Returning alone and tired to his Villa Torlonia home one evening some years ago, Benito Mussolini decided on the spur of the moment to go into a cinema. He entered and took a seat, unrecognized. Presently, his own limber face flashed on the screen. Everyone present stood up and applauded, except Il Duce. His secret enjoyment of the demonstration was interrupted by a man behind him who leaned over and whispered: "Better stand up and clap, pal. They'll arrest you if you don't."
This incident, which is supposed to have happened early in the days of Il Duce's power, might easily have taken place again last week. Once more the Dictator was alone and tired. Italians still salaamed to his face on screens, his name on walls, but there were certain new mental reservations in their reverence. Foreign journalists in Rome received anonymous letters: "The Italians desire the end of the dictatorship which renders impossible prosperity and peace. Viva Italia! Viva la libertà !"
Each morning last week, in his monstrous office, Il Duce's heart was not cheered by the reports on the country's state of mind given him by Chief of Italian Police Arturo Bocchini. Italy's Himmler—an efficient, honest, courageous, unpublicized bustler who hangs a sign over his desk which says: "Please make it snappy"—daily reported the findings of his intricate wiretapping, eavesdropping machine, and the sum of the findings was not to Il Duce's taste: Italians want peace.
Since the Year One (of Fascism—1922) Benito Mussolini had given his people a martial slogan: "Believe! Obey! Fight!" He hurried from naval reviews to maneuvers at sea, from military exercises to parades to grandiose mock campaigns on land. He learned to salute like Caesar, scowl like Napoleon, wear uniforms like the Kaiser. Of all his Cabinet portfolios, his favorites were those of War, Navy, Air Force. He raised a whole generation of young Italians—among them his own sons —to live dangerously, to consider pacifism a bourgeois vice, to take sensuous, esthetic pleasure from the pattern of exploding bombs and the music of gunfire. He told them time & again that supine neutrality is a cowardice fit only for decadent democracies.
He gave Italy an Empire, won in blood, albeit from some poor colored people and a handful of Adriatic hillbillies. He made his countrymen feel that Spain's victory was Italy's. He held out the Axis to his people as a double-bladed fasces which would cut a big place in the sun for Italy.
By last week Benito Mussolini was a thoroughly disillusioned warrior. The first step in the process of his disappointment was the frenzied joy with which Italians greeted him back from Munich—a far more spontaneous ovation than any military triumph had ever earned him. On the Piazza Venezia balcony that day he made no martial speech, but said only: "You wanted peace. I have brought you peace," then turned gloomily and went indoors. Next came the German-Russian Pact, which he was not told about until the last minute and which at one slap put down any extravagant hopes Il Duce may have reposed in his partnership with Adolf Hitler. Worst of all was what happened last autumn.