ITALY: Community of Directives

Five thousand Italian officers and a group of foreign military attaches tramped across a dusty field outside Bologna toward the grey hulk of a heavy tank. Maneuvers were over and Benito Mussolini, standing legs astraddle on the turret of the tank, was ready to deliver a final oration before troops were dismissed.

"No one in Europe wants war!" he shouted, "but the idea of war is floating in the air. It is not necessary to be ready for the war of tomorrow but for the war of today! We must become a military nation, even a militaristic nation, even, I might add, a warlike nation!

"At the end of July an unforeseen situation [the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria] developed which was similar to that which prevailed in 1914. If we had not sent our divisions to the frontier, complications might have resulted that could not have been settled save by the voice of cannon."

Il Duce needed all his trust in armies as keepers of the peace last week, for away from the blank cartridges of the maneuvers, he was still playing with Austria's political dynamite. In the face of the surly, worried opposition of the Little Entente, owl-eyed Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg, new Chancellor of Austria, arrived in Florence for an interview like those that Benito Mussolini and the late Engelbert Dollfuss used to hold. At the railway station Il Duce met his guest in an all-purpose costume consisting of brown sack suit, riding boots and yachting cap. Most of his staff, during a lull in their enforced tour of duty with the troops, were still in uniform. A gay note was the guard of honor, dressed in 14th Century Florentine helmets and breastplates and carrying not Fascist banners, but the ancient white fleur-de-lis of the Republic of Florence.

Quickly Dr. Schuschnigg was whisked off by Il Duce to the Villa de Marinis, to sit at a long elaborate luncheon with 14 Fascist bigwigs. At the same time Il Duce's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, herded foreign correspondents into the Florentine prefecture, repeated over and over again that there would be no discussion of the restoration of Archduke Otto in Austria. He handed out an official communique. Excerpts:

"Here resulted an effective community of directives and methods in what concerns the independence and integrity of the Austrian State, an independence and integrity to which appertains also com plete internal autonomy and which represent, moreover, the concrete European interest and a favorable element for the maintenance of the Danubian sector."

Seers and oracles studying this jumble of words decided that it meant that the restoration of Otto was a card still a long way up Benito's sleeve, and that Italy was worried about unconfirmed rumors to the effect that the Schuschnigg Government was softening toward the former Social Democrats.