The End of the Tunnel
ROME, SUEZ AND NEW YORK
By CHARLES MORGAN
DURING the last war, early in 1917, a newspaper then famous for its literary competitions offered a prize for the opening paragraphs of a chapter on that year, supposed to have been written by Lord Macaulay as part of his History of England. A pastiche of Macaulay presents no great difficulties to anyone who perceives that, however strong his mannerism of antithesis may have been, the essence of his style was not in this but in his genius for lucidity, and that his defect was not that he was pompous, but that he had an itch for over-simpli- fication. To him, his own judgement was the law and the prophets ; he did not hesitate or qualify; with the glorious result that, though we may passionately disagree with him, our dis- agreements are at any rate passionate, and his writing is never dull. For a few paragraphs, then, he could be successfully imitated ; to have sustained the pulse and vigour of his narrative would have been a different matter.
But more was required of the competitors than a pastiche of Macaulay's style. They were asked to see current events with the eye of posterity and, while themselves struggling through one of the darkest sections of the tunnel which began in 1914, to project their imaginations beyond its unknown end and, as historians, calmly to look back. It is, we are free to say, an impossible exercise for anyone who does not combine the qualities of Thucydides and Old Moore, yet it may be salutary and even comforting sometimes to attempt it. There is, indeed, no reasonable hope that our prophetic judgement of these times will prove to have been right in detail. The names of Russia and the United States will appear in our history—we do not yet know how soon or in what context ; their appearance will throw back on present happenings—particularly, it may be, on June loth, 1940, when Italy declared war—a light of which we can now but vaguely guess the power and colour ; nevertheless, for all the errors to which we may thus commit ourselves, there is valuable mental discipline in an attempt to see today in historical perspective. It may enable us to lift our noses from this morn- ing's newspaper and to look at the world over its edge.
The news that Italy was at war with France and England evoked, in all who commented on it, the historical or the prophetic spirit. Mr. Duff Cooper looked forward, in an admirable passage, to the fruits of that curse which Garibaldi laid upon any Italian Government that behaved as Mussolini's Government has done. The same night, at Charlottesville, Virginia, President Roosevelt was impelled by Italy's stroke to inquire of his own country's future, and, more openly than ever before, to identify it with ours. Not only Ministers and Presi- dents turned that evening to memory and foreseeing, for there are many English homes where love of Italy dies hard. To Germans the making of war is the performance of a regular and natural function, a normal release of energy, a necessary labour and sedative like the taking of exercise ; but to Italians it is not. They do not like war, because no one likes doing what he does badly. They can, moreover, think of other things better worth doing, they are capable of other than warlike virtues, and there must have been many thousands in England who,'on June loth, remembered these virtues with honour and affection.
Those who did so are not to be accused of sentimentality as those are who have persisted to our cost in mis-reading the history of united Germany and in making a false distinction between her people and her rulers. Sentimentality consists in believing what is known to be untrue, and it is not untrue that the Italians are at root a civilised people with, as Stendhal knew, a sense of comedy, and a saving capacity, which the Germans lack, to perceive that a modern war, apart from its other dis- advantages, is the most tedious of human occupations. They have a light touch on the guitar ; they can do nothing more gracefully than any people on earth ; they have the discretion to fight more stubbornly when French troops are behind them than when they are in front ; and they have an almost Austrian agility in retreat. The Alps were placed where they are by benevolent Providence so that these two natural enemies might the more conveniently run downhill.
In brief, a charming, if not a respectable, people. Fascism has not struck deep into them biecause nothing does, and they would always rather sing than frown. If it had, Mussolini, a cool Christian at best, would not so often have found it desir- able to go through forms of respect for the Vatican, or so long have thought it necessary to suffer the House of Savoy. This does not mean that Italians may not shout under the Duce's balcony as long as their arms meet with no serious reverse, but it does mean that an alternative Government and an alternative way of life exist in their hearts. In Rome, the paths of conciliation have always been worth pursuing as they have not been and, in our time, will not be in Berlin. It is, therefore, reasonable to guess that a future historian will say of June loth that it marked the beginning of an interval in Anglo-Italian friendship, not the end of it.
He may say also that it marked a turning-point in the present war. The influence of sea-power on history is seldom clearly seen except at long range. Napoleon himself did not see it even after Trafalgar or modern Germany become alive to it until Mahan had written. Since September, 1939, we have been consistently handicapped in our exercise of it by Italy's neutral privilege. Whatever the immediate effect on land of her aggression, her abandonment of neutrality lays open Germany's southern frontier to all the chances and changes of Balkan politics, and locks the blockade. In a long war it must be a fatal disadvantage to Germany, provided that two conditions are fufilled: first that we hold Suez, second that we command the seas. From this gigantic proviso a new con- sideration springs. If these conditions were not maintained, the frontier of liberty would shift over-night to the eastern coasts of the United States. The United States has, therefore, a vital interest, newly created by Italy's maritime threat, in the main- tenance of them. Even today it sounds paradoxical to suggest that the freedom of America depends upon the preservation of Suez from Italian domination, but historians may well decide, fifty years hence, that this became true in 1940 and that it was on June loth, at Charlottesville, Virginia, that the truth appeared.
Important though these considerations now seem to us, his- torians will be less concerned with them than we are, for history, except to military specialists, is not an inquiry into how wars are lost and won, but a study of mankind's successive dis- covery, forgetting and re-discovery of its own spiritual and in- tellectual powers. Victories splendid to the barbarians who won them are, in the eye of the years, a beginning of, the Dark Ages, and the great tragedies of nations are not their defeats in the battlefield but their self-betrayals. In this aspect of tragedy, the Italians' declaration will cervinly appear, whatever its material outcome, for it contradicts their nature and perjures their tradition. The Germans, a bold and fanatical people, have staked their all on an attempt to-rule the world. This, in them, is a logical and comprehensible act; it is not a denial of their interest, as they conceive of it, nor of their spirit, which is essentially warlike. In Italy, the opposite is true. The inter- est of a nation that does not hope to rule all Europe is to pre- serve there a protective balance of power. This balance Musso- lini has called upon his people to destroy. Their victory would deliver Italy, together with whatever conquests she might tem- porarily acquire, bound and friendless into the hands of a people whom all Italians hate. For this reason—that it is intolerably opposed to the logic of history—the future historian may hold that Italy's aggression contains within it the seed of its own decay, and may see in it, not only the opportunity of sea-power, but, as it fails, an exposure of Gerinany's Austrian flank.
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