World War, SOUTHERN THEATRE: Toward the Capital

Benito Mussolini's official biographer, Margherita Sarfatti, writes that one day, as Il Duce was pacing his great room in the Chigi Palace, she asked him what his ambition was.

He said: "I am obsessed by this wild desireĀ—it consumes my whole being: I want to make a mark on my era with my will, like a lion with its claw! A mark like this. ..." And with his fingernail he scratched a chair back from end to end.

The lion's paw drew its thin line across Libya, across Ethiopia, across Albania. But when Benito Mussolini tried to make his mark in...

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