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Perhaps in the familiar echoing halls of the Palazzo Venezia he had summoned his cabinet and the tough, diehard party bosses, such men as Roberto Farinacci and Carlo Scorza, for a final tempestuous session. Then, perhaps, he had conferred with the King and Marshal Badoglio. One fact stood out: the Fascist Grand Council met the day before the resignation, its first meeting since Italy entered the war. Mussolini, the wily politician who had made just one big. but fatal, mistake in his fustian career, might hope that lip service to legality would pay him. One unkind rumor had him relinquishing his power on condition that his personal safety be assured. Another rumor had him and his chief party colleagues arrested while seeking escape to Germany, then put under house guard near Rome.
From many sources came reports of Italy in upheaval. Bern and Stockholm told of peace riots in Bologna, Milan and Rome, of clashes between Italians and German soldiery. The Fascist Blackshirt militia, posted on the northern frontier, it was said, had been replaced by Badoglio's police; bad blood brewed between the factions; Italy might yet be plunged into civil war.
The Wheel of Fortune. If the ex-Duce were really under arrest, his political career had now run full cycle, and an old claustrophobia might be tormenting him. In his youth he had been a vociferous, stinging pleader for socialism and pacifism. For such views he had seen the inside of many a prison; he had come to loathe confining walls. In World War I his principles had shifted: he had become an imperialist and a nationalist; he had started on the path to lofty offices, an open balcony, spreading maps of empire and the windy vista of Fascism.
If, in a quiet moment now, Benito Mussolini's mind flashed back, what highlights might it dwell on? There were many: Varano di Costa, an old hamlet on a hill in northern Italy, where he was born 60 years ago; his schoolteacher mother and blacksmith father; the black columns of Popolo d'ltalia, "my most cherished child"; the day in Milan when he needlessly barricaded his newspaper shop while his comrades elsewhere marched on Rome and waited until he arrived by railroad sleeper; the following day when, in black shirt and hip pistol, he stood before Vittorio Emanuele and said: "I have just come from a bloodless battle that had to be fought. I bring back to your Majesty the Italy of Vittorio Veneto, consecrated by a new victory."
For Benito Mussolini it had been a Latin pageant: the refurbishing of old Roman monuments and the building of new ones; marshland drained and colonies settled; a corporative state and the Balilla; adventure in Corfu, Ethiopia, Spain, Albania, Greece and Egypt; the dream of Mare Nostrum and the grandest of Mediterranean empires.
But on that glory the ashes were already thick. The dead face of more than one rival might flood by in Benito Mussolini's remembrance: Giacomo Matteotti, the murdered Socialist who defied castor oil and clubs; Italo Balbo, cut down when he grew too popular in the Fascist State. Then there was the dead face of his son, Bruno, a casualty of the war the father had glorified. Then the dead faces of those hundreds of thousands of men lost with the empire in Africa, the dead and fear-racked faces of millions of civilians fleeing their bombed homes.