy at will, and that this is just what 
will happen in the spring — provided, of course, that the latter 
country does not see the error of her ways and conclude a 
separate peace before it is too late. 
"It is the Tedescofit — muttering for the most part in his 
beard or dropping dark hints in salons or caf^s — who 1*5 
responsible for the ihghts of foolish rumours whicli wing 
their way in certain Italian 'circles in which talk takes the 
place of action to perplex the visitor to whose ears they 
chance to come. If his spirit was not as weak as his tongue 
is strong — if he were not as cowardly as he is voluble — the 
Tedescofil might be a real menace. As it is, his vapourings 
only create mischief when they are taken seriously by visitors 
who have no chance to judge them for what they arc worth, 
and who may pass them on to the world as characteristic 
of Itahan sentiment." 
Of all the four principal Allies, France is probably the only 
one that has been fuUy trusted by the others from the first, 
the only one that has always enjoyed a full measure of con- 
fidencefrom the peoples of the nations who fought with her. 
There have been times when doubt and jealousy of Great 
Britain, Russia and Italy w«re rife among the peoples of each 
of these respective country's AUies, but never a moment, 
even when the ardent German propagandist considered it 
worth his while to endeavour to sow the seeds of distrust, a» 
regards France. That England and Russia should have 
given France their confidence from the outset is not remark- 
able, but how many grievances— ^real and fancied— Italy, 
when her* turn came to €nter the war, had to forget before 
doing likewise I did not- reaUze until an .extremely keen 
Italian journalist, with whom I spent several days at the 
Front, passed the last century of the relations between these 
two countries in hasty but illuminative review one evening. 
" It is indeed a fact," he said, " that in the minds of the 
average Italian France had, for a good many decades, ranked 
as second only to Austria among this country's enemies. 
Not that there was ever anything approaching — as regards 
France — the practically universal execration felt for Austria ; 
but rather that we had come to harbour many grudges, to 
feel that France had been just about everything betwixt 
and between a good enemy and a bad friend to us. Somehow 
our people were more inclined to recall the art treasures 
Napoleon had earned away than the great laws he liad left 
behind him. It was against French troops that Garibaldi 
made his brave but futile defence of the Roman Republic, 
and it was French troops that kept the Popes in Rome and 
postponed the unification of Italy until France had been 
beaten by Prussia in 1870. Again, our people — and especially 
those of Piedmont — felt that Napoleon III. drove a hard 
bargain in claiming both Savoy and Nice in 1859 after he 
had abandoned us in our attempt to redeem Lombardyand 
Venezia, when only the former had fallen to our Allied 
armies. France's seizjire of Tunis was another hard blow. 
We felt— and still feel — we should have had Tunis (whose 
