CIANO'S HIDDEN DIARY, 1937-1938 (220 pp.)—Dutton ($4).
"Dead men tell no tales," Benito Mussolini once reminded Count Galeazzo Ciano, little realizing that the son-in-law he ordered shot in January 1944 would prove a talkative exception. As Italy's Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943, Ciano jotted day-to-day entries in a red diary. The first volume, covering 1939-43, appeared in 1945. The latest covers 1937-38, the years of the German annexation of Austria, the forging of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, and Munich. Like the first, it packs no great historical surprises, but sketches in a lively picture of intrigue and ethical corrosion along with some gossipy portraits of Fascist bigwigs. As a strutting I-witness of fateful events, Ciano thought that he and the Duce were swashbuckling through history like Renaissance princes, when actually, as the diaries reveal, they were only learning to heel every time the Germans heiled.
"The Goose Is Roman." The Fascist leaders were painfully anxious not to lose face with the Germans. "Pay attention to uniforms," Ciano cued himself for a visit to Germany. "We must be more Prussian than the Prussians." Mussolini repeatedly lectured Ciano on "the necessity for redeeming Italy's reputation as a faithless nation. Bismark used to say that you can't have a policy with Italy when she is faithless both as friend and foe." Yet no one took a more contemptuous view of the Italian people than Mussolini himself. One incident or another kept him boiling. "The Duce has been made furiously angry ... by the bad behavior of some farmers from Bari who were being entertained in the Party House in Munich —they even relieved themselves on the stairs. A disgusting incident, likely to lower us to an unbelievable extent in the opinion of the Germans; The Chief . . . let fly at the 'sons of slaves.' "
To turn the army, at least, into a Prussian facsimile, Mussolini introduced the "passo Romano," a copy of the goose-step. When old soldiers and short-legged King Victor Emmanuel complained, the Duce's comment was: "People say the goose-step is Prussian. Nonsense. The goose is a Roman animal. ... It is not my fault if the King is half-size. Naturally he won't be able to do the parade step without making himself ridiculous. He will hate it for the same reason that he has always hated horses—he has to use a ladder to climb on to one."
The Silent Partners. In one mood, Mussolini would defend all his sedulous aping of the Nazis on the ground that "Italy will never be sufficiently Prussianized." In another, he would harbor black, if fanciful, designs against his ally: "I shall combine the whole world into a coalition against Germanism. And we shall crush Germany for at least two centuries." What irked the Italians most was that they were treated as silent partners of the Axis, and only called in when matters reached the sign-on-the-dotted-line stage. After the Austrian Anschluss, "the Duce was in a mood of irritation with the Germans . . . they ought to have given us warning—but not a word." Just before Munich, Ciano notes: "The Duce is disturbed by the fact that the Germans are letting us know almost nothing of their program with regard to Czechoslovakia."