Il Duce

IL DUCE
The Life of Benito Mussolini

IL DUCE
The Life of Benito Mussolini
BY
Christopher Hibbert
W ITH PHOTOGRAPHS
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

Boston Toronto
© CHRISTOPHER H IBBERT 1 Ç0 2
ALL RI GHTS RESERVED. NO P A R T OF T H I S BOOK MAY BE R E P R O

D U C E D I N ANY F O R M W I T H O U T P E R M I S S I O N I N W R I T I N G F R O M T H E
P U B L I S H E R , E X C E P T BY A R E V I E W E R WH O MAY Q U O T E B R I E F P A S
SAGES I N A R E V I E W TO BE P R I N T E D I N A M A G A Z I N E OR N E W S P A P E R .
L I B R A R Y OF C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G CARD NO. 6 2 - 8 0 6 9
FIRST EDITION
Published in England under the title of b e n i t o m u s s o lin i
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To H am ish and H elen
PREFACE
‘No one understands him/ wrote Fernando Mezzasoma of Mussolini

during the last week of both their lives. ‘By turns shrewd and in
nocent, brutal and gentle, vindictive and forgiving, great and petty,
he is the most complicated and contradictory man I have ever known.
He cannot be explained/
During the eighteen years between the March on Rome in 1922 and
the outbreak of war in 1940, numerous books were written in an
attempt to explain this extraordinary man; most of them were by Fas
cists or by expatriate Italians who had cause to hate Fascism. But not
since his death has a full-length biography, taking advantage of the
great mass of documentation which has come to light in the last six
teen years, been written in English.
Ever since I came home from Italy after the War I have felt the
need of an impartial book which answered at least some of the ques
tions which had puzzled me. I wondered how much Mussolini resembled
the monstrous buffoon of war-time propaganda and how much the
demi-god of Fascist doctrine; I wondered how it was that some Italians
could shoot at his corpse as it swayed upside down in Piazzale Loreto in
Milan and yet others, who were, so it seemed to me, just like them,
could weep in the streets when told that he was dead; and I wondered
whether it could really be true, as Mr Churchill had said, that ‘one
man and one man alone *had plunged Italy into tragedy. I wondered,
too, how Mussolini had retained this power so long and how during the
final, twilight phase on the shores of Lake Garda, when defeat was
certain and death likely, he had still been able, though physically and
morally decayed, to find so many men still willing to follow him.
It was with these questions in mind that I went back to Italy in i960
to read books and papers about Mussolini and the Fascist dictatorship
which are not available in London, to talk to people who knew him,
and to discover as much as I could of his last years, about which so
little reliable information is available. Not being qualified to pass judg
ment on him—even if such a judgment were yet possible—I have
written the book in the form of a historical narrative, hoping that in
telling the story of his life I have given at least the more important of
the evidence about him upon which opinions can be based. There are
no references to sources in the text, but at the end of the book I have
commented on the material that I have used and I think that the
authority for any controversial statement and the sources of all direct
or indirect quotations will be found there.
For their great help in a variety of ways I want especially to thank—
v ii
PREFACE
in addition to those who have asked to remain nameless—Professor G.

Baldini, Fr J. A. Barrett, S.J., Lord Beaverbrook, Signor Pietro Beneven
tano, Sir Noel Charles, Brigadier R. C. Edge, Professor Vittorio Gabrieli,
Viscountess Hambleden, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the late Sir Percy
Loraine, Dr Roger Manvell, Admiral Franco Maugeri, Prof. Dott. Paolo
Milano, Signor Paolo Monelli, Conte Umberto Morra di Lavriano, Signor
Romano Mussolini, Herr Hans Pächter, Conte Novello Papafava, Sir
Charles Petrie, Herr Otto Reitsch, Signor Ernesto Ricci, Signor Dino Ros
selli, Miss Frances Ryan, Signor Pietro Sanarelli, Mrs Joan St George
Saunders, Mr B. A. C. Sweet-Escott, Colonel Otto Skorzeny, General
Kurt Student, Colonel Hedley Vincent, Professor Roberto Weiss and
Miss Elizabeth Wiskemann. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to
Signora Linda Bertelli-Attanasio for helping me with my researches
when I was in Rome; to Mr Roy MacGregor-Hastie, who has been good
enough to provide me with information about Mussolini’s family; and
to Senatore Generale Raffaele Cadorna, who has kindly helped me with
some of my final chapters. I want also to thank the staffs of the London
Library, the British Museum, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Italian
Embassy in London, the British Institute in Florence, the Biblioteca di
Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, the Biblioteca Universitaria Alessan
drina and the Generale Direzione di Accademie e Biblioteche dello
Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione.
C.H.
viii
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Preface vii
Family Tree Showing Mussolini's Ancestry and Des

cendants xiv
PART I
TH E FIG H T FOR POWER
1 The Young Rebel 29 July 1883-December 1912 2
2 The Interventionist October 1913-24 May 79/5 19
3 The Fascist in the Making August 79/5 - 28 October 1922 24
4 The head of the Government

28 October 1922-13 June 1924 35
5 The Dictator 13 June 1924-10 June 1940 47
PART II
E M P IR E A ND AXIS
1 The Diplomat 28 October 1922-10 June 1940 66
2 The Commander-in-Chief 10 June 1940-23 October 1942 127
PART III
T H E F A L L OF T H E COLOSSUS
1 1The War is Going Badly ’

23 October 1942-23 January 1943 146
2 The Conspirators November 1942-24 July 1943 160

ix
CONTENTS
Chapter Fuge
3 The Grand Council Meeting 24-25 July 1945 173
4 The Arrest at Villa Savoia 25 July 1943 192
5 The Prisoner 25 July 1943 -28 August 1943 196
6 On the Gran Sasso 28 August 1943 - 12 September 1943 217
7 The Rescue from Gran Sasso 12 September 1943 223
8 The Meeting at the Führers Headquarters

15 September 1943 236
9 The President at G argnano-The First Year

27 September 1943-27 September 1944 241
10 The Civil War November 1943- December 1944 268
11 The President at G argnano-The Final Months

December 1944-April 1945 274
12 The Germans Surrender February-April 1945 282
13 The Move to Milan 19-25 April 1945 286
14 The Flight from Milan 25-27 April 1945 298
15 The Capture 27 April 1945 310
16 ‘Colonel Valerio' 27-28 April 1945 322
17 Death at Villa Belmonte 28 April 1945 328
18 The Piazzale Loreto 29 April 1945 333
Notes on Sources 335
Bibliography 346
Index 356
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page
The house at Dovia where Mussolini was born 80

Pictorial Press
Mussolini as a boy 80
Radio Times/Hulton Picture Library
As a Socialist agitator inSwitzerland 81

London Express News and Feature Services
As a soldier in the Bersaglieri 81

Pictorial Press
Inspecting Blackshirts at the Fascist rally in Naples in 1922 96

Surrounded by members of the ‘London Fascisti’ in London

in 1922 96
W ide W orld Photos
Rachele, Anna Maria, Romano, Benito, Edda, Bruno, Vittorio 97

Exclusive News Agency
In the grounds of Villa Torlonia with Romano 97

Mirrorpic
Playing the violin at Villa Torlonia 160

With his fencing master 160

Keystone Press Agency Ltd.
On a visit to Gabriele D’Annunzio at Gardone 161

Associated Press
With Austen Chamberlain at a hotel in Florence 161

Giving the Fascist salute at a parade in Rome 176

Exclusive News Agency
Standing beside his writing-table in the Sala del Mappamondo

at Palazzo Venezia 177
Mirrorpic
Giving instructions to a Fascist journalist 177

Mirrorpic
XI
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page
An anniversary parade celebrating the March on Rome with

Balbo, De Bono and De Vecchi 208
Reviewing troops home from Abyssinia in Piazza Venezia 209

Associated Press
Making a speech in the reclaimed Pontine marshes, July 1938 210

Associated Press
Greeting the King during the Army manoeuvres in the Abruzzi

in August 1938 210
Associated Press
Accepting a presentation from Count Grandi during the seven

teenth anniversary celebrations of the March on Rome 224
Fox Photos Ltd.
With Bruno and Vittorio before the war 224

London Express News and Feature Service
With Ciano, Halifax and Chamberlain in Rome in 1939 225

Imperial W ar Museum
With Hitler and Ciano at the Brenner in October 1940 225

Imperial W ar Museum
Making a speech from the balcony at Palazzo Venezia 304

Claretta Petacci 304

Rizzoli , Müan
Walking out of the Albergo-Rifugio after his rescue in

September 1943 305
Welcomed by Hitler in East Prussia in September 1943 305

Planet News Ltd.
At Villa Feltrinelli in 1945 320

Rizzoli, Milan
De Bono, Pareschi, Gottardi, Ciano and Marinelli await

their execution 321
Rizzoli, Milan
Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 29 April, 1945 321

Map of the Lake Como Area 288

xii
You cannot have a king
without subjects or a leader
without those who are will
ing to be led. . . .
‘ victrix causa deis placuit ’
I g n a z io S il o n e
FRANCESCO
died at Calboli 1737
PAOLO
died at Calboli tj jg
GIACOMO ÂNTONIO
died at Montemaggiore 1810
GIUSEPPE DOMENICO GASPARE

died at Montemaggiore 1822 MUSSOLINI’S ANCESTRY AND DESCENDANTS
LUIGI
died at Montemaggiore 182g
LUIGI AGOSTINO GASPARE = CATERINA VASUNI

died at Dovia igo8 I
ALESSANDRO » ROSA MALTONI ALCIDE ALBINA FRANCESCA

died at Forlì tgto
« RACHELE GUIDI ARNALDO «= AUGUSTA BONDANINI EDVIGE = MICHELE MANCINI

b. 1883 d. ig+s b. 188$ d. 193/ I b . 1888 d. 195a I
ALESSANDRO ITALICO VITO ROSA ROSETTA MARIA TERESA GIUSEPPINA PAOLO GIUSEPPE
EDDA = GALEAZZO CIANO VITTORIO = ORSOLA BUVOLI BRUNO - GINA RUBERTI ROMANO ANNA MARIA
b. tgto I b. tgi6 I b. tgi8 d. tg4t I b. 1937 b. 1929
MARINA
FABRIZIO RAIMONDA MARZIO GUIDO ADRIA b. tgô
b. tgzt b. 1933 b. 1937 b. 1937 b. tg4o
NOTE: Luigi Mussolini (Benito's grandfather)came from an old Bolognese family who for several generations were traders
in muslin (mussolina). Luigi did not prosper on his farm and many of his descendants still live in and around Predappio
as poor peasants and farmers having profited nothing from their kinship with the Duce.
PART I
THE FIGHT FOR POWER

1
THE YOUNG REBEL

29 J U L Y 1 8 8 3 - D E C E M B E R 1912
The fact that I was born among the common

people put the trump cards into my hands.
A t about half past ten on the night of 9 May 1936 a sudden roar,
which a journalist described as being like the noise of a volcanic
eruption, broke out from a crowd of some four hundred thousand
people standing shoulder to shoulder around Palazzo Venezia in
Rome. Benito Mussolini, il Duce del Fascismo, had stepped out
on to the palace balcony above their heads and gazed silently down
at them. His hands were on his hips, his immense jaw thrust out,
his legs splayed apart in a pose which was familiar to them all. He
was wearing the black shirt, grey uniform and round black cap of
the Fascist Militia, and for a few moments he stood in front of
the floodlit latticed windows as motionless as the symbol of his
régime—the axe and the lictor’s rods—carved in stone on the wall
beside him.
He lifted his hand. The crowd fell into silence. Not only in Rome
but all over Italy millions of people were listening and waiting for
the sound of the Duce’s voice. In the warm spring evening, already
given a strangely augural air by a moon of unusual clarity, crowds
of excited listeners, summoned out of doors by church bells and
sirens, looked up at the loudspeakers in the squares.
‘Officers, non-commissioned officers and m en/ Mussolini an
nounced at last in a deep, sonorous voice which Lady Oxford had
described as one of the most beautiful she had ever heard, ‘ Black
shirts of the Revolution, Italian men and women at home and
throughout the world, hearken: a great event has been accom
plished. The destiny of Abyssinia has been sealed today in the
fourteenth year of the Fascist era. Every knot has been cut by our
shining sword, and the Abyssinian victory will remain in the history
of our country, complete and pure like the legionari who have
fallen. Italy has her Empire. . . /
2
THE YOUNG REBEL
His final words were lost in a wild torrent of cheers, in the swell
ing, repetitive, ululating chant, *Duce! Duce! Duce! in the screams
of hysterical women, in the shouts of adoration and protestations
of loyalty to death. And the Duce stood looking down calmly, not
acknowledging the cheers, his hands gripping the stone balustrade,
his massive face expressionless in the brilliant light of the flood-
lamps.
‘He is like a god/ one of his gerarchi said as he watched him
standing there with such Olympian impassivity. ‘No, not like a
god/ his companion replied, ‘ he is one/
Mussolini was fifty-two then. Twenty-five years before, in October

1911, while serving a sentence in cell 39 at Forlì prison for having
‘ incited the people to strike and insurrection ’, he had begun his
autobiography.
‘ I was born on 29 July 1883 ’, he wrote, ‘ at Vamano dei Costa, an
old hamlet on the top of a hill in the village of Dovia, which is near
the village of Predappio. I was bom at two in the afternoon on a
Sunday. . . . The sun had entered the constellation of Leo eight
days before/
His father was a blacksmith, and the son was always proud of
this. ' I am a man of the people/ he was fond of saying. ‘ I under
stand the people because I am one of them / In 1935 a plaque was
made and embedded in the wall of a farmhouse near Predappio to
inform the passers-by that ‘On this farm Mussolini’s peasant
ancestors lived and worked.’ But they were not really peasants;
they were members of a class which the Duce was later to despise—
the petite bourgeoisie. His grandfather had owned the farm on
which his father was born, and had been a lieutenant in the
National Guard. His mother Rosa was a schoolmistress, a quiet,
religious woman, gentle and kind, ‘ esteemed by everyone ’, as the
Forlì paper, Il Pensiero Romagnolo, wrote when she was dead, ‘ for
her virtues and for the love and intelligence with which she ful
filled her noble function ’. She was extremely thrifty and she needed
to be, for her husband Alessandro, although a skilled blacksmith
and the owner of a threshing-machine, was not interested much
in his work and spent more of his time in talking politics than in
working at his anvil. He had never been to school, but he was not
an uneducated man and he was certainly an intelligent one. He
3
MUSSOLINI
contributed articles to various Socialist journals as well as to the

local paper, the republican II Pensiero Romagnolo, and his sons
afterwards described how he would spend hours reading to them
from political works which they did not begin to understand. Like
so many men of the Romagna, that lovely yet rugged part of Italy
between Tuscany and Emilia, his political views were passionately
held and vehemently expressed. He started in Predappio a local
branch of the International and had been in prison, like his father
before him, for his beliefs. He christened his elder son Benito after
the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez, the leader of the savage
revolt against the Emperor Maximilian, and he gave him two other
names—Amilcare after Amilcare Cipriani, the Romagnol anarchist,
and Andrea after Andrea Costa, one of the founders of the Italian
Socialist Party.
It was a poor house where the Mussolinis lived at Dovia, a small,
tumbledown palace, two miles from Predappio, known as Palazzo
Varano, where they were crowded together in two rooms on the
second floor. To get to these rooms the family had to pass through
the room which Rosa Mussolini used as her schoolroom and in
which, during the summer holidays, Alessandro stored the wheat
that he had threshed with his home-made machine.
Benito and his quiet, fat little brother Arnaldo slept together in
the room that was used as a kitchen and wood-store; Edvige, his
sister, slept with her parents in the other room, where the family
lived by day and where the children played and looked at the
pictures in their father's books and newspapers stored in a book
case by the wall. But when he was old enough to hold his father's
bellows Benito was sent to work in the smithy, where he was given
a slap on the back of the head if he did not pay sufficient attention
to his work or showed fear of the flying sparks.
There was little money for food. Rosa Mussolini earned only fifty
lire a month from her work at school, and much of what Ales
sandro earned was spent on his mistress. Meals would often be
little more than vegetable soup and wild radishes and chicory, with
flat cakes made of flour and water.
Benito was a difficult child. Disobedient, quarrelsome, self-willed
and moody, he lost his temper quickly when provoked and often
came home with his clothes torn and his face scratched and bleed
ing after fighting with other children in the village when he did
not get what he considered his fair share of the proceeds of the
poaching expeditions which he went on with them. But despite his
aggressive ill-temper and surly obstinacy he was capable both of
4
THE YOUNG REBEL
arousing and of feeling deep affection. His brother and his sister
both adored him, and even the village children with whom he was
so often quarrelling and fighting remembered years later the
warmth of his rare smiles and the unshakable loyalty of his friend
ship once obtained. They remembered too that he was a dreamer
as well as a fighter and that he would sit for hours on end watching
the birds and gazing across the beautiful valley of his birth, with
his chin in his hands, his enormous dark eyes beneath the bulging
forehead wondering yet watchful. ‘ One day/ he said to his mother,
*I shall astonish the world/
Each year he became more arrogant, less controllable. At school
he crawled under the desks to pinch the bare legs of the other
children, and on Sundays when Rosa took her children to Mass
down the rough track which led to the church, with their shoes
tied round their necks to keep them clean, Benito would lag behind
the others, kicking at the stones with his bare feet. He would never
stay long in church. The smell of the incense made him feel sick,
he said, while the colours of the vestments, the light of the candles,
the singing and the noise of the organ, all upset him profoundly.
He waited for the others to come out, sitting at the top of a tree
and throwing stones at the children on their way to Sunday school.
When he was nine he was sent away to school at Faenza, where
it was hoped that the rigid discipline of the Salesian Fathers would
achieve what his parents could not. Alessandro, his atheistic and
anti-Catholic spirit revolting at the idea of handing his wayward
son over to the care of the Church, but admitting that he could not
control him himself, took him there in a donkey-cart.
11 don't remember being much upset about leaving my brother
and sister/ Benito wrote later. ‘Edvige was only three years old,
Arnaldo was seven. But I was miserable at having to leave behind
me a little bird which I kept in a cage beneath my window. On
the day before we started, I had quarrelled with a companion and
had tried to hit him but missed and my fist went smash against a
wall and I hurt my knuckles so badly that I had to leave with my
hand bandaged up. At the moment of parting I cried/
He remembered how the donkey stumbled and fell just outside
Dovia and how his father grumbled and cursed and muttered that
it was an ill omen. It was October and the leaves were falling from
the trees and the streams were fast and full and the vines were
turning from red to yellow. They arrived at Faenza in the early
afternoon, and Alessandro knocked on the heavy door of the school
and handed his son over to the headmaster and then bent over
J
MUSSOLINI
him to kiss him good-bye with rough tenderness. As the door closed
Benito burst into tears again. The master took him into the yard
where the other pupils were playing, and he watched them silently,
standing alone in a corner, aloof and hostile.
He hated the school. He hated the Fathers, particularly his form-
master, who had a piercing laugh which frightened him, and he
hated the other boys, and most of all he hated the rich boys, who
sat at a different table and ate better food. He did not even try to
work. One day a Father beat him and he hit back and threw an
inkwell at him. He had only one friend, a boy with a skull so thick
that he let Benito amuse himself by hitting him hard with a brick.
In a fight with an older boy he pulled out his penknife and stabbed
him, and the headmaster decided that in the interest of his other
pupils he must expel the uncontrollable child; but on reflection he
decided to keep him until the end of the school year. Frustrated
by the strict rules, the interminable sermons, the lectures on sin
and corruption, he confessed before his first Communion to a long
catalogue of sins both real and imagined. The Fathers were over
come with relief when he left, and one of them afterwards said
that he had never had so difficult a pupil. At his next school, the
Giosuè Carducci school at Forlimpopoli run by the poet’s brother,
Valfredo, he was as deeply unhappy and as obstinately intractable.
In a fight with a boy who had pushed his arm when he was writing,
he lost control of himself and once more pulled out his penknife
to stab the boy in the bottom. And again he was expelled.
In spite of his passionate rebelliousness, however, and his refusal
to do work that seemed boring or unnecessary, he was recognized
as an unusually intelligent boy. He was readmitted to the Forlim
popoli school as a day pupil and three years later, at the age of
eighteen, he passed his final examinations and obtained a teaching
diploma. He had not lost his ferocious temper or his sulky inde
pendence, but he had discovered a hunger for knowledge and an
ability to learn. He had developed too a passion for declamation.
He loved to stand on the hills above Predappio reciting in his
already powerful voice the lyrical and patriotic poems of Carducci,
and one of his earliest oratorical triumphs was in the civic theatre
at Forlimpopoli, where, chosen by the masters at his school, he
made a dramatic and emotional speech to commemorate the death
of Giuseppe Verdi.
On 13 February 1902 he applied for an appointment in a school
at Pieve di Saliceto in the commune of Gualtieri, and the town’s
Socialist councillors, preferring his politics to those of older and
6
THE YOUNG REBEL
more experienced teachers, gave it to him. He came into the town

wearing a black hat with an immense brim and a floppy black
cravat. His pale face and his wide, black, piercing eyes gave him
the appearance of a poet or a revolutionary, and he liked to think
of himself as both. *1 was a Bohemian in those days/ he said
proudly.41 made my own rules and I did not keep even them / The
mild, respectable Socialists of Gualtieri were 4tagliatelle Socialists \
weak and flabby as spaghetti, and he did not trouble to disguise his
contempt for them. The *injustices of the world ', he wrote, 4will
never be reformed by such men \ He was restless and impatient,
overwhelmingly anxious to make his mark, to do something to
astonish and challenge the world and not to remain the teacher of
forty pupils in a village school.
In the four months that he spent at Gualtieri he found his first
mistress. She was a beautiful girl of twenty, the wife of a soldier,
and he treated her with violent ruthlessness. 4Our love was wild
and jealous/ he admitted with a kind of savage exultation. 41 did
what I liked with her/ They quarrelled and fought and fornicated
with that furious abandon that was to characterize all the love-
affairs of his youth. Once he stabbed her, driving the knife which he
always carried still, deep into the flesh of her thigh; and always he
abused her and bullied her and made love to her violently and
selfishly. She was not the first woman he had treated so. Already
as a student at Forlimpopoli he had visited the local brothel and
fallen on a whore whose flaccid body, ‘exuding sweat at every
pore ', is described in the fragment of autobiography he wrote in
prison but whose existence—as that of other women of his youth—
is not mentioned in the more staid versions of his autobiography
published later. Also in this early fragment are descriptions of his
raids on dance halls with other hooligans, his fights over girls and
his triumphant, unashamed account of his first assault on a girl
who was not a prostitute. Her name was Virginia. She was 4poor \
he wrote condescendingly, 4but she had a nice complexion' and
‘was reasonably good-looking. . . . One day I took her up the
stairs, threw her on to the floor behind the door and made her
mine. She got up, crying, and insulted me between her sobs. She
said that I had violated her honour. I probably had. But what sort
of honour? '
Throughout his life he was to remember these wild days of youth
with pleasure and pride, to speak and write of his violence and
passion, his impatience and hunger and savage discontent. And it
is difficult now to disentangle the facts from the legends created by
7
MUSSOLINI
his own imagination and his insatiable appetite for self-dramatiza

tion. In June 1902, feeling, as he later put it himself, the urge to
escape, he went to Switzerland ‘ as a worker without any money ’,
and he claimed that while he was there he experienced long days
of hunger and despair, illness and imprisonment, his pockets empty
save for a nickel medallion of Karl Marx. He slept in a packing-case
under a bridge, or in a public lavatory or with a Polish refugee, a
medical student whose love-making was ' unforgettable \ In July
he found work as a mason’s mate and wrote from Lausanne to a
friend to tell him of his experiences.
*Eleven hours’ work in the day at 32 centesimi the hour. I made
one hundred and twenty-one journeys with a hand-barrow full of
stones up to the second floor of a building in process of construc
tion. In the evening the muscles of my arms were swollen. I ate
some potatoes roasted on cinders and threw myself in all my clothes
on my bed—a pile of straw. At five in the next morning I woke and
returned to work. I chafed with the terrible rage of the powerless.
The padrone made me mad. . . . Saturday evening came. I said
to the padrone I intended to leave and therefore wanted to be paid.
He went into his office and I remained in the lobby. Presently he
came out. W ith ill-disguised rage he threw into my hands twenty
lire and some centesimi, saying “ Here is your money and it is
stolen.” I remained as though made of stone. W hat was I to do
with him? Kill him? W hat did I do to him? Nothing. Why?
Because I was hungry and had no shoes. I had worn a pair of light
boots to pieces on the building stones which had lacerated both my
hands and the soles of my feet.’
He worked later, he said, as a navvy and a butcher’s boy, as an
errand boy for a wine shop and in a chocolate factory. He was
arrested one day for begging in the streets of Lausanne and another
day when he was out of work in Geneva he attacked ‘ two English
women sitting on a bench with their lunch—bread, cheese, eggs.
I could not restrain myself,’ he confessed. 41 threw myself upon
one of the old witches and grabbed the food from her hands. If
they had made the slightest resistance I would have strangled them
—strangled them, mind you! '
How much of all this is true it is impossible now to say, but it is
certain that by the end of the summer he had found regular work
and was never hungry. Considered an intellectual by the workers
with whom he had come into contact, he was offered the Secretary
ship of the Lausanne Association of Bricklayers and Manual
Labourers and was put in charge of propaganda. He was also giving
8
THE YOUNG REBEL
Italian lessons and being paid for articles in which he gave vent to
his peculiar form of anarchistic Socialism, his anti-Clericalism, his
erratic sense of social injustice, his angry hostility towards types
and classes of people for whom he felt a personal antagonism. He
began to read a great deal, impatiently and haphazardly, as though
he wished to absorb the whole history of political philosophy within
a few months. He rushed through various works of Lassalle,
Kautsky, Kropotkin, Marx and Schopenhauer, Sterner and
Nietzsche, Blanqui and Bertoni, picking up ideas, misinterpreting
them, extending them. Later he fell upon Baboeuf, Proudhon,
Kant and Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, Sorel and Guyau, and everything
he read affected him deeply so that, as a woman he had met in
Geneva said afterwards, ‘his philosophical views were always the
reflection of the book he had happened to read last \ He found the
most inspiration not in the turgid pages of Marx, with which he
never got very far, but in the angry writings and dramatic lives
of Louis Auguste Blanqui, the violent French revolutionary, and
Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist. And it
is significant that the only book mentioned in his autobiography is
The Psychology of the Crowd by Gustave Lebon.
Fired by visions of violence he wandered through the streets of
Lausanne and Berne arguing, quarrelling and making inflamma
tory speeches to his trade union. He spent most of his evenings with
Russian students, strange, wild, dissolute Bohemians and nihilists,
and he drank with them and made love with them and argued with
them so intently that he seemed to believe, as one of them said,
‘ that each day might be his last ’. Benitouchka they called him,
but he found the endearment objectionable and preferred to refer
to himself, in the style of Sorel, as ‘un apostolato di violenza9
‘ When will the day of vengeance come? ’ he asked repeatedly
When would the people free themselves from tyranny and from
religion, that ‘immoral disease of the m ind'? Who was Christ, he
asked outrageously, but a ‘ small mean man who in two years con
verted a few villages and whose disciples were a dozen ignorant
vagabonds, the scum of Palestine'? W hat was Switzerland but a
‘ sausage-maker’s democracy which had never known how to find
the road of protest and pretended to be unaware of its immense
shame, believing, perhaps, that William Tell's apple was enough
to perpetuate the tradition of liberty’? In the summer of 1903 he
went too far for the peaceable Swiss, who had him arrested for
making a speech to his union in Berne in which he proposed a
general strike and advocated violence as a means of enforcing the
9
MUSSOLINI
workers’ demands. After twelve days in prison he was expelled

from the canton of Berne and hustled over the frontier to Chiasso.
Within a week, however, he was back in Switzerland and became
more wild than ever.
He was twenty now, and already he had the appearance of a
seasoned revolutionary burned and aged by the agonies of an inner
passion. His fine, long black hair was already beginning to grow^
thin, and his intense, dark eyes were heavily shadowed. The pallor
of his skin was emphasized by a black moustache and the stubble
of a beard which he rarely shaved more than twice a week. Angelica
Balabanoff, a clever, hunchbacked, sensual Russian Socialist he met
in Geneva a few months later, said that he rarely washed either.1
He was also, she thought, neurotic, excitable, self-pitying, exces
sively blasphemous, vindictively revengeful, aggressively ill-dressed
and a sponger who hated manual work and considered himself an
intellectual. He was constantly complaining of his health and boast
ing of his virility. Angelica Balabanoff was not sure that behind
the flashing, positive facade he was not shy and unsure of himself
when in the presence of those whom he suspected might be his
social or intellectual superiors. When she first spoke to him she
thought that she had never seen 4a more wretched human being.
In spite of his large jaw, the bitterness and restlessness in his black
eyes, he gave the impression of extreme timidity. Even as he
listened, his nervous hands clutching at his big black hat, he
seemed more concerned with his own inner turmoil than with what
I was saying.’ But she liked him at the time although she grew to
hate him later for his betrayal of Socialism. Indeed, most people
liked him then; he was not a man to inspire hatred.
Towards the end of 1903 he returned to Italy as his mother was
ill; but as soon as she was better he went back to Switzerland to
escape military service, for he was, of course, a violent anti
militarist with a bitter contempt for the ‘ paid slaves of kings ' in
their ‘gaudy uniforms, their chests covered with crosses, decora
tions and similar foreign and domestic hardware . . . blinding the
public with dust and flaunting in its face their impudent display ’.
1 Margherita Sarfatti, then a fellow-Socialist and later to become one of Musso

lini’s earliest biographers and closest friends, who admired Angelica BalabanofPs
intelligence but could not disguise her dislike of her as a woman—perhaps her
jealousy of her as a woman—said that Balabanoff also did not wash. 1The saving
grace of humour failed her completely,’ Margherita Sarfatti thought. *She lacked
a sense of beauty even more. This was fortunate for her! Otherwise she would
probably have thrown herself down the nearest well. As things were she had the
slightest possible acquaintance with water.’
IO
THE YOUNG REBEL
Within a few weeks he was arrested again and spent Easter Day
1904 in Lucerne prison. It was, he said afterwards, ‘one of the
saddest days of my youth ’, and as he listened to the church bells
ringing he wondered whether the Swiss would send him back to
Italy on his release from prison to serve the year's imprisonment
to which he had been sentenced as a deserter. But he was, to his
profound relief, put off the train before it reached Chiasso, and
although expelled from the canton of Geneva he was allowed to
return to Lausanne, where thousands of other Italian emigrants
lived and tried to find work. Mussolini, however, was more for
tunate than most. His French was good by now, his German
passable; he had also learned a little English and some Spanish. He
managed to support himself and even to attend the lectures of
Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne and summer courses
at the University of Geneva by giving Italian lessons, by translating
philosophical and political works with the help of his Russian and
Polish friends, by writing articles, by borrowing money from his
mother and from anyone else who would lend it to him, until in
November 1904 the King of Italy, in order to celebrate the birth
of his son Prince Umberto, granted an amnesty to deserters.
Mussolini had thought of emigrating to America, but he changed
his mind and decided to go back to help his mother teach in her
school at Dovia. On his way home he met Angelica Balabanoff in
Lugano and left for Italy, so she says, having delivered himself of
a characteristic outburst against the rich. ‘ Look! ’ he said, waving
his arm towards the restaurants and hotels along the pier. ‘ People
eating, drinking and enjoying themselves. And I will travel third
class, eat miserable cheap food. Porca Madonna, how I hate the
rich! W hy must I suffer this injustice? How long must we wait? ’
Two days later Mussolini arrived back in the Romagna with a
reputation for political extremism which was now of more than
local interest. On 18 April 1904 the Rome paper La Tribuna had
published an item from its Geneva correspondent in which Musso
lini was referred to as €il grande duce9 of the local Italian Socialist
club. Already the pattern of his life had begun to form.
3
On 19 February 1905 Rosa Mussolini died of meningitis at the
age of forty-six, and Benito, so II Pensiero Romagnolo said, was
overcome with grief. At her funeral he ‘wanted to utter a last
ii
MUSSOLINI
farewell, but in the painful effort to do so he burst into tears and

he was able only to throw some flowers on to the grave \ After his
mother's death he went to teach in a school at Caneva, a small town
in the commune of Tolmezzo in the Venetian Alps north of Udine.
He was not a good schoolmaster and he knew it. The children liked
him well enough, but it seems that he found it difficult to control
them and his mind was often far away. Sometimes he would lose
his temper and bang his fist on the desk and swear at them. But
although they called him ‘ il tiranno' they were not frightened of
him. Some of them thought he was mad. His collar was usually
askew and nearly always dirty, his shoe-laces were often undone and
his hair long and untidy. He walked about the town and the two
and a half miles from his boarding-house to the school, reading a
book or murmuring poetry; he took Latin lessons from the priest,
began to study Indian arithmetic and made notes for a history of
philosophy and for a critical study of German literature; but most
of the time when he was not giving lessons in the school or private
lessons at the boarding-house where he lived, he was drinking or
indulging his craving for sexual excitement. He said himself that
his year at Tolmezzo was one *of moral deterioration \ Frequently
he was drunk, and frequently after his drinking companions had
gone to bed he continued to stumble alone through the dark streets
shouting, reciting the poems of Carducci and making speeches to
the fountain in the square. He made love to any girl who would have
him and threatened to rape any who would not. He contracted
syphilis, and when he discovered the symptoms he loaded a
revolver and said he would shoot himself and was with difficulty
persuaded to see a doctor instead. He had a passionate affair with
his landlord's wife, and when he had left Tolmezzo he travelled
three hundred miles from Predappio in the middle of a winter
night because he wanted her so urgently, and he crept up the stairs
and ravished her on the floor while her husband was asleep in
another room.
By the middle of the following summer he was in prison again.
W ith his accustomed uncompromising vehemence he had, during
one of the recurrent agrarian conflicts which repeatedly disturbed
Romagnol life, joined a political argument on the side of the casual
labourers of Predappio against their ‘oppressors', the tenant
farmers, and was sentenced to three months' imprisonment.
He was becoming well known in the Romagna now. He was
talked about and he was written about in newspapers. ‘Comrade
Mussolini', at the age of twenty-five, was already a formidable
12
THE YOUNG REBEL
force. After his release from prison he went north to Trento, at

this time part of Austria, to take up an appointment with a trade
union and to become a frequent contributor to the weekly paper
of the Left, the revolutionary and internationalist L'Avvenire del
Lavoratore. But he did not like the Socialists of the Trentino and
their worship of Mazzini any more than he had liked the
4tagliatelle Socialists ’ of Gualtieri. They were 4toadies of bourgeois
cap italism 'slav es of nationalism and patriotism * who must be
attacked and attacked again until ‘their treachery to the prole
tariat ' was exposed. For the proletariat must consider itself 4anti-
patriotic by definition and necessity', and made to realize that
nationalism was a mask for 4rapacious militarism ’, which 4should
be left to the masters ', and that the national flag was, as Gustave
Hervé had said, 4a rag to be planted on a dung-hill \
Although his distaste for the nationalism of the Trentino
Socialists went very deep, he agreed to write for II Popolo, a news
paper edited by Cesare Battisti, a man of irredentist sympathies.
In the articles he wrote for II Popolo and for another paper, owned
and edited by Battisti, La Vita Trentina, he attacked with his by
now familiar indiscrimination a complex range of targets, from the
anti-proletarian mentality of Freemasonry to the cupidity of land
lords, from the evil influence of Neo-Malthusianism2 to the
bourgeois spirit which had led to the degeneration of May Day as
a revolutionary holiday. His most savage attacks, however, were
made in L'Avvenire del Lavoratore against militarism and national
ism and above all against the powerful Catholic influence in Trent
supported by the widely read Catholic paper, Il Trentino, one of
whose leading political writers was Alcide de Gasperi. Indeed, as
*For the whole of his life Mussolini was obsessed by what he called 'Italy's
demographic problem \ When the German writer Emil Ludwig suggested to him
in 1932 that *Malthusianism was more necessary in Italy than anywhere else in
the world he *flared up in wrath. Never before or afterwards,' Ludwig said, ‘ did
I see him lose his self-command in this way. Speaking twice as fast as usual, he
flung his arguments at me like missiles. "M althus! Malthus is economically a
blunder and morally a crime! A reduction in population brings poverty in its
train! When the population of Italy was only sixteen millions, the country was
poorer than it is today when we have forty-two million inhabitants." '
Every family, he said repeatedly, ought to have five children like his. The
fathers of such large families received higher wages than their less fortunate
fellow-workers, and prolific mothers were made honorary members of the Fascist
Party.
Once having promoted an officer general in the morning, he cancelled the pro
motion in the afternoon when he discovered h£ was a bachelor. ' A general must
be the first to realize/ he said, *that without men you cannot have divisions.' A
large population, it could be argued, provided not only cannon-fodder but ex
cellent reasons for wanting colonies and for keeping wages low.
>3
MUSSOLINI
Gaudens Megaro has shown, it was his violent attacks on the

Catholic Church—4that great corpse ’—and on the Vatican—4that
den of intolerance and of a gang of robbers ’—and on Christianity
itself—4humanity’s immortal stigma of opprobium ’—which led to
his arrest and expulsion from Austria, rather than those occasional
diatribes against Austrian nationalism and articles supporting the
rights of Italians working under Austrian domination that Musso
lini and his Fascist biographers were later to pick out of his writings
as evidence of his irredentist sympathies.
On io September 1909 he was arrested yet again and on the 26th
expelled from Austria as he had been expelled from the cantons
of Berne and Geneva. The following month he went home once
again to his father, who had given up the smithy at Dovia and had
moved with his tall, thin, farouche mistress, Anna Guidi, and her
five children to Forlì, where he had become the landlord of the
Bersaglieri inn. The younger of the widow Anna’s'daughters was
named Rachele. She was a pretty girl of sixteen with fluffy fair hair
and a manner at once provocative and dissuasive; and Mussolini
decided that he would like to marry her. He had fallen in love with
her elder sister Augusta, but she, thinking him too unstable, had
married a man in regular work as a gravedigger, and Mussolini had
immediately transferred his attentions to Rachele. In the evenings,
when he had emptied the jugs and washed up the glasses, he wrote
short stories, finished a book about John Huss, the Bohemian
reformer, and began a novel which was published as a serial in
Il Popolo, the editor of which had suggested the plot. Claudia
Particella, translated into English in 1928 as The Cardinal*s
Mistress, is not a very interesting book and certainly not a very
lively one. Margherita Sarfatti described it, as all Mussolini’s trivial
but nevertheless revealing fiction might be described, as 4a clumsy
hash without head or tail, a flashy film of long footage’. But
Rachele liked it, for one of its most sympathetic characters is the
heroine’s maid who gives her life for her mistress, and Benito had
called her Rachele.
Rachele has described the night when Benito took her to the
theatre for the first time. He brought her back to the Bersaglieri and
demanded to be allowed to live with her. Both his father and her
mother refused to consider it. He took out a pistol and said that he
would shoot himself and her if he could not have his way. They
gave in and a few days later Mussolini rented two rooms in a damp
and crumbling palazzo in Via Merenda. 4We moved into the place
one night,' Rachele wrote afterwards. 41 remember how tired and
14
THE YOUNG REBEL
happy he was—perhaps a little uncertain of my reaction because

the marriage papers were not yet ready. But I understood. I saw a
man of my heart there before me, eagerly awaiting the only gift
life could give him—my love. His young face was already lined by
his daily struggle. There was no hesitation. I went with h im /
They lived together in the squalid rooms in Palazzo Merenda
for three years. Towards the end of the first year, on i September
1910, their first child, Edda, was born, and Mussolini went out to
buy a cradle and brought it home on his shoulders. It had cost
fifteen lire—half a week’s wages—and for the rest of that week he
and his wife lived on cabbages. He had a job as Secretary of the
Forlì Socialist Federation, but it was poorly paid and much of his
money was spent on the weekly newspaper that he had founded,
La Lotta di Classe— The Class Struggle—all four pages of which he
wrote himself. He was a dedicated Socialist now. He drank wine
with his friends, but he never got drunk; occasionally he kissed a
pretty girl or pinched her bottom, but he remained faithful to
Rachele. All his energy and all the drive of his growing ambition
were thrown into politics and into La Lotta di Classe, which soon
became a much more influential paper than most of the many
Italian Socialist weeklies of its sort and which was often quoted in
Avanti! the official Socialist newspaper. He was rarely at home,
often to be seen strolling through the town on his way to a meeting,
looking at the ground, his hands deep in his pockets, pale and
unshaven, poorly and untidily dressed, murmuring to himself.
When he was at home, he was usually working, writing or reading,
translating Kropotkin, preparing his speeches. Sometimes he would
break off suddenly and pick up his violin, which he had first been
taught to play by a fair-ground fiddler when he was a little boy.
He was not a graceful musician but a loud and powerful one, and
it eased his nerves, he said, to play as the words of his articles and
speeches went through and through his mind. Occasionally he
went to the theatre with Rachele and her curious, witch-like
mother, but even there, so he later confessed, his mind was full of
his speeches and he was anxious to get home and write down the
thoughts that had come to him. If the play did not start on time,
he would take off his shoe and threaten to throw it at the stage.
He was becoming a good speaker, forceful and authoritative. His
attacks were outlandish, his facts often wrong, his opinions usually
contradictory and aggressively didactic, his attitudes theatrical; but
there was no denying the compelling fascination of his voice and
of his provocative, repetitive, vigorous gestures, his gift for the
*5
MUSSOLINI
dramatic phrase, for the enigmatic allusion, the improbable but apt
and striking metaphor. He had developed a skilful ability for arous
ing emotion by building up a series of apparently disconnected
sentences, delivered in staccato bursts but in varying tones of voice
and emphasized by a calculated contrast of gestures into a climactic
whole. He had developed, too, that ability which was later to
become a genius for imposing a mood upon an audience and then
abandoning himself to it until his speech became not a speech at
all, but a dialogue, a kind of unrehearsed litany in which the con
gregation chanted their responses to the preacher’s urgent questions
and he would re-phrase them and throw them back to receive a
louder answer, a more passionate encouragement, a stronger affirma
tion of their unity. He had already learned as well the advantages
of having a reliable claque whose infectious applause and shouts
of agreement could be evoked by a nod of the head or an agreed
gesture. And he had realized, above all, the necessity for a band
of faithful admirers around whom could be built a powerful follow
ing of men ready to regard him as their leader.
For he had by now recognized himself as the leader in chrysalis.
Prompted by ideas, still largely uncorrelated and not always under
stood, picked out of Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, Blanqui, Hegel
and Sorel and borrowed from the Russian Bolsheviks, he was com
ing to the belief which was soon to dominate his life—that the
existing order must be overthrown by an élite of revolutionaries
acting in the name of the people, and that this élite must be led by
himself.
But only the most violent of his fellow-Socialists were prepared
to follow him by endorsing his extreme and violent views, by sup
porting him in his indiscriminate attacks on Turati, Bissolati and
Treves, the moderates within the Party, and indeed on any group,
inside or outside the Party, which disagreed with him. He was an
outstanding man all right, the most conventional Socialists had to
agree, but a dangerous one, already as dangerous as Lazzari. They
heard with alarm his speeches advocating the efficacy of violence—
‘the iron necessity of violence’, as he later termed it—the com
pelling need to ‘use force surgically’. They read with nervous
disapproval accounts of his methods in Forlì and in particular of
one occasion when he marched to the town hall, followed by a large
crowd, and threatened to throw the Mayor out of the window if he
did not obtain a reduction in the price of milk.
When in the summer of 1911 the Government of Giovanni
Giolitti sent troops to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica with the declared
16
THE YOUNG REBEL
object of protecting the property of Italian subjects, but with the

real intention of wresting these colonies from Turkey, Mussolini
demonstrated just how dangerous he could be. To his fury the
Socialist National Congress in Milan, to which he had been sent as
Forli’s representative, had refused to discuss anti-militarism; and
there were even some 4bourgeois lickspittles ’ who were prepared to
support the Government’s aggression. *M arx/ Giolitti commented
with satisfaction,4has been relegated to the attic/ Mussolini made
it acutely clear in his articles in La Lotta di Classe and in his
speeches that he was not, under any circumstances, prepared to
support the war. *International militarism continues to celebrate
its orgies of destruction and death/ he shouted angrily.4Every day
that passes, the huge pyramid of lives that have been sacrificed
rears its bloody summit upon which Mars stands waiting with his
unsated and contorted mouth in an infernal grin. . . . So long as
there are Fatherlands, there will be militarism. The Fatherland is
a spook . . . like God, and like God it is vindictive, cruel and
tyrannical. . . . Let us show that the Fatherland does not exist just
as God does not exist/
As a protest against this disastrous war, the committee of the
General Confederation of Labour called a general strike and drafted
a protest. But this was not enough for Mussolini. Shouting to the
workers of Forlì to come to political meetings not with their arms
hanging loosely by their sides but with weapons, he joined forces
with the young republican Pietro Nenni in inciting them not
merely to strike but to revolution; and he himself led a gang of
men who, during two days of rioting in Forlì, occupied itself by
tearing up the town’s tramlines with pickaxes. A few weeks later,
after a trial in which he defended himself with a remarkable
display of skilful double-talk, he was in prison for the fifth time.
Released after five months, he returned to his rooms in Via
Merenda more determined than ever to become the leader of the
Socialists and to mould them into a revolutionary and republican
party. After the Socialist National Congress of Milan, which he
had been unable to dominate, he had demanded that the Forlì
,Socialist Confederation should declare itself outside the Party; now
that opinion within the Party appeared to be swinging to his side,
he demanded that it should return to it. Obediently it did so, and
at the next National Congress at Reggio Emilia the fiery delegate
from Forlì, of whom many delegates had not even heard and others
. remembered as an incoherent speaker at the last congress at Milan,
initiated his campaign against his opponents in the parliamentary
*7
MUSSOLINI
group by a spirited, eloquent and malicious attack on Leonida

Bissolati, Ivanoe Bonomi and Angiolo Cabrini, the middle-class
Socialist Deputies who had laid themselves open to ' serious accusa
tions from the Party* by publicly congratulating the King after
an anarchist bricklayer had attempted to assassinate him. The
Party, Mussolini declared, must be purged of such dross. It must
learn never to compromise with anti-proletarian institutions. It
was a triumphantly forceful speech. Even the supporters of Bissolati
and Turati were impressed. One of these, Margherita Sarfatti’s
husband, wrote to his wife to tell her of the emergence of ‘ a won
derful young man* who was ‘destined to dominate the Party*.
‘ Spare of figure, hard, fiery, most original with occasional bursts of
eloquence,* he was a man with a great future before him.3
Six months after this National Congress, in December 1912, the
Executive Committee of the Party, now dominated by left-wing
members, also recognized the startling talents of the young journa
list and announced that it had ‘ unanimously decided to nominate
Professor Benito Mussolini of Forlì as editor of Avanti! * ‘ I have
decided,* Mussolini told his staff as soon as he arrived at the offices
in Milan, ‘ to write all the political articles myself.* W ithin a few
months his great gifts as an editor and his boldly original typo
graphical ideas had doubled the circulation of the paper. By the
end of his editorship the circulation had increased from 28,000 to
nearly 100,000 copies.
‘ I don’t know what to make of this queer fellow Mussolini,* one
of the young reporters said. ‘ But I know one thing—he’s going to
get somewhere.*
* Another delegate, the Russian nihilist Anna Kulishov, who had been im
prisoned at the same time as Filippo Turati in 1898 for her part in the revolu
tionary meetings held that year in Milan, gave a different and more perceptive
opinion of the fiery young man. 4He is nothing of a Marxist,* she said. *In fact he
is not really a Socialist at all. . . . Nor is he really a politician. He is a senti
mental poetaster who has read Nietzsche.* Another less enthusiastic opinion of his
performance at the Congress was given in II Resto del Carlino, which described
his *abundant gestures and expressions that make him resemble a Chinaman *.
The Corriere della Sera, however, endorsed the view of Margherita Sarfatti*s hus
band : 4Mussolini spoke with candour and sincere agitation . . . lean, bitter,
speaking with explosive sincerity, he is liked by the Congress which feels it has in
Jüm an interpreter of its feelings.*
18
2
THE INTERVENTIONIST
O C T O B E R 1913- 24 M A Y 1915
Nobody loves a neutral.
I n October 1913, Mussolini stood as Socialist candidate for Forlì

and made a series of election speeches in condemnation of mili
tarism, nationalism and imperialism. He was heavily defeated.
Although he was soon afterwards elected a councillor in Milan, he
ascribed his defeat and the defeat of extremists like himself to the
*bourgeois spirit of the people ’, who did not have the courage or
the energy to fight for their demands and who needed to be aroused
by some cataclysmic event to an awareness of their destiny. At
Forlì after leading his assault on the tramway lines, he had
addressed a meeting of over ten thousand workers in the municipal
park, but when some boys had climbed on to the bandstand the
knocking of their wooden clogs on the boards had seemed like the
clattering of horses’ hooves. The shouts of ‘Up with the revolu
tion! ’ changed to alarmed cries of 4The cavalry are coming! ’ and
the crowds ran out of the park. ‘This is a nation of cowards,’
Mussolini had said angrily to one of his companions. ‘ They won’t
fight.’ Now they disappointed him again. At the beginning of 1914
a general strike was called in the Romagna and the Marche. Soon
the whole area was in uproar. There were savage anti-clerical and
anti-military demonstrations, while self-declared republics grew up
overnight. Ancona announced that it was an independent com
mune, and the red flag flew over the town hall at Bologna. In
Milan, where the Socialists and Syndicalists had united to form an
action committee, Mussolini rushed once more into the streets,
commanding the workers to occupy the squares, but in Piazza del
Duomo he watched them retreat headlong before a cavalry charge.
In his own offices, when a column of nationalists threatened to
storm the building, his shouts of ‘To arms! ' were met without
enthusiasm. Margherita Sarfatti, at this time the art editor of the
paper, encouraged him in his advocacy of violent resistance and
suggested that they should use the editorial scissors as daggers; but
'9
MUSSOLINI
the others were less resolute and seemed relieved when the
nationalists called off their assault.
A few weeks later, Austria declared war on Serbia and the Great
War had begun. ‘Down with the war! ' Mussolini thundered from
the offices of Avanti/, repeating the slogans he had used when
attacking the nationalists of Trent. ‘ Down with arms, and up with
humanity! ' If the Government intervened in favour of Austria
and Germany, its partners in the virtually defunct Triple Alliance,
the workers' revolution would surely begin. Intervention on behalf
of France would be equally disastrous. It was the duty of the
Socialists, in fact, to fight to ensure that Italy maintained a policy
of ‘ rigid neutrality \ He sent a referendum to his fellow-Socialists
asking them to confirm their agreement with this uncompromising
stand, and his admiring followers immediately replied with their
support. When the Government declared that Italy would, in fact,
remain neutral and the Syndicalists declared that the decision was
wrong and that the country should enter the war, Mussolini
attacked them furiously as subversive traitors to the working-class.
Behind the outspoken condemnation of the interventionists, how
ever, different ideas were taking shape in Mussolini’s mind. On the
day of the Sarajevo murder, he was on holiday at Cattolica with a
fellow-journalist, Michele Campana; and as they travelled back to
Milan together, Mussolini confessed his growing disillusion with
his Socialist colleagues. ‘ I want to guide the Party intelligently,' he
told Campana, ‘ steering it as it should be steered through the great
events that lie ahead,' but he doubted that it would follow him
intelligently.
‘ Let’s understand this clearly,' he went on. ‘ The Central Powers
are attacking England and France through Serbia. A general con
flict is inevitable, and France will be its first victim if the civilized
countries do not unite to save her^TJie defeat of France would be
a death-blow to liberty in Europe. The Socialist Party should not
turn its back on the possibility of intervention in favour of France
if she is dragged into the war. But will the Party leaders understand
these truths? '
Michele Campana reminded him of his speech at the last Socialist
Congress at Reggio Emilia, when he had spoken with such force
against nationalism and against those Syndicalists who were sup
porting the war against Turkey in Libya.
‘ That was different,' Mussolini said quickly. That was a war of
aggression. This war could be Italy’s salvation. It could settle the
problem of Trentino and Trieste and deliver them from the grasp
20
THE INTERVENTIONIST
of Austria, a country which the irredentist Cesare Rossi had taught

him to consider the enemy of liberty; and it could bring forward
the day of revolution. Apart from the belief that the Socialists
should take advantage of the war in order to provoke unrest and
eventually destroy the bourgeois system, there was another belief
helping to alter Mussolini’s mind. The Syndicalists, led by Alceste
De Ambris and the violently nationalist Filippo Corridoni, who
were advocating war, were obviously being listened to with a respect
and sympathy which led Mussolini to fear that he might lose con
trol of the Socialist conscience to them. Some of them were quoting
Karl Marx’s aphorism that a social revolution usually follows war
and, there can be little doubt, this exercised a profound influence
on Mussolini’s mind.
Karl Marx’s aphorism was certainly mentioned during an impor
tant conversation Mussolini had in Milan with Filippo Naldi,
owner of the Bologna newspaper II Resto del Carlino, which had
previously advocated a neutral attitude favourable to Austria and
Germany but was now advocating intervention on the side of
France. Mussolini repeated to Naldi what he had already said to
Campana, that his Socialist colleagues would not agree to support
an interventionist policy and, in any case, he could not actively
support such a policy himself as editor of Avanti! Well, then, Naldi
advised him, why should he not resign and start a new paper of his
own? Naldi would finance it.
And so on 26 October Mussolini resigned his editorship of
Avanti! and on 14 November the first number of II Popolo d'Italia
appeared. On either side of the title were two maxims which might
well have been interpreted as the birth cries of Fascism—Chi ha del
ferro ha del pane (‘ who has iron has bread ’), from Blanqui, and La
rivoluzione è un9 idea che ha trovato delle baionette (‘ Revolution
is an idea which has found bayonets ’), from Napoleon. And on its
front page was an article signed by its editor Benito Mussolini and
headed ‘Audacia9.
*I address my first word to you,* he had written, ' the young men
of Italy, the young men of the factories and of the universities,
those who are young in years and young in spirit, the young men
belonging to a generation to whom fate has given the task of mak
ing history. It is a word which in normal times I would never have
used, but which today I am forced to utter loudly and clearly in
sincere good faith, the fearful and fascinating word— W ar9
Ten days later, at a meeting of the Socialist Party in Milan,
amidst shouts of €Traditore! Venduto! Sicario!9 Mussolini’s expul-
21
MUSSOLINI
sion from the Party was proposed. Pale and visibly trembling, he
approached the platform to answer his critics. He was wearing the
shabby black suit which he always wore, and a delegate noticed
that his trousers were so short that they scarcely reached to his
ankle-bones. He had not shaved that day nor, so it seemed, the day
before. He stepped on to the platform, and the shouting and jeer
ing grew louder. He began to speak, but no one could hear what he
said. Coins and balls of paper, even chairs, were thrown on to the
stage as he shouted back at the angry delegates, not excusing him
self but accusing them of harbouring a petit bourgeois spirit, which
was always for him the final insult. 4I tell you you are wasting your
breath,' he yelled at them. 4You will all be forced into the war. . . .
You cannot get rid of me, because I am, and will always be, a
Socialist. . . . Your votes against me mean nothing at all.' The
words were shouted at the delegates in a voice which sounded close
to hysteria, and some of those present afterwards said that his eyes
were full of tears. ‘You hate me,* he told them desperately, throw
ing out one of those apparently paradoxical but at least partly
justifiable assertions which he was later never to tire of making.
4You hate me because you still love me I '
But it was no good. As he said himself, his fate was already
decided, and there was no point in trying to make himself heard
by people who were determined to reject everything he said. W ith
a small group of his supporters he left the People's Theatre and
returned to the offices of II Popolo d’Italia.
The resentment of the Socialists was bitter afid implacable.
Former friends and admirers felt a disillusion which went as deep
as hatred. W ith one of them, Ciccotti, who had previously referred
to him as having 4the brains of a direct descendant of Socrates ',
he fought a duel; by many others, including Angelica Balabanoff,
he was considered to be Socialism’s most dangerous traitor. They
accused him not only of betraying Socialism but of accepting
money through the French Institute in Milan for having done so.1
By the beginning of 1915, however, he had gained more supporters
by his volte-face than he had lost. He had swung to his side most
of those who agreed with his declarations that, in the last analysis,
one's country must come first, that the German Socialists having
supported the Kaiser had secured the collapse of the International,
1 Although the money supplied by Filippo Naldi for starting II Popolo d’Italia
does not seem to have come from French sources, there is good evidence to sug
gest that when the paper ran into financial difficulties in 1915 Mussolini received
contributions from *French comrades to help the interventionist campaign
22
THE INTERVENTIONIST
and that freedom was in danger. He had gained the support also
of Corridoni’s Syndicalists, of Libero Tancredi's anarchists, of the
irredentist Cesare Battisti, even of the right-wing Socialist Bissolati
whose expulsion from the Party he had helped to secure after the
attack on Tripoli. His opinions were endorsed by patriotic workers,
by nationalists, by thousands of young people for whom war was
sdii a dramatic adventure, by many intellectuals and by writers
such as Gabriele D’Annunzio who believed that participation in
the war would help Italy on her way towards complete unity,
towards the realization of her rightful sovereignty in the Adriatic
and her place of influence in Europe.
Encouraged by this growing success, by the resignation of
Giolitti and the appointment to the premiership of the opportunist
Antonio Salandra, which made intervention more likely, Mussolini
became more and more clamorous for war, increasingly intemper
ate. He fought a duel with the reformist Socialist Claudio Treves,
a former editor of Avanti!) he was arrested after a wild meeting of
interventionists in Rome; he fought with police officers who broke
up one of his meetings in Milan. And then at last, on 24 May
1915, to the satisfaction of the King, the irredentists, the futurists
and the Freemasons as well as of Mussolini, Italy declared war. The
interventionists who greeted the declaration with such noisy en
thusiasm were not, however, representative of the country as a
whole; and Mussolini was later to record with pleasure that they
had demonstrated unmistakably how a forceful minority could
always impose its views on the masses. It was a lesson which he
did not forget.
‘From today onwards,’ he wrote triumphantly in II Popolo
d’Italia, ‘we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that
steel has to meet steel, one single cry comes from our hearts— Viva
l’Italia!9
Already the seed of Fascism was sown.
23
3
THE FASCIST IN THE MAKING
A U G U S T 1915- 28 O C T O B E R 1922
For my part I prefer fifty thousand

rifles to five million votes.
M u s s o l i n i was a good soldier. He did not volunteer like most

of his supporters, waiting until August to be called to the n th
Regiment of Bersaglieri, but he refused his colonel's suggestion that
he should work at regimental headquarters on a war diary; and
within a few weeks he was in the front line. He had already done
nineteen months’ military service on his return from Switzerland
in 1905 and 1906, and during that time had shown that, despite his
reputation for rebelliousness, he could be a disciplined soldier. He
had shown then, as he showed now, an anxiety to please and to
demonstrate his capacity for hard work and enthusiasm. Deter
mined never to appear at a disadvantage he performed his duties
uncomplainingly, without undue heroism but with sufficient zeal
to be described in an official report as a saldier whose behaviour
was exemplary and whose spirit was truly that of a Bersagliere. He
was promoted corporal. In letters home he made the most of the
dangers and hardships of an infantryman's life in the trenches and
he spoke of being under fire for weeks on end, of the times his life
had been endangered. He came home on leave from his trench
beside the Isonzo river looking impressively tired and ragged, his
coat done up with bits of wire instead of buttons.1
One day in February 1917 while watching the demonstration of
a new mortar, there was a thunderous explosion and five men
1 Angelica Balabanoff—not an impartial critic—says that Mussolini was not

only a poseur but a hysterical and hypochondriacal coward. It is a judgment which
is not supported by her contemporaries, even by those anti-Fascist writers like her
self who knew him at this time and had good cause to attack him as a traitor to
their ideals. A man I met in Milan in 1945, who claimed to have been a fellow-
corporal with Mussolini in the Bersaglieri, said that he was 1always showing off
and he talked too much; but he was a nice chap. We all liked him. He wasn't
much under fire so far as I know but when he was they say he behaved all right.'
24
standing near him were killed as pieces of jagged metal from the
bomb and the burst barrel flew into the air. He was thrown violently
to the ground himself and carried back to the dressing-station
scarcely conscious and with more than forty pieces of the mortar
embedded in his flesh. The hospital to which he was taken at
Ronchi was so badly damaged in a bombardment that most of the
wounded had to be evacuated, but he was too ill to be moved.
Some weeks later, when he was well enough to return to Milan,
Margherita Sarfatti went to visit him. ‘ I shall never forget going
to see him / she wrote. ‘He was so exhausted he could scarcely
speak. He smiled out at us from his pale face, his eyes sunken in
great hollows. His lips scarcely moved; one could see how horribly
he had suffered. Someone asked if he would like a book to read.
He refused. “ I read only this, because it is familiar. I cannot read
anything new ” and he indicated a volume of Carduccio poems/
Mussolini, of course, was not a man to let the advantages of being
a wounded soldier pass by without using them. ‘ I am proud \ he
wrote with characteristic self-dramatization as soon as he was suffi
ciently recovered to hold a pen, ‘to have reddened the road to
Trieste with my own blood in the fulfilment of my dangerous duty/
‘ I faced atrocious pain/ he wrote in his autobiography in no less
dramatic a strain. ‘My suffering was indescribable. I underwent
practically all my operations without the aid of an anaesthetic. I
had twenty-seven operations in one month; all except two were
without anaesthetics/
Recognizing the value of a wound at such a time, he went back
to the offices of II Popolo d’Italia leaning on crutches, which he
continued to use long after the need for them had gone. As a
veteran of the war he felt able to attack the Socialists, the clerical
pacifists and the neutralists, whom he took to be responsible for the
disaster at Caporetto, with more licence than he could have allowed
himself as a civilian journalist; and as one of those to whom he
repeatedly referred as ‘ the survivors \ he began to urge the participa
tion of the returned soldier in the Government of the new Italy, a
Government which must be strong and uncompromising. As early
as February 1918 he was advocating the emergence of a dictator,
‘a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean
sweep \ Three months later, in a widely reported speech at Bologna,
he hinted that he himself might prove such a man.
It was to those who had fought in the war that these aspirations
were principally addressed, and it was amongst them that they
found their most enthusiastic support. Mussolini’s urgent claims
*5
MUSSOLINI
on behalf of Italy to Fiume and Dalmatia in addition to those areas

—the Trentino and Venezia Giulia—which the Treaty of St Ger
main was eventually to grant her, were enthusiastically endorsed
by those who had fought on the Carso; while his attacks on the
Russian Revolution and Lenin’s totalitarianism made a wide appeal
to all those who associated the October Revolution and the Bolshe
viks with the discredited Italian Socialist Party. He no longer con
sidered himself a Socialist even in name. The Party had not only
opposed the war, he said, they had opposed the victory and were
prepared to forgo the fruits of it; and in their advocacy of the
principles of international Bolshevism had forfeited the right even
to be considered as champions of the Italian working-class. Realiz
ing that his own views would not prevail unless he could weaken
the links which traditionally bound the workers to the Socialist
Party, he was careful to demonstrate by his articles and speeches
that he himself was still their friend and advocate. He was, he
assured them, although no longer a Socialist, still unremittingly
anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.
But although there could be no doubt now what Mussolini was
against, there was still in 1919 considerable doubt what he was for.
And on 23 March, when at his instigation a group of men met in
a room at the Milan Association of Merchants and Shopkeepers
in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan to found a new force in national
politics, there was still doubt as to what his policy was. His sup
porters were a curious rag-bag of discontented Socialists and
Syndicalists, republicans, anarchists, unclassifiable revolutionaries
and restless soldiers many of whom had been Arditi (the impet
uous Commandos of the Italian Army), and some of them were
wanted by the police.2 They formed themselves into what Musso
lini called a Fascio di Combattimento, a fighting group, bound by
ties as close as those that secured the fascinae of the lictors, the
symbols of Roman authority. But apart from forthright declara
tions in favour of nationalist sentiments, the Milan Fascio had
little to offer a largely unimpressed and vaguely suspicious public
which doubted the honesty, let alone the political possibility, of a
programme which included an 80 per cent tax on war profits, a
9 The number of men who attended this meeting is not known. There were,
perhaps, less than two hundred. Mussolini, who wanted to emphasize the im
portance of a dedicated minority, subsequently put the number of men who
signed the programme at forty-five. After the triumph of Fascism, however, hun
dreds of men who called themselves Sansepolcristi, after the place where the meet
ing had been held, claimed to have been there. They were recognized as the élite
of Fascism.
36
heavy capital levy, the confiscation of property belonging to the

Church, the annexation of Dalmatia, the abolition of the Stock
Exchange and the handing over of industrial management to the
workers. Throughout 1919 the new movement gained little support.
It was joined by other ex-soldiers, by a few more disillusioned
Socialists and angry young Syndicalists, by conservative monarch
ists and former Army officers such as Cesare Maria De Vecchi and
General Emilio De Bono. But the hybrid nature of the movement,
the contradictions between Mussolini who still, as Mr Denis Mack
Smith has said, 4fancied himself the Lenin of Italy \ and the con
servative elements who considered his ideas on the occupation of
the factories more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks, were its ruin.
When the Fascists put themselves forward as candidates for the
Chamber of Deputies in October 1919 they received only 4,000
votes. Their Socialist opponents received more than forty times as
many, and a hundred Christian Democrats were elected to the
Chamber of Deputies. Mussolini, Avanti! declared in triumph, was
a political corpse. His coffin was paraded up and down the streets
of Milan surrounded by candles and accompanied by dirge-chant
ing demonstrators. His effigy was burned in Piazza del Duomo.
A few days after his heavy defeat the offices of his paper were
entered by the police. Concerned by his unequivocal support of
D'Annunzio’s dramatic and flamboyant action in occupying Fiume
in the name of Italy, Francesco Nitti, the Premier, had ordered
Mussolini's arrest on a charge of 4armed plotting against the State \
The charge seemed justified. The comfortless offices of II Popolo
d’Italia were like an arsenal.3 The cupboards and filing-cabinets
were filled with bombs and explosives. There were even bombs in
the stove in Mussolini's room, behind the opaque glass walls of his
bookcase and in the drawers of his desk; and on top of the desk
were his revolver and a stiletto and behind it the skull-embroidered
flag of the Arditi. Despite these symbols of violence, however,
Mussolini was soon released. N itti was advised that Fascism was a
still-born movement and that there was no point in making a
martyr of its leader—4a relic, a defeated man \
By the beginning of the following June, however, the description
applied more truly to N itti himself. His failure either to meet the
challenge of revolutionary strikes and riots or to solve the Adriatic
problem, and his weakness in resisting the demands of the Socialists*
* He never overcame this taste for the flamboyant display of firearms. For many
years after he had come to power he exhibited on a table in the ante-room out
side his office at Palazzo Venezia a case of duelling-pistols and a pair of sabres.
2?
MUSSOLINI
and Communists, contributed much to the growing influence and

strength of Fascism. On 6 June 1920 Nitti retired for the third time
in three months and was succeeded by Giovanni Giolitti. But even
the skilful and calculating Giolitti was no more able than N itti had
been to control what was widely interpreted as a mounting Bolshe
vik menace to the security of the state. His efforts to satisfy both
Right and Left satisfied neither, and when in September he allowed
the Socialists to take over the organization of the workers’ occupa
tion of the factories, although he demonstrated the ineffectiveness
of the strikers, he lost most of the support of the middle class, who
saw in his refusal to intervene the continued toleration of lawless
ness. The fact was that the national situation could no longer be
controlled by a Government which could not rely upon a working
majority in an already discredited Parliament. Inflation was
aggravated by subsidies which did not relieve the distress of a pain
fully impoverished country left milliards of lire in debt by the
sudden end of economic help from its Allies; while the problem of
unemployment was aggravated by the demobilization of thousands
of soldiers and the problem of crime by the existence of no less
than a hundred and fifty thousand former deserters who had grown
accustomed to living by their wits.
Mussolini and the Fascists were quick to realize the full measure
of their opportunity, and it was to be one of Fascism’s proudest
boasts that power had been achieved after a fierce struggle with
Communism, a denial of the true fact that Fascism had drawn its
strength from Socialism’s weakness. Accepting his defeat in the
1919 elections as evidence that the Fascists could not wrest the
working-class from their traditional support of the Socialists, Musso
lini, with characteristic opportunism, dropped his Leninist notions
and adopted the language and attitudes which then became
essential to the Fascist ethos.
While the strikes and riots against the cost of living grew in
frequency and intensity, while all over Italy trains and barracks,
banks and public buildings, were attacked by mobs, while local
Soviets were proclaimed and many areas passed wholly into the
hands of the Communists, while neither the ill-led Socialists nor
the Christian Democrats could decide on a common policy which
would offer a firm alternative to Fascism, the Fascists put them
selves forward as saviours of the country, the only force by which
Bolshevism could be checked and strangled. Protesting that
violence could only be met by greater violence, squads of Fascists
armed with knives and cudgels or with revolvers and rifles brought
28
back from the war attacked Communists and Communist sympa

thizers with a ferocity and regularity which soon resulted in a
situation almost comparable to civil war. Three thousand anti-
Fascists and three hundred Fascists, it was afterwards computed,
lost their lives between October 1920 and the March on Rome.
Fascist statistics virtually reversed these proportions, but the total
numbers are probably correct.
Wearing the black shirts which the labourers of the Romagna
and Emilia had adopted as the uniform of the anarchists, and
carrying the flag of the Arditi, the Fascist squadristi marched to
the attack singing patriotic songs and shouting nationalist slogans.
Composed for the most part of men who had fought in the war
and of youths who wished that they had been old enough to fight,
of older men fired with that mystical patriotism that had brought
volunteers from all over Italy to serve D’Annunzio in Fiume in
defiance of the Governments of Europe, and of the criminal adven
turers which D’Annunzio had also attracted, these squadristi
obtained the support and admiration of thousands of Italians who
were prepared to condone their methods in the belief that only by
terrorizing their opponents, by making them salute the Fascist flag
as Italo Balbo did in Ferrara, by filling them with castor oil, even
killing them, could the disease of international Bolshevism be
wiped out. For the Socialists, many of whom were indistinguishable
from Communists, were terrorists and murderers too, and it was
folly to show mercy to the merciless. When, for instance, riots were
provoked in Bologna in November 1920 against the Communist-
dominated town council, it was the Fascists who directed the
demonstrations, organized the resistance and made the most of the
opportunity of presenting themselves as being on the side of
freedom against tyranny. They were undoubtedly helped in
Bologna as in other towns by the Government’s complicity. Neither
the Army, nor the carabinieri, nor the guardie regie were called
out against them by Giolitti or by the other liberal Governments
which succeeded him. And so the virus of Fascism was allowed to
spread. Even some trade unions, disillusioned by Communist inter
ference and broken promises, became converted to Fascism; and
several others, and many town councils, were forcibly taken over.
Despite all this, many liberals and Catholics, as well as a majority
of the most influential of the country’s newspapers, took the view
that, despicable as the Fascist squadristi might appear to all
opponents of violence, they were unquestionably more effective
than either Nitti or Giolitti or any of their supporters had been in
29
MUSSOLINI
saving the country from chaos. There was, too, running through
the hooliganism, the degrading savagery, the bombast and rather
absurd devotion to the less admirable military virtues, an unmistak
able thread of patriotic zeal and idealism. There were those, of
course, who supported the Fascists for selfish reasons—industrialists
and war profiteers who saw their factories and capital threatened
and who hoped, as Giolitti himself did, that they could use Fascism
to crush Socialism, landlords who looked to the squadristi to pro
tect their property, peasants who hoped to wrest land from Socialist
farmers, angry soldiers impatient to satisfy grievances against those
who had stayed at home and anxious to enjoy the fruits of the
social revolution which the war had brought about, opportunists
who saw in a possible Fascist State careers and money and power
which would otherwise have been denied them. But there were also
many idealists in the movement. Puccini, for instance, supported it
and Toscanini was actually a Fascist candidate in 1919. Benedetto
Croce thought Fascism in power would be better than the existing
anarchy and believed, like Giolitti, that the Party might be con
verted to constitutionalism. Many Catholics supported the move
ment too, as they saw in it the only firm defence against the atheism
of the Communists. And so by the end of 1920, from bad sources
and from good, Fascism had built for itself a large body of political
support. In the elections of May 1921 in an anti-Socialist alliance
with Giolitti, for which the liberals never forgave the ageing
Premier, thirty-five Fascists were elected to the Chamber of
Deputies, and one of these was Mussolini. He fully realized now
the opportunities which were being presented to him. In the un
certainty and chaos of Italian life he was beginning to gather
round him, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done, a group of
dedicated revolutionaries prepared to seize power in the name of
the workers whether or not the workers supported them. And it
was he who would lead them. He had seen the Socialists losing
influence before Italy’s entry into the war and he had abandoned
a Party which he saw that he could no longer lead to power; but
Fascism he could lead to power, and power excited him and never
failed to excite him. 'I am obsessed by this wild desire,’ he con
fessed without shame years later. *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 savagely he scratched the covering
of a chair-back from end to end. He would do anything to fulfil
his ambitions, he admitted. The end was always the justification
of the means. The Fascist policy of squadrismo, for instance, had
30
been a calculated effort to stir up unrest and disillusion. Presenting

themselves as patriotic anti-Bolsheviks, the squadristi had been
able to provoke and intensify an anarchic situation which would
make the people willing to accept the authoritarian régime that
was to be imposed upon them.
After the elections of May 1921, two years after having been a
somewhat discredited and friendless revolutionist, the editor of a
Milan newspaper, Mussolini had become a national figure, the
leader at thirty-seven of a political party which was growing every
month in size and influence. His maintained leadership was the
most remarkable tribute to his political gifts, for the Fascists,
despite their militaristic techniques and proclaimed ethos of unity,
were still, in fact, a widely disunited group. And Mussolini was
constantly obliged to qualify a previous declaration, change a course
formerly pronounced unalterable, even to contradict himself in his
efforts to control the more impetuous squadristi, while in his
speeches and in the columns of his paper appearing as the fiery
Romagnol revolutionary. To widen the basis of Fascist support he
referred, for example, to the great role which the House of Savoy
had played and could play in the nation’s history, although not
long before he had spoken often of the ‘ republican tendencies of
Fascism ’. Anxious to obtain Giolitti’s support for the inclusion of
Fascist candidates in his lists, he had been prepared to support the
Treaty of Rapallo, by which Italian claims to Dalmatia were
renounced. Concerned to keep the support of the industrialists and
manufacturers, upon whose financial support he had come to rely,
he declared in one of those rare speeches in the Chamber of
Deputies that there must be ‘no further attempt to occupy the
factories’, an attempt he had supported eighteen months before.
And yet in August 1921 he went so far in the opposite direction as
to sign a pact of pacification with the Socialists, declaring that it
was ‘ridiculous to talk as though the Italian working-class were
heading for Bolshevism ’ and that he would defend the pact with
all his strength. ‘If Fascism does not follow me in collaboration
with the Socialists,’ he added, ‘at least no one can force me to
follow Fascism.’ Three months later, however, after it had become
clear that Fascism was not prepared to follow him and that the
Fascist federations were not willing to accept Mussolini’s warning
that public opinion was slipping away from them and it was neces
sary to consolidate Fascist successes by a parliamentary compro
mise, the Pact was abandoned. And all the time while repeatedly
insisting at Fascist meetings that a coup d’état to overthrow Parlia-
31
MUSSOLINI
ment and the liberal State was necessary and imminent, he was as
constantly restraining his more impatient colleagues Italo Balbo,
Dino Grandi and Roberto Farinacci from putting any plans for a
coup into effect. He was, indeed, not as confident as they were that
Fascism was sufficiently powerful yet to be sure of success, and he
was also more anxious than they that the Fascists should assume
power with an approval which was at least general if not universal.
Many Fascist Deputies had been helped on their way to the
Chamber by the bludgeons of their supporters, and the number
of deaths on polling day had disturbed him. ‘The trouble with
Mussolini/ one of his more arrogantly ruthless henchmen said, 1is
that he wants everybody’s blessing and changes his coat ten times
a day to get it/
In August 1922, after months of vacillation and uncertainty,
Mussolini saw his chance clearly. In that month, to the fury of an
exasperated public, a general strike was called. Mussolini declared
that unless the Government prevented the strike, the Fascists
would. The opportunity of violence in the name of law and order
was again presented to him. At Ancona, Leghorn and Genoa, the
squadristi attacked Socialist buildings and burned them to the
ground; and in Milan they broke up the printing presses of Avanti!
Two months later, at a Party congress held in Naples, Mussolini
was so impressed by the obvious determination of 40,000 Fascists
that he said more and threatened more than he had ever done
before. ‘ What we have in view/ he declared, ‘ is the introduction
into the liberal State, which has fulfilled its functions . . . of all
the forces of the new generation which has emerged from the war
and the victory. . . . Either the Government will be given to us
or we shall seize it by marching on Rome/
*Roma! Rom a!2*9 repeated the claque. ‘ Roma! Roma!9 thousands
of other voices shouted, taking up the cry.
The March on Rome had already been discussed by Mussolini

and four leading Fascists who were later to be known as the Quad
rumviri—Italo Balbo, the strikingly handsome twenty-six-year-old
leader of the squadristi; General Emilio De Bono, a former com
mander of the Italian Army’s IX Corps; Cesare Maria De Vecchi,
a Fascist Deputy; and Michele Bianchi, General Secretary of the
Party. Balbo later suggested that it was himself and Bianchi who
3*
advocated the March on Rome and that Mussolini was so cautious

that it was considered necessary to tell him that the Fascists would
march on Rome whether Mussolini agreed or not. This was not
Mussolini's own version, and there is no doubt that, whether his
apparent hesitation was contrived or not, it did enable him to main
tain contacts with all his opponents, none of whom was certain
until the last moment whether he might even then choose collabora
tion with them instead of leading a purely Fascist revolution. It is
at least certain that when he returned from the Naples Congress
in October, he was convinced that the time for action had come
and that Luigi Facta’s Government, which had succeeded Ivanoe
Bonomi’s, which in turn had succeeded Giolitti’s, was unable and
unprepared to resist determined action. On 27 October Fascist riots
broke out in several Italian towns, and the Quadrumviri called on
Facta to resign. The following morning, in four converging
columns, the March on Rome began. The Government, stung at
last into action, proclaimed its intention to declare martial law, but
the King, fearing that this would mean civil war and already, in
any event, prepared to countenance a Fascist Government, refused
to sign the decree and so left the Government powerless. In despera
tion, as the Fascist columns closed on the capital, various leaders of
the Party were offered seats in a new coalition Government of the
Right under Antonio Salandra. Grandi and De Vecchi advised
Mussolini to accept. But he refused. He saw full power in sight now
and he was not prepared to compromise, although the fear that he
might have gone too far obsessed him.
He was still in Milan. His offices were surrounded by units of the
Army and the police, and he kept looking out of the window and
telephoning constantly for news. He was making a strenuous effort
to appear calm and controlled, but his excitement was close to
hysteria. When a squadron of tanks rolled through the streets
towards II Popolo dylta\ia he ran out of the building with a rifle
in his hands shouting incoherently and was nearly shot by a sup
porter even more excited than he was. In fact there was practi
cally no opposition to the march of Fascism. Both the Army
and the police were prepared to stand aside and let it take its
course.
At last a telephone message came from Rome calling him there
for a consultation with the King. ‘ I shall want it in writing/ he
said curtly, his confidence returning. A telegram arrived shortly
afterwards: ‘Very urgent. Top Priority. Mussolini—Milan. H.M.
the King asks you to proceed immediately to Rome as he wishes to
33
MUSSOLINI
offer you the responsibility of forming a Ministry. With respect—

Cittadini, General.'
He left by train that evening. As if to make his black shirt more
respectable he was wearing, in addition, a journalist delightedly
noticed, a bowler-hat and spats. When he presented himself to the
King he apologized for this unconventional attire. 4Please excuse
my appearance,' he said, and then added a dramatic comment both
predictable and unashamedly vainglorious: 41 come from the
battlefield.'
4
THE HEAD OF THE GOVERNMENT
28 O C T O B E R 1922- 13 J U N E 1924
The crowd loves strong men. The crowd is like a woman.

. . . Everything turns upon one9s ability to control it like
an artist.
‘I c o u l d have transformed this grey hall/ Mussolini reminded

the Chamber of Deputies in the first speech he made there after his
acceptance of the King’s request that he should form a Government,
‘ into an armed camp of Blackshirts, a bivouac for corpses. I could
have nailed up the doors of Parliament/
Although his Fascist supporters, most of whom did not get with
in forty miles of Rome, could easily have been overpowered by the
troops in the capital if the King had agreed to use them, it was not
in effect an unfounded boast; but having achieved power by the
threat of force he began to exercise it with restraint. The day follow
ing his meeting with King Victor Emmanuel he gave orders for
the 25,000 squadristi who were still camped outside Rome to be
brought into the capital by special trains and after marching past
the Quirinale to go peaceably home again. He punished severely
those who had been guilty of violence and seemed anxious to
demonstrate that he was now not only the leader of Fascism but
the Head of the Government of Italy. His Cabinet, which he had
formed within seven hours, included men from all the main politi
cal groups except the anti-nationalists, portfolios being given to
Social Democrats, Catholics and liberals. Only four F o i s t s were
included. 1 . 8 o l *3 £>
There could be no doubt, however, that he had come to Rome
not to preside over a coalition but to govern authoritatively and
personally through his own Party. He appointed himself Minister
of Foreign Affairs as well as Minister of the Interior and demanded
from the Chamber of Deputies full powers for a year to carry out
what he considered to be essential reforms. These powers were voted
to him by a majority of 275 votes to 90.
He set to work with an energy and determination which even his
severest critics could not but admire. He got up early, performed a
35
MUSSOLINI
variety of violent exercises until his hairy, barrel-shaped chest was

glistening with sweat, and then after a breakfast of fruit and milk,
rushed to his office, where he was at work by eight o'clock having
already read with astonishing speed several of the Italian and
foreign newspapers with which his rooms were always cluttered.
His meals were sparse, for the ulcer which was to trouble him in
creasingly for the rest of his life had already formed in his stomach;
and often he would have nothing at either lunch or dinner but
spaghetti with a little wholemeal bread, fresh vegetables and fruit,
preferably spinach and black grapes. He drank quantities of milk
and fruit juice, but, because of the ulcer, very little wine, and he had
not smoked since the war. He had once been fond of his food, but
now he ate hurriedly and without interest, proud of his Spartan
table and his rigorous abstinence at State banquets, attacking the
buongustai and the alcoolizzati for indulging in such decadent
pleasures. He had no pleasures himself, he insisted, he only had his
work. It was at this time largely true. He took fencing lessons and
boxing lessons, he swam and took up tennis, but those who taught
him or played with him believed he took this exercise not so much
because he enjoyed it as because he had a passion for physical fitness
and for the possession of a hard, strong body.1 He was, in fact,
becoming rather fat. His fingers were chubby and soft, and the flesh
of his massive jaw sagged when he did not remember to keep it
well thrust out. He looked older than thirty-nine, for his dark and
flashing eyes were heavily shadowed and the front part of his head
was quite bald and the hairs at the back were greying. But his
energy was indefatigable. Restless, impatient, vibrant, nervous, he
seemed never tired and never relaxed. Still compulsively sexual he
assaulted the various women who came to the room he took in a
hotel, and afterwards to his flat on an upper floor of a palazzo in
Via Rasella with a phrenetic passion which was always exciting and
often frightening. As impatient with them as with his less effective
Ministers, he ravished them as a conquering war-lord might ravish
his captured slaves, and seems to have enjoyed the process whoever
his companion might be. For his taste was wonderfully catholic. As
a young man he had preferred intellectual women and had had a
particular interest in schoolteachers. But now he liked all women
indiscriminately, provided they were not too thin; and his only
1 He had a horror of physical deformity and could summon no sympathy for

sickness, which embarrassed him. One day he met Prince Torlonia, who com
plained of a boil. *I once had a friend with the same trouble/ Mussolini told him
shortly; *he died almost at once.'
36
requirement was that they should smell strongly, either of scent if

their bodies had little natural smell or preferably of sweat. He did not
mind if they were not clean and often dabbed his own body with
eau-de-Cologne instead of washing. Totally uninhibited and wholly
egocentric, he gave little thought to his lovers' comfort or their
pleasure, often choosing the floor in preference to the bed, removing
neither his trousers nor his shoes. The whole uncontrolled process
was usually over in a minute or two. The women—unmarried
journalists and the wives of Fascists, countesses and maids, actresses
and foreign visitors—who then and later were ravished by Musso
lini in this way spoke of their experiences afterwards without regret
and frequently with pride. One of them, who had at first been dis
gusted by his habit of experimentally squeezing her breasts before
thrusting himself upon her, went back to him again because she
found herself unable to ‘ refuse a man of such importance \ Others
less conscious of his importance were enraptured by the unfettered
sensuality of his love-making, particularly when his brutality and
savage curses in the moments of climax were followed by words of
tenderness, however brief and however commonplace, when he was
satisfied. For Mussolini was capable, so most of these women have
said, of affection as well as of ferocity, of caresses, even of sentiment.
One of them has spoken of his habit of taking up his violin to play
some appropriate piece tocher as soon as he lifted himself from her
body. And all of them were agreed that despite his selfish rough
ness, broken only occasionally by flashes of affection, there was
something appealing in Mussolini's completely unselfconscious
clumsiness, his refusal to conform to any accepted patterns of
behaviour.
He carried this unconventionality into public life. He had not
shaved every day in Milan; he did not do so during these first few
months in Rome and went so far as to attend unshaven a reception
held at the Costanzi in honour of the King and Queen of Spain. The
clothes he wore on these occasions were often startling. His shirts
were not always clean and his shoes were rarely polished. The shoes,
however, were not often seen, as he had developed a taste for spats
which he wore buttoned high up his ankles in a fashion long out
moded. He had no interest in, nor indeed any conception of, fashion
and did not see why he should not wear spats with evening dress
if they kept his feet warm. Nor did he see why he should not wear
a black tie with tails, and he did so. He could not be bothered to
tie up shoelaces, so he had elastic laces with made-up bows. He
bought a morning suit for wearing at the office as the striped
37
MUSSOLINI
trousers and cut-away black coat appealed to him, but he did not
look well in it and was constantly wriggling his neck in the butterfly
collar and shaking back the cuffs of his starched shirt. When
Rachele came to Rome he looked a little better dressed than he had
done before; but at the beginning she stayed behind in Milan with
Edda and their two boys—Vittorio, bom in 1916 soon after they
were married, and Bruno, bom in 1918. Rachele did not want to
come to Rome. She was conscious of the fact that she looked and
talked like a Romagnol peasant and would feel out of place and
unhappy. She did not want to share Benito's public life but just to
remain a wife and a mother to his children, and she knew that was
all he expected or wanted from her. When friends had called to see
him in Via Merenda before the war, they had often found Rachele
doing the family's washing in the courtyard.
1Is he in? ' one of them called to her one day.
He was out, Rachele said, referring to him as ‘the m aster' as
wives do in the Romagna.
‘Where's he gone? '
‘ I don't know. He never tells me what he's doing.’
He never did. There was no resentment. Men were like this. It
was a happy marriage. She realized her husband was a donnaiuolo
and she was later to admit that she knewhe had about twenty mis
tresses—‘and what of it? ' she wanted t^ffnow; he loved his family
as well. Donnaiuoli usually do. She did not blame him. She was a
hard-working, capable housewife, loyal, humourless, sometimes ill-
tempered, often sulky. She was simple, but she had a peasant's
shrewdness. She understood little about her husband and less about
his work and always irritated him when she attempted to advise or
warn him, and so rarely did. Later when she moved to Rome she
was constantly receiving anonymous letters and telephone calls and
messages from her friends, but when she spoke to her husband he
would say sharply, ‘You know nothing about it.' And it was true,
and she did not mind him telling her so. ‘ He was always the best of
fathers and a good husband,' she said when he was dead, and that
was true as well.
‘W hat a character! ’ she is reported to have exclaimed, amused
and proud and puzzled, when told that Benito had been made Head
of the Government.
The men who had to work for him expressed their opinion of
him in similar terms. To some he was a genius, to others merely
louche, but to all remarkable. He was, of course, a brilliant propa
gandist and he did not hesitate to use this genius for publicity not
38
merely in order to project his own personality but to create an

image, part fact and part fantasy, of a man of destiny natively
cunning and widely learned. Often, it must be said, his anxiety to
demonstrate his cleverness was manifest and therefore absurd. The
German writer Emil Ludwig, to whom he granted a series of inter
views in 1932, while presenting in his Mussolinis Gespräche mit
Emil Ludwig the picture of an experienced and deeply read man,
gave at the same time the impression of one who could never let
pass an opportunity of showing off. Being an egotist he could not,
of course, bear to be laughed at—and it is interesting to reflect how
many actions of his life were prompted by a desire to have his
revenge on those whom he took to be guilty of this offence and
offences like it—but being also an unsophisticated man he constant
ly gave cause for men to laugh at him. ‘He never attempted to
correct my faulty Italian/ Ludwig said, ‘ but when, on one occasion,
I mispronounced a French name, the sometime schoolmaster peeped
out amusingly, and in a low tone he uttered it as it should have
been spoken. When, in his turn, he wanted to speak of the t/ra-
wertung aller Werte and, despite his intimate knowledge of our
language, made a slip, he corrected himself by adding " genitivus
pluralist’ ‘ Forgive my learned references/ was a phrase which he
often used when talking to members of his Government and the
gerarchi. Ulrich von Hassell, later to become German Ambassador
in Rome, and Filippo Anfuso, the Italian diplomat, both noted this
anxiety of the Duce’s to appear more learned than he was. Anfuso
tells the story of a conversation he once had with Mussolini and his
family during which the Duce commented on Nietzsche's excellent
knowledge of Greek. ‘But, Papa, you don’t know Greek! ’ one of
his children interrupted him in a piping voice, and when his father
affected not to have heard him he said it again. Mussolini felt
obliged to lead his guest from the room. Hassell recorded with con
tempt an occasion upon which Mussolini was photographed
winning at chess, a game which he did not even play. Hassell also
suspected, as many others did, that Mussolini’s celebrated memory
was little more than a trick, and that in order to impress his
listeners he committed various figures and statistics to memory
shortly before he intended bringing them out as if from a great
store of remembered knowledge. Ludwig, however, was taken in by
this and so were most of Mussolini’s Ministers, to whom he behaved
in a way calculated to inspire their fear and admiration. By turns
he was oudandishly rude and graciously charming, impetuous and
wary, ferocious and forgiving; they never knew how he would react
39
MUSSOLINI
to them or when they might be, as they often were, replaced with
out warning for no reason which they could understand, but which,
often enough, was because the Duce had felt their influence a threat
to his position on the pinnacle of power, where he was frankly
determined to remain. In the morning he would telephone a
Minister and without any greeting shout at him a string of peremp
tory instructions and then, a few hours later, he would telephone
again and speak to him perhaps as if he were his closest friend.
Unpredictable, excitable and glowing with vitality and the proud
knowledge of his power, he was as capable of arousing craven fear
by his anger as devotion by the benedictory peace of his forgiveness.
W ithin a few months of his rise to power, his success seemed
assured. The tumult of Italy had subsided into a mood of guarded
but admiring watchfulness. The workers went back to the factories,
production increased, the streets were quiet, the students took up
their books again. On assuming office he had no political programme
and contented himself with undertaking to balance the budget,
ensure a fair deal for the workers and conduct the country’s foreign
policy with determination and dignity. *We shall succeed/ he said,
*because we shall work/ And with the skill of the great propagan
dist that he was, he succeeded in impressing upon the people how
hard he worked himself, not only at his desk but in the factories
and fields encouraging the workers. Pictures of him laying bricks,
hammering with fierce concentration in smithies, cutting corn with
his great chest photographed as he liked to have it photographed,
naked and glistening in the sun, appeared daily in the Press.
The Italians followed his lead. He was the youngest Prime
Minister they had ever had, and most of them were proud of him.
They accepted with pleasure the restoration of the eight-hour day,
enormous cuts in Government expenditure (which had grown so
large under previous administrations that the estimated deficit for
1922-3 was 6,500 million lire), the transference to the retired list or
to other work of thousands of officials. Within two years a deficit in
the postal services of 500 million lire was converted, according to
Fascist calculations which have not been shown to be false, to a
surplus of 43 million lire and a deficit on the railways of 1,400
million lire was converted to a surplus of 176 million lire. And what
was more, Italians were proud to tell you, the trains ran on time.
The Italians, indeed, began to feel pride in many things. Fascism
seemed to work. Mussolini had the backing of the people and he
was careful to nourish the impression that he had saved them from
chaos and Bolshevism. The disillusion of the workers with their
40
Socialist leaders, their reaction against social-reformism and the

inability of the Italian Bolsheviks to agree on a common policy
had, in fact, done more to save them, and Mussolini himself realized
this; and, because he realized it, he was infuriated by those who
discovered and propagated the truth that Fascism was a counter
revolution against a revolution which never took place.4Bolshevism
in Italy ', he declared without undue exaggeration long before the
March on Rome, 4is dead/ But that it had come to power to save
the country from Bolshevism was one of Fascism's most assiduously
fostered myths. A second, which grew from it and became in the
end the principal tenet of faith, was the myth of the leader as
Superman and not only as the all-powerful, all-wise Duce del Fas
cismo who was never wrong, but who was also, like God himself,
just and merciful and benevolent. For Fascism, although its prophets
had at first proclaimed that it was a movement and not a doctrine—
4our programme/ Mussolini had said,4is deeds. We have no ready
made doctrine '—now presented itself as a moral force as much as a
political one. Authoritative, virile, austere and nationalist, the true
Fascist must, as the Duce explained, 4consider himself the devotee
of a faith of corporate discipline . . . the rightful descendant of
Caesar’. Fascism, in fact, as Professor Alfredo Rocco, one of its
early intellectuals, said, explaining the Duce's more abstruse and
often derivative philosophizing, 4rejects democratic theories of the
State and proposes that society does not exist for the individual but
the individual for society. Fascism does not abolish the indivi
dual as individuals have abolished society in other more primitive
doctrines, but subordinates him to society leaving him free to
develop his personality on lines which will benefit his fellow-men/
Attempts were made by Rocco and Gentile and other Fascist
apologists to show that the theory of Fascism was in no sense con
tradictory to the 4fundamental trends of Italian history \ Garibaldi
and Mazzini were shown to be Fascists at heart. But attempts like
these to explain Fascism intellectually or historically made little
impact upon the Italian people, and Mussolini himself once said
that they should only be made with a view to the effect that they
might have on the foreigner. The Italians, he thought, should not
try to understand Fascism, but experience it. They should not
think, they should feel. And it was in order to impress them with
its emotional nature that Fascism was presented as a ‘mystical
vision ’ with symbols and fetishes, liturgical formulas, and choreo
graphic techniques; with atavistic incantations, medieval trappings
and suggested affinities to the 4classic spirit of Rome \ Fascism, its
4i
MUSSOLINI
critics said, was a fraudulent substitute, a kind of mental and politi

cal margarine, as Ignazio Silone called it, but Mussolini saw virtue
in this. Fascism could replace truth, liberty, art and thought, as well
as Socialism and democracy, and it could above all, supremely above
all for him, provide the need for a leader and a prophet.
And in himself Fascism had such a man. In speeches all over the
country, painstakingly prepared but delivered as if spontaneously,
full of easily remembered catchwords and phrases, he developed
that eloquence and wonderful power of communication that he had
practised long ago in the Romagna. The dialogue with the crowd,
which had delighted the audiences of his home-land and which
D’Annunzio had found so inspiring in Fiume, thrilled a whole
country that felt itself awakened to a new and brilliant future under
the guidance of a man who could achieve anything. The repetitive
and meaningless cries, such as the ‘eia! eia! alalà!y invented by
D’Annunzio during the war, that became an essential part of the
ritual hysteria of Fascist demonstrations, increased the illusion of
unity and power, and heightened the fever of adulation.
And yet, the people were told, in spite of his consummate genius
the Duce was a simple man and a good one. When he had spoken
to the hungry peasants of the South and seen their dry and withered
skins the tears had poured from his eyes. 41 will care for you/ he
said. 41 too have known hunger.’ They believed him and they
trusted him.2
They were told too that he was modest. *1 do not feel myself
worthy of this honour,’ he said when created an honorary citizen
of Florence. He would only accept an honorary degree in law from
the University of Rome on condition that he wrote a thesis to
justify it, and when it was first offered to him he refused the collar
of the Order of the Annunziata, Italy’s most coveted decoration.
The refusal was not, as even his enemies admitted, entirely cal
culated. He had an apparently genuine lack of interest in such
things. Years later his Foreign Secretary described an occasion on
which he asked the Duce if he might award Baldur von Schirach
the Grand Cordon of San Maurizio. 4Certainly/ Mussolini replied
3Two stories illustrate the idolatry with which hundreds of thousands—if not
millions—of ill-educated Italians regarded their Duce. When Etna exploded and
he visited the endangered areas it was widely believed in the South that he had
succeeded where Canute had failed and checked the forces of nature; and at least
one newspaper reported it as a fact. When a visitor to the Etruscan tombs of
Orvieto was told that the inscriptions had not yet been deciphered, for they were
written in an unknown language, she replied confidently, ‘ Oh, that's because
Mussolini hasn't been here yet. When he comes he’ll find out.' This trusting con
fidence was not in the least exceptional.
4*
impatiently. *And you can give him my decorations too if you like/
Ciano also described another occasion when the Ministry of Fine
Arts were having difficulty in finding a work of art which would be
suitable as a present for Reichsmarshal Goering on his fiftieth birth
day. ‘At home the Duce only owns one good piece/ the Minister
wrote, ‘a self-portrait by Mancini. . . . Well, when he heard that
a gift had to be made to Goering . . . he immediately thought of
giving his Mancini. I had to argue a great deal to make him change
his mind. . . . The Duce's indifference to personal possessions is
moving/
Soon after coming to Rome he decided not to accept any salary
as either Premier or Minister or Deputy, living on the money he
received for the articles he still wrote, mainly for American papers
and from II Popolo d’Italia* He had a profound contempt for those
whose overriding ambition was to be rich. It was a mania, he
thought, ‘ a kind of disease ’, and he comforted himself with the
reflection that the rich were rarely happy, and he would refer with
satisfaction to Rockefeller, who had lived ‘ on milk and oranges for
the last sixteen years of his life \ But although he had no private
wealth, nor ever wanted it, Mussolini did not live austerely. He was
not a gourmet, his mistresses rarely received as presents so much as
a pair of stockings or a bottle of scent, his children went to State
schools, his wife lived simply, he wore the same suit day in and day
out for weeks on end, but he never, on the grounds of economy,
refrained from indulging a whim. He had taken flying lessons in
Milan, and now that he was qualified as a pilot he had his own
aeroplane and took it up whenever he felt inclined; he enjoyed
driving, and so ordered an expensive red sports car; he enjoyed
riding, and soon had a string of horses in his stables; he liked
reviewing the Fleet and the Army and later on he took immense
pleasure in air displays, and his opponents frequently accused him
of ordering these expensive demonstrations because of the personal
satisfaction they gave him; he was fond of animals, so when he had
grounds in which to keep them he had what amounted almost to
a zoo—not only horses and dogs, but gazelles, a monkey, an eagle,
a deer, a tiger cub, several cats which were his favourite animals,
even a puma which he kept on a leash in his room until it broke
loose one night and roamed through the house to the terror of the
* He remained uninterested in money to the end. It was with the greatest diffi
culty he was persuaded to accept a salary as President of the Social Republic in
1943. 1What do I want with all that money? * he asked when a secretary brought
him a decree prepared by one of his Ministers which allowed him 125,000 lire a
month; and he refused to sign it.
43
MUSSOLINI
staff; he liked films—particularly newsreels that showed him im

pressing a crowd and the comedies of Laurel and Hardy—so he had
his own cinema built. In addition to a seaside villa he had two large
houses—Villa Torlonia in Rome and in the Romagna, Rocca delle
Caminate, which was presented to him by the province of Forlì.
Villa Torlonia, a large, cool, graceful house of classical symmetry,
stands behind high walls in a lovely garden in Via Nomentana be
yond Piazza di Porta Pia. It belonged to Prince Giovanni Torlonia
of the Rome banking house, who offered to place it at the Duce’s
disposal for as long as he wanted it. Mussolini, who admired its
dignity and those deep ochre walls which give to the buildings of
Rome their incomparable loveliness, accepted the offer gratefully
and enjoyed living in the house well enough; but he liked to get
away whenever he could to Rocca delle Caminate, a feudal, battle-
mented castle perched on a high hilltop from which he could look
across the countryside of his youth to the Apennines in the south
and in the distance, eastwards, to the shores of the Adriatic. This
castle was a ruin when he was presented with it, but over the years
large sums were spent on its renovation, and it became filled with
the gifts which came to the Duce from all over the world, so that
outside his tastelessly furnished study, the walls of which were
lined with photographs, many of them depicting himself in his
various activities as sportsman, pilot, father and ruler, Rocca delle
Caminate was more like a museum than a house. Indeed, towards
the end of his life he told the German doctor, Professor Zachariae,
that that is what he hoped it would become. He also told him that
one item there, a painting on silk given to him by the Emperor of
Japan, was the finest of its sort in the world and that an American
millionaire had shocked him by offering him several million dollars
for it. But it was not his to sell, Mussolini reminded the American
curtly, it was not a personal possession, it belonged to Italy.
This identification of himself with his country, later to become so
obsessive that any attack on Italy was resented as a personal insult,
was part of the secret of the Duce’s firm hold on the loyalty and
imagination of his people. For the young, patriotic Italians of the
early nineteen-twenties, at least, the Duce’s arrogant nationalism
was his finest contribution to the new risorgimento. But it was not
only to these young men but to a large majority of the Italian
people as a whole that Mussolini seemed, in these early years of
power, an impeccable paragon. He could do litde wrong. He was care
ful enough to move so slowly and to act so unobtrusively that the con
struction of a new, illiberal State was scarcely noticed at first; he had
44
no settled policy, adopting ideas and methods as they came to hand,

solving problems fortuitously as they arose, now giving his régime
what he called a 4progressively Fascist ’ look by Gentile’s Education
Act of 1923, now making it appear sound and respectable by a
respectful attitude towards the susceptibilities of Catholic voters and
the Church. The growing suppression of liberty, which he felt able
to refer to publicly as a 4more or less putrid goddess ’, over which
Fascism had stepped and 4would if need be quietly turn round to
step over again ’, was accepted as a necessity if Italy was to become
strong and throw off the atrophy of dissension which had been
crippling her for years. The reduction of Parliament to an assembly
of ineffectuals was not regretted by those millions of Italians who
had agreed with Mussolini’s youthful description of it as 1a gather
ing of old fossils ’. The gradual denial of freedom to the Press, the
establishment of a regular Fascist Militia of nearly 200,000 men to
take the place of the ill-organized squadristi, many of whom were
incorporated in it, the enforced but weakly resisted dissolution of
the guardie regie, the spreading of Fascist ethics into every aspect of
Italian life which could be infected, even the violent punishments
dealt out to outspoken critics of the régime, were accepted by the
great majority of the people as essential prerequisites to the estab
lishment of the sort of Italy which was promised them .4The people,’
Mussolini declared in July 1924, ‘on the innumerable occasions
when I have been face to face with them and have spoken with them
close at hand . . . have never asked me to free them from a
tyranny which they do not feel because it does not exist. They have
asked me for railways, houses, drains, bridges, water, light and
roads.’ It was largely true. The benefits of Fascism were felt to out
weigh its disadvantages and faults.
Mussolini, himself, was exempted from most of the blame attend
ing the savage and squalid beatings-up of his opponents; and indeed
he did not, so far as can be known, specifically order them and
certainly took care not to appear the instigator. Only occasion
ally was his complicity made known, as when a French newspaper
discovered and published the facsimile of a telegram from Musso
lini to the Prefect of Turin in which orders were given for life to
be 4made impossible ’ for the dangerous anti-Fascist Pietro Gobbi,
who was beaten up so badly in Turin that his broken ribs punctured
a lung. Similarly in July 1923, according to Cesare Rossi, at that
time head of the Fascist Press Office, the Fascist headquarters in
Florence, Pisa, Milan and Monza and other smaller towns received
instructions from Mussolini to wreck the premises of the local
45
MUSSOLINI
Catholic associations. At the same time the prefects of each town

where an anti-Catholic demonstration had been held received a tele
gram from Mussolini which said: ‘In view unfavourable reper
cussions Vatican latest anti-Catholic incidents it would be well if
local leaders provincial Fascist Federation officially approached the
archiépiscopal see to present regrets renewing assurances of high
respect of Fascism for Catholicism/
The attempt of Fascist biographers to absolve Mussolini
altogether from the charges of connivance at crimes like these or to
ignore their existence is, to say the least, disingenuous. Once the
Press was brought largely under Fascist control the incidents were
only briefly reported and sometimes not at all; but it is certain that
they continued for some time and that the Duce made it known
within the Party that it was his conviction that, for Fascism to sur
vive, its enemies must be made to ‘ live in fear \
In the summer of 1924, however, millions of non-Fascists who
were prepared to overlook even the worst excesses of the régime in
the hope that they were the price which had to be paid for an
honourable future, were suddenly and deeply shocked by an outrage
which it was difficult to forgive and impossible to ameliorate.
Mussolini did not give orders for the outrage to be committed, nor
did he know that it was being contemplated, but his responsibility
for it is at least as great as Henry IFs for the murder of Thomas
Becket. Unlike Henry, however, Mussolini did not do public
penance at the victim's tomb.
46
5
THE DICTATOR
13 J U L Y 1924- 10 J U N E 1940
Liberty is not an end. It is a means. As a

means it must be controlled and dominated*
I n the summer of 1923 Mussolini had drafted a Bill, afterwards

known as the Acerbo Electoral Law, by which Italy was to be
divided into fifteen constituencies, each elector being asked to vote
for the party of his choice. The party which secured relatively the
largest number of votes, provided it was at least a quarter of the
total of votes cast, was to be granted two-thirds of the seats in
the Chamber, the remaining third being given to the other parties
on a proportional basis. Although the Bill met with opposition
from Socialists, Liberals and Catholics alike, most deputies had not
lost their confidence in Mussolini’s Government and were prepared
to support it or at least to abstain from voting against it. In July,
watched by armed Blackshirts in the public gallery, they passed
it by a large majority; and in November it was given an even larger
majority in the Senate. In April the following year the elections
were held, and the voters went to the polling-booths past the
watchful eyes of the Fascist Militia. Helped by the failure of his
opponents to agree on a common policy of opposition, and by the
intimidation of opposition newspapers, his appeal to the country
for support in continuing the work which had so far been accomp
lished was triumphant—65.23 per cent of the votes, excluding those
given for minority candidates prepared to support the Govern
ment, were cast in his favour. It was an overwhelming victory, the
largest majority given to a Government since the time of Cavour,
and it had been achieved, so the Fascists could boast, without
physical bullying except in some isolated instances.
Fascism, having achieved power by the threat of force, was now
confirmed in power by the will of the people. Mussolini, immensely
encouraged by his success, considered a return to normal political
conditions and even some form of collaboration with the Socialists.
On 7 June, after the newly elected Chamber had given the Govern-
47
MUSSOLINI
ment a vote of confidence of 361 to 107, Mussolini indicated that

he was prepared to include two Socialists in his Cabinet.
Three days later a Socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, a rich—
Mussolini called him ‘a millionaire’—landowner from Rovigo,
disappeared from Rome. He was one of Fascism’s most outspoken
critics and was believed to be about to publish documents exposing
the activities of its most irresponsible and ruthless henchmen. On
13 June his body was discovered buried in a shallow grave twenty
kilometres outside the city.
The murder of the brave and respected man reached the head
lines of newspapers all round the world. While Fascist apologists
referred to him as an insignificant and malicious agitator whose
death was a ‘regrettable incident’, liberals everywhere spoke of
him as one of the great heroes and martyrs of Socialism whose
name would be remembered for ever. And so it is; and Mussolini
is remembered as his murderer; and so in a sense he was, but not
in the sense that his enemies have insisted. Carlo Silvestri, an anti-
Fascist journalist, who saw much of Mussolini during the last few
months of his life, was convinced that he knew nothing of the plot
and had no responsibility for it. Signora Matteotti was also con
vinced that Mussolini had nothing to do with her husband’s death
and that he was deeply upset by it. At an anti-Fascist court set up
in 1947 to re-try the survivors of the episode these views were
generally confirmed, and it was suggested that the murderers—
extremist Fascists disturbed by Mussolini’s apparent drift towards
parliamentarianism—had not intended to kill Matteotti but only
to beat him up in the way that they had beaten up his supporters
and that his death was actually due to a heart attack. Certainly
Mussolini’s behaviour after the murder is scarcely consistent with
that of an assassin or an accomplice. ‘ I did not have a moment of
doubt or discouragement,’ he boasted in his autobiography; but in
fact, for several weeks, he was in a state of anxiety verging on
hysteria. ‘His life’, Margherita Sarfatti says, ‘seemed completely
wrecked.’ He maintained a brave front in public, but in private his
distress was pitiable, and he told Silvestri that he considered hand
ing in his resignation. When a woman friend offered him sympathy
he broke down. ‘ My worst enemies ’, he said, ‘ could not have done
me as much harm as my friends.’
Two days after the discovery of the body the Socialist Deputier
and their allies, led by Giovanni Amendola, whose brave and final
condemnatory speech was interrupted by a savagely angry Musso
lini twenty-seven times, withdrew from the Chamber and formed
48
THE DICTATOR
an opposition group, which received a degree of support which

would have been unthinkable a week before. Known as I deputati
dell9Aventino, in memory of the Roman plebs who had withdrawn
to the Aventine Hill in protest against the aristocracy, they
reminded the country of Mussolini’s recent attacks on Matteotti
and II Popolo dyItalia's declaration that ' if Matteotti gets his head
broken, he will only have himself and his obstinacy to th an k ’.
Hoping that their action would persuade the hesitant King to use
his influence in support of parliamentary Government, they
demanded the repression of all acts of violence by Fascists and the
disbandment of the Fascist Militia. Each evening when Mussolini
left his office at Palazzo Chigi to go home, a crowd of people stood
in silence to watch him reproachfully; and in the streets of Rome
anti-Fascist slogans appeared in hundreds on the walls.
Four well-known Fascists—Giovanni Marinelli, the administra
tive secretary of the Party, Filippo Filippelli, editor of the Corriere
Italiano, Cesare Rossi, head of the Fascist Press Office, and Filippo
Naldi—were all arrested as accomplices. But the clamour did not
die down. Towards the end of the month those opposition news
papers which had not already come under Fascist influence became
more outspoken than ever before, and on 8 July Mussolini brought
into force a decree which provided for the suspension of publication
of newspapers that continued to print what was interpreted as
being seditious matter or incitements to violence. In this way one
of Italy’s most influential papers, the Corriere della Sera of Milan,
was later taken out of the hands of the anti-Fascist Senator Alber
tini and passed into the hands of an editor who was prepared to
support Mussolini. Several other liberal and democratic newspapers,
including La Stampa, were similarly forced into Fascist hands. One
of those that for the time being escaped, however, Amendola’s
paper II Mondo, published at the end of December a document
which ended Italy’s six months of uneasy opposition to the Fascists.
It was a statement by Cesare Rossi, the former head of the Fascist
Press Office who had been arrested after the murder, accusing
Mussolini of being implicated in the plot. The Duce gave up all
hope of reconciliation with the liberals. Accepting the advice of
Roberto Farinacci, a former railway clerk who had become a lawyer
and one of Fascism’s most intransigent leaders, and of various
former squadristi who had come from all over Italy to bolster up
his apparently flagging confidence, he announced in the Chamber,
five days after Rossi’s allegations had been published, that he had
stayed his hand against his perfidious opponents only to calm his
49
MUSSOLINI
more impetuous followers. But now the time for action had come.
‘ I declare here in front of this assembly,’ he said, ‘ and in front of
the Italian people that I and I alone assume the political, moral
and historic responsibility for everything that has happened. If
misquoted words are enough to hang a man, then out with the
noose and the gallows 1 If Fascism has been castor oil and club and
not a proud passion of the best Italian youth, the blame is on me.
If Fascism has been a criminal plot, if violence has resulted from
a certain historic, political and moral atmosphere, the responsi
bility is mine, because I have deliberately created this atmos
phere. . . . Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will
give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.’
The date was 3 January 1925. It was one of the fundamental
dates in the history of Fascism.
Thereafter there was no further thought of compromise, no turn
ing back. Although the Matteotti murder had provoked a wide
spread reaction against Fascism in a suddenly disillusioned country,
it had also shown how weak and disorganized were its opponents
and how few of them were prepared actively to resist it. Within
five years Mussolini was able, with the help of Roberto Farinacci,
the newly appointed Secretary of the Party, to achieve his declared
object—the ‘ complete Fascistization ’ of Italy. Most of the remain
ing free newspapers were either suppressed or came under Fascist
control. A few self-styled independent papers remained, but were
so colourless as to be treated with contempt by the State and with
indifference by its opponents. Opposition parties were dissolved,
and free elections came to an end. The Chamber of Deputies
became little more than a means of clothing Fascist decrees with
an aura of national approval; the Senate was filled with senatori
prepared to wear black shirts when required and to chant Fascist
slogans; the Grand Council of Fascism, formed by Mussolini who
became its president with full powers to decide its agenda and its
membership, was grafted on to the Constitution as a check on any
independence which might be displayed by individual members of
the Cabinet. Nominated podestà took the place of elected mayors
in an increasingly centralized autarchy. The Fascist Party song,
Giovinezza, was sung at all the flamboyant, choreographic displays
which the Duce loved, and often instead of the Marcia Reale, for
the Party was now taken to be synonymous with the State. Strikes
and lock-outs were declared to be incompatible with the new,
elaborately involved and characteristically corrupt Corporative
System, which, Mussolini said, was ‘ destined to become the civiliza-
50
THE DICTATOR
tion of the twentieth century \ In this Corporativism, a less com

plicated form of which had been evolved in D'Annunzio’s Fiume,
all labour conflicts were to be referred to labour tribunals, which
were attached to the courts of appeal and purported to represent
both employers and employed. As all union officials in the twenty-
two different categories of trades and professions were eventually
appointed by the Party, the Corporative System became in time a
convenient mask for dictatorship. More obviously illiberal were
the laws which were directed against Freemasonry and against
anti-Fascist Italians living abroad and those which extended the
authority of the Head of the Government.
As in all totalitarian régimes, particular attention was paid to
the young; and children from the age of four were dragooned into
Fascist youth organizations, which supplied them with toy
machine-guns and black shirts. These measures, each one taken
with the intention of imposing an essentially and indisputably
Fascist character on the State and all its institutions and citizens,
and of securing—on the Russian Bolshevik model—the hold of the
State on all the country’s media of information, aroused little
opposition amongst the mass of the Italian people, who did not
quarrel with the Government’s repeatedly voiced contention that
whereas a responsible opposition would have been tolerated and
even welcomed, a mischievous, anti-national, scandalmongering,
hypocritical and factious opposition could not be. Totalitarian as
they were, the laws were accepted—as the more moderate early
Fascist laws had been accepted—as a fair price to pay for the new
Italy which was already astonishing the world.
For, after years of recurrent economic crises, Italy’s exchange
seemed steady at last, and the country was enjoying a prosperity
general to the whole of Europe but ascribed to the advent of
Fascism and its determination to achieve self-sufficiency through
a planned economy. Although, in fact, he never comprehended the
problems of economics and commerce, Mussolini was quick to
accept the credit for a period of recovery which had already begun
before he came to power, just as he was quick later on to accept the
credit for the country's recovery after a slump which was at least
partly caused by his own policies. On the surface the credit did not
seem misplaced. In his determination to settle the country’s
crippling war debt to the United States, he sailed to Washington
with his Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Dino Grandi, and
concluded an agreement whereby a large reduction was secured.
In his determination to win what he called the ‘ battle for wheat ’,
51
MUSSOLINI
he toured the country making speeches to the ‘brave farmers,

fighting in the front line’; and each year the crops grew bigger.
Already by 1925 there was a crop of 64 million quintals in com
parison with a pre-war average of 49 million. In his determination
to make Italy the powerful, modern state of his imagination he
instituted a programme of public works hitherto unrivalled in
modern Europe. Bridges, canals and roads were built, hospitals and
schools, railway stations and orphanages; swamps were drained and
land reclaimed and irrigated, forests were planted and universities
endowed. By the end of the nineteen-thirties immense schemes had
been completed not only on the Italian mainland but in Sicily and
Sardinia, Albania and Africa, and even more grandiose schemes
were promised, planned and contemplated. In these years, Fascist
statisticians boasted, never less than 100,000 labourers were engaged
on public works, and by the summer of 1939 170,000 men were
working on roads and irrigation schemes in Albania alone. Between
1922 and 1942 the Ministry of Public Works spent 33,634 million
lire on such enterprises. Archaeological works were financed in an
effort to awaken the people to the memories of their glorious past.
‘ In five years/ Mussolini told Rome’s City Council, ‘ this city must
appear wonderful to the whole world, immense, orderly and power
ful, as she was in the days of the first empire of Augustus. The
approaches to the theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio, and the
Pantheon must be cleared of everything that has grown up round
them during the centuries of decadence. W ithin five years the hill
of the Pantheon must be visible through an avenue leading from
Piazza Colonna. . . . The third Rome will extend over other hills,
along the banks of the sacred river, as far as the shores of the
Tyrrhenian Sea.’
But although much that was undeniably imposing and impres
sive was done, performance in the field of public works, as in the
field of economic development and industrialization and indeed in
most fields of Fascist enterprise, fell far below both intention and
claims. Work was begun but often left unfinished, and immense
sums of money disappeared on impossibly grandiose plans or drifted
into the pockets of corrupt officials and high-ranking Fascists
anxious to make their fortunes while the going was good. Mean
while, behind the façade of well-advertised schemes of moderniza
tion and welfare services, half a million people were still existing in
conditions of pitiable squalor. For the sake of the tourists, beggars
were kept off the streets by the police; but poverty was not lessened
by being kept out of sight. For the sake of victory in the battaglia
52
THE DICTATOR
del grano, farmers were given medals and subsidies for helping to
cut wheat imports; but the farming industry was seriously affected
by this concentration on cereals, which were not, and never had
been, an economical agricultural product for Italy. Thousands of
small farmers and discontented peasants left the land, while noth
ing was done to break up the vast landed estates which were one of
the main causes of their discontent. As year followed year wages and
conditions of work in the towns as well as in the country failed to im
prove at the rate they did in most other countries in Western Europe.
And yet few blamed the Duce. Fascism was seen to be imperfect;
but its founder was still the man of destiny. There might be anti-
Fascists, but there were few anti-Mussolinians. Hardly anyone
questioned him. He was not only a dictator. He was an idol. Photo
graphs of him were cut out of newspapers and stuck on the walls of
thousands of homes, slogans in praise of him were splashed in
white paint everywhere, glasses that he had drunk from and pick-
axes that he had used during his extensive tours were prized as
holy relics. In 1929 when he settled a problem which had been
dividing Italy since 1870 and signed with the Vatican the agree
ment known as the Lateran Pacts, his popularity reached new
heights. Every former anti-clerical statement and blasphemous
attack on ‘ the small and insignificant Christ ’ was forgiven or for
gotten by his former Catholic critics, who recognized in the Lateran
Pacts the beginning of a new and satisfactory relationship between
Church and State. His equivocal attitude to Catholicism and
Christianity, which led him at one moment to speak of himself as
*profoundly religious. . . . A Catholic and therefore a Christian '
and at another moment to profess himself an unbeliever, was over
shadowed by the new official Fascist presentation of the Duce as
a practising Catholic.
He was, in fact, never more than an intermittent Catholic. He
was, on the contrary, and always had been, extremely superstitious
and was quite unashamed of being so. He was seen frequently in
public to put his hand in his pocket to touch his testicles to guard
himself from the gaze of someone whom he suspected of having
the evil eye. He had strange beliefs also, Margherita Sarfatti says,
‘about the moon, the influence of its cold light upon men and
affairs and the danger of letting its rays shine on your face when
you are sleeping'.1 He was proud of his skill in interpreting dreams
1 The belief in the malign influence of moonlight was perhaps inherited from
his father, who blamed its rays for an attack of scurvy he once suffered when he
was in prison in 1902.
53
MUSSOLINI
and omens and in telling fortunes by cards, and he always enjoyed

having his own fortune told and his palm read; and one clair
voyante who had, to his own satisfaction at least, forecast the
Matteotti murder so impressed him that he even sent his Chief of
Police to consult her when faced with an apparently insoluble
problem. One evening, after reading in The Times of the treasures
discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen and of the maledictions
invoked by the Egyptians upon those who disturbed their remains,
he rushed to the telephone to give orders that a mummy which had
been given to him and which had been placed in a salon at Palazzo
Chigi must be removed immediately. The drawers of his desk were
full of charms and religious objects which admirers had given to
him and which he never dared to throw away; and to the end of
his life he wore round his neck a scapular which his mother had
bequeathed to him and an ancient medal which the King’s mother,
Queen Margherita, one of his most devoted admirers, had asked
him to keep in memory of her. These charms protected him, he
said, from death at the hands of his enemies.
The first of four attempts on his life was made on 4 November
1925, when the Socialist ex-Deputy Tito Zaniboni—according to
Mussolini ‘a drug-addict in the pay of Czechoslovakia’—was
arrested near Palazzo Chigi in a hotel room from which he had
intended shooting the Duce as he came out to take the salute at
a military review. Five months later an Irishwoman, the Hon.
Violet Gibson, shot at him as he was on his way to visit Tripoli.
But only after a fourth attempt was made at Bologna on 31 October
1926, and a boy whom Mussolini did not think was the culprit was
lynched by the mob, did the Duce take reprisals. His previous
tolerance was highly praised; his action now against the Freemasons
and Socialists was considered no more than just; his bravery and
coolness on each occasion was admired. ‘FancyI ’ he said without
apparent concern after Miss Gibson’s bullet had grazed the bridge
of his nose, ‘ Fancy ! A woman 1 ’ ‘ If I go forward,’ he shouted to a
group of officials after his face had been bandaged, ‘ follow me I If
I go back, kill me I If I die, avenge me I ’ Immediately after one of
the other attempts he received a visit from the British Ambassador,
who did not realize that it had been made until he heard the shouts
of thanksgiving in the streets below the window.2
3 King Victor Emmanuel, also physically courageous, behaved in a similarly

admirable way when a youth tried to assassinate him in Tirana in 1941. ‘ That
boy,’ he said calmly to the Albanian Prime Minister, who was sitting opposite
him in the carriage, ‘ is a poor shot, isn’t he? ’
54
THE DICTATOR
'God*, the Secretary of the Party declared to wildly cheering

crowds, ‘ has put his finger on the Duce. He is Italy’s greatest son,
the rightful heir of Caesar.’
‘Duce! Duce! Duce! 9 the crowds responded. ‘We are yours to
the end.’
As the months went by and the triumphs were multiplied, the
set-backs discounted or denied, the legends created and sustained,
the truth distorted or suppressed, the image of the Duce as benevo
lent Superman loomed ever more pervasive in the public mind.
His inconsistency, his superficialities, his vanity in public, his
dangerous belief that he could always master and solve a problem
with speed, decision and correctness, his constant dismissals of
Ministers, Party Secretaries and officials in case anyone should
build himself up as a rival, as Balbo had once tried to do, the petti
ness which made him order Italian journalists to hiss Haile Selassie
when he came to speak on behalf of Abyssinia before the League
of Nations, the concentration of power in his own hands so that at
one time he was not only Prime Minister, Foreign Minister,
Minister of the Interior and President of the Grand Council, but
Minister for Corporations, Commander-in-Chief of the Militia
and Minister of the Navy, Army, and Air Force as well—all these
things were forgiven or ignored, suppressed or unknown.
There were, of course, the dissident ones, the isolated voices cry
ing for freedom and for deliverance from the bad taste, the
intellectual vulgarity, and shallow materialism of the Fascists, but
they were generally disregarded, even despised. Success and esteem
seemed better than political freedom; guaranteed wages better
than the right to strike in an impoverished industry. Brilliant and
courageous anti-Fascists, such as Ignazio Silone, working against
the State either from abroad or in Italy were few, and for the most
part made little impression on a people not so much bullied as
coerced and deluded into conformity. Liberty, it was suggested by
the Fascists, was not of much importance to a peasant who fears
the return of hunger. Those writers and intellectuals and the kind
of political and social agitator that the Duce himself had once been,
who protested and reminded the people of the dangers of submis
sion, were removed, or more often constrained or bribed into
obedience and sometimes even into open support by a policy which
Mussolini referred to with frank cynicism as one of *the olive and
the club’. And those other writers, artists and scientists, who
found good reasons to remain silent, could pretend to hope that
authoritarianism would come to an end when the emergency was
55
MUSSOLINI
over or that Fascism could be reformed from within; and, in the

meantime, they could at least point with satisfaction to the lenience
with which the non-conformists were treated. Exile abroad, to the
Mediterranean islands or the villages of Calabria, and imprison
ment in the few and rarely vicious confini were compared
with the death in the torture-chamber, the life-long incarceration
in the concentration-camp or the years in the forced-labour mines
which awaited the outcasts in more intolerant dictatorships. The
punitive expeditions of local Fascist gangs, which, uncontrolled by
the police, degraded their opponents by forcing them to swallow
castor oil or to eat live toads in public, were disgusting; but they
could be compared with the relative freedom granted to such
opponents of the new Fascism as Benedetto Croce. The OVRA3
seemed an almost harmless institution when compared with the
OGPU or the Gestapo; and its chief, Arturo Bocchini, was sardonic
but not, despite his subsequent reputation, malevolent. By 1927 the
Duce, assured of his success, and conscious of the fact that Matteotti
was all but forgotten, felt able to tell his prefects that squadrismo
was no longer necessary and that ‘ the period of reprisals, devasta
tion and violence is over \
Mussolini had never for a moment considered himself unjust.
Emil Ludwig once asked about his own prison experiences. ‘“ I
have tasted prison in various countries,” Mussolini said, leaning
forward into the light of the tall standard lamp, laying both his
arms on the table as is his way when he wants to explain something
clearly or to relate an anecdote. At such times/ Ludwig went on,
‘ he is especially genial, thrusting his chin forward, pouting his lips
a little, while fruitlessly endeavouring to mask his good humour
by knitting his eyebrows. “ I have tasted prison in various countries,
eleven times in all. . . . It always gave me a rest which otherwise
I should not have been able to get. That is why I do not bear my
jailers a grudge. During one of my terms of imprisonment I read
Don Quixote and found it extraordinarily am using/"
41 suppose that is why you clap your political opponents in jail? ’
Ludwig asked ironically, and he smiled. ‘ But does not the memory
of your own prison experiences sometimes give you pause? ’
‘“ By no means 1 It seems to me that I am perfectly consistent.
They began by locking me up. Now I pay them back in their own
•_ » »
com.
It was, indeed, difficult to believe that this man—disingenuous as
his arguments were—was capable of the excesses usually expected
3 Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo.
56
THE DICTATOR
of a dictator. He was—and in this the public estimate was just—

not a cruel man. He was stern, he could be unforgiving, he was
often cynical and disconcertingly remote; but he was, behind the
blusterings of the tyrant and the marble-like impassivity which he
delighted to impose upon his massive face, both emotional and
compassionate. Margherita Sarfatti tells the story of his decorating
‘ a number of men well on in years ’ with the Star of Labour. He
began with a formal embrace for the old man at the head of the
line, but by the time he had reached the far end he was hugging
the others and chatting to them with an excitement which was so
infectious that they ‘ might have found in him a long-lost brother \
M. H. H. Macartney, the Rome correspondent of The Times dur
ing the nineteen-thirties, describes two other occasions when the
Duce was overcome by his emotions. The first was on hearing of
the death of his brother, the news of which had been brought to
him by Admiral Count Costanzo Ciano, the Foreign Secretary’s
father. Mussolini broke down completely and wept on the old
admiral’s shoulder without reserve. He broke down too, Macartney
says, when he was presented with a doll at a reception given by the
President of the Foreign Press Association for the foreign corre
spondents in Rome. It was a gift for his youngest daughter Anna
Maria, who was recovering from meningitis, the disease from which
his mother had died. . . . ‘ The tears rushed to his eyes,’ said the
Daily Mail's correspondent, who was also there. ‘ He took the doll
and stood up for a moment, clearing his throat as if about to speak.
Then in a strained whisper he said to Signor Alfieri, the Press
Minister, “ I can’t reply. You must say something.” The Duce
walked away and stood with his back turned, looking out of the
window.’ He wept again in a paroxysm of sorrow when his second
son, Bruno, was killed in the war; and when the widow came to
receive her husband’s gold medal at a public investiture, carrying
Mussolini’s grand-daughter Marina, who held out her arms to him,
Ciano saw in his eye ‘ a light that betrayed everything his iron will
had sought to h id e’ and felt himself very close to his father-in-
law’s ‘ heart and to his sorrow ’.
He was passionately fond of his five children. He loved to play
with them and to teach them games. Photographs of him with
them appeared regularly in the national Press, where he was pre
sented not only as a great sportsman, a brilliant horseman and a
fine aircraft pilot, but as a devoted uomo casalingo—Italy’s most
perfect example of a family man. The fact that he was also a
donnaiulo was, however, little known. Occasionally a scandalous
57
MUSSOLINI
story was printed in a foreign newspaper, but the Italian public

remained strangely ignorant of their Duce’s proclivities, which he
himself took pains to conceal. One of his earlier mistresses, for
instance, a strange, neurotic woman, Ida Dalser, by whom he had
had a mentally retarded and physically deformed child, was for
years a constant source of anxiety to him. In the end she proved
so savage in her resentment when he finally broke off his relation
ship with her that she had to be confined to a mental hospital. Ever
since 1913 she had been insisting that Mussolini had promised to
marry her, or had in fact done so, and that she could not be
bought off with a maintenance allowance. She came often, Cesare
Rossi said, to the offices of II Popolo d’Italia in Milan, and once
when she came with her son on her hip she shouted to Mussolini
to come down if he dared, and he went to the window to threaten
her with a pistol. On another occasion she was arrested for causing
a breach of the peace in Trento, where she had set fire to the furni
ture in a bedroom of the Hotel Bristol, screaming hysterically that
she was the Duce’s wife. She died in a mental hospital at Venice in
1935, and her son, Benito, died in another one near Milan in 1942.
But of all this the Italian people, with few exceptions, know noth
ing. Shortly after Ida Dalser’s death, however, Mussolini became
involved in a scandal which it was impossible to conceal. A French
actress, Magda Corabœuf, whose stage name was Fontanges, came
to Rome in 1937 to interview the Duce for La Liberté. She would
not return to Paris, she declared openly, until he had made love to
her. ‘I stayed in Rome two months,’ she boasted later, ‘and the
Duce had me twenty times.’ Revelations such as these, framed in
more prosaic but no less revealing language, appeared in the Press,
and Mussolini made it known to the police and the French Embassy
that Mile Fontanges was no longer welcome in Rome. She reacted
violently, first by trying to poison herself and then by shooting and
wounding the French Ambassador, the Comte de Chambrun, who,
she said, had made her ‘ lose the love of the world’s most wonderful
man ’. When she was arrested over three hundred photographs of
Mussolini were found in her flat.4 During the time that Mussolini
was having his brief affair with her, he had already begun a much
more deeply emotional affair with another young woman, for whose
body he was later to develop an insatiable appetite.
She was Claretta Petacci, the daughter of a doctor and the wife
4 She was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for malicious wounding and
served a second sentence after the war for having been an Axis agent. She
poisoned herself in Geneva in i960.
58
THE DICTATOR
of a lieutenant in the Italian Air Force from whom she later

obtained a divorce in Hungary. Mussolini met her, it seems, on the
road to Ostia in 1932. He was sitting in the back seat of his Alfa
Romeo and turned round to look at Claretta as he was driven past
her. She was waving and shouting ‘ Duce! Duce!9 and she looked
so excited and pretty that he told the driver to stop. He got out of
his car and walked back towards her, and she trembled with excite
ment, she said afterwards, when he spoke to her.
r She was a pretty girl with green eyes and long, straight legs and
those large and heavy breasts which he liked his women to have,
and her voice was delightfully husky. Her clothes were tastelessly
fussy, and her black hair was tightly curled in the same frippery
style. Her upper lip was short and her teeth were small, so that
when she smiled she showed her gums until she learned to smile
with her lips only slightly parted. She was generous, hysterical,
vain, obsessively sentimental and fundamentally stupid. Her devo
tion to Mussolini was complete and touching. She was often ill
with real and imagined ailments, and once when she had a mis
carriage she nearly died of peritonitis and Mussolini visited her
regularly, impressing her parents with the obvious sincerity of his
concern and even insisting on being present at her operation.
Usually she went to him at Palazzo Venezia, entering by a side
door and going up by the lift to a flat on an upper floor where the
Duce visited her, sometimes going up for a few minutes only, to
fornicate urgently between one interview and the next.
Like most compulsive donnainoli Mussolini was a lonely man.
He had few friends and no intimate ones, and even seemed proud
of this fact. 4If the Eternal Father were to say to me, “ I am your
friend,” ' he often boasted, ‘I would put up my fists to h im ’; and
‘If my own father were to come back to the world, I would not
place my trust in him / ‘I have not known the warmth of real
friendship/ he said in a gentler mood at the end of his life,
‘although I have loved many women. But I don’t mean that. I
mean a strong and unbreakable bond of intimate affection between
two men. I have not known that since my brother Arnaldo died/
Arnaldo died in December 1931, and to commemorate his love
for him Benito wrote a book in which his affection not only for
him, but for his parents too, is sincerely and movingly evoked.
Unlike the writing of his autobiography and the self-consciously
emotional passages in Parlo con Bruno which he wrote during the
war after the death of his second son in an aeroplane accident,
Vita di Sandro e di Arnaldo contains many pages of great beauty.
59
MUSSOLINI
After reading those which describe the author’s family and the
lovely countryside in which he was born, Giovanni Gentile said
that no man who was a tyrant could have written them. It was an
extravagant claim, but an understandable one. And it was prob
ably true that they were written from the heart, for Mussolini did
not have the ability to recognize beauty in a work of art.
Margherita Sarfatti describes an occasion when they were look
ing at the tapestries in the Vatican museum together. He could
not find much beauty in th em .4W hat are they when all’s said and
done? ’ he said. ‘Just bits of material.’ Even the Vatican itself did
not greatly impress him—only its size. ‘ W hat a lot of rooms,' he
said like a little boy in a palace,4and how big they are. They knew
how to build then.’
Hitler also noticed Mussolini’s lack of appreciation of any of the
visual arts, and on a visit to the Pitti and Uffizi galleries in Florence
in 1938 he was shocked by the Duce’s obvious boredom. Later, at
Naples, Mussolini’s indifference to the pictures he had taken Hitler
to see shocked the Führer again. When he 4had looked at three
pictures ’, Hitler said, 4he could not bear any more. Consequently
I saw nothing of them myself.’ Mussolini was never able to sympa
thize with the Italians’ pride in their great artistic heritage and
could not understand the dismay caused by the Fascist Govern
ment’s gift of Myron’s Discobolus to Hitler, who had expressed
admiration for it on his visit to Rome. He also refused to sympa
thize with their fear that their works of art might be destroyed by
British or American bombs during the war.
But although painting and sculpture and all objects of art and
of virtu left him puzzled and unmoved, and although a visit to
the opera drove him to boredom and, so his son Vittorio says, even
tually to sleep, literature continued throughout his life to exercise
upon him a compelling fascination which was none the less sincere
because while flaunting his literary taste he had a secret passion
for cheap and erotic novels.5 It was one of his great sorrows, so he
5 Ignazio Silone, of course, disagrees with this view. In his brilliant anti-
Fascist book The School for Dictators he makes one of his characters say when
commenting on Mussolini’s account of his father reading Machiavelli^ The
Prince to him every Saturday night : 1Our knowledge of Mussolini’s father makes
it certain that the last thing he was capable of on Saturday nights was reading
anything to anybody. Mussolini’s only object in encouraging such legends is to
create an impression. He uses medieval uniforms and rides on horseback for the
same purpose. It is Mussolini’s great good fortune that throughout his life he has
read and still reads nothing but newspapers. However, as a talented journalist, he
is able to talk and write arrogantly about all the things that he knows nothing
whatever about.'
60
THE DICTATOR
later complained, that Fascism had not produced a single great

poet, or even a worthwhile writer.
41 wouldn’t complain,’ he said, ‘ if there was even just one good
Fascist book. But what have we had? Ill-written claptrap! I’d
rather have well-written abuse than that.’ Despite the absurdities of
Fascist censorship, which banned the books of Robert Graves and
Axel Munthe (among many others) from the public libraries, he
may even have meant it.
In a recent interview Alberto Moravia spoke of his satirical anti-
Fascist book La Mascherata, which he wrote on Capri in 1940.
*We were in the full-flood of war, Fascism, censorship, etc. The manu
script, once ready, like all manuscripts had to be submitted to the
Ministry of Popular Culture for approval. This Ministry, let me ex
plain, was overrun with grammar-school teachers who received three
hundred lire for each book they read. And, of course, to preserve
the sinecures, whenever possible they turned in negative judgments.
Well, I submitted the manuscript. But whoever read it, not wishing
to take any position on the book, passed it to the Under-Secretary;
the Under-Secretary, with similar qualms, passed it to the Secretary;
the Secretary to the Minister; and the Minister finally to Mussolini.’
‘I suppose, then,* the interviewer said, ‘you were called on the
carpet? ’
‘ Not at all. Mussolini ordered the book to be published.’
‘O h !’
‘ He was not a bad man.’
‘This interview, you realize, is being published abroad. Abroad,
Mussolini is seen in quite a different light.’
' But we understand what Mussolini was. I hope thatf doesn’t make
us Fascists. His worst fault was his abysmal ignorance of foreign
affairs. If he had had a foreign policy as clever as his domestic one
perhaps he’d be Duce today.*2
Although too casual and too tolerant of the nonconformist ever

to be guilty of the excesses of the National Socialist régime in Ger
many, the Fascist State in Italy was nevertheless by the end of 1936
one in which the doctrine of Gleichschaltung was a dominating in
fluence. In order to force the Italians to live up to the Fascist ideals
of discipline and duty, determined, strenuous and often absurd
attempts were made to impose upon them a rigidity and unifor
mity of behaviour wholly alien to their character and alien also to
61
MUSSOLINI
the early and irresponsible Fascist motto ‘Me ne frego’ (‘I don’t
care a damn ’). It was now, as the Duce himself never tired of saying,
‘ the classic and historical responsibility ’ of Fascism to insist on the
‘ severa osservanza dello stile fascista just as it was the duty of the
Fascist to set an example of efficiency, decisiveness, dinamismo, in
contrast to the laxness of pre-Fascist Italian life and to the way of
life in the Western Democracies, which was characterized as seden
tary, traditionalist, bourgeois and pantofolaie—as decadent as
carpet-slippers. ‘ Live dangerously ’, ‘ Life must not be taken easily ’,
were not merely slogans; they were fundamental tenets of Fascist
faith. ‘In other countries/ Mussolini was fond of pointing out,
‘ revolutionists have by degrees become more complaisant; but here
in Italy, year by year, we have grown more radical, more stubborn/
The Fascist must be ever on guard against a relapse into the lazy
habits, both mental and moral, of the past. He must be ‘ Vuomo
nuovo del tempo di Mussolini\ ardent, determined, dedicated,
ready to renounce pleasure and even personality in the service of
the strict ideals of Fascist morality. ‘ We are advocates/ Mussolini
said, ‘ of the collective significance of life, and we wish to develop
this at the cost of individualism/ In pursuit of this aim, the regis
tered Party members, who in March 1937 numbered more than two
million, were to set a rigid standard of behaviour to which the
whole race would eventually conform.
The five years preceding the outbreak of war became known as
Vera Starace, because of the repeated efforts made by the Secretary
of the Party, Achille Starace, to mould the Italians into the obedient
conformists and Spartan disciples of Mussolini’s ideal. Starace was
a blindly devoted follower of the Duce, unimaginative and unin
telligent, hated particularly in the north because he was an ignorant
and vulgar southerner, the kind of official, indeed, that Mussolini
liked to place in positions of responsibility in the Fascist hierarchy.
By the later nineteen-thirties there was, Ciano noted in his diary,
‘ a veritable popular uprising against the pettifogging restrictions of
the Party Secretary. He had made/ the Foreign Minister went on
perceptively, ‘ the two most serious mistakes which you can make
when you have to deal with the Italian people. He has created an
atmosphere of persecution and he has caused annoyance by a
thousand little things of a personal nature. Now the Italians like
their rulers to rule with heart. They may forgive you if you do them
harm, but not if you pester them.’
Starace’s passion for uniforms and medals, his insistence that the
Roman salute should take the place of the handshake, his devotion
62
THE DICTATOR
to slogans, and his eager and sycophantic adoption of all the Duce’s
ideas, earned him not only the dislike but also the contempt of
his fellow-countrymen. When in 1938 Mussolini endorsed the views
of Bruno Cicognani, who had written an article in the Corriere della
Sera attacking the *ridiculous ' use of lei in polite conversation as
being a form of address not in keeping with the best Italian literary
tradition or with personal dignity, Starace took up the campaign
against lei with zealous fury and issued circulars demanding the
immediate and compulsory use of voi in its place. His extravagant
attacks on lei deepened the derision with which the Italian people
regarded him and provoked the opponents of the régime to use
this form of address as often as possible. Benedetto Croce, now
a strong and outspoken anti-Fascist who had always used voi with
his family and friends, abandoned the custom and in defiance of
Starace addressed them all with lei. On occasions Starace went
beyond even the wide limits of Mussolini's approval, as, for in
stance, when he attempted to make it a rule that all official letters
should end with the words ‘ Viva il Duce \ Mussolini first heard of
this new rule when he saw it announced in the newspapers and
called the Secretary to his angry presence. ‘ Dear Madam,' he dic
tated furiously as soon as Starace entered the room. ‘This is to
inform you that your son, a corporal in this regiment, has fallen off
his horse and cut his head open. Viva il Duce. . . . Dear Sir, This is
to inform you that reduction of personnel next month will mean
your dismissal from this office. Viva il Duce.' Mussolini dictated
several more imaginary letters before turning on Starace and send
ing him away with the enraged charge that he had succeeded in
making him ‘ look ridiculous to the whole of Italy '.
As Party Secretary, Starace was also responsible for the increased
intrusion of Fascist ideals into sport, which ultimately became a
virtual State monopoly over which the propaganda departments of
the State exercised a typically absurd control, decreeing, for in
stance, that the national tennis team should wear black shirts and
refuse to shake hands, and that photographs showing Primo Camera
knocked out in the ring should never be published. While the
organization known as Dopolavoro did much good in providing
cheap games and even cheap holidays for workers, the insistence on
the stile fascista in sport and recreation was resented as both meddle
some and pretentious. The institution of what became known as
the ‘Fascist Saturday', a weekly holiday which was, as a replace
ment o f cil weekend *and all that that term implied, to be ‘ imbued
with the spirit of the Revolution’ was a typical example of this.
63
MUSSOLINI
Workers and clerks, whether in the Government service or not,

were required to spend the afternoon playing games or taking part
in military exercises and parades or attending some sort of political
discussion group.
‘The natural inclinations and passive resistance of the people,
however/ as the historians of the Fascist era, Luigi Salvatorelli and
Giovanni Mira, have written in their Storia d’Italia nel periodo
fascista,
reduced this programme to a minimum: and the Fascist Saturday in
the end became no more than an afternoon of rest and amusement,
that is to say an English Saturday. And it was not only in this par
ticular case that resistance to Staracian discipline manifested it
self. . . . The accepted difference between what was required and
what was performed, between theory and practice, appearance and
reality in the whole field of Fascist discipline contributed on the one
hand to preserve the Italians from complete servility and degrada
tion of the spirit, but on the other hand it engendered that scant
respect for the law, that insufferance of regulations, that lack of a
social conscience which were and remain grave defects of the national
character. This is by no means the least important of the charges
which can be brought against the Fascist régime.
Italo Balbo, the most intelligent of the Quadrumviri, whom
Mussolini, jealous of his popularity and angered by his outspoken
criticisms, had sent away to be Governor of Libya, was well aware
of this. ‘ In Italy/ he said sadly in the summer of 1938, ‘ there is no
longer a taste for sincerity/
64
PART II
EMPIRE AND AXIS

1
THE DIPLOMAT
28 O C T O B E R 1922- 10 J U N E 1940
The Germans should allow themselves to he guided by me

if they wish to avoid unpardonable blunders. In politics
it is undeniable that I am more intelligent than Hitler.
‘ I h a v E always held that having broken the pride of Bolshevism/

Mussolini declared before the March on Rome, ‘Fascism should
become the watchful guardian of our foreign policy/ It was, indeed,
because of this constantly reiterated promise that he would lead
Italy towards a more respected position in Europe that he gained
such powerful support from the young. In his first speech in the
Chamber he gave voice to their urgent aspirations, and within less
than a year had been encouraged to behave with a defiance which
brought the country to the verge of war.
On 27 August 1923 the Italian General Enrico Teliini, president
of the international commission for the demarcation of the Graeco-
Albanian frontier, was murdered with three other Italian soldiers
by some Greeks who accused him of being prejudiced in favour of
Albanian claims. Two days later Mussolini presented Greece with
an ultimatum and a demand for fifty million lire compensation.
When the Greeks denied responsibility, he despatched the Italian
fleet to Corfu and occupied the Island. On 1 September Greece
appealed to the League of Nations, and Italy responded by insisting
that the League was not competent to deal with the dispute. Eventu
ally the Greek Government were prevailed upon to agree to Italy’s
demands to make full compensation and to pay the indemnity. The
Italians evacuated Corfu.
The nearness of war alarmed Mussolini, although it was not until
years later that he admitted it, and he trod with more caution after
this first brash foray into the treacherous field of power politics.
Indeed, for the first ten years of his régime it seemed that he had
no ambitions in Europe or in Africa and was content to spend all
his energies in promoting the welfare of his Fascist State. On the
66
THE DIPLOMAT
occasional appearances he made abroad—in Lausanne and in Lon

don for the Conferences of 1922 and at Locarno to put Italy's sig
nature to the famous treaty of December 1925—he seemed, in his
butterfly collar and spats, his top hat, white gloves and badly
pressed trousers, a person very different from the ferocious revo
lutionary the foreign journalists had been led to expect. They were
above all surprised by his smallness—he was only 5 ft. 6 in.—and
by the warmth of an unexpected, almost diffident, smile. There
seemed no cause for alarm. ‘He is really quite absurd! ' Curzon
commented with dismissive, patrician scorn.1
His views seemed reasonable, a great deal more reasonable, in
fact, than those held by many other European statesmen of his
time, and the speeches in which he expressed them, compared with
his later outbursts, were positively conciliatory. He gave an example
of his apparent generosity by concluding with Yugoslavia a series
of agreements which were a good deal less to Italy's advantage than
many Italian nationalists had expected; and seeing in ‘ revisionism '
a chance to exploit the prejudices of Europe in Italy’s favour, he
constantly urged the need for modifications of the Treaty of Ver
sailles. ‘This absurdity,’ he said in 1926, ‘will one day soon bring
about not only revolution in Germany but war in Europe.' It was
a warning which he was constantly to repeat. Although he remained
faithful to Italy's allies of the war and generally supported their
endeavours to find a peaceful solution to the problems of Europe,
he could not always agree that they were dealing with these prob
lems in a realistic way and frequently pursued an independent and
contradictory policy of his own, following what Lord Halifax later
called ‘ the classic Italian role of balancing between Germany and
the Western Powers '. Taking the side of those countries which he
felt had been unfairly and dangerously treated by the Peace
Treaties, he pressed for a more sympathetic and practical approach
towards the problems of his former enemies and demanded, in par
ticular, a more realistic attitude from France, whose resistance to
his demands for naval equality with her at the London Conference
of 1930 he was never to forgive. In 1933 he proposed a Four Power
Pact, between France, Great Britain, Italy and Germany, in the
hope that ‘peaceful revision’ might be carried out by Italy and
Britain acting as mediators between France and Germany and, no
doubt, also in the hope that he could take advantage of Germany's
1Mussolini returned the insult. He hated Curzon and disliked London, which
seemed full of men like him. After his brief visit to London he decided it was ‘ a
nightmare to anyone from Italy *, and hoped he would ‘ never have to go back '.
67
MUSSOLINI
revival to extract concessions from France; but the French, sus

picious of his motives, treated his proposal with reserve, and in the
following year events in Austria persuaded him that the chance
of improving Italy’s standing in Europe by a sympathetic apprecia
tion of Germany’s legitimate complaints was gone. What was now
wanted, he believed, was a firm stand against the growing ambitions
of a country which was learning that it could take anything that its
hostile neighbours denied it.
Mussolini’s advocacy of a strong anti-German front and his con
sequent closer ties with France and Britain were, however, soon to
be radically modified. During the last days of 1934 there was a
clash between Abyssinian and Italian soldiers on the borders of
Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland; and in October 1935, after ten
months of preparations, rumours, threats, warnings and hesitations,
Italy invaded Abyssinia. The clash by the wells of Wal Wal was, of
course, no more than a pretext. Mussolini had had his eye on this
only remaining potential colony in Africa long before and, accord
ing to General De Bono, had decided on invading it as early as 1932.
Although he had been afraid at first that the British might inter
vene to stop him, Dino Grandi, now his Ambassador in London,
assured him that he knew from Eden’s opponents in the Cabinet
that the British would not fight and an intercepted message proved
it. Hitler, hoping that Italy’s involvement in Africa would distract
her from his own ambitions in Austria, actually encouraged him.
People all over the world listened to the accounts of defenceless
natives being mown down by machine-guns and choking on
poison gas, and they were outraged. The Italians, however, had
these matters interpreted for them in a different light; and when
the short campaign was over Mussolini was at the height of his
power and his popularity.
He had defied the world, and he had triumphed; and to most
Italians his triumph was a just reward and his defiance a proud and
honourable attitude; for they did not recognize in his determina
tion to build an empire in Africa either cruelty or rapacity. The
British and French had built their empires by the same means but
under the protection of international agreements, and had, there
fore, no right to condemn with such hypocrisy the legitimate claims
of another European nation dying for want of space for a rapidly
increasing population. They protested in the name of humanity,
but their real enmity was caused by a wish to keep Italy out of
Africa and a determination to deny her both an economic outlet and
the possibility of territorial expansion. It was absurd to talk about
68
THE DIPLOMAT
Abyssinia as a sovereign State when it was nothing but a collection

of heterogeneous tribes dominated by various primitive chieftains
most of whom, including Haile Selassie, were revered by Italy’s
critics for little other reason than that they had been converted to
some sort of Christianity. It was absurd, too, to deny that Italy's
influence in Abyssinia would be a good one. Britain herself had ob
jected to the admission of ‘ this barbarous country ’ into the League
of Nations when Italy had proposed her membership in order to
check British encroachments. Tribal wars and slavery would be
abolished, and the people would be provided with great social
benefits. The charge, widely spread in both Britain and France,
that the Italian Army had killed thousands of innocent Africans by
poison gas had been no more than malicious propaganda. The only
gases used had been tear-gas and a mild kind of mustard-gas which
was never fatal nor even permanently disabling. Had not Bernard
Shaw himself found reasons for condoning their use? ‘ If you want
to talk about atrocities,’ the Duce himself had said to an English
journalist, ‘ I will show you pictures of what Abyssinians have done
to our men which are too horrible for any newspaper to print. We
have never used gas clouds like those of the Great War, and to drop
mustard-gas bombs into ravines down which Abyssinians might
have crept to attack an isolated column was really a measure of
humanity, for it had the effect of saving lives.’
The Italians had a clear conscience. They had not felt the need
for an Empire as strongly as the Duce had done, and no enthusiasm
for its conquest by force. Several leading Fascists, indeed, told Prince
Starhemberg, the Austrian Vice-Chancellor and head of the Heim
wehr, who was a personal friend of Mussolini’s, that they were
against the Abyssinian adventure. They did not share the Duce’s
belief that Fascism would be strengthened both at home and inter
nationally by a show of power, which, he insisted, was always more
respected than any amount of political manoeuvring, however
successful. Nor did they endorse the Duce’s emotional assumption
that the authority of Italy in Europe and the ‘ future progress of
the Fascist ethos demanded the avenging of Adowa ’, where, forty
years before, the Italians had been humiliatingly defeated by the
Abyssinians to the undisguised pleasure of a mocking world.
But now the reservations were invalidated and the voices of
caution and restraint were silenced. ‘ My objective is simple,’ Musso
lini had declared some years before. ‘ I want to make Italy great,
respected and feared.’ And few Italians now denied that he had
done so. There were still those, of course, who doubted that Italy’s
69
MUSSOLINI
action was compatible with twentieth-century morality and who

feared that Mussolini was prompted by his envy of Hitler’s growing
success in Europe and his desire to demonstrate that Italy too was
strong; but even they felt compelled to admire the speed with
which, contrary to the forecasts of military experts in both London
and Rome, the Abyssinian campaign had been completed, a speed
for which the Duce took the credit, remarking—as if it were a
subject for boasting—that he had given the commander in the field
constant instructions, amounting on some days to more than a
hundred top-priority telegrams which dealt with every conceivable
aspect of the Army’s business. The military success, however, was
but a small part of the Duce’s triumph. The more important effect
of the war was the lasting spirit of national unity which it had
engendered. Anthony Eden, British Minister for League of Nations
Affairs, after an acrimonious meeting with Mussolini in Rome
which settled the opinions they held about each other for ever, had
successfully rallied support for a policy of ‘ sanctions ’, and on io
October 1935, by a vote of fifty to one, the Assembly of the League
had resolved to take collective measures against Italy. The result
of the resolution could not have favoured Italy more. Stanley Bald
win, the British Prime Minister, following the now accepted rule
of British diplomacy by simultaneously refusing either to sustain
the League of Nations at the risk of war or to abandon it by con
doning Mussolini’s action, declared that sanctions meant war;
’secondly,’ as Sir Winston Churchill afterwards said, ‘he was
resolved that there must be no war; and, thirdly, he decided upon
sanctions. It was evidently impossible to reconcile these three con
ditions.’ Pierre Laval, the clever and cynical French Foreign
Minister, had realized their irreconcilability from the beginning
advocating a deal with Mussolini. And once sanctions had been
decided upon he encouraged Britain’s efforts to ensure that the list
of prohibited exports would not include any, such as oil, that might
provoke a European war.
Mussolini was, therefore, not prevented from attacking and
defeating Abyssinia, but on the contrary was given an opportunity
of uniting his country under the protection of Fascism against the
actions and slanders of a hostile world. ‘ Italy will meet sanctions,’
he declared, ‘ with discipline, with frugality and with sacrifice.’ And
she did. As the outraged members of the League of Nations rallied
round Anthony Eden, so the isolated Italian people, most of whom
had been trained to share Mussolini’s dislike of Eden, rallied round
the Duce. Old ladies sent him their jewellery to help him pay for
70
THE DIPLOMAT
his war, and young men said they would gladly die in it by suicidal
air-raids on the British Fleet. Many former liberals supported the
war, and the Church did not oppose it. Several former anti-Fascists
living in voluntary exile returned to support their country in her
hour of need. ‘ The Italian people ’, Mussolini announced in one of
those speeches which delighted Italians whether Fascists or not,
‘are worthy of their great destiny.’ The shocked reaction of the
British people when they were told about the Hoare-Laval Pact of
1935, which planned the partition of Abyssinia between Italy and
the Emperor, had been interpreted as anti-Italian; and when, in
the uproar after its publication, Sir Samuel Hoare was obliged to
give up the Foreign Office to the detestable Anthony Eden, who
could be relied upon to pursue a more rigid and unsympathetic
policy towards Italy, Mussolini’s popularity rose to new heights.
There was yet another and more fateful consequence of Musso
lini’s victory. Watching the success of his Italian friend in his
quarrel with the League of Nations, from which he himself had
flamboyantly withdrawn in October 1933, Adolf Hitler drew his
own conclusions. It was not merely a vindication of the philosophy
of force, it was not only another demonstration of the decadence of
democracy; the League’s débâcle marked the end of the so-called
Stresa Front and the beginning of the Italo-German alliance.
There had been a time when such an alliance had seemed im
possible. Only two years before, relations between the two countries
had been not merely strained but on the point of disruption. Musso
lini, anxious to protect Italian interests in Central and South
eastern Europe, was determined to prevent Hitler realizing his
known ambitions in Austria. On 17 February 1934 he made a
declaration, in which the British and French Governments joined,
upon the necessity for the maintenance of Austrianjndependence;
a month later he emphasized Italy’s resolve to prevent German
expansion across her northern and eastern borders by signing with
Austria and Hungary the Rome Protocols, which provided for
mutual consultation in the event of a threat to any one of the
three countries; and when in July the Nazis sò far overplayed their
hand as to attempt a coup d'état by murdering the Austrian Chan
cellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, while his wife and children were guests
of Mussolini in Italy, the Duce’s reaction was immediate and force-
71
MUSSOLINI
fui. He telegraphed Prince Starhemberg, the acting Chancellor,

promising Italian support and despatched three Italian divisions to
the frontier as a guarantee that the promise was not an idle one.
Hitler, realizing that his supporters had gone too far, was obliged
to give way; and Mussolini's carefully disguised envy of the man,
whom after his first meeting with him he had referred to contemp
tuously as ‘ that mad little clown ', came close to hatred. Hitler, he
told Prince Starhemberg, was the murderer of Dollfuss and respon
sible for all that had happened. He was ‘a horrible sexually
degenerate creature ', a ‘ dangerous fool \ He was the natural leader
of National Socialism, which was a travestied and brutalized imita*
tion of Fascism and a ‘ barbarous and savage system, capable only
of slaughter, plunder and blackmail \ The ferocious purge of June
1934 had been ‘an inevitable crisis of so despicable a political
system \ ‘ I should be pleased, I suppose,' he said to another friend
of his, the journalist Michele Campana, ‘that Hitler has carried
out a revolution on our lines, but they are Germans so they will
end by ruining our idea. They are still the barbarians of Tacitus
and the Reformation in eternal conflict with Rome.'
Mussolini’s anger was understandable. With the independence of
Austria threatened, Italy was in danger of losing her principal
guarantee of security and in danger too of losing her 300,000
formerly Austrian subjects in Alto Adige to the subversions of
German nationalism. He felt obliged to abandon his policy of
‘ revisionism ' in favour of a more friendly attitude towards France,
whose backing he now needed. It was with these thoughts in mind
that he joined the anti-German front created at Stresa on 11 April
1935, when he combined with the British and French Governments
in condemning any attempt to change the treaty settlements by
force.
Mussolini had attended the conference himself with Fulvio
Suvich, his Under-Secretary of State and principal adviser on
Foreign Affairs, and revealed that his determination to curb Ger
many's ambitions was not the only reason for his presence. An
understanding with France and England would certainly help pre
serve Italy’s position in Europe, but it would also help her to extend
her influence in the Mediterranean and Africa.
In his speech he had made reference to the final declaration of
the conference, which condemned ‘any unilateral repudiation of
treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe '. The Duce spoke
the word ‘ Europe ' with so obvious an emphasis and paused for so
long before continuing that the British Foreign Office representa-
72
THE DIPLOMAT
tives realized at once what was in his mind and conferred together
that night to decide whether or not to warn him against an attack
on Abyssinia. They decided his support in their stand against Ger
many was too important to risk, and did not do so. Mussolini had
left Stresa believing that he had gained his point. And when in
June the Anglo-German naval treaty was signed, his belief that
Britain did not really care what happened in the world so long as
her own interests were not threatened was again understandably
reinforced.
Four months later the invasion of Abyssinia had begun. And
that autumn, as Western Europe turned so ineffectually against
him, the idea of an alliance with the one powerful country which
had not openly done so came to the forefront of Mussolini’s mind.
The first overtures had come from Hitler, who had admired the
Duce for the whole of his political life and had been deeply in
fluenced by many of Fascism’s ideological conceptions and choreo
graphic techniques. In 1926 he had written to Rome asking for a
signed photograph. ‘Please thank the above-named Gentleman’,
the Italian Foreign Office had coldly replied to the Embassy in
Berlin, 4for his sentiment and tell him in whatever form you con
sider best that the Duce does not think fit to accede to the request.’
Although there is some evidence to suggest that the Nazis were
being subsidized from Italy as early as 1932, the Duce himself had
no wish to sully his remarkable reputation by open contact with
the ‘unsavoury adventurer’ who was their leader. Even after
Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, which took him by surprise, Musso
lini’s suspicion and wary disdain did not relax. He had made
Fascism, he believed, both respected and admired and had no wish
to taint it by association with National Socialism, which he des
cribed at this time as being the ‘ revolt of the old German tribes of
the primeval forests ’. There was certainly no doubt that Mussolini
was held in a higher regard both in Europe and in America than
Hitler ever was or could be. The accolades which had been so
enthusiastically and gratuitously cast upon him by conservative
writers and public figures in the nineteen-twenties and early
thirties had been so frequent and so unequivocally phrased that he
had no trouble in believing that he was indeed the greatest states
man of his time.
73
MUSSOLINI
In December 1924 Sir Austen Chamberlain, then Foreign

Secretary, referred to him when on a visit to Rome as 4a wonderful
man . . . working for the greatness of his country \ In later years
Lady Chamberlain was often to be seen wearing the Fascist badge.
In 1927 Winston Churchill visited Rome and was widely reported
as having said, 4If I were an Italian I would don the Fascist Black
Shirt/ 41 could not help being charmed/ he said at a Press confer
ence reported by The Times, ‘like so many other people have been,
by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm
and detached pose in spite of so many burdens and dangers. Any
one could see that he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as
he understood it, of the Italian people, and that no lesser interest
was of the slightest consequence to him. . . . If I had been an
Italian I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to
finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and
passions of Leninism.’ The following day The Times congratulated
Mr Churchill 4on having understood the real spirit of the Fascist
movement ’. Lloyd George publicly agreed with him that the Cor
porative System was a 4very promising development ’. In 1928 the
Daily Mail gave expression to a more emphatic enthusiasm when
Lord Rothermere declared in its columns that Mussolini was 4the
greatest figure of our age ’. An English biographer in an extremely
laudatory book published in 1932 agreed that he was 4the greatest
statesman of our tim e’—a view which, as late as January 1939, the
Manchester Guardian confessed itself as sharing. These were not
exceptional verdicts. Foreign diplomats and visitors, both official
and unofficial, who were granted interviews by Mussolini in his
palatial office in Palazzo Venezia were similarly impressed and did
not hesitate to say so. Mr Richard Washburn Child, the American
Ambassador in Rome between 1921 and 1924, felt for the Duce a
respect which was close to idolatry. 4He has not only been able to
secure and hold an almost universal following/ he wrote in the
preface to Mussolini’s M y Autobiography. 4He has built a new
state upon a new concept of a state. He has not only been able to
change the lives of human beings, but he has changed their minds,
their hearts, their spirits/ He spoke of the Duce’s humanity and his
wisdom, his strength and dynamic energy. He was ‘the greatest
figure of this sphere and tim e’. ‘One closes the door when one
leaves him ’, he decided, 4feeling that one could squeeze something
of him out of one’s clothes/
Stories were told of his vanity and histrionics, his pretentious be
haviour and absurd gestures; but most visitors discovered that he
74
THE DIPLOMAT
was a sensible, charming, even (surprisingly) a diffident man with

an uncertain, sometimes self-conscious manner. They were told that
he would sit at his immense desk in the vast and ornate Sala del
Mappamondo and balefully watch them approach across the sixty
feet of coldly echoing mosaic floor or ignore them altogether as
he continued writing. They were told even that they would have
to pass rows of daggers held at arms* length by grim-faced Black
shirts; and sometimes, indeed, they did. But these occasions were
rare. More often the scene was as Duff Cooper found it on a visit to
Rome in 1934. ‘There were no histrionics/ Duff Cooper wrote, 4nor
was I obliged, as I had been told would happen, to walk the length
of a long room from the door to his desk. He met me at the door
and accompanied me to it when I left. We agreed on the importance
of rearmament and he laughed when I said that the idea that arma
ments produced war was as foolish as to think that umbrellas
produced rain. Because he laughed at my joke I thought he had a
sense of humour and was quite prepared to imagine he had other
good qualities. . . . I was favourably impressed/
It was a common reaction. Few men, indeed, were not favourably
impressed. As he came towards them, walking with a springy,
rather cat-like step, friendly and courteous, they were immediately
disarmed. Even when he gave the impression, as he did to Lord
Vansittart, of a man who 4took such obvious pleasure in his own
company ' that he was reminiscent of 4a boxer in a flashy dressing-
gown shaking hands with himself ’, he managed to give pleasure to
his visitor as well as to himself.4He was no joke/ Vansittart thought,
‘nothing like the pantaloon depicted by envy/ He spoke in a low
voice, and his conversational gifts seemed of a high order. Always
fluent, often striking, sometimes witty, his comments were en
livened by unusual but rarely inapt allusions and a remarkable
capacity for neologism. ‘ When the Duce starts to talk/ his Foreign
Secretary once said of him, ‘ he is delightful. I know nobody who
uses such rich and original metaphors/ Like most good talkers he
was not a patient listener, sometimes even getting up abruptly from
his chair to carry on the conversation, distractingly striding up and
down the room; but with foreign visitors he made an effort to over
come this habit, and although—perhaps because of his ulcer—he
found it difficult to keep still in his chair he gave the impression of
attentiveness as he sat at his desk, stiffly upright, his finger-tips
pressed together. He rarely laughed, and when he did it often
sounded more like a laugh of scorn or the hearty, shoulder-heaving
laugh of a man who feels he ought to be amused but is not. But a
75
MUSSOLINI
smile, flatteringly appreciative, often flashed across his usually grave

face. ‘ He is not only a great m an/ Aristide Briand said. ‘ He is a
good one/ Franz von Papen, in Rome for the signing of the Con
cordat with the Vatican in the summer of 1933, ‘found the Italian
dictator a man of very different calibre from Hitler. Short in stature,
but with an air of great authority, his massive head conveyed an
impression of great strength of character. He handled people like
a man accustomed to having his orders obeyed, but displayed im
mense charm. . . . Hitler always had a slight air of uncertainty, as
though feeling his way, whereas Mussolini was calm, dignified and
appeared the complete master of whatever subject was being dis
cussed. . . . He spoke excellent French and German/
In America the praise was as emphatic as it was in Europe.
As Lord Rothermere had compared him to Napoleon, so the Presi
dent of Columbia University compared him to Cromwell. ‘ Fascism/
he went on to say, ‘ is a form of government of the very first order
of excellence/ Otto Kahn, the famous banker, agreed with him and
in a speech which he gave to the students of Wesleyan University
referred to the Duce as a ‘ genius \ It was an estimate which Cardi
nal O’Connell of Boston endorsed. ‘ Mussolini/ the Cardinal said,
‘ is a genius in the field of government given to Italy by God to help
the nation continue her rapid ascent towards the most glorious
destiny/ The Archbishop of Chicago after a visit to Rome gave it
as his opinion that ‘ Mussolini is the man of our time \ Fiorello La
Guardia, Mayor of New York, said that he wished the Duce every
success and that there was no resemblance between Hitler and
Mussolini.
Suggestions that there might be a resemblance between the two
dictators were certainly and angrily rejected by Mussolini himself.
He was forced to agree that National Socialism, like Fascism, was
authoritarian, collectivist, anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic and
anti-liberal, but further than that he would not go. As for the
transcendental theme in Nazi philosophy—the idea of a master
race—he dismissed it as ‘arrant nonsense, stupid and idiotic’. If
Hitler’s theories of racial superiority were correct, he thought, *the
Lapps must be considered the highest type of humanity \ ‘ Thirty
centuries of history ’, he said in a speech at Bari in September 1934,
‘ enable us to look with majestic pity at certain doctrines taught on
the other side of the Alps by the descendants of people who were
wholly illiterate in the days when Rome boasted a Caesar, a Virgil
and an Augustus.’ Anti-Semitism he described in a conversation
with Emil Ludwig in 1932 as ‘the German vice’. There was ‘no
76
THE DIPLOMAT
Jewish question in Italy and could not be one in a country with a

healthy system of government
It was not until 14 June 1934 that he met Hitler for the first time.
He disliked him as much as he had expected. The meeting, arranged
by German diplomats who hoped that Mussolini might have more
success than they in moderating Hitler’s attitude towards Austria,
took place in the Royal Villa at Stra on the River Brenta near
Padua. Hitler, accompanied by numerous SS men including Sepp
Dietrich, looked nervous and insignificant. Mussolini, noticing in
particular his lank, ill-brushed hair and his watery eyes, murmured,
‘ I don’t like the look of him.’ He was wearing a yellow mackintosh
and striped trousers with patent leather shoes and held against his
stomach a grey felt hat which he twisted convulsively in his hands
as if, a French journalist commented, he were a ‘little plumber
holding an embarrassing instrument*. Mussolini, who had also
arrived in civilian clothes, changed on arrival into a splendid
uniform with a dagger and black boots with silver spurs.
Before their first conversation was over, Mussolini had already
made up his mind about Hitler. Leaving the conference table during
a pause in the discussion to walk over to the window, he murmured
with a kind of amused contempt^ ' He’s quite mad.’ By early even
ing both of them were seen to be not merely losing patience but on
the verge of a quarrel. They agreed that they both disliked France
and Russia, but they could not agree about much else, least of all
about Austria, where, Mussolini said, the Nazis ought to drop their
terrorist campaign. All that night the mosquitoes buzzed incessant
ly, and Mussolini spent a sleepless night disturbed not only by the
insects and the memory of the pretentious talk of the ^ silly little
clown’, but also, so it was suggested, by the ghost of Napoleon,
who had once himself passed an uncomfortable night at Stra. In
the morning it was suggested that the conference should be moved
to Venice.
Here the atmosphere was even more strained. The Duce was
cheered wildly by the Venetians, who greeted his guest in silence.
Later during a conversation on the Alberoni golf course when the
two men were left alone, their anxious staffs, who were following
at a distance, heard shouts which Constantin von Neurath, the
German Foreign Minister, later compared to ‘ the barking of two
mastiffs’. W hat they were arguing about no one knew or could
afterwards discover. They spoke in German, which perhaps left
Mussolini at a disadvantage as although he had loftily declined the
services of Paul Schmidt, the German Foreign Office interpreter, his
77
MUSSOLINI
proficiency in the language was not as great as he liked to suppose.

He enjoyed speaking German, Kurt von Schuschnigg, Dollfuss’s
successor as Austrian Chancellor, thought, but the effort was an
'obvious one and he was slow and carefully articulate. He may well
have had difficulty in understanding Hitler’s still strong Austrian
accent with its Bavarianized overtones.
Although the subject of this particular disputation was never
mentioned by Mussolini, he later referred to other occasions on
which they were left alone together during the conference when
’instead of discussing concrete problems, Hitler merely recited
Mein Kampf from memory—that boring book which I have never
been able to read *. And towards the end of the visit, when Musso
lini took him out in a motor-boat on the Laguna Veneta, instead of
sitting back and enjoying the trip he made a long speech about
his racial theories. ‘ He spent the whole time declaiming about the
superiority of the Nordic races,* Suvich told Starhemberg, ‘and
condemning all the Mec}iterranean people, particularly the Italians,
as having Negro blood .in their veins.* Mussolini, who had given up
arguing with the man and sat listening in silence, ‘was much
amused *, Suvich thought. ‘ The next day, after Hitler had left
Venice on his way back to Germany, Mussolini was asked what he
had thought of him. He replied, with a gesture of dismissal, ‘ He*s
just a garrulous monk.*
Soon, however, despise Hitler as he might, Mussolini felt the need
of his friendship and persuaded himself that Italy would do better
out of an alliance with Germany than she could do out of an alliance
with the Western Democracies. The hostility of France and England
towards Italy during the Abyssinian war had destroyed any chance
of an anti-German agreement between those three countries, but it
had not yet brought Italy very much closer to Hitler, who had been
careful to derive any advantage he could from the conflict and had
been disturbed at the thought that it might be ended by a com
promise such as the Hoare-Laval Pact. In Mussolini’s mind the
Anglo-German Treaty of 1935 also still rankled and, more persis
tently, the question of Austrian independence and the threatened
Anschluss. So long as this particular problem remained at issue
between Mussolini and Hitler, an alliance was impossible. But Hitler
felt the need of the outward appearance of Mussolini’s friendship
more strongly than Mussolini felt the need of his; and it was partly
with a view to the gaining of that friendship that the Austro-
German Agreement was, with the Duce’s approval, signed in July
1936. The Agreement, although apparently settling Austro-German
78 I
THE DIPLOMAT
differences to the mutual satisfaction of both countries, gave Hitler

the opportunity to gnaw slowly away at Austrian independence; but
it also gave him the first real opportunity he had had to bring about
a rapprochement with Italy. For Mussolini, now estranged from the
Western Powers, could no longer successfully defend the indepen
dence of Austria and could not fail to be grateful that her in
dependence was still to be nominally preserved. The opportunity
for closer ties between Germany and Italy was made ideal a month
later when civil war broke out in Spain, and Mussolini, by rushing
to the help of Franco not only in the hope that a third Fascist
state might be created in Europe, but also in the hope that he
might obtain naval bases in Spain from which to threaten France,
drew farther apart from Germany’s enemies. Ulrich von Hassell,
the German Ambassador in Rome,- realized at once the significance
of the *Spanish conflict as regards Italy’s relations with France and
England ’. In a despatch to the German Foreign Office he suggested
that its role could be ‘ similar to that of the Abyssinian conflict,
bringing out clearly the opposing interest of the Powers and thus
preventing Italy from being drawn into the net of the Western
Powers*. The war could also serve another purpose. By allowing
Italy to bear by far the greater burden of Nazi-Fascist help to
Franco, under the pretext that Spain was a Mediterranean country
and therefore in the Duce’s province rather than his own, Hitler
was able to ensure that Germany had a substitute for the Abyssinian
war as a drain on Italian strength and a consequent security against
an inflexible stand by the Duce on the Austrian issue, which he was
determined that Germany should settle in her own way.2
Hitler made his preliminary overtures to Mussolini by offering
to recognize the Italian Empire. This was a matter on which the
Duce was violently susceptible, for the recognition was an acknow
ledgment of Italy’s new status which most countries had so far
withheld; and Mussolini, as Hassell predicted, was immensely grati
fied. In September Hitler sent to Rome his Italian-speaking Minister
of Justice, Hans Frank, with a pressing invitation for the Duce to
visit Germany. Mussolini listened with practised reserve to Frank’s
insistent compliments and to his protestations of the Fiihrer’s belief
in the need for close collaboration between their two countries.
Despite his granitic pose Mussolini was, however, flattered; and
soon after this meeting with Hitler’s envoy he made a speech in
2This, of course, explains what seemed inexplicable to many Republicans at the
time—the fact that they, as well as the Nationalists, were receiving arms from
Germany.
79
MUSSOLINI
Piazza del Duomo at Milan in which for the first time he used a
term which was for ever afterwards to hold a special connotation of
ruin for his country. Referring to the better understanding between
Italy and Germany, he borrowed a dramatic metaphor used two
years before by the Hungarian Premier Combos in describing this
understanding. There had been created, the Duce said, ‘a Rome-
Berlin axis around which all European states that desire peace
can revolve ’. Delighted by this public announcement of friendship,
the Germans read much more into the speech than had been in
tended and were given the impression by their Press that a common
policy had already been established.
Meanwhile in Germany, Mussolini’s new Foreign Minister, Count
Galeazzo Ciano, was paving the way for the State visit to Germany
which the Duce was shortly to make. The son of Admiral Count
Constanzo Ciano, a hero of the First World War, Galeazzo had
entered the Diplomatic Service at the age of twenty-two after work
ing as a journalist in Rome. Three years later, on 24 April 1930, he
had married Edda Mussolini, the Duce’s eldest daughter and, so it
was believed, his favourite child. Thereafter Ciano’s rise to power
was meteoric. Within two months he was Consul-General in Shang
hai and soon became Minister Plenipotentiary in China. By 1933
he was back in Rome as head of the Press Office, and after service
as a pilot during the Abyssinian war he was appointed Foreign
Minister. He behaved in those early years as a devoted disciple of
the man who had made him and who now treated him not only
as a well-liked son-in-law but as an intimate confidant. Vain, self-
indulgent and indulged, ambitious, pretentious and evasive, Ciano
attempted to conceal by a superficial cynicism what was undoubted
ly a deep admiration for the Duce. Even in the diary which he began
to keep with assiduity after he became Foreign Minister he often
made transparent efforts to disguise the idolatry which in conversa
tion with his friends he took pains to hide altogether. Only occa
sionally did he allow himself to lapse into emotional eulogy. ‘ The
Duce praised me several times today,’ he wrote in one such moment
of frank avowal. ‘This so overwhelmed me that I am incapable
even of thanking him. The truth is that one works for only one
reason—to please him. To be successful in this is my greatest satis
faction.’ After an illness in 1938 he confessed that when he heard
the Duce’s voice on the wireless he ‘ started to cry like a small child
His infrequently admitted but heartfelt admiration was apparent
in other ways which made him appear almost ridiculous. He was
unconsciously imitative. He copied the Duce’s attitudes and
80
THE D I P L O M A T
mannerisms both in public and in private; he copied his rapid,
jerky, emphatic way of talking; he even copied his pose of stone-like
impassivity when on the point of hearing some anxiously awaited
news. But he was not a ridiculous man. He had a quick eye for an
opportunity, an undoubted gift for assimilation and a sincere
patriotism. He was often indiscreet and sometimes ruthless, and on
more than one occasion he was to push his country into adventures
which were both immoral and inept. He was so lazy that he refused
to read a memorandum if it were more than a page long, and he
spent as much time on the golf course and at parties given by his
rich acquaintances in Roman society as he did in his office at
Palazzo Chigi. He was so irresponsible that, according to Raffaele
Cuariglia, who was Ambassador in Paris from 1938 to 1940, the
only instructions the Embassy ever received from him were to find
a French governess for his children. But he was nevertheless a man
of many qualities rarely found in Fascism’s gerarchi. He was intelli
gent, alert, brave, not insensitive and, in spite of his postures and
pretensions, charming. He was a devoted son and brother; he loved
his children; and, although he had his own friends, both men and
women, he did not lose the affection of his wife. 4He was a bounder ’,
wrote Lord Vansittart, who met him for the first time in 1934.4But
bounding is no sin in the sun. He liked women and advancement;
others have had the same tastes with less fulfilment. He enjoyed
good looks with some good nature and an occasional sense of
humour. . . . He was having too good a time to want trouble; and
a jouisseurs repugnance to war is more reliable than a pacifist’s
because it is more practical.’
Dino Alfieri, who as Italian Ambassador to Germany was later to
know Ciano well, painted a similar, if more flattering portrait of his
itMovì-jouisseur.
4 In spite of his fickleness and his inconsistency, which sometimes
left one with a feeling of genuine perplexity, Ciano was a good-
natured, generous man. He was always glad to be of service to his
friends, and it gave him a particular pleasure to be able to pass
on a welcome piece of news. . . . He had a slighdy Tuscan turn of
phrase, and his conversation was animated, his language graphic
and concise. By turns serious, paradoxically witty, mocking, some
times even a little cynical . . . he was by nature extremely viva
cious, whimsical, inquisitive, ironical and sentimental. He always
had a ready retort and his wit was facile and spontaneous/
Not everyone found him so quick-witted and attractive as Alfieri,
but few people disliked him and none found him insignificant. With
81
MUSSOLINI
the Germans, however, he created a less favourable impression. He

was always careful to suggest in his official memoranda that he got
on well with them. But in fact he did not, and they found him
superficial, vain and so anxious to assert himself that his behaviour
was often merely absurd. On one occasion during a visit to Berlin,
William Shirer, the American foreign correspondent, described him
as ‘the clown of the evening. Without the slightest pretext he
would hop to his heels and expand in a salute. Could not help
noticing how high-strung Ciano is. He kept working his jaws and
he was not chewing gum/
His first official visit, which took place in October 1936, a month
after Hans Frank's visit to Rome, was, however, successful enough.
Ribbentrop, who grew to hate Ciano, had not yet replaced Neurath
at the Foreign Ministry, and Hitler, who also grew to hate him,
treated him at Berchtesgaden with a flattering deference. He was
obviously pleased with the friendly messages which Ciano had
brought with him. ‘ Mussolini/ the Führer said in a sentence which
delighted the son-in-law, ‘ is the leading statesman in the world, to
whom no other may even remotely compare himself/ Talking rapid
ly he went on to survey the international situation, the growing
danger of Bolshevism and the comforting speed of German re
armament. ‘ Every subject Ciano wrote afterwards, ‘ brought forth
a long exposition by Hitler and every conclusion was repeated
several times in different words/ From the tangle of verbosity Ciano
was, nevertheless, able to gather that, so far as Britain was con
cerned, Hitler had not yet made up his mind and he did not even
now preclude the possibility of some sort of agreement with her.
Mussolini, more furious than ever with the British since Haile
Selassie had been invited to the coronation of King George VI, was
afraid of this and anxious that at all costs an Anglo-German rap
prochement should be avoided. He was glad to hear from Ciano
that, despite the Führer’s moderate attitude, this seemed unlikely
and that Hitler thought that if England continued to work against
them, Germany and Italy would have the combined power to defeat
her. ‘ In three years/ the Führer had said, ‘ Germany will be ready,
in four years more than ready; if five years are given, better still.
. . . According to the English there are two countries in the world
today which are led by adventurers, Germany and Italy. But
England, too, was led by adventurers when she built her Empire.
Today she is governed by mere incompetents/ Some months later,
on 10 September 1937, at a conference at Nyon, Britain gave fur
ther offence to Mussolini by signing an agreement with France to
82
THE D I P L O M A T
protect merchant ships in the Mediterranean, where supposedly
Spanish, but in reality Italian, submarines had been ‘ committing
acts of piracy ’ on Franco’s behalf. Again Hitler, disapproving this
belated but perhaps infectious attempt of the democracies to unite
effectively against the developing Axis, gave Mussolini his sym
pathy.
For, anxious as Mussolini was that Germany should not achieve
the agreement with Britain that was never in these years far from
Hitler’s mind, the Führer, himself, was also anxious that Italy and
Britain should not renew friendly relations at his expense. W ith a
view to preventing this and to emphasizing the solidarity of the
Axis he had sent several representatives to Rome in 1937 on visits
which superficially seemed friendly enough. None of the visits,
however, was notably successful. When Goering arrived and had
two discussions with Mussolini at the beginning of the year, the
atmosphere was even strained. Mussolini had already decided that
he did not like Goering. He thought him ‘ flashy and pretentious ’
and did not approve of his admiration for Balbo. On this occasion
when Goering spoke of Austria as if the Anschluss were inevitable,
the interpreter Paul Schmidt said that Mussolini shook his head
violently.
Austria, however, was only one of Mussolini’s problems, and his
unfulfilled ambitions in Europe and the Mediterranean and his
rancour against the Western Powers brought him to the view that
he should no longer resist Hitler’s blandishments. In September it
was announced that he would visit Germany. He had agreed to
accept the invitation, he said, on two conditions; that he would not
have to bring any formal evening clothes with him and that he
would be allowed to meet not only the leaders of the country but
also the common people. These conditions were not prompted by
modesty. He wanted to show that even in a foreign language he
could excite a Berlin crowd to the same pitch of enthusiasm as
he excited the people of Rome; and he wanted also to ensure that he
would not have to wear civilian clothes in which he did not appear
to his best advantage.
Wearing a splendid uniform specially designed for the occasion,
he left for Germany on 23 September 1937 with a large staff almost
as beautifully caparisoned as himself. Hitler, not to be outdone,
ordered the reception committee which was to meet him at the
frontier to wear uniform too, while he himself put on the brown
shirt and tunic and the black trousers of the Nazi uniform
and waited in Munich, whose streets were lined with troops and
83
MUSSOLINI
whose buildings were emblazoned with flags, for the Duce to

arrive.
For weeks Germany had been preparing not only a welcome and
a tribute but a carefully calculated display of power, regimentation
and organization which Mussolini should never forget. He never
did forget. For the rest of his life, disillusioned with the Germans
as he was to profess himself, he never lost his admiration for their
efficiency, their dedication, their violently militaristic industry.
From the beginning of his visit he was seen to be impressed; and
he had cause to be. In spite of the rain, the cheers of the crowds
were deafening, the countless lines of steel-helmeted soldiers motion
less and seemingly unending. There were banquets in Munich,
manoeuvres at Mecklenburg, visits to the factories of the Ruhr and
parades of goose-stepping troops everywhere. In Berlin, towards the
end of his tour, over 900,000 people gathered on the Maifeld to hear
him speak, and even there, although Goering had previously put
him in a bad mood by allowing his pet lioness to jump on him and
by keeping him playing with his electric trains until the last
minute, and although a thunderstorm of savage force interrupted
his speech, soaked his notes and played havoc with the loudspeaker
system, he was deeply impressed. The crowds had waited in the
pouring rain, as if on parade, to cheer the end of a speech which
they could no longer hear and, from its beginning, had had diffi
culty in understanding. The Duce arrived back at his car soaked
to the skin and obviously worn out, but he was undeterred. He had
seen ‘ the most powerful nation in modern Europe rising magnifi
cently to greatness’. His own progress through the country had
been triumphal. ‘His magnetism, his voice, his impetuous youth-
fulness,’ Ciano wrote proudly, ‘ completely captivated the German
crowds.’ He had hardly had time to see Hitler alone for more than
a few moments, so nothing of importance had been discussed, and
Austria, as he later told Schuschnigg, had not even been mentioned.
But he had made up his mind about Germany. ‘ When Fascism has
a friend’, he had shouted into the crackling loudspeakers above
the roar of the downpour on the Maifeld, ‘ it will march with that
friend to the last.’
This categoric promise of loyalty marked the beginning of a fall
into disaster. For many Italians it also marked the beginning of
disillusion. They had until now been able to see the Fascist revolu
tion as something clean and beneficial and, although authoritarian
and anti-liberal, unadulterated by the grosser barbarisms of
National Socialism. They had been content to see Germans des-
84
THE DIPLOMAT
cribed as uncouth and Hitler as a political criminal, paranoic,

imitative, even grotesque. But now they had to read a different
story. The Duce himself had referred to the Germans as *a great
people with proud traditions and a noble future’, while Hitler was
no longer the ‘ clown1 but publicly eulogized in a widely reported
speech as ‘a genius, one of those few geniuses who make history
and are not made by it*. A month after the Duce's visit, on 6
November 1937, Italy signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. Italy and
Germany were to ‘ stand side by side against the threat of
Bolshevism \
The German influence on Fascism was soon apparent. So over
whelmed with admiration had Mussolini been at the sight of those
thousands of rigidly drilled troops goose-stepping past him, their
heavy boots falling with so rhythmic and intimidating a crash on
the rainswept streets, that he decided to introduce this magnificent
evidence of virility into the Italian Army and the Fascist Militia.
Unconscious or disdainful of the antagonism and ridicule which
such degrading plagiarism would arouse, he ordered the goose-step
to be the new march of the Italian soldier. He called it the passo
romano, ‘ the firm, inexorable step of the legions for whom every
march was a march of conquest ’. Ten years before, the Nazis had
adopted the Roman salute as their own; but now, although he
vehemently denied it, maintaining that the goose was a Roman
animal because it had saved the Capitol, it was Mussolini who was
the imitator, taking the goose-step without acknowledgment from
Hitler as he had taken the Roman salute from D’Annunzio. The
step was a difficult, tiring one to perform, and unless done well
looks absurd. This criticism as much as the charge that it was a
mere copy of il passo dell’oca infuriated Mussolini. When the King
made it, he commented contemptuously to Ciano, ‘It isn’t my
fault if the King is physically no more than a half-cartridge. It’s
natural that he can’t perform the step without appearing ridicu
lous. He doesn’t like it for the same reason that he doesn’t like
riding a horse—because he has to use a ladder to mount.’ ‘ Clearly,'
he said, on another occasion after practising the step himself, ‘ that
wretched little thing could never do this on parade; but it’s of no
consequence. I shall get rid of him. The course of history can be
changed in a night.’ Mussolini’s increased resentment against the
King rose from the fact that Victor Emmanuel did not like the
Germans and did not hesitate to say so or to express his concern
about the growth of friendship between Italy and the Reich. ‘ The
monarchy ’, Mussolini angrily decided, has become ‘ a useless super-
%
MUSSOLINI
structure \ When told that the King also objected to the introduc
tion of the Roman salute into the Army, Mussolini exploded with
indignation. ‘ It has needed all my patience/ he said, ‘ to tow this
tiresome monarchy along. It has never done anything which would
commit it to the régime. I am still biding my time, because the
King is seventy and I hope that nature will come to my help/
A more alarming result of Mussolini's friendship with Germany,
and one infinitely more despised than the introduction of the goose-
step and the Roman salute into the Army, was the introduction of
anti-Semitism into national life. The evil never went very deep. A
declaration by some well-known university professors printed in the
Fascist Press in July 1938 that the Italians were Nordic Aryans
whose blood had not been mixed since the Lombard invasions was
greeted with the ridicule which it deserved. But three months later
the Fascist Grand Council decided upon a programme of racial
legislation. Marriages with those of non-Aryan race—a term never
precisely defined—were to be forbidden unless permission was ob
tained from the Ministry of the Interior; foreign Jews and those
who had come to Italy after 1 January 1919 were to be expelled; no
Jew was to be allowed to be a teacher, lawyer, journalist, banker or
a member of the Fascist Party; special elementary schools were to
be established for Jewish children; marriage, or even fornication,
with African natives was to be punished by imprisonment. ‘All
this/ the Duce said, would ‘ increase the hatred of foreigners for
Italy. Good ! ’
It also increased the opposition to Fascism, and this drove Musso
lini to frequent and extravagant outbursts against ‘ spineless people
in Italy who were moved by the fate of the Jews \ The King was
one of them, and his expression of ‘ infinite pity for the Jews ’ made
Mussolini remark that the little milksop ought to be treated as one
of them himself. Even before his visit to Germany, Mussolini had,
in Ciano’s phrase, let fly at America as ‘ the country of niggers and
Jews—the forces which disintegrate civilization \ In the year 2000,
he prophesied, the races playing an important role in Europe would
be the Italians, the Germans, the Russians and the Japanese.
‘ Other countries will be destroyed by the acid of Jewish corrosion.
The Jews even refuse to breed because it costs pain. They don't
realize that pain is the only creative factor in the life of a nation/
He approved unconditionally, he said later, the reprisals carried out
by the Nazis when they used the murder of the Third Secretary of
the German Embassy in Paris by a Polish Jew as the pretext for an
increase in their anti-Semitic activities.
86
THE DIPLOMAT
And yet the Duce himself viewed with apparent unconcern the
haphazard and uncertain way in which his own racial legislation,
as indeed so much other Fascist legislation, was enforced. ‘It’s
typical of him / a German Embassy official said to a friend. ‘He
barks like mad, but he doesn’t bite.’ He changed his dentist and
told a leading Fascist to change his secretary, but these gestures did
not impress the Germans with the seriousness of his attitude to the
Jewish question. The OVRA was never instructed to ensure that the
racial legislation was enforced, and Bocchini himself was known not
to take it seriously. As an anti-Semite Mussolini was, and remained,
a disappointment to Hitler. When a Fascist scholar went to him
to protest against the treatment of some Jewish friends, he was
reported as replying, ‘ I agree with you entirely. I don’t believe a
bit in the stupid anti-Semitic theory. I am carrying out my policy
entirely for political reasons.’ But the impression that he was carry
ing it out in deference to German wishes was nevertheless inescap
able.
By the beginning of 1938 Mussolini’s enthusiasm for Germany
had somewhat cooled. Throughout the winter he had been aware
of the imminence of a new German assault on Austrian indepen
dence, but Hitler had not troubled to inform him of his plans. On
12 February Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, who ever since
the signing of the Austro-German Agreement of July 1936 had
been playing for time and making concessions in order to avoid a
Nazi Putsch, paid a visit to Berchtesgaden for a conversation with
Hitler. The Führer was abusive and threatening, and Schuschnigg
was presented with far-reaching demands of which the Italians had
been given no previous notice. Ciano was instructed to make it
known that the Duce was annoyed, but that was as far as the pro
test went. He knew he would have to succumb if Hitler’s threats
provoked war, and the following month, when Schuschnigg had
taken the dangerous but courageous step of announcing that he
would hold a plebiscite in Austria in which the people would be
asked to declare their views on the Anschluss, Mussolini said that
the decision was a mistake. For Hitler it was a great deal more
serious than a mistake. It was, as A. J. P. Taylor has written in
an apt phrase, ‘ as though someone had trodden on a painful corn ’.
He fixed Saturday 12 March as the day for marching across the
frontier, and on the previous Thursday sent a letter which was to
be delivered personally in Rome to the Duce by Prince Philip of
Hesse, whose exceptional ugliness and supposed homosexual pro
clivities were disregarded in a royal messenger who was not only a
87
MUSSOLINI
Nazi sympathizer but also married to the King of Italy’s daughter,

Princess Mafalda.
41 am now determined to restore law and order in my homeland,’
Hitler wrote. 41 wish now solemnly to assure your Excellency, as
the Duce of Fascist Italy: (i) I consider this step only as one of
national self-defence. . . . (2) In a critical hour for Italy I proved
to you the steadfastness of my sympathy. Do not doubt that in the
future there will be no change in this respect. (3) Whatever the
consequences of the coming events may be, I have drawn a definite
boundary between Germany and France and now draw one just as
definite between Italy and us. It is the Brenner. This decision will
never be questioned or changed.’
Although extremely anxious to obtain Mussolini’s agreement not
to intervene as he had done in 1934, Hitler had decided in any
event to attack, and while Hesse was still on his way to Rome
instructions for Operation Otto had already been issued. By the
time he received Hitler’s letter Mussolini was aware of this. He
knew that it would be pointless to resist and had in fact, since
Schuschnigg’s visit to Berchtesgaden, decided that it would not
be politic to do so. All he could hope for now was that some advan
tage might be gained by a ready acknowledgment of Hitler’s pro
vocation. Just before half past ten on the Friday night Prince
Philip telephoned Hitler to give him the Duce’s reply to his letter.
41 have just come back from Palazzo Venezia,’ Prince Philip
said.4The Duce accepted the whole thing in a very friendly manner.
He sends you his regards. . . .’
Hitler’s relief was overwhelming. He knew that Mussolini had
once passionately declared that Italy 4could never permit Austria—
the bastion of Mediterranean civilization—to be the victim of
Pan-Germanism ’. But now the Duce’s support, of which he had not
till now felt completely assured, was granted him.
4Please tell Mussolini that I shall never forget him for this.’
4Yes.’
'Never, never, never, whatever happens. . . . As soon as the
Austrian affair is settled, I shall be ready to go with him, through
thick and thin, no matter what happens.’
4Yes, my Führer.’
‘Listen, I shall make any agreement. . . . You may tell him that
I thank him so very much; never, never, shall I forget.’
4Yes, my Führer.’
41 will never forget, whatever may happen. If he should ever
need any help or be in any danger, he must be assured that I shall
88
THE D I P L O M A T
stick to him, whatever may happen, even if the whole world were
against him /
‘Yes, my Führer/
Two days later Hitler repeated his assurances of lifelong grati
tude. ‘ I shall never forget this/ he said in a cable sent from Austria,
which was already officially described as ‘ a province of the German
Reich \
‘ My attitude Mussolini replied, ‘ is determined by the friend
ship between our two countries, which is consecrated in the Axis/
His attitude, however, had still to be explained to an indignant
Italian public which not many months before had listened to the
Duce’s determined declaration that ‘ the independence of Austria,
for which Dollfuss died, is a principle for which the Italians have
fought and will continue to fight*. It certainly could not be ex
plained by dismissing Austria, as he did in conversation with Ciano,
as ‘an ambiguity which has been removed from the map of
Europe \ In the Chamber, Mussolini disingenuously attempted to
silence opposition by affirming in a particularly bombastic speech
that Italy had ‘ never given any pledge, either directly or indirectly,
either verbally or in writing, to intervene to save the independence
of Austria*. This was demonstrably false, and the Italian people
knew that it was. For the first time since the murder of Matteotti
a general and deep sense of disenchantment swept over them; and
although the Axis survived the Anschluss, the Duce’s hitherto un
questionable popularity did not. Apart from the sudden and seem
ingly abject change of policy to please an unwanted ally, no in
telligent observer could fail to realize the dangers for Italy in
allowing a strong and militant Germany to extend its frontiers to
the Alps. The whole traditional theme of Italian foreign policy had
been contradicted.
For Hitler the annexation of Austria was a triumph, the realiza
tion of his most compelling ambition. But it was also a stepping-
stone towards an even larger empire in the East. As early as
November 1937 he had spoken at a secret meeting at the Reich
Chancellery of his intention to annex Czechoslovakia. Now he was
ready to do so. The reaffirmation by the French Government of
its guarantees to Czechoslovakia he did not take seriously. He felt,
with that instinct which he was beginning to consider infallible,
that France, like England, was so anxious not to go to war that
her protestations could be discounted; but, to make sure that
France was driven by fear to atrophy, he decided before taking any
irrevocable step that he would strengthen the Axis.
89
MUSSOLINI
Mussolini had invited him to visit Italy the previous September.
On 2 May 1938 the Führer left for Rome with the expressed inten
tion, so a secretary at the Italian Embassy in Berlin reported, of
flattering the Italians* pride and of demonstrating that the Axis
was a living reality. He had much lost ground to regain. The
Anschluss was not forgiven and had revived fears about German
intentions in Alto Adige. Also the British Government, taking
advantage of what it hoped was Italy's disillusion with Germany
over Austria, and in an attempt to prevent Hitler from further
aggression, had come to a settlement with Mussolini.
This settlement, suggested by Ciano, was welcomed by Chamber-
lain but strongly resisted by Eden—‘ that sworn enemy of Italy ’,
as Mussolini had called him—and a heated argument between the
two Englishmen, which resulted in Eden's resignation two days
later, was carried on in the presence of Count Dino Grandi, the
Italian Ambassador. Gratified by Eden's resignation, which was
celebrated in the Italian Press as a triumph for Italy (editors were
instructed to tone down their pleasure in case the hated English
politician might be turned into a martyr), Mussolini accepted the
settlement with a sulky pleasure. He knew that Hitler’s actions had
put him in a good bargaining position, and for indeterminate
promises of support in Central Europe he had been able to obtain
acceptance of his conquest of Abyssinia and of his intervention in
Spain in addition to satisfactory guarantees in the Mediterranean.
‘ The Italian pact ', Churchill wrote in disgust to Eden, ‘ is of course
a complete triumph for Mussolini.’ Ciano thought so too, and
could not conceal a mild contempt for the English for having
given so much ground. ‘How romantic! ' he commented when it
was suggested that the Agreement should be signed on Easter Day
because it was also Halifax’s birthday. ‘ The scope of the agreement
is vast,’ he wrote excitedly in his diary. ‘ It is the beginning of a
new era in our relationship with Great Britain. Friendship on a
footing of equality—the only kind of friendship we can accept with
London or with anyone else.’ Italian public opinion would welcome
it, he said, ‘with immense enthusiasm partly because it will be
seen as a possible way of disengaging ourselves from Berlin \ Cer
tainly when Lord Perth, the British Ambassador, left Palazzo Chigi
after signing the Agreement on 1 April 1938 he was loudly cheered;
and on his way to report to the Duce at Palazzo Venezia, Ciano was
given an even more enthusiastic ovation. By eight o’clock the
crowds had become so large that Mussolini himself went on to the
balcony to acknowledge their cheers.
90
THE DIPLOMAT
It was, as Churchill said, a ‘ triumph But so far as the British

were concerned the Agreement was worthless. Not for a moment
did Mussolini envisage it as the first step in a policy of disengage
ment from Germany; it was, for him, merely yet another acknow
ledgment of Italy's influence and growing power. He was more
gratified, in fact, by Germany's recognition of how one-sided the
Agreement was than with the benefit which Italy would derive
from it; and seems not to have realized now or later what great
opportunities were open to him in steering the traditional middle
course between Germany and the Western Democracies, or that
his Axis partner would have treated him with a greater respect if
he had felt less able to rely upon him. But Mussolini was so anxious
to impress the Germans with his ruthlessness that he threw away
the chance of pursuing a skilful diplomacy.
Ever since his last visit to Germany this wish to impress the
Germans had been a growingly persuasive influence on his policies.
In the early stages of his negotiations over the Anglo-Italian Agree
ment Lord Perth had remonstrated with Ciano about the Italian
air raids on Spanish towns. The Duce, though, ‘wasn't at all
worried ’, about the Ambassador’s comments. ‘ In fact,' Ciano wrote,
‘ he said he was delighted that the Italians should be horrifying the
world by their aggressiveness for a change instead of charming it
by their skill at playing the guitar. In his opinion this will send up
our stock in Germany, where they love total and ruthless war.'
Mussolini was determined that Hitler's visit to Italy should be
as impressive as his own to Germany. The planning had begun six
months before, and Ciano, anxious that nothing should be done in
a ‘commonplace, countrified, Humbertine sort of way', had paid
particular attention to the decoration of the streets and, although
many shopkeepers refused to display portraits of Hitler, they were
made to look splendidly welcoming. The Duce spent hours super
vising the arrangement of military parades and checking the details
of every march-past; and he was rewarded. Achille Starace, for all
his faults, was a brilliant stage manager. ‘The military parades,'
as Ciano said, ‘were magnificent. The Germans, who may have
been a little sceptical on this point, will leave with a very different
impression.’
Hitler certainly was impressed. He had seen more expert displays
in Germany and knew that Italy could not be considered a strong
military Power, but she was obviously an ally he could not afford
to lose; and Mussolini himself lived up to the Fiihrer's estimate of
him as the only leader in the world worth comparison with him-
91
MUSSOLINI
self. Hitler, for his own part, behaved admirably. He was far from
being the ‘silly little clown* he had seemed at Venice; and the
only fault that the Duce could now find in him was that he appeared
to wear rouge on his cheeks to hide his pallor. He was acclaimed in
Rome, cheered enthusiastically in Florence and Naples; and he
spoke to the crowds well and with dignity. Disclaiming any inten
tion of demanding the return of the South Tyrol, he said, ‘ It is my
unalterable will and my bequest to the German people that it shall
regard the frontier of the Alps, raised by nature between us, as
for ever inviolable.* ‘The Führer has had a great personal success,*
Ciano thought. ‘ He has succeeded quite successfully in melting the
ice around him. . . . His personal contacts too have won sympathy,
particularly among women.* Not even the photographs of him leav
ing the San Carlo Opera House, looking absurd in evening dress
and a top-hat, destroyed the favourable impression that he had
created.
But if the gerarchi were satisfied, King Victor Emmanuel was
not. He disliked and distrusted him on sight, and accepted him as
his guest at the Quirinale with obvious reluctance. He told Musso
lini that on his first night there Hitler had asked for a woman. This
request caused a convulsive tumult in the Royal Household until
it was explained that the Führer could not get to sleep until he had
seen a woman remake his bed. Was the story really true, Ciano
wondered? Or was it rather malice on the part of the King, who
also insinuated that ‘Hitler injects himself with stimulants and
narcotics*? The whole atmosphere of the Palace, Ciano decided,
was ‘ moth-eaten—a dynasty a thousand years old does not like the
manner of self-expression of a revolutionary régime. To a Hitler,
who is nothing but a parvenu, they prefer any paltry little King.*
Hitler disliked King Victor Emmanuel as much as the King dis
liked him, and for the rest of his life he nursed a resentment against
the House of Savoy. In their last public appearance together their
mutual antipathy was apparent. But no less apparent was the cor
diality that existed between the Duce and the Führer. At the
station when they said good-bye, both of them were moved and
Hitler was seen to stare at Mussolini with an almost dog-like
devotion. ‘ From now on,* the Duce told him, ‘ no force on earth
will be able to separate us.* The Führers eyes filled with tears.
He returned from Italy satisfied that the Duce would not inter
fere with his designs on Czechoslovakia. Only the vaguest refer
ence to the problem had been made during the visit, but
Mussolini was known to dislike the Czechs and had already referred
92
THE DIPLOMAT
to their country—as he had referred to Austria—as *an ambiguity

on the map of Europe \ As if to prepare his country for Italian
acceptance of a German solution, the Duce referred in his speeches
to the necessity of facing the Czechoslovak problem and of
‘ settling it in a general manner \ ‘ If Czechoslovakia finds herself
today in what might be called a delicate situation/ he said in one such
speech, 4it is because she was—one may already say was—not just
Czechoslovak but Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyar-Rutheno-Rou-
mano-Slovakia/
The Duce’s main concern, indeed, was not that the Germans
would, if necessary, settle the problem by force but that he would
not be informed beforehand of the date of their intended action.
On more than one occasion Bernardo Attolico, the Italian Ambassa
dor in Berlin, was instructed to ask Ribbentrop, Neurath’s successor
as Foreign Minister, to ‘communicate in good time the probable
date of action against Czechoslovakia ’. When it seemed probable,
however, that Hitler’s diplomacy would provoke a general war,
Mussolini, as always at the thought that German threats were
about to cause a crisis, became less sure that he should continue to
give Hitler his unqualified support. Chamberlain, as Ciano said,
was more interested than the Duce in reaching a peaceful agree
ment; but Mussolini himself was increasingly aware of how close
to the brink of war Hitler was moving and of how dangerous it
would be to allow his own unprepared country to be forced into
the conflict or for his own insistently gasconading bluff to be called.
‘If war breaks out in Germany, Prague, Paris and Moscow/ he
confided to Ciano, ‘ I shall remain neutral/
By 28 September war seemed inevitable. Hitler’s ultimatum to
the Czechs, delivered at Godesberg four days before, was due to
expire that afternoon at two o’clock. During the morning an
urgent telephone call was made to Palazzo Chigi. The British had
again looked to Mussolini as a moderating influence on Hitler.
Could Lord Perth see Count Ciano immediately? ‘ I receive him at
once/ Ciano recorded. ‘ He says, with much emotion, that Chamber-
lain appeals to the Duce for his friendly intervention in these hours,
which he considers the last in which something can be done to save
peace and civilization.’
Mussolini was delighted. It was far better, he admitted, to pose
as a peace-maker than risk being dragged into a war he was not
ready to fight; besides, the eyes of the world were upon him. He
told Ciano to telephone Berlin, and as soon as Attolico’s voice came
on the line he snatched the receiver to tell the Ambassador to go
93
MUSSOLINI
to Hitler to assure him that Italy was at Germany's side but to

suggest a delay in mobilization for twenty-four hours. 1Get a reply
by noon,' Mussolini added.
It was already after eleven. Attolico ran downstairs and jumped
breathless and without his hat into a taxi. When he arrived at the
Chancellery, Hitler was talking to the French Ambassador, André
François-Poncet, who had brought a last-minute offer from his
Government. An SS officer went into the room to announce that
Attolico had arrived with a message from the Duce, and the Führer
left François-Poncet immediately. Hitler read the Duce's message,
which Attolico had had translated into German. He hesitated for
a moment, but then he agreed. He confessed later to Goering that he
was left wondering whether if he did not agree Mussolini would leave
him to pursue his course alone. ‘ The Communists have lost their
chance/ Attolico said to the British Ambassador, Nevile Hender
son, a few hours later. ‘ If they had cut the telephone wires today
between Rome and Berlin there would have been war/
At three o'clock Hitler's agreement was made known in the
House of Commons by the Prime Minister. ‘ That is not all/ Mr
Chamberlain went on with rising emotion as a further message was
handed to him, ‘ I have something further to say to the House yet.
I have now been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to
meet him at Munich tomorrow morning. He has also invited
Signor Mussolini and M. Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted,
and I have no doubt M. Daladier will also accept. I need not say
what my answer will be/
Mussolini, for his part, considered that Chamberlain's obvious
pleasure and pride were misplaced. When Ciano telephoned to give
him the news of Hitler's decision he commented with satisfaction,
‘There will not be war, but this is the annihilation of English
prestige.’
On his way to Germany that night he elaborated on the point.
‘In a country where animals are adored to the point of making
cemeteries and hospitals and houses for them / he said in high good-
humour, ‘ and legacies are bequeathed to parrots, you can be certain
that decadence has set in. Besides, other reasons apart, it is also
a consequence of the composition of the English people. Four
million surplus women! Four million sexually unsatisfied women
artificially creating a host of problems in order to excite or
sublimate their desires ! Not being able to embrace one man, they
embrace hum anity/
He went on talking till late at night. He was in excellent spirits.
94
THE DIPLOMAT
He knew that without his influence the conference would not be

taking place. Only he could reason with Hitler; it was only his
sponsorship of the talks that had provided the Führer with a face
saving reason for agreeing to them; and it was only on condition
that the Duce attended in person that the Führer had agreed to
them at all. Mussolini had even been asked to choose the meeting-
place; Hitler had suggested Frankfort or Munich and the Duce
had chosen Munich.
About seventy miles south of the town the train stopped at
Kufstein on the Inn, where Hitler, anxious to talk to Mussolini
before the conference began, boarded it with Prince Philip of
Hesse. He invited the Duce to come across to his carriage, where he
showed him some large-scale maps of the country which he intended
to liquidate. If the conference was not successful, he insisted, a
solution would be imposed on Czechoslovakia by force. It was with
difficulty that Mussolini persuaded him not to condemn the con
ference to failure before it had even begun, and only when the
Duce promised that Italy would support Germany in the event of
failure did Hitler seem satisfied. ‘ The time will come/ the Führer
added, ‘ when we shall have to fight side by side against England/
Mussolini did not answer him, and Hitler still did not know how
far he could rely on Italy’s support.
The Führer’s display of intractability was repeated when, a few
hours later, the conference began at the Führerhaus in the Königs
platz. He came down the stairs to meet his guests looking white
and obdurate. He greeted the Italian delegation with calculated
warmth, but shook hands briefly and coldly with Chamberlain and
Daladier. He had already announced, he said, talking fast and
excitedly, that he would act against Czechoslovakia, but had been
told that his action would have the character of violence. Hence
the conference’s task was ‘to absolve the action from such a
character. Action, however, must be taken at once.’
Despite his categoric words he seemed nervous and curiously
unsure of himself. When he had finished speaking he walked away
from the others and stood restlessly by the wall watching Musso
lini, who, by contrast, appeared not merely self-assured but patroniz
ing, as he walked around the room with his hands in his pockets
talking easily in French to Daladier, to Ribbentrop in his careful
German, to Chamberlain in his less certain but adequate English.
He produced a Memorandum which closely followed, with slight
modifications, the German proposals that had been telephoned to
him in Rome by Attolico. Accepting the Memorandum as Musso-
9J
MUSSOLINI
lini’s own draft and one which the Germans would consider a
satisfactory basis for discussion, the other delegates were prepared
to examine it carefully. Other drafts were written and discussed,
but it was this one which formed the basis of the Agreement which
was signed at two o’clock in the morning of 30 September. Hours
before, Mussolini had decided that Hitler had already gained every
material point, and the continued discussions clearly seemed point
less to him. He did not enter into them and succeeded in giving
Chamberlain the impression of being 4extremely quiet and
reserved \ even 4cowed by Hitler ’. Ivone Kirkpatrick, too, thought
that Mussolini, despite his apparent self-confidence, was afraid of
Hitler and that he now seemed to be 4a man who was deeply
relieved at the outcome ’.
Ciano, deeply relieved as well, watched the Duce standing aloof
from the others and could not conceal his admiration. 4His great
spirit,* he wrote afterwards, 4always ahead of events and men, has
already absorbed the idea of agreement and while the others are
still wasting their breath over more or less formal problems he has
almost ceased to take an interest. He has already passed on and is
meditating on other things.’
Although he was later constantly to express his dissatisfaction
with the Munich agreement, Hitler himself appeared to share
Ciano’s admiration for the Duce. He watched him constantly,
François-Poncet said. 4He seemed fascinated. If the Duce laughed,
he laughed; if the Duce frowned, he frowned.’
The Duce’s performance was greeted in Italy as a triumph. The
King came to Florence from his country estate at San Rossore to
congratulate him, and when his train reached Rome enormous
crowds came to cheer him with an enthusiasm which, according
to himself, they had not shown since the proclamation of the
Empire. But the excitement did not please him, for the title
4Angel of Peace’ which he heard shouted through the more
familiar chant of ‘Duce! Duce!9 was not one which in the least
appealed to him. At the sight of an arch of laurel leaves which had
been built across Via Nazionale he exploded with anger. 4Who’s
responsible,’ he asked furiously, 4for this carnival?’ The Italian
people must not be allowed to hope for peace, their ‘character
must be moulded by fighting ’. Determined not to let them suppose
that he should be compared with Chamberlain as a peace-maker—
a term which for him could be nothing but pejorative—Mussolini
celebrated his return to Italy by making a series of speeches in
tended to dragoon them—and in particular the bourgeoisie, who
96
I n s p e c tin g B la c k sh ir ts a t th e F a sc is t r a lly in N a p le s in 1922
Surrounded by members of the ‘ London Fascisti ’ in London in

THE DIPLOMAT
needed a *good punch in the stomach *—into accepting an aggres

sive Germany as their friend and ally and France as their enemy.
4Italy cannot be sufficiently Prussianized/ he thought. ‘ I will not
leave the Italians in peace till I have six feet of earth over my
head/ 41 am preparing a great surprise for them / he had told
Ciano the year before.4As soon as Spain is finished I shall issue an
announcement which will become historic/ His Ministers had
learned to accept these enigmatic threats with reserve, but they
could not help feeling now that the Duce was in earnest. On 26
September he told Ciano that he had definitely decided to mobilize
the next day and to send troops to Libya, and Ciano confessed
later that he believed he was really going to do so. Ciano, indeed,
afterwards told a friend he had feared the Duce would go to
war purely to spite the hated bourgeoisie, who were showing alarm at
the fearful cost of Fascist policy and of the vast bureaucracy which
Fascism had developed. The published figures of State expenditure
showed a rapidly increasing deficit, which from just over two
thousand million lire in 1934-5 was over eleven thousand million
by 1937-8 and by 1939-40 was to be more than twenty-eight
thousand million. Characteristically, Mussolini attributed the
growing restlessness of the middle-classes to their selfish concern
for their own welfare, their refusal to recognize the national interest
or, as he put it in a familiar but fustian phrase, 4the historical and
classic direction of Fascist dynamics \ The rich, too, were wavering
in their support of the régime and were becoming infected with
bourgeois ideas. They must all be bludgeoned into selflessness and
discipline, he said, and Starace was to consider the possibility of
an anti-bourgeois exhibition.3 The Party leaders must set an
example of the true, anti-bourgeois Fascist spirit by not wearing
starch in the black collars of their shirts or attending night-clubs
or drinking coffee. Later on he considered closing the Stock
Exchange, abolishing first-class travel on the railways, outlawing
golf and the importation of French magazines, French clothes and
French books.
The campaign against France had been started months before.
Ciano’s diary for May 1938 is full of references to it. On 13 May the
Duce is described as being 4more and more anti-French. He said
they are a nation ruined by alcohol, syphilis, and journalism/ The
3 It is an illuminating reflection that men tend to condemn most virulently what
they most fear and dislike in themselves. Despite his extravagant Bohemianism,
the young Mussolini always took care to be photographed wearing presentable
clothes and he had visiting-cards printed with the style ‘ Professor \ to which, by
virtue of his qualifications as a teacher, he was entitled.
97
MUSSOLINI
following day he made a speech in Genoa. ‘ It is a very strong

anti-French speech. The crowd hissed France, laughed ironically
at the agreement with London/ On May 17 he was still ‘very
worked up against France’. Two days later he was ‘more exasper
ated than ever ’. An intercepted report, containing some disparaging
remarks made about him by the French Ambassador, had the
predictable effect of driving him to still greater indignation.
After the Munich conference the attacks were sustained until by
the beginning of December anti-French demonstrations in Italy
were becoming commonplace. On 9 December Mussolini confessed
to Ciano that he thought matters had gone far enough for the
moment; a little sand would have to be put into the wheels of the
anti-French campaign. ‘If it continues at this rate,’ he thought,
‘we shall have to make the cannon speak, and the time has not
come for that yet.’ It had, after all, been initiated not as a prelude
to war but to serve the less drastic purpose of acclimatizing public
opinion to a written military alliance with Germany.
The first suggestion of such an alliance had been made by
Ribbentrop during Hitler’s visit to Rome in May, but Mussolini,
although he had at one time seemed favourable towards the idea,
eventually instructed Ciano to be evasive. Ribbentrop had broached
the subject again at Munich. ‘ He says it is the biggest thing in the
world,’ Ciano wrote disdainfully. ‘ He always exaggerates, Ribben
trop. No doubt we will study it quite calmly and perhaps put it
aside for a time.’ And this is exactly what Mussolini told him to
do.
In October, when he visited Rome, the German Foreign Minister
was no more successful. Ciano, after an early flush of enthusiasm,
had now decided that he cordially disliked the man and listened
impatiently when Ribbentrop, referring to England as a woman
might have referred to a ‘ faithless lover ’, told the Duce didactically
that war was inevitable and that the Anti-Comintern Pact should
be made into a military alliance in which Japan should be included.
Mussolini was polite but refused to commit himself. He said that
Italian public opinion was not yet mature. The generals and the
middle-classes would strongly disapprove of it; so would the
Church, which was on increasingly bad terms with the German
Government; and so would the King, who, although he disliked
the French and had his eye on Corsica, disliked the Germans even
more.
The quarrel with France, however, was forcing Mussolini, as he
had been forced during the Abyssinian war, into reliance on Ger-
98
THE DIPLOMAT
man support. He was concerned to hear that while he was laying

public claim to Corsica, Nice and Tunis, Ribbentrop had been to
Paris, and to cause trouble between England and France had signed
a Declaration guaranteeing the existing Franco-German frontier.
He was also concerned by rumours of a military agreement between
Britain and France and of American intentions to supply military
material to the Democracies in case of necessity. He was, perhaps,
in addition, hoping that if he signed a military pact with Germany
he would be able to exercise more influence on German policies.
Certainly by the end of 1938 he had come to the conclusion that he
could no longer procrastinate. On 3 January Ciano told Attolico to
let the Germans know that the Duce would shortly be ready to
sign a treaty of alliance. ‘ In the past,’ Ciano wrote in his diary,
‘ Attolico had been rather hostile to the idea of an alliance with
Germany,’ but now ‘he showed himself openly favourable to it.
He said that during this particular leave in Italy, he has been con
vinced that nothing would be more popular amongst us than a
war against France.’ Two days later, Achille Starace was given his
instructions. Propaganda against France must be steadily increased
so that the alliance could be announced when anti-French feeling
was at its height; and as soon as the news was made public, ‘ demon
strations with a sharply Francophobe flavour *were to be organized.
Nothing, however, was to be done for the moment as the British
Prime Minister was due in Rome in a few days’ time and it would
be better to wait until he had left.
Chamberlain had himself proposed the visit. He believed that he
had come to a satisfactory understanding with Hitler and should
now make sure of Italy’s friendship also. He was prepared, as many
other more percipient Englishmen were prepared, to forgive the
Abyssinian adventure and, in Duff Cooper’s phrase, to let Italian
bygones be bygones. Many members of his Party, indeed, had not
condemned the attack even at the time and were, as Mr Michael
Foot has shown in a clever and ironic book, willing to condone it.
Chamberlain went to Italy hoping to exploit this fact; if he could
create a split between Rome and Berlin, so much the better. W ith
the reluctant agreement of the French Government, he wrote sug
gesting that he and Lord Halifax should visit Mussolini in January.
Despite Chamberlain’s efforts to be pleasant the visit was a
failure and an embarrassment. The English, Mussolini had already
decided, had ‘ their minds in the seat of their trousers ’. ‘ Chamber-
lain and his umbrella are coming,’ he had told his wife, and
although he admitted later that the Prime Minister’s conversation
99
MUSSOLINI
was 4very sprightly for an Englishman ’, he was even less impressed

with him than he had been at Munich. Starace had been instructed
to see that Chamberlain and Halifax received a 4not too enthusiastic
welcome \ These instructions were carried out exactly. The English
men were greeted with restrained courtesy; Mussolini himself was
gracious and accepted with apparent pleasure a signed photograph
of the British Prime Minister, but out of their hearing he spoke of
them with a disdain which was close to contempt. 4How far apart
we are from these people,’ Ciano wrote when his guests had gone
and he had seen Chamberlain’s eyes fill with tears as the train
moved out of the station to the strains of 4For he’s a jolly good
fellow’, sung by a group of English residents. ‘They live in a
different world. We were talking about it after dinner with the
Duce, gathered together in a corner of the room. 44These men are
not made of the same stuff,” he was saying,44as the Francis Drakes
and the other magnificent adventurers who created the British
Empire. They are the tired sons of a long line of rich forefathers
and they will lose their Empire.” ’ He gave similar expression to
his disdain a few weeks later when Lord Perth submitted for his
approval a speech he intended to make in the House of Commons.
41 believe this is the first time,’ he said, ‘that the Head of the
British Government has submitted to a foreign Government the
outline of one of his speeches. It’s a bad sign for them.’ It was
perhaps natural, he said on another occasion, that the English
should be terrified of war. It was only to be expected of a people
who lived a comfortable life and ‘made a religion of eating and
games’. The whole Fascist ethic was opposed to this idea. In a
celebrated article signed with his name in the Enciclopedia Italiana,
Fascism had been officially described as believing ‘neither in the
possibility nor in the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone
brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the
stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet
it.’ This was a philosophy which the English 4could not begin to
understand ’. But what, after all, could you expect of a people, he
asked in a subsequent speech in which his misconceptions of
English life were so grotesque as to be appealing, who changed into
dinner-jackets for their five o’clock tea?
After Chamberlain’s departure Ciano telephoned Ribbentrop to
assure him that the meeting with Mussolini accomplished nothing.
4It was a fiasco, absolutely worthless.’ The preparation of the text
of the military alliance was to go ahead. Before it was signed, how
ever, the Axis was given a jolt which brought it close to dissolution.
ioo
THE DIPLOMAT
On 14 March 1939, without consulting Mussolini, German troops

crossed the Czechoslovak frontier; the following day Hitler was in
Prague. When he was given the news Mussolini was furious. ‘ Every
time Hitler occupies a country/ he said angrily, after the Führer’s
envoy Prince Philip of Hesse had called as usual to thank the Duce
for his support, 1he sends a message/ The German alliance was an
absurdity, he said later, against which the ‘very stones would
revolt ’. His anger, however, soon changed to gloom. When Ciano
commented sourly that the ‘ Axis functions only in favour of one
of its parts’ and that the reaction of the people would be very
hostile, Mussolini replied with a quotation from Dante: ‘We
must avoid “ displeasing God and also God’s enemies”.’ ‘The
German trick’ would have to be accepted with a good grace.
Already he had come to the conclusion that Hitler was too strong
now to be stopped and that Italy must stay on his side, however
insolently he treated her. He was desperately concerned by the
inevitable spread of German influence across the Balkans, which
he liked to consider as his own diplomatic territory, and he
accepted with obvious caution Hitler’s reassurances that Germany
would leave the Mediterranean and the Adriatic to Italy; but he
refused to break the Axis. ‘ We cannot change our policy now/ he
insisted. ‘ We are not, after all, political prostitutes.’
On the evening of 21 March he made his decision known to a
meeting of the Fascist Grand Council in a speech which Ciano
described as ‘ marvellous, argumentative, logical, cold and heroic ’.
He spoke of ‘ uncompromising loyalty to the Axis ’ as being a neces
sity of Italian foreign policy and of the Fascist conception of true
friendship. The Council, accustomed to unquestioning obedience,
accepted the Duce’s decision without complaint. Only Grandi, De
Bono and Balbo appeared dissatisfied, but when Mussolini was told
of their criticisms he dismissed them as ‘ stupidities ’. Balbo, who
said that to remain a part of the Axis was tantamount to ‘ licking
Germany’s boots’, was nothing but ‘a democratic swine’ whose
future Mussolini had already decided he ‘ would not like to guaran
tee ’. De Bono was ‘ an idiotic old dotard ’. He had always been an
idiot and now he was old as well. The Duce had made up his mind,
Starace told the officials at Party Headquarters, ‘and that was
that ’.
Not only Mussolini’s policies but even his character seemed to
have been affected by his association with Hitler, by his unwilling
but growing dependence upon him, his reluctant admiration, his
patent jealousy. Whereas in the past he had been willing to listen
IOI
MUSSOLINI
to advice and even occasionally to criticism, now he attacked with

an alarming venom those who presumed to advise him or to
question his political sense. Deciding that the Italians needed
hardening and infusing with that spirit which characterized Ger
many's military success, he forced his Ministers and the leaders of
the Fascist Party to set an example by performing hard and even
dangerous exercises and by taking part in strenuous sports. W ith
the same end in view he extended the categories of officials who
were expected to wear uniforms; he issued decrees intended
stringently to enforce the regulations abolishing the handshake and
the polite form of address; he obliged the generals and their staffs
to run and not to walk during military exercises. ‘ The Italians must
learn,' he was fond of saying, ‘ to grow less likeable and to become
hard, implacable and hateful.' He himself, he was proud to admit,
would rather be feared than loved. He was certainly doing his best
to become so. Towards the end of the war in Spain, Franco's forces
captured several Italian Communists who had been fighting in
Catalonia. He was asked what should be done with them.
‘ Shoot them,’ he ordered, according to Ciano. ‘ Dead men tell no
tales.'
For the Jews he planned a less conventional fate. When consider
ing the advantages of turning part of Italian Somaliland into a
concession for international Jewry, he decided that Migiurtinia
was the most suitable district. It had many natural resources which
the Jews could exploit, including a shark fishery which would have
the 4great advantage ', he observed with ghoulish humour, ‘ that,
to begin with, many of the Jews would get eaten '.
Anti-Semitism was now declared to be an essential part of Fascist
policy. Although the decrees by which this policy was brought into
effect were never strictly applied, by the end of 1938 many
distinguished Jews had been dismissed from senior posts in the
public service and many had felt obliged to leave the country. By
the spring of 1939 confiscation of Jewish property was widespread.
It was suggested that the anti-Semitic campaign had been initiated
by Mussolini to force upon the bourgeoisie—‘ sedentary, pessimist
and xenophile ', as the Duce described them—a more satisfactorily
imperialistic frame of mind; it was also suggested that it was an
economic measure prompted by the sad state of Italian finances; it
was even suggested that Mussolini wished to ingratiate himself
with the Arabs. But no one seriously doubted that the main in
fluence was Hitler.
Nor could it be doubted that the timing of Italy's first major
102
THE D I P L O M A T
aggressive action since the invasion of Abyssinia was directly in
fluenced by Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Although an
attack on Albania had been discussed months previously, and
Easter Week had been set as a possible date as early as the begin
ning of February, it was not until the middle of March that the
Duce made up his mind. For weeks he had been indecisive, promis
ing instructions which never came, threatening blows which were
never made. As always when he was uncertain about what he should
do, he alternated between moods of almost hysterical excitement
and silent depression. One day he would speak of the necessary
growth of Italy's Empire with passionate emphasis, the next he
would refuse to discuss anything important at all. When he was
in one of his exalted moods, his elation was frequently close to
ecstasy. Bocchini told Ciano ‘ that the Duce should take an inten
sive anti-syphilitic cure ’. His constant restlessness was ‘ obvious now
to all his colleagues ’.
In one of his moments of exaltation he announced at a meeting
of the Grand Council ‘ the immediate goals of Fascist dynamics '.
Albania was to become Italian; the Mediterranean was to be
rendered secure for Italy by the acquisition of Tunisia and Corsica;
the Alpine frontier was to be moved to the Var. *I also have my
eye on the Ticino,’ he went on, ‘ as Switzerland has lost her cohesive
force and is destined, like many little countries, to be disrupted.
All this is a programme. I cannot lay down fixed times. I merely
indicate the lines on which we shall march. Anyone revealing what
I have said, in whole or in part, will have to answer to a charge of
treason.’ Next day these extravagant claims were extended to
include Jibuti and a share of the Suez Canal. Two days later, how
ever, he seemed to have lost all interest in the subject. On 3 March
Ciano found him wanting to ‘ let matters slide ’ on the Albanian
question. But by 23 March he had decided ‘to move more
rapidly \ 4
Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia ended his doubts. As soon
as the news of the German invasion reached him, his mind flew to
‘ the possibility of a blow in Albania ’, but immediately afterwards
he expressed doubts that the occupation of that poor country,
4 Mussolini's sudden changes of mind and of mood, although doubtless accen
tuated by his declining health, were not, as has often been suggested, a pheno
menon of this phase of his life. He had always been subject to them. Margherita
Sarfatti speaks of a day on the eve of the 1919 election when Mussolini told her
' in a decided tone ' that he had made up his mind not to let his name appear in
the list of candidates. The next day he announced, quite as decidedly, that his
name must certainly head the list in Milan.
103
MUSSOLINI
which in any case was already almost a vassal state, would
4counterbalance in world opinion the incorporation into the Reich
of Bohemia, one of the richest territories in the world \ And to the
chagrin of Ciano, who had long advocated the Albanian venture
as a dramatic move which could be set off against *the undesirable
increase in the prestige of the Reich ’ and so 4raise the morale of
Italy’, Mussolini gave no definite instructions then and there.
But when he heard that the King had repeated a conviction that
there was no point in risking war in order 4to grab four rocks \ he
made up his mind to act 4as soon as Spain is over \
On 28 March he was overjoyed at the news of the fall of Madrid.
He had at one time doubted that Franco’s 4flabby conduct ’ of the
war would ever end in victory and had told Ciano during the
previous summer to put on record in his book that he prophesied
his defeat. But now at last the exhausting war was over, and the
world was given evidence of a 4new and formidable triumph for
Fascism ’. The Duce came in from the balcony overlooking Piazza
Venezia, where crowds were cheering the end of the war, and
pointed to an atlas open at the map of Spain. 4It has been open in
this way for almost three years,’ he said with solemn emphasis.
4And that is enough. But I know already that I must open it at
another page.’ At dawn ten days later Italian troops landed in
Albania. There was little fighting, and although the Italian Press,
reflecting the inherent difficulties in interpreting and propagating
‘Fascist dynamics’, did not agree whether this was because the
Italian troops had fought so brilliantly or because the Albanians
had welcomed them as deliverers from a hated King, it was, never
theless, a victory of a sort; and by nightfall Italy had gained what
Hitler described as 4a stronghold which will inexorably dominate
the Balkans ’.
A few days before the attack the Duce’s indecision had given
way to a mood of conviction and determination. ‘He is calm,’
Ciano reported on 5 April, ‘frightfully calm.’ By 15 April, when
the operation had been successfully concluded and Albanian dele
gates had arrived in Rome for the ceremony of offering the crown
to Victor Emmanuel, he was sublimely confident. Foreign reaction
was already negligible and it was 4clear above all ’, as Ciano said,
‘that the British protests were more for domestic consumption
than anything else’. When a message arrived from President
Roosevelt proposing a ten years’ truce, Mussolini refused at first to
read it. When he had done so he threw it to one side with the
contemptuous comment, 4A result of infantile paralysis ! ’
104
THE DIPLOMAT
Goering was in Rome that day. He had been sent by Hitler to give
an account to Mussolini of the state of German preparations for
war and of the confidence with which the German Government faced
*the solution of the Polish problem ’; for the solution of this prob
lem, which was to lead inevitably to war, was now imminent, and
the Führer was anxious to be able to declare to the world that
Germany and Italy stood joined together by a military alliance
before taking any irrevocable step. He knew that Italy was still not
a strong military power—although if General von Rintelen, Military
Attaché at the Embassy in Rome, is to be credited the Duce’s boasts
had deceived him into believing she was much stronger than she
was—but he needed her support politically, and, hoping that the
announcement of an alliance would deter the democracies from ful
filling their obligations to Poland, he instructed Ribbentrop to
renew his effort to get the Italians to sign. Ciano was reluctant to
do so. He was afraid that the Germans would ‘overdo things’ in
Poland and would make some move which would have disastrous
repercussions. Five days after Goering’s conversation with Mussolini,
a report came in from Attolico in Berlin warning that Germany’s
action against Poland was ‘now close at h an d ’. Ciano, who had
himself noticed that Goering had spoken of Poland ‘in the same
tone used at other times for Austria and Czechoslovakia *, was deep
ly concerned and took the report to show to the Duce at Palazzo
Venezia. But Mussolini was not in a receptive mood. Victory in
Spain and in Albania had renewed his taste for conquest. He was
delighted when Ciano told him of a visit the Netherlands Ambas
sador had made to Palazzo Chigi to express Dutch concern at
reports that Germany and Italy were to divide up Europe between
them. ‘I a m ’, he said, as if in confirmation of the Ambassador’s
fears, ‘ training Italy for war.’ And yet despite his belligerent atti
tude he realized in his more reflective moments that Italy was not
yet ready for war. He asked Ciano to arrange a meeting with
Ribbentrop to find out how far the Germans intended to go and
how soon they intended to act; at the same time Ciano was to
impress on Ribbentrop the necessity of peace for Italy for at least
three years.
‘ Germany too ’, Ribbentrop reassured Ciano when they met in
Milan on 6 May, ‘ is convinced of the necessity for a period of peace
which should not be less than four or five years,’
I05
MUSSOLINI
Ribbentrop was in an unusually accommodating mood. Ciano,

who had described him in October as ‘ vain, frivolous, loquacious
and tactless’ and had noted with satisfaction that Mussolini had
said you only had to look at his head to see what a little brain he
had, on this occasion got on quite well with him. After dinner at
the Continental Hotel he telephoned the Duce to say that although
Hitler was apparently determined to recover Danzig, the talks in
general were going well and the Germans were agreed that peace
should be preserved for the next few years. Gratified and reassured
by this and infuriated by the news that Ribbentrop had not been
well received by the people of Milan, Mussolini told him to
announce the news that a German-Italian alliance was in existence.
On 21 May Ciano arrived in Berlin for the ceremony of signing
the alliance, which Mussolini at first suggested should be known as
the Pact of Blood but which afterwards became known to the world
as the Pact of Steel. That evening, at a banquet at the Italian
Embassy, Ciano bestowed on Ribbentrop the Order of the Annun
ziata. Goering, who had gone into the dining-room to change the
cards on the table so that he rather than Ribbentrop should sit on
Ciano’s right, came back into the drawing-room to see the Foreign
Minister, surrounded by guests, admiring the Collar of the Order
which gave him the right to consider himself a cousin of the King
of Italy. Feeling that if anyone was to be honoured it should have
been himself, Goering, with tears of disappointment in his eyes,
made an embarrassing scene, said the collar was really his and was
with difficulty dissuaded from walking out of the Embassy. The
following day when the Pact was signed at an impressive ceremony
at the Chancellery, Goering had not recovered from his ill-temper
and was seen to look the other way whenever Ribbentrop passed
near him. Hitler, on the other hand, had rarely been seen in so
gracious and happy a mood. He was as talkative and boring as ever,
Ciano discovered, and looked older and tired, for he slept very
badly. There were rumours too of his intimate and time-absorbing
affection for a beautiful twenty-year-old girl with a ‘magnificent
body’ whose name was Sigrid von Lappus, but although his eyes
were ‘ much more deeply wrinkled ’ he was ‘ very well, quite serene,
in fact \ He had good cause to be content. The Pact was far from
being the purely defensive alliance which Mussolini had suggested
the previous winter. Its character is epitomized in Article III : ‘ If,
contrary to the wishes and hopes of the contracting parties, it
should happen that one of them is involved in hostilities with
another Power or Powers, the other contracting party will come
106
THE DIPLOMAT
immediately to its side as ally and support it with all its military
forces on land, sea and in the air/ There was no suggestion in the
Article, or anywhere else in the Pact, that the military support
should not apply to aggressive hostilities. Clearly for Hitler the Pact
of Steel was the prelude to war.
The very day after it was signed, he called a secret meeting of his
senior military commanders to tell them this in his study at the
Reich Chancellery.
1Danzig is not the object of our activities/ he said bluntly. *It is
a question of expanding our living space in the East. . . . There is
no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision :
To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot accept
a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. . . . We must
bum our boats. It is no longer a question of right or wrong/
But Mussolini, becoming increasingly alarmed by what he could
deduce rather than by what he was told, continued to advocate a
less reckless approach. Before General Cavaliere left for Germany
to represent Italy on the Military Commission established by the
Pact of Steel, he handed him a secret memorandum which repeated
the warnings that Ciano had given in Milan. Hitler was recom
mended to spend the next two or three years wearing down the
Democracies by fear and not by force, and he was again informed
that in any case Italy needed peace at least until the end of 1942.
A war of nerves, Mussolini suggested, should be the immediate
policy of the Axis.
Mussolini, himself, was already prosecuting such a war. He en
couraged the belief that the Pact of Steel was anti-French and anti-
British; he spoke threateningly of Yugoslavia and of Greece; he
excluded foreign diplomats from Tirana; he increased the numbers
of alarming anonymous letters which he delighted in sending to
unfriendly embassies in Rome; and he referred repeatedly to the
‘Fascist conception of loyalty’. When Sir Percy Loraine, Lord
Perth’s successor as British Ambassador in Rome, was formally
presented to him on 27 May he was, according to Ciano, aggressive
ly rude to him. In view of the manifest British policy of encircle
ment, he said, it was necessary to ask whether the Anglo-Italian
Agreement had any tangible value left. Loraine, shocked by this
sudden attack, blushed deeply and hesitated before he could find
words to reply.4The Duce, who is usually courteous and engaging,’
Ciano said, ‘was very stern. His face became absolutely impene
trable. It looked like the face of an oriental god sculptured in
stone.’ On his next visit Loraine was peremptorily told to ‘ inform
107
MUSSOLINI
Chamberlain that if England is ready to fight in defence of Poland,

Italy will take up arms in defence of her ally Germany’. And
Mussolini repeated the sentence twice.5
But although the Duce was anxious to leave no room for doubt
that he was now unmistakably on Germany’s side, the Germans did
not treat him as the trusted and unshakable ally he professed him
self to be. Article II of the Pact of Steel provided for prior discus
sions on matters of common interest, but in his study the day after
it was signed Hitler had said, ‘ our aim must remain hidden from
Italy \ 6 Despite Attolico’s persistent warnings, however, Mussolini
had refused to believe that Hitler would act without consulting him.
Even Ciano doubted that he would do so 4after so many protesta
tions of the need for peace’. Nothing had changed in regard to
what was said and decided in Milan, Ribbentrop continued to
assure him, stressing Germany’s intention to ensure for herself a
long period of peace—at least three years. But the warnings from
Attolico continued to arrive at Palazzo Chigi and on 20 July there
were also reports of ‘ troop movements on a vast scale ’ in Czecho
slovakia. By 2 August Ciano confessed in his diary, ‘ Attolico’s in
sistence keeps me wondering. Either the Ambassador has lost his
head or he sees and knows something which has completely
escaped us.’
That week Ciano decided that he would have to go to Germany
to find out for himself what was happening there. An international
conference which the Duce had advocated and Attolico had keenly
supported was refused by Ribbentrop; and a suggested meeting
between Hitler and Mussolini at the Brenner had been postponed.
But on 9 August Ribbentrop agreed to meet Ciano at Salzburg two
days later.
There is no doubt that Mussolini was by this time seriously con
cerned to save Italy from war. Time was needed to stabilize the
situation in Albania, North Africa and Ethiopia; to relieve the
congestion of industrial centres in the Po valley by moving factories,
plant and machinery farther south; to bring the Navy, Air Force,
artillery and motorized divisions up to strength; to repatriate the
5Sir Percy Loraine, however, told me that Ciano’s account of Mussolini’s attitude
was ( somewhat highly coloured Mussolini was cold, but not unduly intimidating.
• Hitler’s constant refusal to reveal his plans in advance to the Italians, which
so irritated and distressed Mussolini, seems not to have been so much arrogance
as a fear that they would no longer remain secret. *All Italians,’ Goebbels once
told him, *chatter like gypsies.’ In January 1943 Hitler asked Admiral Raeder
to take great care to ensure that German operational plans should be concealed
from the Italians. ‘ There is great danger,’ he thought, ‘ that the Royal Family is
transmitting intelligence to Britain.*
108
THE DIPLOMAT
million-odd Italians in France; to improve the holdings of foreign

currency by an immensely impressive international exhibition
planned to be held in Rome in 1942 to commemorate the twentieth
anniversary of the March on Rome. For all these reasons, and
particularly, so it seemed, on account of the international exhibi
tion the plans for which excited him beyond measure, Mussolini
was anxious to preserve peace at least for the moment; and protest
as he would that ‘ whenever Germany finds it necessary to mobilize
at midnight, we shall mobilize at five to twelve ’, his instructions to
Ciano were emphatic.
Ciano was told before leaving for his meeting with Ribbentrop
at Salzburg ‘to prove to the Germans, by documentary evidence,
that the outbreak of war at this time would be foolhardy. Our pre
parations are not such as to allow us to believe that victory will be
certain. Now there are no more than even chances. . . . On the
other hand, within three years the chance will be four to one/
‘Before letting me go/ Ciano recorded in his diary on 10 August,
‘the Duce recommended that I should frankly inform the Ger
mans that we must avoid a conflict with Poland, since it will be
impossible to localize it and a general war would be disastrous for
everybody. Never has the Duce spoken of the need for peace so
unreservedly and with so much warmth/
Ciano repeated Mussolini’s views with equal warmth in Salzburg,
but Ribbentrop was in no mind to listen to them. He was, in fact,
as Ciano was shocked to discover, bent on war and obstinately
determined to bring it about. ‘ It was while we were waiting to be
seated at the dinner-table/ Ciano wrote long afterwards, ‘that
Ribbentrop told me of the German design to set a match to the
European powder-keg. This he told me in much the same tone that
he would have used for an inconsequential administrative detail.
“ ‘Well, Ribbentrop,” I asked, as we were walking together in
the garden. “ W hat do you want? The corridor or Danzig? ”
‘ “ Neither. Not now,” he said, gazing at me with his cold metal
lic eyes. “ We want war!
Ribbentrop refused, however, to give the Italians any idea how
he intended to provoke it. All decisions, he said loftily, using with
infuriating self-complacency one of those archaic metaphors which
made his conversation so tiresome, ‘ were still locked in the Fiihrer’s
impenetrable bosom’. ‘He rejects any solution which might give
satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle,’ Ciano said. ' I am
certain that even if the Germans were given more than they ask
for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by
109
MUSSOLINI
the demon of destruction. At times our conversation becomes very

tense. I do not hesitate to express my thoughts with brutal frank
ness. But he is not moved. The atmosphere is icy and the coldness
between us extends even to our secretaries. During dinner not a
word is exchanged. . . . I am becoming aware of how little we
are worth in the opinion of the Germans/
The next day, when he went to see Hitler at the Berghof, Ciano
was given further evidence of this. The Führer was extremely polite
and friendly, but he did not trouble to disguise that, whatever the
Duce suggested, his mind was made up. His table was covered with
maps, and he was already occupied with military plans. He told
Ciano, as Ribbentrop had done the day before, that France and
England would not fight and added that even if they did, ‘after
the conquest of Poland (which could be expected in a short time)
Germany would be in a position to assemble for a general conflict
a hundred divisions on the West Wall ’. So far as Italy was con
cerned he would ‘not have to ask for help according to the exist
ing obligations \
Ciano was made to realize that ‘ for the Germans an alliance with
Italy means only that the enemy will be obliged to keep a certain
number of divisions facing us, thus easing the situation on the
German war fronts. . . . The fate that might befall us does not
interest them in the least/
It was a prophetic observation.
As soon as he returned to his hotel that evening, Ciano gave
orders for his aeroplane to be kept under special guard in case a
German agent should try to arrange for him to have an accident;
and when Attolico came to discuss the situation with him, he took
him into the bathroom, where he hoped the Gestapo’s microphones
would not be able to pick up their conversation. It was as if he and
the Germans were already enemies.
During the conversation at the Berghof a telegram had been
ostentatiously handed to Hitler. Ciano was allowed to know that it
had come from Moscow and that it gave the Soviet Government’s
agreement to Germany’s sending a delegation there to negotiate a
Pact which would secure Poland’s defeat and, by ensuring the
neutrality of Russia, kill the hopes that France and England had
of enlisting Soviet help in checking the expansion of Germany. The
significance of this Pact and the importance which Hitler attached
to it were not lost upon Ciano. The following day he did not even
trouble to argue any more. He merely asked when Hitler would
attack. The whole matter would be over, Hitler told him, by the
I io
THE D I P L O M A T
middle of October. Ciano returned to Rome on 13 August ‘com
pletely disgusted with the Germans, with their Führer, with their
way of doing things. They have betrayed us and lied to us/ he
wrote with unaccustomed passion. ‘ Now they are dragging us into
an adventure which we do not want and which may compromise
the régime and the country as a whole. The Italian people will recoil
with horror when they learn about the aggression against Poland
and will most probably want to fight the Germans/ The Pact of
Steel had never been popular in Italy, but this would make it hated.
His own misgivings were at an end. No longer did he have
moments when he believed that the Duce might be right in insisting
that Italy must remain loyal to the Axis. In the bathroom of his
Salzburg hotel Attolico had pleaded with him to tell the Duce that
he could consider himself released from the obligation of the Steel
Pact by Hitler's arrogant and one-sided interpretation of it. Ciano
was not yet certain that Italy should go as far as this. But then as
he was flying back to Rome a communiqué, proclaiming that the
Salzburg meeting had ended in Italy's complete agreement with
Germany's views and aspirations, was published by the Deutsches
Nachrichten Büro. Ciano’s final request had been that no communi
qué should be issued for the moment. Both Ribbentrop and Hitler
had agreed. For Ciano this was the final insult. He went to the
Duce and told him bluntly that the ‘ Germans are traitors and we
must not have any scruples in ditching them ‘ I do not hesitate
to arouse in him ', he wrote, ‘ every possible anti-German feeling
by every means in my power. I speak to him of his diminished pres
tige and of his playing the none-too-brilliant role of second fiddle.
And finally, I turn over to him documents which prove the bad
faith of the Germans on the Polish question. The Alliance was based
on promises which they now deny/
Mussolini's immediate reaction was characteristic of the doubts
and uncertainties, the sudden tergiversations, which were in the next
ten months to drive his Ministers close to distraction. ‘ At first he
agreed with m e/ Ciano remembered. ‘Then he said that honour
compelled him to march with Germany. Finally he said that he
wanted his part of the booty.'
The first of these three reactions—that of agreement with Ciano's
anti-German arguments—was neither an unexpected nor an un
usual one. Even at those times when he was prepared to back his
allies unreservedly, he was capable of criticizing them in as harsh
a way as he criticized the English or, for that matter, the Italians
themselves. ‘The Germans are merely soldiers not real warriors/
111
MUSSOLINI
he said one day with profound contempt. ‘Give them enough
sausage, butter, beer and a little car and they won’t worry about
sticking their bayonets into people.’ In the presence of Germans,
however, he seemed to lose every reservation. He would thrust out
his jaw, carefully compose his features in a pose of rock-like stern
ness, and for hours after they had left him he would speak with
admiration of their 4fine martial spirit ’, 4their heroic philosophy ’.
And then a reaction would set in and he would have doubts again.
During this month of August 1939 the entries in Ciano’s diary
provide eloquent testimony of Mussolini’s equivocal, floundering
state of mind. On 14 August he was refusing to act independently;
the next day he was convinced that Italy 4must not march blindly
with Germany’, on 16 August he was ‘really beginning to resent
German behaviour towards h im ’; three days later he was in his
4usual shifting mood ’ and obsessed by fears that 4Germany might
do good business cheaply ’ from which he would be excluded. On
20 August Ciano was recalled by telegram from a visit to Durazzo
by his Principal Private Secretary Filippo Anfuso, because the Duce
had suddenly decided 4to support Germany at any cost in the con
flict which is now close at hand ’. Ciano flew back to Rome, where
he found Mussolini holding 4very stubbornly to his ideas ’. Attolico,
who had on his own initiative come back from Berlin to support
Ciano, was also present at the interview and left i t 4discouraged and
overwhelmed with grief’. But Ciano, who knew the Duce better,
still had hopes and by the next day he had, in fact, succeeded in
persuading him to change his mind once more. He agreed that
Ciano should ask Ribbentrop to meet him at the Brenner, where he
was to reaffirm Italy’s rights as Axis partner.
Ribbentrop, however, had more important matters on his mind.
He was due in Moscow the following morning to sign the German-
Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; he could not come to the Brenner, but
he could spare Ciano an hour or so in Innsbruck. Mussolini’s mind
quavered again. Ciano must not agree to go to Innsbruck; anti-
German feeling was strong enough in Italy already, and while he
could not himself fail to admire Hitler’s diplomatic coup the
Italian people were not likely to see it in the same light. Starace had
been quite right when he had warned that public demonstrations
would break out if the régime supported Hitler’s attack on Poland.
Besides, the officers of the Army were not qualified for their job
and its equipment was old and obsolete. Italy m u st4wait events and
do nothing’.
A few hours after coming to this decision Mussolini received
112
THE D I P L O M A T
Giuseppe Bastianini, a former Ambassador to Poland, who des
cribed him as being ‘ furiously warlike \ He was still in this mood
when Ciano called at Palazzo Venezia that morning and he was
with difficulty persuaded to postpone intervention until preparations
for mobilization were more complete. Relieved to have got at least
this much from him, Ciano returned to Palazzo Chigi; but the
Duce called him back.
‘He has changed his mind,’ Ciano wrote with sad and painful
resignation. ‘He fears the bitter judgment of the Germans and
wants to intervene at once. It is useless to quarrel. I submit.’
During the afternoon, however, Mussolini received a message
from Hitler suggesting that action against Poland would begin in
a short time and assuring him that if the Duce were to be in a
situation similar to his own he ‘ would have complete understand
ing for Italy ’. Seeing in this message a chance of playing on the
Duce’s apprehensions, Ciano returned to Palazzo Venezia, where
the Duce was persuaded to write to Hitler informing him that
Italy’s support, unless immediate supplies of equipment and raw
materials were to be made available by Germany, would have to
be restricted to ‘ political and economic assistance ’. ‘ At our meet
ings,’ the Duce added, as both an apology and an implied rebuke,
‘ the war was envisaged for after 1942 and then I would have been
ready on land, sea and in the air according to our agreed plans.’
This reply temporarily unnerved Hitler. He had counted on
more definite support than this. Already upset by news received
that afternoon that a Pact of Mutual Assistance had been signed
in London between Britain and Poland, he decided to postpone the
invasion set for dawn the following morning. When he saw the
list of supplies the Italians requested, it was obvious that they
could not be met. Mackensen, die German Ambassador, who did
not want war, had recommended that the Italians should make a
formidable list, and it was, in fact, as Ciano observed, ‘ enough to
kill a bull ’. It included seven million tons of oil, six million tons
of coal, two million tons of steel, a million tons of timber, 17,000
military vehicles and no less than 150 anti-aircraft batteries.
Attolico, on presenting the list to the Germans, was brusquely
asked by Ribbentrop when the items were required. At once, said
Attolico, adding on his own iniative, ‘ before hostilities begin ’. It
was Attolico’s final effort to preserve peace, but it was useless. Hitler
had recovered his nerve and was as ready as, according to Gisevius,
he had been ready in August to ‘ throw any swine of a mediator
downstairs, even if he had to kick him in the stomach in front of
1x3
MUSSOLINI
the photographers He immediately accepted the impossibility of
complying with the Italian demands and asked only that the Duce
should give him his political support; that the decision to remain
neutral should not be made known until absolutely necessary; that
military preparations should be continued in order to impress the
French and the British; and that agricultural and industrial
workers should be sent to Germany. ‘I respect the motives and
influences determining your resolution, Duce/ he assured him .
‘Perhaps it will nevertheless be for the best/
But although the Duce was momentarily calmer after he had
finally made up his mind, he did not long remain so. Haunted by
the idea that he had not only been disloyal to his ally but had also
suffered a blow to his prestige, he pressed for another Munich
conference as the only way by which war might still be averted, by
which he might regain his status as Hitler's superior and by which
he might avoid his magniloquent bluff of ‘ otto milioni di
baionette ’ being called. He did not press his views, however, with
much force and conviction. Painfully aware that Italy was of little
use to Germany as a fighting ally, he was not fully aware of the value
which Hitler placed upon him as a political one.
‘ I allow myself to insist afresh/ he wrote mildly on 26 August,
when at the same dme agreeing to Hitler’s request of the day before,
4upon the possibility of a political solution which I still think can
be attained—and I do so certainly not on account of considerations
of a pacifist character alien to my spirit, but in the interests of our
two peoples and our two régimes \
As late as 31 August he was still diffidently pressing for accept
ance of his idea for a conference. On the evening of that day
Attolico called at the Chancellery with Mussolini’s offer of himself
as mediator. But the Duce had left it too late. Hitler had already
gone too far.
41 am not in the mood to be slapped in the face time and again
by Poland/ Hitler told Attolico sharply. ‘And I do not want to
bring the Duce into an uncomfortable position.’
Attolico asked him if that meant that everything was at an end
and Hitler said, ‘Yes.’ Two days later Mussolini made yet another
and a final appeal, but by then the invasion of Poland had begun.
‘ Although our paths are now diverging/ Hitler replied in a letter
which foreshadowed Italy’s catastrophe, 41 have always been con
vinced personally of the indivisible future of our two régimes
and I know that you, Duce, feel the same thing.’1
1*4
THE D I P L O M A T
The brilliant successes of the German armies in Poland unsettled

Mussolini again. Although he announced at a meeting of the
Fascist Grand Council on i September that Italy would ‘not for
the time being initiate military operations ', he was careful to add,
for the benefit of those members of the Council who appeared to
take his decision with relief, that this did not constitute a declara
tion of neutrality. Italy, it was later announced, was assuming ‘ an
attitude of her own, a position of her own in which there are
implicit judgments and lines of action. That is the reason why we
do not speak of neutrality. A neutral is a person who is a mere
onlooker, because his own interests are not at stake and because
the struggle does not concern him. On the contrary this struggle
concerns us closely. It is not the case that there is nothing to be
said by us. We reserve the right to say our word at the right
moment, in our own language and in our own style. We watch with
cold calm and mature our determination/
But Mussolini could not watch with cold calm. Each time he
read a confidential report or one of those telegrams which were
regularly lifted from the files of the foreign embassies in Rome,
and saw in it an unwelcome comment on his neutrality, and each
time a foreign newspaper, and particularly an English newspaper,
commented adversely or even favourably on his decision, he spoke
of going to war. ‘ Whenever he reads an article that compares his
policy with that of 1914/ Ciano wrote in his diary, ‘he reacts
violently in favour of Germany. He was quite pleased with an
English article which suggested that the Italian people might fight
at the side of Germany for reasons of honour. This is also his own
point of view and even when there are a thousand voices to the
contrary, a single anonymous voice saying that he is right is suffi
cient, and he will cling to it and overlook, indeed deny, the others/
Although the economic advantages of neutrality—or ‘ non-belliger
ence ', as he insisted on calling it—were soon apparent, with stock-
market quotations soaring, foreign markets—particularly in the
Balkans—captured from Germany, and merchant vessels loaded
with exports sailing from every port, Mussolini did not seem to
take ‘ a great deal of interest \ It was the news of German victories
that held and fired his imagination. ' It's impossible to keep out of
this war/ he told his wife impatiently, ‘ and even more impossible
and dangerous not to enter it on Germany's side. The Russo-
"5
MUSSOLINI
German Pact makes Germany unbeatable by any other Power or
coalition/ ‘ Nobody/ he kept murmuring, repeating what he had
said so often since 1915/ nobody loves a neutral/
But the dangers of entering what might yet prove a long war
held him back. He accepted the fact, in his less impatient moments,
that Italy must enter the war only when victory seemed certain
and imminent. And then after the capture of Warsaw when Rib-
bentrop met Stalin at the Kremlin and agreed to divide Poland
with him and virtually to allow Russia a free hand in the Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Mussolini saw an oppor
tunity to escape his dilemma. He decided to make a fresh attempt
to persuade Hitler to agree to mediation. A negotiated settlement
would not only allow Italy gracefully to avoid a war which she was
not equipped to fight, but it would also rescue the Axis from the
position of secondary importance to which Hitler’s preoccupation
with the Nazi-Soviet alliance had relegated it; and it would in
addition do something to appease the Italian people, who were out
raged by the spectacle of the Fascist Government standing silently
and, so it seemed, approvingly by, while Catholic Poland was
brutally cut in half by two heathen butchers. When, therefore, the
Führer suggested that Ciano should visit him in Germany, Musso
lini eagerly accepted the invitation on his behalf.
Hitler, Ciano discovered, was ‘absolutely sure of himself'.
Although the German Press approvingly endorsed the joint com
muniqué issued by Molotov and Ribbentrop to the effect that ‘ now
that the Polish problem had been definitely settled, it would serve
the true interests of all people to put an end to the state of war
existing between Germany on the one side and England and
France on the other', Hitler himself did not appear to Ciano to
have much faith in a peaceful solution—nor, indeed, did he appear
to want one. He was at his most charming and persuasive as he
told Ciano that he was to make a speech in the Reichstag which
would contain his last attempt at peace with the West, and that
‘ if Italy were disposed to march with me at once I would not even
make this speech but would at once have recourse to force in the
certainty that Italy and Germany together can smash France and
England in no time and settle their accounts with those countries
once and for all '. The Duce need feel no concern that he had so
few anti-aircraft batteries, Ciano was assured, for the enemy was
much too frightened of German reprisals to bomb Italy.
Mussolini, however, was not impressed. He did not disguise the
fact that Hitler’s attitude irritated him, and the jibes and advice
116
THE D I P L O M A T
in the foreign Press no longer made him want to join the war on
Germany’s side but to demonstrate to the world that it was not he
who had let Germany down but Germany who had abandoned
him. He even began to hope for a German defeat and told Ciano
to let it leak out to the Dutch and Belgian Embassies that a Ger
man invasion of their countries was only a matter of time. And on
16 December he allowed Ciano to make a speech in the Chamber
of Deputies which astonished the world.
The speech contained strong denunciations of Great Britain and
France for destroying the Duce’s attempt at mediation, but its
main thesis was German treachery. Germany, Ciano said, had gone
back on her anti-Comintern policy, had rejected Italy’s advice that
France and England would fight for Poland and had jumped into
war ignoring the undertaking that had been given not to do so for
three years. Having let down the Duce, Italy’s declaration of non-
belligerence was more than Hitler had any juridical right to expect.
The speech was acclaimed all over Italy as *the funeral march of
the Axis ’; and the people were delighted. Three days after having
been instructed to give the speech front-page treatment, the Italian
Press was ordered to report war news with complete impartiality;
and on 3 January 1940 Mussolini wrote to Hitler to inform him
that everything that Ciano had said expressed his own views pre
cisely. It was one of the most forceful letters he had ever written to
the Führer :
No one knows better than I, with forty years' political experience,
that any policy—particularly a revolutionary policy—has its tactical
requirements. I recognized the Soviets in 1924. In 1934 I signed with
them a treaty of commerce and friendship. I therefore understand,
especially as Ribbentrop’s forecast about the non-intervention of
Britain and France has not been fulfilled, that you feel obliged to
avoid a second front. But you have had to pay for this in allowing
Russia, without striking a blow, to become the great profiteer in
Poland and in the Baltic.
But I who was bom a revolutionary and have not modified my
revolutionary mentality tell you that you cannot permanently sacri
fice the principles of your revolution to the tactical requirements of
a given moment. . . . I must also add that any further step in your
relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy,
where the unanimity of anti-Bolshevist feeling is absolute, granite-
hard and unbreakable. . . J Permit me to think that this will not
happen.
7 Thousands of Italians had volunteered to tight in defence of Finland.
117
MUSSOLINI
Attolico handed this sharp rebuke to Hitler, who read it ‘ almost
with avidity' and when the Ambassador had left he called for
Goering and Ribbentrop, who discussed it angrily with him for
more than five hours. Later Hitler pettishly concluded that Italy
would enter the war only in the event of ‘ great German successes
and preferably only against France ' and that, in any case, there
would not be much advantage in Italy's participation because of
the subsequent strain on German supplies.
While impatiently waiting for Hitler's long-delayed reply to his
letter, Mussolini's mood began to change again. At the beginning
of February, on the anniversary of the founding of the Militia, he
made a widely reported speech in which he said the Italians were
yearning to fight ‘ the fight which is bound to come '. In the middle
of the month, when still there was no response from Hitler, he
said that no one should suppose that Italy’s deficiencies in military
supplies could constitute an alibi. ‘ The Duce Ciano wrote in his
diary on 21 February, ‘intends to satisfy the Germans.’ The anti-
German attitude of the King also had the predictable effect of
making Mussolini more anxious to fight on their behalf. ‘ How dare
that little midget presume to tell me what to dol ’ he exclaimed
angrily one day when he heard that the King had deprecated the
German alliance and had again compared the straightforwardness
of the British with the untrustworthiness of his nominal allies.
‘ Why doesn't the stupid little sardine stick to his numismatology?
That’s the only thing he understands.' When the war was over he
would ‘ tell Hitler to do away with all these absurd anachronisms
in the form of monarchies '. ‘ The King would like us to enter the
war,' he told Ciano, ‘ when it’s a case of gathering up the broken
dishes. I hope they won't all be broken over our heads before that.
It's humiliating to remain with folded arms while others make
history. It doesn't matter much who wins. To make a people great
it is necessary to send them into battle, even if you have to kick
them in the pants.'
The Papacy, in the Duce's view, was behaving in quite as infuriat
ing a way as the King. At least the new Pope was not so unreason
able as that ‘ impossible old autocrat ' Pius XI, who had made no
bones about speaking against exaggerated nationalism and racial
ideology at the time of the Pact of Steel and had driven Mussolini to
remark that he was quite ready to ‘ break a few bludgeons on the
backsides of the priests ’. It would not be difficult, he thought; the
Italians were not religious, merely superstitious; they could soon be
familiarized with the idea that they could do without the Vatican.
118
THE D I P L O M A T
But although Cardinal Pacelli, who succeeded Pius XI at the begin
ning of 1939, had not at first seemed so obdurate and meddlesome
as his predecessor, he too was now proving an annoyance. He had
been Apostolic Nuncio in Germany and liked the Germans, but he
felt it his duty to do all that he could to prevent Italy fighting on
their side. Through the Jesuit Father Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, the
Pope’s link with Palazzo Venezia since the conclusion of the
Lateran Treaty, Pius XII repeatedly advised Mussolini of the neces
sity for Italian neutrality and of his desire for peace. The Vatican
newspaper, L ’Osservatore Romano, published this advice together
with much political comment which was subtly but unmistakably
anti-Fascist. In May 1940 it printed the Pope’s message of sympathy
to the King of the Belgians, the Queen of Holland and the Grand
Duchess of Luxemburg. The circulation of the paper rose sharply,
despite the activities of Fascist gangs who intimidated intending
purchasers by tearing up and burning copies of it in the streets and
by beating up the owners of kiosks who offered it for sale. Even
tually the Papal Nuncio was told on Mussolini’s orders that the
paper must either stop printing political comment which could be
interpreted as anti-Fascist or it would be banned altogether.
L ’Osservatore Romano felt compelled to surrender.
One of its sins which Mussolini found it impossible to forgive
was its contradiction of the official Fascist policy, strenuously sup
ported in Roberto Farinacci’s Regime Fascista, that there could be
no forgiving those countries which had supported sanctions against
Italy during the Abyssinian war. This was a constantly rankling
theme in Mussolini’s thoughts. In February 1940 Sumner Welles
noticed how obsessed by it he appeared to be.
Sumner Welles had been sent to Europe by President Roosevelt
to see if there was anything that Mussolini could be persuaded to
do to bring Britain and France to terms with Germany. Welles
arrived in Rome on 25 February with a long personal letter from
the President to the Duce. Mussolini received him with an alarm
ing frigidity which disappeared when the American raised his
dormant hopes for a negotiated settlement by suggesting that
Roosevelt might be willing to fly half-way across the Atlantic to
meet him for a conference which could not fail to have world-wide
repercussions. Welles left Rome in a fairly hopeful mood on 29
February. But by 10 March Mussolini was once more securely back
in the German camp. On that day Ribbentrop, anxious to
counteract any reservations about the German alliance which the
American envoy might have aroused in Mussolini's mind, and
up
MUSSOLINI
accompanied by an immense staff including not only secretaries,
interpreters and Foreign Office officials, but a barber, a masseur, a
gymnastics instructor and a doctor, arrived in Rome with Hitler's
reply to the Duce's letter of 3 January. To Ribbentrop’s confident
assertions that Germany was about to win a great and decisive
victory Mussolini replied that Italy’s intervention was now a cer
tainty as she was being imprisoned by the British blockade in
what he referred to, in his subsequent declaration of war, as *her
own sea When three months later Hitler decided to occupy Den
mark and Norway and, in accordance with his usual practice, sent
Mackensen, the Ambassador, to Mussolini with a letter telling
him that the decision had already been acted on, the Duce showed
no annoyance, but said on the contrary that he 'approved the
action wholeheartedly It seemed to Mackensen that he could not
wait to join in the conflict himself, and his impatience was
increased when long letters arrived from the Führer describ
ing the triumphant successes of the German armies. The idea
that the Germans might win the war single-handed was, as
Ciano had already commented, unbearable for him. By 21
April he had become ‘more warlike and more pro-German than
ever
The British, however, still shared the American hope that Italy
could be kept out of the war. Anxious to offset the effects of the
British blockade upon the supply of German coal to Italy, the
Government offered Italy eight million tons a year of their own
coal as a substitute; and anxious to show that Britain had no funda
mental quarrel with Fascism, Lord Lloyd as head of the British
Council was authorized to write a pamphlet which carried a com
mendatory preface by Lord Halifax and which contained these
observations :
The Italian genius has developed, in the characteristic Fascist in

stitutions, a highly authoritarian régime which, however, threatens
neither religious nor economic freedom nor the security of other
European nations. It is worth while to note that quite fundamental
differences exist between the structure and principles of the Fascist
State and those of the Nazi and Soviet States. The Italian system is
founded on two rocks : first, the separation of Church and State and
the supremacy of the Church in matters not only of faith, but of
morals; second the rights of labour. The political machinery of
Fascism is, indeed, built up on Trade Unionism, while that of the
German State is built up on the ruins of the German labour move
ment.
120
THE D I P L O M A T
On 16 May 1940, six days after becoming Prime Minister, Win
ston Churchill, aware that he must do his ‘ utmost to keep Italy out
of the conflict ’, wrote to Mussolini, who, as he had told President
Roosevelt the previous day, would probably soon ‘hurry in to
share the loot of civilization ’. ‘ Is it too late,* he asked him in that
splendidly grandiloquent phraseology so dear to both their hearts,
‘ to stop a river of blood from flowing between the British and
Italian peoples? We can no doubt inflict grievous injuries upon one
another and maul each other cruelly, and darken the Mediterranean
with our strife. If you so decree, it must be so; but I declare I have
never been the enemy of Italian greatness, nor ever at heart the
foe of the Italian lawgiver. . . . I beg you to believe that it is in
no spirit of weakness or of fear that I make this solemn appeal,
which will remain on record. Down the ages above all other calls
comes the cry that the joint heirs of Latin and Christian civiliza
tion must not be ranged against one another in mortal strife.
Hearken to it, I beseech you in all honour and respect, before the
dread signal is given. It will never be given by us/
Mussolini’s reply was hard, but, as Sir Winston afterwards
admitted, ‘ It had at least the merit of candour.’
‘ I reply to the message which you have sent me,’ the Duce wrote,
‘ in order to tell you that you are certainly aware of grave reasons
of an historical and contingent character which have ranged our
two countries in opposite camps. Without going back very far in
time I remind you of the initiative taken at Geneva in 1935 by your
Government to organize sanctions against Italy, engaged in secur
ing for herself a small space in the African sun without causing the
slightest injury to your interests and territories or to those of
others. I remind you also of the real and actual state of servitude in
which Italy finds herself in her own sea. If it was to honour its
signature that your Government declared war on Germany, you
will understand that the same sense of honour and of respect for
engagements assured in the Italo-German Treaty guides Italian
policy today and tomorrow in the face of any event whatsoever/
‘ It was certainly only common prudence ’, Sir Winston thinks,
‘for Mussolini to see how the war would go before committing
himself and his country irrevocably/ And after receiving this reply
he no longer had any doubt that the Duce had decided to enter
the war on Germany’s side. The French too had now come to the
same conclusion. Their Ambassador in Rome, François-Poncet,
refused to believe that Mussolini would not want ‘ to rob Stalin of
the glory of striking at a fallen man ’.
121
MUSSOLINI
That the man had fallen was now certain. Encouraged by his
triumphs in Norway, Hitler had launched his attack on France
and the Low Countries early in May. By the end of the month the
Allies had been driven back to Dunkirk. On 3 June, in a final and
frantic attempt to prevent Italy from attacking in the south, the
French Government ordered François-Poncet to buy Mussolini off
with territorial concessions, which were immediately rejected out
of hand. He was not interested in peaceful negotiation, Ciano told
the Ambassador bluntly; he had decided to make war.
*Any further delay is inconceivable,* he had already told Ciano.
‘ We've no more time to lose. . . . Some months ago I said that the
Allies had lost the victory. Now I tell you that they have lost the
war.* The Italian people, ‘already sufficiently dishonoured’, were
ready and anxious to fight, he insisted, and were deeply concerned
that they were about to miss an opportunity that might never come
again. He quoted a tapped telephone conversation between two
journalists one of whom had protested that the Germans were
' pinching everything ’. Even Nice would fall into their hands now.
‘ Don’t worry,’ the other journalist had said. ‘ He has thought of
everything. This isn’t a question of war, it’s a question of not being
absent at the division of the cake.’ In fact, as most Fascist leaders
realized but few dared say, the Italian people were far from ready
and anxious to fight. Bocchini spoke gloomily to his friends, who
doubted that he repeated to the Duce, his pessimistic views about
the internal situation, the poverty of the country, the decline in
the prestige of the régime and, above all, the anxiety of the people
not to go to war. There was, indeed, no mistaking the pleasure
which the dismissal of certain pro-war Fascists in October had
given to a desperately worried country; and in particular the
pleasure caused by the replacement of Starace, that ‘sinister
buffoon ’ as De Bono called him, by an agreeable and less bellicose
friend of Ciano’s, Ettore Muti, as Secretary of the Party. From the
King (who had conferred the Collar of the Annunciata on Ciano as
much to hold him firm to his neutralist policy as to gain his sup
port against Mussolini’s growing anti-monarchism) to the poor
peasants and industrial workers, the Italians were overwhelmingly
against fighting on Germany’s side. The Pact of Steel had never
become popular in Italy, and Germany’s invasion of Poland had
made it positively detested. The thought that the country would
be dragged into the war saddened the Catholics, who dreaded the
idea of having to fight in support of a régime which was more or
less openly anti-Catholic; it saddened the liberal-minded, who
122
THE D I P L O M A T
feared that a war would end their hopes for a resurrection of
liberty; it saddened the patriots, who feared that a German victory
would be the end of Italian independence; and it saddened even the
more enlightened and better informed Fascists, who realized that
despite the Party declarations, the public expenditure and the
Duce’s boast of €otto milioni di baionette ’ the country was hope
lessly ill-prepared for war. The reputation of Fascism had never
been so low. It was losing the support of even those rich financiers
who, like Count Volpi, had done so much in the past to support it
in times of stress. It was in this atmosphere of depression and dis
gust that the announcement of Italy’s non-belligerence had been
made. The country had felt a deep sense of relief. ‘ It is not easy ’,
the historian Luigi Salvatorelli says, ‘ to give an adequate idea of
the general and profound satisfaction, of the sense of relief pro
duced by the declaration of non-belligerence in virtually the entire
population, including the Fascists.*
But the sad fact was that when it became clear that non-belliger
ence was a passing phase in Italian policy, the people accepted the
approach of war with a kind of numbed, apathetic resignation, so
torpid had they grown after seventeen years of Fascist indoctrina
tion. Three years before, a reader had been issued for compulsory
use by children in State schools. ‘A child who, even though he
does not refuse to obey, asks why,* one of its sophisms read, ‘is
like a bayonet made of milk. . . . “ You must obey because you
must,” said Mussolini when explaining the reasons for obedience/
It was an explanation which not only children had grown
accustomed to accept, for, as Mussolini had learned years before,
everything that he said had to be presented as an incontrovertible
truth. Never must an appeal be made to the critical faculties of his
people. The most effective formulas for a dictator were often the
most vague, sometimes even the most meaningless.
At the end of May 1940 Hitler had suggested that Italy should
launch her attack ‘after the liquidation of the Anglo-French-
Belgian strongholds’, when the Germans could throw the whole
weight of their power on Paris. Mussolini had agreed and at that
time was considering intervention at the end of June. When the
Belgian Army appeared to be about to surrender, however, he
decided he could not wait so long. He was greatly encouraged by
123
MUSSOLINI
what he took to be a sudden enthusiasm in the people who 1like
whores ’ always wanted to be on the side of the winner. Even Ciano
felt that the mood of the country had changed, and he was sur
prised to be heartily welcomed at every railway station when
making a journey in May up the east coast, where he heard ‘ many
voices calling for war \ In the same month Edda came to see her
father at Palazzo Venezia and told him that the country wanted
war now and that to pursue a policy of neutrality would be 4dis
honourable for Italy ’. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the influential
and pro-German subjugator of Italy’s African territories, also
supported this view.
After receiving news of the surrender of the Belgian Army on
28 May, Mussolini called for the Air Force Marshal, Italo Balbo,
and for the Army Chief-of-Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, to tell
them that he would declare war on 5 June. Badoglio, according to
his own account, protested that it was suicide. ‘You, Marshal,’
Mussolini replied imperiously, ‘ are not calm enough to judge the
situation. I can tell you that everything will be over by September
and that I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the
peace conference as a man who has fought.*
He was standing up behind his desk with his hands on his hips,
staring fixedly at the two worried Marshals, and it was in moments
like these that men were prepared to suppose that all his sudden
changes of opinion and contradictory decisions were cunningly
calculated, even inspired; that they were, as he himself had always
insisted, clever strokes of intuitive deceit, a demonstration of his
instinctive mastery of the techniques of Machiavelli. Certainly the
following day Badoglio, so Ciano said, was preparing for war with
a good grace.
At the request of Hitler the date of Italy’s intervention was post
poned for a few days. And then at last on 10 June Mussolini, hav
ing already arranged—to the King’s sulky annoyance, but without
recorded protest from anyone else—for himself to be appointed
Supreme Commander of the Forces in the Field, strode onto the
balcony overlooking Piazza Venezia to the loud but mechanical
sounding cheers of an enormous crowd.
4Fighting men of the land, the sea and the air,’ he called out in
a strangely high-pitched voice, ‘ Blackshirts of the Revolution and
of the Legions, men and women of Italy, of the Empire and of the
Kingdom of Albania, hearken! An hour marked by destiny is
striking in the sky of our country; the hour of irrevocable decisions.
We are entering the lists against the plutocratic and reactionary
Ï24
THE D I P L O M A T
democracies of the West, who have always hindered the advance
and often plotted against the very existence of the Italian people.
. . . At a memorable meeting in Berlin I said that, according to
the laws of Fascist morality, when one has a friend one goes with
him to the very end. We have done this and will do this with Ger
many, with her people, with her victorious armed forces.
*Proletarian and Fascist Italy is for the third time on her feet,
strong, proud and united as never before. The single and categoric
watchword is binding on us all. Already it is flying through the
air and kindling hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean—to
conquer. And we will conquer. And we will give finally a long
period of peace with justice to Italy, to Europe and to the world.
People of Italy, to arms! Show your courage, your tenacity and
your worth/
A few hours previously Mussolini’s intentions had been conveyed
to the British and French Ambassadors in a less dramatic manner.
Sir Percy Loraine received them, so Ciano said, *without batting
an eyelid or changing colour. He confined himself to writing down
the exact formula used by me and asked me if he was to consider
it as advance information or as a general declaration of war. Learn
ing that it was the latter, he withdrew with dignity and courtesy.
At the door we exchanged a long and cordial handshake.’
The interview with François-Poncet was no less friendly.
*I expect you understood the reason for your being called,’ Ciano
told him almost apologetically.
‘I am not too bright,’ François-Poncet replied with the hint of
a smile, ‘but this time I have not misunderstood the situation.’
Like Sir Percy Loraine he had been aware for some time that war
was coming and that Mussolini had already decided his country’s
fate.
Ciano read out the declaration of war.
‘ It is a dagger blow at a man who has already fallen,’ François-
Poncet commented sadly. ‘Thank you all the same for using a
velvet glove.’
Before leaving he added a warning which Ciano had good cause to
remember : ‘The Germans are hard masters. You too will learn this.’
That night in Rome an atmosphere of gloom hung over the

dreadfully quiet city. Going dejectedly home to his flat to do his
MUSSOLINI
packing, the correspondent of The Times passed down Corso
Umberto and across Piazza di Spagna and saw not a single flag
hung out. Italian friends came to wish him good-bye, walking past
the policeman on watch near his front door and the people mutter
ing anxiously in the doorways, and they shook hands with him
with a kind of sad apology.
1The shouts in the piazza/ as Cavour had said, ‘ cannot be taken
as manifestations of public opinion/
2
THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF
io J U N E 1940- 23 O C T O B E R 1942
Cromwell had a splendid idea—supreme

power in the State and no war.
F r o m the first the war went badly for Italy. It was painfully and
immediately apparent that the country—although for eighty years
more than half the State expenditure had been applied to military
purposes—was shamefully ill-equipped to conduct a major war. The
long-continued fighting in Spain had reduced absurdly inadequate
military reserves, already weakened by the Abyssinian campaign,
to dangerously low levels; and yet the unco-ordinated and often con
tradictory policies of the various departments of the Government
allowed valuable stocks to be exported to England as late as the
beginning of 1940 and to Finland (whose supplies included aircraft)
later even than that.1 Most of the Army’s equipment was obsolete
or obsolescent. The artillery was using guns that had been in service
in 1918; the so-called armoured divisions were so short of vehicles
that, according to Carmine Senise, the Chief of Police, they were
obliged to borrow some from him for military parades; the Air Force
was also pitiably equipped; the Navy had neither aircraft carriers
nor a fleet air arm. At the time of the Albanian invasion in April
1939 mobilization revealed that many units listed as divisions on
paper were, in fact, no more than a few battalions strong, and by
the end of the summer of that year Mussolini, himself, had to admit
that, of the seventy divisions he had claimed the Army possessed,
only ten were fit for action. At the beginning of 1938 the Army
Chief-of-Staff had said that by the end of the following spring stocks
and production of munitions and equipment would be adequate
for a full-scale war; in fact, six months before war was declared
General Carlo Favagrossa, Under-Secretary for War Production,
reported that if he could have all the material already asked for
1 Another interesting example of the muddles and contradictions of Fascist

policies is provided by the fact that when the Anti-Comintern Pact was signed
with Japan a ship was on its way with supplies to China and in order to avoid
embarrassment her master was ordered to wreck her off the Chinese coast.
127
MUSSOLINI
(which would necessitate the factories working double shifts) the
earliest date the country would be ready for war was October 1942.
General Valle, Under-Secretary of the Air Force, had said that he
had over three thousand effective aircraft; in fact, there were less
than one thousand. General Pariani, Under-Secretary of the Army,
had persuaded Mussolini that eight million men could be mobilized
in a matter of hours; in fact, not half that number of ill-equipped
and unenthusiastic men could be mobilized in a matter of weeks,
and only then at a disastrous cost to industry and agriculture. Ad
miral Cavagnari, Under-Secretary of the Navy, tried to show how
woefully not only his own department but also every other depart
ment of the Government was prepared for war; but the Duce, he
complained, was completely unimpressed and unimpressionable.
Once De Bono ventured to give a similar warning against the
*Buffoon ’ Valle and the ‘ traitor *Pariani, but Mussolini would not
listen, he said. ‘ He believes what he wants to believe/ Occasionally
Raffaello Riccardi, the Minister of Commerce, warned him about
the economic difficulties of the country, but he blithely observed
that Governments did not fall because of economic difficulties and
preferred to listen to Thaon di Revel, the Minister of Finance, who
implied that everything was all right and that Italy would become
rich through the sale of works of art. ‘ W hat is the Duce doing? ’
Ciano asked, exasperated by his attitude. ‘ His attention seems to be
mainly devoted to matters of drill/
And yet although his capacity for self-deception was apparently
limitless there can be no doubt that Mussolini was well aware how
unprepared his country was for war. After the final collapse he
admitted it in a conversation with Admiral Maugeri, saying that
Italy had been better equipped before the First World War than
before the Second. W ith a short break between 1929 and 1933 he
had been head of all three Service Ministries since 1925, and despite
his willingness to believe what he wanted to believe and to ignore
what offended him, to push work onto incompetent subordinates, to
concern himself more with the passo romano or the date for chang
ing into summer uniforms than with the really urgent problems, to
sacrifice truth to propaganda and reality to hope, he was neverthe
less forced frequently to realize that the estimates and reports he
was given were not merely inaccurate but wilfully misleading. 4He
believes ’, Ciano wrote in April 1939,4that beyond appearances more
or less carefully kept up, there is little underneath/ Five months
later, on 18 September 1939, he was handed a report by Graziani
which showed that, instead of the great numbers he had boasted
128
THE C O M M A N D E R - I N - C H I E F
of, the first-line forces of the Army amounted to only ten divisions.
The thirty-five other divisions were patched up, under strength and
ill-equipped. ‘The Duce admitted this was so/ Ciano said, ‘and
uttered bitter words about the real condition of the Army, which
is, at this time, so lamentable/ On the very day before war was
declared General Favagrossa sent to Mussolini an exceptionally
gloomy report on Italy’s unpreparedness emphasizing particularly
the lack of anti-aircraft defences.
Mussolini had, however, been determined to go to war not only
‘ because Fascist ethics demanded it ’, but also because he felt con
vinced that peace would come before the futility of Fascist preten
sions was known. So confident, indeed, was he that the war would
soon be over that no instructions were given to stop building on
the site, extending to several hundred acres, which was to impress
the whole world during the forthcoming exhibition in 1942; and
demobilization was actually in progress by the autumn of 1940 after
the collapse of France and when it seemed that the German invasion
of England was imminent. Desperately concerned that his army
should at least make a token advance beyond the Alps before the
Germans ended the campaign, he ordered an attack within three
days although his staff advised him that three weeks would not be
enough in which adequately to prepare one. France’s request for an
armistice, less than a week after his declaration of war and before
he had achieved even a token victory, dismayed him, and he left
for a meeting with Hitler to discuss die terms which would be im
posed upon France, sadly aware, as Ciano put it, that his opinion
had ‘ only a consultative value ’. ‘ The campaign ’, Ciano went on,
‘ has been won by Hider without any active military participation
on the part of Italy, and it is H ider who will have the last word.
This naturally disturbs and saddens him. His reflections on the
Italian people and, above all, on our armed forces are extremely
bitter. . . . In truth the Duce fears that the hour of peace is grow
ing near and sees that unattainable dream of his life—glory on the
field of batde—fading once more/
As reports of the unenthusiastic way in which the war was being
waged were received at Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini’s complaints
against the Italian people grew more and more bitter. Their reluc
tance to enter the war at all—and it is certain that despite public
statements he was well aware of this reluctance—had already driven
him to fury. The cold winter of 1939-40 had pleased him. He
watched the snow falling in December and said, ‘ This snow and
cold are very good. In this way our good-for-nothing Italians, this
129
MUSSOLINI
mediocre race, will be improved. One of the principal reasons I
wanted the Apennines to be reforested was because it would make
Italy colder and snowier/ In January when there was a serious coal
shortage he was gratified again, because it was good for the people
to be put to tests which would make them shake off their *centuries
old mental laziness’. ‘We must keep them disciplined/ he said,
‘ and in uniform from morning to night. Beat them and beat them
and beat them /
‘It is the material that I lack/ he complained. ‘Even Michel
angelo had need of marble to make statues. If he had only had clay
he would have been nothing more than a potter. A people who for
sixteen centuries have been an anvil cannot become a hammer
within a few years.’ The Italians were ‘ a race of sheep ’. Eighteen
years had not been enough to change them. Throughout the war
he spoke like this. Every setback, every defeat, was angrily blamed
on a ‘soft and unworthy people’, a people ‘made flabby by a r t’;
just as every German success aroused in him an agonized longing
for the means and the opportunity of emulation. Each hint of an
Italian victory was exaggerated both in his mind and in the Press
until fantasies became accepted as facts and minor advances became
major victories. A month after the war had begun he was blindly
insisting that glowing reports received from the Italian Air Force
were all justified and that the Italian Navy had ‘ annihilated fifty
per cent of the British naval potential in the Mediterranean’. So
gratified was he by favourable news from the war front and so
furious when disillusioned or dismayed that many of his Service
chiefs concealed from him news which would enrage him, giving
him only reports which would please him and magnifying even
those. The fact that in the year 1940-41 there was a budget deficit
of the enormous sum of twenty-eight thousand million lire seems
to have been carefully concealed from him.
Having failed to strike a coup de grâce in France, he impatiently
looked for another target. He considered a heavy attack on Egypt
from Libya where the Italian Army had been heavily reinforced; he
considered, too, an attack on Yugoslavia. ‘We must bring Yugo
slavia to her knees,’ he had told Marshal Graziani in a directive
given before war was declared. ‘We need raw materials and we
must take them from Yugoslav mines.’ But the Germans advised
against the attack on Yugoslavia for fear of raising too many hares
in Eastern Europe, and Graziani advised against the attack on
Egypt, ‘a very serious undertaking’ for which preparations were
‘far from perfect’. Mussolini, however, was insistent and an-
130
nounced at a Council of Ministers on 7 September that unless an
attack was launched on the following Monday, Graziani would be
replaced. Although all Graziani’s generals, so he said, were against
the offensive, he gave in and issued his orders. Never had a military
operation, Ciano commented, ‘been undertaken so much against
the will of the commanders’. But, in fact, neither Graziani nor
Badoglio had pressed their views strongly when in the Duce’s
presence.
The attack began on 13 September. W ithin four days, six infantry
divisions and eight tank battalions had advanced sixty miles to Sidi
Barrani, and Mussolini was, in Ciano’s words, ‘ radiant with joy
On 4 October he had rarely been seen ‘ in such good humour and
good shape ’. But at Sidi Barrani the Italian Army halted; and for
three months, while the Duce pressed for a lightning attack on
the British position at Mersah Matruh, Graziani held back.
Almost, so it seemed to one of them, as if it were to spite the
generals and to show himself independent of Hitler, Mussolini
chose a new victim. As early as the beginning of July, General De
Vecchi, Governor of the Dodecanese, telegraphed to say that British
ships and perhaps British planes were being given supplies and
refuge in Greece. Ever since then he had been projecting an attack;
and on 12 October he announced that he had come to his final
decision. Admitting without compunction that it was Hitler’s un
expected occupation of Rumania that prompted him to act, he set
the date for the attack at the end of the month. Hitler’s action in
Rumania was reminiscent of his secrecy about his attacks in the
West. ‘Hitler always presents me with a fait accompli/ he said.
‘ This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will
find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way
the equilibrium will be re-established.’ He had not yet come to
an agreement with Marshal Badoglio, he confessed; but if anyone
objected to the attack he would hand in his ‘resignation as an
Italian ’. He wrote to Hitler on 22 October informing him of his
plans. The Führer was on his way to Hendaye in what was to prove
an unsuccessful attempt to bring Franco into the war, and Musso
lini, antedating the letter 19 October, took care to ensure that it was
not received until it was too late for any objections to be raised.
This time Ciano, who saw the attack on Greece as a check upon
German influence in the Balkans, supported the Duce; but again
the generals did not. The three heads of the General Staff were
unanimously against it, hesitantly pointing out the difficulties of
mountain warfare so late in the season. They were overruled. Mili-
l3 l
MUSSOLINI
tary intelligence gave a disturbing and, as it happened, fairly
accurate estimate of the likely strength of Greek resistance. Musso
lini condemned it as absurdly pessimistic. On 28 October, the anni
versary of the March on Rome—after the Duce, so General
Armellini says, had changed his mind about the timing almost
every hour and once five times in a quarter of an hour—the Italians
invaded Greece across the Albanian frontier. Six weeks later, after
accepting the retirement of an exasperated Badoglio as Chief-of-
Staff, Mussolini was forced to conclude at a meeting of the Council
of Ministers that the situation was serious and ‘ might even become
tragic ’. It was further evidence, Mussolini decided, that the Army,
and in particular its senior officers, were a disgrace to Italy. Once
again they had failed completely. *The human material I have to
work with/ he complained savagely, ‘is useless, worthless/ In
support of this view, Starace, on his arrival back from the front,
passed 4severe judgment on the behaviour of our troops ’, who had
fought ‘but little and badly\ On 4 December General Ubaldo
Soddu, Under-Secretary of State for War, who had been sent to
Albania by Mussolini to see for himself exactly what was happen
ing, reported that the military situation was now beyond redemp
tion and the situation would have to be settled ‘ through political
intervention\ Mussolini called Ciano to Palazzo Venezia. ‘There
is nothing else to do/ he said when Ciano arrived. ‘ This is grotesque
and absurd, but it is a fact. We shall have to ask for a truce through
H itler/ Ciano had never seen him so discouraged.
He had reason to be. Hitler had strongly advised him not to
invade Greece, an action which would set the Balkans in uproar,
and had gone straight to Italy from a meeting with Marshal Pétain
at Montoire, following his meeting with Franco at Hendaye, in an
attempt to dissuade Mussolini from making his disastrous attack.
Two hours before the Fiihrer’s train reached Florence, where his
meeting with the Duce was to take place, he was told that he was
too late and that Italian troops were already across the frontier.
Although Hitler behaved with remarkable restraint and went so
far as to promise Italy his full support in the Greek campaign,
Mussolini returned to Rome well aware that he was deeply con
cerned by Italy's action, which might jeopardize all his future plans.
Three weeks after the meeting, when the campaign appeared
already doomed to ignominious failure, he received a letter from
Germany confirming this impression. Not only, Hitler reminded
him, would Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Vichy France and Turkey become
increasingly reluctant to commit themselves, but Russia’s concern
132
for the Balkans might lead to a new threat from the east, while
Britain had now been able to obtain bases in Greece to bomb
Rumania and the south of Italy. The consequences of the Greek
adventure were that operations in the desert against Egypt would
have to be abandoned for the moment and that the Germans
would ultimately be obliged to send troops against the British in
Thrace although nothing could be done in this direction until the
following year. ‘ This time/ Mussolini commented sadly when he
read the Fiihrer’s letter, ‘he really has slapped my fingers/2
And now his Under-Secretary of State for War was telling him
that he would have to ask the Greeks for an armistice. Eventually
he allowed Ciano to persuade him that the situation was not yet as
bad as that and that it might even now be stabilized by immedi
ate German help. Dino Alfieri, the Italian Ambassador to Germany,
was in Rome at the time convalescing after an illness, and Ciano
took him to Palazzo Venezia to discuss the matter with the Duce.
I found the Duce plunged in the depths of depression [Alfieri wrote

afterwards]. I had never before seen him looking so dispirited. His
face was pale and drawn, his expression sad and preoccupied. His
dejected look was increased by his wearing a shirt with a grotesquely
big turn-down collar and by his not having shaved for at least two
days. With unaccustomed courtesy and solicitude—showing in itself
how distraught he was because only in a distracted mood would the
mask of impassivity he usually assumed in the presence of sub
ordinates desert him—he asked me how I was and whether I was
quite recovered from my illness.
He paced slowly round his big desk, taking short steps and, as if
developing an idea which dominated his mind, talked of Soddu’s
telegram and tried to fathom the reasons that had prompted the
General to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. He kept passing
his right hand nervously across his chin and face, turning now to
Ciano, now to me, as though seeking approval or support for his
theories and justification for his hopes.
But all his hopes were illusory. He did not have to make peace
with the Greeks, but he was forced to rely on German help to ex
tricate himself from his predicament, and that was almost as
unpalatable an indignity. While Soddu’s telegrams maintained their3
3 According to the Hitler-Bormann documents published in 1961, Hitler con
sidered Mussolini’s mistake to be the greatest contribution to his failure. In fact
the whole Italian alliance was seen by Hitler at the end of his life as the main
obstruction to his success. It even prevented him from making an anti-colonial
appeal to the Arabs and Africans, for Italy was committed to colonialism.
>33
MUSSOLINI
gloomy note, prompting Mussolini to observe that he would in
future form an army from the inhabitants of the Po valley and
central Italy, leaving the rest of the nation to make arms for the
*warrior aristocracy ’, Hitler wrote with a calm and unreproachful
reassurance, which Mussolini took as patronizing, to say that
arrangements were being made for German intervention. Before
these arrangements were complete, a group of Yugoslav officers
carried out a coup d'état against their Government, which had
recently signed a pact binding the country to the Axis. Hitler’s
reaction was violent. He insisted that Yugoslavia should be crushed
with 4merciless harshness ’ at the same time that Operation Marita
was launched against the Greeks. On 5 April, only ten days after
the coup d'état in Belgrade, having already asked Mussolini to stop
operations in Albania for a few days so that the Yugoslav-Albanian
frontier could be covered by Italian troops, he wrote to him again
to tell him that the German attack on Yugoslavia and the invasion
of Greece would begin the following day. All Italian forces, he
suggested, should be subject to the strategic orders of the German
command. Without consulting his generals, Mussolini agreed.
The German attacks, begun on 6 April, were ruthless and com
pletely successful. By 17 April the Yugoslavs had surrendered; ten
days later Athens was occupied. The surrender of Greece was
accepted and the new frontiers of Yugoslavia were drawn, both
without reference to the Italians. Although in his speech to the
Reichstag Hitler tried to soften the blow to Mussolini’s pride by
describing the German intervention as a ‘precautionary measure
against the British attempt to entrench themselves in the Balkans ’
and denying that it ‘was made for the purpose of assisting the
Italians against Greece’, no one, and least of all Mussolini, could
have any more illusions about the position to which Italy had fallen
in the eyes of Germany and of the world. In Berlin, Alfieri was
forced to listen to Hitler’s criticisms of the Italian action and of
the behaviour of the Italian troops. The Führer spoke in ‘ vehement
and aggressive tones ’, Alfieri said, and ‘ contrary to his custom he
did not ask me for news of Mussolini ’.
The subordinate position of Italy was demonstrated not only by
events in Greece and Yugoslavia. On 10 December news had been
received in Rome of the assault on the Italian position at Sidi
Barrani. Mussolini surprised Ciano by maintaining an appearance
of utter calm and impersonal objectivity, hoping that Marshal
Graziani would be able to hold the enemy attack. But this hope,
like all others that winter, was soon dispelled. By nightfall on the
*34
ioth the British had taken so many prisoners it was impossible to
count them. There were 4about five acres of officers ’, the battalion
headquarters of the Coldstream Guards reported, ‘ and two hundred
acres of other ranks \
'F our divisions’, Ciano wrote in his diary, 'can be considered
destroyed.’ The following day Mussolini admitted that Italy had
suffered an unmistakable defeat. By the beginning of January,
Bardia had fallen, and the tattered Italian Army, many units of
which had fought with pitiable bravery against a far better led
and infinitely better equipped enemy, was driven back to Tobruk.
Mussolini remained calm—‘ superhumanly calm ’, Ciano described
his behaviour at a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 7 January
—as he maintained that every army had its day of defeat. But it
was not so easy for him to disguise the feelings of dismay that
Hitler’s prescription for the Italians caused him. Rommel he
recognized, except in his more bitter moments, to be a brilliant
general, but it was hard for him to accept the fact that this single
German officer and a relatively small number of German troops
had altered the whole aspect of the war in North Africa within a
few weeks of their arrival there. Gloomily comparing Rommel, who
was always in his tank at the head of the attacking columns, with
Graziani, who had remained ‘ seventy feet underground in a Roman
tom b’, he could not view the victories in the desert without
grumbling that they looked like German victories, not Italian ones.
He ordered Graziani to face a court of inquiry, which censured
the conduct of the man for whom he felt now nothing but con
tempt. The court’s findings gave profound satisfaction to Badoglio,
who heartily disliked his formerly more popular colleague; but
both he and Mussolini knew that Graziani was not, in fact, alone
to blame. Military intelligence, one of the few really successful
organizations in the Italian Army, had intercepted American
messages which showed how much weaker—both in numbers and
in armour—the British were in North Africa. A less adequate
general than Graziani could have stopped them with men who
were properly trained to fight and wanted to fight and who had
proper equipment with which to fight. But what could you do,
Graziani asked his wife in an exasperated letter; ‘you cannot
break armour with finger-nails alone! ’ Badoglio, who as Chief-of-
Staff since 1926 had been in charge of staff planning and armaments
research for fifteen years, and Mussolini, who shut his eyes to
Badoglio’s evident incapacity, must both share in the responsibility
for the Army’s failure. But while Badoglio and Graziani blamed
135
MUSSOLINI
each other, Mussolini blamed them both and exacerbated his dis
content by angry reflections on the Germans’ success. When Rom
mel was promoted field-marshal he complained that it was a device
of Hitler’s to ‘ accentuate the German character of the battle ’ and
retaliated by promoting General Count Ugo Cavallero, Badoglio’s
successor as Chief-of-Staff, a marshal, although his opinion of him
was not much higher than that of his other generals. ‘ Cavallero is
optimistic,’ De Bono said. ‘ That’s the only reason the Duce prefers
him.’ He was also, according to Ciano, grotesquely servile and
*would bow to the public lavatories if that would advance him \ 3
Despite Mussolini’s resentment and pique, however, Hitler
remained understanding and friendly towards him personally. For
whatever he thought of the Italians, his respect for their Duce was
as yet but little dimmed. Even in November, when the situation
in Greece was at its most chaotic, he had embarrassed Ciano by
declaring with tears in his eyes : ' From this city of Vienna, on the
day of the Anschluss, I sent Mussolini a telegram to assure him that
I would never forget his help. I confirm it today. I am at his side
with all my strength.’ And after the North African disaster, at a
conference at the Berghof in January, Hitler was as friendly as
ever. Mussolini was so ashamed of his army’s failure that he left
for Germany in a state of high nervousness and dreaded the meet
ing. He had postponed it twice in the hope that better news would
come from the Italian war fronts, and had made a half-hearted
attempt to cancel it altogether. But it was so cordial that Ciano
described Mussolini’s subsequent mood of relief as one of elation—
'th e normal reaction after a meeting with H itler’. The Italian
delegation arrived at Pusch station to find the Führer standing on
the platform in the snow in his long leather greatcoat with his cap
pulled down over his ears. Mussolini’s Pullman coach stopped
immediately opposite him, and the Duce got out slowly and walked
towards his host, and for a moment as they shook hands they
looked each other sternly in the eye. ' I haven’t enough blood in
my veins,’ Mussolini had said a minute or two before in the cold
train, ‘ to blush when I see him.’ His features were set in a hard
expression, the Italian Ambassador noticed, and then as Hitler
spoke they relaxed into an artificial smile.
The Ambassador saw Mussolini alone for a moment before the
*Ciano*s opinion in this case—as in many others—was biased. He was on
intimate terms with (supposedly the lover of) Cavallero’s daughter who was married
to Francesco Jacomoni, the Governor of Albania. Indeed it was widely supposed
in Rome at the time that Ciano had advocated the attack on Greece because he
was personally interested in Albanian expansion there.
136
conference began and told him that Hitler would be prepared to
listen favourably to any request for help that he felt inclined to
make to him. Mussolini interrupted him sharply. ‘ I have nothing
to ask/ he said.
Nor did he ask. He allowed Hitler to do most of the talking, sit
ting quietly in one of the deep arm-chairs with which the German
conference rooms were always filled, making only an occasional
comment while the Führer demonstrated his knowledge of the
military problems and outlined his schemes for their solution with
a skill which deeply impressed Alfieri and Ciano and the fat little
General Alfredo Guzzoni, acting in Cavallero's absence in North
Africa as Chief-of-Staff. Hitler was in a contented mood, his mind
already occupied with pleasant anticipatory thoughts about his
forthcoming attack on Russia, which with his usual care he con
cealed from the Italians. But Mussolini's amour-propre had been
so much upset by what he thought of as his country's disgrace, by
the Germans' insistence that his attempts to improve relations with
Moscow should be discontinued and by their obvious hints that as
Italy could not supply reliable soldiers she should supply more
workers for German industry instead, that he could not bring him
self to respond to Hitler’s charm and reassuring confidence. The
Führer was ‘polite, friendly and understanding', he admitted to
the Italian Ambassador, but felt compelled to add ‘ too much so.
The man is hysterical. When he told me that no one had lived
through and shared my anguish more intensely than he had, there
were tears in his eyes. It's all so exaggerated. He was too eager to
make me feel and appreciate his kindness and generosity, his
strength and superiority.'
At meal-times Mussolini seemed to concentrate on his food,
bending over his plate with his napkin tucked into the top of his
tunic, eating very little and very quickly. He listened to Hitler with
that earnest display of concentration which so often conceals a
deep embarrassment. On the rare occasions when he intervened in
the discussion he did so in a mumble as though German were a
language that he had forgotten how to speak. During tea on the
first day he was a pathetic figure as he tried without success to
push his chair back from the oppressive heat of the fire, sipping
a cup of camomile tea while Hitler ate a large number of biscuits
and jam tarts and Goering, splendid in a new dove-grey uniform,
talked and talked.
The whole pattern of the conference was repeated six months
later, in August 1941, when Mussolini visited the Führer's head-
137
MUSSOLINI
quarters on the Eastern Front to make a tour of the Russian battle
fields. ‘ The Duce judged it opportune \ the Italian official record
of the meeting explained, *to allow the Führer to develop his pro
positions quite freely/ Hitler made the most of his opportunity and
on one day spoke for two and a half hours without stopping. Musso
lini’s relief when they left for the front was obviously overwhelming.
Notice of the attack on Russia had been given to the Italians
at half-past four in the morning of 22 June. Alfieri was
summoned from bed to the Auswärtige A m t, where Ribben-
trop told him that at three o’clock that morning German troops
had crossed the Russian frontier. Mussolini was still in bed
when the telephone rang at his villa in Riccione. Rachele answered
it and gave her husband the message. He took the news
badly, Rachele afterwards told the journalist Bruno d’Agostini, and
he said to her forlornly, ‘My dear Rachele I This means the war
is lost.’ A few hours later, however, Ciano telephoned Alfieri with a
personal message from the Duce to the Führer. Italy considered
herself at war with Russia as from three o’clock that morning,
Ciano informed the Ambassador, and then asked him to do his
‘ utmost to get the Germans to agree to the Duce’s suggestion ’ that
an Italian expeditionary force should be sent to Russia.4
Although the offer of Italian troops was not welcomed in Berlin,
Mussolini was determined to send them, insisting in private that
it was not only his own pride which was involved. Italy must con
tribute all she could to ensure ‘a blitz victory. If Russia is not
defeated in the first six months,’ he thought, ‘she will never be
defeated at all.’ Eventually a force of 200,000 Italian soldiers, which
might have altered the whole aspect of the war in North Africa,
was despatched—against the advice of every responsible Italian
general—to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front.
And here their horror at the Nazis’ treatment of Russian civilians
and their own ill-treatment after the collapse at Stalingrad, where
the Germans commandeered most of the available transport, as
they did in North Africa in 1942, were to be yet further strains on
the weakening military alliance.
Mussolini followed the movements of his troops in Russia with
an interest which for days on end completely absorbed him. Their
activities were reported in the most minute detail in the Press, and
4 Mussolini had been similarly insistent that an Italian expeditionary force

should fight alongside the Germans in the invasion of England in 1940. Ten
divisions and thirty squadrons were offered to Hitler *at the earnest wish of the
Duce
138
their successes were as over-stressed as the German successes were
depreciated. The news that the German armies had come up against
stiffening resistance at Minsk delighted him. 11 hope for only one
thing/ he said, 4that in this war in the East the Germans will lose
a lot of feathers/ This attitude was apparent throughout his tour
of the Russian front. When he reviewed General Messe’s Turin
division, he was clearly annoyed that the men looked so clean and
well-shaved as they drove past him in their requisitioned lorries,
which, to the drivers’ obvious embarrassment, skidded drunkenly
on the mud-covered road, and he could not disguise his disappoint
ment that Hitler had not seen them looking like the battle-scarred
warriors of his imagination. In contrast the German troops looked
rough and aggressive, and when Hitler went up to talk to them,
making them laugh with dutiful heartiness at his heavy jokes,
Mussolini was left talking to Field-Marshal Von Rundstedt.
"Hitler might have taken me with him when he went to speak
to the troops/ he afterwards complained petulantly to Alfieri, 4in
stead of leaving me with that old Rundstedt. Did you notice
how unsoldierly the Führer looked when he was talking to the
men? ’
Later on that day, as if to show that there was at least something
he could do which Hitler could not, he went up to Bauer, Hitler’s
personal pilot, and, having asked him various questions about the
aircraft in which they were travelling, he said that he would like
to pilot it himself. When he asked Hitler if he might do so, the
Führer looked around anxiously, not wanting to refuse but evi
dently hoping that one of his staff would find a reason for him to
do so without hurting Mussolini’s feelings. Bauer caught his eye
and nodded slightly to reassure him. Hitler then agreed that the
Duce should take the controls; but for the rest of the journey
Hitler stared fixedly at Bauer’s back 4as if to make sure ’ Alfieri
thought, 4that the proximity of the Duce was not distracting hi9
attention
In the subsequent official communiqués, by means of which the
war aims of the Axis Powers and their New Order for Europe were
announced as a counterblast to the recently published Anglo-
American Atlantic Charter, Mussolini’s prowess as a pilot was given
prominence. 4You can add/ he told Alfieri as he gave him instruc
tions for the Stefani news agency, 4that according to my reckon
ing I have travelled altogether 3,300 miles by rail, 1,250 by air and
700 by road. And, as you can see, I’m quite ready to do it all over
again.’
139
MUSSOLINI
4His face was wreathed in smiles/ Alfieri said. 4He gazed at me
with an expression of childlike contentment/
Never again was a visit to Hitler to end on so pleasurable a note.
At the beginning of the following year Goering arrived in Rome
wearing what Ciano described as 4a great sable coat, something
between what motorists wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prosti
tute wears today' and suggested that Mussolini should make
another trip to Germany. Hitler, concerned to put new spirit into
the Duce, who must, he felt, have lost heart during the sad winter
days, invited him to Schloss Klessheim. 4Hitler talks, talks, talks,
talks/ Ciano wrote in an anguished description of this meeting.
4Mussolini suffers—he who is in the habit of talking himself and
who instead has to remain silent. On the second day after lunch
when everything had been said Hitler talked without interrup
tion for an hour and forty minutes. He omitted absolutely no
subject : war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history.
Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist-watch. I had my
mind on my own business, and only Cavallero, who is a
phenomenon of servility, pretended he was listening in ecstasy,
continually nodding his head in approval. The Germans, however,
dreaded the ordeal less than we did. Poor people, they have to
endure it every day and I am sure there isn't a gesture, a word, a
pause, which they don't know by heart. General Jodi after an
epic struggle went to sleep finally on the divan. Keitel was yawning
but succeeded in keeping his head up.'
Afterwards Hitler compared himself to Napoleon, and confided
to the Duce that he 4was in the protection of Providence ' . 41 really
don't know/ Mussolini said on the way home, ‘why the Führer
asked me to go/
Three months later he might well have asked a similar question
about Cavallero. For over a year he had been awaiting a favourable
opportunity to visit North Africa and had given General Cavallero
instructions to send him a telegram with the single word ' Tevere9
when he was certain that the Italian Army had begun an advance
which would take them to the Suez Canal. The telegram arrived
on 27 June, when it was hoped that Rommel's counter-attack,
which had driven the British back across the Egyptian frontier,
was still in full impetus. But a cyclone prevented Mussolini’s
departure for two days, and by the time he arrived in Libya the
advance had already slowed down and was stopped at El Alamein.5
5 In his Storia di un anno written two years later Mussolini gave the date 28
June 1942 as the turning-point of the war and of his own career.
140
Furious with the military commander for making a fool of him
by calling him to the front at an unfavourable stage, as had been
done during the invasion of Greece, Mussolini spent three unhappy
weeks in Libya wandering about behind the lines, followed by
dispirited Italian generals whom he tried to encourage with
promises that every effort was being made to get supplies across the
Mediterranean and that one day soon a convoy would get through.
Plans were being prepared, he told them, for the capture of Malta,
and the Mediterranean routes would then be kept open. But his
listeners could not disguise their doubt.
On 20 July 1942 Mussolini returned to Rome. He looked
desperately tired and ill. It was announced that the exhaustion
caused by his strenuous duties had brought on an attack of amoebic
dysentery. He was taken to Rocca delle Caminate, and a rumour
flew round Rome that he had gone there to die. 'Perhaps he is
dying/ one of his Ministers said, ' but not of dysentery. It’s a less
commonplace disease. It’s called humiliation/
It was an understandable diagnosis. So excited by the prospect of
victory in North Africa that he had been planning the details of
the Italo-German military government of Egypt, he was forced to
face a situation which even the blithely confident Cavallero
described as ' serious \ He was forced also to accept the abandon
ment of the plans for the capture of Malta, which Hitler implied
could not now be carried out successfully owing to the low state of
Italian morale. He was obliged to accept severe cuts in the shipment
of coal and oil from Germany and Rumania as the German
Government felt disinclined to 'throw good oil after b ad ’, as an
attaché at the German Embassy in Rome brutally put it. He had,
as the cruel year went on, to read reports and to listen to accounts
of German units appropriating transport on the Russian front and
leaving Italian units to retreat on foot through the snow. He had
to face the fact that the Germans were not only losing confidence
in the Italian will to fight but were actively taking steps to protect
themselves from the consequences of an Italian collapse. The Ger
man Military Attaché in Rome was appointed a ' liaison officer ' at
Italian Army Headquarters; several German units entered Italy
for 'training'; and Field-Marshal Kesselring was sent to Italy as
'Commander-in-Chief, South'. There were also alarming reports
of German cells being formed in the larger Italian cities and of
plans for the military occupation of the country and the establish
ment of a puppet Government under the slavishly Germanophil
Roberto Farinacci.
141
MUSSOLINI
Month by month the relationship between Italy and Germany
deteriorated. The treatment of Italian workers in German labour
camps; the resentment caused in Italy by the export of so many
works of art to the Reich; the refusal of the Italians to be other than
‘ extremely lax \ as Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘ in their treatment
of the Jews '; the continued reluctance of Hitler to agree to a more
uncompromising policy towards France, whose Mediterranean
possessions formed a perpetually rankling topic in Axis relations
and caused Mussolini repeatedly to complain that the Germans had
demonstrated typical unintelligence by not having ‘occupied the
whole of France at the armistice '; the perpetual and increasingly
open complaints by the Germans—particularly by Goering, whose
grumblings infuriated Mussolini, and later by Hitler, who put them
into writing—that if Italy had not attacked Greece, Spain would
have come into the war and Gibraltar would have fallen—all these
jarring dissensions aggravated a relationship which had never been
harmonious and eventually brought Mussolini to the exasperated
conclusion that, if things went on as they were, Italy would soon
be 'fighting the Germans as a matter of honour and historical
duty \ Such bitter pronouncements were becoming habitual. Alter
nately raging at the Germans, already infected by ‘ the germs of
collapse ’, for their ‘ senseless barbarity ’ and at his own people for
their ‘debilitating clemency', his outbursts of fretful ill-temper
became as regular as his sudden changes of mood. One day criticiz
ing Franco for his ingratitude, the next day praising him for his
stand against German pressure; in the evening muttering gloomy
prophecies about the progress of the war and in the morning
accepting the reassurances of his more confident advisers and talk
ing with apparently genuine confidence in ‘the most optimistic
fashion', so Ciano said, ‘of successes, offensive possibilities and
African recoveries', he seemed not merely erratic but no longer
conscious of inconstancy. His threat of war against Germany was
followed within a few days by his reaffirmation of his ‘ decision to
march with Germany to the end'. Rommel was ‘a m adm an' at
one moment, and ‘ one of the great military leaders of our time ’
at another.
After the summer of 1942, Mussolini rarely appeared in public,
and when he did people looked at him with a kind of shocked
sympathy. He pushed out his jaw and opened wide his eyes in the
grimly noble expression which he liked the photographers to catch,
but the face had lost the spontaneous vitality that once had made
it so arresting. As long as three years before, Sumner Welles had
142
THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF
found a man looking 'fifteen years older than his actual age of
fifty-six. He was ponderous and static rather than vital. He moved
with an elephantine motion; every step appeared an effort. He was
heavy for his weight and his face in repose fell in rolls of flesh.
His close-cropped hair was snow-white.' A month after Welles' visit
the new Secretary of the Party, Ettore Muti, was also shocked to
find the Duce looking aged and haggard. Ciano was worried, too,
but comforted himself with the reflection that it was ‘ a temporary
condition
Ciano was wrong. By the summer of 1942 two years of war had
so aggravated Mussolini’s health that one of his doctors began to
doubt that he had long to live. ‘ Somehow,’ said a woman who saw
him at Villa Torlonia towards the end of that summer, ‘ he didn’t
look real any more. It was like looking at a caricature—or even at
a corpse.’
*43
PART III
T H E F A L L OF T H E C O L O S S U S
1
‘T H E W A R IS G O I N G B A D L Y ’
23 O C T O B E R 1942- 23 J A N U A R Y 1943
Fate! Statesmen only talk of fate when they have blundered.
By the autumn of 1942, after more than two years of a hated war,
the opposition to the Germans and to the Fascist régime was
already widespread all over Italy. Intellectuals in Rome and Milan,
working-men in Naples and Sicily, were being arrested daily.
Strikes were common, and frequently the police fired over the heads
of angry crowds as the only way of dispersing them. Socialists in
Genoa and Communists in Turin printed clandestine news-sheets
and scratched Fascist slogans from walls and pasted in their place
posters demanding liberty and peace. Non-Fascist newspapers
cautiously supported the opposition and fanned the sparks of dis
content by referring, although forbidden to do so, to queues and
shortages, until several of them—including Oggi—were suppressed.
Almost all foodstuffs including bread, vegetables, meat, rice and
eggs were rationed, and the police did not any longer even attempt
to interfere with the extensive and intricate black market which
had become uncontrollable since the Government in a charac
teristically inept decree had decided to cut all prices by 20 per
cent.
In the south thousands of peasants were close to starvation, and
all over the country the poor were hungry and pulling in their
belts to the last hole, the one they called the ‘foro Mussolini9—
Mussolini’s hole.1 For it was his war and he had led them to it,
and these Germans who marched about everywhere, like the
soldiers of an occupying force, were his friends not theirs. They
would do anything to end the war, the Italians told each other,
repeating with sardonic humour a favourite joke : as a last resort
they would even try to win it. But most of them had already
stopped thinking about victory and waited with a kind of hopeful
1It is a pun. Foro means forum as well as hole; and Mussolini’s forum on the
outskirts of Rome was part of a grandiose scheme of his not yet completed when
war had been declared.
146
‘t h e w a r is going badly ’
resignation for defeat, listening to the broadcasts of the B.B.C. for

any hint that it might soon be granted them.
Mussolini accepted their despondency and defeatism as a further
manifestation of their unworthiness to be considered as anything
other than ‘ a mediocre race of good-for-nothings ' who were ‘ only
capable of singing and eating ice-cream They were not as good as
the Italians of 1914: this was a sad ‘result of the régime, but an
undeniable one’. As for the Army, it was ‘useless’, and the
generals, almost to a man, were ‘paralytic’. The admirals were
worse. The bourgeoisie, of course, were ‘ selfish and decadent ' and
‘the worst possible type of Italian’. But although he permitted
himself these frequent and varied attacks on his people, if the
Germans showed signs of agreeing with him he was furious.
He was handed one day the transcript of an intercepted telephone
conversation between a staff officer at the German Army Head
quarters in Italy and another German officer in Berlin, in which
the Italians had been referred to as ‘ macaroni’ and Italy as a
country which ought soon to be occupied. For days afterwards he
went about muttering the enigmatic threats which he never tired of
making and told Ciano that he was preparing a dossier of German
insults and crimes which was *to be used when the right moment
comes ’.
In the meantime, however, he limited himself to frequent public
references to Japanese virtues and triumphs, obviously intended as
slights to Germany. Declaring that he was ‘the foremost pro-
Japanese in the world ’, he ended a speech by announcing that the
Italian and Japanese soldiers would march side by side to victory
with the other ‘ armies of the Tripartite Alliance ’, whose nationality
he was careful not to mention. On another occasion after reading
a report on the treatment of Italian labourers in the camps in
Germany, where they were not only treated as unwelcome slave
labour and denied even the pretence of hospitality but were even
beaten for insubordination and laxness and guarded by watchdogs,
he exploded with indignation. ' These things are bound to produce
lasting hatred in my heart. In the end I shall square this account.
I can wait many years to do so, but I will not permit the sons of a
race which has given to humanity Caesar, Dante and Michelangelo
to be devoured by the bloodhounds of the Huns.’
He made no direct protest to the Germans himself, however, pre
ferring to rely on the Germans to tap the telephone lines between
Rome and Berlin, which for years had been the accepted method
of conveying complaints to Germany. Indeed, he instructed Ciano
*47
MUSSOLINI
to take the matter up with Mackensen, the German Ambassador,

as if he were acting on his own personal initiative without orders
from the Duce, who was 'to be supposed to have no knowledge
of it \ This reluctance to intervene personally was symptomatic of
an attitude of mind towards the Germans which was disastrous for
Italy. They were 4uncouth barbarians ’ who were attempting to ride
roughshod over Italy for their own ends; they were again now, as
they had been in 1936, 'primitive degenerates* without ‘taste or
scruple \ They were ' dirty dogs * who were taking everything and
leaving Italy with a heap of bones; ‘untrustworthy humbugs’ who
ought to leave the Italians alone. ‘ They should remember,’ he said,
4that through them we have lost an Empire. I have a thorn in my
heart, because the defeated French still have their Empire, while
we have lost ours. . . . We may be willing to give up our shirts,
but the Germans remove even our hides.’ The only hope for Italy,
he admitted privately, was that the war would end in a compromise
which would save Italian independence and at the same time be
long enough to exhaust the grasping Germans. And yet he felt for
them, despite these judgments and extravagant tirades of abuse, a
continuously compelling admiration. So jealous of their military
success that he could not disguise his pleasure when he heard of
some German failure on the Russian front; so anxious not to give
them cause for condescension that he could not bring himself to
write what he could only conceive as a humiliating letter to Hitler
asking for the grain that would have helped to feed millions of his
hungry people; so angry at each fresh report of their high-handed
ness and cruelty, particularly in Alto Adige, that he foresaw ‘an
unavoidable conflict between Italy and Germany ’, he nevertheless
succumbed to the irresistible attraction of their power, efficiency
and ruthlessness whenever in the presence of a German general or a
German diplomat, or, above all, in the presence of their leader
himself.
A few hours after a conversation with Field-Marshal Kesselring,
the German Commander-in-Chief in Italy, he spoke of his own
generals with profound contempt. He only liked one of them, he
said, the one who had said to his soldiers in Albania, ‘ I have heard
that you are good family men. That’s all very well at home; but
not here. Here you can’t do too much thieving, murder and rape.’
‘I too will adopt the method of hostages,’ Mussolini announced
while in this ruthless mood. He had given orders, he said, that for
every soldier wounded by Croatian rebels two hostages would be
shot, for every one killed twenty hostages would be shot. But he
148
‘t h e war is g o in g badly ’
knew, Ciano commented, that he would never enforce it. He was

always threatening death and punishment; he rarely went beyond
the threat.
In his compulsive determination to make his own people as hard
and disciplined, as strong and indifferent to suffering, as the Ger
mans, he introduced measures which the Italians considered merely
absurd. Gratified, so he said, that Naples was having so many air
raids because they would help to harden the breed and make of
the Neapolitans a Nordic race, he gave orders that every time
there was an alarm there, the sirens would sound in Rome as well;
and at the first opportunity the anti-aircraft batteries were to open
fire to make the illusion of danger more exciting, more fearful and
more dramatic. W ith the same ends in view, new categories of
civilians were pronounced fit for mobilization; punishments for poli
tical and military offences were to be made more severe; newspapers
were ordered to print, without undue regard for truth, items which
tended to inflame patriotism, loyalty to Fascism and hatred for the
enemy. Hitler, he told Ciano, had used big figures to impress people
‘ like that jackass of a Roosevelt. . . . (They are both big jackasses
and belong to kindred races.)’ But if the Germans falsified their
communiqués, so would he. He had in fact always done so. When
the British Navy had attacked the Italian battle fleet on 11 Novem
ber 1940 at Taranto and put half of it, including the new Littorio,
out of action, the papers had been ordered to discount this crushing
defeat and to print instead fanciful commentaries on an air-raid
which, through the pressing insistence of Mussolini, the Italian Air
Force had carried out on the same day on a convoy in the Medway
—a raid which in fact caused little damage, cost the Italians eight
bombers and five fighters and was the first and last Italian raid on
Britain. Later when a company of parachutists, numbering about
a hundred and fifty men, occupied one of the Ionian islands, Musso
lini said that it should be announced that a division had landed
there.
The Italians, however, were not impressed by the Duce’s efforts
to deceive them, to mould them into the people he would like them
to be, to force upon them characteristics which were not their own.
And as the months dragged on and the war seemed interminable
and victory no longer possible, Mussolini began slowly but inexor
ably to slip from the favour of even those supporters who had
enthusiastically accepted his declaration of war and had excused
the disasters of its first two years. He was still cheered, of course,
on the rare occasions when he was seen, still spoken of with admira-
149
MUSSOLINI
non and treated with that adulatory respect which he had by now
accepted as his right; but the spontaneity of devotion and the over
whelming acclamations which, with rare exceptions, had swayed an
entire nation were gone. The cheering seemed mechanical; the
respect prescriptive.
There were other reasons, apart from the detested war and the
hated German alliance, which were the cause of this.
Mussolini was now seriously ill. His presence was never dynamic
and glowing as once it had constantly been. He had lost most of his
former tireless energy, and his always mercurial temperament was
no longer merely unpredictable but wildly erratic. Syphilis was
responsible, his enemies said; inadequately treated in his youth, it
was now entering its final stages, inducing feverish excitation and
hallucinations. ‘I remember,’ Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of
National Education said at this time, that Marshal Balbo ‘called
Mussolini a product of syphilis, and that I used to object to his
words. I wonder now if this judgment on Mussolini wasn’t correct,
or at least very close to the truth. The Duce has decayed intellectu
ally and physically. He doesn’t attract me any more. He is not a
man of action. He is presumptuous and ambitious and expects only
to be admired, flattered and betrayed.’
By October 1942 Mussolini was not merely decaying but often
in violent pain, and his physician, D r Pozzi, was constantly in
attendance either at Villa Torlonia or Rocca delle Caminate. The
wounds he had received in 1917 had opened up again. In addition,
the ulcer which had intermittently been troubling him for years
gave him so much pain that frequently during an interview he
found it impossible to sit still and turned and twisted in his chair,
fidgeting convulsively; and sometimes the pains were so bad that
he had to press his hands against his mouth to prevent himself
from crying out. According to Quinto Navarra, his personal atten
dant who acted as Chief Usher at Palazzo Venezia, he would on
occasions abandon himself to his pain and throw himself on the
floor to roll about, groaning in agony. No one could doubt his
physical courage, but he was never a man to bear pain without com
plaint and he began increasingly to rely on the analgesic drugs and
injections which Dr Pozzi gave him.
At the end of September Edda Ciano had written to her husband
at the Foreign Ministry; ‘ My mother has no sense of humour. She
says and does the most fantastic things. Anyway this is not why I
am writing to you. My father is very ill. Stomach pains, irritability,
depression, etc. My mother draws a dark picture. In my opinion
150
‘t h e war is going badly *
it’s the old ulcer again—his private life of the last few years gives
one much to worry about, its effects, etc. Well, let’s not talk about
that. They made X-ray pictures of all kinds—all negative—but a
specialist was never called. . . . Please will you do something . . .
anything so that my father is seen and examined properly. Get in
touch with my mother and help her. So far the only measures taken
have been blasphemy and curses.’
Professor Cesare Frugoni, one of Italy’s leading doctors, was even
tually asked to examine the Duce and confirmed Edda Ciano’s
opinion by diagnosing severe duodenal ulcers. Mussolini was put
on a mainly liquid diet, and this made him anaemic. In May 1943
he was found writhing on the floor at Rocca delle Caminate by a
servant, who rushed up to Rachele’s room shouting, ‘Il Duce
muore! Il Duce muore! The Duce’s dying I’ Dr Pozzi came immedi
ately and told Rachele that her husband must stay in bed and rest.
He advised also that another specialist should be consulted in addi
tion to Professor Frugoni and the three other doctors who had
already been called. But Rachele wrote in her diary, ‘ the idea of
too many doctors frightens me ’. They all contradicted each other
anyway. Frugoni, who at first diagnosed ulcers saying that one of
his colleagues had ‘a bee in his bonnet about dysentery’, later
agreed that acute dysentery was a complicating factor. Then he
gave it as his opinion that the Duce was suffering from advanced
cancer, only to be immediately contradicted by Professor Cesare
Bianchi.
The real trouble, as both Ciano and Mussolini’s eldest son Vit
torio knew, was psychosomatic.2 Although the Duce slept heavily,
his days were spent in an almost continual state of excitement and
anxiety. He would never recover so long as the war went so badly
for Italy. As the news of each new disaster in North Africa and in
the Mediterranean reached him, he wrought himself into a
paroxysm of emotion as he inveighed against the Army, which was
fighting with the ‘ calm and indifference of the professional instead
of the fury of the fanatic ’; against the Navy, to which he longed
to send some signal ‘ like the one Churchill sent his admirals ’ but in
eighteen months had given him no opportunity to do so; against
the Italian people, who were not made for war like the Germans
and Japanese and who were ‘ not mature or consistent enough for
3 In May 1945 Avanti! published an article, ‘ Parla il dottore che misurò il
cadavere di Mussolini* by A. Astuni, which showed that the doctor who per
formed the autopsy on Mussolini's body could find no more than a slight scar as
evidence of his ulcer. His heart and arteries were still sound. A knowledge of his
glandular condition would doubtless be revealing.
151
MUSSOLINI
so grave and decisive a test'; against the English, whom he swore

to hate ‘ for all time ' for having taken his Empire from him and
for having carried out the conquest of Abyssinia as a ‘ purely per
sonal vendetta'; and against Roosevelt, for whom he reserved a
scarcely less than pathological hatred. ‘Never in the course of
history/ he exclaimed maliciously, ‘has a nation been guided by
a paralytic. There have been bald kings, fat kings, handsome, even
stupid kings; but never kings who in order to go to the bathroom
and the dinner-table had to be supported by other men/ At Christ
mas he got angry about presents, which were the ‘ alibi of the rich
to justify their good fortune in the eyes of the poor '. And then he
even got angry about traditional holidays. W hat was New Year's
Day, for instance, but ‘the day of the circumcision of Christ—
that is the celebration of a Hebrew rite which the Church itself has
abolished '? And why did people complain so much about illiteracy?
‘ Even if there is illiteracy what does it matter? ' he asked im
patiently. ‘In the fourteenth century Italy was populated by
nothing but illiterates, but this did not prevent the flourishing of
Dante Alighieri. Today when everyone knows how to read and
write, whom do we have? The poet Govoni ! '
Mussolini, in fact, would take it out on everything and every
body, Ciano sourly commented, ‘even on the Almighty, when
things go wrong '.
But although increasingly vituperative, Mussolini was becoming
noticeably more apathetic even on those days when his health
seemed improved. His conversation was no longer forceful and
sparkling, his ironic comments no longer entertaining but merely
savagely ill-tempered. He contradicted himself frequently, lost his
temper on the least provocation, roused himself to bursts of strenu
ous activity, only to relapse into a kind of absent-minded morbidity.
His prejudices were more pronounced than they had ever been. He
once dismissed a man from his personal staff because he wore a
beard, ‘that absurd fungus' which he had always detested as a
mask ‘ for solemn humbugs and second-rate arrivistes '. He refused
to employ another man because he did not like the look of his
handwriting, for like most superstitious men he was convinced that
graphology was an important guide to character, and he was proud
of his own firm, idiosyncratic hand. ‘ I can tell a man’s character as
well by looking at his handwriting/ he once said, ‘ as by looking at
his face/ For hours on end he would occupy himself with the details
of propaganda which were often trivial and sometimes meaningless.
Cutting out items from foreign newspapers, which he read with
l 52
‘t h e w a r is g o in g b a d l y ’
undiminished avidity, re-phrasing the headlines of his own news

papers, writing incongruously esoteric political articles, altering the
style or content of the daily war bulletin before it was broadcast,
releasing one item of news and increasing or minimizing the im
portance of another, he worked hard, but it was work which could
well have been performed by any experienced journalist or official
at the Ministry of Popular Culture. As editor of 11 Popolo d’Italia
he had amused himself by cutting out entertaining or fallacious
items from other papers and sticking them on a wall of the office
under the heading ‘Colonna I n f a n t e now, in imitation of this, he
spent a great deal of time in looking for and cutting out inaccuracies
and absurdities in foreign newspapers and having them reprinted in
the Italian Press in what was called ‘The Nonsense Column’.
Before the war he had been known to issue as many as six orders
a day to the newspapers instructing them on the handling of news;
now even ten orders a day were not infrequent.
In the early days of the war journalists were invited to Villa Tor-
lonia so that they could report the Spartan and energetic life which
the Duce led—his habit of leaping from bed as soon as he awoke;
his cold bath before reading his mail, and dictating his orders with
the quick, mechanical ease of a teleprinter; his sudden breaks for
riding, swimming or a violent game of tennis; his simple meals, his
refusal to rest, his voracious appetite for work. But now all had
changed. The simple meals became medicinal slops; the riding and
tennis were forbidden, and he took exercise by gently scything the
long grass in the grounds of his villa; the vitality was contrived and
the urgency simulated. The light in his office was kept on till late
into the night, but this was to give an illusion of industry to those
who passed the curtained window; the room beyond might well be
empty. And the Duce himself in fact was now hardly ever seen.
Obsessed by the fear of defeat and failure, by doubts and un
certainties, overwhelmed by sudden bursts of anger which would be
followed by days of despair, conscious of his sunken cheeks, thin
neck and darkly shadowed eyes, Mussolini became more and more
reluctant to show himself in public and lived, so he told Giuseppe
Bottai at Palazzo Venezia one day, ‘ a solitary life wrestling with my
problems and deciding them all by myself ’.
It would have been better, Bottai observed later, if he had, in
fact, led a solitary life there. But, on most afternoons still—as in
the past—Claretta Petacci lay waiting for him in the Cybo rooms,
a flat on an upper floor of the palace. And Bottai was not the only
Italian to suggest that the regular visits which he felt compelled to
*53
MUSSOLINI
make to his mistress were at least partly responsible for the Duce’s
declining health. His visits, though, were in reality both shorter and
rarer than before; and for hours on end Claret ta lay on the divan
bed in the sitting-room looking up at the signs of the Zodiac painted
in gold on the blue vaulted ceiling and listening to gramophone
records playing sentimental songs or dance tunes over and over
again. Sometimes she would pass the time drawing designs for new
clothes or painting romantic pictures of birds and flowers, or she
would lie on the pillows reading love-stories, painting her nails,
gazing at herself in the looking-glass or out of the window at the
fountain in the courtyard. She filled a little book with descriptions
of their happy days in the past—ski-ing at Terminillo, swimming at
Rimini, picnics on the royal estate of Castelporziano—and with
painful doubts about the future. For when her lover came to her
now, he was often depressed, sometimes angry and glowering,
nearly always irritable. On some evenings she waited until ten
o’clock and he never came at all; and in her loneliness the resent-,
ments she harboured against those who blamed and despised her
grew and festered. ‘They are all his enemies/ she shouted to a
servant one evening when she had waited five hours for him in vain.
‘They betray him fifteen times a day/ The Fascists were ‘ traitors ’;
the generals ‘ silly old fools ’—particularly that doddering idiot De
Bono. ‘ Why does he pretend to be so scandalized/ she asked indig
nantly, ‘ when he makes love himself to an old countess on a black
velvet sofa? ’
Of course, the Duce himself, she felt convinced, was not only
betrayed, but he in his turn was betraying her. She was haunted by
the fear that he had found another mistress or had begun to make
love again to one of his former ones. Margherita Sarfatti or Angela
Curri, perhaps, were trying to take him from her, and there was a
new woman now called Irma who was ‘making a rag of h im ’.
‘ People say it’s m e/ she complained, ‘ but it’s her, it’s her/ When
she dared to do so, she taxed Mussolini about his other mistresses,
but he would then insult her or deride her so sarcastically that she
began to cry, and that would make him angrier than ever. So she
took to writing him letters in which appeals and accusations
tumbled over each other in her fear that she was losing him. How
could she make sure that she did not do so? she asked her brother’s
mistress, Zita Ritossa. By not making herself so readily available
whenever the Duce wanted her, Zita Ritossa advised her. ‘ But if I
tried that/ she said pathetically, ‘ he wouldn’t bother about me at
all.’ It was probably true. Indeed, at this rime he made a positive
154
‘t h e war is going badly ’
effort to end the affair which had now lasted for seven years—the
longest liaison of his life. According to the Sicilian Princess di
Gangi he confessed that he now found the woman ‘ revolting \ One
afternoon in the spring of 1943 Claretta was told by an embarrassed
policeman at the Via Astalli entrance to Palazzo Venezia that he
had orders not to let her in. She lost her temper and pushed her
way past him, only to be met by the Duce’s cold, dispassionate
stare.41 consider/ he announced aloofly, using an expression which,
she afterwards confessed, terrified her, for he had told her how
often he had used it in dismissing other women in the past, ‘I
consider the cycle closed/ But he gave in. There were to be several
more attempts to dismiss her, and he was always to give in. The
tears poured down her face, streaking her white cheeks with the
thick mascara she always wore as she begged him to forgive her
and to take her back; and he did. Afterwards he would regret that
he had done so and telephone to say she must not go to Palazzo
Venezia again. 4Please leave me alone. The war is going badly/ he
told h e r.4The people might criticize me for my weakness/ 4There's
already been one woman who made me do stupid things/ he said
on another occasion, 4and I don't intend to put up with it again.’
But he did. He insulted her, quarrelled with her, behaved towards
her with studied indifference, ‘just as if', so she said herself, ‘he
had another woman who was taking everything out of h im ’. He
quarrelled with her about her family, about her brother's disreput
able financial speculations and the absurd memoranda he sent him
on how to win the war, about her tall, hook-nosed, calculating
mother, whose dangerous boasts and promises of patronage were
earning her the contempt of Rome. Once when they were quarelling
about her brother he hit her so hard that she fell back against the
wall and was only restored to consciousness by a strong injection of
a stimulant given to her by her father. But there were days when,
for a moment, their quarrels seemed unimportant and they found
comfort in love and in the memory of happiness; and afterwards
she would fill her diary with the trivialities of their conversation.
‘I won't come in the day any more/ she whispered once. ‘Just
after dark. For a few minutes, just to see you and to kiss you. I
don't want to cause a scandal.'
It was a scandal, though—a scandal which, in the words of an
important police officer, was ‘ doing the Duce more harm than the
loss of fifteen battles '. 4There is really much too much talk about
the affair/ Ciano agreed, and he told his friend Serrano Suner, the
Spanish Foreign Minister, that there would be no objection to lots
l S5
MUSSOLINI
of mistresses, but this concentration on one and on her family was

a serious scandal. The Petacci family, Angelo Cerica, a senior
carabinieri officer said, 4meddles in everything, grants political pro
tection, threatens from above and intrigues from below \ But what
could one do to warn the Duce, Ciano asked in exasperation, parti
cularly as two of his most intimate colleagues, his private secretary
De Cesare and his Under-Secretary of the Interior, Guido Buffarini-
Guidi, were making plenty of money in 4this underworld setting’?
Someone really must talk to him, though, Mussolini’s sister Edvige
insisted. It was all very well for her brother to protest to Alessandro
Pavolini, the Minister of Popular Culture, that all the great men of
the Italian Renaissance had had their love-affairs and that he gave
nothing to Claretta except a few small presents now and again and
occasionally five hundred lire to buy a dress. This was true; but the
people who saw her wearing the expensive clothes and smelling of
the expensive scent with which artful Roman shopkeepers and cal
culating business-men were anxious to provide her, did not believe
it was true and told each other that their exorbitant taxes were
paying for her luxuries. They could not know that her large
diamond ring was given to her by a banker who believed he owed
the successful conclusion of a business deal to her intervention and
that her mink coat was a gift from an acquaintance of her brother’s
who had been given a profitable contract by the Ministry of Works.
In any event when people spoke, as they frequendy and openly did
speak, of the 4Petacci scandal ’ they were usually referring to the
family’s discreditable activities rather than to Claretta’s. They
knew her parents had built before the war a beautiful modem
villa with black marble bathrooms in the expensive Camilluccia
district, and they believed that Mussolini had paid for it or, at least,
for Claretta’s exotic bedroom, the walls of which were covered with
looking-glass and whose enormous silk-covered bed was raised like a
throne on a dais. But he had not paid for it, although the domineer
ing Signora Petacci had told her daughter to ask him to do so.
Claretta had refused even to suggest it, and when he saw the villa
for the first time and was asked by its proud owners if he liked it,
he replied gruffly, 4Not much.’
The most detested member of the family was Claretta’s brother
Marcello, a doctor in the Navy, who was reported to be making a
fortune from smuggling gold through the diplomatic bag, from
illegal trading in foreign currency and from his widely self-adver
tised friendship with the Duce, which enabled him, so it was
supposed, to place contracts and arrange profitable appointments.
*56
While it was untrue that the Duce helped Marcello to make money
—he never directly helped anyone to make money, least of all him
self—he was nevertheless ingenuous and careless enough to let the
suspicion grow up that he had done. The truth was that he was not
in the least interested in money and hardly ever thought about it.
He was, indeed, according to Claretta, so innocent about it that he
once inquired how she managed to live so well. ‘ Does your father
earn a lot? ’ he asked her with an apparently genuine wish for
enlightenment about something that had never before occurred to
him. It was, of course, absurdly ingenuous of him not to realize that
when Claretta, heavily made-up, over-dressed and over-scented, dis
tributed money to the poor, her careless patronage would be
resented. Ciano noted in his diary that the Director of Public
Health had told him that Guido Buffarini-Guidi was allowing her
two hundred thousand lire a month; but, as was natural, the poor
to whom she distributed most of this largesse grumbled that it was
the conscience-money of a spoiled tart.
It was, above all, absurd of Mussolini to suppose that his selection
of friends and protégés of the Petaccis to fill the vacant posts at his
disposal would not cause deep resentment. That he was surprised
when his choices were resented seems certain, and that he remained
as often as not unaware of the resentment seems equally so. No one
greatly objected to his asking the newspaper II Messaggero to
appoint Claretta’s father its medical correspondent : Dr Petacci was,
after all, a competent physician. No one objected to his trying to
ensure that Claretta’s sister Miriam should have a successful film
career; she was not a bad actress. But other displays of his hap
hazard patronage could not so easily be forgiven; and in particular
his choice of Aldo Vidussoni, a young man of twenty-six and a
friend of the Petaccis, for the important Secretaryship of the Fascist
Party was universally regretted; and the semi-official explanation
that Vidussoni had been appointed to exercise some sort of bene
ficial influence on the recalcitrant youth of the country convinced
no one. Ciano was aghast at this particular choice of a man whom
Vittorio Mussolini described as full of ‘idiocy, ignorance and
malice ’ for so important an appointment, and said so—but not to
the Duce.
Several leading Fascists approached Ciano and told him that as
Mussolini’s closest adviser and as his son-in-law it was his duty to
inform him how strong feelings in the Party were against the
appointment and how fast resentment in the country generally was
rising against the Petaccis. But Ciano dared not. Nor did anyone
157
MUSSOLINI
dare to mention to him the damaging gossip which was going

round Rome concerning the influence that a somewhat disreputable
architect named Pater was having on Donna Rachele, who, accord
ing to her daughter Edda, was going through her change of life.
‘ The fact was/ Bottai said,1no one dared speak to Mussolini about
anything/ When a friend had said to Ciano that the Duce was often
in ‘ such obvious pain it was alarming ’ and he ought to do some
thing about it, he asked, ‘But what? . . . Who has the courage
to speak to him about a personal matter? ’
Who for that matter, as Bottai had said and as Ciano might well
have added, had the courage to speak to him about any unpleasant
matter? When the Ministry of the Interior prepared a documented
report on the disturbing internal situation in Italy and the growth
of anti-Fascism, Buffarini-Guidi dared not show it to the Duce.
When the indignation of Raffaello Riccardi, the Minister of Com
merce, eventually overcame his reluctance to speak to Mussolini
about the Petaccis’ illegal gold transactions, the Duce appeared in
dignant too, and even—so Riccardi thought—‘ humiliated ’. But
Ciano did not think that the Minister’s future in the Party was
likely thereafter to be very successful. ‘W ith Mussolini/ he com
mented astutely, ‘it is extremely dangerous to believe that one is
two steps above him / Buffarini-Guidi agreed and said that the
Duce’s principal reaction was not one of indignation and certainly
not of humiliation, but of anger with Riccardi for having made
a scene. Count Cavallero took no such chances as Riccardi had done.
He had found by experience that it was much easier to get on with
the Duce if information which would displease him was suppressed.
When asked to provide a list of military equipment being manu
factured in Italy, he allowed the numbers of anti-tank guns to be
deliberately exaggerated. Mussolini, although often willing to
accept good news without the deeper inquiry which would perhaps
prove disappointing, on this occasion questioned the high figures
which Cavallero had supplied. The Count said that they represented
theoretical possibilities of production rather than actual numbers,
and altered them in pencil.
This calculated withholding of information from the Duce was,
of course, no new development in Fascist circles. It was, indeed,
widely believed in Italy that for years the gerarchi had been con
cealing the true facts from him. In the past this belief had often
worked to Mussolini’s credit. When some local Fascist was thought
guilty of corruption or an act of cruelty or malice, or when a Fascist
decree was found to be harsh or intolerant, the people would say to
158
each other, ‘ If only the Duce knew 1 ’ For the Duce was still a god
then and not to be held responsible for the wrongs of his mortal
followers; but this was an attitude which was rare now. By the end
of 1942 mo5t Italians had begun to suppose that the Duce must be
a part of every rankling injustice, every defeat, every hardship, every
fresh disaster that showed the Fascist system which he had created
was not capable of dealing with the emergency into which he had
plunged it. The war had gone on too long.
l S9
2
THE CONSPIRATORS
N O V E M B E R 1942- 24 J U L Y 1943
Why did not Cæsar look at the list of the conspirators

when it was thrust into his hand? Maybe he allowed
himself to be killed, feeling that he had reached the
end of the tether.
O N 23 January 1943 units of the British Army occupied Tripoli.

To many Italians then, the war appeared already lost and the only
hope for Italy seemed to lie in a disengagement from the German
alliance. Few of them expected, however, that the Axis would
be broken so long as the Duce remained in power. It was an
opinion which the Germans shared. Writing after the fall of Tripoli
and when it seemed likely that Tunis also would be taken, Goebbels
laid emphasis on this belief. ‘The Duce has again assured the
Führer and in a most emphatic way/ he wrote, ‘ that he will march
with us through thick and thin and that he will always remain
faithful to the Axis. This is absolutely true. As long as the Duce
is in power in Italy, we can feel secure; the loyalty of Fascism is
assured/
How long, though, Goebbels wondered, could the Duce remain
in power? And how much power did he really possess? ‘The
aristocracy and the Court/ he was sure, ‘sabotaged all his deci
sions ’; and the generals were constantly at odds with him.
The opposition, in fact, had already gone deeper than Goebbels
knew. As early as November 1942, when General Montgomery's
victory at El Alamein had presaged the ultimate defeat of the
Italian armies in North Africa, the plotting had begun. It had at
first been limited to vague and indeterminate suggestions and hints,
secret conversations and meetings between the Court and various
officers of the General Staff. But in time the conspiracies spread and
multiplied, and the King himself became deeply involved in them;
while both the Minister of his Royal Household, Duke Pietro
d’Acquarone, and Princess Maria José, the wife of his son and heir
160
)n a visit to Gabriele D ’Annunzio at Gardone
THE CONSPIRATORS
Umberto, were known to be in touch with those generals who

wanted to see the end of the Duce’s dictatorship. Acquarone,
indeed, had not limited his contacts to the generals, and three years
before, in January 1940, he had approached Ciano on the golf-
course and said that the King felt that it might ‘ become necessary
to give things a different direction ’. He wanted to go deeper into
the subject, Ciano thought, but he was given no opportunity to
do so.
41 hear from several sources’, Marshal Caviglia, an old and
respected anti-Fascist, wrote in his diary in the winter of 1942,4that
at the Palace they envisage a solution earlier than anyone supposes.
The King is carefully considering what should be done/
Those of Caviglia’s fellow-generals, however, who were also con
sidering what should be done, did not all agree that it was Musso
lini alone who would have to be replaced. General Vittorio
Ambrosio, for instance, a man who was later to play an important
part in the dramatic events which were to lead to the Duce’s arrest,
believed that the King also might have to go, as he had been 4too
identified with Fascism ’. 4Visited Bonomi,’ he recorded in a cryptic
but nevertheless revealing note in his diary in February 1943,
'Badoglio’s proposal—Abdication of the King. The Prince. Armi
stice. Cavallero.’
Ivanoe Bonomi, whose name is the first mentioned in this note,
a Prime Minister before the Fascists came to power and a Prime
Minister again after her débâcle, was one of those few Socialists
whom the King trusted. His supposed loyalty to the Crown was,
however, opportunist rather than inflexible. So was that of Marshal
Badoglio, whose proposal that the King should abdicate was
apparently the subject of the discussion to which General Ambrosio
referred. Although he himself denied harbouring so presumptuous
an aspiration, Badoglio was believed by Marshal Caviglia to have
4designs on Mussolini’s succession ’, and he certainly admitted to
a friend in April 1943 that he agreed with General Ambrosio that
Italy must lose no time in breaking with Germany 4with or with
out the Monarchy ’ and that this would involve the removal of the
Duce.
While Badoglio and Ambrosio, in concert with two other
generals, Giuseppe Castellano and Pompeo Carboni, discussed their
plans and assessed their chances of success, several of Mussolini's
Fascist Ministers were also plotting the Duce’s overthrow. The
most influential and outspoken of these were Giuseppe Bottai,
Minister of Education, and Count Dino Grandi, Minister of
161
MUSSOLINI
Justice. Dino Grandi, like Marshal Badoglio, was both ambitious

and shrewd. He was also extremely intelligent, vain and amusing,
and, unlike most of Fascism's gerarchi, charming and compara
tively cultured." He had a delightful smile and a manner at once
expansive and equivocal. He was—and remains—an enigmatic
figure whose motives were clear neither to his friends nor to his
enemies. One of these enemies, Guido Buffarini-Guidi, the large and
sensual Under-Secretary of the Interior whose craftiness was univer
sally admitted and deplored, hoped that by bringing Grandi’s
conspiratorial activities to the Duce's notice he would bring him
self into favour. He contrived to do so in a characteristically devious
way. As the man responsible for the allowance of which Ciano had
made note, Claretta Petacci had become dependent upon him. He
had also taken care to ingratiate himself with Donna Rachele, and,
although she was later to detest him, she was at this time disarmed
by the flattery of his calculated attentions. A third woman whose
friendship Buffarini-Guidi was careful to cultivate was Angela
Curti, one of the Duce's former mistresses and still an influential
confidante. Protesting much concern for Mussolini's safety, he
persuaded Angela Curti to write to him and warn him about the
plots which Grandi and Bottai were hatching. He indmated that
Count Ciano and Roberto Farinacci were also showing signs of
serious disloyalty.
Mussolini was not much disturbed. A few days after receiving
Angela Curti's letter, he decided to make another ‘ change of the
G uard', as the frequent reshuffles of the Ministries were termed
in Fascist parlance. But all the important offices changed hands,
so that there was no discrimination against those Ministers he had
been warned about, and none of them was sent from Rome; Count
Grandi was replaced as Minister of Justice, but he was allowed to
retain the Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. Giuseppe Bottai
was replaced as Minister of Education, but he retained, as the others
did, his seat on the Fascist Grand Council. Count Ciano was
replaced at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Duce himself,
with Giuseppe Bastianini, who had been Ambassador in London
for some months before the war, as Under-Secretary; but Ciano
was permitted to choose his next appointment and it was at his
own request that he went as Ambassador to the Holy See. Musso
lini, in fact, so Ciano wrote in his diary, was ‘very much em
barrassed ' and said, *You must consider you are going to have a
period of rest. Then your turn will come again.' ‘ Our leave-taking
was perfectly friendly,' Ciano added, ‘ and I am very glad of that,
162
THE CONSPIRATORS
because I like Mussolini, like him very much, and what I shall miss
most will be my contact with him /
It seemed, indeed, that the reshuffle had taken place with the
principal object of showing the Germans that their Axis partners
were determined to prosecute the war with increased energy. On
31 January, six days before the Government changes were an
nounced, Count Ugo Cavallero had been dimissed as Chief-of-Staff
in consequence of the military defeats in North Africa. A new
Cabinet was a logical corollary.
Mussolini’s choice as successor to General Cavallero, a blind
supporter of the German alliance, was, however, as ingenuous as
his refusal to take seriously the defection of his Ministers. He chose
as the new Chief-of-Staff General Ambrosio, one of the men most
deeply implicated in the plots to overthrow him and, as it hap
pened, a man both disliked and distrusted by Field-Marshal
Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief in Italy, and by
Hitler, who thought he would ‘ be happy if Italy could become a
British Colony today \
As the winter turned to spring, the plots developed and ramified.
There were anti-Royalist plots, anti-Fascist plots, anti-German plots.
Filippo Anfuso, on a visit to Rome from the Embassy in Buda
pest, found that Count Ciano, now working in his new office, was
‘up to his neck’ in them; and there were many others besides
Ciano as deeply involved. It was difficult to discover, in fact, as
Anfuso says, ‘ who was in what conspiracy ’; but it was certain that
each one, for a variety of conflicting reasons, was aimed at the
displacement of the Duce.
Mussolini, however, continued to ignore the reports he was given
about them. Rachele passed on the warnings she had received, but
he told her not to fuss; his sister Edvige did the same, and he said
that she was dramatizing the situation; in April the anxious Angela
Curri went to tell him that the King was frequently receiving not
only the dissident generals but anti-Fascist politicians as well, and
Mussolini, confident that the Court was completely out of touch
with liberal opinion, replied that he had complete faith in the
King’s loyalty to him; the Secretary of the Party gave Mussolini a
similar warning a few weeks later, telling him that Badoglio’s son
had announced in Morocco that his father would soon succeed
Mussolini and that there were reports from all over Italy that the
Fascists were planning to destroy him, but again he did not take
the warning seriously; even the Pope, so it seems, offered through
an intermediary to receive him secretly and to provide him with
163
MUSSOLINI
information of which the Vatican felt sure the Duce must be

ignorant, but Mussolini declined the offer. He had seen the King
recently, he said, and His Majesty had assured him of his friend
ship.
Carefully concealing any anxiety which these repeated warnings
may have given him, discounting the most alarming reports from
the Minister of Commerce, dismissing the extensive strikes in the
industrial north as ‘ the machinations of the bourgeoisie ', Musso
lini remained as indifferent towards his opponents as ever. He was
too concerned about the war, he said, to bother with anything else.
‘ The political situation/ he felt sure, was *entirely dependent upon
the military one1—a victory in the field would silence all the
opposition. And he continued to insist that a military victory was
still possible, if only the Army would pull itself together. Rommel’s
retreat would undoubtedly prolong the war, but the ultimate result
was not in doubt. The situation in Tunisia was serious but not yet
irredeemable. The immediate necessity, he believed, was a nego
tiated peace with Russia, which would free Germany to concentrate
on the threat in the Mediterranean. On 26 March he wrote to
Hitler to congratulate him on having stabilized the Russian front
after the battle of Stalingrad and to suggest that now that Russia
was weakened ‘ to such a degree that she cannot hope, at any rate
for a long time to come, to constitute a serious menace ’, he should
‘ end the Russian episode ’. Hitler was in no mind to do so. He was,
in the words of Dino Alfieri, the Italian Ambassador in Berlin,
‘ dominated and obsessed by his fanatical desire to defeat Russia
Anxious about the Duce’s attitude, by the reports of increasing
anti-German feeling in Italy, by the replacement of General
Cavallero by Ambrosio—‘ an untrustworthy political general ’—and
by the persistent rumours that Ciano had gone to the Vatican as
Ambassador in order to negotiate a separate peace, Hider asked the
Duce to come to Germany to discuss the whole situation. A meet
ing was accordingly arranged for 7 April at Klessheim Castle near
Salzburg.
Mussolini did not want to go. He had not fully recovered from
a particularly violent attack of his illness and was afraid that the
Germans would despise him for having to travel with a doctor to
give him his injections and a cook to prepare his special foods. He
had already decided that he was ‘sick and tired of being rung
for ’, and the last time he had visited Germany he had only con
sented to go on condition that he would be allowed to eat his meals
alone, not wanting ‘ a lot of ravenous Germans to notice ’ that he
164
THE CONSPIRATORS
was compelled to live on a diet of rice and milk. This time he was
sick several times on the journey and arrived looking, so Goebbels
thought, like ‘ a broken old man \ His resolutions about insisting
on the necessity for peace with Russia, about demanding the return
of Italian troops from other fronts to defend the homeland, and
about telling the Germans that Italy must have more military and
economic help, were all forgotten. He never once mentioned the
need for a new sort of European charter with a view to peace in
the West, which he had discussed at length in Rome. He spoke
half-heartedly and soon abandoned all attempts at talking himself
to sit listening in morose silence to the Führer’s endless expositions
and diagnoses. He was thinking, Alfieri believed, of what Hitler's
determination to launch a new offensive in Russia would mean to
the Italian Army in Tunisia. On the second day he had to leave
the conference room because of a sudden attack of stomach cramps,
and in another room while he drank the medicine his doctor had
given him to ease the pain he said sadly, ‘ The Führer wanted me
to be examined by his own doctor. I refused. I've already diagnosed
my illness myself. It's called “ convoys He seemed so depressed
and listless that for the first time Hitler expressed concern as to
whether *the Duce was determined ', as he said to Doenitz when
the visit was over, *to carry on to the end '.
On the return journey to Italy, however, he began to feel
better, and as always when he had come home from Germany he
spent the first few days behaving as a dictator is expected to behave.
He threatened various arrests and gave instructions for a new
confino to be prepared for anti-Fascists; he dismissed Carmine Senise
as Chief of Police, because he had not dealt sufficiently harshly
either with the strikes in Milan and Turin or with the clandestine
Press or the growing black market, and he appointed the more
severe Renzo Chierici in his place. He also dismissed Aldo Vidus-
soni from the Secretaryship of the Party and replaced him by Carlo
Scorza, a myrmidon of the Party's youth who had been implicated
in the murder by Fascist thugs of the liberal leader Giovanni
Amendola in 1925. He went over the plans for a series of regional
rallies at which leading Fascists were to harangue the people and
encourage them to fight to the death. ‘ They spread it about that
I'm finished,' he said grimly to Bottai, indulging his passion for
enigmatic menaces, ‘ fading away, done for. Well, they'll see----- '
On the anniversary of the capture of Addis Abbaba he went out
onto the balcony of Palazzo Venezia to speak to the crowds in the
square below. 11 feel your voices are vibrating with an incorrupt-
165
MUSSOLINI
ible faith,’ he shouted with the tire of his youth. 4Have no fear for
ultimate victory. It is certain that your sacrifices will be rewarded.
That is as true as it is true that God is just and that Italy is
immortal.’
He came in from the balcony encouraged by the cheers of the
people, and the windows closed behind him; although at the time
it seemed impossible to believe that he had spoken publicly in
Rome for the last time, they never opened for him again.
Two days later his momentary enthusiasm had collapsed. Within
a fortnight all the Axis forces in Africa had been taken prisoner,
and a landing on the other side of the Mediterranean was believed
to be imminent. Hitler believed the attack would be made in Sar
dinia; Mussolini thought it would come in Sicily, and he told a
meeting of his generals at Villa Torlonia that it would have to be
fiercely resisted, for there was no question of a political settlement
or a separate peace. On io July the attack was made after a violent
bombardment of the coast-line. W ithin a few days the Allied armies
were streaming across the plain of Catania, and for a week Musso
lini alternated between periods of studied calm and unconcealed
anger with the retreating Italian troops.
The King, after so many changes of mind and of mood that the
conspirators had begun to doubt that he would ever take a deter
mined stand, at last decided that he could delay no longer. Inde
pendently of the Fascists, with whom he had been in contact, he
decided on the advice of General Castellano and the Duke
d’Acquarone to arrest Mussolini on a Monday or a Thursday when
he went to the Quirinale or the Villa Savoia for the usual audience.
He asked Marshal Badoglio if he were prepared to succeed the
Duce as Head of the Government and Badoglio agreed, suggesting
a non-Fascist administration led by such men as the Socialist
Ivanoe Bonomi and another former Prime Minister, Vittorio
Emanuele Orlando. Castellano and d’Acquarone then met to discuss
the details of the arrest and the action to be taken to ensure that
no unmanageable opposition came from Mussolini’s supporters and,
in particular, from General Galbiati, who, largely on the recom
mendation of the Petaccis, now commanded the Fascist Militia.
Meanwhile the Fascist plotters also decided that they could wait
no longer. Although separated by mutual suspicions and jealousies
and by conflicting ambitions, they were at least agreed that in the
extreme emergency which had been forced upon them by the
invasion of Sicily it was essential that the Fascist Grand Council—
the supreme constitutional authority of the State, created by the
166
THE CONSPIRATORS
Duce but not convened since the war began—must meet again. On
16 July various important Party officials, who were to have spoken
at the several regional rallies planned before the invasion of Sicily,
met in Rome and insisted on the necessity of a meeting of the
Council to obtain from Mussolini a report on the general situation,
which was daily growing more alarming. At first Mussolini refused,
but later consented and set the date of its meeting for the following
week, Saturday, 24 July.
On the Monday of that week Hitler asked Mussolini to meet him
again for an urgent conference in Italy. More worried than ever by
reports of anti-German feeling in Italy, of Italian Army units sur
rendering en masse in Sicily and of their refusing to co-operate
with the German Army, he hoped to stiffen Italian resistance by
persuading the Duce to agree that all Italian armies should be
placed under the German High Command. Piloting his own aero
plane, Mussolini flew from Rimini to Treviso, where he met Hitler
on the airfield and accompanied him to Senator Achille Gaggia’s
villa at Feltre on the southern slopes of the Dolomites. The villa, as
Mussolini described it, was 'a labyrinthine building which some
people found almost uncanny. It was like a crossword puzzle frozen
into a house/ The atmosphere was formal and strained.
This was their thirteenth meeting, and it followed the by now
familiar pattern. For almost three hours, from eleven o’clock until
nearly two, Hitler talked. W hat he had to say was simple and
direct enough. There was only one thing to be done—to fight and
to go on fighting, in Italy as well as in Russia, until the Axis was
triumphant. It was no good thinking that this could be done with
out sacrifices. In Germany boys of fifteen were fighting in anti
aircraft batteries. In Italy there appeared to be a very different
attitude. The troops had not fought as they should have done; the
civil administration commanded insufficient respect; the people had
abandoned themselves to defeatism; it would be necessary to adopt
much more vigorous measures; cowards, traitors and incompetents
would have to be shot; the Italian armies must put themselves
under German command. Mussolini sat listening silently, cross-
legged on the edge of his big arm-chair, his hands clasped round his
knees. He was obviously in pain and frequently he stretched his
back and pressed his hands against it with a sigh. Often he rubbed
his lips with the back of his fingers, and occasionally he was
obliged to wipe the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. But
only twice did he speak—once to correct a misapprehension as to
the population of Corsica and once when his secretary came in to
167
MUSSOLINI
hand him a piece of paper and he announced dramatically in Ger

man, 4At this moment the enemy is carrying out a heavy air attack
on Rome/
After a brief discussion on the subject of the air-raid between the
Italians, Hitler’s tirade continued; but Mussolini seemed scarcely to
be listening any more, and as soon as the meeting broke up for
lunch he said, ‘I am extremely upset to think I am away from
Rome at a time like this. W hat will the Romans think? ’
Not interested in what the Romans would think of him, the three
Italian delegates—Bastianini, the Under-Secretary of State at the
Foreign Office; the Ambassador, Alfieri; and the Chief-of-Staff,
General Ambrosio, pressed the Duce to answer the Fiihrer’s charges
and to tell him that Italy was at the end of her tether and could
not carry on much longer without extensive help. On the way to
Feltre General Ambrosio had asked Field-Marshal Keitel bluntly
what help Italy could expect to receive from Germany before it
was too late. Sitting in the same car next to the German Ambassa
dor, Alfieri listened to Ambrosio’s direct and uncompromising ques
tions with admiration. 4Here at last was a m an/ he thought, 4who
was not afraid to use the kind of language which I had waited so
long to hear/ But it was no good. 4The two leaders will discuss
these matters themselves, you know/ Keitel said coldly, refusing to
be drawn.
Ambrosio had no more success with the Duce than he had had
with Keitel. Mussolini listened silently to his advice and then sud
denly burst out, 4Can you really suppose that I’ve not been tor
tured by the same thoughts as you? Behind my mask of impassivity
I am in an agony of spirit. But if we detach ourselves from
Germany, what then? One day at a specified hour we broadcast a
message to the enemy. W hat would happen? They would demand,
quite justly, our capitulation. But can we give up so easily twenty
years’ work and abandon the realization of all our hopes? And
what do you think Hitler will do? Do you really think he will
leave us liberty of action? ’
He spoke in a voice which Alfieri described as 4trembling with
emotion ’. He seemed more profoundly upset than they had ever
seen him before, and when Ambrosio, later on in the conversation,
made some remark to the effect that the war was not popular in
Italy, he rounded on him furiously.
4Oh, don’t let’s have platitudes, for God’s sake I No war ever has
been or will be popular. Wars only become popular when they end
in victory/
i68
THE CONSPIRATORS
Suddenly his anger evaporated, and after a moment’s pause he

calmly began a long political and historical dissertation which, the
Ambassador thought, ‘would have been interesting in any other
place and at any other time
This long and ill-timed dissertation was interrupted by the
appearance of his secretary, De Cesare, who told him that the
Führer was waiting for him to join him for lunch. Mussolini
walked down the corridor to the dining-room looking, so Alfieri said
afterwards, ‘ strangely absent-minded
During the train journey back to Treviso the Italian delegates to
the conference wondered what Mussolini and Hitler had talked
about when left alone in the dining-room. ‘ I am certain,’ Macken
sen, the German Ambassador, assured them, ‘ that this time they
will come to some most important decisions.’ They watched the two
men closely as they walked together from Treviso station and got
into the car which was to take them back to the airfield. Both of
them, in Alfieri’s phrase, ‘ looked calm and satisfied '—perhaps the
Duce had spoken out, after all. Ercole Boratto, the driver of the
car, knew better. ‘ Mussolini had difficulty in concealing his worry,’
he thought. ‘During the drive the tension found expression in
sudden outbursts on the part of the German and suppressed re
actions from the Italian.’
As Hitler's Condor flew back to Germany, Mussolini stood alone
on the air strip, stiffly at attention, his arm raised in salute. Then
he turned abruptly away and walked to his own aeroplane. Am
brosio, Alfieri and Bastianini hurried after him. He affected not to
see them, slowly putting on his flying jacket and talking with great
concentration to the Italian general who commanded the troops
stationed at Treviso. Alfieri, afraid that he would leave without say
ing anything at all, overcame his diffidence and went forward to
speak to him on the pretext of asking for some instructions to take
back to the Embassy in Berlin. Mussolini waved him away. ' I had
no need to speak to Hitler in the way you suggested,’ he called
above the roar of the engines. ‘ This time he promised faithfully to
send all the assistance we ask for. Of course,’ he added, turning to
Ambrosio, *our requests must be reasonable.'
It was the final disillusion. Ambrosio knew from what little Keitel
had told him that even reasonable requests would be met only if
the Italians agreed to conditions which Mussolini had admitted
were wholly unacceptable. He felt sure that Mussolini was refusing
to face his problems and doubted that he had so much as sug
gested to Hitler that Italy would soon be utterly incapable of
169
MUSSOLINI
fighting any longer. He knew that the letter which the Duce had
once said he would write to Hitler, telling him that Italy must
make peace, had not been sent and never would be sent. He returned
to Rome fully convinced that the other generals were right, that
the Duce would never be induced to break with Germany and that
his removal from power was the only hope for Italy.
On his return from Feltre, Mussolini went to the King to give a

report on the meeting. Before leaving for the Palace he told Senator
Manlio Morgagni, president of the Stefani news agency, that
the Germans were still strong enough to 1dam the tide and perhaps
to solve the whole situation in Italy \ But to do so they would want
‘effective command not only of the Italian front, but that of the
interior as well. This is a condition that the people will not accept,
the King will not accept and I cannot accept/
Mussolini found the King, so he wrote afterwards, ‘frowning
and nervous. “ A tense situation,” he said. “ It can’t go on much
longer. Sicily has gone now. The Germans will double-cross us. The
discipline of the troops has broken down.” This was the gist of the
talk/ The King was violently opposed to the German conditions. He
had already been told by Ambrosio what Hitler’s attitude had been
at Feltre, and he had been warned that Mussolini had appeared
physically and morally incapable of presenting the Italian tragedy
in its true light. During the audience he referred to the growing
feeling in Italy against the Duce, and the reports of various con
spiracies were also mentioned. But he was generally reassuring, and
Mussolini left the Palace as unconcerned for his safety as he had
always been. A few hours later Roberto Farinacci warned him that
General Cavallero had proof that both the Court and Count Grandi
were plotting to overthrow him and, what was more important to
Farinacci, were plotting to do so in order to break with Germany. It
was impossible, Mussolini said. Why, that very morning the King
had told him, ‘These are fearful times for you, but you can rest
assured you have a friend in me. It’s absurd to suppose that everyone
will abandon you after all you have done for Italy and in any event
I would be the last to do so.’ When Scorza came to give him another
warning and to tell him that a telephone conversation between
Badoglio and the Duke d’Acquarone had been intercepted, he
seemed scarcely interested to hear what the conversation was about.
170
THE CONSPIRATORS
It was about his being4bundled up ' one day when he left the King,
Scorza insisted on telling him. 4I do not like cowards/ was Musso
lini's only comment.
That evening he went to see the damage that had been caused
by the air-raid on 19 July. The ruins were still smouldering, and
the Duce looked at them, his chauffeur noticed, with a kind of
piteous despair.
Filippo Anfuso used a similar phrase in describing his own feel
ings as he looked out of Ciano's drawing-room window in the Via
Angelo Secchi and saw the clouds of dust drifting slowly away to
the east. Those bombs, he afterwards decided, were the mainspring
of the Roman conspiracies.
No one thought of anything but the conspiracies now. Even the
troops of countesses and princesses who paraded in and out of
Ciano’s room, gossiping about their experiences in the raid, laugh
ing at Anfuso, the emotional Sicilian, for suggesting that his native
island should be defended at all costs, even they who usually talked
of little but themselves like the 4inmates of a high-class harem '
avidly picked on every detail which would help them solve what
one of them called 4the mystery of the imminent fall of the Duce \
For nobody knew what would happen, just as nobody agreed about
what ought to happen. Bastianini said that Mussolini had ruined
Italy. Gaetano Polverelli, the new Minister for Popular Culture,
thought that he was the only man who could save it. Vittorio Cini,
the Minister of Communications, said that Mussolini had ‘gone
mad and must be put away \ Ermanno Amicucci thought that it
was they who considered putting him away who were the imbeciles.
4I've no idea what they are all up to/ he said, 4but it's easy to see
that they'll lead us to ruin.' Ciano, whom most of them believed
had always considered himself to be the Duce's rightful successor,
remained secretive and enigmatic. There was no doubt that even
before his dismissal from the Foreign Office—since the beginning of
the war in fact—he and Mussolini had not been as close as once they
had been. In January 1941, when, like many other Ministers sent to
fight by the Duce as an example to the nation, he had come to say
good-bye at Palazzo Venezia before leaving to take command of an
Air Force squadron at Bari, he had found the Duce distant and cold.
All foreign policy matters were taken out of his hands, and he was
not informed of what was happening in his absence. He lived at the
Hotel d'Europa in Bari between missions, and the life he led there,
while no wilder than that led by any extrovert Air Force officer, was
maliciously criticized. Mussolini's refusal to support him in one
171
MUSSOLINI
particular scandal seemed to Ciano a piece of gratuitous spite. He

often spoke of it to his friends; but if they ventured to criticize the
Duce themselves, he would look at them disapprovingly. ‘ I wish I
could be sure/ Bottai said anxiously, ‘which way that cat would
jum p/ But no one could be sure about Ciano or, indeed, Anfuso
frustratedly decided, ‘about anything*. All that was certain was
that the Duce was approaching disaster; and that Rome, dusty,
expectant and suffocatingly hot, felt—as Mussolini himself was to
say—‘ that a great drama was about to be performed \
3
THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING
24-25 JU L Y 1943
I came to Rome to stay in power as long as possible.
O N the afternoon of 21 July Dino Grandi went to Via Ferdinando di

Savoia to call on Federzoni, then President of the Italian Academy.
Federzoni was a fellow-Bolognese, and Grandi felt that he could
trust him. Grandi handed him the draft of the resolution he in
tended to submit at the meeting of the Grand Council. At first sight
the resolution seemed harmless enough. It was only in the last few
sentences that its real purpose was revealed. After a long and
rhetorical preamble, which recited a number of well-established
facts and unexceptionable hopes, it declared that ‘the immediate
restoration is necessary of all State functions, allotting to the King,
the Grand Council, the Government, Parliament and the corpora
tions the tasks and responsibilities laid down by our statutory and
constitutional laws’. It was also necessary, it declared, to invite
‘The Head of the Government to request His Majesty the King—
towards whom the heart of all the nation turns with faith and con
fidence—that he may be pleased, for the honour and salvation of
the nation, to assume, together with the effective command of the
Armed Forces . . . that supreme initiative of decision which our
institutions attribute to him and which, in all our national history,
has always been the glorious heritage of our august dynasty of
Savoy’. In other words Mussolini was to resign his power.
Federzoni read the paper silently and carefully. Watching him
read it with such quiet deliberation, Grandi began to think that he
had gone too far in showing it to him. But then Grandi’s mind was
put at rest. ‘We must try anything and everything,’ Federzoni
said as he handed it back, ‘ even the impossible, to save the nation
from total ruin. Even if we fail in our attempt, our sacrifice will be
the spark that will fire a rebellion and arouse the people from their
apathy/
Encouraged by Federzoni’s reaction, Grandi then approached
173
MUSSOLINI
Giuseppe Bottai, Giuseppe Basdanini and Umberto Albini, three

other influential members of the Fascist Grand Council. All of them
agreed to support his resolution at the meeting.
The most respected of the three was Bottai. He had been an early
supporter of Fascism and was one of its few leaders who was an
intellectual. He was a good writer, an adroit negotiator and an able
administrator. As Minister of Corporations he had been m ainly
responsible for the Fascist Labour Charter and as Minister of Edu
cation for the School Charter, which, when it was felt that Gentile's
Act of 1923 was too liberal and anti-clerical, had brought the
Italian education system more completely under Fascist super
vision. He was clever, witty, malicious and indiscreet. He made no
secret of the fact that his former devotion to Mussolini had turned
to sour disillusion and that he hated the war. The week before
Mussolini declared war on France and Britain he told Ciano on the
golf-course that a new party to rival the Fascist should be formed
and that it should call itself the ‘Party of the Interventionists in
Bad Faith ’. Two years later he was even more bitter. The only way
to get on in Italy now, he said, was to get to know the Petacds,
so he had decided to accredit an ambassador to their Court. In the
summer of 1942 he paid Ciano a visit. ‘ He has nothing to tell me ’,
Ciano wrote afterwards, ‘ but he is more anti-Mussolini than ever.
If he talks this way to me, imagine what he must say among his own
friends 1 ’ The following month, while staying with Ciano again, he
was once more indulging in ‘ useless recriminations \ He spoke of
Mussolini with angry resentment and said that the war was illegal
because the Grand Council had not been consulted. The Duce in his
opinion was ‘ a self-taught man who had had a bad teacher and was
a worse student '.
It was on men like Bottai that Grandi felt able to rely for the
unwavering support he would need when Mussolini himself must be
faced at the Grand Council meeting. Of Bastianini and Albini he
could not be so certain.
Bastianini, as Mussolini's choice as successor to Ciano at Palazzo
Chigi, did not share Bottai’s strongly antipathetic opinion of the
Duce, but he was well aware that the war was leading Italy to
disaster and that with the displacement of Mussolini as Head
of the Government a separate peace might still be concluded.
W ith this end in view he had already made some tentative sound
ings in neutral embassies. Cautious, precise and methodical, he
was not likely to make any forceful criticism of the Duce at
the meeting, but it was not likely that he would fail to vote for
*74
Grandi’s resolution if it seemed that it was gaining support.

Albini was Buffarini-Guidi’s successor as Under-Secretary of State
for the Interior in the recently reshuffled Cabinet, and he knew at
first-hand the real extent of the disastrous situation on the home
front. Like Bastianini he thought that Mussolini should be re
placed, but also like Bastianini he could not be expected to take
the aggressive stand that it was hoped Bottai would adopt.
The cautious and hesitant attitude of Bastianini and Albini was
also assumed by several other members of the Grand Council whom
Grandi, Federzoni and Bottai then approached. De Bono and De
Vecchi, since Balbo’s death in an aeroplane accident the only two
surviving members of the Quadrumviri who had led the March on
Rome in 1922; Annio Bignardi, President of the National Fascist
Confederation of Agricultural Workers; Count Giacomo Suardo,
President of the Senate; Cianetti, Minister of Corporations; and De
Stefani, a former Minister of Finance all agreed to support Grandi’s
resolution, but none of them would take the responsibility of com
mitting themselves during the meeting unless the debate appeared
to take a favourable turn.
To Grandi’s surprise Carlo Scorza, Secretary of the Party, to
whom he showed the resolution on Wednesday 21 July at the
Fascist Party Headquarters, seemed prepared to support it. He took
the precaution before committing himself, however, of taking a
copy to Mussolini when he went to see him at noon that day to
present his daily report. Mussolini read it quickly, not in the least
alarmed. He handed it back with the laconic comment that it was
‘inadmissible and contemptible’. Scorza, so Mussolini himself
wrote later, ‘put it back in his brief-case and did not press the
matter further ’. When he had left Palazzo Venezia, Scorza drafted
his own resolution, which he intended to present to the Grand
Council as an alternative to Grandi’s.
Having now obtained the support of Federzoni, Bottai, Bastianini,

Albini and, as he hoped, of Scorza, Grandi asked for an interview
with the Duce. He did not, in his own phrase, ‘ wish to pass for a
conspirator ’ and hoped that he might perhaps be able to persuade
him to make some voluntary gesture which would render the meet
ing unnecessary. At five o’clock on the afternoon of 22 July, Grandi
was received in the Sala del Mappamondo at Palazzo Venezia. The
I7J
MUSSOLINI
Duce was standing behind his enormous desk and watched Grandi
with a cold impassivity as he approached him. He did not ask him
to sit down. Grandi read out his resolution and then made the Duce
a brief speech in support of it. Mussolini did not interrupt him,
continuing to watch him with an expression of haughty contempt,
and when the speech was over he merely said ,4Leave me now. We
shall see one another at the Grand Council/1
On his way out Grandi passed through the assembly hall where
the palace servants were already arranging chairs for the meeting.
On one of them, waiting for the Duce to receive him, sat Field-
Marshal Kesselring. It was, as Grandi said afterwards, *not a good
sign'. He had, he admitted, become nervous. The Duce’s impas
sivity and disdainful confidence were not merely enigmatic but
alarming. He decided to ask Albini to arrange for two hundred
police to be hidden in different parts of the building. He also
decided to give way to Bottai, who suggested that Count Ciano
should be brought into the conspiracy. Although Grandi did not
altogether trust Ciano he had to agree with Bottai that if he were
persuaded to support the revolt many wavering votes might be
given to the resolution.
On the afternoon of the day before the meeting Bottai invited
Grandi and Ciano to come to his house. His guests were not at ease
with each other and could not agree on a common policy. Ciano
seemed to suspect that Grandi wished to displace Mussolini only
to gain more power and influence for himself and Federzoni;
Grandi felt that Ciano, despite any undertakings given beforehand,
might at the last moment throw the weight of his influence on to
the side of his father-in-law; Bottai believed that the political power
which was to be wrested from Mussolini should be placed in the
hands of the King together with the supreme command of the
armed forces, but the others did not think that this was practicable.
The conversation between the three men was long and inconclusive,
and when Ciano left. Grandi and Bottai were not at all sure
whether or not he intended to support them.
But by the following morning, he had apparently made up his
mind. A t noon Dino Alfieri, recalled from the Italian Embassy in
Berlin to attend the meeting later on that day, paid a visit to the
1 Count Grandi’s account of this meeting does not differ materially from
Mussolini’s. Field-Marshal Kesselring, however (giving the date as 24 July and
not 22 July), says that Mussolini was quite cheerful when he went into the Sala
del Mappamondo after Grandi had gone.4Grandi has just left me Mussolini said.
‘ We had a heart-to-heart talk. Our views are identical. He is loyally devoted to
me.’
176
Giving the Fascist salute at a parade in Rome
tanding beside his writing-table in the Sala
del Mappamondo at Palazzo Venezia
Giving instructions to a Fascist journalist
Foreign Ministry, where he found Bastianini ‘silent and pre

occupied \ He had been with Bastianini only a few minutes, how
ever, when Count Ciano was announced, and the rather gloomy
atmosphere immediately cleared. ‘ Ciano was cordial and friendly/
Alfieri wrote later, ‘and he seemed excited. He was obviously
pleased to see m e/
‘ I’m so glad you've come/ he said. ‘ We are all agreed that we
must go to any length to save Italy. . . . “ He ”—the pig-headed
one—simply refuses to understand the position. Today when the
Grand Council meets, we have decided to speak out clearly and
he’ll be made to understand it.’
Ciano told Alfieri that he was on his way to promise Grandi his
support and asked him to go with him. They found Grandi wearing
a sports-shirt in his office at the Chamber of Deputies. He greeted
them warmly and showed them the resolution. Alfieri read it quickly
and said that while it seemed all right he would like one or two
passages explained to him.
‘ No need to have any scruples or misgivings/ Ciano said, inter
rupting him impatiently. ‘ It’s simply a memorandum. During the
discussion we shall, as always, treat the Duce with the utmost
respect and deference.’
And so Alfieri hesitantly gave way and Grandi wrote his name in
blue pencil at the bottom of a list of his supporters.
W ith the exception of Federzoni, however, Grandi was not sure
that he could trust anyone on the list absolutely, not even Bottai.
‘ In my heart of hearts/ he said afterwards, ‘ the only person I
trusted completely was Federzoni.’ He had begun to think it would
have been better if he had staged a sudden colpo di stato. Now that
Mussolini knew how far he had already gone in his efforts to under
mine his authority, he was afraid that he might be arrested; and he
felt sure that if he were arrested most of his supporters would
desert him and align themselves with that strong group of devoted
disciples on the Grand Council who would certainly stand by the
Duce whatever happened.
When he had put on the black bush-shirt, known as the
Sahariana which Mussolini had ordered all the members of the
Council to wear, he put a pistol in his pocket and some hand-
grenades in his brief-case. At half past four he left his flat and set
out for Palazzo Venezia, where he found several companies of the
Fascist Militia in the inner courtyard. Other militiamen were in
the Palazzo itself. ‘You did a fine thing by having that talk with
him / Bottai said angrily. ‘ This is the end for us.’ Grandi thought
177
MUSSOLINI
so too. Indeed, he had begun to think that he would not get out
alive.
Mussolini was already in his office. He had had lunch at Villa
Torlonia, where ‘everything’, as Rachele noted in her diary that
evening, ‘was as usual’. He seemed completely unmoved by the
reports of the plots against him. Four days previously, while a maid
was fastening his collar before dinner, Rachele told him that she
had been given a list of names of men whom Bastianini had sup
plied with passports and that it was ‘ high time he did something
about Ciano, Grandi, Badoglio and company’. But he would not
be warned. He was worrying about the Americans’ tanks, he said,
not about the intrigues of a few Italians. Now, as he left for the
Grand Council meeting, Rachele offered him her advice again.
‘Have them all arrested before the opening,’ she urged him. He
kissed her at the door of the villa without replying and walked to
the waiting car with a bulging brief-case under his arm. ‘He
honestly believes that everything will work out for the best,’
Rachele wrote in her diary after he had gone.
He strode into the meeting with his customary self-confidence,
not looking at any of the members of the Council, who jumped to
their feet when he came in to answer Scorza’s shouted order ‘ Salute
the Duce ! ’ with a loud chorus of ‘ We salute him.’ He showed no
pleasure at being so readily accorded the ritual salute to the Duce
of Fascism, and sat down at his table glowering. He flinched with
pain as he settled himself in his chair. His ulcer had been troubling
him in the night, and when Claretta Petacci had telephoned him
he had mentioned it.
‘W hat will happen if you are feeling ill on this day of all days? ’
she had asked him.
He had replied with that characteristically self-glorifying resolu
tion which was never softened by irony, ‘I shall be strong and
dominate the situation in my usual way.’
As he sat in his chair, listening to Scorza calling the roll, pulling
papers out of the brief-case which Navarra, the Chief Usher, had
put on the table in front of him, frowning sternly with his chin
thrust out so that he looked, as one of his mistresses once said, as if
his whole face was pushed forward by his ears, he seemed capable
indeed of domination. Unlike the others in their black Saharan
shirts, he was wearing the greyish-green uniform of the Fascist
Militia, and this alone accentuated his aloofness, the acknowledged
supremacy of 11 Duce. The table at which he sat was on a dais
higher than theirs, and this too created an illusion of spiritual
178
superiority. And above all there were the habits, the attitudes, the
memories and fears of two decades of Fascism. The man looking
down at them so fiercely, Bottai could not help thinking, was
Fascism incarnate.
For many of them—for most of them perhaps—he was, despite
himself, still Italy’s greatest son. And there were few of them there
who had not once professed it; and fewer still, no doubt, unwilling,
had they been given the cause, to profess it even now. Grandi him
self had done so recently with a fervour which the Duce’s most
fanatical adherents would have found it difficult to match. 4My life,
my faith, my soul are yours,’ he had declared less than two months
before.
But Mussolini, like his own faithful followers, had also become
conditioned by the habits of the past. Obedience, adulation, un
questioning trust, had been for years accepted not as the pleasing
reactions of a responsive people, but as the homage due to his
genius. 4Mussolini is always right ’—the slogan splashed on count
less walls—was not so much a tribute to a great leader for whom
his people should feel constant admiration and gratitude, but a
statement of undeniable fact. This confidence in his own self-
sufficient greatness and inviolability and in his incontestable
superiority to all other Italians had made it difficult for him to
recognize the merits of those who might have helped him and the
danger of those growing numbers of dissatisfied men who believed
him beyond the reach of reason. And it was this blind confidence
that had induced him not merely to dismiss the idea of a success
ful plot as illusory, but to reject any suggestion that care should be
taken in the management of a meeting which he expected to be no
more than 4a lively debate ’. He had not even taken any trouble
with the preparation of his speech, which traditionally opened the
proceedings; for he did not doubt that he would silence the opposi
tion by the very sound of his voice.
4The war,* he began in the prosaically didactic manner of a peda
gogue reciting a familiar lecture, 4has entered an extremely critical
stage. W hat seemed impossible (and indeed was thought by some
to be an absurd hypothesis), even after the entry of the United
States into the Mediterranean, has come to pass. One may say that
the real war began with the loss of Pantelleria. The peripheral war
on the African coast was intended to avert or frustrate such an
eventuality. In a situation like this, all official or unofficial trends
of opinion, openly or clandestinely hostile to the régime, make
common cause against us.’
79
MUSSOLINI
It was the beginning of a long and rambling speech of a quite

astonishing opacity. Complacent, disingenuous, sometimes arrogant,
often accusatory, self-justifying and misleading, he spoke in an un
relieved monotone without conviction or regard for truth, occasion
ally pressing the palms of his hands to his stomach as if to relieve
the pain of his ulcer.
‘Let it be said once and for all/ he said, according to his own
account of a speech which his audience found far less determined
and concise, ‘I did not in the least desire the delegation of the
Command of the Forces in the Field given to me by the King; that
initiative belongs to Marshal Badoglio. . . . When I fell ill in
October 1942 I contemplated giving up my military command, but
I did not do so because I thought it wrong to abandon ship in the
middle of a storm. I postponed doing so until after a sunny day
which has not so far appeared. I think there is nothing further to be
said on the subject of the command/
Having by strange casuistry and unwonted explanations disposed
of his own responsibility, he went on to point out the real culprits.
He found them everywhere. He found them amongst the highest
ranks of the General Staff who were unreliable and misinformed,
and amongst the lowest ranks of the infantry, who were surrender
ing in droves in Sicily as they had done in Africa. He spoke of them
as if they were soldiers in an army that had long ago been defeated
in a war which was already part of history. He made excuses, he
cast the blame wide, he found reasons for disaster; but he proposed
no cure. He agreed that the people’s heart was not in the war; but
he did not suggest a remedy. ‘The people’s heart is never in any
war/ he said. ‘ War is always a party war, a war of the party which
desired it. It is always one man’s war. If today this is called
Mussolini’s war, in 1859 it would have been called Cavour’s
war.’
‘I had foreseen the English would attack at El Alamein on 20
October/ he commented suddenly after a brief silence, interrupting
the stream of his monologue with an observation so outlandish that
Bottai wondered if he were attempting to make some extravagantly
ironic joke. He had foreseen the day of the attack, he said, because
he knew the English wanted to spoil the twentieth anniversary of
the Fascist revolution during the following week.
He reverted to the Germans. ‘ We must admit in all fairness/ he
said, ‘ that Germany has met us generously and substantially.' He
gave details of the German supplies of raw materials, arms and
troops, but he did not mention the price that Italy had had to
180
pay for this help. Nor did he mention the further help that Italy
might now expect in her truly desperate need. He carefully avoided
all reference to the meeting at Feltre from which he had just
returned.
‘The great dilemma now/ he said at length, ‘is war or peace.
Surrender or resistance to the end/ Instead of answering this vital
question by one of those fervent tirades, epigrammatic, theatrical
and moving, which even then might have brought the Council
once more to heel, he slipped away into weary polemics. ‘ Anyway/
he concluded with a final non sequitur, ‘England is looking a
century ahead to secure its five meals a day. It wants to occupy
Italy and to keep it occupied/
It was a disastrous performance. The members of the Council
looked at the Duce in a kind of shocked silence. Alfieri wrote after
wards of the feeling of appalled disillusionment that swept over
them all. It was the most inept speech that they had ever heard
him make, and in a sense the most decisive. When he had finished
speaking, the Duce had already fallen.
For a few moments no one spoke. Then the sounds of shuffling
feet, whispering, the clicking of brief-case catches, disturbed the
embarrassed silence. At length Marshal De Bono stood up. His
short speech was no more than a veiled attack on politicians who
blamed the Army chiefs when they themselves should accept the
blame for having chosen them. This was a view which his old
fellow-monarchist, De Vecchi, now rose to support; but in support
ing it he made some remark about Italy’s allies which the violently
Germanophil Roberto Farinacci found objectionable. Contradicting
De Vecchi, Farinacci launched into a fanatical panegyric upon
German strength and invincibility. Stung by his remarks, De
Vecchi accused Farinacci of shirking military service in the First
World War and of posing as having been a hero of the Abyssinian
war after having been injured in a fishing accident.
Bottai, realizing that the meeting was in danger of breaking up
in a petty squabble, interrupted De Vecchi to make the first
authentic speech of the evening. The other members of the Council
listened to his words and understood that for the first time Musso
lini was being criticized in public and in his presence. Gathering
courage from the spark that Bottai’s words had struck, other mem
bers showed that they wished to speak; but it was Grandi who rose,
and the others sat back to listen.
‘ I am going to repeat here before the Grand Council/ Grandi
said in a low, grave voice which immediately commanded respect,
181
MUSSOLINI
4what I told the Duce the day before yesterday, and I propose the
following Order of the Day/
He read out his resolution calmly and clearly, but when he had
finished it his tone changed and he made a speech of passionate
eloquence and savage indictment. He spoke bitterly of 4the restric
tive and idiotic formula of the Fascist war \ of the 4needlessly rigid
insistence on the observation of petty formalities ’; of the 4constant
introduction of new regulations and the gradual suppression of
personal freedom*. 4You have imposed a dictatorship on Italy/ he
said in a voice breaking with emotion, ‘ which is historically
immoral. For years you have kept in your own hands the three
Service Ministries. And what have you done? You have destroyed
the spirit of our Armed Forces. For years you’ve suffocated our
personalities in these funereal clothes. For years when selecting
someone from among several candidates for an important post, you
have invariably selected the worst/
For over an hour Grandi spoke. Mussolini sat listening in silence
to the speech which he afterwards referred to as a 4violent philippic
—the speech of a man who was at last giving vent to a long-
cherished rancour \ He leaned over the table in a cramped posture
as though he were still in pain, occasionally drawing doodles on
a large sheet of paper, covering his eyes with his hand to shade
them from the brilliant light of the chandelier in the middle of
the ceiling.4Those fearfully strong white lights/ he confessed later
to Marinetti, 4made me terribly tired. I had to keep my hand in
front of my face to shield them from my eyes. . . . Two hours
before the meeting I had had a violent attack of my old complaint.
I was still in pain then, but my brain was very clear. I heard the
speech of Grandi, the public prosecutor, distinctly, but all my
energy was drained away. This is one of the effects of the disease :
complete extinction of energy but a great clarity—one might almost
call it transparency—of thought/
He looked defeated, Bottai thought, and in despair. 4He didn’t
seem like a man any more, but the ghost of a man already on the
other side of life.’ Buffarini-Guidi described him as being like a
man so far lost in tho u g h t4that he was in another world. It seemed
that he was covering his head as Caesar had done with his toga
under the blows of Brutus and the conspirators.’
When Grandi stopped speaking he changed his position to slump
back in his chair as he undid the collar of his shirt. His white face
was seen to be running with sweat.
It was now that Ciano decided to speak. Under his father-in-
182
law's baleful gaze he spoke in an almost gentle voice. He confined

himself to a history of the Italo-German alliance which, to Farin-
acci’s fury, seemed to reflect no credit on the Germans; but he left
no room for doubt that he would support Grandi's resolution. At
the end of his speech Farinacci rose again to contradict most of
what he had said and to make a second and yet more passionate
defence of the Germans. He offered the Council an alternative to
Grandi's resolution in his own, which proclaimed the solidarity of
Fascist Italy with National Socialist Germany and invited the Head
of the Government to request the King to assume command of all
the Armed Forces and ‘thus to show the entire world that the
whole population is fighting, united under his orders, for the salva
tion and dignity of Italy \ Expecting that the King would be more
easily persuaded than Mussolini to delegate his powers to Kessel-
ring, Farinaccio motives for wanting to displace the Duce were not
the same as those of Grandi. But they were both agreed that Musso
lini would have to go.
As the evening wore on it became apparent that a majority of
the Council thought the same, while even those members who
would not have hesitated to vote against a simple motion of censure
were apparently prepared to support one which seemed to be so
much less than that, so mild and so apparently innocuous. Few
members questioned Grandi's motives. Gaetano Polverelli, Minister
of Popular Culture; Antonino Tringali-Casanova, President of the
Fascist Special Tribunal; Carlo Alberto Biggini, Minister of
Education; and Enzo Galbiati, Chief-of-Staff of the Fascist Militia,
spoke against his motion but with little conviction and less effect.
More taken up with personal quarrels than reasoned argument,
their speeches added to Mussolini's weariness while contributing
nothing to his salvation.
After midnight, when the meeting had been going on for over
seven hours, in a voice of utter exhaustion, ‘ low, humble, almost
pathetic ', as Bottai described it, Mussolini asked, ‘ W hat good are
these reproaches now that we are alone and face to face with the
power of three empires? ' He proposed to Scorza that the meeting
be suspended until the following day. He was unwell, he said, and
must not overstrain himself.
‘In the past,’ Grandi said firmly, returning to his attack, ‘you
have kept us here till five o’clock in the morning discussing some
trifle or other. We shall not leave here until my resolution has been
discussed and voted on.' He would agree to an adjournment for ten
minutes, but no more.
183
MUSSOLINI
Mussolini gave a nod of assent. ‘The arrogance of the dictator

had given way/ Bottai noticed with pleasure, ‘ to the submission of
the accused/ He left the room to go into his office, a lonely,
dejected figure. As he passed the Ambassador to Germany he said
to him, ‘ Come with me, Alfieri/
‘ The vast room was in semi-darkness/ Alfieri remembers, ‘ only
partly relieved by a feeble glimmer from a reading-lamp. Slowly
he crossed to the table, gently pressed a tiny switch connected to
the central chandelier, and glanced absent-mindedly through a
few telegrams. He stood for a few moments in silence; then, as if
he had only now become aware of my presence, he asked me,
“ W hat’s happening in Germany? ” ’
Alfieri repeated what he had already told him at Feltre and in
his reports, of the obvious signs of weariness in the German people,
but also of their discipline and fatalistic fanaticism, their fear of
the Gestapo, their belief in Goebbels’ propaganda. ‘ In Berlin ’, he
added, 'people are following events here with particular interest
and feel that as a result of recent military developments, the internal
situation has become somewhat critical.’
‘Who told you th a t? ’ Mussolini asked sharply, almost with
annoyance, as if even now, after all that had happened and all
that he had had to listen to during the last few hours, there could
be any doubt that the internal situation was indeed critical.
‘ It’s the general opinion in Berlin,’ Alfieri said. ‘ And the prefects
whom I spoke to on the way here confirmed it.’
But Mussolini would not be persuaded. He refused to accept the
truth of facts that others had accepted long before. As he sipped
a cup of sugared milk that had been placed on his table, he told
Alfieri that the Germans were misinformed, adding that the bomb
ing of Rome and other large cities would eventually have a bene
ficial effect on the Italian people, inspiring them ‘with a sort of
mystical heroism which makes men indifferent to danger and
enables them to resign themselves to suffering, bereavement and
the destruction of their homes’.
' Believe me,’ he said, ‘ you have been misinformed. Anyhow, the
situation is not as grave as you make out. Time is still on our side/
He spooned out the remains of milk-sodden sugar in the bottom of
his cup and then, wiping his lips on a napkin, he stood up. The few
minutes’ escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the adjoining
room, the cup of milk, the opportunity to speak again, had restored
some of Mussolini’s lost confidence. For some time after the meet
ing had been resumed this regenerated mood persisted. When Gal-
184
biati made a flamboyant speech in his favour and cried out that all
Italians were united round the Duce, he decided to make another
speech himself.
‘Among the accusations that are made against the régime/ he
said with a sudden flash of anger, *the one most current on the lips
of the people is forgotten. I mean the fabulous riches which several
of you have amassed. I have enough here/ he added, tapping his
brief-case, ‘ to send you all to the gallows. You/ pointing to Ciano,
‘ more than anyone/2
Encouraged by Mussolini’s revival, Scorza now rose to say in a
long and incoherent speech that the only thing wrong with the
Duce was that he had not been dictator enough and that to give
him more time for the discharge of his other duties he should give
up the command of the Armed Forces to Graziani. Constantly
interrupted by Bastianini, he tried to put forward his own motion,
which seemed to suggest that the dictatorship of the Fascist Party
should be more strictly enforced.
By this time the meeting had lost all semblance of order. ‘ Every
one was talking at once/ Bottai said. ‘Everyone hurled insults/
Mussolini said that he had in his hand the key to the military
situation, but he would not tell them what it was. ‘ If you get rid
of m e/ he called out, ‘ I shall have to renounce the secret weapon
that can end this war. You’ll lose at the same time the war, me
and your own heads.’ While Farinacci looked at him in amaze
ment, Grandi murmured, ‘Blackmail! ’
Then Count Giacomo Suardo, President of the Senate, who had
helped himself to a large glass of brandy during the few minutes'
recess, astonished everyone by saying that he had decided to with
draw his support of Grandi’s resolution and hoped that others
would join him in voting for Scorza’s. Tullio Cianetti, Minister of
Corporations, said that that might well prove the better course.
Ciano also began to waver. He proposed that a commission should
be appointed to consider the resolutions of both Grandi and Scorza
and devise a third to combine the two. Bottai opposed this sug
gestion and spoke again of the necessity for immediate action, but
his words were less confident than before and he was heard with
obvious impatience. Before he had finished Polverelli stood up to
•During his years of power, however, he never seems to have paid any more
attention to the dishonest financial speculations of the gerarchi than to those of
anyone else. When Achille Starace became involved in a scandal of this sort, he
was not much concerned, implying that the man’s real sin was his wearing a
Distinguished Service medal without authoritv.
i8 S '
MUSSOLINI
say in a voice broken by emotion that he had always been and

would die Mussolini's man. Grandi spoke again, with interruptions
from Biggini. Carlo Pareschi, Minister of Agriculture, supported
Grandi and was attacked for doing so by Buffarini-Guidi. The
debate had become not merely confused but incoherent.
Grandi afterwards confessed that at this point he felt that he
had lost. The supporters of Scorza—of war to the end and uncom
promising devotion to the existing régime—and of Farinacci and
his motion for unalterable loyalty to Germany, seemed to be gain-
ing ground. At about a quarter past two Mussolini abruptly
interrupted the discussion.
‘ The debate has been long and exhausting/ he said in a harsh,
brusque voice. ‘Three motions have been tabled. Grandi’s takes
precedence over the other two, so I'll put it to the vote. Scorza, call
the names/
As the Party Secretary called out the names on his roll, Musso
lini leant forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the table,
staring at each member as he gave his vote. ‘ His imperious eyes
seemed to bore into the minds of us all/ Alfieri said afterwards, *as
if he sought to influence our decisions/
There were twenty-eight members of the Grand Council present
at the meeting. Of these Count Suardo was the only one who
abstained from voting. Scorza voted against the resolution, as did
Polverelli, Buffarini-Guidi and Galbiati, but only three other mem
bers supported them. Farinacci voted for his own resolution. Nine
teen votes were given for Grandi.
Mussolini quickly gathered together his papers and stood up. As
he rose to his feet Scorza shouted out the order, ‘ Salute the Duce I ’
There was a mumble of embarrassed response, which Mussolini
cut short with an angry gesture.
41 excuse you from th at/ he snapped.
At the door he turned round, and in a quiet yet bitter voice, he
added, ‘You have provoked the crisis of the régime/
He went into the Mappamondo room, where after a few moments
Polverelli, Galbiati, Buffarini-Guidi and Scorza joined him. Galbiati
suggested that the traitors should be immediately arrested, but
Mussolini seemed stunned by his defeat and spoke scarcely a word.
When the others had been talking together for some time, he
interrupted them, turned to Scorza and said, 4Those gentlemen in
there seemed very anxious to talk of peace. W hat they don’t realize
is that Churchill and Roosevelt don’t merely want my overthrow
but the suppression of Italy as a Mediterranean Power. . . . With-
186
out me/ he added with a sudden flash of vanity, 4it would not be
a peace but a Diktat/
At five o’clock he decided to go hom e,4Come home with m e/ he
said to Scorza. 41 am very tired/
4The streets were deserted/ he wrote later,4but in the air, already
almost light, for dawn was breaking, there seemed to be a feeling
of inevitability/ As he went down Via Nomentana with Scorza at
his side he m urm ured,4Albini and Bastianini too. And Ciano even
—the lovely forty-year-old! ’
At Villa Torlonia his haggard face told Rachele that her fears
were justified. She had waited up for him, and when someone rang
from Palazzo Venezia to say that he was on his way home she went
into the garden to meet him.
4W ell/ she said to him with a kind of piteous anger.4You’ve had
them all arrested, I suppose.’
4N o/ he replied, weary and unconvincing. 4But I will.’
It was no more than a conventional protest. It was as if already
his will to resist was broken. He went into the house and looked at
his wife in silence. 4There’s nothing more I can do/ he said.
4They’re set on our ruin. My orders don’t count any more.’
He undressed and went to bed, but he could not sleep. At eight
o’clock, when Dr Pozzi called to give him the analgesic injection
which he had now every morning, he refused it. 41 don’t want one
today/ he protested. 4My blood’s running too fast.’
An hour later, however, to Bastianini’s amazement, he was sitting

at his writing-table in Palazzo Venezia as though nothing had
happened. He looked neither tired nor worried. He asked to speak
to Grandi on the telephone, but when he was told that he was not
to be found and was thought to have gone to his country house, he
suggested mildly that the staff should try to contact him there
later.
At about half past nine Albini brought him the usual morning
post, and he read it carefully, paying particular attention to the
reports of a heavy air-raid on Bologna. Only when he had finished
reading these reports did he remark to Albini in an almost con
versational tone, ‘W hy did you vote for Grandi’s motion last
night? You were a guest, not a member of the Grand Council/
Albini blushed and muttered an excuse. He was not only em-
is?
MUSSOLINI
barrassed but seemed to regret his vote of the night before. ‘I

might have made a mistake/ he said. 4But no one can have any
doubt about my devotion to you—not just now but always/ Others
too were alarmed by what they had done. Scorza telephoned to
say that 4the night had brought wisdom ’ and they were 4begin
ning to have qualms'.
4Too late/ Mussolini commented with one of those enigmatic
threats which by now had become mechanical. He seemed almost
cheerful. He asked Scorza to come round to Palazzo Venezia where
the Party Secretary found him in a mood of complete confidence.
He listened with obvious indifference to Scorza’s anxious sug
gestions that he ought to act quickly against his enemies. There
was no need for alarm, he said. He would issue instructions after
he had seen the King. When a letter was handed to him from
Cianetti, who wrote to withdraw his vote and to offer his resignation
as Minister of Corporations, he read it without apparent surprise or
pleasure, as if he had expected it, as if the other rebels would soon
follow his example.
Just before lunch Bastianini arrived with the new Japanese
Ambassador. Mussolini was 4particularly courteous and friendly \
Bastianini said, expounding his views on foreign policy and mili
tary strategy in considerable detail. He spoke knowledgeably and
flatteringly of Japan and her people while the Ambassador smiled
and bowed with pleasure.
After Hidaka had gone, Bastianini remained with Mussolini to
discuss various routine matters and the arrangements for the forth
coming visit of Reichsmarshal Goering. Not a word was said about
the Grand Council meeting. Mussolini seemed to have dismissed
it from his mind. Only when his secretary, De Cesare, told him
that he had made an appointment for him to see the King at five
o’clock at Villa Savoia did he make any sort of reference to his
predicament. 41700 hours/ he said quietly. 4 17. That’s an un
lucky number.’ By the time he left his office to return to Villa
Torlonia for lunch, however, he had apparently overcome his
momentary concern. Accompanied by General Galbiati he went
by way of the Tiburtino quarter, which had been badly damaged
in the air-raid of 19 July. As he got out of his car to walk about
in the ruins, he was cheered by a large crowd of people. He raised
his arms to them, basking in the comfort of their adulation, telling
Galbiati to distribute all the money he had on him as his own
pockets were, as usual, empty. When he got back into the car Gal
biati advised him, as Scorza had already done, to have the nineteen
188
dissident members of the Grand Council arrested. But again he

refused.
After a late lunch at Villa Torlonia, at which he ate nothing but
a bowl of soup, he changed into a dark blue suit for his audience
with the King. Civilian clothes had been specified by the staff at
Villa Savoia, his secretary had told him, and this in itself seemed
suspicious to the wary Rachele.
‘Don’t go, Benito/ she pleaded with him. ‘He’s not to be
trusted.’
That morning in his office Claretta had said the same thing. *I
begged him not to go,’ she told Navarra, ' but he wouldn't listen/
He would not listen to his wife either. He had no sense of danger.
Perhaps the King would take over from him as Commander-in-
Chief of the Armed Forces, but nothing would happen worse than
that. It was not until three o’clock that he thought of suggesting to
General Galbiati that some mechanized units of Blackshirts camp
ing near Bracciano should move into Rome; but it was too late
now. Several hours before, a division of Granatieri had been ordered
to come to Rome by General Castellano, and Galbiati’s order to the
Blackshirts was intercepted and held.
At about half past three Galbiati left Villa Torlonia. Mussolini
was still completely confident. His last comment to Galbiati was
that he would get the King’s agreement to appoint three new mem
bers of the Government. At a quarter past four he telephoned to
Scorza, who had rung up earlier to leave a message that Marshal
Graziani had promised Mussolini his continued support. ‘Tell
Graziani/ Mussolini said carefully, ‘that I will see him after my
audience with the King.’ While he was still talking with Scorza on
the telephone, De Cesare arrived at the villa. It would take them
only a quarter of an hour to drive to their appointment, however,
so Mussolini decided to wait until a quarter to five before setting
out. Even on a week-day there was hardly any traffic in the streets
because of the petrol shortage; on a Sunday they would be deserted.
Exactly at a quarter to five Mussolini picked up his black felt hat
and went out with De Cesare to his waiting car. He did not take
with him a brief-case full of papers as he usually did when going
for an audience with the King, but only a document setting out the
constitution and powers of the Grand Council, a copy of Grandi’s
motion and Cianetti’s letter of resignation.
89
MUSSOLINI
While Mussolini was getting ready for his interview with the
King at Villa Savoia, the King was making preparations to
receive him there.
Early that morning Grandi had reported the results of the Grand
Council meeting to Acquarone and had suggested that Marshal
Caviglia, a distinguished soldier and a well-known anti-Fascist,
should be nominated Head of the Government by the King and
that diplomatic representatives should immediately be sent to
Madrid to open negotiations for peace with the Allies. When
Acquarone said that the King had decided to appoint Marshal
Badoglio as Head of the Government, Grandi was dismayed. With
scarcely another word he left the room and disappeared for ever
from public life.3 At six o'clock Acquarone woke up the King to
pass on Grandi's report on the Grand Council voting. An hour later
he called on General Ambrosio, and together they went to Badoglio
to tell him what the King had decided to do. Although Badoglio
was later to lose much of his self-confidence, for the moment he
was overcome with excitement. He put on his Marshal's uniform
and sent a servant down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne.
Then he cheerfully told his family that he had decided, in exercise
of the powers shortly to be conferred upon him, to have them all
put under arrest.
Ambrosio, charged with the duty of arranging a less light-hearted
arrest, did not share Badoglio's high spirits. General Castellano had
been to see him that morning and had told him that the King
had given no definite orders for Mussolini's arrest. ‘If Mussolini
accepts his dismissal without protest,' Ambrosio said, ‘ we'll let him
go. But if he resists we'll have to arrest him.'
‘ But that's not possible,' Castellano objected. ‘ The King doesn’t
3 Grandi had spent part of that morning in his office at Montecitorio, where
Ciano called on him with Filippo Anfuso. Anfuso's account of the events of that
morning provides evidence of how little any of the conspirators knew about the
plans of the Court and how little they trusted each other. At Montecitorio, Anfuso
says, Grandi and Ciano *went off and talked together in a corner '. Then they
began arguing. 1It was clear that Grandi hid a lot from Ciano.* A little later, when
Ciano and Anfuso had left Grandi and were going back together to Anfuso*s
house, Ciano showed that his knowledge of the Court's intentions was as uncertain
as Grandi's. ‘ All is arranged, you'll see,' he said confidingly. 1The Ministry is
already made. Pirelli will be Foreign Minister. I believe Vitetti is Under-Secretary.
General Carboni is Minister of Propaganda. For the time being I shall stand aside,
but we shall see. As for you, I don’t want to say too much. You are known as a
Germanophil. However, I'll speak to my friends.'
190
want anyone with him when he talks to Mussolini. We shan’t know

how he takes it. And if we let him get out of Villa Savoia, we’ll
never catch him again.’
4All right,' said Ambrosio. ‘ Then we’ll have to arrest him any
way.’
At about eleven o’clock Castellano left Ambrosio to go to the
office of the Commander of the Carabinieri. A week before he
would have had to contend with General Hazon who, although a
supporter of the conspiracy, would not have readily agreed to
Ambrosio’s proposal. But Hazon had been killed during the air
raids of 19 July, and the appointment of his second-in-command
General Pieche, a loyal Fascist, had been avoided by the machina
tions of General Antonio Sorice, Under-Secretary of State at the
Ministry of War, who persuaded Claretta Petacci to support the
candidature of General Cerica. Cerica agreed to do what Ambrosio
and Castellano wanted. He arrived at Villa Savoia with a colonel
and fifty officers and men of the carabinieri half an hour before
Mussolini was due.
‘ Do you want orders from the King in person? ’ Acquarone asked
him when he arrived.
‘It’s all right if you give me orders in the King’s name,’ said
Cerica. ‘ But I want it in writing.’
Acquarone went over to the King, who was walking in the garden
with his aide-de-camp, General Putoni, and said to him, ‘ The Com
mander of the Carabinieri, General Cerica, desires your Majesty,
through me, to confirm the order to arrest il cavaliere Benito
Mussolini.’
The King’s voice was so soft that they could scarcely hear him
as he replied, ' Va bene/ When he turned away to continue his walk
with General Putoni, his face was deadly white.
During the afternoon General Cerica was given a written order
signed by Ambrosio and Acquarone. Cerica folded it up carefully
and put it in his pocket. Even now, so he says, he could not believe
that he would be given the opportunity of using it.
191
4
THE ARREST AT VILLA SAVOIA
25 J U L Y 1943
One can't govern for so long and demand

such heavy sacrifices from the people with
out provoking some sort of indignation.
M u s s o l i n i ' s car drove down the almost deserted Via Salaria

in the burning heat of the silent Sunday afternoon and through the
open iron gates into the grounds of Villa Savoia. It stopped outside
the portico. The driver, Ercole Boratto, noticed with surprise that
the King, accompanied by an aide-de-camp, was standing on the
steps wearing the uniform of a Marshal of Italy. He walked down
the steps to greet his visitor, which was something Boratto had
never seen him do before, smiling and offering his hand. The King
and Mussolini walked back to the villa together, followed by the
aide-de-camp and De Cesare, while Boratto drove the car to the
corner of the steps as usual. He watched the four men walk
through the door of the villa and settled down to wait. It was in
sufferably hot in the car, but these interviews normally lasted no
more than a quarter of an hour, and he comforted himself with the
reflection that he would soon be home again. He had not been
waiting long when a police officer, whose face was familiar, came
up to the car and leant through the window to say, 1Ercole, you’re
wanted on the telephone. Hurry up 1 I'll come with you. I've got a
call to make too.’
Boratto got out of the car and walked away with the police
officer, wondering who could want him. It was not the first time
that he had been called away to the telephone at Villa Savoia, but
he felt a vague uneasiness. There were more carabinieri in the
grounds than he had seen there before, and everyone, apart from the
Duce, seemed tense and watchful. Mussolini, however, appeared
quite unconcerned. He had been perfectly composed in the car.
He was behaving so still. Although he had not replied to the
King's greeting, merely shaking his head as if to say, ‘No, I am
not very well, thank you,' when they walked into the drawing
room a servant heard him reply in a polite, conversational tone
192
‘Yes, very/ to the King’s comment ‘Isn’t it hot I ’ In the drawing

room, calmly and without undue emphasis, he reported the events
that had taken place at the Grand Council meeting the night before.
They were unimportant, he said, and by reference to various
statutes added that he would prove that the vote against him had
no legal force. He was quite confident in the merits of his case.
The King interrupted him. ‘ I immediately gave him to under
stand,’ he said afterwards, ‘ that I did not share his opinion, point
ing out that the Grand Council was an organ of State which he
himself had created and which had the approval of both parliamen
tary chambers. Therefore, every decision taken by the Grand
Council was highly important.’
‘My dear Duce,* he continued, ‘it isn’t any good any more.
Matters are very serious. Italy is in ruins. The Army is completely
demoralized. The soldiers have no desire to go on fighting. The
Alpine brigades have started singing a song to the effect that they
will not go on fighting for Mussolini.’ In Piedmontese dialect he
quoted a chorus of the song which ended with the words, ‘Down
with Mussolini, who murdered the Alpini.’
Mussolini listened in silence.
‘ The Grand Council’s vote is terrific,* the King went on. ‘ Nine
teen votes for Grandi’s motion and among them four holders of
the Order of the Annunziata. You can certainly be under no illusion
as regards Italy’s feeling for you. At this moment you are the most
hated man in the country. I am your only remaining friend. That
is why I tell you that you need have no fears for your own safety. I
will see you are protected.’
Mussolini still did not speak, and when the King brought his
comments to an end by saying that Marshal Badoglio was an
obvious successor, Mussolini sat down suddenly, without a word, as
if he felt faint. All the colour had gone from his face. He appeared
not to be listening any more; and after the King had said that
Badoglio had the full confidence of the Army and also of the police,
he repeated the words ‘ Also of the police ’, as though he had heard
the sound of them but had not understood their sense.
‘ Then it’s all over,’ he muttered and, according to the King, he
repeated the sentence three times.
At length he stood up.
‘ If your Majesty is right/ he said in a stronger voice, ‘ I should
present my resignation/
‘ Yes. And I have to tell you that I unconditionally accept your
resignation as Head of the Government/
*93
MUSSOLINI
‘You are taking a decision pregnant with results. A crisis at the

moment will cause the country to believe that peace is near, be
cause the man who declared war has been removed. The blow to
the Army’s morale will be disastrous. . . . The crisis will be con
sidered a triumph for the Churchill-Stalin set-up, especially for the
latter, who will see it as the retirement of an antagonist who has
fought against him for twenty years. I realize the people’s hatred.
I had no difficulty in recognizing it last night at the Grand Council.
One can’t govern for so long and demand such heavy sacrifices from
the people without provoking some sort of indignation. I wish good
luck to the man who takes over the Government at this stage.’
The interview was over. They walked together to the door. The
King’s face, Mussolini said afterwards, was ‘ yellow and he seemed
even smaller, almost bent double *. He had conducted the interview
with ‘ unusual agitation . . . in a jerky painful mumble ’, biting his
nails, and at times his remarks had been ‘ incoherent ’. But an aide-
de-camp who saw him leave the room in which the interview had
been held could see no alteration in the King’s appearance or in his
manner; and Badoglio, who saw him soon afterwards, described
him as being ‘ very calm ’.
Although the King, returning Mussolini’s opinion of himself,
said that the Head of his Government seemed smaller than before,
‘almost shrunken’, in fact Mussolini too was calm. Outside the
drawing-room he offered the King his hand, and Victor Emmanuel
took it in both his own and shook it warmly. They spoke again of
the oppressive heat, and then the King asked to be introduced to
De Cesare, who had been waiting outside in the ante-room with
Colonel Torella di Romagno, one of the King’s personal staff. Mus
solini presented De Cesare with evident composure. He had accepted
his dismissal as calmly as he had rejected the warnings about the
King’s intentions.
And despite all the warnings he had received, it is certain that he
had not been in the least alarmed. The immediate shock of the
Grand Council meeting had soon given way to a mood of blind
confidence. ‘My father’s behaviour during those days,’ Countess
Ciano says, ‘was completely incomprehensible. He knew that a
coup was being prepared some fifteen days before it happened, but
he did not treat it at all seriously. He thought it would be quite
sufficient to change a few Ministers.’ When his wife had warned
him, he had turned on her and said that she herself was the
mischief-maker. When Claretta had warned him, he had ignored
her. When Scorza and Galbiati had warned him, he had paid no
194
attention and had asked for no details. Even now as he came out
onto the portico steps of Villa Savoia he had no sense of danger. He
saw his car parked not in its usual place at the corner of the steps,
but farther away on the other side of the drive. He made a slight
gesture of irritation and walked down the steps towards it. Captain
Vigneti of the carabinieri went up to him, saluted smartly and said,
‘Duce, we have heard you are in danger. I have orders to protect
you/
‘ There’s no need for that,’ Mussolini said with no more than a
hint of either surprise or anger. ‘ I have my own escort.’
‘My orders are’, Captain Vigneti insisted, ‘that I must escort
you.’
Mussolini had reached the bottom of the steps now and was
walking across the drive towards his car. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If
those are your orders. You had better come with me in my car.’
‘No, Duce,’ the captain told him. ‘You must come with me.’
‘ But it is ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing.’
‘ It is an order, Duce.’
Vigneti pointed to an ambulance. Mussolini made no further
protest and went towards it. The back doors were open, and as he
came up to them he hesitated for a moment, for there was an
armed guard inside. The captain took him gently by the elbow,
and Mussolini, accepting the gesture as one of help rather than
compulsion, climbed aboard. He sat down, pulling his hat over his
eyes as De Cesare climbed in after him. Another officer and three
carabinieri climbed in as well and two police officers in plain clothes
carrying machine-pistols. The doors were loudly slammed shut. It
never occurred to him that he had been arrested.
195
5
THE PRISONER
25 J U L Y 1 9 4 3 - 2 8 A U G U S T 1943
Historia magistra vitae—but she has bad pupils.
N o one spoke in the ambulance. For half an hour, as it raced

through the streets, Mussolini sat crouched and silent, believing the
carabiniere captain’s assurance that he was merely being protected
from the danger of the mob. At six o’clock, when the ambulance
came to a stop inside the courtyard of the Carabinieri's Podgora
barracks in Via Quintino Sella, he stepped down as though he had
come on a tour of inspection, scowling about him, his jaw thrust out,
leaning forward slightly with his legs apart and his hand on his
hips in a stance which was as familiar as his face.
He was shown into the officers’ mess, which he noticed was sur
rounded by carabinieri with fixed bayonets, and was left there
alone.
In the next room an officer watched him through the half-open
door, but they did not speak to each other. After three-quarters of
an hour Mussolini was taken out again to the ambulance, which
drove off at so great a speed that De Cesare protested that the fear
ful jolting would upset the Duce’s stomach. But Mussolini himself
remained silent, and when the ambulance arrived at the barracks
of the carabinieri cadets in Via Legnano he got out again without
protest. De Cesare whispered that the unusual numbers of armed
carabinieri in the courtyard were surely not there only to see that
no harm came to him, but Mussolini refused to believe him. Even
when De Cesare was put in another room and he was left alone in
the Commandant’s office he still believed that the rows of carabin
ieri in the corridors of the building had been posted there for his
protection. He seemed merely surprised when on going to the
lavatory he was accompanied by an officer and several men, who
guarded the door and then followed him back to the commandant’s
office.
He was offered a meal, and he refused it as if the very thought of
196
THE PRISONER
food nauseated him. Although he did not complain, he looked so

ill that the Commandant thought it would be wise to get a doctor
to look at him. Dr Santillo came immediately and found him ‘ very
pale, almost deathlike', with ‘a very slow pulse'. He asked for a
barber, and when he had been shaved he apologized, with un
expected embarrassment, that he did not have any money with
which to pay him; but he would remember him, he said, and one
day perhaps he would be able to make it up to him.
At eleven o'clock he put out the light and tried to sleep on the
camp-bed which had been provided for him. But he was disturbed
by the light shining through from the next room, where the officer
on guard sat watching him intently, not even troubling to answer
the telephone which rang with a maddening persistence.
Outside in the streets of Rome people had been gathering in little

groups ever since dusk to discuss the latest rumours. At five o'clock
the squares had filled with soldiers armed with machine-guns and
even light artillery, but few people believed the semi-official ex
planation that these troops were preparing to resist an Allied para
chute landing which was expected to take place at any moment in
the suburbs of the city. No news of what had passed at the Grand
Council meeting had reached the public or even the Press, and all
that was known was that the meeting had lasted until the early
hours of the morning and that some decision of importance had
been taken. By nightfall the rumours had become more insistent,
and they all centred upon the Duce. He was reported dead; to have
flown to Germany; as having resigned and gone home to the
Romagna. At a quarter to eleven, when thousands of people listened
in silence for the expected announcement in news broadcast at that
time, their wireless sets were silent. They waited anxiously. Usually
a gramophone record was played when a programme did not run
to time; but now they could hear only the hum and crackle of their
sets. And then at last, with relief and excitement, they recognized
the voice of the announcer :
‘His Majesty the King-Emperor has accepted the resignation,
from the office of Head of the Government and Chief Secretary of
State, of his Excellency Cavaliere Benito Mussolini, and has nomin
ated as Head of the Government and Chief Secretary of State
Cavaliere Marshal of Italy Pietro Badoglio . . .'
197
MUSSOLINI
For many listeners this was enough. They waited to hear no more.
They ran down into the streets to shout and dance and sing. Musso
lini had fallen; the war was as good as over. They kissed each other,
held hands to run up and down the pavements calling up to the
faces at open windows that Fascism was dead. They yelled curses at
Mussolini like excited children who have been told after an en
forced silence that they are allowed to scream. They ran to the
Quirinale to cheer the King and to Via XX Settembre to cheer
Badoglio. They broke into the offices of II Messaggero and threw
furniture, files, telephones and enormous portraits of Mussolini out
of the windows. They hacked Fascist emblems off buildings and
tore Fascist badges out of the lapels of anyone foolhardy enough to
wear them. Few badges, however, were still worn. Rowdies and
toughs, looking for victims, could find none. Everyone, it seemed,
had become anti-Fascist. Scorza, who had been waiting in vain for
a message from Mussolini, had gone in desperation to Party Head
quarters in Piazza Colonna, where he had ordered a mobilization
of all Fascists in Rome. 4Something is happening/ he said to the
Federal Secretary. ‘ I don’t just know what, but I ’ve got a feeling
it’s serious.’ He had no more success, however, than Calbiati had
had with the Militia. Less than fifty Fascists answered his call
to duty; and even they could find little to do.
The houses of a few known Fascists were broken into, but their
owners could not be found. The offices of a few Fascist organiza
tions were set alight, but the fires were soon put out. A gang of
demonstrators burst into Palazzo Venezia, shouting that they
wanted the man who had oppressed them for twenty years, but they
did not attempt to break down the locked door of the Mappa
mondo room and contented themselves by waving a red flag.
There was little violence and no one was killed. The mood was
one of gaiety rather than of revenge. In Via del Tritone, Piazza
Colonna, Via Nazionale and Piazza del Popolo crowds of people
sang and danced as at a festa. ‘ Fascism is dead,’ they called happily
to each other. And it was true. Not a single man died in Rome that
night in an effort to defend it.
Most of the population, however, sat at home in sad disillusion
ment. After the announcement that Mussolini had resigned came
Badoglio’s proclamation that the war would go on and that Italy
would remain true to her allies. They had expected as much. The
Germans were still in Rome. It might have been Mussolini’s war,
but it could not be ended yet. The German Army was still in control
of most of Italy, and already orders had been issued by the German
198
THE PRISONER
Command to ensure that this control should become a stranglehold.

There seemed no hope yet of peace.
There were those as well who remembered how so many of those
people outside, celebrating his fall with such exuberance, had once
filled the air with their tautophonic chants, ‘Duce! Duce! Duce!9
and their protestations of loyalty till death. But only one of those
seemingly devoted disciples felt called upon to make any final
gesture of constancy.
‘The Duce has resigned/ Senator Manlio Morgagni wrote in a
note which he left on his office desk. ‘ My life is finished. Long live
Mussolini ! ’ Then he shot himself.
At Villa Savoia the King was pacing up and down the paths of
the garden talking cheerfully about the Grand Council meeting and
Mussolini’s arrest with an officer of his staff. The Queen was not so
content. ‘They could have arrested him where and when they
wanted/ she complained later. ‘But they should not have done it
here. Here he was our guest. The laws of hospitality have been
violated. It is a disgrace/1 She had thought Mussolini gross and
vulgar when she had first met him, but she had grown to admire
him and could find it in her heart to regret the suddenness and
violence of his fall.
At one o’clock in the morning Lieutenant-Colonel Chirico went

into the Commandant’s office in the Vittorio Emanuele II barracks
and said to Mussolini, ‘ General Ferone has just arrived with a mes
sage for you from Marshal Badoglio.’
Mussolini got off his camp-bed and went into the next room,
where he found General Ferone wearing what he described as ‘a
strangely smug expression’. Ferone, a staff officer at the War
Ministry, handed him the letter from Badoglio. Before reading it,
Mussolini looked again at Ferone and said to him, ‘General, we
have met before, have we not? ’
1 Prince Umberto also disapproved of the methods of the generals, some of
whom, so he afterwards said, went so far as to propose that the fallen Duce should
be executed immediately. He claims to have opposed the suggestion vehemently.
199
MUSSOLINI
Ferone, who had commanded a division in Albania, had, in fact,

once been introduced to Mussolini, but the meeting had been a
hurried one and the Duce, whom he felt sure had forgotten it, had
not appeared to pay him the least attention.
‘We met in Albania/ Ferone said rather coldly.
‘Quite right/ Mussolini replied, opening his eyes wide, suggest
ing that he was surprised that Ferone should have remembered it,
implying, as Napoleon liked to do, that his memory for such things
was infallible. ‘ Quite right, General. Don’t forget I always appreci
ated you/
Then he turned his attention to the letter.
To His Excellency Cavaliere Benito Mussolini [he read]. The
undersigned Head of the Government wishes to inform your Ex
cellency that what is being done is solely for your own safety and in
the knowledge of reliable information from several quarters of serious
plots against your life. He, therefore, wishes to inform you that he
will give orders that you shall be safely escorted, with all due con
sideration, to any place you indicate.—The Head of the Government,
Pietro Badoglio, Marshal.
Mussolini looked up at Ferone, who asked him where he would

like to be taken.
It wars not for him to say, Mussolini replied with a hint of proud
disdain, he had no home of his own. He would be a guest wherever
he went.
Ferone suggested Rocca delle Caminate, and Mussolini seemed
pleased. He had not presumed to suggest it himself, he said, as he
had always considered the house not as his personal property but as
belonging to the Head of the Government. He asked Ferone to con
vey his wish to Marshal Badoglio in a letter which he dictated
slowly.
26 July 1943. One o’clock in the morning [he began in those tones
of measured solemnity which were intended to give to his most mun
dane remarks a sense of inspiration and of destiny]. One: I thank
Marshal Badoglio for his concern for my personal safety. Two: The
only residence at my disposal is Rocca delle Caminate, where I am
prepared to go at any time. Three : I desire to assure Marshal Bado
glio, recalling our work together in days gone by, that there will be
no difficulty on my part and I will co-operate in every way. Four:
I am glad of the decision taken to continue the war with our ally
as the honour and the interest of the country require it, and it is my
heartfelt desire that success shall attend the grave task which Marshal
200
THE PRISONER
Badoglio is undertaking in the name and on the order of H.M. the

King whose faithful servant I have been for twenty years, and still
remain.
He finished the dictation of this almost servile letter, asked to
read through what had been written, and then at the foot of the
page wrote in blue pencil, *Long live Italy. Mussolini.’2
General Ferone left, and Mussolini went back to lie down on his
camp-bed in the dreary little office. He lay awake for a long time,
but before dawn he fell into a heavy sleep.
For the whole of the next day he remained in the room, lying
for most of the time on his bed, occasionally getting up to look out
of the window at the cars driving in and out of the barrack square
below and at the cadets marching in front of the wall on which,
painted in huge white letters, were the words : ‘ Credere! Obbedire!
Combattere! ’ the sempiternal slogan of his régime.
He was polite to his captors, ‘ desirous ’, so it seemed to one of
them, ‘of ingratiating himself with ready obedience to every
request. He ate little and did not smoke ’. When Dr Santillo called
again to ask him if there was anything he wanted, he answered him
almost deferentially. 4Only some toothpaste,’ he said, 4and a pair
of slippers.’ The officer in charge of him said that he was 4resigned
and tranquil ’. He had at last, he later confessed to Rachele, realized
that he was a prisoner and that after twenty-one years of power he
had lost it in a day. ‘Dictators cannot slide from grace,’ he said
sadly to Dr Santillo. ‘ They must fall. But their fall makes no one
happy.’
The next day he was allowed to visit De Cesare in a nearby
room. They sat on De Cesare’s bed talking to each other and drink
ing cup after cup of tea, which was brought to them by the Com
mandant’s wife. At seven o’clock, on looking out of the window of
his room, Mussolini saw two platoons, one of carabinieri and the
other of metropolitan police, enter the barrack square and form up
beside a group of lorries. An hour later more vehicles drove into
the square with several officers. The carabinieri cadets, intrigued
by the sight of such activity, craned out of the windows and filled
the balconies as they looked down excitedly.
‘All inside,’ an officer shouted up at them. ‘All inside I And
close the windows I ’
Soon afterwards the officer came into Mussolini’s room and said
to him, ‘The order to leave has come/
* When the letter was published Hitler said it was obvious from its meek tone
that it had been forged. But Mussolini printed it in his Storia di un Anno.
201
MUSSOLINI
They went downstairs together to a waiting car. Mussolini got

into the back, followed by a man who introduced himself as
Brigadier-General Polito, Chief of Military Police. The car drove
quickly out of the barracks led by a despatch-rider who raced on
ahead to warn the carabinieri at the road blocks to let it through
without question. The blinds of the car were drawn down, but
through a crack Mussolini caught sight of the Santo Spirito hospital
and realized that he was being taken not towards Rocca delle
Caminate along Via Flaminia but south towards Via Appia. When
the car reached Albano, his fears were confirmed.
‘ Where are we going? 1 he asked.
‘ Southwards.'
‘Not to Rocca delle Caminate? '
*Another order came.'
4And who are you ? I used to know of a police inspector called
Polito.'
4That's me.’
‘ How do you come to be a general? '
‘They gave me equivalent rank in the Army.’
Saverio Polito had, in Mussolini's own phrase, ‘ carried out some
brilliant operations during the years of the regime ', and he spoke
of them now—of his capture of Cesare Rossi, the former head of
the Fascist Press Office, who had been arrested after the murder of
Matteotti, and of his destruction of the Pintor gang in Sardinia.
As the car raced down the Appian Way, through Velletri, Cisterna
and Terracina, Polito, smoking continuously, talked with anima
tion, entertaining Mussolini with details of his adventures and
of criminals he had known. And then, well after midnight,
the car slowed down and General Polito pulled down the glass
partition behind the driver's head and called out, ‘Where are
we?'
‘ Near Gaeta.’
The name filled Mussolini with a kind of bitter pride. Already
he was thinking of himself as one of the tragic figures of history.
This self-defensive compensation for his fall from grace was later
to assume the force of an obsession, and he was to see in his own
fate a reflection of the fate of those other great men whose lives
had finished like his. Julius Caesar’s end, Napoleon’s, even that of
Christ, were seen to have close affinities with his own. Now, when he
saw the massive shape of the fort which dominates Gaeta harbour,
he comforted himself with the reflection that Pius IX had taken
refuge there in 1848 and that Mazzini had been interned there in
202
THE PRISONER
1870. ‘I reflected,* he told a Swiss journalist the following year,

‘that the same destiny was awaiting me. I was so convinced of
this, that I question my Cerberus, Inspector Polito, asking if I was
to have the honour of occupying the same cell as the great hero of
our Risorgimento .'
‘ It has not been decided/ Polito said shortly.
The car came to a halt and a naval officer walked towards it,
waving a torch. The instructions he gave to the driver disabused
Mussolini of his hope of sharing the scene of his martyrdom with
Mazzini. The officer pointed towards the docks, announcing the
cruelly ironic name of the prisoner’s destination—‘The Ciano
W harf’.
At five o'clock that afternoon Rear Admiral Franco Maugeri,

the Chief of Naval Intelligence, had been told by the Chef de
Cabinet of the Ministry of the Navy that he was to hold himself
ready for a ‘ little escort duty ’. He was to drive to Gaeta, where the
corvette Persefone was waiting at the Costanzo Ciano Wharf.
Two hours later General Cerica gave him his detailed orders. Musso
lini, accompanied by General Polito, Colonel Pelaghi and an armed
escort, was leaving Rome that night for Gaeta. Maugeri’s orders
were to meet him there, take him aboard the Persefone and give
orders to her master, Captain Tazzari, to sail for Ventotene, an
island thirty miles to the south. No one must know the identity of
the prisoner until the Persefone was at sea. He was to be described
to Tazzari and the officers at Gaeta Naval Headquarters as an
‘ important personage implicated in a serious charge of espionage ’.
Maugeri had arrived at Gaeta at a quarter to eleven and for three
hours waited for the arrival of the prisoner from Rome, first in the
Persefone9s stifling ward-room, then walking up and down the
quayside, endlessly smoking and talking to the other naval officers,
one of whom believed that the Admiral had an appointment at sea
to discuss with English or American envoys the possibility of an
armistice. A few minutes after two o’clock in the morning Maugeri
saw the headlights of three cars approaching rapidly down the road
from Formia.
Maugeri has described, in his book Mussolini mi ha detto, how
the leading car drew up in front of him a few yards from the gang
way leading on board the Persefone. Lieutenant-Colonel Pelaghi
of the carabinieri got out of it and came across the quayside
203
MUSSOLINI
towards him. General Polito got out of the following car and then
Mussolini also stepped out onto the quay. Maugeri saluted and, as
he did so, he met Mussolini's 4enormous eyes ' as they came nearer
to him 4shining in the surrounding darkness \
Admiral Maugeri led the way on board and, followed by Polito,
Colonel Pelaghi and another carabinieri officer, took him as far as
the door to Captain Tazzari's quarters. While Mussolini stopped
to look at the barograph, Maugeri went back on deck where he
found the Lieutenant of the corvette giving instructions to Musso
lini's guards—six carabinieri armed with machine-guns.
The Persefone weighed anchor and left Gaeta astern. There was
some trouble with the starboard engine which, however, eventually
started up, throwing out a cloud of smoke that lasted throughout
the voyage.
Visibility was poor and there was a slight sirocco. It was hot and
humid and the clouds were low. Maugeri was happy to be at sea
again but he remembered thinking that if there were to be an
attack by bombers or submarines it wouldn't be 4much fun ’.
Before reaching Ventotene, Captain Tazzari reduced speed and
reversed course to wait for dawn; and at a quarter past five he
dropped anchor a few hundred yards from the shore.
The crew remained at action stations while General Polito went
ashore to discover if the island was suitable for Mussolini's exile.
Admiral Maugeri watched him as he climbed into the Persefone*s
motor-launch, and then went below again to make sure th a t4every
thing was all right ’.
4Also,' he admitted, 41 am compelled by a feeling of curiosity.
I enter the cabin. Mussolini raised his great eyes to mine, as I say
“ Excellency" (what else could one call him?). 44Do you want any
thing—a hot drink or a cup of coffee? " '
Mussolini refused the coffee. All he wanted, he said, was some
information. How big was Ventotene? he asked.
Admiral Maugeri told him all that he could from memory and
then sent for the chart-book.
4Ah, a small island,' Mussolini said, smiling.
He was thinking of Elba and St Helena, Maugeri realized, and
the Admiral's thoughts too turned to Napoleon. He looked down
at Mussolini with a kind of pity. He 4looks like a corpse ’, he noticed,
as if seeing him for the first time. 4He is emaciated.'
‘This is a corvette, isn't it? ’ Mussolini asked him, interrupting
his thoughts, and they began to talk of the war at sea, the technical
superiority of the British Navy, the battles that Maugeri had seen.
204
THE PRISONER
The conversation flowed easily, Maugeri said. They spoke of the

American, French and Japanese Navies, and of the way of life in
America and in Japan.
Mussolini said that he had recently been shown a film about a
Japanese school of aviation. He had noticed that the Japanese were
much taller than was generally believed and asked Maugeri if he
knew why.
The Admiral thought that this was because they were very fond
of sport and had inter-married much with Russians and Koreans.
The children were very pretty, Mussolini commented. His
daughter who had been there had told him so.
The conversation turned again to America and of her capacity
to absorb so many races. As he spoke Mussolini's face became less
ashen and his eyes regained some of their sparkle, so that when
Polito returned he seemed almost cheerful.
Polito said that Ventotene was out of the question as a place for
Mussolini's internment, for the Police Commissioner on the island
was not at all helpful and there was, in any case, a German garrison
there. Admiral Maugeri immediately gave orders for the Perse-
fone to sail away twenty-five miles north-west to Ponza, where she
anchored in the roadstead soon after noon.
‘ Through some unexplained impulse,' Mussolini wrote—charac
teristically mistaking the natural curiosity of the islanders at the
arrival of a warship for their extra-sensory recognition of the
importance of the ship's passenger—*all the windows and balconies
were suddenly filled with men and women armed with binoculars
who were watching the boat as it came ashore. In a flash the whole
island knew of my arrival.'
One of those looking out towards the Persefone was Pietro
Nenni, who recalled the day, thirty years before, when he and
Mussolini had been prisoners together at Forlì. They had been
friends then, Nenni remembered with a sudden access of sympathy.
Standing next to Nenni was another anti-Fascist, Zaniboni, who
shared his fellow-exile's pity.
‘ I shan’t go for a walk again,’ Zaniboni said as he saw the white
face of Mussolini in the boat. 41 don't want to risk a quarrel with
a ruined man.’
The sight of the scores of staring people in the harbour and along
the mole, watching the motor-launch approach the island, filled
Mussolini with dread. He felt, he said later, a terrified anxiety lest
they should see him brought ashore a prisoner, and he asked to see
Admiral Maugeri.
205
MUS SOLIN
Maugeri, who had been smoking on deck, went below and found
Mussolini, ‘very agitated*, although he was making an obvious
effort not to appear so.
*I don't want to land by daylight,* he said. ÄI don’t want people
to see me. . . . Admiral, why all these pointless annoyances? *
Since the previous Sunday, he complained, he had been cut off
completely. He had had no news of his family. He had only the
clothes he stood up in. He referred to the letter in which Badoglio
had spoken of a serious plot against him.
Maugeri told him that he had been ordered on the mission
because the Navy had considered an officer of high rank should
accompany Mussolini on his journey. But he had no authority to
answer his complaints.
It was, nevertheless, Mussolini insisted but in a calmer, even
petulant voice, most ungenerous treatment. It might have serious
repercussions. It might even be dangerous, for Hitler had a strong
sense of friendship.
He continued in this manner for some time, and the longer he
spoke the less agitated and concerned he became. Soon Maugeri
and he were talking again about the war and about the reper
cussions which his fall had had in Germany and England.
Was Churchill very harsh about him, Mussolini wanted to know,
and suggested that the feeling against him personally in England
was very strong.
Maugeri did not answer the question directly, but spoke in a
general way of the *colourless German comments * and the *trend
of English propaganda ’, which was advising the Italians to drive
the Germans out if they wanted an honourable peace. Then he
suggested that Mussolini should go up on deck as it would soon
be time for him to land. Polito had returned to the Persefone
from his reconnaissance of the island where orders had been given
for a house in the village of Santa Maria to be prepared for the
reception of ‘ an exalted personage *.
Mussolini walked up to the ship's rail with his hat—as he was
usually to wear it now—pulled well down over his eyes. He looked
across to the island and asked which was to be his house. He was
shown an isolated, greyish, sad-looking, three-storeyed house with
green shutters on the shore of a little bay between two high rocks.
In front of it was a row of sailing-boats laid up on the beach. When
someone began to describe the house to him, he said irritably, *I
understand. It is that little house above the sailing-boats with green
windows.*
206
THE PRISONER
He was not told that it had also been the prison of Ras Imeru,
the Abyssinian patriot.
He was overcome with depression and made sure his face was
well concealed by his hat before climbing down the ladder into the
launch.41 don’t want to go/ he protested, with the sudden desperate
anger of a child, turning round, holding on to the rail. ‘I don’t
want everyone to know what’s happened.' But the anger subsided
as quickly as it had risen, and he said good-bye to Admiral Maugeri
with composure. 4Please pass on what I have told you,’ he said in
a voice so unnecessarily loud that a sailor standing nearby won
dered if the words had been meant for him.
He smiled sadly, Maugeri noticed, and saluted in the Roman
manner. He took his place in the motor-launch with his escort of
carabinieri. The motor-launch drew away from the ship and the
sailors remained silently at their stations.
It was ten o’clock when Mussolini landed on the beach of Santa
Maria in Ponza. Before walking up to the house, he turned round
and stood for a few moments looking back towards the sea.
41 am tired,’ he said suddenly. 41 should like a bed to rest on.'
The bedroom had been freshly white-washed, and with its
clinically austere walls and cheap wash-basin it gave the inescap
able impression of a prison cell. The only furniture was a bare iron
bedstead, a dirty wooden table from a wine-shop heavily scratched
by knives and a chair with the stuffing bursting out of its seat. At
sight of this lonely, comfortless room Mussolini was overcome
again by that sudden anger of despair that he had felt on the
Persefone. 41 have had enough of this,’ he said, clenching his fists
as he turned towards the window to pick up the chair, which he
placed in the middle of the floor. He sat down on the chair and
buried his face in his hands.
Sergeant-Major Marini of the Ponza carabinieri, who was stand
ing in the doorway and had watched the scene with embarrassment,
came into the room, gave a Roman salute and remained standing
at attention. He tried to say something, but the words caught in
his throat. So nervous and unsure of himself did he look that
Mussolini’s mood immediately changed. He stood up and took the
Sergeant-Major by the shoulders and said to him dramatically,
4Courage I I know what you must be feeling.’
4We didn’t know you were coming to Ponza, Excellency. I was
told barely half an hour ago.’
‘Don't worry.’
41 so often wanted to meet you in the past to tell you things.’
207
MUSSOLINI
‘ And now that you do meet me it doesn't matter any more.'

The Sergeant-Major left the room to fetch a mattress and some
sheets, and when he returned the wife of one of his men came with
him carrying a bowl of soup, an egg and some peas. Mussolini was
lying on the slats of the bed with the jacket of his suit for a pillow.
He looked worn out. But when he had eaten he felt better and
later on was able to talk with some semblance of his former anima
tion to some fishermen who came to visit him and to give him a
present of a few lobsters.
The next day, 29 July, was his birthday. He was sitting, dressed
in his ill-fitting blue suit, by the window when Sergeant-Major
Marini came into the room to give him four peaches.
1Sergeant-Major, you are very kind,’ he said. 4I hope this doesn’t
mean that the population will go short of fruit? *
‘No, no.’
4Good. Then I shall eat them between now and tomorrow.’
During the morning a few fishermen and carabinieri came to
wish him a happy birthday, and in the afternoon a carabinieri
officer handed him a telegram.
D uce,
My wife and I send you our warmest and best wishes for today.
Though circumstances have prevented my coming to Rome as I
planned—in order to offer you a bust of Frederick the Great as well
as my congratulations—the feelings I express to you today of com
plete solidarity and brotherly friendship are all the more cordial.
Your work as a statesman will live in the history of our two nations,
destined as they are to march towards a common fate. I should like to
tell you that our thoughts are constantly with you. I want also to
thank you for the charming hospitality which you formerly offered
me, and I once more sign myself with invincible faith—
Yours,
G o e r in g .
It was the only message he received from the mainland.

Hitler, so Mackensen told Alfieri, was ‘ furious with the King and
Badoglio because he could not find out where Mussolini was’. In
an effort to discover his whereabouts he had instructed him as his
Ambassador in Rome to go and see the King and ask for permis
sion to visit him. But Badoglio regretted that he was 4unable, in
the personal interest of H. E. Mussolini himself, to consent to the
proposed visit ’. He was, however, prepared to 4forward forthwith
any letters which H. E. Ambassador may have for him and to
transmit any answers '. Hitler thereupon decided to send to Musso-
208
An anniversary parade celebr;
the March on Rome with B
De Bono and De Vecchi
Reviewing troops home from

Abyssinia in Piazza Venezia
Greeting the King dur
the army manœuvres in
Abruzzi in August 193
THE PRISONER
lini a beautifully bound edition of the collected works of Nietzsche.

The books did not arrive while Mussolini was at Ponza, and he
passed his time on the island by translating Carduccio Odi Barbare
into German and in reading Giuseppe Ricciotti’s Life of Christ,
which he later gave to a priest on the island heavily annotated with
comments indicative of the comfort he had received from the
4surprising analogies ’ between Christ’s fate and his own. He had
started annotating the book before his arrest, and it is evident from
the notes made in Ponza in a different coloured pencil that those
pages describing Christ’s betrayal and arrest were now the most
significant. Seeing him reading the book one day, Marini made
some reference to the parallel which could be drawn between the
betrayals of the founder of Christianity and of the founder of
Fascism.
4You should not compare Him with me,’ Mussolini said, but he
could not disguise his pleasure.
There was comfort for him too in the reflection that Ponza had
been the home of other exiles. 4Ever since ancient times,’ he wrote
afterwards, 4famous people had been banished there—Nero’s
mother Agrippina, Augustus’s daughter Julia, and to make up for
these a saint—Flavia Dominila and, in a.d. 538 a pope, St Sylvester
the Martyr.’ But this capacity to see himself against the background
of history was no more than a cold consolation in the bleak same
ness of his days.
He got up each morning at half past seven and had a glass of
milk and an egg for breakfast; for lunch he had another egg, a
few tomatoes, a piece of bread and some fruit. He drank another
glass of milk before he went to bed, which he did every evening
as soon as it was dark. For hours on end he sat alone reading and
writing or looking out of the window across the harbour bay, think
ing, as he later confessed, about 4the miserable conspiracy which
had got rid of me, convinced that all this would lead to capitula
tion and to my being handed over to the enemy ’. He was allowed
no newspapers and no visitors; nor was he allowed, so he told
Rachele, to attend the Mass which he asked the parish priest of
Ponza to say on the anniversary of Bruno’s death. His only com
panions were the carabinieri who listened to him talk not only
with bewilderment but also with embarrassment, for they had been
forbidden to reply, Sergeant-Major Marini, and the parish priest,
Luigi Maria Dies, who said afterwards that Mussolini’s exile had
turned this ‘great man into a good Christian’.
He rarely left the house. When two new officers, Lieutenant-
209
MUSSOLINI
Colonel Meoli and Lieutenant Elio di Lorenzo came out to the

island with Sergeant-Major Antichi to reinforce his guard, he was
allowed to go swimming; and once, escorted by three carabinieri,
he went to see the Roman remains on the island and the grottos
where lampreys had been reared by the priests of the temple. But
he did not like the villagers to see him, and for most of the time he
preferred to stay indoors.
On I August a lobster fisherman came out from the mainland in
his motor-boat Maria Pace, bringing him a box of fruit and two
trunks which his family had been allowed to send him. Sergeant-
Major Marini watched him unpack. There were three envelopes in
the case, one containing a letter from Rachele and a photograph of
Bruno, the second containing 10,000 lire and the third a letter from
Edda, which he read hastily and then threw under the bed. ‘Do
you want to reply to the letters? ’ Marini asked him. 4N o/ he said,
4I'm not in a hurry for th at/
The clothes, however, gave him a momentary pleasure, and he
changed immediately into a clean white shirt. A moment later he
was seen to take the shirt off and to walk to the window with his
chest bare and a yachting cap on his head; then suddenly he took
the cap off and put his white shirt on again. He was bored and he
was frustrated. The basin tap in his room did not work, and this
alone was enough to drive him to despair. 4Tell me, Sergeant-
Major/ he asked Marini with bitter petulance. 4Why is there never
any water in this tap? I’ve spent a pretty penny on getting the pipes
laid in Ponza, I can tell you/
‘Excellency, you spent a pretty penny all right, but the water
from the spring still runs into the sea/
4Are you speaking the truth, Sergeant-Major? '
4Yes, Excellency/
4Ah, these Prefects I These Prefects 1 ’
And so another discourse began.
After a week of this sad, dispiriting life, he became ill and Dr
Silverio Martinelli, the Ponza doctor, was sent for.
41 know your complaint/ Martinelli said without examining him.
‘I’ve brought you some medicine. I can't do more than that. You
ought to be operated on/
4Everyone in Italy knows my complaint/ Mussolini said angrily.
4Give me my medicine/ But when he was handed it, he said it was
not enough and demanded a double dose. Even now he could not
resist the opportunity for talking, and at great length expounded
to the doctor his medical history. 4So there you are/ he added at
210
THE PRISONER
the end of his monologue without self-consciousness, ‘ those are the

physical sufferings of the Duce ! ’
Six days later, soon after dark, Mussolini saw a mysterious light
flashing continuously on the hills behind the harbour. He watched
it for some time, but was, however, fast asleep when shortly before
dawn he was woken up abruptly and told that he was being moved
from the island immediately.
‘I collected my few things/ he wrote the following year, ‘and,
accompanied by my armed escort, went down to the beach, where
a boat was waiting. The structure of a warship showed clearly in the
distance at the entrance to the roadstead/ He was taken on board
the Panthère, a ship which had formerly been in the French Navy,
where he saw Admiral Maugeri again.
Maugeri found him looking better than before. ‘ He looks bolder,
has more colour, less flaccid. . . . Still the same suit, still the same
h at/
' And where are we going to this time, Maugeri? *he asked almost
cheerfully.
‘To Maddalena Island/
‘ More and more inaccessible/
The thought seemed to please him. During the long conversation
which he and Maugeri had in the captain’s cabin, the Admiral
admitted that the disconcerting impression began to grow in his
mind that Mussolini was now considering himself as a ‘third
person and not as the principal actor in the gigantic tragedy of our
nation \ Mussolini was speaking and yet it seemed to Maugeri that
he was not speaking of himself and had nothing at all to do with
the events he described.
Despite his aloofness and exalted dissociation he was, neverthe
less, extremely anxious to know what had been happening in the
world from which he had been cut off for ten days. Already he
had been told by another naval officer on board that Badoglio had
dissolved the Fascist Party. Now he heard with apparent interest
that Farinacci had gone to Germany and spoken on Munich radio
and that Ciano had been dismissed from his ambassadorship. ‘ Now
there/ he commented in a ‘decided and mournful voice’, ‘is a
truly wretched figure . . . golf with his girl friends every day.’
And when Maugeri told him that it was feared that German com
mandos had been preparing an attempt to remove him from Ponza
he displayed a natural and real concern. It would be the greatest
humiliation which could possibly be inflicted on him, he thought.
And did people really think he would go off to Germany and try
211
MUSSOLINI
to seize power again with German help? he asked, denying strongly

that he ever would.
The thought that he was, indeed, not yet an historical figure, upon
whom contemporary events could no longer have any influence, and
the realization of what a raid by German commandos might mean,
apparently filled him with indignation. Maugeri thought that the
indignation was sincere. Certainly he seems not to have considered
before the implications of a rescue by German troops, although he
had discussed with Marini on Ponza the possibility of a British
attack.
The following morning, when the ship, steaming at twenty-two
knots in a strong westerly wind, was already half-way to Maddalena,
Mussolini was composed again. There had been two alerts in the
night when enemy aircraft had flown low over the ship, but no
attacks had been made and afterwards he had been to sleep for a
few hours. When Maugeri came in to see him he was rested and
calm.
The sea was rough, breaking over the bows and across the deck
and the strong wind carried the spray as far as the bridge. Visibility
was poor. The mountains of Corsica could be seen through the mist
on the port bow, but Sardinia was no more than an indeterminate
blur. The Panthère steamed right up to the danger limit of the
batteries so that the captain could take his bearings accurately. But
there was nothing to be seen except Cape Figari and neither he
nor Admiral Maugeri were absolutely certain of that. So the ship
steamed slowly southwards keeping outside the limits of the mine
fields until Tavolara came clearly into sight and it was possible to
identify the entrance to the estuary. Piloted by a motor-boat the
Panthère went down the channel at four knots. Now that the
worries of navigation were over, Admiral Maugeri felt calmer but
the sight of Mussolini standing on deck with the carabinieri
officers annoyed him. Colonel Meoli ought to have avoided this, he
thought, for the crew might well have made some demonstration.
They did not do so, however. They looked at him, of course, but
they were silent and they did not stare.
At two o’clock a motor-launch, with Admiral Bruno Brivonesi
aboard, drew alongside, and Mussolini climbed down towards it.
He knew Brivonesi and did not like him. He had had him court-
martialled after a naval incident in which he had lost three ships
without inflicting any loss on the British cruisers which had
attacked him. The sentence which the court had imposed was, in
Mussolini’s opinion, inadequate, and his subsequent appointment
212
THE PRISONER
to command the naval base at La Maddalena a disgrace. He was

married to an Englishwoman, Mussolini commented with evident
distaste.
On Maddalena, Mussolini was given further irritation by being
reminded of the English. He was taken to a house with a large
garden overlooking the sea and surrounded by pine-trees. It was
well furnished and had until the night before been used as a mess
by E-boat officers. Mussolini was told that it belonged to an English
man called Weber, behind whose desire for isolation he detected a
sinister motive. Of all the places in the world where this Weber
could have settled why did he have to choose 4the most stark and
lonely island of all those to the north of Sardinia? The Secret
Service? Possibly/
Maddalena was even more lonely now. Nearly all the civilian
population had been evacuated after a heavy air-raid which again
Mussolini, with an increasingly paranoiac insistence on betrayal
and deceit, found 4mysterious ', for the enemy had 4an exact know
ledge of the targets \ The only people remaining were sailors, a few
fishermen and a force of carabinieri now increased to more than a
hundred men.
The bleakness of the place had an immediate effect on Musso
lini's spirits. He went out on to the terrace of the house from which
he could see, through the depressing mist of the early afternoon,
the hulks of the big ships sunk in the harbour and beyond the
harbour the dark shapes of the Gallura mountains. He found the
atmosphere 4menacing and hostile \ He came back into the house
and Maugeri noticed how gloomy his face was. Barely nodding the
Admiral farewell, he went into his room and shut the door.
Mussolini remained on the island for three weeks. It was a miser
able time. The days at Ponza, he had complained, were long and
lonely; here they seemed even longer, and 4the solitude still more
rigorous \ That August was particularly hot; the sea was calm and
there was no wind. ‘Everything*, Mussolini afterwards wrote,
4seemed to be nailed down under the sun/ He showed no desire to
leave the cool of the villa, only occasionally going for a short walk
in the pine-wood with a carabinieri sergeant. Once again he was
completely cut off from the outside world, receiving nothing but
Hitler's present of the twenty-four volumes of Nietzsche's works,
which he began carefully to read from the beginning, finding the
early poems 4very beautiful '. He also began to write a diary, filling
it with 4daily notes of a philosophical, political and literary charac
ter'; but no one saw it except himself, and it was never afterwards
*13
MUSSOLINI
found.3 Most of the time he spent looking gloomily out to sea from
the shade of the terrace.
One day General Polito came to the island, and Mussolini asked
him what had become of Badoglio’s promise to let him go to Rocca
delle Caminate. It had been decided that it was too dangerous,
Polito said; the Prefect of Forlì did not think he could guarantee
his safety there.
*Nonsense/ Mussolini said crossly.
1It isn’t nonsense/ Polito said. ‘ The Fascists seemed to have dis
appeared. There are signs of the reaction against them and against
you everywhere. The offices of 11 Popolo d’Italia have been attacked
in Milan. I myself saw a bust of you on the floor of a public lavatory
in Ancona/
‘ W hat about the war? ’
‘ Everyone is longing for it to be over. It's just as much a burden
now for the civilian population as it is for those who are fighting—
particularly for the old people, the women and the children. This is
why there is so strong a feeling against you/
But although the Italians were indeed longing for the war to be
over, Badoglio felt obliged to move towards an armistice with ex
treme caution. His policy was not a successful one. He had said,
and continued to insist, that the new Government would remain
faithful to Italy’s allies. The Germans, however, openly doubting his
word, were still pouring troops across the Brenner, while the Allies,
antagonized by his declared object of continuing the fight, hardened
their determination to batter Italy into defeat. On 6 August at the
frontier station of Tarvisio, Ambrosio and the new Foreign Minister
Raffaele Guariglia met Ribbentrop and Keitel and registered a for
mal protest against what was now in effect a military occupation of
their country. ‘ We have a right/ Ambrosio told Keitel, *to be given
advance information about German troop movements/ It was no
more than a formal objection. The delegates on both sides knew
that the Axis had already collapsed. Kesselring was one of those
few Germans—perhaps indeed the only one—who still believed that
3Pensieri di Maddalena e di Ponza published in translation in the Salzburger
Nachrichten may perhaps have been this diary. A notebook containing the Pen
sieri was given to the Salzburger Nachrichten, so this paper says, by an SS officer
a few days before the surrender. Colonel Skorzeny tells me that when Mussolini
invited him to visit him in the summer of 1944, he asked him to bring back with
him from Germany a diary which had been impounded by the Germans after the
rescue from the Gran Sasso. Skorzeny persuaded the Auswärtige A m t to let him
take back the diary after photostat copies had been made. He believes that one
of these copies may have been extracted from the files and sold to the Salzburger
Nachrichten.
214
THE PRISONER
Badoglio would keep his word. At this meeting Ribbentrop, sur

rounded by an intimidating SS guard, made no secret of his own
distrust and asked Guariglia how long the new Government had
been negotiating with the Allies for a separate peace. Guariglia,
shrewd and wily, looked back at Ribbentrop with an air of injured
innocence and said in his strong Neapolitan accent, ‘But we are
your loyal allies! ’
Less than a week later General Castellano was on his way to
Lisbon to inform the British Ambassador there that the Italian
Government was ready to surrender. For days the atmosphere in
Rome had been electric. Diplomats watched each other warily, and
at Palazzo Chigi the confusion was appalling as officials and mes
sengers rushed from one office to another trying to learn what was
happening. ‘Telegrams kept pouring in from our embassies/ Alfieri
said, ‘urgently requesting instructions. In all the offices the tele
phones rang incessantly/ And over all there hung the fear of a
sudden and savage German reaction, perhaps even a declaration of
war. General Castellano heard officials repeatedly tell each other
that there would soon be a ‘ new night of San Bartolomeo \
After three weeks of furtive negotiations, on 3 September, in an
army tent at Cassibile near Syracuse in Sicily, the surrender was
signed. On that same day Badoglio assured the German Ambassa
dor in Rome that Italy would fight alongside her ‘ ally Germany to
the en d ’; and it was not until eight o'clock on the evening of 8
September, when the Allies had landed on the mainland at Salerno,
that the armistice was revealed to the Germans and to the world.
Of the negotiations which ended the Pact of Steel Mussolini, of
course, knew nothing. Looking out across the sea, so flat and motion
less that it reminded him of an Alpine lake, he waited gloomily for
news throughout the hot August days. He was sitting on the terrace
of the Villa Weber as usual on the evening of 26 August when a
German aircraft flew so low over the house that he could see the
pilot's face. The next day a carabinieri officer came to warn him
that he would be taken off the island the following morning. General
Basso, the military commander in Sardinia, had advised that Mad
dalena could no longer be considered a safe confino for the ‘ high-
ranking personage' held there. German submarines often passed
very close to the island, and an attempted rescue was believed to be
imminent.
In the early hours of 28 August Mussolini was taken from the
Villa Weber down to the harbour where a Red Cross seaplane had
been moored for some time. Accompanied by Lieutenant Faiola
215
MUSSOLINI
and Sergeant-Major Antichi, he stepped aboard, and after an hour

and a half's flight the seaplane landed on the waters of Lake Brac
ciano. At Vigna di Valle he was met by a police inspector named
Gueli, who, since Polito had been injured in a car crash, had been
appointed his senior jailer, and by a carabinieri major. He was
transferred to an ambulance, which then drove away fast in the
direction of Rome.
6
ON THE GRAN SASSO
28 A U G U S T 1943- 12 S E P T E M B E R 1943
Ah! The highest prison in the world.
O N reaching the Rome by-pass the ambulance turned left towards

Via Flaminia, and crossing the iron bridge over the Tiber it made
for the Sabine road. At Rieti the road turns sharp right across the
valley which divides the Sabine mountains from the Abruzzi, and
Mussolini realized with relief as the ambulance climbed up the
Aquila road towards the Gran Sasso d'Italia that he was being taken
to a part of Italy that he loved.
The rugged profile of the mountain rising to over 10,000 feet in

the heart of Italy cannot easily be forgotten [he wrote in his Storia di
un anno]. There is an indefinable aura about the people and the
atmosphere of the Abruzzi which captures one's heart. . . . At the
beginning of September many flocks of sheep which had come up
from the campagna in the spring and had been pasturing on the
plateau were now slowly drifting away and preparing to go back.
Sometimes the shepherds appeared on horseback and then vanished
along the ridge of the mountain, standing out against the skyline
like figures from another age.
Fifteen miles beyond Aquila the winding road up the Gran Sasso
ends at the terminus of a funicular, which goes up a further 3,000
feet to the plateau known as the Campo Imperatore. This plateau,
6,500 feet above the sea, stretches for ten miles beneath the tower
ing Monte Corno, the highest peak in the Apennines. It was to an
isolated hotel on this high plateau that Mussolini was being
taken.
For several days it had been known that ‘ an important person
age’ was soon to visit this hotel, the Albergo-Rifugio, and the
arrival there on 28 August of Private Francesco Grevetto, who was
known to have been in the service of the Duce before his arrest,
left little room for doubt who that visitor was to be. As the hotel
217
MUSSOLINI
was still full, the Villetta inn at the bottom of the funicular was pre
pared for Mussolini’s reception until the Albergo-Rifugio had been
cleared of its guests.
Flavia Iurato, the manageress of the hotel, who had come down
the funicular to supervise the preparations for Mussolini’s reception
at La Villetta was in the village square when the Red Cross ambu
lance drew up. ‘From it emerged a heavily built man,* she said
afterwards. ‘ He was wearing a dark suit, overcoat and black hat—
Mussolini. There was no longer anything of the well-fed, self-
assured dictator about him. Indeed he looked anxiously about him
as if he feared some trap, rolling his eyes which stood out from his
emaciated face.’
There had been an air-raid warning on the drive up from Citta
ducale. ‘Groups of soldiers in their shirt sleeves fled shouting in
all directions,’ Mussolini himself wrote later with undisguised con
tempt. ‘And the civilians followed their example. So did the
officers.’ But some of the officers noticed that Mussolini himself was
as anxious to reach the safety of the ditch as any of them.
His lonely days on Ponza and Maddalena and his declining
health had sapped the vigour of his spirit as well as of his body.
To those who saw him now he seemed not only a sick man but a
defeated one. His physical courage had never been doubted before,
and was not to be doubted again, but for the moment he seemed
almost timid.
In his second-floor room at La Villetta Mussolini sat listlessly gaz
ing upwards at the mountains. He was allowed for the first time
to listen to the wireless, but the privilege seemed a not particularly
welcome one. So depressed, indeed, did he appear to his warders,
Faiola and Gueli, that after each meal they quickly removed the
knives and even the forks from the table as they feared he might
try to use them on himself.
At the beginning of September he was taken to the funicular
station for the last stage of his journey. He did not want to go, but
his protest was no more than mild.
‘ Is this funicular safe? ’ he asked the station-master nervously.
And then added quickly, correcting himself with a touch of his
former pride, ‘Not for my sake, you understand, because my life
is over. But for those who accompany me.’
He comforted himself with the thought that it was built, like the
Albergo-Rifugio itself, ‘ during the twenty years of Fascism ’.
How high up was the hotel? he asked: 2,112 metres, someone
told him.
218
ON THE GRAN SASSO
His comment was predictable and somehow touching in the guile

less simplicity of its childlike pride: ‘Ah! The highest prison in
the world.’
Seen from the top of the funicular railway, the Albergo-Rifugio

certainly gives the impression of a prison. Its plain curved walls
and small windows are uncompromisingly functional. But Musso
lini seemed pleased with its appearance, Gueli thought, as though
considering its bleak bareness a worthy setting for the tragedy of
exile. Once inside, however, his pleasure was dispelled. He was
shown into a suite on the first floor which was lavishly furnished
and included a room for his servant, Grevetto. Immediately he
knelt down on the floor of the sitting-room and rolled up the carpets.
‘ If I am a prisoner,’ he said to a group of carabinieri and some
members of the hotel staff who seemed disposed to treat him with
a deference ill-suited to the role in which he had cast himself, ‘ if
I am a prisoner, treat me as such. If I am not, I would like to go
to Rocca delle Caminate.’
He was, in fact, treated more like a guest than a prisoner. His
day, the manageress of the hotel said, ‘ became that of any peaceful
citizen on holiday. . . . At his own request he took his meals in
his own rooms—in the sitting-room, to be exact. He was on a strict
diet due to his illness, that is, almost entirely plain rice, eggs, boiled
onions, very little meat, some milk and a lot of fruit. Indeed he
really did a grape cure, because he ate about seven pounds of them
each day.’ Every afternoon he went for a walk with Sergeant-
Major Antichi and every afternoon, when he returned, Gueli went
up to the sitting-room to talk to him. Those conversations with a
man ‘ of such brains ’, Gueli said, were ‘ the best hours of my life ’.
He had dinner at seven o'clock and then went down to the hotel
dining-room to play scopone with Antichi, Gueli and Faiola.
Before going back to his suite he was allowed to listen to the wire
less. He heard not only Italian news broadcasts but German and
English ones as well, and whenever his name was mentioned, some
times with praise, more often with abuse, the others looked at him
to see what his reaction might be, but behind his expression of
hard impassivity it was impossible to detect either pleasure or pain.
He listened without apparent emotion to the news of what he
now called the ‘sham w ar’, which daily grew more serious and
219
MUSSOLINI
tragic. He heard of the increasingly violent air-raids on Italian

cities and the appalling numbers of casualties; of the armies falling
back; of the rapid conquest of Sicily and the reports of hundreds
of thousands of homeless and almost starving refugees; of the
destruction of crops and the shortage of wheat and the sudden
stoppage of coal shipments from Germany; of the bewildered
Italian armies in Croatia, Greece and France giving up their arms
without protest to the Germans; of the capitulation and the armi
stice; of the increased flow of German troops from the north and
the precipitate flight of the King and Badoglio’s Government from
Rome to Pescara and then to Brindisi. And he listened to all these
things with the same expression of cold, dispassionate inappetence.
It was as if the whole course of history had already been decided,
or that without his hand to guide them contemporary events had
for him no interest or meaning.
‘W hat judgment will history pass on me? ' he asked Gueli one
day; and it was for him the one important question. For the rest
he appeared to care nothing. This impassive dissociation had
become almost habitual. He displayed no interest in the increas
ingly elaborate security measures on the Campo Imperatore, in the
armed guards now placed at his door, the machine-guns on the
terrace. ‘ He showed neither sorrow nor humiliation/ the manager
ess noticed, ‘only sometimes when he saw he was being watched
he composed his face in a studiedly thoughtful expression. . . .
He did not spend his time in either reading or writing. . . . He
was often to be seen at the window, looking at the majestic Gran
Sasso with field-glasses or sitting on the low wall by the courtyard,
gazing abstractedly into the distance like the traditional oleograph
of Napoleon on St Helena/
Sometimes he would go out of his way to be kind or gracious, but
there was always something consciously paternal in his manner, a
compelling necessity to compare the misfortunes of others with his
own. When, for instance, the chambermaid, Lisa Miscordi, who
did his washing for him complained of a painful ankle, he imme
diately went to look for ointment and bandages.
‘ Be brave, my child/ he told her soothingly. ‘ Remember that I
have been in pain for eighteen years/
On another occasion he heard one of the carabinieri guards
arguing with a shepherd who had come to the hotel to buy a bottle
of wine. No civilians were allowed into the hotel, the carabiniere
said, but the shepherd refused to be turned away. Mussolini told
the guard to let the shepherd in and he took him to a table, where
220
ON THE GRAN SASSO
he sat down, not in the least concerned to find himself in the

unexpected company of his former Duce.
W hat improvements, Mussolini asked him, had Fascism brought
about in the sheep-farming industry?
The shepherd could not think of any, and said so. And then,
leaning forward across the table to put a roughly confidential hand
on Mussolini’s shoulder and addressing him with the familiar tu,
he added, ‘ You were wrong. You taxed us too heavily; and you let
them steal too much for the wool and cheese State Pools.’
Changing the subject, Mussolini asked him about the war. W hat
did he think of that, now it had ended so badly?
‘ Too many thieves about,’ the shepherd said with the conscious
knowledgability of his kind. ‘The bread had to fatten too many
people before it got to the soldiers’ mouths.’
At length when he had finished his wine he got to his feet, patted
Mussolini on the shoulder and then shook him by the hand.
‘ Take care of yourself, Mussolini,’ he said with easy familiarity.
‘And thanks for the wine.’
Instead of angering him, as the onlookers feared, the strange
interview put Mussolini in a cheerful mood. After supper that
evening when he came down for the usual game of cards he asked
enthusiastically when the first snow would fall. Sometimes there
was snow up there at the beginning of October, he was told. ‘ Let’s
hope it snows soon,’ he said, looking pleased. ‘ I should love to put
on skis again.’
The mood was only momentary. An hour or so later the full
terms of the armistice which Badoglio had signed with the Allies
were announced on the wireless. It was a Berlin transmission repeat
ing a news item which had been broadcast by Algiefs Radio.
‘It is officially announced,’ Mussolini heard, ‘that one of the
conditions of the armistice is that Mussolini shall be handed over
to the Allies.’
At three o’clock the following morning Private Grevetto handed
Lieutenant Faiola a letter which Mussolini had asked him to
deliver.
In the few days that you have been with me [Faiola read], I have
realized that you are a true friend. You are a soldier, and know better
than I what it means to fall into the hands of the enemy. I learned
from the Berlin radio that one of the armistice terms speaks of hand
ing me over alive to the English. I shall never submit to such a
humiliation, and I ask you to let me have your revolver.
221
MUSSOLINI
Faiola jumped out of bed and rushed to Mussolini's room, where

he found his prisoner sitting on the bed, ‘awkwardly waving
a Gillette razor-blade, as if he were trying to slit the veins of his
wrist \
According to Mussolini's own account, Faiola, ‘after removing
any remaining metal or other sharp objects ' from the room, includ
ing all the razor-blades, repeated what he had promised previously :
‘I was taken prisoner at Tobruk, where I was badly wounded. I
witnessed the British cruelty to Italians and I shall never hand an
Italian over to the English.' Then he burst into tears. But it was
not only, as he later confessed, the fear that he would be ordered
to hand Mussolini over to the English that distressed Faiola. A
more urgent fear was that the Germans would make it impossible
for him to do so; for in that event, so he said, his instructions were
categoric. ‘The Germans', he had been ordered, ‘must not take
Mussolini alive.'
222
7
THE RESCUE FROM GRAN SASSO
i2 S E P T E M B E R 1943
I knew that my friend Adolf Hitler would not desert me.
O N the afternoon of 26 July Otto Skorzeny, a young captain in the

Friedenthal Special Formation of the Waffen SS, was sitting in the
Hotel Eden in Berlin drinking coffee with an old friend from
Vienna. Without understanding why, he was conscious of a vague
feeling of apprehension.
He decided to telephone his office, and was immediately glad that
he had done so. His secretary had been trying to find him for two
hours; he was urgently wanted at the Führers Headquarters; a
plane would be waiting for him at five o’clock at the Tempelhof
airfield.
4Radi must go to my room at once/ Skorzeny said, ‘ pack a uni
form and linen and go straight to the airfield/
Obersturmführer Karl Radi, his second-in-command, was waiting
there when Skorzeny arrived. What was it all about? Skorzeny
asked him. But Radi had no idea either.
As they walked on to the tarmac a Junkers 52 came down the run
way, and a few minutes later Skorzeny was flying over Berlin with
a glass of brandy in his hand. Three hours later the Junkers came
in to land on an airfield at the edge of a lake near Lotzen in East
Prussia. A Mercedes was waiting for him, and he was driven
through the forest in the gathering darkness. The car slowed down
at a barrier, and Skorzeny’s papers were inspected. The barrier was
raised, and the car drove on through a birch-wood to another
barrier, where his papers were inspected again. Once more the car
moved on and entered now an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire
where sheds and huts covered with grass and camouflage nets stood
in muddled confusion at the side of the winding tracks.
Skorzeny was taken to a wooden building and shown into an ante
room, comfortably furnished with a Boucle carpet on the floor.
There were five other officers in the room, and a Waffen SS captain
223
MUSSOLINI
introduced him to each of them in turn. He was nervous and did

not listen to the names, and when the captain had gone he lit a
cigarette. After a few moments the captain came back again and
said, 4I'll take you to the Führer, gentlemen. You’ll be introduced
and must tell him of your military careers. He may have some
questions to ask you. Please come this way.’
Skorzeny put his cigarette out and began to tremble as he fol
lowed the others through another and larger ante-room into a room
where there was a massive table covered with maps. In his excite
ment his eyes picked out details which seemed curiously vivid : a
picture by Dürer in a silver frame, bright curtains at the windows,
a row of coloured pencils lying exactly parallel on a writing-table.
A door opened, and the Führer came in. The officers clicked their
heels. The Führer gave the Nazi salute and came slowly towards
them. He was wearing a white shirt and black tie and the Iron Cross
First Class on the field-grey coat of his uniform. The officers were
introduced to him in turn. He asked each a question and then
moved on to the next. Having spoken to Skorzeny, who, as the
junior of the five, was on the left of the line, he stepped back and
said suddenly, ‘Which of you knows Italy? ’
Skorzeny was the only one to reply. He had been to Naples twice,
he said.
‘ W hat do you think of Italy? ’
The officers hesitated before making the conventional replies
which such a question was likely to evoke. In the mumble of un
certain voices talking about the Axis and Fascism, Skorzeny’s voice
sounded sharp and definite.
‘ I am Austrian, my Führer,’ he said dramatically.
Hitler looked at him as the other voices fell into silence.
‘ The other gentlemen may go,’ he announced at length. 41 want
you to stay, Captain Skorzeny.’
When they were alone the Führer began to talk with that grow
ing animation rising to excitement which the sound of his own
voice always aroused in him.
‘ I have a very important task for you,’ he began. ‘ Mussolini, my
friend and our loyal comrade-in-arms, was betrayed yesterday by
his King and arrested by his own countrymen. I cannot and will not
fail Italy’s greatest son in his hour of need. To me the Duce is the
incarnation of the ancient grandeur of Rome. Italy under the new
Government will desert us. I will keep faith with my old ally and
dear friend. He must be rescued promptly.’
There seemed so real a warmth and so sincere a sympathy in
224
Accepting a presentation from Count Grandi during the seventeenth
anniversary celebrations of the March on Rome
With Bruno and Vittorio before the war

With Ciano, Halifax and Chamberlain in Rome in 1939
With Hitler and Ciano at the Brenner in October 1940

Hitler’s tone, Skorzeny said afterwards, that he was both discon

certed and moved. And when the Führer began to give him his
instructions, he found his words and manner so convincing that he
did not doubt for a moment that he would succeed in his mission.
*I fully understand, my Führer,’ he said, as intense and emotional
as Hider himself. 41 will do my best.*
Not once during the interview had Hitler’s eyes moved from his
face. As he left the room he turned at the door to salute, and Hitler
was still watching him. He felt dizzy and for a long time afterwards
he had difficulty in collecting his thoughts.
He had not recovered from the effect of Hitler’s hypnotic presence
when he was called into another room to discuss the details of his
assignment with General Student and Reichsführer Himmler.
Himmler was irritable and on edge. He was sure that the defection
of the Badoglio Government was only a matter of time. Italian
representatives were already in Portugal attempting to negotiate a
separate peace. He quickly recited a list of Italians, giving his views
on their reliability. When Skorzeny took out his pen to make a note
of the names, most of which he had never heard before, Himmler
turned on him furiously. ‘You must be mad to put anything on
paper! ’ he shouted. ‘This is top secret. You must remember the
names.’ Not even Field-Marshal Kesselring, the Commander-in-
Chief in Italy, nor the German Ambassador knew anything of the
Führer’s plan.
Later Himmler again rounded on him angrily when he saw him
smoking. ‘These eternal weeds! ’ he said, glaring at Skorzeny
through the thick lenses of his rimless spectacles. ‘Can’t you
do anything without a cigarette in your mouth? I can see you’re
not at all the sort of man we need for this job.’
General Student was more friendly. When Himmler had gone
they made their plans. Skorzeny would fly to Rome as Student’s
aide-de-camp at eight o’clock the next morning. At the same time
fifty men of Skorzeny’s unit were to fly from Berlin to the South
of France and then on to Rome to join the ist Parachute Division
which was also to be sent to Italy.
It was already nearly midnight. The next few hours Skorzeny
spent preparing lists of equipment, explosives, and weapons, wireless
equipment, medical supplies and civilian disguises—even priests’
cassocks and black hair dye; choosing the officers who were to go
with him; making telephone calls to Berlin; writing messages for
the teletypist. Then he tried to sleep, but he could not. At six o’clock
he got up and made his will.
225
MUSSOLINI
That evening in the uniform of an officer of the Parachute Corps

he was dining at Field-Marshal Kesselring’s villa as Frascati. The
conversation was mainly concerned with the arrest of the Duce. An
officer said that he had asked an important Italian officer if he knew
where the Duce was, but the Italian had replied that he did not
know and that none of the other generals knew either.
‘ I should doubt whether that can be true/ Skorzeny said, hoping
that one of the other officers might be provoked into betraying a
confidence.
' I believe it absolutely/ Kesselring said quickly, annoyed by the
imputation to the honour of professional officers who were his col
leagues and allies. ‘ I have no reason to doubt the word of honour
of an Italian officer, and it would be as well for you to feel the same,
Captain/
Kesselring himself had asked Crown Prince Umberto where the
Duce was, he said. Umberto had replied that he had no idea. Mus
solini had vanished.
There were rumours, of course, Skorzeny soon discovered. It was
widely believed that the Duce had had a stroke and was closely
guarded in a sanatorium in the north. He was also reported to have
committed suicide and to have escaped to fight with the Blackshirt
brigade at the front. It was even said that he had been flown to
Spain. Each rumour contradicted the last, and for days Skorzeny
remained in ignorance of the truth and began to doubt that he
would ever find it. In Berlin astrologers were consulted, and in
Rome agents of A m t VI of the Security Service were told to do
their utmost to find the Duce. There was a brief hope when the
Police Attaché at the German Embassy was told by an officer of
the carabinieri that Mussolini had been taken from the Villa
Savoia in an ambulance and that on 25 July, at least, he was in a
carabinieri barracks. But it was now well on into August and,
so far as Skorzeny could discover, Mussolini was no longer
there.
And then at last in a restaurant in Rome, Skorzeny received by
chance his first real clue. A fellow-customer of the restaurant, who
paid frequent business trips to Terracina on the Gulf of Gaeta, told
him an interesting story. The maid of a man he knew at Terracina
had a lover in the carabinieri who was stationed on the island of
Ponza. The carabiniere who did not get much time off to visit the
mainland, wrote often to his mistress. In one of his letters he had
mentioned the presence of ‘a very important prisoner’ on the
island.
226
It was later confirmed by an Italian naval officer that the prisoner

was, in fact, Mussolini. But by this time the Duce had already been
moved. A few days later, though, Skorzeny had discovered where
the new hiding-place was. A German liaison officer with the Italian
Navy in Sardinia had reported the presence of a mysterious
prisoner on the island of Maddalena. Skorzeny decided to go there
immediately, taking with him one of his officers, Lieutenant
Warger, whose Italian was fluent. Warger was ordered to frequent
the dockside taverns in the guise of a heavy-drinking German
sailor. As soon as he heard Mussolini’s name mentioned he was to
say the Duce was dead. If he were to be contradicted, he must bet on
it.
One evening a market-gardener, who had mentioned Mussolini’s
name, accepted the bet and to prove that he had won it he took
Warger to a house adjoining the Villa Weber and pointed with
satisfaction to the huddled figure of a man sitting alone on the
terrace. It was not, however, until Skorzeny had paid a second visit
to the Führer’s headquarters that the German Command was per
suaded that the man Warger had seen was, in fact, Mussolini.
Admiral Canaris had reported that the Duce was held prisoner on
a small island near Elba and orders had already arrived for a para
chute attack on the island when Skorzeny convinced Hitler that
the prisoner was held a hundred miles farther to the south.
*I believe you, Captain Skorzeny,’ Hitler said, abruptly standing
up to shake his hand when he had finished speaking. ‘ You’re right.
I withdraw my order for the parachute attack. Have you a plan
for a similar operation on Maddalena? If you have, tell us about
it.’
Skorzeny propounded a plan, which was immediately accepted.
‘You will succeed, Skorzeny,’ Hitler said dismissively, and once
more Skorzeny felt the power of the Führer’s hypnotic confidence.
In less than a week the whole operation—involving the use of a
flotilla of E-boats, several R- and M-boats, a company of volunteers
from the SS Brigade in Corsica as well as Skorzeny’s own unit—had
been planned in its every detail. The attack was to be made at day
break on 27 August. On the morning of the day before, while the
German troops were actually embarking, Mussolini was flown back
to the mainland, and once again the search for him began. This
time, however, they had less difficulty in tracking him to his next
hiding-place. The Red Cross seaplane was seen landing on the Lago
di Bracciano, and a few days later Skorzeny was handed an inter
cepted code message intended for the Ministry of the Interior which
227
MUSSOLINI
read, ‘ Security measures around Gran Sasso completed \ The mes

sage was signed 1Gueli \
The preparations for his rescue began once more. Aerial photo
graphs were taken, and to ensure that an Intelligence report that
he had received about the hotel on the Gran Sasso was correct
Skorzeny arranged for a German staff surgeon to inspect it, osten
sibly to inquire about its suitability for a hospital for malarial cases.
The surgeon, not knowing the real purpose behind his visit, reached
Aquila without difficulty, but in the valley below the Albergo-
Rifugio he found the road closed and the station of the cable rail
way guarded by a detachment of carabinieri. He persuaded them to
let him telephone the hotel, where an officer told him that the
Campo Imperatore was now a military training area and closed to
all visitors and that the hotel itself had been cleared of its guests
and prepared for the reception of two hundred soldiers.
The surgeon noticed a wireless truck in the valley and a good
deal of activity on the cable railway. Some Italians he spoke to later
said they thought the reason for the activity might be that Musso
lini was being held prisoner at the hotel. That, of course, was only
a rumour, the surgeon insisted, and he did not suppose that it was
at all likely to be correct.
If he did not make haste with his plans, Skorzeny thought, the
surgeon’s supposition might well soon prove true. There was now
not only the danger that the Duce might be moved again, but also,
since the recent announcement of the armistice, the further danger
that he might be handed over to the Allies and thus lost to the
Germans for ever.
Skorzeny had three alternatives : a ground attack, a landing by
parachute, or a landing by glider. A ground attack was ruled out
because of the number of troops that would be needed. The idea
of a parachute assault was also discarded because of the danger of
dropping through thin air at such high altitudes and the difficulty
of getting the parachutists to land on the plateau in a compact and
manoeuvrable mass. A landing by glider, therefore, seemed the
only workable solution. This too was dangerous because the single
possible landing-ground was a small triangular field just behind the
hotel. Indeed, the Chief-of-Staff of the Parachute Corps and his
senior staff officer both thought that a landing on so small and
unprepared a space would result in the loss of well over three-
quarters of the force and that the few who survived would not be
enough to complete the operation. When asked to suggest an alter
native plan, however, they could not; and ultimately they were
228
obliged to agree that gliders would have to be used. General

Student decided that twelve gliders should be brought from the
South of France to Rome and while Skorzeny’s force landed in
these, the lower station of the funicular should simultaneously be
seized by a battalion of parachutists. The operation was to be
carried out at dawn on 6 September.
While discussing the details of the operation with Skorzeny, his
second-in-command, Karl Radi, made a suggestion which he hoped
would increase the effect of surprise, an essential prerequisite to the
success of the plan. He proposed that they take with them an
Italian officer, whose presence would mislead the carabinieri and
help to prevent them carrying out any orders they might have
received to kill Mussolini rather than let him fall into German
hands. The officer chosen was General Soleti. He was told by
General Student that Hitler had personally requested that he should
take part in the operation in order to prevent unnecessary blood
shed. General Soleti immediately accepted the invitation, which
Skorzeny thought had greatly flattered him.
Owing to a delay in the arrival of the gliders the date fixed for
the operation had to be postponed. It was eventually fixed for two
o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 12 September. At one o’clock
that day the gliders of Skorzeny’s force were circling above the
Pratica di Mare airfield, slowly gaining height. The weather was
perfect. Banks of white cloud hung steadily in the air at about ten
thousand feet, and when the gliders rose above them they came into
brilliant sunshine. Inside the gliders it was insufferably hot. Behind
Skorzeny a corporal was being sick; next to him, crouching on the
narrow board that ran through the centre of the fragile canvas-
covered skeleton of the craft, General Soleti looked anxious and ill.
A few minutes before two o’clock Skorzeny, looking through a hole
he had cut in the canvas of the glider, saw beyond the edge of a
cloud below him the roof of the hotel.
‘ Helmets on I ’ he shouted, and then, ‘ Slip the tow ropes ! ’
The gliders fell towards the earth in a sudden silence. Both the
pilot and Skorzeny could see the triangular space behind the
Albergo-Rifugio, but as they dropped down towards it they saw that
it was not the flat ground that they had supposed but a very steep
hillside. A landing there was impossible. They would have to crash-
land on the rough ground in front of the hotel.
22g
MUSSOLINI
Hearing the roar of the aircraft Mussolini, sitting with his arms
folded by the open window of his sitting-room, looked up into the
cloud-filled sky and saw the gliders swooping down on to the rock
immediately in front of the hotel. As the nearest glider came to
ground with a crash of tearing canvas and splintering wood, he saw
several men fall out of the wrecked fusilage, pick themselves up and
run towards him. At first, although they were less than thirty yards
from the hotel door, he could not see who they were; but then he
saw that one of them was an Italian officer, who was shouting at the
top of his voice to the stupefied carabinieri, 1Don’t shoot ! Don’t
shoot! ’
‘ Don’t fire ! ’ Mussolini himself shouted through the open win
dow. ‘There’s an Italian general there. Everything’s all right! ’
‘Excellency! Excellency! ’ Lieutenant Faiola called out breath
lessly as he ran up the stairs to Mussolini’s room. ‘ Excellency ! The
Germans ! ’
He burst into the room, and at the sight of his prisoner leaning
out of the open window he screamed, close to hysteria, ‘ Shut the
window and don’t move.’
Below them Skorzeny had dashed across the rough ground in
front of the hotel and through the first open door he had seen.
Kicking the chair from beneath a wireless operator, he smashed the
set and looked around for a way out of the room into the hotel.
But there was none. He ran outside again and raced along the side
of the building until he came to a terrace about nine feet above the
ground. Jumping on to the back of one of his men he leapt to the
top of the terrace and looked anxiously upwards at the curved wall
of the building with its rows of small square windows. At one of
these on the first floor he saw the face of Mussolini gazing down
towards him.
‘Get away from the window,’ he shouted and ran on into the
entrance hall of the hotel. ‘ Here,’ one of the staff said later, ‘ all was
confusion. No one thought of giving orders.’ The place was filled
with carabinieri, who had left their machine-gun posts at the first
sight of the German commandos and rushed for shelter, many of
them dropping their rifles and grenades on the way. With unneces
sary shouts of ‘ Mani in alto!9Skorzeny’s men pushed their way into
the building while Skorzeny himself beat a path through the cara
binieri with the butt end of his machine-pistol to reach the staircase,
230
which he rail up three steps at a time. At the top he turned left

along a corridor and threw open the door of the room he hoped was
the one he wanted.
Facing him, in the middle of the room, stood Mussolini. With
him was Lieutenant Faiola and another Italian officer, who were
both taken out into the corridor by a young Untersturmführer.
Below the windows outside, the other gliders had now crashed on
to the rock and more SS men were streaming across the rocks
towards the hotel. So far not a shot had been fired.
Skorzeny put his head out into the corridor and shouted for the
officer in command of the hotel. An Italian colonel appeared and
was summoned to surrender. He asked for time to consider the
summons, and Skorzeny gave him a minute. In less time than that
he returned with a goblet of red wine. Bowing politely he held it
out towards Skorzeny and said solemnly, ‘To the victor/
In the somewhat formal atmosphere that had now been created
Skorzeny turned round to introduce himself to Mussolini.
‘Duce! ’ he announced, standing stiffly to attention. ‘The Führer
has sent me! You are free! * He was sweating heavily, Mussolini
noticed, and ‘ seemed deeply moved \
The Duce put out his arms and for a moment held Skorzeny to
his breast.
‘ I knew/ he said, ‘ that my friend Adolf Hitler would not desert
m e/
He spoke in a clear voice, but Skorzeny was shocked by his
appearance. He wore a shabby, badly fitting suit and looked very
ill. He was unshaven and seemed to have aged many years since
Skorzeny had last seen him, standing proudly on the balcony of
Palazzo Venezia. Looking down now on the stubbly hairs of his
head, the Austrian was reminded of its former smooth and massive
grandeur. Only his large, dark eyes seemed to be those of a man of
power and influence. General Spoleti said afterwards that he looked
haggard and that his only wish seemed to be to return home to
Rocca delle Caminate.
Skorzeny’s immediate problem, however, was to get him away at
all. It had been arranged that he should leave in a Heinkel from
Aquila airfield, which was to be captured by paratroopers; but the
wireless operator could not make contact with the Luftwaffe to call
the Heinkel up from Rome. An alternative plan had been to use
a lighter aircraft, which could land and take off in the valley. This
aircraft had managed to land, but in doing so had damaged its
landing gear so badly that it was no longer serviceable. Finally, if
231
MUSSOLINI
all else failed, it had been planned to land a Fieseler-Storch spotter

plane on the plateau. Captain Gerlach, General Student’s highly
skilful personal pilot, had managed to bring the Storch down. He
was frankly doubtful, however, that he would be able to get it up
again.
As yet unaware of Gerlach’s apprehension, Mussolini came out
into the open air wearing a pair of heavy ski-boots. As always in
the presence of Germans, he looked sternly resolute. Domenico
Antonelli, who had taken over as manager of the hotel the day
before, thought that he had already reassumed the manners of a
dictator. 4He moved with more determination, he spoke with con
fidence, he thrust out his jaw/
He asked Gueli and Faiola to go with him. At first they both
agreed, but when the time for departure came Faiola hesitantly
asked if he might have a word with the Duce.
‘ Go on then/ Mussolini said impatiently. 4Go on I Go on I ’
4Duce/ said Faiola, with obvious nervousness. 41 have a wife and
child. If you don’t mind I would rather stay here.’
4Very well, then, stay.’
Antonelli noticed how harsh his words were.
Outside the hotel the staff were lined up as servants once were in
country-houses to bid farewell to an honoured guest. Mussolini
shook hands with each one in turn, saying a few words with a dic
tator’s condescension, at once gracious and remote. They had ex
pected this proud and aloof courtesy from the first, but he had not
previously shown it.
4Thank you very much,’ he said finally and distantly to them all.
41 shall never forget you.’
He walked away to the Storch while the German soldiers, and the
carabinieri too, stood stiffly at attention, saluting him in the Fascist
manner, shouting loudly 4Duce! Duce! Duce!9
4The captain who was to pilot me came forward,’ Mussolini said
when describing this dramatic moment. 4A very young man called
Gerlach, an ace. Before getting into the machine I turned to wave
to the group of my guards. They all seemed stunned. Many of them
were sincerely disturbed. Some even had tears in their eyes.’
Gerlach was too worried to appreciate the drama. He had only
managed to land on so short and roughly prepared a strip with the
greatest difficulty, he insisted, and did not think he could possibly
take off with a passenger. When Skorzeny said that he was coming
too, Gerlach was aghast. It was quite impossible, he said. One pas
senger was bad enough, two would be disastrous. If the aircraft ever
232
got into the air it would never stay there. But Skorzeny was in
sistent. ‘ If there was a disaster/ he wrote afterwards, admitting his
concern for his own interest, ‘ all that would be left for me would
be a bullet from my own revolver. Adolf Hitler would never forgive
such an end to our venture. As there was no other way of getting
the Duce safely to Rome it was better to share the danger with him,
even though my presence added to it. If we failed, the same fate
would overtake us all/
Mussolini confessed later that he shared Gerlach’s apprehension,
but he did not mention it. A carabiniere watched him as he stooped
to enter the small aircraft. He looked old and frail in a winter over
coat which was too big for him and a black, wide-brimmed felt hat
pulled down low over his eyes; and the carabiniere felt a sudden pity
for him and an admiration for his courage. Skorzeny noticed that
he hesitated slightly before climbing into the rear seat and respected
him for making no protest.
The Fieseler-Storch’s engine roared to full power as twelve men
tugged hard against its pull and then, as Gerlach dropped his hand,
let go to send it hurtling over the rocky plateau. The aircraft
gathered speed as it approached the end of the cleared strip, but
the wheels did not leave the ground. The edge of the plateau drew
closer and it seemed that the Storch would surely dive down the
declivities of an approaching gully when suddenly it rose from the
ground. A moment later it fell again and one of its wheels hit a
rock, sending the machine toppling to the left and over the edge
and down towards the valley. It fell dizzily through the thin air,
and the wind roared in Mussolini’s ears, as Gerlach tried to pull
the Storch out of its dive and into level flight. ‘ It was a moment of
real terror for m e/ Mussolini admitted to a Swiss journalist the
following year.
The carabinieri and SS men ran forward towards the shelf of the
plateau and watched the machine falling helplessly towards the
dark rocks of the valley. And then, as if from the beginning the
pilot had intended this spectacular take-off, his machine came out
of its dive and flew away to the south-west towards the Avezzano
valley less than a hundred feet above the ground.
For some time no one in the aircraft spoke. Crouched close to
Skorzeny, Mussolini looked not so much afraid as sad and troubled.
As though to reassure him Skorzeny placed his hand on his
shoulder, and when the Duce turned round his face was paler even
than before. But after a few moments he began to speak, pointing
out features of the countryside below, telling Skorzeny what had
*33
MUSSOLINI
happened to him in the towns and villages over which they passed.
On the Pratica di Mare airfield Gerlach’s passengers were trans
ferred to a Heinkel, the engines of which were so loud that Musso
lini could no longer make himself heard. He sat back with his eyes
closed and then appeared to sleep.
It was already dark when the Heinkel came down at Aspern air
field in Vienna, and Mussolini came out of it looking exhausted.
On his arrival at the Hotel Continental, where a suite had been
prepared for him, Hitler telephoned to congratulate him on his
escape; but he was in no mood for conversation. He thanked the
Führer briefly. ‘I am tired/ he said. ‘Very tired. And I need to
rest/
Hitler’s obvious concern for his welfare, however, and his ex
pressions of delighted pleasure had a restorative effect and when
later on Skorzeny took him a pair of pyjamas which had been pro
vided for him by Gruppenführer Quermer, the SS chief in Vienna,
he refused them quite gaily. ‘It’s unhealthy to sleep in night
clothes/ he said with a suggestively prurient smile which Skorzeny
took as indicative of the ‘ Duce’s wide experience of life \ ‘ I never
wear anything at night and I should advise you to do the same/
In the morning Mussolini was obviously refreshed. He had his
beard and scalp shaved, and he received numerous callers. The ex
cited congratulations, the adulatory respect, the infectious enthusi
asm, affected him deeply. He spoke no longer of retirement to Rocca
delle Caminate, but of the future of Fascism and of the necessity
for making it a republican party.
‘ I made one great mistake/ he said, ‘ and have had to pay the
price. I never understood that the Italian Royal House was my
enemy and would remain so. I should have made Italy a republic
after the end of the Abyssinian campaign/ Once again he seemed
to Skorzeny a man of hope and of resolution.
At midday on 13 September he left Vienna for Munich, where
Rachele and the children met him at Reem airport. Rachele was
1shaken by his deathly pallor \ But he walked up to her 1in his
usual sprightly fashion ’ and when she asked him what he intended
to do now he began immediately to talk of his future plans. ‘ I am
determined not to abandon my course of action and to do what may
still be possible to save the Italian people/ he said. He spoke very
fast as if afraid, Rachele thought, that she would interrupt or argue
with him. They left the airfield together and drove to the Karl
Platz, where a suite had been prepared for him. But it was so
luxurious that he refused to sleep in the bedroom and spent the
234
night instead in the more modest room which had been given to
Rachele. He agreed, however, to have a bath. He badly needed it,
Rachele said. 4His socks were sticking to his feet/
The next morning Edda came to see him. The meeting was a
difficult one, for Galeazzo too was in Munich. Helped by the Ger
mans and against the orders of Marshal Badoglio, he had left Rome
with Edda and the children on 23 August. He had tried to obtain
from the Germans a visa to go to Spain or South America, and after
long delays was given one on condition he travelled via Munich.
But the Germans, and in particular Ribbentrop, whose dislike had
turned to hate, did not want him to escape them. Ciano, himself,
seems not to have been aware of the extent of the feeling against
him and he left for Germany without undue apprehension. Filippo
Anfuso, his former Principal Private Secretary, has described how
he warned Ciano not to go to Germany. Ciano broke down and
wept. 4Mussolini is a great m an/ he said. 4A real genius/ The son-
in-law did not doubt that he would be forgiven. But on his arrival
in Munich difficulties were put in the way of his continuing his
journey. Both he and Edda were diligently watched and reported on
by the Gestapo, whose men waited in the corridor outside Musso
lini's room while the interview between the Duce and Countess
Ciano was taking place.
Edda begged her father to see Galeazzo. He had a full explana
tion of his conduct, she said. But, persuaded by Rachele, Musso
lini refused to meet his son-in-law. Later, however, he relented and
said that he would grant Galeazzo a short interview in a few days'
time. Nothing, though, would make his wife change her mind. 41
hate him,' she said with Romagnol passion and implacability. 41
would like to kill him.’
Before the interview between the two men took place, Mussolini
was flown from Munich for a meeting with Hitler at the Fiihrer's
headquarters in East Prussia. The conversation he had with him
there decided Ciano's fate for ever.
235
8
T H E M E E T I N G A T T H E F Ü H R E R ’S
HEADQUARTERS
15 S E P T E M B E R 1943
1 have come for my instructions.
T h E ju 52 came down onto the headquarters airfield in dazzling

sunshine. As Mussolini climbed out, Hitler came towards him with
tears in his eyes. They shook hands, looking at each other silently;
and for a long time they stood together alone holding hands, like
David and Jonathan in the wilderness of Ziph. It was obvious that
Hitler at least was deeply moved.
Immediately afterwards, however, when they met in private the
atmosphere was very different. Mussolini’s ambitions, reawakened
by the compliments and adulation in Vienna and Munich, had
died away again. Hitler found him depressed and listless. The inter
view began, so Mussolini said later, by Hitler ‘recalling him to
realities ’, as the King had done in July.
What, Hitler asked sharply, did the Duce intend to do now?
When Mussolini suggested that it might be best to retire from
public life so as to avoid a civil war in Italy, Hitler said, ‘Non
sense! ’ That was quite out of the question. It would show to the
world that the Duce no longer believed in a German victory. The
Duce must reconsider the question. Without a strong Fascist
Government back in power in northern Italy there was no telling
what might happen to the Italian people. The German armies
would be compelled to govern by merciless martial law, they would
have to fall back to the Po or even to the Alps, leaving the earth
scorched behind them. ‘Only barbaric measures’. Hitler had
already decided, ‘ can now save Italy.’ It had been suggested that a
Fascist Government in Italy should be formed under the leadership
of one of those Italians who had escaped to Germany—Tavolini,
Farinacci, Renato Ricci, Preziosi, or even Vittorio Mussolini—but
these men were not acceptable to the Führer. The Governo
Nazionale Fascista which had been announced on the German wire
less from the forest of Rastenberg on 9 September was no more than
a stop-gap and would come to nothing without the Duce’s leader-
236
MEETING AT THE FÜHRER’s HEADQUARTERS
ship. The Duce, himself, must go back, place the traitors of 25 July
on trial and have them executed. He must allow Germany to occupy
the north-eastern provinces of Italy, Alto Adige, Venezia Giulia
and the Trentino as a safeguard against an attack through Yugo
slavia. The world must be given reaffirmation of the solidarity of
the Axis. Hitler went on talking for about an hour, and Mussolini
felt too tired and weak to resist him. At the end of his speech Hitler
turned to the newly appointed German Ambassador, Rudolf Rahn,
who was present at the interview, and ordered him peremptorily to
assist in the drafting of the new Republic’s Constitution. Musso
lini left the Führer’s room in a daze. Countess Ciano, who saw him
a few days afterwards, described him as a man deprived of his will.
Hitler, in telling Goebbels of his interview, did not disguise his
disappointment in the Mussolini that Skorzeny had brought back
from Italy, saying that he seemed a much smaller man than before.
The main cause of Hitler’s disillusionment, Goebbels thought,
was Mussolini’s apparent lack of determination to hound the
traitors of 25 July to their deaths. ‘Punishment of the Fascist
traitors ’, Goebbels wrote, ‘ is indispensable to any resurgence of Fas
cism ’. But the Duce, ‘ too much bound to his family ’, seemed un
willing to punish anybody. He seemed to blame the King for his
catastrophe more than anyone else, certainly more than Ciano, a
particularly hated figure at the German headquarters. When Musso
lini had made reference to the fact that Ciano was after all his
daughter’s husband, Hitler had snapped, ‘ That makes his
treachery all the graver. I must be very clear. The apparent con-
donement of treachery in Italy would have profound effects else
where.’ This, Germany would not allow. An example of condign
punishment must be given to the world.
Ciano, it was known, had been promised an interview with Musso
lini on his return to Munich. ‘That means this poisonous mush
room is again planted in the midst of the new Fascist Republican
Party,’ Goebbels commented in disgust. ‘ Ciano intends to write his
memoirs. The Führer rightly suspects that such memoirs can only
be written in a manner derogatory to us, for otherwise he could not
dispose of them in the international market. There is, therefore,
no thought of authorizing Ciano to leave the Reich. He will remain
in our custody.’
‘ The Duce,’ Goebbels added in another passage of his diary, ' has
not drawn the conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe which the
Führer expected. He was naturally overjoyed to see the Führer
and to be at liberty again. But the Führer expected the first thing
237
MUSSOLINI
the Duce would do would be to wreak full vengeance on his

betrayers. He gave no such indication, however, which showed his
real limitations. He is not a revolutionary like the Führer or Stalin.
He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad
qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.*
The Führers attitude pleased Goebbels. ' We may consider him
he wrote, 'absolutely disillusioned concerning the Duce*s person
ality, although there was no actual quarrel.* Jealous of the Führer*s
former friendship with Mussolini, he had never been able to like
him himself and had obviously been pleased when those Fascists who
had already fled to Germany spoke to Hitler of his weakness or his
lack of force as an anti-Semite. Goebbels had recognized the Duce*s
fall as a serious blow to German propaganda, but had soon com
forted himself with the thought that he had never accorded him
the Führer*s fulsome admiration. Now he thought that Hitler too
was disenchanted, he sat back in the chair in his office, intoning,
' Duce! Duce! Duce! ’ with malicious pleasure.4In the last analysis,*
he thought, ‘ he is nothing but an Italian, and he can*t get away
from that heritage.*
And it was because he was an Italian, Mussolini said afterwards,
that he accepted Hitler’s terms. Cruel as they were, he believed that
to refuse them would be to condemn Italy to destruction. Already
Kesselring had announced that the whole of Italy behind the Ger
man front line was a war zone subject to martial law and that
various acts calculated to injure the successful prosecution of the
war, including the organization of industrial strikes, were capital
offences. It was, Mussolini later maintained, in order to protect Italy
from further enslavement by German orders such as diese, and to
ensure that those violently Germanophil Fascists who had fled
from Italy after his arrest did not inherit his power, that he went
back to Hitler and told him that he had decided to return to active
political life. ' I have come,* he said bitterly, *for my instructions.*
Hitler, taking no notice of the Duce*s sad implication of protest,
immediately gave him them. The Duce would, of course, under
stand that in exchange for the re-establishment of Fascism, Ger
many would need ‘ territorial security to prevent any further crisis *.
The security required would involve reorganization of the whole of
Alto Adige and in particular the handing over to the Third Reich
of the province of Bolzano and eventually, after a plebiscite under
German supervision, of the districts of Trento and Belluno. These
areas would form part of the new and enlarged Austria, which was
to become one of the Federated States of Great Germany like
238
MEETING AT T H E F Ü H R E R *S H E A D Q U A R T E R S
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. Later on Italy might have

to give up Dalmatia, Trieste and Istria. As Germany was now fight
ing virtually alone on Italy’s behalf, there would have to be re
organization too in the economic and industrial fields. Installations
and industrial machinery would have to be evacuated north of the
Alps, more Italian labour would have to be supplied to German
farms and factories and German reparations eventually paid. More
immediately, certain Fascists would have to be removed from their
offices, and, of course, the traitors of 25 July tried and executed.
As always when he spoke of his future plans to change the course
of history and alter the shape of Europe, Hitler became feverishly
excited and seemed to detect in the mere power of his own words
a transcending significance. Mussolini listened, as he had become
used to listening, making no comment of either agreement or
dissent. Even when Hitler stopped, Mussolini’s questions were
mild to the point of diffidence.
Would it not be desirable, he wondered, to enter into negotiations
with Russia so as to smash the Allied bloc? No, it would not. W hat
about Corsica? There might be discussions about Tunis, but other
wise Italy had forfeited her claims against France. Would it not be
advisable to allow Poland and Czechoslovakia the same autonomy
which would be allowed to other nations of the European bloc?
No. The only concession which Mussolini was able to obtain was
freedom of action in Italian internal affairs; but even this freedom
was to be carefully controlled.
He was, and he looked, a defeated figure. His clothes hung about
him in folds, and his untidy collar sagged loosely from his neck.
Hitler, having got his way with him, became sympathetic and in
sisted that he should be examined by Professor Mordi, a gross and
dirty quack who had once been a specialist in venereal diseases.
Mordi, who gave Hitler daily injections and regular doses of drugs
containing a haphazard variety of narcotics, diluted poisons, stimu
lants and aphrodisiacs, examined Mussolini and found him fairly
healthy with slight blood-pressure, nervous exhaustion and weak
bowels. ‘In fact, just about what we’ve all got,’ Goebbels com
mented impatiently. But Hitler, despite his dependence on Mordi,
did not altogether trust him, and, professing himself dissatisfied
with his diagnosis, he asked Mussolini to take Professor Zachariae,
another German doctor, back to Italy with him.
Mussolini returned to Munich on 17 September. ‘Physically he
looks a little better,’ his wife wrote in her diary. ‘But there is a
bitter expression in his eyes which betrays his mental torment.' As
239
MUSSOLINI
usual he did not discuss his dilemma with her, saying merely that
he had spent 4three days of intensive work with Hitler \ Late on
the afternoon of the next day he shut himself up in his room to
prepare the speech to the Italian people which he was to broadcast
over the Munich radio that evening.
‘I went with him / Rachele said, ‘into the little transmission
room fixed up in the Karl Platz. It may seem strange, but this was
only the second time he had broadcast. In the past his speeches
were always made in public, though they were relayed by radio.
He was not at his best, and before he began his eyes held mine.
After a pause, which it seemed would never end, he began to
speak/
His voice sounded feverish and his words were slurred, often
mispronounced and sometimes unintelligible. He told his listeners
about his imprisonment and dramatic escape in a way which even
a neo-Fascist admirer has felt compelled to call 'journalistic'.
Then, in an attempt to recapture the powerful accents of the past,
he recalled his people to their duty and enjoined them to follow
him in the march to victory.
But neither Goebbels nor Hitler expected them to follow him.
Italy had abdicated 1as a people and as a nation and although
Goebbels, in contrast with other listeners, thought that the Duce
had spoken ‘quite coolly, realistically, and without exaggerated
pathos ', he had shown himself ‘ incapable of staging a great come
back In any event ‘ old Hindenburg was undoubtedly right when
he said that even Mussolini would never be able to make anything
but Italians out of Italians ’.
240
9
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
THE FIRST YEAR
27 S E P T E M B E R 1943- 27 S E P T E M B E R 1944
Hitler and I have surrendered ourselves to our illusions like
a couple of lunatics. We have only one hope left—to create
a myth.
M u s s o l i n i remained in Germany for ten days, first in Munich,

but when the air-raids became heavy he was moved fifty miles
away from the town to Schloss Hirschberg, a castle at the foot of
the Bavarian Alps near Barmisch. Here he planned the organiza
tion of his new Government and the reconstruction of Fascism.
By six Orders of the Day, dated from Rastenberg between 15
and 17 September 1943, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana had already
been announced. These orders provided for the Duce’s resumption
of ‘ the supreme direction of Fascism in Italy ’; for the reconstitu
tion of the Fascist Party under its new name of *Partito Fascista
Repubblicano for the restoration of the Militia; for collaboration
with the Germans and for the punishment of traitors. Of the
several Fascists who had fled from Badoglio’s Italy only two were
mentioned in these Orders—Alessandro Pavolini, a political fanatic
and former secretary of the Duce’s, who was made the Secretary of
the new Party, which he was determined should be one of an
intransigent and powerful minority; and Renato Ricci, who was
appointed to command the Militia, into which, despite his deter
mined efforts, he was never able to enlist more than a few worth
while men. Roberto Farinacci, violently Germanophil, and Giovanni
Preziosi, unshakably anti-Semitic, both of whom had been endeav
ouring to ingratiate themselves with the Germans at Mussolini’s
expense, were disappointed in their hopes of being given important
office.1 Vittorio Mussolini told his father that neither of them had
1They had annoyed Hitler by flying to Germany after Mussolini’s arrest instead
of organizing a counter-revolt which could have resulted in forcing the King to
hand over command of the Armed Forces to the Germans. ‘ There’s nothing to be
done,* Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, *with these dagos ! ’
241
MUSSOLINI
hesitated to provide Hitler with their versions of the Duce’s weak

nesses and failings—his anti-German outbursts, his absurd tolerance
towards his political enemies, his equivocal attitude towards
National Socialism, above all his irresponsible views on anti-
Semitism. They had spoken to the Germans, too, of his increasing
lack of virility and his declining health.
It seemed, indeed, that their criticisms might be justified. It was
obvious certainly to the Germans that talk as he would at this time
of a new approach, fresh ideas, the opportunity of learning from
past mistakes, a cleansed Fascism, he spoke without inner convic
tion. He was tired and depressed and seemed—although better than
he had been on his arrival in Vienna—still desperately ill. He was
habitually nervous and on edge. He came down to work in the
mornings looking as exhausted as he had done the night before.
For the first time in his life he could not sleep, and on the rare
occasions when he did manage to fall into a restless slumber he
would wake up suddenly, the nurse who attended him says, in the
agonies of cramp. ‘He eats very little/ Dr Zachariae reported to
Berlin. ‘ Cramps in his stomach prevent him from sleeping. He has
very low blood-pressure, a dry skin; his abdomen has become exces
sively thin, and his liver is swollen/ After a careful analysis of his
blood, however, Zachariae had decided that he was not affected by
any syphilitic infection, although Farinacci had told Ribbentrop
that the Duce was ‘ obviously in the tertiary stage ’.
Farinaccio verdict was understandable. A sudden brief mood of
high excitement would collapse without warning into a period of
apparently blank despair. The report of a serious disaster on the
Italian Front would seem to affect him not at all, and then a
trifling irritation would throw him into a deep despondency. He
would appear to be in a momentarily cheerful mood as he dis
cussed the revival of Fascism, and then the mere sight of a German
uniform would drain away his evanescent enthusiasm.
For the influence of the Germans was pervasive and inescapable,
and he knew in his heart what the revival of Fascism really meant.
On 27 September, accompanied by General Karl Wolff, Chief of the
SS in Italy, he returned to Rocca delle Caminate, where several
members of his newly formed Government came to swear
allegiance to him as President. As if to emphasize the nature of the
power from whom they derived their authority, these Ministers
were brought to the house by Himmler's most trusted SS agent in
Italy, Colonel Eugen Dollmann.
Although they did not include the extremists, Roberto Farinacci,
242
who went sulkily back to Cremona to give his newspaper, Regime

Fascista, a veiled anti-Mussolini bias, or Giovanni Preziosi, they
were all men who were prepared to uphold the German alliance.
Guido Buffarini-Guidi, who was appointed Minister of the Interior,
was already well known in Fascist circles as a cunning and evasive
intriguer, but his claims to office were supported by the Germans,
for whom he was careful to display an obvious admiration. Another
admirer of the German spirit, Fernando Mezzasoma, was given the
important office of Minister of Popular Culture. A young, small,
pale man, whose eyes seemed abnormally large behind the thick
lenses of his spectacles, Mezzasoma was Fascism’s last able recruit.
He spoke of the rebirth of the Party, and its new role as a revolu
tionary system which was to combine totalitarianism and social
radicalism, with a burning enthusiasm which Mussolini seems to
have found as tiring as Pavolini’s theatrical outbursts and Buffarini-
Guidi’s calculated demands for harsh reprisals against the enemies
of the Axis. It was these three men—Pavolini, Mezzasoma and Buf-
farini-Guidi—whom the Germans were relying upon to ensure that
the Social Republic took the course which they wanted it to take. A
fourth member of the Government, whose loyalty to the German
alliance was unquestioned, was Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. ' I have
never been a Fascist/ he told a German officer, *but a soldier who
has always obeyed his orders/ And although he confessed to a
disappointment that Mussolini had been returned to power, his
dislike of Badoglio and his contempt for the political intrigues of
the Army staff were so intense that it was felt his political short
comings could be discounted. The Government was given an aura
of respectability by his appointment to it as Minister of Defence.
The other Ministries were allocated to men of no remarkable talent
or reputation. Antonino Tringali-Casanova became Minister of
Justice; Domenico Pellegrini of Finance; Silvio Gai of Economics;
Edoardo Moroni of Agriculture; Carlo Alberto Biggini of Educa
tion and Giuseppe Peverelli of Communications. Francesco Maria
Barraci was appointed Sottosegretario alla Presidenza del Consiglio.
Mussolini, himself, took over die direction of what Foreign Affairs
the Republic was entitled to have and gave the Under-Secretaryship
to Count Serafino Mazzolini. Zealous, intense and hysterical,
Mazzolini, whose body was wasted by the effects of tuberculosis
and diabetes, fitted well into the atmosphere of intrigue and un
reality which was to characterize the Republic.
For most of its life Mussolini took pains to avoid the company of
these Ministers who formed its Government, characteristically pre-
*43
MUSSOLINI
ferring to talk to men who were political outsiders. Two such men
were Carlo Silvestri, a Socialist journalist, and Nicola Bombacci, a
former Communist and Vice-Secretary of the Italian Socialist
Party, whom he had known since 1902 when they had been school
masters together at Gualtieri. Although Bombacci, the friend of
his youth, had become his political enemy, Mussolini had gone out
of his way to help him and his family when he was out of work in
1937. It was a gesture which the impressionable Bombacci never
forgot. *I shall share his fate/ he said when asked what he intended
to do if the German armies collapsed. 41 shall never forget what he
did for my family when they were starving/
Mussolini, he decided, was himself in need of help and sympathy
now, and he went to stay with him at Rocca delle Caminate and
listened with patience and understanding to his long complaints
and diatribes against the Germans, whose influence was as pervasive
here as it had been in Germany.
SS troops patrolled the grounds continually and even stood watch
ing him balefully when he tried to recover his lost strength and fit
ness by chopping up wood in the garden. When, on German advice,
it was decided that the headquarters of the new Government should
be at Salò on Lake Garda rather than at Rome, which might have
to be abandoned to the Allies, and Mussolini moved to Villa Fel
trinelli in the little lakeside town of Gargnano a few miles north of
Salò, German guards patrolled the grounds there too.2 Specially
chosen from the Volksdeutsche and with little knowledge of Ger
man, let alone Italian, these foreign guards depressed Mussolini
beyond measure. 41 don't want everyone to think I am a prisoner/
he complained angrily. But his status was almost that. 4He is fan
tastically guarded/ a young German officer, Fürst Urach, wrote
home . 41 always sing or whistle when I cross the garden as there is
an SS man with a pistol behind every tree. There are a few Italian
Blackshirts there as well in order to keep up appearances.'
German soldiers followed him in lorries when he went out in his
car and German agents listened in to his telephone calls, which had
to be made through a German Army exchange. General Wolff, the
Ambassador Rahn, the doctor Zachariae and Colonel Dollmann,
who had received personally from Himmler orders never to go far
9It was one of the principal weaknesses of the Salò Republic that for reasons of
military exigence it was established so far north. By abandoning Rome, the his
torical capital of the country, the Fascist Government lost what little prestige it
could hope to have in the particular circumstances of its creation and accentuated
the impression of its precariousness.
244
from Mussolini’s side, were all regular visitors. ‘Wolff and Doll-
mann are my jailers/ he grumbled, and whenever he looked from
his window he saw a German helmet. ‘ They are always there/ he
said, ‘ like the spots of the leopard.’
To his Italian visitors he was always grumbling like this; but he
did not do so to Hitler. Once he wrote to him to complain of the
high-handed conduct of German troops, of their arrogant occupa
tion of north-eastern Italy, which amounted almost to annexation,
and of the attitude of the German Government, which seemed to
regard his own as completely servile. But he received no satisfaction
and never repeated his protests so unequivocally, deriving some
sort of comfort from the knowledge that he had at least once made
them and frequently re-reading, with a pleasure that one of his
secretaries thought pitiable, the carbon copy of the letter which he
kept in a drawer of his desk.
Against the trial of the traitors of 25 July, which Hitler had
imposed upon him, he made no such protest. He accepted Hitler’s
terms and issued orders that these men must be found and brought
to trial. The world must be shown, he said, that there had been an
underhand plot against him in which the King had been involved;
and the world must also know that he still had the power and the
relentless implacability of the Duce of Fascism. His secretaries have
described how, when the names of the traitors were mentioned, his
face would assume the marble-like expression of the Emperor
Caracalla, at once merciless and passionless. They could only guess
what he was thinking. Was he hiding behind that façade of cold
impassivity a shame for his weakness in not resisting Hitler’s
demands? Was he hiding a human concern for Edda’s children,
whom, until the beginning of December, the Germans still held in
Munich, by implication as hostages? Was he hoping to regain his
reputation for stern justice and impartiality? Did he really believe,
as he told Serafino Mazzolini, that the trials were necessary for
‘ pure reasons of State ’? Was it true, as he later told the journalist
Ivanoe Fossani, that he had not wanted the trial himself, but the
Party had insisted and the Germans had been determined to have
it as ‘ it was necessary to restore faith in the alliance.’
Whatever his reasons might have been, there was no doubt that
having on 24 November 1943 issued a decree establishing the special
tribunal, he never wavered in his determination to abide by his
promises to Hitler. The decisions of the Tribunal were ‘to be
guided by justice ’ but ‘ also by the highest interests of the country
now at war Its President was to proceed ‘ without regard to any-
*45
MUSSOLINI
body whosoever he might be ’; and there was no doubt who was

meant by that anonymous description.
Soon after his return to Italy Edda came to see her father.
Exhausted by a long journey on a slow military train, she became
almost hysterical as she begged him to save Galeazzo from the
Germans. ‘Non agitarsi t r o p p o Mussolini told her impatiently.
‘Don’t get so upset.’ He advised her to go into a nursing-home;
there was nothing he could do to help her. Ribbentrop had pro
vided him with ‘documentary evidence’ that established fully
‘Galeazzo’s perfidy, particularly in regard to the English’, and
he could not for the sake of Italy forgive him.
He had seen Ciano, in fulfilment of the promise he had given
in Munich, before coming back to Italy, and the interview had
been short and painful. ‘ The poisonous mushroom ’, as Goebbels
had called him, endeavoured to explain his conduct at the Grand
Council meeting to the Duce, whose face took on its most granitic
expression. He seemed scarcely even to hear Galeazzo’s voice as
he looked at him with a cold distaste, unforgiving and inexorable.
He remained standing by the fireplace when Ciano left and he did
not wish him good-bye. It was as if he had already come to his
decision to show that he too, like the man who had become his
master, was implacable; that the betrayal of Fascism’s Duce was
treason and the only punishment for treason was death. ‘I feel
myself akin to Dante,’ he had said years before, ‘owing to his
partisanship, his irreconcilability. He would not even forgive his
enemies in Hell.’
After this interview Ciano had tried again to get away to Spain,
but once more the Germans prevented him. They had, however,
given him permission to return to Italy, and in the belief that he
was being allowed his freedom he flew from Munich to Verona,
where he was immediately arrested by a force of German and
Italian police.
Having failed to break down her father’s stony resolution, Edda
had been to see Hitler, but he too refused to intervene to save her
husband’s life. She threatened to reveal things which would shock
the whole world, and Hitler, so Mussolini told Mazzolini, was
‘very much upset’ by Edda’s threats and even more by a letter
which she had subsequently written to him. Certainly a request
was made through the German Embassy that the trial should be
postponed. But Mussolini, characterizing the role for which he had
cast himself, was adamant. He would ‘not delay the trial by a
single d ay ’. When the jurist Rolando Ricci, who had helped to
246
devise the Constitution for the Social Republic, advised him

against the trial, he rejected the advice with the same inflexibility;
and when Edda made a passionate plea to him as her father and
as her children’s grandfather, he replied, ‘Before the supreme
necessity of Rome, Roman fathers never for a moment hesitated
in sacrificing their sons. Here there is neither father nor grand
father. There is only Fascism’s Duce.* Edda burst into tears and
ran out of the room.
At this time on the edge of a nervous breakdown, she had taken
her father’s advice and had gone to live in a nursing-home at
Ramiola near Parma, under the name of Elsa Santos. Giovanni
Dolfin, one of Mussolini’s secretaries, has described her visit to
Villa Feltrinelli. Dolfin had not seen her before and was impressed
by her extraordinary resemblance to her father. ‘ She is very
different from her photographs,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She is
exactly like her father. E una Mussolini inconfondibile.’ They had
the same eyes, the same expression, the same gestures, the same
vivacity when talking. They even had the same nervous habit of
suddenly throwing the head back in the middle of a sentence, and
the same way of looking with an almost hypnotic intentness at the
person to whom they were talking. Although she tried to disguise
her agitation, Edda was close to distraction. Untidy, pale and thin,
she looked as ill as her father had done a few weeks before, and
when she left Villa Feltrinelli, having failed in her mission, a
servant noticed that the tears were streaming down her face. Two
days later the German officer in command of the villa guards was
summoned to Verona to explain why he had allowed Countess
Ciano, who was known to be Mussolini’s favourite child, to enter
the villa.
The Germans’ concern was unfounded. The preparations for
Ciano’s trial continued. Mussolini appointed as President of the
Tribunal Aldo Vecchini, an old lawyer who shared Rolando Ricci’s
doubts about the validity of the evidence which could be brought
against the prisoners, but was obliged to overcome them. The eight
other members of the Tribunal had no doubts at all: five of them
at least were devoted Fascists. Of the nineteen accused only six
were present in court, the remainder—including their leader,
Grandi, who had flown to Spain soon after Mussolini had been
arrested—had managed to escape abroad or were successfully
hidden in Italy. Those present were Emilio De Bono, Tullio
Cianetti, Giovanni Marinelli, Luciano Gottardi, Carlo Pareschi and
Ciano.
247
MUSSOLINI
The trial began at nine o'clock in the morning of Saturday, 8

January 1944 in the hall of Castelvecchio in Verona. The members
of the Tribunal, all wearing black shirts, sat at a table on a dais
behind which hung a black cloth on which had been embroidered
the symbol of Fascism. Each of them the night before had received
the anonymous present of a miniature coffin.
To their left was a bench where the six prisoners sat; to their
right a table for journalists and film cameramen; in front a bench
for counsel and behind this bench the public seats. Outside the rain
had turned to snow, and the spectators came in from the cold in
silence.
The Clerk read the indictment in an ugly nasal voice. The
prisoners were accused of ‘having, on the occasion of the vote
taken by the Grand Council of Fascism on 25 July 1943 in Rome,
conspired among themselves and attempted to destroy the inde
pendence of the State and of having thwarted, by the encourage
ment of illusions of easy terms of peace, not only the moral
resistance of the nation but military operations also and, by so
doing, of having given aid and comfort to the enemy.'
The first of the accused called upon to answer this charge was the
seventy-eight-year-old Marshal De Bono. He stood up to face the
court in his military uniform, wearing all the decorations he had
earned before and since the March on Rome. He had at first
refused to consider himself in any danger. The King and Badoglio
might have been well advised to move south to Brindisi, but he
had served Mussolini faithfully for more than twenty years and
no harm would come to him. He rejected with scorn the sug
gestions of his friends that he should go into hiding or shave off
his distinctive beard. Even when he was arrested he thought the
whole matter would be cleared up in a few days and did not take
the opportunity to abscond which had been given him when he
contracted bronchitis and was allowed to return to his country
estate on parole. He arrived in Verona in his own car and told his
chauffeur to wait for him as he would not be kept long. There was
something, however, in the forbidding atmosphere of the court
room that told him that he had been wrong. He had an old man’s
premonition of death. Suddenly in the middle of his examination
he interrupted the proceedings and said impatiently, ‘All this is
so futile! Someone has apparently decided that I must die. I am
old, very old. So you rob me of nothing. But please be quick.’ He
went back to the bench amidst a murmur of sympathy from the
public seats and sat down; and, although he had not been dis-
248
THE PRESIDENT AT G A R G N A N O
missed, neither the President of the Tribunal nor the prosecuting

counsel felt able to recall him.
The Tribunal's efforts to establish ‘the existence of a premedi
tated plot' were no more successful when the next prisoner, Carlo
Pareschi, was called. Pareschi had been Minister of Agriculture
and had been attending his first meeting of the Grand Council.
He was a young and inexperienced man whom a journalist
described as looking ‘ dazed by his predicament ', but to the prose
cuting counsel's suggestions that there had been a plot to overthrow
the Duce in order to come to terms with the enemy, he replied
with calm denials. ‘All responsible Italians were against Musso
lini,' he ended by saying bravely, ‘and against the war. But
amongst the members of the Grand Council there was no agree
ment and no plot such as you describe. It was just that the cup was
full to the brim and Grandi poured in the drop that made it spill
over.’
Cianetti was called next. He had withdrawn his support of
Grandi’s resolution immediately after he had given it, he said, and
his faith in the Duce was undimmed. He gave no hint of a pre
meditated plot. Nor did Gottardi, the former President of the
Fascist Confederation of Industrial Workers, who had voted for
Grandi's resolution only because he hoped it would ‘liberate the
Duce from the grave responsibilities of military command when
the war was taking such a bad turn ’. Nor did Marinelli, who for
many years had been Treasurer of the Party. He was sixty-five and
very deaf—so deaf, in fact, that he had, so he maintained, only
caught snatches of the speeches made at the meeting and had
gained the impression that the resolution contained nothing that
would harm either the Duce or Fascism, being led to suppose even
that the resolution had been approved by Mussolini himself. Nor
finally, when he was called, did Ciano give any hint of a conspiracy
to overthrow Fascism and the Duce. ‘Grandi never suggested,'
Ciano explained, ‘ and I never imagined that the resolution would
cause the fall of the régime.'
‘You signed Grandi's Order of the Day,' Counsel persisted, ‘be
fore it was presented at the meeting.'
‘Yes, a few hours before. But I knew—Grandi had told me—that
Scorza had taken a copy of the text to the Duce. When one is
plotting to overthrow someone by treason one does not as a rule
forewarn him, nor does one inform him of the means that are to
be empjpyed.'
‘But why didn’t you personally inform your father-in-law? In
249
MUSSOLINI
view of your personal relationship with him it would seem normal.’

‘Mussolini, even for me, was totally unapproachable. For six
months I had been unable to see him alone.’
For the whole of that day the prisoners were examined and re
examined and their depositions read; but not once was the prosecut
ing counsel able to uncover even a hint of the conspiracy which it
was his duty to expose. The following morning, however, when the
trial was resumed a document was placed before the court which
went a long way to show that the actions of the accused might not
be as guileless as the prisoners had insisted they had been the day
before. The document, which the President read out with careful
emphasis, was a paper written by General Count Ugo Cavallero, the
former Chief of the General Staff. Cavallero had been found dead
on a garden bench in the early morning of 14 September, a few
hours after having had dinner at Field-Marshal Kesselring’s Head
quarters at Frascati. A pistol lay on the bench beside him; and
although the bullet holes in the left side of his head were in a
curious position for a man who had committed suicide, there now
seems no reason to doubt the verdict of the German Embassy that
Cavallero had shot himself. He had been arrested on Badoglio’s
orders on the day of the Grand Council meeting and had previous
ly been dismissed by Mussolini in favour of Ambrosio. Neither side
trusted him, and he knew that if he worked for either, the other
would condemn him as a traitor. He had been involved in some
indeterminate way in the plots to overthrow Mussolini, and Kessel
ring says that it was the thought that he might have to meet the
Duce again that drove him to suicide. The document he had written
was found, so the President of the Tribunal said, in Badoglio’s office
after the flight of the Government to Brindisi. In its detailed des
criptions of the plots against the Duce, beginning as early as
November 1942, it was exactly what the prosecution required. Its
genuineness was accordingly doubted—and in view of its late intro
duction into the proceedings the scepticism was natural—although
its contents have since been shown to be largely true. It revealed
that the General Staff in league with the King had been seriously
discussing the overthrow of Mussolini for nine months before the
Grand Council meeting; and that Ambrosio and Badoglio had
agreed that the Grand Council should be made the instrument of
their designs, which would thus be given a clothing of constitution
ality.
Accepting Cavallero’s document as evidence, the members of the
Tribunal felt able to agree that the prosecution’s case had been
250
made. That afternoon and the following day were spent in listening
to the cautious pleas made on behalf of the prisoners by their
counsel; but the result was not now—nor perhaps ever had been—
in doubt. At half past one on Monday the President of the Tribunal
returned to pronounce that, with the exception of Cianetti, who
was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, all the accused were
condemned to death.
Cianetti murmured, €Grazie, g r a z i e Marinelli fainted. De Bono
gave a shout of ‘ Long live Italy ’, in which Pareschi, Gottardi, and
Ciano joined.
At ten o’clock that night the priest who heard confessions at the
Degli Scalzi prison came to see the condemned men. The German
guards would not at first let him into Ciano’s cell, but after tele
phoning the Gestapo command he eventually obtained permission
to administer the Last Sacraments to him.
Some nights before, Ciano had had a very different companion in
his cell. She was a good-looking girl with blonde hair who, the
Gestapo hoped, would be able to persuade the susceptible Ciano (in
a moment of passion or desire) to reveal where he had hidden his
diaries. This improbable and outmoded device had an unexpected
result. Donna Felicita was not only unable to persuade Ciano to tell
her anything but, according to Colonel Dollmann, she fell in love
with him, wept bitterly when he was condemned to death and
eventually became an agent for the Allies.
For Ciano there was some comfort in his last hours. A message
was smuggled through to him that his wife, helped by her lover,
Marquis Emilio Pucci, had managed to escape across the border
into Switzerland with some notebooks containing his later diaries
concealed in a belt round her waist, leaving the earlier diaries,
together with some important documents dealing with Italo-Ger-
man relations, which Ciano had extracted from the files at Palazzo
Chigi, in the care of one of the doctors at the Ramiola nursing-
home. Edda had collected these notebooks and papers from their
hiding-place in Rome and had at one time hoped that she might
exchange them with the Germans for her husband’s life. Negotia
tions were, in fact, begun with the Gestapo in Italy, but when
Himmler heard about them he persuaded Hitler to put an end to
them. Ciano, himself, seems never to have believed in the possi
bility of their success and told the priest who visited him on the
night before his execution that he was convinced that the Ger
mans would arrange in some way for him to be killed.
Having given Ciano his Last Sacraments the priest obtained per-
*Ji
MUSSOLINI
mission for him to join the other condemned men in De Bono’s cell.
Marinelli had had a heart attack and lay on the bed while the
others sat talking to the priest. ‘ We did not talk about the life that
was past/ the priest said afterwards, ‘but about the life to come,
about God and the immortality of the soul. . . . It was a pleasant
night, almost Socratic/ Pareschi read extracts from Plato, which the
others discussed with him. Once someone mentioned Mussolini and
for a moment the conversation returned to their trial. As traitors,
Gottardi supposed, they would be shot in the back. ‘ It’s too much/
De Bono suddenly exclaimed with an anger that was close to tears.
‘For sixty-two years I’ve worn a soldier’s uniform without ever
bringing a stain on it/
At dawn news came that the execution had been delayed. They
had all signed an appeal for mercy the night before, which Pavolini
had undertaken to hand to Mussolini, and it was expected that De
Bono, at least, would be reprieved. The prisoners began to have
hope again until De Bono shook his head and said, ‘ It’s an empty
hope. We have Galeazzo with us.’ Pavolini, in fact, had taken
care to withhold the appeal so that Mussolini, in Pavolini’s own
phrase, would be spared the ‘necessity of confirming the death-
sentence ’.
At eight o’clock a German officer came to the prison to say that
the ‘technical difficulties’ had been overcome and the executions
were to take place within the hour a few miles outside Verona at
Fort Procolo. The five prisoners were taken there by car under a
German escort. In an uncontrollable access of rage Ciano began to
curse Mussolini to damnation, until De Bono put a hand on his
shoulder and told him he should try to die in a state of forgive
ness.
It was a cold morning, and De Bono rubbed his hands vigorously
as he walked from the car to the row of school chairs to which he
and the others were to be tied with their backs to the firing squad.
Ciano, perfectly composed again now, pointed to the right-hand
chair and said to him, ‘ That is your seat by right, Marshal.’
‘On the journey we are about to take/ De Bono answered, ‘I
cannot believe that precedence is of any importance.'
They both asked the police officer who commanded the firing
squad if they might face the rifles; but their request was refused.
Marinelli had fainted again and had to be carried to his chair;
Pareschi took off his fur-lined coat and offered it to the soldier who
was tying him up; Gottardi murmured to himself, perhaps in
prayer. The sky was dull and overcast, and Muller the UFA camera-
252
man doubted that his pictures would come out very well. While he
was adjusting his lens, De Bono shouted,4Long live Italy ! *
'Long live Italy I ' Ciano answered him.
And then the order to fire was given, and the five men were
shot. At the last moment Ciano managed to struggle free of his
ropes and turned to face his executioners. Their aim was bad, and
Ciano was not dead when the commander of the firing squad walked
up to him to put a bullet through his head. Muller's photograph
was clear enough to show a face completely calm, almost serene.
‘ We were all swept away by the same storm,' Ciano had said to
the priest. ‘Let my children know I died without bitterness to
anyone/
Two hours later Mussolini presided over a meeting of Ministers

and said to them tonelessly, ‘ Justice has been done/
He had, as was usual now, spent a sleepless night. His secretary,
Giovanni Dolfin, says that at one o'clock in the morning he had
made a muddled telephone call to ask for news of Edda and of the
condemned men in Verona. At six o'clock he telephoned General
Wolff. Apparently anxious to appear calm and dispassionate, he
spoke to him for an hour ‘ in a perfectly friendly way ' and, accord
ing to both Colonel Dollmann and Möllhausen, the head of the
political section at the German Embassy, he did not once ‘ mention
the imminent tragedy'. Wolff told Möllhausen that he thought
Mussolini had made the call as a ‘ means of getting through the
critical hours and of preventing himself from weakening '.
When Dolfin had come in to tell him that the execution had been
postponed, he had murmured an acknowledgment and carried on
writing at his desk. The secretary was conscious of the great effort
he was making to maintain a façade of indifference. An hour later
he was told that the traitors had been executed, and he accepted
the news in silence, trying not to betray the deep emotion which—
Dolfin thought—he was obviously feeling. ‘ I have never been blood
thirsty/ he had said the night before with a kind of angry apology.
‘ So far as I am concerned Ciano has been dead for ages.' Now he
said briefly and sternly that he was glad to know that his son-in-law
and the others had died like good Italians and Fascists; but when
he left for his office, having eaten nothing all morning, Rachele said
that he was ‘ weeping tears of despair \ ‘ We will lose the sympathy
253
MUSSOLINI
of the Italian people/ he said desperately to Dolfin, the stony mask

broken at last. ‘ They will never understand my torment/
After the trial at Verona the changes of mood which during the
last few years had been an essential trait of an increasingly un
stable temperament became more sudden and pronounced than
ever. On the day after the executions Mussolini said to the Minister
for Foreign Affairs, ‘Now that we’ve started rolling heads in the
dust we’ll carry on to the end/ and he gave to Tamburini, his Chief
of Police, a list of untrustworthy Fascists who were to be arrested.
A few days later, however, he had changed his mind. He cancelled
the instructions he had given Tamburini and spoke instead of
pardon and forgiveness. Indeed, he seemed, on occasions, to have
lost altogether his wish to govern and wanted only to think of
his past and of his place in history. Photographers and journalists
who came to see him to prove that he was still alive, tried to indi
cate also that he had lost nothing of his spiritual fire; but they
admitted in private that he seemed listless and defeated. He looked
in much better health than he had done at the time of his rescue
from the Gran Sasso; he gave brave answers to their questions and
stared with familiar force into the camera’s lens, but when the
photograph was taken and the notebook shut he seemed to sink
into lethargy. One day he asked Colonel Dollmann if it were really
true that no one in Rome had moved a finger to help him after
his arrest, and when Dollmann had to admit that it was so, he said
with a flash of anger that he could never forgive such ingratitude.
‘ No man has done more for Rome/ he went on, ‘ since Julius Caesar.
I will never go to Palazzo Venezia again unless as a conqueror/ The
next day his anger and claims were forgotten, and he was sunk
again into lethargy.
He spent hours reading newspapers and looking eagerly for
references to himself, cutting out those articles which directly con
cerned him, even those printed in Rome newspapers during his
captivity which gave sensational and spurious descriptions of his
private life and his supposed mistresses. He carefully numbered each
item and annotated most of them with coloured pencils. He was
constantly making excuses for his failure and the loss of the
Empire. He blamed alternately the British and the Americans,
the Germans and the Italians, the Freemasons, the bourgeoisie, the
Jews, the conspirators of 25 July, above all the King. ‘ If the colpo
di Stato had not taken place/ he once told a parade of Fascist
soldiers in Guardia, ‘ I should not now be standing in a suburb of
Brescia, but in a square in Cairo.’
254
THE PRESIDENT AT GARCNANO
‘He thinks only of history/ his Minister for Popular Culture,

Fernando Mezzasoma, wrote, ‘ and how he will appear in it/
He spent hours too in lecturing and haranguing his Ministers and
visitors on historical and political themes, using the grandiose ges
tures and phrases of his youth. Once at the Party headquarters at
Villa Cavallero he got up from a conference which was boring him
and walked round the room, abruptly stopping with his arms
crossed on his chest to ask intently, ‘ W hat is Fascism? ’
It was obviously a rhetorical question and he went on to answer
it himself. ‘ It can be answered in only one way. Fascism is Musso-
linism. Let us not delude ourselves. As a doctrine Fascism contains
nothing new. It is a product of the modem crisis—the crisis of man
who can no longer remain within the normal bounds of the existing
laws. One could call it irrationalism/ He had not created Fascism,
he maintained another day, he had merely exploited the Italians’
latent and inborn Fascist tendencies. ‘If this had not been so I
would not have been followed for twenty years. The Italians are a
most fickle people. When I am gone I am confident that the his
torians and the psychologists will ask how a man had the power to
lead such a people for so long. If I had done nothing else this master
piece would be enough to prevent me being swallowed up in
oblivion. Others will conquer with sword and fire, perhaps, but
certainly not with consent as I did. . . . When people say that we
were the white guard of the bourgeoisie they lie shamelessly. I have
promoted—and I say this with a clear conscience—the progress of
the workers more than anyone. . . . I have made dictatorship
noble. I have not, in fact, been a dictator, because my power was no
more than the will of the Italian people/
And on he went, becoming more convoluted, more obscure, until
his hearers could not understand what he was talking about and
doubted that he could himself. On another occasion, when the
defence of Rome was being discussed, he gave a long dissertation
upon the ‘ biological decadence of France ’. At other times he would
talk as he had done years before as a Socialist, dismissing the recent
development of Fascism as a political calamity. ‘We’ve lost com
pletely/ he said to Nicola Bombacci, ‘without the possibility of
appeal. One day history will judge us and say that many buildings
were built, that many bridges were thrown across many rivers; but
it will be forced to conclude that as far as the spirit is concerned we
were only common pawns in the recent crisis of human conscience,
and that we remained pawns to the end/
It was becoming a frequently voiced assessment. ‘ Hitler and 1/ he
*55
MUSSOLINI
admitted in one of these moments of self-analysis, ‘have surren

dered ourselves to our illusions like a couple of lunatics. We have
only one hope left; to create a m yth/ Others had not needed to do
so; their work had survived. He often spoke of these men: of
Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Washington, Bismarck, of his
fellow-Italians—Garibaldi, Mazzini, Giolitti and particularly of
Crispi, whose career offers so many parallels with his own. He spoke
frequently too of his contemporaries : of Pietro Nenni, who ‘ when
all was said and done remained a good Italian ’; of Dino Grandi,
who ‘despite everything* was ‘the finest man Fascism produced*;
of Briand, ‘perhaps the only statesman who wished to create a
European federation without resorting to arms *; of Eden, whom he
hated; of Roosevelt, whom he despised; of Lansbury, Hoare and
Lloyd George, whom he had liked; of Stalin, whom he envied; and
often of Churchill, whom he greatly admired. He was, however,
sometimes unable to disguise his jealousy of Churchill's success. He
‘ does not have the European spirit * he once decided, ‘ and doesn't
really understand anything except the necessity of those English.
But he is the man of the moment because he hates the Germans/
Churchill's great merit, of course, was that he was not so much a
politician as a buccaneer. ‘He is an obdurate and obstinate old
m an/ he once told Mezzasoma with a respect which was almost
affectionate. ‘ In some respects he is like my father.*
He did not always speak with so detached and tolerant an air,
and occasionally the mere mention of a man’s name would induce
in him a sudden surge of fury. Farinacci was one of these names
that he could not bear to hear discussed. ‘ Don't talk about him /
he once told Dollmann angrily. ‘He wants to be my successor/
‘ Don't mention his name,' he snapped on another occasion when
the conversation turned to another Fascist whom he did not like;
‘ the very sound of it,’ he added, scratching his fingers feverishly,
‘makes me itch all over.’ In an effort to bring Mussolini's mind
to a favourite topic Mezzasoma asked him one day when he was
plainly beside himself with irritation, ‘ And you, Duce? How about
yourself? '
‘ I? ' Mussolini said, smiling that consciously enigmatic smile
which he was apt to use before delivering himself of one of his
celebrated neologisms. ‘I? I am not a statesman. I am more like a
mad poet/
He would have liked to have been one just as Hitler would have
liked to have been a great painter—most dictators are, it seems,
artists manqués. He would have liked to have had D'Annun-
256
zio’s bizarre gifts, or Baudelaire’s or Rimbaud’s, and he spoke of

these men with veneration, if not always with discrimination. But he
was not a poet, not even in the sense that he thought he was. He wrote
a great deal as he had always done. He formed a news agency,
Corrispondenza Repubblicana, which issued reams of his polemical
writings; he wrote a series of autobiographical articles for the
Corriere della Sera, which were eventually expanded into a book; he
translated an Italian version of Walküre back into German to see
how it compared with the original; he even wrote for a schoolboys’
magazine. But none of these writings was the work of a mad
poet.
He felt nearer to this ideal, perhaps, when he played his violin.
‘ It leads me to a glimpse of eternity,’ he said. ‘ And when I play
the world slips away from me.’ He played without grace but with a
kind of emphatic power, sometimes with a wild hysteria that sug
gested the agony of a great mind distraught. *He was dictatorial
even where music was concerned,’ Margherita Sarfatti says, ‘ and
had no respect for style or form. He had expression and technique,
but he played everything in his own way.' Often in the evenings at
Villa Feltrinelli he would shut himself away to practise his favourite
pieces by Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert and Verdi, and sometimes
he would stand alone in the garden with the pink marble walls of
the villa for a backcloth playing with an abandoned force that the
German guards took for genius. Once in a bombed house after an
air-raid he played parts of the Beethoven Violin Concerto to some
German officers, and when he had finished and they applauded him
he closed his eyes as if in ecstasy.
He felt a particular need now for the sort of emotional escape
that his playing gave him, for his family suffocatingly surrounded
him. They were all at the villa for most of the time from the
beginning of January 1944 onwards—the unpopular and arrogant
Vittorio with his wife and children, Bruno’s widow Gina and her
children, the schoolboy Romano, his third son, and Anna Maria,
his youngest daughter.3 Professor Zachariae lived in the house as
well, together with Lieutenant Dicheroff, a twenty-two-year-old
liaison officer who was there on Hitler’s orders. In her autobio
graphy Rachele describes the atmosphere as a happy one, but the
Germans did not find it so. Romano was learning to play the
accordion and filled the house with his strident discords; the
•For some years previously Vittorio had been occupied, without conspicuous
success, in the film industry. He now lives in South America. Anna Maria has
recently married in Italy. Romano has a jazz band.
257
MUSSOLINI
daughters-in-law quarrelled; Vittorio induced his father to employ

two of his friends as well as himself and his cousin Vito as addi
tional and incompetent private secretaries; the grandchildren
screamed and squabbled and rushed round the house shouting for
4Grandpa Duce ’; while Rachele, herself, indulged her discontent
by sulking silently or breaking out into torrents of recrimination
or complaint. The trouble for her was that she had been told in
anonymous letters that Claretta Petacci, whom she had hoped had
gone from her husband’s life for ever, had now come back to him
and was living in a villa near the lake. She had only heard about
Claretta on the night of 25 July when she had left Villa Torlonia
for fear of the mob and had taken shelter in the gatekeeper’s lodge,
where a servant had commiserated with her about her husband’s
long-standing infidelity.41 wish I had not told her,’ the servant said
afterwards. 41 was amazed that she did not know.’
Claretta had moved with her family from Rome on hearing of
Mussolini’s arrest, and on 12 August she had been arrested at the
villa of her sister Miriam’s husband, Marquis Boggiano, on Lake
Maggiore. Together with her parents and Miriam she had been
shut up in the prison of the Visconti Castle in Novara, where she
had passed the time by scribbling convulsively in her diary about
her sadness and her great love for Ben. 41 feel like a swallow,’ she
wrote one day in an entry typical of many, 4a swallow which, by
mistake, has got into an attic and knocks its head against the walls
in terror.’ Not content with making long and romantic entries such
as this in her diary, she wrote almost every day to Palazzo Venezia,
hoping that by some means Mussolini might receive her letters.
41 wonder if you’ll get this letter of mine,’ she wrote, 4or will they
read it. I don’t know and I don’t care if they do. Because although
I used to be too shy to tell you that I loved you, today I’m telling
all the world and shouting it from the roof-tops. I love you more
than ever.’
She was still in prison writing with the insatiability of a grapho-
mane when her lover flew back to Italy from Munich. She was
determined to rejoin him. The nuns who had been looking after
her smuggled a letter out of the prison to her brother, Marcello,
who went to the German headquarters in Novara. The whole
family was immediately released, and a few days later a German
staff car took her from the hotel in Merano, where she was staying,
to see Mussolini. She returned to the Hotel Parco ecstatically happy.
She would be allowed to return to him, she said, and when a house
had been found for her on Lake Garda she would be able to see
258
him every day. Soon after this Buffarini-Guidi arranged for her
family to move to Villa Fiordaliso in the grounds of D’Annunzio’s
villa, the Vittoriale, a big, mournful house which had been turned
into a museum. She herself was given a sitting-room high up in a
tower of the Vittoriale itself and, as an additional security against
an attack by partisans, a German officer for a bodyguard. Although
she wrote in gratitude of the Germans’ thoughtfulness in providing
her with so young and charming a guard and told her sister how
much she liked him, Major Franz Spögler was not so much an
escort as a spy. One of his principal duties was to send a weekly
report on Claretta Petacci to the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna,
where it was supposed that her influence on the Duce might not
be a beneficial one.
In fact, Mussolini saw little of his mistress. Rachele’s outbursts
of jealous rage were becoming insufferable, and in consequence he
visited Claretta less and less. Only occasionally in the evenings,
when it was getting dark, did he go to the Vittoriale, but he never
stayed long. He drove there in a small Fiat, leaving his official
Alfa Romeo in front of the main door of his office in Villa delle
Orsoline. The meetings were sad and unsatisfactory, Claretta said.
The Vittoriale was damp and cold, the woods outside it full of
German soldiers. There was no happiness anywhere and no
seclusion. Twice he told her that he did not want to come to
see her any more; but she began to cry and begged him not to
abandon her, and he gave in and said that he would come again
soon.
One day Rachele, unable to control her jealousy any longer,
exacerbated Claretta’s misery by insisting that Buffarini-Guidi
should take her to see her husband’s mistress. Rachele arrived at
the Vittoriale trembling with anger. Claretta kept her waiting and
eventually came down in a dressing-gown accompanied by Major
Spögler. She looked pale and ill and sat in an arm-chair twisting
a scarf between her fingers and did not answer when Rachele told
her to leave her husband alone. Her silence irritated Rachele, who
came towards her and grabbed hold of the sleeve of her dressing-
gown. At this Claretta burst out, ‘ The Duce loves you, signora. I
have never been allowed to say a word against you.’
For a moment Rachele seemed placated, but when Claretta
offered her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had written to her
she flew into another rage.
‘ I don’t want typed copies,’ she shouted. ‘ That’s not why I came.’
'W hy did you come, signora? ’ Claretta asked her.
*59
MUSSOLINI
She did not reply for the moment. ‘ She stood looking at m e/
G aretta said afterwards, ‘ her hands on her hips. Then she started
to insult me. Her face got redder and redder/
G aretta decided to ring up Mussolini.
‘ Ben/ she said, ‘ your wife is here. W hat shall I do? ’
Rachele snatched the telephone from her and made her husband
admit that he knew she was coming. She was angrier than ever by
now. She told G aretta that she was hated by the Fascists even more
than by the partisans, and twice G aretta fainted and Buffarini-
Guidi had to run away to fetch some smelling-salts. When she was
revived she sat in her chair crying helplessly. Rachele too, Spögler
thought, was crying when she left.
W ith his mistress and his wife squabbling over him, his
daughters-in-law irritating him, his Ministers bothering him with
details which no longer interested him, Mussolini was more and
more anxious to be left alone. During the first few weeks at Gar-
gnano he had stayed in bed until ten o’clock in the morning and
had not left for his office in Villa delle Orsoline until half-past
eleven or twelve. But by the spring of 1944 he was getting up
earlier and earlier every day and was often in his office by eight
o’clock. He stayed there until two o’clock, when he returned to
Villa Feltrinelli for a light lunch, which, like all his meals, was
eaten so quickly that he had often finished and left the room before
the others had begun. By three he was back again in his office, or
in the ill-furnished and tastelessly decorated sitting-room wrhere
he saw his visitors, and he did not go home again until eight or
nine o’clock.
Although he spent so many hours at his desk, the questions which
really concerned him were of a philosophical or personal nature
rather than a practical one. Only occasionally did a problem of
government occupy and absorb his mind, and even then it was
usually one which did not appear to deserve the sudden interest
which he took in it.
He was, for instance, passionate in his determination to obtain
the formal recognition of the Vatican for his régime. He could not
carry on, he once exclaimed in exasperation, without this recogni
tion, although his Government’s functioning was not likely to be
any the more successful with it. It was a matter of personal pride,
and he began to feel himself insulted by the Pope’s reluctance,
which became so much an obsession with him that he declared that
his patience was exhausted and he would denounce the Lateran
Pacts and set up a schismatic Church. He went so far as to consider
260
the qualifications of certain politically sound priests for new bishop

rics and was only dissuaded from his reckless course by the Ger
mans, who did not want their bad relations with the Papacy made
any worse than they already were.
* The only other matter which excited in him, at this time, a com
parable interest was his recognition of himself as a man who had
never in his heart lost the Socialist principles of his youth. Although
most of his Ministers privately condemned this renewed belief in
authoritative Socialism as a misguided one, they could not doubt
the sincerity with which he held it. It was certainly not a passing
enthusiasm, but remained with him to the end. ‘Socialism’, he
was fond of saying, ‘ is the cornerstone of the Republic.’ Such pro
nouncements were heard with alarm by the Germans and by the
new élite of Fascism and in particular by men such as Farinacci,
Pavolini and Buffarini-Guidi, who viewed with profound misgivings
Mussolini’s endeavours to widen the appeal of the Partito Fascista
Repubblicano by making what they took to be servile concessions to
the Left: concessions amounting almost to the abrogation of the
Fascist ideal and—even more tragic to some of them—the rejection
of the myth of the Duce as Superman.
The ideological pattern for the Social Republic had been set at
Verona on 14 November, when the first congress of the Republican
Fascist Party met to define the principles upon which it would
govern. The proceedings were opened by the reading of a letter from
the Duce in which the importance of returning to ‘the original
intentions of the Fascist revolution’ was stressed. Indeed the
Manifesto di Verona which was ultimately issued was largely a
recapitulation of the aspirations of 1919 with the added reference,
which had become almost obligatory in Fascist circles, to the ‘ deca
dence of the monarchy ’. So far as Mussolini himself was concerned
its most important points were those dealing with the welfare of the
workers; and he refused to accept the suggestion that this aspect
of Socialism was a newly discovered interest.
Any accusation, particularly in the newspapers which he still read
so avidly, that Fascism had not in the past been seriously concerned
with the good of the working-class and that it had been maintained
in power by bourgeois capitalists, aroused in Mussolini an anger and
contempt that seemed otherwise reserved for Roosevelt, the King
and Anthony Eden. Having read one day a report of a meeting of
the General Confederation of Workers in Naples where a delegate
had alleged that the social laws of the Fascist régime had proved
of no benefit to the workers, he immediately wrote a passionate
261
MUSSOLINI
reply for the Corrispondenza Repubblicana in which he listed the

laws he had enacted on their behalf, the number of hospitals he
had built for them, the pensions he had provided, the scales of
minimum wages he had introduced. ‘These charges/ he insisted,
were made by ‘ Communists and other enemies of our country who
use the workers as pawns in their devilish games/ But the ‘ workers
themselves knew them to be false
‘ It is impossible/ he said during a subsequent discussion on the
same subject, ‘to corrupt the proletariat. The workers are not
capable of the sort of betrayal that the bourgeois are. The bourgeois
with their materialistic mentality and greed are the ruin of Italy.
I am an old Socialist at heart/
Certainly it was true that while other aspects of his Government’s
business received scant attention, he was determined to show that
with what little power and funds it possessed the Social Republic
should live up to its name. In the last month of his life, when the
Gothic Line was broken and the complete overthrow of the shat
tered Axis and of his Government seemed certain, he was still
giving his attention to such, by then irrelevant, matters as the pos
sibility of introducing collective farming as a means of saving the
small peasant and the reorganization of hospitals for impoverished
victims of tuberculosis. Möllhausen told Rahn that even at this
hour Mussolini—despite his detachment and his attitudinizing pro
testations that he and his work were already a part of history—was
dominated by an ingenuous concern to leave behind him some sort
of framework on which a Welfare State could be built.
But few problems concerned him as deeply as this, and for most
of the time he seemed content to sit quietly reading or writing in
his office, to be left alone and to become less and less the dictator
and more and more the ‘ university professor ' which the admiring
Doctor Zachariae had decided he so much resembled. His office was
a small stuffy room with a majolica stove disproportionately large
and a desk set across the comer, and he sat there by himself for
hours on end reading and writing and looking out of the window
into the garden. When a secretary entered the room he would look
up slowly, not troubling to remove the spectacles the necessity for
which he would have strongly denied a year before; but he had no
pride of that sort now. His eyelids were often swollen and inflamed
and he admitted without compunction that his sight was getting
worse and worse every day.
He did not trouble either to foster the impression of a great mind
at work as he had done at Palazzo Venezia, where his enormous
262
desk had sometimes been completely bare to show how his mind
contained all that he needed to know and sometimes littered with
documents to show how busy he was. At Villa delle Orsoline it
was merely untidy. Newspaper cuttings, papers and books, jars of
coloured pencils and photographs, were piled higgledy-piggledy
upon it without regard to order or, more unusually, effect. A journa
list once looked at the spines of the books to see what the Duce was
reading. They were a characteristically disparate selection—Dostoev
sky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Plato, Sappho, Kant, Sholokov’s Quiet
Flows the Don, Nietzsche, Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon, Sorel’s Ré-
flexions sur la Violence, Goethe, Schopenhauer, books about Christ,
about Frederick the Great, about Beethoven—and they all had bits
of paper stuck between the pages to mark a significant passage or
pencilled notes scribbled in the margins. So engrossed did he become
on occasions that visitors and officials, particularly German ones,
were dismissed with an impatient order to go and see Graziani or
the Minister of Popular Culture or his Principal Private Secretary.
‘ Mussolini tends to withdraw from all questions of Government/
the young German officer Fürst Urach wrote home. ‘ If a German
General comes to him with some request he says, “ Oh, do talk to
Graziani.” If Leyers or some economic expert comes he says, " Oh,
do see my Economics Minister, won’t you? ” ’ When one visitor,
more importunate than the rest, insisted that the Duce’s decision
was vital, Mussolini replied that if the decision really were a vital
one he could not possibly make it. The Germans must : he himself
was merely Mayor of Gargnano.
But however vindictively he spoke against the Germans, those
*criminals by birth ’, as he referred to them on one occasion, those
‘ barbaric vandals, cruel, unjust, violent and rapacious ’, as he called
them on another, he could not escape from the spell of their leader.
On 2i April 1944 he went to Germany to see him. Hitler received
him warmly at Salzburg, and Mussolini assured him more than
once of his unshadowed belief in an ultimate German victory. The
atmosphere was friendly and comforting, and encouraged by that
and by the support of Graziani and Mazzolini, who had come to
Germany with him, and of Filippo Anfuso, his new Ambassador in
Berlin, Mussolini went so far as to protest against the German occu
pation of Alto Adige and Trieste, which he had mentioned in his
letters, and to call Hitler’s attention to the ill-treatment of Italian
workers in Germany. Hitler seemed sympathetic and said that he
would see what could be done. Little was done, however, and three
months later, when Mussolini went to see Hitler again, the atmo-
263
MUSSOLINI
sphere was very different and at the beginning seemed unaccount

ably tense. Hitler came towards him, limping across the station
platform, looking very pale. He held his right arm stiffly against
his chest and offered Mussolini his left hand. He had had a slight
accident, he apologized. Later on he took Mussolini to the still
smoking ruins of the hut where Colonel Graf Claus von Stauffen-
berg’s bomb had just exploded, killing four men. Stauffenberg had
brought the bomb into the conference room inside his brief-case,
which he had placed under the table where the maps were spread
out in front of the Führer, but finding the brief-case in his way an
operations officer had pushed it away from Hitler with his foot.
Providence had saved him once again, Hitler said, and had shown
him that he was destined to triumph over his enemies. *I am ab
solutely of your opinion,’ Mussolini politely replied, ‘this was a
sign from Heaven.’ The Führer seemed quite calm, Mussolini
thought, but he was much quieter than usual, and when the con
ference with the Duce was over he sat down next to Ribbentrop
and Goering on one side of the tea-table and said nothing, abstrac
tedly staring at the wall in front of him and swallowing from time
to time one of his brightly coloured pills. For the first hour Musso
lini and Graziani had to listen to the Germans arguing amongst
themselves about the reasons why the war had not yet been won
and to Goering grumbling at Keitel and making threatening ges
tures at the Foreign Minister with his baton. A reference was made
to Roehm and the purge of 1934 and at this Hitler suddenly jumped
to his feet and began to speak, insisting that Providence by inter
vening to save him from death had again demonstrated that he was
the Man of Destiny chosen to save Europe and the World. It was
his duty to spare no one in pursuit of his revenge. He went on in
this vein for half an hour, while the Germans fell into silence and
Mussolini gazed at him as if mesmerized, looking appalled by the
shouted threats and hysterics. At last the stewards came in with the
tea, and the Führer lapsed once more into the silent reverie from
which the mention of Roehm had roused him.
Mussolini seemed deeply shocked by Hitler’s behaviour, and
when he said good-bye on his return to Italy he did not respond to
Hitler’s emotional words as once he might have done. Undeterred
by the Duce's withdrawn coolness, however, Hitler prolonged the
farewell and stood holding his hand and staring into his eyes. He
looked, Rahn told Möllhausen when they got back to Lake Garda,
like a bemused lover and everyone was thoroughly embarrassed. ‘ I
know I can count on you,’ Hitler had said emotionally.4Believe me,
264
you are the finest, indeed perhaps the only, friend I have in the
world/ As soon as the Duce had gone, Hitler gave orders that an
air-raid shelter should be built in the grounds of Villa Feltrinelli,
but Mussolini only visited it once and then merely to congratulate
the workmen who had built it.
The meeting between the two men had been valueless. Mussolini
had repeated none of the protests he had found the courage to men
tion in April and he returned to Italy gloomy and silent. People
had become used to him coming back from Germany infused by
Hitler’s confidence and spirit, but this time if there was a change in
him it was for the worse. He had been given some statistics by an
Embassy official concerning the Italians in Germany and they had
appalled him.4
He returned to the inconsequential routine of his work with even
less energy and enthusiasm than before. Earlier in that summer he
had played an occasional game of tennis, but his opponents always
let him win and he became bored with the game and confined his
exercise to riding a bicycle round the shores of the lake, and to
walking in the woods either alone or with Romano, but followed
always by his German guards. He also gave up the German lessons
which he had previously been having three times a week; he could
always make himself understood, and the expert fluency which he
had hoped to achieve seemed no longer necessary. He left for the
office earlier than ever now, sometimes before eight o’clock, in order
to escape from the squabbling household, and returned home late
to spend the evening, whenever he could, reading alone in his room
or sitting outside in a garden chair with his hands clasped behind
his head staring out over the lake until the sun went down.
He hated the twilight. As soon as it grew dark, he went indoors
and switched on the light in his room. One evening the current had
failed and Quinto Navarra, who had returned to Mussolini’s service,
brought in a candle. 4But he couldn’t stand its low light,’ Navarra
said, ‘ so he went out into the garden until the electric light came
on again, and stood by the lake throwing stones into the water.’
Either his Italian physician or Professor Zachariae called on him
every morning to satisfy themselves that the diet they had recom
mended him to follow was having the required effect. He was exces
sively pale, Zachariae noticed, and his dark eyes were on occasions
almost feverish as they gazed out of a head that seemed curiously
4 Salvatorelli and Mira say that in all 700,000 Italian soldiers were sent to Ger
many during the war for various non-combatant duties and that 30,000 of them
died.
265
MUSSOLINI
gaunt. He had no more than a cup of tea for breakfast, a very light
lunch and dinner. He never drank milk although in the past he
had had as many as six pints a day. The plain uniform of the
Fascist Militia, which he wore habitually, though usually well
pressed seemed to hang about him, and the black collars of his
shirts were much too big, revealing his formerly massive neck as
lined and wrinkled like the neck of a tortoise. He took care to see
that his skull was always well shaved and twice a month a girl came
from Gardone to manicure his nails, but these were his only con
cessions to a personal vanity which had once been compulsive.
' Only rarely,' Navarra said, 1was he in a good humour, and these
rare moments were always followed by long, black hours of sad
ness.'
The month after his visit to Hitler in Prussia he decided to make
a tour of inspection of the front. Encouraged by the regimented
cheers that greeted him he spent five days touring the lines, giving
advice to the generals which they did not take and suggesting
counter-offensives which were obviously impractical. Kesselring
listened politely, but to Mussolini's annoyance made it clear that
his suggestions were not considered of undue importance. 'T h at
Kesselring,' Mussolini had already decided crossly, ‘is not worth
a fig.’
The cheers which had greeted him, however, from both Italian
and German troops, had an invigoratingly restorative effect. He
returned to Gargnano with new confidence and hope and told
Rachele over and over again how the soldiers had displayed their
spontaneous affection. The Germans in particular, he said, had
‘ gone wild with excitement and '—a seemingly incompatible reac
tion—‘ stiffened to attention in the cramped space of their dug-outs '.
But the mood did not last. Within a week he had relapsed into his
former despondency.
In June Otto Skorzenv went to visit him and found him lethargic
and pessimistic. ‘ Mussolini was really quiet,' Colonel Skorzeny says,
‘ and he seemed to me to have resigned completely. He was not any
more the strong chief directing his Ministers, but he let them go
their own way. . . . He seemed to be a philosopher and no longer
the chief of a Government. He talked to me about German history,
with which he was very familiar, and about the philosophical basis
of Fascism and how it would have to be changed in the future. He
tried not to show his pessimism to his family.' But he did not
succeed.
'A s the days passed he became more thoughtful than ever,’
266
Rachele said. ‘ I could tell by the way he talked from time to time
that the deadly struggle between Italians behind the lines was a
constant torment to him. Even at meals he sat gloomy and dis
traught. He would sometimes listen to me in silence and then ask
suddenly, “ W hat did you say? ” '
There was no doubt that this struggle, to which Rachele referred
‘as a constant torm ent’, had by the end of 1944 begun to assume
the proportions of a civil war.
10
THE CIVIL WAR
N O V E M B E R 1 9 4 3 - D E C E M B E R 1944
I have decided that the Party must no longer remain a

political organization but must become exclusively military.
L ong before the Social Republic came into existence the plans for
organized resistance to the Germans were being made. By the end
of 1943 clandestine Committees of National Liberation had been
established in most of the larger towns in northern Italy, and bands
of partisans had been formed. Composed of deserters from the
Italian Army, which had virtually disintegrated after the armistice,
of professional criminals and adventurers, of self-styled anti-
Fascists more interested in settling personal grudges than in help
ing to drive out the Germans, these bands were at first little
better than the 1groups of ruffians ’ which Mussolini was later to
call them. Soon, however, their character changed. They were
joined by sincere enemies of Fascism, by genuine patriots who saw
that in the defeat of Germany lay the only hope for their country's
future, and by regular officers who considered that the army of the
Social Republic which Graziani was trying hard to create would
never be more than a German satellite or even a police force for
the coercive imposition of anti-Royalist and Fascist measures.1
These officers gave to the partisans a sense of responsibility and an
aura of respectability, and one of them, General Raffaele Cadorna,
the son of Marshal Count Luigi Cadorna, a former Commander-
in-Chief of the Italian Army, ultimately became their leader. They
were, however, in no sense the real leaders of the movement, which
from the first was in the control of less disinterested hands.
1 Graziani’s difficulties were increased by the Germans* attempts to hamper the
creation of an independent Italian army which they could never bring themselves
to trust, and by their encouragement of the formation of several almost autono
mous units such as the Decima Mas which did not come directly under his control
and of various independent armed police forces which served the same purpose
of *divide and rule *. When it was decided that four divisions of Italian troops
should be formed, arrangements were made for them to be equipped and trained
in Germany. Hitler never made ftiy secret of the fact that he thought that Italy’s
contribution to the manpower of the Axis should be in labourers rather than in
soldiers.
268
THE CIVIL WAR
In November 1943 a meeting was held at Monchiero in Pied

mont which, typical of many others held that winter, revealed the
main direction that partisan activities were to take. At the meeting,
which was conducted by Luigi Longo, subsequently to become
deputy leader of the Italian Communist Party, it was decided that
the most effective way of increasing the power and influence of
their organization—the Volunteer Freedom Corps—would be by
inciting the Germans and Fascists to take reprisals against the
Italian people. German soldiers and Fascist officials were, therefore,
to be assassinated in order to provoke retaliation which would in
its turn provoke hatred. For the same reason bridges and railway
lines, electricity and telephone cables, must be blown up whether
or not they were of strategic importance.
From the first Communist influence in the movement was strong.
Soon it became dominating. Some bands were composed entirely
of Communists and were led by Party members with political com
missars on the Soviet model to ensure that they did not operate on
deviationary lines. Other bands, although only a few of their
number were Communists, were eventually obliged to accept the
appointment of a political commissar. These commissars ‘were
proposed and introduced by Communists ’, Luigi Longo said after
wards, ' and were at first opposed by all the others. They were not
understood save in the manner described by Fascist lies and libels.
The military officers saw in them an intolerable outrage to their
own dignity and prestige; the politicians recognized them as a
Communist innovation, designed to secure control of the bands and
to exploit them for Party purposes. . . . But we strove to the bitter
end to support the institution of political commissars. Gradually
they were introduced into nearly all the formations, even if under
other names such as that of representatives of the Committee of
National Liberation or of civilian delegates, but always with their
duties recommended by us.’ Even those bands who professed them
selves to be Socialist and called themselves Matteotti Brigades or
said they were royalists and gave themselves the dashing title of
Green Flames, were largely directed by the Communist-dominated
Committees of National Liberation some of whom went so far as
to advocate secretly that the arms and supplies which the Allies
parachuted to them should not all be used against the Germans
but that some of them at least should be concealed until the war
was over and the workers’ revolution began.
During the winter of 1943-4 the partisans began their work as
agents provocateurs. At first few incidents occurred. There were
269
MUSSOLINI
some isolated murders, acts of sabotage and reprisal; but the

Fascist régime in German-occupied Italy did not seem yet in any
real danger from its political enemies. On 23 March, the anniver
sary of the Foundation of Fascism, however, the Rome Commit
tee of National Liberation arranged for a massacre which was to
act as an inspiration to the committees of the north. On the after
noon of that day a rubbish cart filled with explosives was blown
up in Via Rasella beside a lorry taking a squad of German soldiers
to their quarters. Thirty-three Germans and a few Italian passers-by
were killed. As a reprisal 335 hostages were shot the following
day on the Ardea road and buried in the Fosse Ardeatine
caves.
The news of this outrage spread rapidly in Italy, and during that
spring and early summer the activities of the partisans in the
north were greatly increased and reprisals became more and more
savage. In May nearly a hundred miners were shot by the Germans
in a single small village; a few weeks later the execution of 400
prisoners and n o deserters was announced; shortly afterwards
2,000 men were forcibly deported to Germany for blowing up a
bridge over a river in Piedmont. The acts of sabotage increased
after the collapse of the Gustav Line and the fall of Cassino until,
at the time Rome was liberated in June 1944, they were of almost
daily occurrence. On 21 June Mussolini declared that the Fascist
Party could no longer remain a political one, but must become
*un organismo di tipo esclusivamente militare \ From 1 July all
members between the ages of nineteen and sixty who did not
belong to the Armed Forces of the Republic were to become armed
Blackshirts in order to safeguard ‘public order and the peaceful
life of the citizens against the cut-throats and those who were
collaborating with the enemy \
It was interpreted as a declaration of civil war. The outrages
which these Brigate Nere provoked and the reprisals which they
carried out against the partisans, although not on so extensive a
scale, were often as violent as those taken by the Germans. And
although it was the German SS who took reprisals in the grand
manner, massacring the entire village of Sant* Anna di Stazzema
in August 1944 and between 28 and 30 September killing almost
700 people at Marzabotto south of Bologna, the Brigate Nere were
guilty of many less-well-known acts of savage inhumanity. Com
posed for the most part of worse riff-raff than even the most
criminal of the partisan brigades, they performed their duties with
a high-handed insolence and cruelty, torturing prisoners without
270
THE CIVIL WAR
compunction as Blackshirts themselves were sometimes tortured

by the Communist partisans who captured them. Even when
the Germans managed to rally north of Florence and settled
down for the winter along the Gothic Line from Rimini to
Spezia, the violence behind the German lines was only slightly
abated.
Mussolini observed the increased savagery of Fascists and anti-
Fascists alike with gloomy concern, occasionally giving way to
outbursts of anger in which he would insist that the days for
mercy are p ast’. But despite these flashes of exasperation and
despite his call for more Brigate Nere, in the end he was forced to
come to the belief that the only hope for the Republic was an
attitude of conciliation. He instructed the Prefect of Turin to meet
General Operti, a former quartermaster-general of the Italian IV
Army and now a leading partisan leader, and to try to negotiate
an amnesty with him. The negotiations dragged on for some time,
but in the end only 57 partisan officers, who had already been
arrested by the Fascist authorities, accepted the terms of surrender.
Pavolini, Farinacci and Buffarini-Guidi were constantly complain
ing of Mussolini’s unrealistic belief in the possibility of a reconcilia
tion between Fascist and anti-Fascist and of his refusal, when the
time came for a final decision, to endorse the stern measures which
they proposed and to which earlier he had himself agreed. He had
issued a decree on 25 April 1944 providing that the death penalty
should be inflicted on all partisans arrested after that date, but he
granted at the same time a free pardon to any who surrendered
within a month and was afterwards easily persuaded to grant
pardons in other cases. Sometimes he would make a show of harsh
ness, but a day later he would relent and become forgiving again.
Giovanni Dolfin recorded in his diary the many occasions upon
which he intervened to save the life of a man condemned to death.
Known Communists he could not forgive, particularly those acting
under Tito’s orders in Venezia Giulia, and many of these were
executed as traitors, but when once a letter containing the names
of the leaders of various illicit non-Communist political parties
came into his hands, he did no more than make threats which no
one took seriously and which he himself had forgotten the follow
ing day. One of the names in this intercepted letter was Ferruccio
Parri, leader of the left-wing Partito d9Azione, against whom
Mussolini’s Minister of Justice had given repeated warnings. Musso
lini, however, refused to order Parri’s arrest, believing him to be
an 4honest man at heart ’, and the Minister exclaimed in exaspera-
271
MUSSOLINI
tion to Carlo Silvestri, ‘ How many times have I done my best to

save him! ' ‘He refuses to save himself/ Farinacci said on a
different occasion. ‘He can only succeed by ruthlessness, not by
conciliation/
In his efforts to win over the people of the north by the socializa
tion of industry he was no more successful. The laws which brought
about his policy of Socialism and which attempted to solve the
Republic’s economic problems would, he felt sure, ensure the sup
port of the northern workers. And when in early March the Rome
Committee of National Liberation ordered a general strike through
out the territories of the Social Republic he did not consider the
danger a great one. Certainly it was not the general strike that the
Rome Communists had wanted and asked for, but Mezzasoma’s
office was obliged to admit that several factories had had to close
down and that 250,000 men had come out, while the Communists
claimed that more than a million men were on strike. Urged by the
Germans to take drastic measures against the strikers, Mussolini
refused. He had had enough of Italians fighting Italians, he said,
and would not risk more of it.2
The danger of a full-scale civil war was not the only one caused
by the existence of a Fascist Government and the division of Italy.
There was the danger too that Italians might find themselves
fighting their own countrymen at the front. This fear seemed con
stantly in Mussolini’s mind. He marked on a map the movements
of Italian units fighting with the Germans and repeatedly asked
for information concerning units which Badoglio had made avail
able to the Allies. There were three Italian units still fighting the
Allies in Italy—the Barbarigo battalion on the Anzio front, a
Blackshirt battalion fighting Tito in Croatia and a Bersagliere
battalion fighting the Slav partisans on the Carso. Another Bersag
liere battalion was in action against the Germans, and Mazzolini
once heard Mussolini say how pleased he was to learn from
a communiqué broadcast by Bari radio that they were doing
well.
‘But they are Badoglio’s troops 1 ’ Mazzolini exclaimed in
amazement. ‘ They are fighting the Germans ! ’
*That widespread civil war might, in fact, break out in northern Italy was, so
the German Embassy believed, the Allies’ constant hope. The head of the political
section suggested that this was the reason why the Government offices on Lake
Garda were never bombed. The Americans knew exactly where each office was, he
said, but only the villas occupied by the German Ambassador or by German
troops were ever attacked. So long as a Fascist Government remained in power
the advantages of a festering opposition to it could be reaped by the Allies.
272
THE CIVIL WAR
‘They are Italians/ Mussolini said contentedly, ‘and they are

fighting bravely. That is all that m atters/
Mazzolini noticed how for the rest of that day the Duce was
almost happy. During the evening he seemed genuinely to believe
that the war might yet be won; but two days later, in conformity
with the predictable pattern of his life, he was depressed again.
11
THE FINAL MONTHS
D E C E M B E R 1 9 4 4 - A P R I L 1945
/ am like the captain of a ship in a storm; the ship is

broken up and I find myself in the furious ocean on
a raft which it is impossible to guide or to govern.
I n December 1944 Mussolini was raised to a pitch of exaltation

which lasted for several days. He had gone to Milan with Wolff
and Rahn for a brief visit when abruptly, and for once spon
taneously, his car was surrounded by a crowd of people cheering
him as vociferously as if he had just announced that the war was
over. Occasionally he was cheered at Gargnano, but he had never
been received like this. The crowds increased as the car drove
slowly on through the streets, until even anti-Fascist observers had
to admit that as many as 40,000 people were excitedly shouting,
' Duce! Duce! Duce!9 at the top of their voices. ‘ Had I not heard
the frantic cheering on the radio/ Rachele said, ‘ I could scarcely
have believed Benito's account of his experiences when he got back.
It simply cannot be true that the whole country is against Fascism,
or that everyone hates him /
‘ In twenty years of Fascism/ he told her proudly, *I have never
had such a welcome. For some odd reason General Montagna, the
Chief of Police, had not been told of my visit till the day before.
The proceedings at the Lirico were broadcast so that all Italy
suddenly knew of my presence. When I had finished speaking the
ovation was thrilling—an absolute triumph. As for the crowds,
they were like a tidal wave. It was wonderful to be among the
people, standing up in the car and to hear their shouts of loyalty.
He continued to speak of his reception for more than a week, and
the Germans professed themselves astounded by it. There was no
doubt, Rahn thought, that it had taken everyone completely by
surprise. ‘ It was an astonishing ovation/ It was the more surprising
because the speech which the Duce had made at the Teatro Lirico
was a far from powerful one. He spoke slowly from notes which
274
THE PRESIDENT AT G A R G N A N O
without his spectacles he had obvious difficulty in reading and

promised further reforms in politics and industry. He said that it
would soon no longer be necessary for workers to hold the Fascist
Party ticket and that soon other political parties would be recog
nized. But only when he spoke of the inevitability of German
victory and hinted at secret weapons of immense force did his voice
catch the accents of its former power.
He had been told something of these weapons when he had
visited Hitler in July, and soon after this triumphal visit to Milan
he went to Germany again to receive from the Führer a report on
them which drove him into a paroxysm of excitement. His train
stopped outside Munich and waited in a siding for Hitler’s train
to come down from the north. The two men greeted each other
with the warmth of their more happy days and drove away in a
car to see the new weapons—‘extremely delicate machines’, as
Mussolini afterwards described them, ‘ evolved by laboratory
research ’. He believed without question all that the Germans told
him about them.1 They would ‘ amaze the whole world ', he told
Major Fortunato Albonetti, commander of his bodyguard, ‘and
would alter the course of the war within a few days ’. Mussolini’s
excitement lasted all the way back to Gargnano, and Möllhausen
said that as he was driving down the lakeside road to Villa Feltrin
elli he shouted out cheerfully to a group of militiamen, ‘ Keep at
it, lads. We’ve won the war.’
It was his last show of confidence. As the bitter winter turned to
spring, he sank more deeply than ever into despair and relapsed
again into that ‘state of moral and physical collapse, absolutely
devoid of energy ’ which Professor Zachariae had described before
his final visit to Hitler. The details of government concerned him
less than ever, the intrigues, the petty squabbles and the discussions
about the immediate future of Fascism, hardly at all. In the past
he had occasionally made a successful protest against German
demands; now he rarely did. In his first year as President he had
resisted strong German pressure to replace the lira by the mark as
the Republic’s currency; later he had also successfully resisted
many demands for the dismantling of Italian industry and its
transference behind the barrier of the Alps. But now his resistance
was spasmodic and ineffectual, and the ultimate credit for keeping
1 He was always wonderfully credulous about secret weapons, as he was about
so many other things. When he heard that an Italian inventor was working on a
*death-ray * which would bring victory to Fascism, he was readily persuaded to
invest money in its development; and as early as February 1939 he was talking
of a secret weapon *which could affect the whole course of the war
*75
MUSSOLINI
the factories out of German control must go to the combined

efforts of the workers and employers themselves. For a time he
refused to replace the Chief of Police, Tamburini, who had given
offence to the Germans; but he did not maintain his refusal for
long and allowed Buffarini-Guidi to persuade him to give way.
When Count Mazzolini died of blood-poisoning following an
insulin injection, and Preziosi tried behind Mussolini’s back to
obtain the German Embassy’s support for his attempt to get the
vacant appointment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mussolini
said petulantly, when told of the intrigue, ‘W hat does Preziosi
want the job for anyway? He will never have anything to do.’
‘ One thing is certain,’ Hitler had written to him in his last New
Year’s letter, ‘and that is that neither Fascism nor National
Socialism will ever be replaced in Europe by Democracy.’ Musso
lini, however, no longer had patience with such claims or with the
people who made them. He heard of the activities of rebel Fascists
who were endeavouring to obtain German help for his overthrow
and to have him replaced by a new Fascist leader whose views were
sternly authoritarian and not tainted by Socialism; he heard that
others were advocating a faster slide into democracy; he was told
that Farinacci and Buffarini-Guidi were constantly reporting to the
Germans that Mussolini had become too soft to remain even as a
figurehead. But he heard these things with a calm which was close
to indifference. One day Farinacci’s newspaper Régime Fascista
carried the headline, ‘ Duce’s excessive kindness to Zaniboni,’ and
attacked Mussolini for permitting this man, who had tried to
assassinate him in 1925, to remain alive. Rachele says that he
brought the paper home with him from the office and threw it
down on the table with a tired comment that he would have found
it impossible to make in the days of his power. ‘Kindness,’ he
said, ‘ can never be excessive.’ Eventually, mainly on the pressing
insistence of Rachele, who had grown to hate him because of his
contact with the Petaccis, he agreed to dismiss Buffarini-Guidi from
the Ministry of the Interior; but he told one of his secretaries that
he had only dismissed him to gratify Rachele and to irritate the
Germans, not because he thought the Government would be
strengthened or his own position more secure.
He seemed drained of all hope. He had no illusions left. Pre
viously he had been able to retain them by succumbing to his own
propaganda that the Germans’ secret weapons and their new secret
army would soon turn the fortunes of war, that the Allies’ losses
were more than they could bear, that the discord between the
276
Russians and Americans would result in war between them, or at

least make it possible for him to make a separate peace with one
or other of them, preferring if it came to that, so he told both his
Finance Minister and Preziosi, that Italy should become a Soviet
Republic rather than an Anglo-American colony. But now he
derived comfort only from the reflection that even if the British did
win the war they would lose their Empire after it, just as he had
done. When his Ministers tried to give him encouragement, he
smiled at them ironically. When Graziani told him of his latest
quarrel with Kesselring he shrugged his shoulders with indifference.
One day after Mezzasoma had burst into his office to announce that
1wonderful news ’ had just come in of a successful German counter
attack on the Meuse, Mussolini remarked, without interest, as if
indeed he had not understood what the excitable young man had
said, ‘That’s good.’ And he made a gesture of dismissal, not
troubling to ask for any details.
On the anniversary of D ’Annunzio’s death he went to the Vit-
toriale and, standing beside the poet’s tomb, he made a sad, almost
despairing speech which one of his audience described as being
4short and mysterious, grave with a sense of tragedy '. His face was
pale and sad and *looked like stone ’, and the sky was grey and the
atmosphere oppressive. 4You are not dead, my friend,’ he said, 4and
you will not die so long as there remains, standing in the Mediter
ranean, an island called Italy. You are not dead and you will not die
so long as in the centre of Italy there is a city to which we shall
return—a city called Rome.’
4He lives by dreams, in dreams and through dreams,’ Mezzasoma
said. 4He does not have the least contact with reality. He lives and
functions in a world which he builds for himself, a completely fan
tastic world. He lives outside time. His reactions, his enthusiasms,
his breakdowns, never have any relation to life. They come at any
moment and without any definite reason.’
Sometimes, indeed, he talked and behaved as if he had in
fact become the mad poet which the year before he had claimed
to be.
The journalist Ivanoe Fossani has described a revealing interview
which Mussolini gave him at this time. It took place in the middle
of Lake Garda on the island of Trimellone under a night sky bril
liant with stars. A ferocious police dog was barking savagely, and
Mussolini went up to it and took its lower jaw in one hand so that
he could stroke it with the other. He gazed into its eyes, Fossani
said, as he told it to be quiet, and after a few moments it stopped
277
MUSSOLINI
barking and lay down at his feet and went to sleep, and Mussolini
began talking to Fossani. He spoke so fast and at such length that
when he had finished and went back to Gargnano in his motor-boat,
Fossani wrote furiously for three hours without stopping, in an
effort to record everything that Mussolini had said. Fossani him
self during the whole interview only spoke one word—‘T ell’—the
name of the police dog. 4I suspected from the beginning/ he said,
4that the sound of my voice would have damned the flow of talk
of a man who had decided to confess to the stars/
Away from the guards, and the Germans and the arguments of
his Ministers, the tantrums of his wife and the tears of his mistress,
Mussolini felt a sudden liberation which was close to delirium. 4If it
were a summer’s day/ he said, 41 would take off my coat and roll
in the grass like a wildly happy child/ He spoke of the stars, and
the mysterious power of the soil, of his dead son and his brother
Arnaldo, of the inconsequence of human life and of the life of the
soul. He spoke like a feverish prophet, spinning a web of argument
and fantasy and unrelated fact, catching a thread in one train of
thought to leap away to another, suddenly breaking through the
muddle of contradiction, extravagant metaphor and half-formed
ideas to make an observation of striking truth and clarity, or a
prophecy of deep prescience. He tried to analyse the reasons for his
successes and failures. He was not infallible, he said. He had made
mistakes. He could see them now and recognize them. It had not
been easy for he had been surrounded for years by idolators. ‘I
heard the word genius/ he said with a kind of bitter disgust, ‘a
hundred times a day/ But others had made greater mistakes, and
all his own would have been forgotten if the war, forced upon him
by the diabolical foreign policy of the English, had been conducted
by the Germans with restraint. The attack on Russia had been made
against his strong advice, and now Germany was almost destroyed
and the Russians would soon be in a position in Central Europe
from which it would be impossible to dislodge them. If the same
mistakes were committed in the East, China too would help to
strangle the world. 4How can England and America fail to see so
enormous a danger? '
This reference to the English aroused in him a fresh burst of
invective. He attacked them and the French for failing to support
him in his demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, for
the cancellation of war debts and reparations and in his stand
against Germany in the early 1930s. He attacked the King and the
reactionary Court which surrounded him, he attacked the hour-
278
geoisie who had infused a false spirit into the faith of Fascism, he
attacked the General Staff for betraying the soldiers, he attacked
the sordid industrial and financial groups who had outrageously ill-
treated the workers whom he himself had 4always loved and love
still. They are good and indestructible/ he said, 'an d infinitely
superior to all the false prophets who pretend to represent them /
And the thought of them brought a new mood of sadness. 41 have
been a prisoner ever since I was arrested in the King’s villa/ he said,
in a quieter voice. 'There is no longer any escape. To our enemies
we are those who must surrender unconditionally, to the others we
are traitors. . . . I have no illusions about my fate. Life is only a
short span in eternity. After the struggle is over they will spit on
me, but later perhaps they will come to wipe me clean. And then
I shall smile because I shall be at peace with my people/
He stood up at last and shook Fossani silently by the hand. And
as he walked back to his boat, the journalist, deeply impressed by
the calm dignity of this ‘great, unfortunate man in his hour of
tragedy ’, says that the police dog 4leapt on to a rock where it let
out a long, shrill howl ’.
But if it were possible to recognize the greatness of this tragic
figure in a moment of ecstatic pity beneath the purity of the stars,
it was more difficult to do so in the stuffy little room in Villa delle
Orsoline where most journalists saw him. One of these, Madeleine
Mollier, found a man she scarcely recognized, a man who looked
like a convict with his white face and shaven head and black, lack
lustre eyes. He was not so much resigned as humble. His resignation
and calm acceptance of his fate had an almost apologetic, self-
pitying air.
‘W hat do you want to know? * he asked her. ‘Seven years ago I
remember you came to Rome. I was an interesting person then. Now
I am defunct. But I am not afraid any more. Death is a thank-you
to God who has suffered so much. This morning in my room a little
swallow was trapped. It flew around desperately in the room until it
fell exhausted on my bed. I picked it up with care so as not to
frighten it, opened my window, then opened my hand. It did not
understand at first and looked around, before opening its wings and
flying, with a little cry of joy, out to freedom. I shall never forget
that cry of joy. But for me, the window will never open except to
let me out to death. And it is right. I have made mistakes and I
shall pay for them, if my poor life is worth the payment. I have
never made mistakes when I have followed my instincts, but often
when I have obeyed my reason. . . .
279
MUSSOLINI
‘Yes, signora, I am finished. My star has set. I still work, but

I know that everything is a farce. I await the end of the tragedy,
strangely detached from it all. I don’t feel well and for a year have
eaten nothing but slops. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. . . . Perhaps
I was, after all, only destined to indicate the road to my people. But
then have you ever heard of a prudent, calculating dictator? ’
He only derived comfort now, he said, from his books, the works
of the great philosophers. He did not want to do anything except
read and go on reading as he waited for the end.
‘ I have been dying,’ he said when asked a question about Ciano,
‘since that January morning when he too met his destiny. The
agony is atrociously long. I am like the captain of a ship in a
storm; the ship is broken up and I find myself in the furious ocean
on a raft which it is impossible to guide or to govern. No one hears
my voice any more. But one day perhaps the world will listen to
me/
To everyone who came to see him now he spoke in this way—
consciously tragic, sometimes mystical, occasionally obscure, often
lyrical. To the young French writer Pierre Pascal, who had trans
lated his Parlo con Bruno, he said : ‘ Have you noticed on your way
here this morning the violent colours of the lake? The deep blue?
I look at it when it is red at sunset or grey in the wintriness of the
dawn and I see it as if for the first time. The beauties of Italy are
profound.’ Then, changing the subject suddenly, not waiting for an
answer, he asked Pascal if he believed in God. He was not certain,
himself, and wished that he could be so. Darting from God to
Napoleon, to Charles Maurras, to the Italian painters, to Dante, to
D’Annunzio, he avoided any mention of politics until Pascal made
an observation about the necessity of uniting Europe so that it
could defend itself from the intervention of the English. ‘ That will
be the task of your generation,’ Mussolini said, dismissing the un
welcome thought of the English, who had contributed so much to
his ruin, ‘ and of the next one.’ He was not in the mood for a talk
about politics, and after Pascal had made a few remarks about the
partisans in Italy and the maquis in France the conversation came
to an abrupt end.
Another writer, Pia Reggidori Corti, found him equally unwilling
to discuss contemporary events. He preferred to talk of Mazzini,
Garibaldi, of philosophy and of sexual love. Every love died, he
said, sooner or later through the impossibility of lovers to under
stand each other; and when Corti replied that disillusion only came
when simple infatuation was mistaken for love, Mussolini referred
280
to Plato and ended the interview by saying that for his part he
was convinced that to live was to suffer.
He would even interrupt an important conference with his Minis
ters or the Germans to talk of philosophy or history or religion. On
6 April when the last offensive of the Allies had already begun,
when Massa had been occupied and the German armies were re
treating fast through Tuscany, he shocked Colonel Dollmann, who
was only concerned with the problems of withdrawal and surrender,
by suddenly saying to him in the middle of an urgent discussion,
‘Tell me, Colonel, do you believe in God? General Wolff does.'
12
THE GERMANS SURRENDER
F E B R U A R Y - A P R I L 1945
Surely I have the right to be at least

informed of what is going on.
U n k n o w n to Mussolini, Colonel Dollmann and General Wolff of
the SS had for some time now been negotiating with the Allies for
the surrender of the German armies in Italy. Their mediator was
Cardinal Idelfonso Schuster, the worldly-wise Archbishop of Milan,
who had been in contact with them since the beginning of Febru
ary, when he had suggested that to save Italy and to prevent the
useless sacrifice of thousands of men they should allow him to come
to terms on their behalf with the partisans. The partisans, the Car
dinal said, were growing more numerous and better organized every
day, and every day the Allies were sending them arms and supplies.
Colonel Dollmann discussed the Cardinal's suggestion with General
Wolff, and the two German officers agreed that Schuster should
send a representative to the partisan headquarters to see General
Cadorna. Schuster chose a tough, intelligent priest, Don Giuseppe
Bicchierai, who had been a military chaplain.
Meanwhile Colonel Dollmann arranged for Baron Luigi Parelli,
a former representative of an American business concern in Italy,
to be provided with a visa for Switzerland, where he was ostensibly
going for reasons of health. In Zürich Parelli stayed in the house
of a friend of his, Professor Hussman, Director of the Zugerberg
Institute.
One evening, soon after Parelli's arrival in Zürich, a man whom
the Professor did not know called at the house and said that he
had come to read the gas meter. To Professor Hussman's surprise,
Parelli introduced this man to him as Colonel Dollmann of the
German SS and suggested that he should get through to the Ameri
can Embassy and ask Mr Allen Dulles to come and meet him.
Dulles did not himself want to enter into the negotiations at this
stage, so he sent his assistant, Dr Gaevernitz, instead. Gaevernitz
met Dollmann at the Café Bianchi, where the German frankly ad
mitted that his name was sure to be on the Allied list of war
282
criminals and in exchange for its removal he would help to bring

about the end of the war in Italy.1 Gaevemitz was sceptical. He
doubted that Dollmann had either the intention or the influence
to arrange a surrender; and as a token of his power and goodwill it
was suggested that Dollmann should bring to the Swiss frontier
a prominent anti-Fascist held in an Italian prison. The German
readily agreed and asked Gaevemitz to name one. Gaevemitz said
that he would have to consult his chief and rushed back to Dulles.
‘Ask him for Ferruccio Parri,’ Dulles said, believing that Doll
mann would be sure to make excuses why this, the most important
prisoner in Fascist hands, could not be released. Just over a week
later Ferruccio Parri, his wife and Usmiani, another anti-Fascist who
had been under sentence of death in Verona, were in Switzerland.
On 8 March General Wolff himself came to Switzerland. He met
Professor Hussman in a compartment of the Chiasso-Zürich ex
press. Later he was introduced to Allen Dulles, who still made no
promises but intimated that Wolff’s future might well be assured
by a successful end to the negotiations. On his return to Italy,
however, Wolff heard that in his absence Field-Marshal Kesselring,
on whose good sense he had felt able to rely, had been flown north
with instructions to replace Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief West
and to keep intact the crumbling German front. Wolff did not
know how far he could trust Kesselring’s successor, General Vieting-
hoff; but he continued with the negotiations, hoping that Vieting-
hoff and the other Wehrmacht officers would accept what terms he
could arrange for them. On 19 March he met the British Major-
General Airey and the American General Lemnitzer close to the
Italian-Swiss frontier at Ascona on Lake Maggiore and discussed
with them the terms of surrender. But when he arrived back at his
headquarters, Wolff was again given unpleasant news. This time
Himmler telephoned from Berlin to say that the General’s family
and Frau Dollmann had all been brought under ‘the personal
supervision ’ of the Gestapo. General Wolff was forbidden to leave
Italy again, and Himmler would telephone now and again to ask
how he was and to give him news of his family. Wolff told Baron
Parelli that he would have to break off the negotiations, but Parelli
1 Dollmann teas on the list of war criminals. He was responsible for the estab
lishment of the Gestapo torture-chambers in the Via Tasso and the Pensione
Jaccarino in Rome and for the activities of the SS at the Hotel Regina in Milan.
He was also responsible for the shooting of the hostages on the Fosse Ardeatine.
Extremely intelligent and good-looking, he had been attached to the Rome Em
bassy since 1939 and before that had lived in Rome, where his mother, the
daughter of a Munich doctor, kept a pensione.
283
MUSSOLINI
dissuaded him, telling him that he ran a greater risk as a known

war criminal than as a suspected traitor. So Wolff agreed to main
tain contact with the Allies by means of a radio transmitter in his
aide-de-camp’s bedroom, and on the last day of March he obtained
Vietinghoff’s agreement to the surrender. But on 13 April he was
called to Berlin. He said good-bye to his friends and made his will.
Less than a week later, however, he was back in Italy. Himmler
had not wanted to commit himself and had told Wolff to make a
personal report on the Italian situation to Hitler. At half past four
in the morning of 18 April Hitler, already in the bunker at the
Chancellery, had listened to his report, as Wolff said later, in a kind
of dazed, exhausted silence and finally had spoken not of Italy but
of the chance that even now Russia might be separated from the
British and Americans. Wolff, himself, knew this to be most un
likely, as a guarded suggestion that the remaining Axis troops in
Italy should be allowed to cross the Alps unmolested so as to be
free to fight against the Russians had been quickly and firmly re
jected at the beginning of the negotiations by the Allied represen
tatives, who insisted that the Russian alliance was indissoluble. But
when he left the bunker, he felt that for Hitler the only remaining
hope was that his enemies would quarrel. Italy had already been
discarded from his mind.
W ithin a week of his return to Italy, Wolff had met the Allied
representatives at the Swiss frontier for the last time and had agreed
with them the final details for the unconditional surrender of the
German armies and the action he should take against any Wehr
macht generals who failed to conform to them. The day after he
got back from Chiasso, Wolff went with Dollmann to Cardinal
Schuster’s palace in Milan to meet the representatives of the parti
sans, who confirmed their acceptance of the terms agreed with the
Allies and told the Germans that the Committee of National Libera
tion for North Italy had given orders for a general insurrection
against Mussolini’s Government on 25 April. It was also confirmed
that a few hours before the insurrection was due to begin General
Wolff would rive Colonel Rauff, the Gestapo Chief in Milan, an
order forbidctmg SS troops to interfere in what was recognized to
be an Italian matter.
Of all this Mussolini was told nothing. Rumours, of course, had
reached Gargnano. General Wolff had himself hinted at some sort
of contact with the Allies in Switzerland at an unfriendly interview
with a stony-faced Mussolini as early as 27 February. And on 5
March in a conversation with Alberto Meliini, an official at the
284
Foreign Ministry, Mussolini admitted that he was suspicious. He

believed that ‘ Schuster was up to something \ and that the Germans
were in touch with the Committee of National Liberation in Milan.
But Rahn, while acknowledging that there was some sort of contact
between the partisans and the SS, protested that the subjects dis
cussed were confined to matters of a very limited sort and denied
that he, or any other German, was negotiating with Cardinal Schus
ter. The release of Parri, Mussolini was assured, had been ordered
purely in the interests of the Italian people, who would benefit by
the lessening of tension which such a gesture would bring about.
Mussolini accepted this assurance and told Meliini that he was not
opposed to the man’s release, but he could not believe that the
rumours he had heard about the German overtures were unfounded.
‘ I feel sure they are treating with the Committee of Liberation/ he
said. ‘ Rahn and Wolff would do well to tell me what they are up to.
Surely/ he added petulantly, ‘I have the right to be at least in
formed of what is going on/
On 13 March he decided to make an overture himself. He sent
his son Vittorio to Cardinal Schuster with a letter proposing some
sort of guarantee for the civilian population in the event of a com
plete German retreat from Italy and a withdrawal of Fascist forces
to a defensive position in the Alps. It was a hopelessly inadequate
gesture, as Cardinal Schuster realized, but the Apostolic Nuncio at
Berne was asked to transmit it to the Allied Forces Headquarters
at Caserta, where it was immediately rejected. Only unconditional
surrender would be entertained. Mussolini refused to consider un
conditional surrender, still reluctant to believe that the Germans
had in fact already agreed to it. On 6 April he received a report
that certain German units had received orders to prepare for an
evacuation of the country, but a day or two later he allowed General
Vietinghoff to persuade him that his allies would fight to the death.
Any rumours he might have heard about a German surrender, he
was assured, ‘ were spread by Allied propaganda \
285
13
T H E MO VE TO M I L A N
19-25 A P R I L 1945
I have gambled right up to the end and I have been beaten.
O N 13 April Mussolini received the Under-Secretary of the Interior.

‘Tell me,’ he asked him bluntly, ‘ what do you think about the
war now? ’
‘ There is no doubt/ the Minister replied, ‘ that it’s lost/
But, Mussolini protested, in Germany resistance was hardening;
every inch of ground was being contested.
‘The last spasms cannot affect the final outcome/ the Minister
said.
Mussolini became silent. And then he said softly, ‘Yes, you are
right. It is so. There is nothing else to be done/
This fatalism, broken by one last eruption of hope, was now to
remain with him to the end. Victory was at last accepted as being
no longer possible; his only thought was the manner of his
apotheosis. Some of his Ministers suggested a last stand at Trieste;
some, supported by the German commander of the Milan garrison,
General Wening, advocated a determined defence of Milan, which
would become an Italian Stalingrad; others felt that the myth of
Fascism would be more dramatically served by a fight to the death
in the Alps. On 14 April Pavolini came to a meeting at Villa delle
Orsoline to put forward his plans for this final gesture of faith and
defiance, which was to be made in the Valtellina north of Bergamo.
None of the Germans, including General Wolff, who were present
at this meeting raised any objections to Pavolini’s plans, and the
possibility of a German surrender was not mentioned.
Mussolini spoke little. He seemed prepared to accept Pavolini’s
decisions without question, thinking of other things, as if already
he were preparing himself for death. When Graziani spoke against
the final stand in the Valtellina and attacked Pavolini for not hav
ing made more detailed preparations, Mussolini said quietly, ‘ No
one is obliged to go to the Valtellina. Each one of you must decide
for yourself/
The following day when Father Eusebio, an Army chaplain who
286
THE MOVE TO MILAN
had had several conversations with him before at Gargnano, came

to see him for the last time, he spoke like a dying man making his
last confession. He was completely convinced of defeat. Father
Eusebio thought, and had a presentiment of his own violent death.1
‘ Say good-bye to me now. Father/ he said to Don Pancino, another
priest who visited him two days later. ‘ Thank you for the prayers
you say for me. Please go on with them, for I have need of them.
I know I shall be shot/ He gave the same impression of despair and
resignation to Dinale, an old revolutionary whom he had known
since his days in Switzerland. ‘ Gloomy and bitter presages of mis
fortune are in the air/ he told him, claiming to sense the same
portents of disaster in the atmosphere that he had sensed in the
air of Rome the day before his arrest. ‘I am crucified by my
destiny. I have provoked fortune and it has turned against me. The
believers—and I have never envied them as much as I do now—
would point to the hand of divine justice. For me the events are
merely historical. I have gambled right up to the end and I have
been beaten. I leave life without recriminations, without hate, with
out pride. Addio/
‘ Arrivederci/ Dinale replied.
‘No! No more illusions. Addio/
On 16 April the Ministers of the Social Republic met for the last
time. The next meeting, Mussolini told them, would be called in
Milan, which he said, with a final and unconsciously ironic
challenge to his enemies, thinking of his recent triumph there five
months before, must be ‘ Decemberized \ ‘ I have never liked this
cul-de-sac in which I find myself cut off from all contact with the
people/ he had confided to Meliini earlier. ‘Now Rome is lost,
Milan is the only capital of the Italian Republic/12
In the early evening of 19 April he prepared, ignoring the advice
of Wolff and Rahn, to leave for Milan accompanied by an escort
of German troops under Captain Otto Kisnatt of the Sicherheits
dienst and Lieutenant Fritz Birzer of the SS, a sad-looking young
man who was told not to let the Duce out of his sight for an
instant.
1 ‘ Poör Mazzolini/ he had said to his sister when talking of the Under-Secre-
tary’s death. *But he died in his bed, as he wanted to. Who knows where we shall
die and where our bones will be thrown? '
2Previously he had wanted to move the seat of the Government south to a more
central position at Monza, but the Germans had refused permission. They now
advised against leaving for Milan on the grounds that Lake Garda would be on
the main line of the Army’s withdrawal, whereas in Milan they would not be able
to provide the Fascists with adequate protection against the partisans.
287
MAP OF THE LAKE COMO AREA
THE MOVE TO MILAN
As the sun was setting Mussolini said good-bye to Rachele in the

garden of Villa Feltrinelli, saying he would be back for her later.
4He also mentioned the possibility of a last stand in the Valtellina/
Rachele said, 4I could not find it in me to argue with him / W ith
Edvige, his sister, he was more explicit. Germany was at the end
of her tether and after the war would be divided between the
Russians and the Western Allies. As for himself, he added, unable
even then to resist the pleasures of rhetoric, he was ready to 4enter
into the grand silence of death \
In Milan Mussolini established his office in a first-floor room in
the Prefecture at Palazzo Monforte, where for five days he received
an endless stream of visitors. The constant talk, the atmosphere of
excitement and almost of hysteria, had a restorative effect on him.
He had arrived nervous and depressed, hopelessly uncaring. By
20 April he was calm and almost confident. He even spoke of the
resistance in the Valtellina lasting for a month, which would give
him time to form a stable Government and to arrange for an
honourable peace. He energetically discussed the possibility of
establishing a new anti-monarchical front with the Socialists. The
journalist G. G. Cabella, who was accorded an interview on 20
April, found him 4in very good health as opposed to what people
were saying*. He looked fatter than when Cabella had seen him
last and seemed almost cheerful as he asked the journalist what
he could do for him. 41 would like a signed photograph/ Cabella
said, and Mussolini gave him one dating it proudly as was his
habit 4Year XXIII of the Fascist Era* as if the régime were close
to its birth and not its death. His career was over, he said, but
neither Italy nor Fascism would ever die.
4Do you really trust Schuster? * Cabella asked him.
Mussolini looked out of the window spreading his hands wide in
a familiar gesture, the palms towards the ceiling. 4He is a little
glib/ he said. 4But one must trust a man of God/
4And are there really any secret weapons? * Cabella asked him.
4There are/ Mussolini replied emphatically. 41 had news a few
days ago/ The plot against Hitler's life had put things back, but
the tide would soon turn. He told Cabella that he would like an
opportunity of correcting the proofs of his article before it
appeared in II Popolo di Alessandria, and some time later he was
discovered doing so with his accustomed care.
On 21 April when Rahn called to see him he was still4seemingly
imperturbable and serene \ But the Ambassador thought that he
saw in his eyes the knowledge of his tragic death. On the desk was
289
MUSSOLINI
a book of poems by Mörike. And it was, of course, a mood which

could not last. Every hour there came news of a military disaster,
a fallen town, a continued retreat. On 20 April he had heard that
Bologna had been overrun and had to cancel the plans he had
made to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Rome by a
speech to the people after High Mass in the Cathedral; on 22
April he learned of the advance along the Po and the fall of
Modena and Reggio; the next day news arrived that Parma had
fallen and contact was lost with Cremona and Mantua; in
the evening Genoa was occupied by the partisans and Fiume by
Tito.
W ith the enemy only sixty miles away and the Germans retreat
ing headlong before them, Mussolini could no longer hope for a
stand on the Alps lasting for a month. Graziani, indeed, insisted
that the whole idea from a military point of view was quite inept.
But Mussolini and Pavolini would not be dissuaded. It was not in
any case a military triumph that they wanted but a moral triumph
for Fascism. When Buffarini-Guidi advised the Duce to escape to
Switzerland or Spain, he angrily rejected the idea as he had
rejected the suggestion of Francesca Lavagnini, a former mistress,
who had sent a message from the Argentine urging him to join
her there, and as he had rejected the suggestion of Claretta Petacci
that he should allow her to stage a car accident in which, it could
be announced, Mussolini had been killed. He was angry, too, when
one of his secretaries and Dr Zachariae suggested he should fly to
Spain and when Tamburini proposed a flight to Polynesia. He was
determined to die in the Valtellina. He was finished but Fascism
was not. In a final speech to several officers who had been brought
to see him he spoke with a flash of his former power of ‘ Vimmor-
talità della patria e del Fascismo \
His family, however, must be got to safety. On 23 April he tele
phoned Rachele at Gargnano to tell her that he would come to
make arrangements for her flight to Switzerland. But a few hours
later he had to telephone again. Mantua had fallen, he told her,
and Brescia was threatened; he would not be able to get through.
She must go to Monza, where Barracu would meet her at the
royal villa. He would get in touch with her again there. He tried
also to persuade Claretta to escape, and went to see her at the
house in Milan to which she and her family had been taken by
Major Spögler. The rest of the family were planning to fly to
Spain; but Claretta could not be persuaded to go with them. ‘ I am
following my destiny/ she wrote to a friend, using one of her
290
THE MOVE TO MILAN
lover’s favourite expressions. ‘W hat will happen to me I don’t

know, but I cannot question my fate.’
Throughout 25 April Mussolini remained in Milan. Repeatedly
rejecting all ideas that he should fly out of the country, he appeared
placid and, on occasions, apathetic. Sometimes he would make an
angry remark about the Germans, the King or the English; but for
most of the day he worked uncomplainingly and unhurriedly,
collecting his papers together, receiving visitors, making prepara
tions for his journey north. There were rumours that he would
leave Milan that day, and during the morning Lieutenant Birzer
called to remind him nervously that he had promised not to leave
until Captain Kisnatt returned from Gargnano, where he had gone
to collect their men’s baggage. ‘The situation is very changed,’
Mussolini said coldly and told him to go to the Muti barracks to
fetch some lorries and petrol for their journey. He seemed upset
that Birzer should imply he had broken his word to Kisnatt, but
not in the least agitated by his own predicament.
During the late afternoon General Montagna, Chief of Police in
Milan, and Graziani called at the Prefecture to discuss plans for
all the retreating Republican troops to be reformed north of Milan.
But Mussolini told them that he was going to Cardinal Schuster,
to ask him to arrange a meeting with the leaders of the Committee
of National Liberation to find out their terms for a surrender.
He had decided that he would ‘spare the Army any further
sacrifice ’.
Soon after five Mussolini left for the archiépiscopal palace,
leaving Graziani to follow on later. The streets were strangely quiet,
the public buildings shut, most shops and offices locked and
shuttered. Earlier on in the afternoon the factory sirens had
screamed, announcing the beginning of the general strike.
‘ Mussolini entered my reception room,’ Cardinal Schuster said,
‘ with such a dejected air that the impression he gave me was of a
man benumbed by an immense catastrophe. I received him with
episcopal charity, and while waiting for the arrival of the persons
whom he had wanted to meet I tried to cheer him a little by start
ing a conversation.’
The conversation was difficult and spasmodic. Mussolini ‘ seemed
extremely tired ’ and indisposed to talk. Cardinal Schuster insisted
on his taking some refreshment as he was ‘ so very dejected ’, and
‘out of politeness he accepted a small glass of liqueur and a bis
cuit. . . . He was like a man bereft of will, listlessly accepting his
fate.’
291
MUSSOLINI
Only when the Cardinal begged him to spare Italy useless havoc
and to accept an honourable surrender did Mussolini momentarily
recover his strength of will. His problem was twofold, he said, and
would be carried out in two moves. The Army and the Republi
can Militia would be dissolved, and he himself would retire into
the Valtellina with three thousand Blackshirts to continue the war
in the mountains.
‘Duce, do not have any illusions/ Cardinal Schuster told him.
‘I know the Blackshirts who are going to follow you are rather
three hundred than three thousand as some would have you
believe/
‘ Perhaps a few more/ Mussolini admitted with grim resignation.
‘Not many, though. I have no illusions/
Even with three hundred, however, Schuster believed that Musso
lini would still go to his last ditch in the mountains. He was ‘ reso
lute in his determination ’, the Cardinal thought, and he did not
venture to reply. They spoke of other things, but the brief fire
in Mussolini had died, and it was the Cardinal who did most of
the talking. He spoke of expiation and atonement, of imprisonment
and exile; but Mussolini might not have been listening, although
once when Schuster mentioned Napoleon there was a glint of
pleasure in the tired eyes, and once when he spoke of God's forgive
ness they filled with tears. The Cardinal gave him a copy of the
Storia di San Benedetto and he accepted it gravely, carefully put
ting it into a brown envelope.
At six o’clock General Cadorna arrived with another delegate
of the National Liberation Committee, Achille Marazza, a lawyer
who was a Christian Democrat, and Riccardo Lombardi, an
engineer who belonged to the Partito d*Azione, was already there. A
few minutes later they were shown into Cardinal Schuster’s room
by Don Giuseppe Bicchierai. The Cardinal offered them his hand
so that they could kiss his ring. When they had done so he intro
duced them to Mussolini, who walked quickly towards them, smil
ing with what Marazza thought was a vague sort of condescension.
He held out his hand to each of them in turn, and uncertainly
they shook it. Then he sat down next to Schuster on a sofa while
the others remained standing.
There was an atmosphere of restraint and embarrassment which
increased when the Social Republic delegates, Graziani, Barracu
and Paolo Zerbino, the Minister of the Interior, joined them.
Mussolini was taking a part he had never learned to play and stared
intently at the heavy crimson damask on the walls, avoiding the
292
THE MOVE TO MILAN
eyes of the others. It was very quiet in the street below the partly
open window.
*Shall we sit down over there? ’
Cardinal Schuster pointed to a large oval table in the middle of
the room on which were several glasses, a decanter of marsala, and
a plate of biscuits. He sat himself at one end of the table next to
Mussolini. Cadorna and Marazza and Lombardi sat on their left;
Graziarli, Zerbino and Barracu on the right. Graziani, Cadorna
says, was looking very angry.
‘ Well, then/ Mussolini began in a sharp, impatient voice as if
the initiative were unquestionably his. 4Well, then. W hat are your
He had addressed the question to Cadoma, who, unwilling to

answer it, turned to Marazza.
4My instructions are limited and precise/ Marazza said. *I have
only to ask and to accept your surrender/
4I'm not here for th a t/ Mussolini snapped, turning indignantly
to Cardinal Schuster. 41 was told that we were to meet and to dis
cuss conditions. That’s why I came—to safeguard my men, their
families, and the Fascist Militia. I must know what’s to become of
them. The families of the members of my Government must be
given protection. Also I was assured that the Militia would be
handed over to the enemy as prisoners of war.’
Mussolini’s indignation rose as he spoke. He would have said
more had not Lombardi interrupted him to say, 4These are details.
I believe we have authority to settle them.’
*Very well/ said Mussolini in the aggrieved but reluctantly satis
fied tone of voice of a man who has won a point in an argument.
4In that case we can come to some agreement/
The discussion then began in earnest and at first gave promise
of success. The delegates of the Liberation Committee agreed that
the Fascist forces when taken prisoner would be treated in accord
ance with the rules of the Hague Convention, that the families of
Fascists should not be victimized and that diplomats accredited to
the Social Republic would be given the protection of international
law. But as Mussolini seemed by his unaccustomed silence to be
giving his assent to the Committee’s terms, when the matter of
war criminals was mentioned Marshal Graziani suddenly rose to
his feet.
4No, no. Duce! *he protested.4Let me remind you that we have
obligations of loyalty to our ally. We can’t abandon the Germans
and negotiate a capitulation independently like this. We cannot
*93
MUSSOLINI
signân agreement without the Germans. We can’t forget the laws

of duty and honour.’
‘ I am afraid the Germans don’t seem to have been troubled by
the same scruples,’ Cadorna said slowly, emphasizing each word
and looking at Mussolini as he spoke. ‘ We have been discussing
terms of surrender for the past four days. We’ve already agreed on
all details, and we are expecting news of the signed treaty at any
moment.’ Marazza had no doubt that the news was a great shock
to Mussolini. He appeared to wince as if he were in pain. ‘ Haven’t
they even bothered to inform your Government? ’ Marazza said
with a pretence of surprise.
‘ Impossible ! ’ Mussolini said angrily. 4Show me the treaty.*
It was not impossible, Zerbino interposed, for Don Bicchierai
had told him as much in the ante-room. Mussolini turned to
Cardinal Schuster, who later admitted to feeling annoyed that
Don Bicchierai had violated a diplomatic secret. ‘ It was useless now,
however,’ the Cardinal said, ‘to keep a secret which had become
common knowledge. . . . I explained that, in fact, General Wolff,
chief of the SS in Italy, was negotiating with me through the
German Ambassador and Colonel Rauff. Mussolini, giving way to
a sudden impulse of indignation, declared himself to have been
betrayed by the Germans, who had always treated us as their slaves.
He threatened to resume his freedom of action since, he said,
“ They have acted behind my back’’.’
Cardinal Schuster and Graziani tried without appreciable success
to calm him down while the discussion was resumed. But he was
obviously no longer in a mood for negotiations and he soon rose
to his feet to say that he would agree to nothing until he had had
an opportunity of talking to the German Consul. ‘ This time,’ he
said, ‘ we shall be able to say that Germany has betrayed Italy.’ He
asked for an hour in which to consider the Committee's demand
for surrender, and the delegates agreed to give it to him. He left the
room, so Graziani said, muttering threats to announce the
German betrayal on the radio. Cardinal Schuster saw him to
the ante-chamber and wished him good-bye and a safe
return within the hour. Mussolini answered him ‘with no special
interest ’.
Half an hour later the German Consul arrived and asked what
had happened. Soon he was arguing heatedly with several of the
Italians. Standing quietly in a corner was Carlo Tiengo, a former
Fascist Prefect of Turin, who had been asked by General Diamanti
of the Fascist Militia to try to find out what was happening. A
294
THE MOVE TO MILAN
quarter of an hour before Mussolini’s answer was due Alessandro

Pertini, the Secretary of the Socialist Party, burst into the room.
He had come from a meeting at the O.M. motor factory, where
there had been a riot of armed workers.
‘Where’s Mussolini?’ he shouted. ‘Why all this talk? Once
Mussolini has been handed over to us, two days will be ample to
set up a People’s Tribunal. Summary justice is what we need. We’ve
had enough of this chattering.’
While Marazza was objecting to Pertini's advocacy of violence,
Tiengo crept from the room and ran to warn Mussolini of his
danger. He found the courtyard of the Prefecture full of vehicles
and excited men rushing up and down the steps. Inside the noise
was appalling.
‘Where’s Mussolini? ’ Tiengo shouted, echoing Pertini’s words at
the archiépiscopal palace.
Someone told him that the Duce had gone into his office, turned
everyone else out, and locked the door. Perhaps he was going to
shoot himself. He had a revolver; he was in a wild mood. Dr
Zachariae had noticed how deathly pale and curiously contracted
his features were. When the German General Wening, commander
of the Milan garrison, offered him an armed escort, he had yelled
at him that the Germans were traitors and cowards and he would
rather die than ask for their protection.
Immediately on his return from the palace Mussolini had gone
up to a map on his table and pointing at it with a trembling finger
he had announced, ‘We leave Milan immediately. Destination
Como.’ It was not the most direct route to the Valtellina, but there
were reports that the Americans were advancing fast along the
Bergamo road and that the partisans had cut the road to Lecco.
No one knew what the Duce intended to do when he got to Como.
Perhaps, some of them thought, he would go on to Chiasso and
try to escape across the frontier into Switzerland; and others have
afterwards maintained that this was, in fact, his intention, and
that he was glad that the Germans’ betrayal had given him a
chance to do so with honour.
But Vittorio, like most of them close to him at this time, did not
think that he was considering escape. Earlier in the day he had
told his father that there were still some aircraft on the Ghedi
airfield and there was even now time to escape. The suggestion
seemed to infuriate him. He stood up and snapped at his son so
violently that Vittorio afterwards confessed, ‘The words froze
my blood.’ ‘No one told you to tell me what to do,' he said
295
MUSSOLINI
savagely. ‘I am going to meet my fate in Italy/ Vittorio found

courage to repeat his advice now; but again the idea was angrily
rejected.
Mussolini stormed out of his office, and in the corridor Tiengo
told him not to go back to the palace as his enemies would be sure
to kill him. Carlo Borsani, a devoted disciple who had been blinded
in Albania, begged him not to leave Milan, holding out his arms
to the Duce, with tears in his sightless eyes. Buffarini-Guidi and
Renato Ricci told him to accept Vittorio’s advice and fly to Spain,
while others called out, ‘Don’t go, Duce! Don’t go.’ A secretary
ran up to him with papers for him to sign, but he brushed them
away, not even looking at them. Someone advised him to try to
get through to his bodyguard, who were still at Gardone. Bom-
bacci, dressed in a black shirt and black breeches, said that the
scene reminded him of a day in Petrograd when with Lenin
he had watched the flight of Jadenic’s troops. ‘ The cannon made
the windows tremble,* he remembered. ‘It was much like this;
except this is worse.’
‘ They want to have another 25 July,’ Mussolini shouted, paying
no attention to any of them, infected by the hysteria around him.
‘But this time they won’t succeed. They won’t succeed! ’
He was wearing the uniform of the Fascist Militia, and there was
a machine-gun over his shoulder. He was carrying two leather bags
full of secret documents, which he gave with some money to Carra
dori, a trusted Blackshirt. He went up to Silvestri and Borsani and
embraced them both silently. Suddenly he stood back and an
nounced with melodramatic force, ‘To the Valtellina! ’ and then
he went down the steps to his car.
A squad of Blackshirts forced a path through the crowd, and
the convoy slowly set off down Corso Monforte and into Corso del
Littorio, making for the Como road. Luigi Gatti, Mussolini’s young
secretary, led the way, sitting on the bonnet of his car in a black
leather jacket with a machine-gun held between his knees. Behind
him Mussolini sat next to Bombacci in the back of an open Alfa-
Romeo, and then followed about thirty other cars and lorries. In
one of these, another Alfa-Romeo with Spanish number-plates,
Claretta Petacci travelled with her brother Marcello and his wife
and two children. Close behind were two lorries of SS soldiers
commanded by Lieutenant Birzer, whom General Wening, despite
Mussolini’s theatrical protests, had ordered to continue his
duties as escort. The last car of all was driven by Vittorio
Mussolini.
296
THE MOVE TO MILAN
Several Ministers of the Republican Government had decided to

remain in Milan, but most of them went after the Duce too.
‘Where are we going to? ' one of them asked Mezzasoma.
4God knows/ Mezzasoma said with prophetic gloom. 4Perhaps
to our death/
14
THE FLIGHT FROM MILAN
25-27 A P R I L 1945
7 shall go to the mountains. Surely it9s not possible that

jive hundred men cannot be found who will follow me.
M u s s o l i n i a r r iv e d i n Como a t a b o u t t e n o'clock.
He hurried up the steps of the Prefecture, where he intended

waiting for Pavolini, who had promised to bring three thousand
loyal Fascists to support him in his last stand in the mountains.
But the news at Como was not encouraging. The telephone was
still working and every few minutes it rang stridently in the corri
dor and a frightened voice would give an account of some new
disaster. All the Milan suburbs were in the hands of armed workers;
the Americans were still advancing; the Germans were in full
retreat. The Republican troops had been stopped from entering
Milan by groups of partisans who were blocking the Melegnano and
Treviglio roads. Mezzasoma telephoned the offices of the Corriere
della Sera and was told that the partisans had already taken the
building over. There was no news at all of Pavolini.
At about half past ten the Prefect's wife cooked supper and served
it in her husband’s office, but Mussolini could not eat. He listened
silently while his Ministers, close to panic, continued to give him
contradictory advice. Paolo Porta, Inspector of the Fascist Party in
Lombardy, said that he should wait no longer for Pavolini but
withdraw to Cadenabbia. Buffarini-Guidi urged him to join him in
an attempt to cross into Switzerland at Chiasso, where the frontier
guards would be sure to let them through. Graziani, who had con
sulted the commander of the German garrison in Como, said that
he thought a flight to Switzerland was out of the question. Then
General Mische of the Republican Army telephoned to say that he
was expecting the Duce at Sondrio.
‘ I shall go to the mountains,’ he announced finally. ‘ Surely it’s
not possible that five hundred men cannot be found who will follow
m e/
298
He appeared to be desperately concerned about his files. Apart from

the two leather bags of papers that he had handed to Carradori in
Milan, there were other documents in a lorry which had not yet
reached Como with the rest of the convoy. He sent back Gatti and
Colonel Casalinuovo to try to find what had become of them, while
he himself carefully read through yet another collection of docu
ments which he kept in two large brief-cases that he never let out
of his sight. Exactly what all these papers were no one knew nor
ever afterwards discovered, although several attempts to describe
them have been, and doubtless will be, made. Carlo Silvestri, who
had helped him fill two bags with them in Milan, believed they
contained much that would help the Duce’s defence in any trial
which he might have to face after the war. They included, he says,
proof of how much the Social Republic had done to save northern
Italy from the ravages of the Germans and from civil war; evidence
of the control which the Communists had gained over the activities
of the partisans, diplomatic papers concerning ‘ England’s responsi
bility for the war ’, papers about Umberto, Hitler and the trial at
Verona. They had certainly been selected with care. For several
weeks before he left Gargnano Mussolini had been gathering to
gether the most important and secret ones, and on the night of his
'departure for Milan one of his secretaries took a motor-boat on to
Lake Garda and threw overboard all those which he had decided
not to preserve.
When Gatti and Casalinuovo returned to Como to report that the
lorry had been intercepted by partisans on its way north from
Milan, Mussolini seemed more distressed by this calamity than by
any other. In addition to his documents, the lorry had also been
carrying part of what was later to be known as the ‘Dongo
Treasure’—gold bars, objects of art and money belonging to the
Social Republican Government or its Ministers and amounting, it
was afterwards suggested, to several thousand million lire.1 But
Mussolini showed a complete indifference to the loss of this treasure.
The loss of the documents, on the other hand, he mentioned
repeatedly during the remaining two days he had left to live.
According to a cashier at the Social Republic's Finance Ministry, this included

a large amount of foreign currency removed to Mussolini's office in February.
£2,675 in Bank of England notes, 2,150 sovereigns, 149,000 American dollars,
278,000 Swiss Francs and 18 million French francs were at that time placed in
Mussolini’s safe. As it is believed that most of this money eventually passed into
the hands of the Italian Communist Party, the Romans have called the head
quarters of the Party 1Palazzo Dongo * after the small lakeside town in which
Mussolini was arrested.
299
MUSSOLINI
While awaiting the return of Gatti and Casalinuovo, Mussolini

wrote his last letter to Rachele, who had left the royal villa at
Monza and was now with Romano and Anna Maria at the Villa
Monterò at Cernobbio, where several times he had tried to tele
phone her without success. It was two o'clock in the morning when
Rachele received the letter. She was lying on a bed in the villa
guarded by some Blackshirts, whom her husband had sent to Cer
nobbio for her protection, when she ‘ heard footsteps and excited
voices at the door'. A Blackshirt tiptoed into the room. ‘There's
a letter for you from the Duce,' he said.
‘ I started to my feet,' she remembers, ‘ and snatched the envelope,
recognizing Benito's handwriting and the blue and red pencil he
had been using lately for his private correspondence.'
She went to wake the children and read the letter with them.
Before destroying it she made them learn it by heart. So far as they
can remember, it said :
D ear R achele ,
Here I am at the last stages of my life, the last page of my book.
We two may never meet again. That is why I am sending you this
letter. I ask your forgiveness for all the harm I have unwittingly done
to you. . . . Take the children with you and try to get to the Swiss
frontier. There you can build a new life. I do not think they will
refuse to let you in, for I have always been helpful to them, and you
have had nothing to do with politics. Should they refuse, surrender
to the Allies, who may be more generous than the Italians. Take
care of Anna and Romano, especially Anna who needs it so badly.
You know how I love them. Bruno in heaven will help you.
My dearest love to you and the children,
Your
B en ito
Como, 27 April 1945 Year XXIII of the Fascist Era

She left the children to read the letter through again and again
while she asked a Blackshirt to try once more to telephone the Pre
fecture at Como. This time he managed to obtain a connection.
Gatti answered the telephone, but the receiver was taken from his
hand and she heard Mussolini's voice.
‘ Rachele, it’s you at last I '
His voice was quiet and resigned. He told her not to think of him
but of her own safety and the children’s. She had ‘never heard
him so apathetic ’.
‘ But what about your safety? ' she protested. ‘ I follow my des-
300
tiny/ he said using once more that self-consciously dramatic phrase.

*But you must take the children somewhere safe. I can only repeat
what I said in my letter. Forgive me for all the harm I have done
you. Your life might have been quiet and happy without me/
4There are plenty left who are ready to fight for you and Italy/
she told him in a hopeless attempt at encouragement. ‘You have
lots of followers and the men around you will do anything for you/
4They’re all gone, I’m afraid/ he said. 2*4I’m alone, Rachele, and
I realize quite well that all is over/
He asked to speak to the children, and Romano begged him not
to leave them.
Rachele took the receiver from her son to say good-bye again to
her husband. But as soon as she had done so, she decided not to
make straight for Switzerland as he had suggested, but to try to
see him once more at Como. When she arrived there he gave her
various papers from his carefully guarded collection, including some
letters he had received from Winston Churchill, which he hoped
would help her to get across the frontier.
4If they try to stop you or harm you/ he told her, 4ask to be
handed over to the English.’
At about half past four in the morning a German sentry, looking

across to the Prefecture in the early light of the dawn, saw Musso
lini come down the steps and walk across towards his car with
Bombacci, Marshal Graziani and some other Italians he did not
recognize.
Tired of waiting for Pavolini, Mussolini had decided to move
farther north along the lakeside road towards Menaggio, leaving
instructions for Pavolini to follow him. Lieutenant Birzer, however,
was determined that the Duce should not move without the escort
that he had been ordered to provide. On hearing a warning shout
from his sentry he ran to his car and drove it across the road,
blocking Mussolini’s way out of the square. He then went up to
the Duce, clicked his heels, saluted and said :
4Duce, you must not depart without an escort/
‘Please leave me alone/ Mussolini told him curtly. ‘I can do
what I want and go where I like. Get out of the way I ’
‘You must not go without an escort/ Birzer insisted, still stand
ing stiffly at attention.
301
MUSSOLINI
1Get out of the way/ Graziani repeated. ‘ The Duce can go where
he likes/
*Not without an escort, Marshal. Those are my orders/
A group of Italians forced themselves between the Duce and the
insistent German officer, but when some of Birzer’s men came up
behind Birzer, their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, the
Italians gave way. Again Birzer clicked his heels, saluted and said,
‘ You must not depart without an escort, Duce/
And at last Mussolini gave a tired gesture of resigned acceptance.
He arrived at Menaggio in a dreary drizzle of rain at about half
past five in the morning. With his machine-gun still slung across
his back and his head bent low between his shoulders he walked
up and down for a few minutes in front of a school which had been
turned into a barracks for the Blackshirts and then went to the villa
of Emilio Castelli, secretary of the local Fascist Party, where he lay
down and tried to sleep. While he was resting the other cars and
lorries that had followed him from Como drove into Menaggio
escorted by several companies of Republican soldiers and two
armoured cars equipped with 20mm. machine-guns. The long con
voy came to a halt behind Birzer’s lorry. Claretta Petacci was in one
of the cars, and Colonel Casalinuovo took her to Mussolini at the
Villa Castelli.
Luigi Gatti, afraid that the concentration of so large a number of
vehicles would soon be reported to the partisans, ordered most of
them to go back a little way down the road to Cadenabbia. The
order was obeyed reluctantly. ‘ We have come to die with the Duce/
someone shouted. Another man was heard to grumble loudly, as he
turned his truck round in the narrow road, that the Duce had aban
doned them and wanted to escape alone across the frontier into
Switzerland. It was a growing apprehension. Birzer felt certain that
this was what the Duce intended to do when, after three hours’ rest,
he came out of the Villa Castelli and gave the orders for the remain
ing vehicles to move off the lakeside road to the village of Grandola,
where they would not be so conspicuous while they waited for Pavo-
lini’s force of loyal Fascists to join them. Grandola is only fourteen
kilometres from the Swiss frontier, and as soon as Mussolini had
given the order for the convoy to go there Birzer went up to him
and asked, stiffly courteous as ever but with evident suspicion,
‘Duce, where are we going now? *
‘Follow me/ Mussolini said, ‘and you’ll find out.’
The Italian cars drove very fast up the steep and winding road
into the mountains, and Birzer had difficulty in keeping them in
302
sight. On the outskirts of Crandola one of the Alfa-Romeos in the

Italian convoy turned sharply off the main road and raced up a
narrow track towards an isolated villa. Birzer could not see whether
or not the car was Mussolini's, but he suspected that it was and felt
suddenly afraid that the Duce had escaped him. A minute or two
later he was surprised and relieved to find him in the hall of the
Miravalle Hotel. He had been walking in the garden with Claretta
Petacci and three of his Ministers when a German sentry had in
sisted that they return indoors.
By the early afternoon the grounds of the hotel were packed with
vehicles and the hotel itself was crowded with nervous and excited
Fascists asking each other what on earth had happened to Pavolini.
Mussolini had seen him for a few minutes during the morning in
Menaggio, but no one was sure what they had said to each other.
It was known that he had collected together between two and three
thousand Blackshirts from all over Lombardy and from as far away
as Turin and Alessandria and that these men, many of them with
their wives and children, were now concentrated around the
Stazione della Ferrovia Nord in Como. But Pavolini had had more
than enough time to return there and bring these Blackshirts back
with him; and yet nothing had been heard of him for more than
four hours.
While the others anxiously ate a hurried meal, Mussolini con
tinued to sort through his documents, annotating them carefully,
picking out those which dealt with the negotiations between the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swiss Government concerning
a free passage across the frontier for the families of his Government
officials and staff.
It was a wet and miserable afternoon, dark and foreboding. In the
hotel the wireless was turned on constantly, and occasional broad
casts gave news of a general uprising of the people of the north of
Italy, the collapse of resistance all along the front and of the
enemy’s advance. To escape from the depressing atmosphere Musso
lini went out into the garden to walk bareheaded in the rain with a
young girl who had joined the convoy at Como. She was Elena Curti
Cucciati, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of Angela Curti, his
former mistress who had warned him so anxiously and so vainly
about the plots to overthrow him. His pleasure at seeing Elena and
the comfort which her company obviously gave him drove Claretta
to a passionate outburst of jealousy. When he returned to the hotel
she screamed at him, ‘W hat is that woman doing here? You must
get rid of her at once. You must! You must! '
303
MUSSOLINI
He tried to calm her, but she went on screaming hysterically, and

a group of people collected outside the dining-room window. One of
them saw Mussolini’s tortured face as he strode across to the window,
shut it violently and shouted,4Stop I’ in a voice not so much angry as
despairing. She turned towards him and in doing so slipped on the
carpet and fell, bruising her knee. He left her sobbing uncontrol
lably and went out into the garden again.
In an effort to give him hope Elena Curri Cucciati offered to go
back to Como on a bicycle to find out what had happened to Pavo-
lini. If he did not come soon, he had told her, everyone would desert
him; several of those who had followed him from Como and Milan
showed signs of doing so already. He continued to insist that Fas
cism must be saved by the example of a last stand in the mountains,
but there were not many left who agreed with him now. When
Buffarini-Guidi, who had taken to smuggling after his dismissal
from the Government and knew the Grandola route well, said that
he would try to break across the frontier into Switzerland through
Porlezza, two of those who had previously agreed to go to the
Valtellina, Angelo Tarchi and Fabiani, protested that they were not
going to run the risk of falling into the hands of the partisans and
agreed to go with him. Provided with false passports, they left soon
after two o’clock without wishing Mussolini good-bye. Graziani also
did not wish him good-bye when he left during the afternoon to
join an Army unit at Mandello. They would soon all go, he said to
Elena Cucciati, and there would be no one left but himself.
In the dining-room of the hotel a Blackshirt suggested that those
who were still left ought to follow Buffarini-Guidi’s example and
ask the Swiss authorities to protect them until the Allies arrived
and they could give themselves up to them. The frontier, however,
was closed. Rachele and the children had already been turned back
at Chiasso and been forced to return to Como; now Fabiani came
running back to the Hotel Miravalle to say that the car in which
he had been hoping to get through into Switzerland with Buffarini-
Guidi and Tarchi had been stopped at Porlezza by frontier guards
who had joined forces with the partisans. He had managed to
escape, but the others had been captured.
Mussolini asked Lieutenant Birzer to go to their help, but Birzer
said his orders were to protect the Duce and he was not concerned
with anyone else. Recriminations, threats and insults flew round
the room as its frightened occupants argued about what they should
do. Mussolini took no part in these angry discussions, but continued
sorting out his documents; and then as the light of the dismal after-
304
Making a speech from the balcony at Palazzo Venezia
Claretta F
Walking out of the Albergo-
Rifugio after his rescue in
September 1943
Dmed by Hitler in East

sia in September 1943
noon began to fail he called to Lieutenant Birzer and told him that
he had decided to wait no longer for Pavolini, but to go back to
Menaggio and then north along the lakeside road towards the
Valtellina. They would leave a message for Pavolini’s men to meet
them in Merano. Birzer did not agree. He said with cold respect
that his men were worn out and that they should not be asked to
break through the blockades which the partisans would surely have
erected north of Menaggio until they had had some sleep. W ith a
shrug of resignation Mussolini gave way and ordered them all to
stay the night at Grandola and to move off to Menaggio at five
o'clock in the morning. Pavolini’s three thousand men would have
got there by then, he said. He spoke without conviction, and no
one believed him.
In the early hours of the morning of 27 April Pavolini arrived
in an armoured car from Como. It was still raining, and as he came
into the hotel Elena Cucciati remembers how the water dripped
down his white face. The Blackshirts in Como had signed a sur
render with the partisans. He had only been able to bring a few
men with him.
‘ How many? * Mussolini asked him anxiously.
Pavolini hesitated.
1Well, tell me. How many? ’
1Twelve/
It was the end of hope.
Soon afterwards Mussolini allowed Lieutenant Birzer to arrange
for him and his few remaining followers to join a German convoy,
of about forty trucks commanded by Lieutenant Fallmeyer, retreat
ing north along the lakeside road towards Innsbruck.
Mussolini, driving himself in his Alfa-Romeo, followed Birzer;
Pavolini, threatening to shoot his way through any road blocks the
partisans might have erected on the road, drove in the armoured
car with Barracu, Bombacci, Casalinuovo, Pietro Salustri, a young
officer in the Air Force, Idreno Utimperghe, a Blackshirt, Elena
Curti Cucciati and Carradori, who was still clutching the two
leather bags of documents and money which Mussolini had given
him in Milan. Marcello Petacci and Claretta were farther
behind in the car which ostensibly belonged to the Spanish
Ambassador.
For a few miles the convoy drove north without being challenged.
Mussolini had recovered his confidence. ‘With two hundred Ger
mans/ he said, ‘ we can go to the top of the world/ On the far side
of Menaggio his car slowed down, and he leaned out of the window
305
MUSSOLINI
and called to a man walking along by the side of the road, 4Are
there any partisans round here? *
There were partisans everywhere, the man said.
The convoy moved on again, but after about a few hundred yards
Mussolini stopped his car and walked back to Pavolini, who sug
gested that the Duce would be safer in the armoured car. Mussolini,
after consulting Birzer, agreed and climbed in. Once more the con
voy moved on. The lakeside road was unnervingly quiet. The men
in the armoured car sat hunched up in silence. And then suddenly
at seven o’clock in the morning about six miles north of Menaggio
three shots rang out, and a moment later the convoy was halted by
an enormous tree trunk and several boulders which had been
dragged across the road. To the right was the lake, to the left an
immense and thickly wooded wall of rock which was known by
the name, aptly ironic, of the Rocca di Musso.
Fire opened again on the armoured car both from the mountains,
where the partisans had placed two 12mm. machine-guns, and from
a bend in the road in front. The guns of the armoured car returned
the fire, killing one of the partisans, a builder’s foreman, and then
a white flag was waved violently above the tree trunk and three
men advanced towards the convoy. Two of them were partisans,
the third was a German-Swiss, Luigi Hoffmann, who lived on the
shores of the lake in a villa which belonged to his wife, the daughter
of a rich silk-manufacturer from Como.
As the three men approached Barracu got out of the armoured
car and went up to talk to them with Fallmeyer and Birzer. Using
Hoffmann as his interpreter, one of the partisans, Davide Barbieri,
a captain in the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, told the German officers
that to save unnecessary bloodshed he would allow their soldiers
through the road block, but that his men had orders to let no Fascists
through. Fallmeyer protested and asked to speak to the local parti
san commander. Barbieri said that he would merely get the same
answer, but if he wanted to speak to him he could go to the Com
mand Headquarters at Morbegno to do so.
The partisan captain was playing for time. His men were no
match, he realized, for the well-armed Germans if it came to a
serious fight, for most of them only had shot-guns. An hour or two’s
respite would give an opportunity for other partisan units to come
to their help. The Germans did not want to fight either. For them
the war in Italy was over, and they were anxious to return home.
One of them, a Protestant pastor in civilian life, went up to
Don Mainetti, the parish priest, who had come down from his
306
church at the sound of firing, and asked him in Latin to see what
he could do to arrange a safe transit, ‘in the name of Christian
charity ’.
Were there any Italians in the lorries? the priest asked him.
The soldier did not reply, but one of the German officers gave
Don Mainetti his word of honour as a soldier that there were not;
and the priest said that he would do what he could. As he was
leaving, however, another soldier came up to him, an Austrian
Catholic who had been educated at Padua, and whispered in Italian,
‘There are Italians. Don’t believe the officer. Have the lorries
searched.’
The priest went up the path into the mountains to the local
partisan headquarters. But when he arrived there he was told that
the matter was now in the hands of the Command Headquarters at
Morbegno and there was nothing to be done until further orders
were received.
It was eight o’clock when Fallmeyer left for Morbegno, and it was
not until after two that he returned to Musso. In those six hours of
waiting the Italians in the convoy became more and more anxious
and distraught. Pavolini proposed that they should shoot their way
through; someone else suggested they ought to turn back and try
to get round the road block by another road; but most of them
thought that it would be madness to try to do anything until Fall
meyer got back. As the morning wore on, however, and the German
officer did not return, some of the Fascists decided to seek the help
and protection of the parish priest. Don Mainetti had returned from
the mountains and was just about to have his midday meal when a
man came up to his house and said, *I am Bombacci. I am ready to
give myself up to the partisans. Will you help me, Father? ’ Bom
bacci later told his captors that he had become disillusioned with
Mussolini at Menaggio because he believed, as Lieutenant Birzer
did, that he had planned to make his escape into Switzerland alone
with Petacci and that only when he had been given proof that the
frontier was impassable did he make an attempt to get to the Vai-
tellina. Several others of the Duce’s followers believed that Bom-
bacci's suspicions might be justified. And his example in giving
himself up to the protection of the parish priest ‘ was soon followed
by others ’, so Mainetti told his bishop afterwards. ‘ In my dining
room ’, his report went on, ‘ were gathered the Ministers Zerbino,
Augusto Liverani, Fernando Mezzasoma, nervously wiping his spec
tacles, and Ruggero Romano with his fifteen-year-old son Constan
tino. . . . It was now past one o’clock. I managed to get some soup
307
MUSSOLINI
for the fugitives. Partisans arrived at the house with Captain Bar
bieri in command. Barbieri tries to discover if Mussolini is in the
lorries. Romano says he was with us in Menaggio, but since then
he has vanished. Bombacci, however, approaches my sister and says,
“ He is with us. It is not fair that he should get away.” *
He was making no attempt to do so. He sat in the armoured car,
reading his documents and listening to the intermittent broadcasts
of news on the wireless, deriving a brief hope from the report that
he had been arrested in a town far away from Musso. Elena Curti
Cucciati has described how, while he sat calmly waiting for Fall-
meyer to return, a small figure in blue overalls and a crash helmet
appeared at the window of the armoured car. Elena thought it was
a boy and wondered what he was doing there until the helmet was
removed, long black hair tumbled down around a woman’s anxious
face and she recognized Claretta Petacci with her ‘beautiful
luminous eyes’. Mussolini spoke to her ‘tenderly’ as he tried to
comfort her.
While he was still talking to Claretta in a low voice, Fallmeyer
returned to the armoured car and told him that he had not been
able to negotiate a passage for the Italians, but that all the German
lorries could pass through provided that it was agreed that they
should be searched at Dongo to see if any Fascists were hiding in
them. Birzer suggested that Mussolini should put on a German
soldier’s overcoat and get into the back of one of the trucks. Trans
lating for the others Mussolini said, ‘ He says I could get through
too, disguised as a German.’
‘ Go on, Duce,’ Claretta said immediately. ‘ Go on, save yourself.’
She was almost in tears.
But he did not want to move. He thought that Fallmeyer had
perhaps made a deal with the partisans, agreeing to hand him over
to them in exchange for a free passage back to Germany for himself
and his soldiers.
‘ I’m afraid we’ve been betrayed, Lieutenant,’ he said to Birzer.
‘No, Duce. Put on a German overcoat and helmet and hide in
one of Lieutenant Fallmeyer’s lorries. They will be searched, but it
is your only hope.’
‘ Very well. But remember your orders are to defend me.’
‘Of course, Duce.’
Birzer walked away to separate the Germans from the Italians.
When he returned Mussolini was still in the armoured car, and
Claretta Petacci was sitting on the roof, crying bitterly.
‘ Lieutenant,’ Mussolini said angrily as Birzer came up to him.
3 °8
‘If my Ministers cannot have the same protection that you are
affording me, I refuse to move.’
‘But, Duce, it is impossible. The conditions are signed. All
Italians must remain behind/
‘ But at least my friend can come with me/
‘ That is impossible as well/
Mussolini remained seated, his mouth set in a stubborn line,
refusing to move. But after Birzer had left to bring the lorry, in
which Mussolini was to hide, alongside the armoured car, the others
persuaded him to change his mind. When Birzer drove up with the
lorry and said, ‘Duce, this is your last chance/ he climbed out
silently and, helped by Carradori, he put on the German overcoat
and helmet and stepped up into the lorry.
As it drove away Claretta ran after her lover and frantically tried
to jump onto one of the other lorries, and Birzer had to use all his
strength to drag her off the tail-board.
So Mussolini went on into Dongo alone. The partisans, warned
of his presence in the convoy by a bicyclist who had seen him in
the armoured car and by Don Mainetti, were waiting for him in the
square.
309
15
THE CAPTURE
27 A P R I L 1945
/ never want to see a German uniform again.
I t was about three o’clock when Mussolini, crouching in the

back of a German lorry, was driven away towards Dongo.
Marcello Petacci’s car with its diplomatic badges and the Spanish
flag flying from its bonnet was the only Italian one permitted to
follow.
As soon as the Germans had driven away the partisans came
cautiously forward to capture the Ministers and offlcials who were
still standing by the other cars in the road. Most of them sur
rendered without a struggle. The Ministers in the priest's house
also allowed themselves to be arrested, but those in the armoured
car were still determined to resist.
As the Germans drove past him, Barracu, his face a fearful white,
stood up in the driver’s seat shouting ‘Cowards! Traitors! ’ at the
top of his voice. Then he disappeared behind the armour, and with
considerable difficulty the heavy vehicle turned round on the
narrow road; but as soon as it had succeeded in doing so the parti
sans opened fire on it again and one of them threw a grenade
beneath its wheels. For a few moments the armoured car returned
the fire until a white rag was pushed up through its turret and
Pavolini jumped out and ran down towards the lake, shouting to the
others to follow him and throw everything into the water. Carra
dori, his arms full of papers, ran after him. They both dived in
and swam under an overhanging part of the bank where the
partisans could not see them.
The others did not get so far. Casalinuovo and Utimperghe were
caught before they had covered a few yards, and Barracu was shot
in the leg. An hour later Carradori and Pavolini were dragged out
of the lake, after a struggle in which both of them were wounded,
and were sent on to Dongo.
Mussolini was already there. The inspection of the lorries had
3 xo
THE CAPTURE
begun. Accompanied by Fallmeyer, the partisans started with the

one in front, but they found nothing suspicious there nor in the
one behind it. Sitting near the driver in one of those farther back,
however, a partisan, Giuseppe Negri, who had once been a sailor,
found a German soldier who appeared to be either drunk or asleep.
He was squatting beside two tins of petrol, wearing a German steel
helmet and the overcoat of a corporal in an anti-aircraft unit.
According to another partisan—one of those ten people who after
wards claimed for themselves the honour of being the first to dis
cover him—the man was also wearing large dark glasses. Negri had
not troubled to climb inside the other lorries, but, pushed forward
by a sergeant of the customs guard, he went into this one and
looked more closely at the man crouching down at the front of it.
He noticed a machine-gun between his knees, and when the other
German soldiers said that he was a drunken comrade he affected
to believe them. He jumped down from the lorry and ran away
to find the deputy political commissar of the brigade, Urbano
Lazzaro.
4Come here/ he shouted to Lazzaro as soon as he saw him. 41
think it's him /
Lazzaro ran over to the lorry and climbed up into it. He pushed
his way through to the front where the figure in the corporal's
overcoat was squatting. 4Aren't you an Italian? ' he asked. There
was a slight pause and then Mussolini looked up and said emphati
cally, 4Yes, I am an Italian.’
‘Excellency! ' Lazzaro exclaimed, so taken aback by the Duce's
suddenly directed gaze that the deferential title escaped from him
unthinkingly. ‘You are here! ’
Mussolini's ‘face was ashen’, Lazzaro noticed. ‘It was also
expressionless. The stubble on his chin was dark and thick, accen
tuating the pallor of his cheeks. The whites of his eyes were
yellowish. One read by his eyes that he was extremely tired, but
not afraid. Spiritual death. He no longer had anything to do
among men.’
He had told the German soldiers not to risk their lives by
attempting to save him from capture, and he made no attempt
himself to use his gun. Helped by Lazzaro he stumbled out of the
lorry and did not protest when the gun was taken from him or
when the German helmet was removed from his head. The crowd
of people in the square began to cheer when they realized who the
prisoner was.
4Have you any other weapons? ’ Lazzaro asked him. But Musso-
311
MUSSOLINI
lini did not answer him, so the partisans searched him and took
from his pocket a loaded revolver. Again he made no protest. When
a partisan tried to take from him his two brief-cases, however, he
turned round sharply. ‘Be careful/ he said, ‘those cases contain
secret documents of great importance both historically and for the
future of Italy/
It was an isolated outburst. He seemed resigned and broken and
looked weak and old and ill. As he walked across the square to the
mayor’s office in the handsome but crumbling building beneath
the overhanging slopes of Monte Bregagno, Lazzaro said to him,
‘ Keep calm, we will not hurt you/
The mayor, Dr Giuseppe Rubini, also tried to comfort him.
‘ Don’t worry/ he said, ‘ you will be all right.’
‘I know,’ Mussolini replied with a sort of ingratiating conde
scension. ‘The lake people are kind-hearted.’
He was allowed to sit down in the mayor’s office and the parti
sans and townspeople crowded round him asking questions which
he answered with indignation, offended pride or a misguided eager
ness to please.
‘Why did you betray Socialism?’
‘ I did not betray it. Socialism betrayed itself.’
‘Why did you murder Matteotti? ’
‘ I had nothing to do with that.’
‘ Why did you stab France in the back? ’
‘ It would take too long to explain why Italy had to enter the
war.’
‘ Did you make the speech after your release from the Gran Sasso
of your own free will, or were you forced to make it? ’
‘ It was forced on me.*
‘ Why did you allow such stern measures to be taken against the
partisans? Some were tortured, did you know that? ’
‘ My hands were tied. There was very little possibility of opposing
Kesselring and Wolff in what they did. Again and again in conver
sation with General Wolff I mentioned that stories of people
being tortured and other brutal deeds had come to my ears.
One day Wolff replied that it was the only means of extract
ing the truth, and even the dead spoke the truth in his torture-
chambers/
The questions were thrown at him one after the other, and he
answered them all. Talking made his mouth dry, and he asked for
a drink. He was given a glass of water and then a cup of coffee. He
drank eagerly and then fell into silence with his hands on his knees,
312
THE CAPTURE
staring at the wall. He had taken off the German greatcoat and
thrown it to the floor and sat bareheaded in the uniform of the
Fascist Militia.
Outside the German convoy was allowed to continue its journey
to the north, and soon afterwards one of the partisans’ political
commissars, Francesco Terzi, sent a message in the opposite direc
tion to Como to report the capture of Mussolini and to ask the
local Committee of National Liberation what should be done with
him.
It was now about half past three. It would be some time before
the partisan who had gone to Como could be expected to return
with the instructions of the Committee of National Liberation.
The young partisan commander in Dongo, Count Pierluigi Bellini
Delle Stelle, decided that he would have to move his important
prisoner to a safer hiding-place in case an attempt was made to
rescue him. By seven o’clock he had made up his mind to take
Mussolini farther up the mountainside, to the frontier guards’
barracks at Germasino.
A heavy rain was falling again now, and it had become much
colder. One of the partisans guarding him asked Mussolini if he
wanted to put the German greatcoat back on. ‘ I never want to see
a German uniform again,’ he said and instead put on a pair of
blue overalls he found lying in a comer of the room. In the car
which took him up to Germasino he began to shiver feverishly. It
was a slow journey, for the rain poured blindingly down, splashing
against the windscreen so violently that the driver could scarcely
see the road in front of him.
‘ This is the second time you have been a prisoner,’ said one of
the guards making a nervous attempt at conversation.
‘That’s life, my dear boy,’ Mussolini replied with a hint of
cynical gaiety. ‘ That’s my fate, from dust to power and from power
back to dust.’
He had recovered some of his lost spirit now, as if he had found
encouragement in the idea of martyrdom. At Germasino he seemed
almost happy. As the guards lit a fire for him and prepared a meal
he talked to them as if he were their guest and not their prisoner
and when he was asked to sign a piece of paper attesting that he
was being treated well, he did so willingly. ‘The 52nd Garibaldi
3*3
MUSSOLINI
Brigade arrested me today, Friday, 27 April, in the square of

Dongo/ he wrote, the words sprawling loosely across the page.
‘ The treatment I received during and after the arrest was
correct/
Mussolini sat down at the dinner-table. He was hungry and ate
with pleasure. During and after the meal he spoke to the guards at
length as a garrulous don might have spoken to a party of nervous
students. It was not a conversation so much as a lecture. He told
the young men about his visit to Russia and of his flight across the
limitless waste of steppe; he spoke of Stalin as one of the greatest
men living and of Russia as the real victor of the war; he expounded
the natures of Bolshevism and of National Socialism; he foretold
the collapse of the British Empire. They listened and they did not
interrupt him. Whatever he had become it was impossible to forget
that for more than twenty years he had ruled them. One of them,
a young man named Marioni, says that ‘sometimes he looked
worried but never frightened. He did not seem concerned about
his fate. He said to me and my mate, “ Youth is beautiful, beauti
ful! ” My mate smiled at this, and he said, “ Yes, yes I mean it.
Youth is beautiful. I love the young even when they bear arms
against me,” Then he took out a gold watch and offered it to us.
“ Take it in memory of me,” he said/
At eleven oclock he said he was tired and asked if he could go
to bed. They took him upstairs to a small room where a bed had
been made up beneath a barred window. Giorgio Buffelli, the guard
who had spoken to him in the car, saw a small black object sticking
out of his pocket and pointed to it diffidently. He had noticed it
some time before and he had persuaded himself it was the handle
of a pistol. Mussolini took it out obediently and showed it to him.
It was a spectacle-case. Buffelli closed the door and shot home the
bolt.
Back in Dongo, Count Bellini had found G aretta Petacci in a
room at the Town Hall, where she had been locked up separately
from her brother as she had no passport to substantiate her claim
to Spanish nationality. She was still insisting that she was the
sister of the Spanish Ambassador to the Salò Republic and had gone
so far as to ask some of the village girls what they thought would
happen to G aretta Petacci if the partisans caught her; and now
that Count Bellini told her that Mussolini was his prisoner, she
said that she had never met him.
‘ I know who you are/ Count Bellini said.
They had also discovered, he said, that the man masquerading
3*4
THE CAPTURE
as the Spanish Ambassador was Marcello. She could pretend no

more. She asked Count Bellini how Mussolini was. He was alone
and safe, Bellini said. Claretta looked at him closely for a moment
and then she asked him, ‘ Who are you? Are you a friend? ’
‘ An enemy/ Bellini said.
‘ I understand/ she said, biting a finger-nail that had been broken
during the journey. ‘You all hate me. You think I went after him
for his money and his power. It isn’t true. My love has not been
selfish. I have sacrificed myself for him. I have tried to be good
for him.’ Then she asked impetuously, ‘Will you do something
for me? '
‘W h at?’
‘ I want you to lock me up in the same place with him. I want to
share his fate. If you kill him, kill me too.’
Count Bellini looked at her as closely as she had looked at him.
He was surprised. He had not expected this. He left the room
without replying.
The young partisan sent from Dongo with the news of Musso
lini’s arrest had arrived in Como at half past six. Unable to find
any members of the local Committee of National Liberation he
had given the information to Gino Bertinelli, a lawyer, who a few
hours previously had become Prefect. ‘ Go back at once,* Bertinelli
had told him, ‘ and tell your commander to take Mussolini some
where safe up in the mountains, otherwise he will be found and
rescued again. I will try to get in touch with Milan.’ The messenger
hurried back to Dongo to give these instructions to Count Bellini,
who had already made the arrangements for Mussolini’s removal
to Germasino.
Later on that night the information that Mussolini had been
taken up to Germasino was received in Como by a close friend of
General Cadoma, Colonel Baron Giovanni Sardagna, who had
recently been appointed commander of the town by the Committee
of National Liberation. Sardagna put an urgent call through to
Cadorna and after a long delay, and on a very indistinct line he
was able to talk to Cadorna’s chief-of-staff, Colonel Palombo.
‘Mussolini has been arrested this afternoon near Dongo/ Sar
dagna told Palombo. ‘W hat shall we do? They’re asking me for
orders. W hat shall I tell them? ’
3*5
MUSSOLINI
‘ I can’t say exactly yet. We’ve already been told about the arrest.
I’ll call you up and give you orders later.’
*All right. But we’ll have to be quick about this.’
1Of course. But I can’t tell you anything definite now. I'll ring
and tell you later.’
At about half past eleven Sardagna’s telephone rang. It was not
Palombo to speak to him, but a telegram from the Committee of
National Liberation in Milan. The message read : 4Bring Musso
lini and the gerarchi to Milan as soon as possible.’
Before acting on these orders, Sardagna telephoned again to
Palombo.
‘Listen,’ he said when at last he got through to him. ‘I can
understand your order, but I would like you to confirm it verb
ally.* To bring Mussolini to Milan was easier said than done, he
protested. There were not many men he could trust. So it would
have to be done by a few picked men secretly at night. They would
be sure to run into road blocks. Of course, they might be able to
take him by water as far as Como, but it would not be easy to find
a suitable boat. 41 must confess,’ he said firmly, 4the whole thing
seems extremely risky.’
‘Well, surely,’ Palombo insisted, ‘you can at least find a safe
place where he could be hidden for a while.’
And so it was decided that he should be taken from Germasino
to Blevio, a village seven kilometres north of Como, where a friend
of Baron Sardagna’s, a rich industrialist named Remo Cadematori,
had a large secluded villa with a long frontage to the lake. Sardagna
telephoned Cadematori and told him that he needed his villa to
hide someone in. The man would be brought across the lake from
Moltrasio during the night. If he was asked who it was, he
must say that it was an English officer who had been wounded.
Cadematori asked no questions, but he knew instinctively
that the man was Mussolini. He went out into the cold night
to sit on the steps of his boat-house and waited there, with his
old gardener for company, looking out across the dark waters of
the lake.
The order for Mussolini’s removal from Germasino to Cadema-

tori’s villa at Blevio was passed on to Count Bellini Delle Stelle at
about half past eleven. Two hours later he had collected his prisoner
316
THE CAPTURE
from the barracks at Germasino, and at half past two in the morn
ing, near the Ponte della Falk, his car met the car which had
brought Claretta Petacci from Dongo. It was still pouring with
rain, but everyone got out of the cars and Mussolini, a blanket
slung over his shoulders and his face partly concealed by a bandage
so that he should look like a wounded man on his way to hospital,
walked towards Claretta. They greeted each other with a formality
which was both pathetic and absurd.
‘Good evening, Your Excellency.”
‘You, signora 1 Why are you here? ’
‘ I would rather be with you/
That was all that was said. The cars splashed off through the
rain towards Moltrasio. Next to the driver of the leading car was
Luigi Canali—a partisan who called himself ‘ Captain Neri ’—and
in the back Claretta sat between two other young partisans,
Giuseppe Frangi and Guglielmo Cantoni, who were both fisher
men. In the second car Mussolini sat between Count Bellini and
Canali’s mistress, Giuseppina Tuissi, who was pretending to be a
nurse. In the front, beside the driver, was Michele Moretti, known
to his fellow-partisans as ‘ Pietro Gatti \
The slippery roads twisted in and out of the rock beside the lake.
Sometimes the cars stopped at a road block, and men would come
out of the darkness with lanterns swinging in the slanting rain;
often the sky was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated by flares
and the quick light of shells exploding in the distance. Once they
were fired on from the hills to their right, and Count Bellini
jumped out of the car, shouting and waving his arms. At Moltrasio
the cars stopped near the Hotel Imperiale, and Count Bellini got
out again and walked away with Luigi Canali.
Mussolini sat still, not speaking. It was very quiet in Moltrasio,
but seven kilometres to the south rockets were flying through the
air above Como and there was the sound of firing in the streets.
The Americans advancing fast across the Plain of Lombardy had
already reached the Bergamo Alps.
After a quarter of an hour Luigi Canali and Count Bellini came
back to the cars. ‘I certainly did not intend/ Bellini said after
wards, ‘that I should run the risk of having to hand Mussolini
over to the Americans/ The plan of taking him across the lake to
Remo Cadematori’s villa at Blevio was abandoned. Canali sug
gested that Mussolini and Petacci would be more safely hidden if
they were to be taken back through Azzano to a farm near Bon-
zanigo where he knew a peasant and his wife, Giacomo and Lia De
3 !7
MUSSOLINI
Maria, who had sheltered partisans on the run from Fascist troops.
This couple would take them in and ask no questions. Count
Bellini agreed to this, and the cars turned round and drove back
north again.
The prisoners reached Azzano at about a quarter past three in
the morning. The De Marias’ house was some way up the steep
mountainside, and Canali told the others that they would have to
leave the cars and walk. He led the way up a narrow path flanked
by stone walls. It was still raining hard, and the water rushed down
the path as if it were the bed of a mountain stream. Mussolini’s
spirits had fallen. The rain had soaked through the blanket which
he still wore over his shoulders. Claretta held his arm tightly.
Despite the heavy rain a full moon shone dimly through the
clouds so that when they reached the outskirts of Bonzanigo
they could see the white walls of the farmhouse in front of
them.
Canali called to the De Marias, making the sound—coaxing,
penetrating and repetitive—that farmers use to call their animals.
It was the partisans’ signal, and in a few moments the door opened.
Giacomo De Maria stood in the doorway with his wife, holding an
oil lamp, behind him. They recognized Canali and stood aside to
let him in. Mussolini followed him and slumped down on a
bench in the kitchen with Claretta next to him, her arm through
his.
‘They are prisoners,* Canali said. ‘Treat them well. Let them
sleep.’
He left the two young fishermen, Cantoni and Frangi, to guard
them and went back to the cars with Count Bellini, Giuseppina
Tuissi and Michele Moretti.
Giacomo De Maria lit a fire and offered the two prisoners some
thing to eat. He did not yet know who either of them was.
‘ W hat can I get the gentleman? *he asked Claretta, unwilling to
address directly the huddled figure with the bandaged head next
to her.
‘Niente,’ Mussolini mumbled, shaking his head, not looking up
from the fire, his hands deep in the pockets of the blue overalls.
‘ Coffee for me, please,’ Claretta said.
*We haven’t any real,’ De Maria said apologetically, ‘ but I could
make you some from flavoured powder.’
‘ I don’t mind.’
He heated the coffee in silence. No one spoke. At length his wife
came down from an upstairs bedroom, where she had turned her
318
THE CAPTURE
two sons out of a double bed and sent them into the loft. She said
the room was ready if the gentleman would like to go upstairs.
Mussolini did not answer her and he did not move.
‘The room is ready/ Claretta said softly. ‘Shall we go up? '
He stood up then, but still he said nothing as he followed Signora
De Maria up the steep stone steps to the whitewashed bedroom on
the top floor, where an immense walnut bed was the only furniture
apart from two chairs with straw seats and a washstand. Mussolini
walked towards the window, and De Maria, who had followed him
up the stairs, thought that he meant to escape and quickly came
up behind him to close the shutters. Claretta went over to the bed
and felt it, as if she were in a hotel, but when she asked for another
pillow she did so diffidently.
‘ He is used to two/ she said. It seemed to Lia De Maria that she
was shy. And she noticed when she gave her another pillow that
she looked at a darn in the linen closely and then put it on her side
of the bed. The other two pillows she put on the side nearer the
window where Mussolini liked to sleep.
He was sitting on the bed now, undoing his bandage. Signora
De Maria watched him. As the white muslin unwound from his
forehead she began to recognize the familiar face of the Duce. She
stared at it, bewildered and alarmed, and the sound of Claretta’s
voice, asking if she might wash, made her jump.
‘ We are mountain people/ she said nervously. ‘ You must excuse
us. You will have to go downstairs to wash/
Claretta followed her downstairs to an outhouse, where she
washed with one of the fishermen looking through a crack in the
door. She had a good body with nice breasts, he said afterwards,
and was not surprised that Mussolini had taken to her. He followed
her back to the room when she had finished and told her that the
door would have to be left ajar.
She finished undressing in the dim electric light and got into bed
beside her lover. She murmured something to him and he replied.
Cantoni and Frangi, listening through the partly open doorway,
tried to hear what they were talking about, but they could not.
They thought they heard the names ‘Pavolini' and ‘Graziarli'
and they believed that Mussolini said, ‘I ’m sure they won't kill
me/ and then something like ‘ Can you forgive me? ' and later on,
when she had answered him, he murmured, ‘ That doesn't matter
any more.' At one point when the talking stopped, the two youths
became nervous and thought that perhaps the prisoners were plan
ning to escape. They threw open the door suddenly and sprang
3*9
MUSSOLINI
into the room. Claretta pulled the sheet over her face and cringed
down beside Mussolini, who sat up and said to them in a voice of
mild reproof, ‘Go away, boys. You needn’t behave like that. Don’t
be tiresome.’ They noticed how exhausted he seemed and how
haggard and despairing his face was.
They left the room and squatted down once more outside on the
landing. The light was switched out; and soon afterwards, above
the continuous murmur of the wind and rain beyond the landing
window, they heard the sounds of Mussolini’s heavy breathing. All
night long he slept, the closed shutters in front of the window of
his room muffling the roar of thunder and hiding from him the
strangely phosphorescent glow of the almost continuous lightning.
At dawn the two young guards slept too; and as they slept the
storm abated.
At about eleven o’clock Signora De Maria went out into the
fields. It was a lovely morning. The earth was sodden, but the air
was warm and clear. There was a gentle breeze from the south. She
looked back at the house and saw the Duce leaning out of the
window looking across towards the snow-covered mountains beyond
the Lago di Lecco and pointing out the peaks to his mistress. Lia
De Maria finished her work in the fields before returning to the
house.
Her husband went up to the bedroom to ask if the prisoners
would like something to eat. It would have to be simple food, he
added with a peasant’s defensive humility. Claretta asked for
polenta with milk, knowing that to be the food of the alpigiani and
hoping perhaps that the man would be pleased at being asked for
it. Mussolini said gruffly he did not mind what he had. He was
depressed to the point of despair. His eyes were bloodshot and his
face was paper white beneath the grey stubble of his beard. He did
not ask if he might wash or shave.
De Maria brought a box into the bedroom, and his wife covered
it with a white table-cloth. Claretta ate the polenta and seemed to
enjoy it, but Mussolini was not hungry. He spent a long time
silently eating a piece of bread and a slice of salame. He kept put
ting the bread down and picking up a glass of water, from which
he took little sips as he stared at the red flowers embroidered
on the table-cloth. Was it true that the Americans had taken
Como? he asked his young guards. They said it was, and he nodded
resignedly.
When she had finished her polenta Claretta went back to lie on
the bed. She pulled the covers up to her chin and shut her eyes, but
320
At Villa Feltrinelli in 1945
De Bono, Pareschi, Gottardi, Ciano and Marinelli (obscurec

by the commander of the firing squad) await their executioi
Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 29 April 1945
THE CAPTURE
she did not seem to be sleeping. Mussolini sat on the edge of the
bed with his back to her, looking out of the window at the
mountains.
A clock in the village struck the hours as the long day wore
on.
16
‘COLONEL VALERIO’
27- 28 A P R I L 1945
However much the killing of one man by another is pro

foundly repugnant to my convictions, I find, nevertheless,
that violence from below in response to violence from
above, although regrettable is sometimes necessary. When
all the roads are closed it is necessary to open up a passage,
even at the cost of blood.
T he night before, on hearing of Mussolini’s arrest, various mem

bers of the Committee of National Liberation for North Italy and
senior representatives of the Volunteer Freedom Corps had met in
Milan.
The reports of the meeting, which began soon after eleven o’clock,
are contradictory and unreliable. It is at least certain that the deci
sions taken at various times during the night were taken by six or
seven men acting in the name of the Committee of National Libera
tion, but not with its full authority. Two of these men were Luigi
Longo, the dedicated Communist who had worked hard to make
the partisan movement a political one, and Walter Audisio, a tall,
pale, thirty-six-year-old book-keeper and former anti-Fascist volun
teer in Spain, who called himself ‘ Giovanbattista di Cesare Magnoli ’
or, more simply and more often, ‘ Colonel Valerio \
In the presence of more scrupulous and less politically committed
members of the Committee it had been decided to give Walter
Audisio the mission of bringing Mussolini back to Milan. Later on,
however, when the others had gone, the 4particulars of this mission ’
were discussed. These 1particulars ’ involved Mussolini’s being
brought back dead. The execution had, in fact, already been ordered
by Paimiro Togliatti in a mandate given—as he said later in the
Milan Communist newspaper Unità—‘as head of the Communist
Party and as Vice-Premier of Italy ’. This order, Togliatti admitted,
was that Mussolini and all his Ministers were to be shot as soon
as they had been captured and identified. But it was never revealed
to the non-Communist members of the Committee of National
Liberation, who felt bound by the terms of the armistice which
322
‘COLONEL VALERIO*
provided that Mussolini should be handed over to the Allies; and

Ivanoe Bonomi, indeed, Badoglio’s successor as Premier, said that
he had never even heard of it. The Communist members of the
Committee were, however, its most powerful ones, and some of
them were known to sympathize with the views of the Piedmontese
Committee, which had gone so far as to draft a penal code of its
own whereby not only all members of Mussolini’s Government, but
all other Fascists regarded as guilty of ‘the suppression of liberty*
as well, were to be executed without trial if they did not surrender
before the proclamation of a general insurrection in northern Italy.
In order to avoid so summary an execution of Mussolini three
attempts—two by Americans and one by the Government in the
south—had already been made to find him. None of them had been
successful, but the members of the Milan Committee who had
decided to have him shot knew that other attempts were being
planned. Accordingly, at three o’clock in the morning a telegram
was sent from Milan to the Allied Headquarters at Siena. This is
what it said : ‘ The Committee of National Liberation regret not
able to hand over Mussolini who having been tried by Popular
Tribunal has been shot in the same place where fifteen patriots were
shot by Fascists Stop.’
An hour later General Cadorna handed to Audisio a pass which,
with the help of Dr Guastoni, an intermediary between the parti
sans and the Allies, he had obtained from Captain Emilio Q.
Daddario of the American Army, a liaison officer with the Com
mittee, who had been involved in one of the unsuccessful American
attempts to find Mussolini. The pass was written in English and
read:
Colonel Valerio (otherwise known as Magnoli Giovanbattista di
Cesare) is an Italian officer belonging to the General Command of the
Volunteers of Liberty. He is sent on a mission by the National
Liberation Committee for north Italy, in Como and its province and
must therefore be allowed to circulate freely with his armed escort.
E. Q. Daddario, Captain.
Armed with this and another pass bearing the stamp—in the
shape of a five-pointed star—of the Volunteer Freedom Corps,
Audisio left Milan in a small car at seven o’clock in the morning of
28 April. He was accompanied by Aldo Lampredi, a workman who
also had the rank of Colonel in the Volunteer Freedom Corps, and
was followed in a lorry by twelve partisans commanded by Riccardo
Mordini, who had fought with the International Brigade in Spain.
323
MUSSOLINI
They were armed with Stens or Beretta machine-guns and were

wearing, not the civilian clothes they usually wore on their missions
but nondescript khaki uniforms. Audisio was wearing a long brown
mackintosh and a red, green and white scarf.
He arrived in Como at eight o’clock and, quickly jumping out of
his car, ran up the steps of the Prefecture with Aldo Lampredi. In
side the building the first person he saw was Gino Bertinelli, the
new Prefect. Bertinelli noticed how nervous and agitated he looked
and immediately asked to see his papers. W ith an irritated gesture
Audisio brought out the one stamped by the Volunteer Freedom
Corps; but Bertinelli, who had seen scores of similar ones in the last
few days, was not impressed. So Audisio produced the one signed
by Daddario. This had more effect on the Prefect, but before pro
mising his co-operation he wanted to know exactly what Audisio’s
mission was. When he was told that it was to take Mussolini and
the other Fascists captured in Dongo to Milan, Bertinelli was more
guarded than ever. He knew that the local partisans in Como would
not want to be deprived of the credit for the capture of so valuable
a prisoner by handing him over to these two unknown ‘ colonels ’
from Milan. The prison of San Donnino in Como had already been
prepared for Mussolini’s reception, and plans were being made for
him to be taken there.
In their obvious anxiety to give nothing away, Bertinelli and his
associates—according to one of the various contradictory accounts
that Audisio subsequently gave of the events of this day—betrayed
*the petty jealousies of a bourgeois spirit ’. And by ten o’clock the
conversation had become acrimonious. Audisio, however, was un
able to persuade either Bertinelli or the Como Committee of
National Liberation to give way, and he demanded to be taken to
Baron Sardagna; but the Baron had disappeared and no one knew
where he could be found. He then demanded to telephone Milan,
and furiously waved his pistol as he told everyone to leave the room
while he did so. During his conversation with Milan his fellow-
colonel, Aldo Lampredi, and Riccardo Mordini, the commander
of his escort, went on to Dongo without him, leaving no message.
Eventually a compromise was reached. It was agreed that the
Fascists would be handed over to Audisio provided he signed a
receipt for them; and it was also agreed that he would be allowed
to take the transport he needed to Dongo, provided two representa
tives from the Como Committee of National Liberation accom
panied him there. And so at last, at a quarter past twelve, Audisio
prepared to leave Como. At the last minute, however, Commander
324
‘c o l o n e l Va l e r i o ’
Giovanni Dessi, an Italian intelligence officer, who had been asked

by the Americans to find Mussolini for them, and another agent
who called himself ‘ Carletto ’, attached themselves to the party. By
this time Audisio was furiously impatient and determined to put up
with no further obstruction. When the car in which the two agents
were travelling stopped for petrol on the outskirts of the town, he
drove up quickly beside it and, with a machine-gun in his hand,
gave them the peremptory order : ' Scendere! ’ and reluctantly they
both did so.
Having got rid of two of his unwanted companions, Audisio,
followed by the other two—the representatives of the Como parti
sans—drove fast along the road to Dongo. On the way he com
mandeered a big removal van, and it was in this that at ten minutes
past two he drove with his escort into the square of Dongo.
Mistaking him and his companions for escaping Fascists or the
leaders of an attempt to liberate their prisoners, the partisans in
Dongo fired on him.
41 am sent by the General Command/ Audisio shouted at the
top of his voice as he jumped down into the middle of the square
waving his arms above his head. 4Who’s in command here? Take
me to him at once.’
After some delay a message, which he took to be insolent, was
given to him. The partisan commander was in the Town Hall, he
was told, and if the colonel cared to come up he would be received.
Audisio lost his temper. He shouted furiously that he had given an
order and that he intended it to be carried out. He marched across
the square to the Town Hall surrounded by his escort; and Count
Bellini came down the steps to meet him. The colonel could come
in, he said, but the escort would have to remain outside.
In Count Bellini’s room at the Town Hall, Audisio found his
colleague Aldo Lampredi and he asked him to leave the room
while he spoke to the Count alone. The conversation between the
two men was cool and unfriendly, although Audisio did at least
succeed in persuading Bellini that the two representatives of the
Como Committee of National Liberation were suspected Fascists.
Having agreed to lock them up, however, Bellini gave Audisio no
hope that he would prove any more amenable than Bertinelli, the
Prefect of Como, had been. He was determined not to be hurried
into doing something which he would regret, and Audisio wrote
afterwards that he was obliged to speak to the young partisan com
mander 4very frankly ’. A partisan named Sauro Gnesi, whose sister
was Bellini’s mistress, said that he saw the colonel from Milan hand
325
MUSSOLINI
the Count a yellow envelope in which there was a sheet of paper,

signed by a single member of the Committee of National Libera
tion for North Italy, on which was written the sentence : 4Colonel
Valerio is empowered to bring the war criminal Benito Mussolini
to M ilan/ Later on, however, when Count Bellini’s fellow-partisans
had been allowed to return to the room where the discussion was
taking place, Audisio put all pretence aside and announced his real
intention.
41 have come/ he said,4to shoot Mussolini and the gerarchi/
Bellini and his partisans, as the Count afterwards said, were
dumbfounded. At length Bellini protested that Audisio’s plai\ was
‘most irregular’. Only that morning he had arranged with the
National Liberation Committee in Como to transport all the Fas
cists, including Mussolini, there. W hat was all this, he asked, about
shooting them in Dongo? He was the local partisan commander
and he did not think he could allow it. The argument continued
until three o’clock, when Count Bellini thought of an excuse for
gaining time. As some of the Fascist prisoners were at Germasino,
he proposed that he should leave to go and get them. Only he,
Michele Moretti and Luigi Canali knew where Mussolini was, and
he believed that while he was away from Dongo there would be
no possibility of Audisio’s discovering his hiding-place.
He was wrong. Both Moretti and Canali were in the Town Hall
when he left it and both of them were fervent Communists. Moretti
in addition knew the other colonel from Milan, Aldo Lampredi,
very well, as they had fought together in the past. Within ten
minutes of Count Bellini’s departure the two colonels, Audisio and
Lampredi, drove quickly out of Dongo. Sitting in the front of the
car, next to the driver, was Michele Moretti.1
1The subsequent history of these men is illuminating. Walter Audisio, alias

‘ Colonel Valerio *, alias ‘ Giovanbattista di Cesare Magnoli *, is a Communist mem
ber of the Chamber of Deputies. Aldo Lampredi, alias 4Guido ', is also alive, but
he has refused to talk about the events leading up to Mussolini’s death. Michele
Moretti, alias *Pietro Gatti ’, although described by previous writers as either dead
or living in luxury abroad on his share of the Dongo loot, is in fact still living,
poorly and simply, on the outskirts of Cernobbio. He is still a Communist and
after speaking to a few fellow-partisans and villagers immediately after Musso
lini was killed now refuses to say any more. Giuseppe Frangi, alias ‘ Lino *, also
spoke to various people after Mussolini’s death and then died in mysterious cir
cumstances on 5 May 1945. His friend Guglielmo Cantoni, alias ‘ Sandrino ’, dis
appeared for some time and was believed to be in Switzerland. He gave some
information to a journalist, but it was clear that at the time Mussolini was shot
he was some way away from the others and could not be sure what happened.
He is now living in a small village on the hills above the lake. Luigi Canali, alias
*Captain Neri ’, has disappeared. He seems to have asked a number of unwelcome
326
‘COLONEL VALERIO*
questions concerning the ultimate destination of the ‘ Dongo Treasure ' and to have
insisted that receipts should be given to the partisans for the money which was
handed over to the Communist Party. His mistress, Giuseppina Tuissi, alias
' Gianna made inquiries about him, and she too disappeared. Her friend Anna
Bianchi asked about Giuseppina, and she was beaten up and her dead body was
afterwards thrown into Lake Como. Anna’s father swore to find and kill her
murderers, and finally he also was killed. For political reasons it was not until
1957 that an investigation into these murders was held at Padua. But like so
many other recent Italian scandals, notably the Montesi case, the truth about the
affair appears to be by now so completely clouded by lies, evasions and the
silence of fear that it cannot be discovered.
17
DEATH AT VILLA BELM O NTE
28 A P R I L 1945
No one can defy fate twice and every one

dies the death which befits his character.
S o o n after four o’clock the silence in the bedroom at the De

Maria’s farmhouse was broken by the sound of quick footsteps in
the yard outside. A tall man in a brown mackintosh came into the
house and ran up the stairs. The door of the bedroom was thrown
open, and the man burst in.
‘ Hurry up,’ he said abruptly to Mussolini. ‘ I have come to rescue
you.’
'ReallyI ’ Mussolini said with heavy sarcasm, managing for
the first time that day to smile ironically as he looked at the
tall, thin man with the machine-gun in his hand. ‘How kind of
you I ’
'A re you armed? ’ Audisio asked him.
‘No.’
Audisio turned away from him and looked at Claretta still lying
on the bed with her face to the wall. ‘You too,’ he said, ‘get up
quickly. Hurry up! ’
She got off the bed and began rummaging amongst the clothes.
‘ W hat are you looking for? ’ Audisio asked her angrily.
‘ My knickers,’ she said.
‘ Don’t worry about them. Come on, hurry up.’
She left the bed, and as Mussolini put on the grey jacket of his
Militia uniform she picked up her handbag and another bag shaped
like a bucket. Mussolini asked Audisio for news of Vittorio. He
had been rescued too, Audisio said. ‘And Zerbino and Mezza-
som a?’ Mussolini asked. ‘Where are th ey ?’
' We are looking after them also.’
Mussolini, Audisio said, ‘gave a sigh of relief’.
‘Quickly! Quickly! ’ Audisio urged them, almost pushing them
down the stairs in his anxiety to get out of the house.
3^8
DEATH AT VILLA BELMONTE
Lia De Maria watched them through the window as they were

taken away out of sight down the steep lane to the road. She
crossed herself when they had gone, for she had liked the woman,
as the two young fishermen had also done, and admired her
courage. She turned back into the room and went towards the bed.
She had put clean sheets on it the night before and noticed that
both they and the darned pillow were smeared with the grey marks
of mascara-stained tears.
Claretta was not crying now, but her eyes were red and her lids
swollen. She held Mussolini’s arm tightly as she stumbled down
the rough path in her high-heeled shoes; carrying her two bags
with two coats—one of fur and the other of camel-hair—over her
arm; but he had no strength left to support her. He stumbled too
in the steep lane and put out his hand to steady himself against
the wall and Claretta tried to help him, but he shrugged her off
angrily as a resentful cripple might have done. They did not speak
to each other.
They were taken down into the village, and as they walked
across the square three women, who were beating their clothes
noisily against the sides of a stone washing-trough, looked up at
them. An old peasant was walking down the mountainside with a
basket on his back and a woman was strolling along the road with
a little boy. It was a quiet afternoon. The rain had stopped.
They turned left in the square and walked under an archway
towards the asphalt road where the car had been left. Signora
Rosita Barbarità was taking her two dogs for a walk, and when
she came up to the car she went across to it to talk to the driver,
whose name was Geminazza. He was nervous and did not want to
talk. ‘Be on your guard,’ he had been told. ‘You will soon see
some people whom you cannot fail to recognize. But forget them
immediately. If you don’t forget you won’t lose just your memory,
but your head.’
As Signora Barbarità left him, she saw a group of people coming
up the road towards her. A man in a brown mackintosh said, *Go
away! Go away! ’ and so she walked quickly back away from them.
It seemed that they were having an argument although she could
not hear what they said. She saw a woman throw her arms round
the neck of an old man, who was pushed roughly into •the car by
the man in the mackintosh.
The car drove on towards the village to turn round in the square,
and when it came back past her Signora Barbanti saw that the old
man was Mussolini. Only he and Claretta were in the car with the
3*9
MUSSOLINI
driver. The man in the mackintosh sat on one of the mudguards

and the other two men stood on the running-board. As the car
moved slowly away up the hill, the two young fishermen, Cantoni
and Frangi, ran after it.
The driver, Geminazza, could see them in his mirror. He could
also see Mussolini and Claretta. ‘They were close together/ he
said years later, ‘ with their heads almost touching. Mussolini was
pale and the Signora tranquil. It seemed to me that she showed no
particular signs of fear. . . . We stopped at the gate of Villa
Belmonte/
It was a large villa standing back from the road behind a stone
wall. Two families of evacuees lived here—Bernardo Bellini, an
engineer, with his wife Teresa, and Rinaldo Oppizzi with his wife
Aminta and their two little girls Lelia and Bianca. When
Audisio’s car stopped outside the wrought-iron gates of the villa,
Signora Bellini was sitting on the terrace of the villa looking out
over the lake. Her husband was inside listening to the wireless
with Rinaldo Oppizzi. Below her in the garden Lelia Oppizzi was
reading a book and the Bellinis' maid, Giuseppina Cordazzo, was
weeding one of the flower-beds. Suddenly they heard a man’s voice
shout out, ‘ Get inside ! Go indoors I ’
Teresa Bellini caught sight of a heavily built man getting out of
the car wearing what she thought was a black beret and holding the
lapels of his coat. He looked ‘ like a mountaineer ’, she says, ‘ hold
ing on to the straps of his rucksack ’.
Audisio ordered Claretta to follow Mussolini out of the car, and
the driver watched him as he levelled his machine-gun at them
both and ‘pronounced a few words very quickly’. The driver
thought they referred to an order Audisio had received and to a
sentence of death he had been ordered to execute, but ‘ everything
happened so quickly’ he was not sure. Mussolini remained com
pletely motionless and impassive, but Claretta lost control of her
self and threw her arms around him, jumping up and down and
shouting, ‘Noi Noi You mustn’t do it. You mustn't I ’
In a voice which Geminazza described as ‘dry and nervous’,
the colonel said, ‘ Leave him alone, otherwise you’ll get shot too.’
But Claretta paid no attention and went on jumping up and down
convulsively as she clung to Mussolini. Audisio squeezed the trigger
330
DEATH AT VILLA BELMONTE
and Claretta rushed at him, grabbing the barrel of the gun in both
her hands and shouting, 'You cannot kill us like this/
Audisio shot again. Geminazza saw the sweat pouring down his
face. He squeezed the trigger a third time, but the gun was jammed
and he pulled his pistol from his pocket. That would not fire either,
and he shouted to Moretti, ‘ Bring me your gun/ Moretti gave him
his French machine-gun and he pointed it at Mussolini, who faced
him squarely, holding back the lapels of his jacket. ‘ Shoot me in
the chest/ he said. Geminazza heard the words distinctly. They
were the last Mussolini spoke.
The first shot which Audisio fired from Moretti’s gun killed
Claretta, who fell to the ground without a sound. The next hit
Mussolini, who stumbled back against the stone wall of the villa,
where he slid slowly to the ground with his legs bent under him.
He was not dead and lay on the ground, breathing heavily. Audisio
went up to him and shot him again in the chest. Mussolini’s body
jerked violently and then lay still. Audisio looked at it in silence for
a moment and then said to Geminazza, ' Look at his expression.
Doesn’t it suit him? ’
Moretti came up to them and made a gesture at Geminazza, as
if to say, 'Accidents can’t be helped.’ Audisio offered them
cigarettes and, although he did not usually smoke, Geminazza took
one. He felt ‘ very shocked ’ and hoped it would soothe his nerves.
He helped the others pick up the empty cartridge-cases from the
road and then he got into the car to drive the two colonels and
Michele Moretti back to Dongo. The two fishermen were left to
guard the bodies. It was twenty minutes past four.
Less than a minute had passed since the car had stopped beside
the villa gates. As it drove away again there was a sudden roll of
thunder, and a few seconds later a torrential rain began to fall.
The people in the villa heard the shots and agreed that in all
there were ten; but a high hedge which grew above the level of the
wall had prevented them from seeing what had happened. The
maid, Giuseppina, pretending that she wanted to pick some
radishes, went up quietly to peep through the hedge; but a voice
called out, ‘ Via! Via! ’ and she went away without having seen
anything.
At six o’clock Geminazza drove back from Dongo, where
331
MUSSOLINI
Audisio had attended to the execution of fifteen of the men who

had been captured at Musso.1 The bodies of Mussolini and Claretta
were put in the back of the car, which then drove away in the rain
to the main road at Azzano. Here the removal van was waiting to
take them on to Milan, and they were thrown into it on top of the
other corpses.
1The fifteen executed men were Marcello Petacci, Fernando Mezzasoma, Nicola
Bombacci, Alessandro Pavolini, Paolo Zerbino (Minister of the Interior), Ruggero
Romano (Minister of Public Works), Augusto Liverani (Minister of Communica
tions), Paolo Porta (Inspector of the Fascist Party in Lombardy), Luigi Gatti
(Mussolini’s secretary), Alfredo Coppolo (President of the Institute of Fascist Cul
ture), Ernesto Daquanno (Director of the ‘ Stefani * Agency), Mario Nudi (Presi
dent of the Fascist Agricultural Association), Colonel Vito Casalinuovo, Pietro
Salustri (a captain in the Air Force) and Hintermayer, a propagandist.
3 3 2
18
THE PIAZZALE LORETO
29 A P R I L 1945
Here is the epitaph I want on my tomb:

Here lies one of the most intelligent animals
that ever appeared on the face of the earth.
I n the early morning of 29 April 1945 the removal van, having

passed through several American road-blocks, stopped in front of a
half-built garage in Piazzale Loreto, where the fifteen hostages had
been shot by the Germans nine months before. It was a Sunday. The
corpses were tipped out and lay in tumbled confusion until dawn,
when a passer-by arranged them in some sort of order. Mussolini
was laid out a little way apart from the others with his head and
shoulders on Claretta’s breasts. Two young men came up and kicked
Mussolini repeatedly and savagely on the jaw. When they left him
his face was appallingly disfigured. His mouth was open and his
upper lip pulled back from his teeth so that he looked as if he were
about to speak. Someone put a stick in his hand and squeezed his
fingers round it.
By nine o’clock a large crowd had gathered and the people in it
were shouting and jumping up and down to get a closer view. Some
of them were calling out obscenities and curses, or shooting at the
bodies with pistols and shot-guns; others were peering forward
silendy with a kind of fascinated satisfaction or a pitying disgust; a
few were laughing hysterically. One woman fired five shots into
Mussolini’s body to *avenge her five dead sons ’. The crowd grew,
and those in front were pushed forward so that they trampled over
the bodies, and the partisans guarding them fired over the heads of
the surging mass and then turned a hose on them in an attempt to
drive them back.
‘Who is it you want to see? ’ an immense partisan, his bare arms
covered with blood, called out to the screaming people.
‘Pavolini,’ a man called back. Then another voice shouted ‘Bom-
bacci’, and others ‘Mussolini,’ ‘Petacci,’ ‘Buffarini-Guidi’. The
partisan lifted each up in turn, gripping them under the armpits,
holding them high above his head.
333
MUSSOLINI
‘Higher! ’ the crowd shouted. ‘Higher! Higher! We can't see.'

‘ String them up I ' a loud voice called authoritatively.
Ropes were found and tied round the corpses' ankles. Mussolini
was pulled up first, the soles of his split boots pointing upwards
towards the overhanging girders of the garage roof, his head about
six feet from the ground. His face was the colour of putty and
splashed with red stains, and his mouth was open still. The crowd
cheered wildly, and those in the front row spat at him and threw
what filth they could find. Achille Starace was forced to stand up in
a lorry to watch, and then he was dragged to a wall and shot and his
body was thrown on to the pile to await its turn to be displayed.
Claretta Petacci was drawn up next. Several women screamed.
And then for a few seconds, as the bodies swung heavily in the
clear morning light, a strange silence fell on the square. The jeer
ing and shouting died away, the watching faces became for a
moment calm and thoughtful, the air seemed filled, says a man who
was there, with ‘ an oppressive quality, an atmosphere of expectancy,
as if the whole thing was a dream from which we would awake to
find the world unchanged. It was as if we had all in those few
seconds shared the realization that the Duce was really dead at
last, that he had been slaughtered without trial and that there had
been a time when we would have given his dead body, not insults
and degradation, but the honours due to a hero and prayers worthy
of a saint.’
The mood soon changed. Claretta’s skirt had fallen down over
her face revealing her naked thighs and hips, and when a woman
stood on a box and reached up to tuck the torn material between
her tightly roped legs there were jeers and shouts from the mob. A
man came up towards the body and poked it obscenely with a stick,
and it rocked stiffly and twisted around at the end of the rope like
a mechanical doll dancing, holding out its jointless arms towards
an imagined partner. But Claretta’s face was not that of a doll. Men
were struck by its beauty beneath the dirt and the smears of blood.
Her eyes, which were open when she was first tied up, had closed
slowly. She looked gentle and at peace. She seemed even to be
smiling.
Mussolini's tortured features expressed no such contentment.
Some men thought they saw in the line of his swollen mouth and
in the sightless, staring eyes a look of hopeless despair, but most of
them could see no more than the ghastly travesty of a mud-splashed
face.
334
NOTES ON SOURCES
In most cases the source for both direct and indirect quotations is
indicated in the text. Where this has not been done the authorities
are given below.
GENERAL
The most comprehensive biography of Mussolini is the four-

volume Mussolini: Uuomo e l’opera by Giorgio Pini and Duilio
Susmel. I have found this of particular value in describing Musso
lini's life at Gargnano. A more recent biography in two volumes,
Il Figlio del Fabbro by Mino Caudana, was published in i960. It
adds little of importance to the earlier work, however, and although
painstakingly prepared and not inaccurate it is ill-written and
partisan. But there are several details in it which I have not dis
covered elsewhere. Neither of these two books has been translated
into English. Paolo Monelli's Mussolini: Piccolo Borghese has been
translated as Mussolini: A n Intimate Life, and, although Monelli
has been careful to paint a portrait to suit the title of his book, his
is the best short life of Mussolini which has yet been written.
Monelli, an expert journalist, interviewed a number of Italians both
for this and for an earlier book, Roma 1943 (this has not been
translated as a whole, but certain parts of it were incorporated in
the translation of Mussolini: Piccolo Borghese), and has been able
to provide much new evidence about Mussolini. I have acknow
ledged my debt to him and to Pini and Susmel and Caudana below.
Richard Wichtering's Mussolini is an interesting account of him
as seen through German eyes. Georges Roux's Mussolini, the most
recent biography, is a long and careful one, but contains many
dubious interpretations of the facts.
Mussolini's own M y Autobiography is of little interest except
as a sort of psychological case-book. It purports to be a translation
by Richard Washburn Child, the American Ambassador in Rome
from 1921 to 1924, but was in fact written by Child from notes
taken during conversations with Mussolini. It is not merely un
trustworthy but boring. Emil Ludwig's Gespräche mit Mussolini
(translated as Talks with Mussolini), also written after lengthy inter-
335
MUSSOLINI
views with Mussolini, is a much more interesting and revealing

book. Where I have quoted from this I have acknowledged the
source in the text. Mussolini's Autobiografia, written in prison in
1912, was published in 1947 with many notes and additions as La
mia vita. Parts of it had already been incorporated in an otherwise
worthless biography by Rossato which was published before the
March on Rome.
The best of the early and semi-official biographies of Mussolini
is Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux (translated as The Life of Benito
Mussolini). Margherita Sarfatti knew Mussolini intimately and
although she admired him profoundly—at least until Claretta
Petacci began to take up so much of his time—her book, if evasive
on occasions, is not unduly prejudiced and is sometimes frank. She
is an extremely intelligent woman and a gifted writer.
By far the most reliable history of Fascism is Storia d’Italia nel
periodo fascista by Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira. My
quotations from this book are taken from the third edition
(Einaudi, 1959). I have found it extremely useful. The most recent
account of modern Italian history available in English is Italy by
Denis Mack Smith.
All the quotations throughout the book from Mussolini’s public
utterances can be found in Scritti e discorsi, and all the quotations
from Mussolini’s correspondence with Hitler in Hitler e Musso
lini: Lettere e documenti.
M u s s o l i n i ’s r is e to p o w e r , p a r t i
An essential book on the young Mussolini, particularly on his

life in Switzerland and the Trentino, is Gaudens Megaro’s Musso
lini in the Making, Megaro was at pains to refute much of what
Mussolini’s adulatory biographers had written about this period
of his life and was able, after extensive research, to publish extracts
from many of his early writings which the Duce would have liked
to suppress. All the quotations from II Trentino, La Vita Trentina,
La Lotta di Classe, L ’Avvenire del Lavoratore, L ’Avanguardia
Socialista, Avanti! and II Popolo d’Italia in the first three chapters
of my book are taken from this excellent study. I have also taken
from it the account of Mussolini’s behaviour at his mother’s funeral
as described by II Pensiero Romagnolo.
Angelica Balabanoff’s disparaging account of Mussolini’s be
haviour and appearance in Switzerland and Milan are from her
My Life as a Rebel. The letter which Mussolini wrote to a friend
336
NOTES ON SOURCES
from Lausanne and from which I have quoted in Chapter I was

previously quoted in Sarfatti; and his own accounts of his child
hood and the countryside of his birth and his journey to school
are from La mia vita and Vita di Sandro e di Arnaldo. For details
of his behaviour as a schoolboy at Dovia, Faenza and Forlimpopoli,
as a teacher at Gualtieri and Caneva, and as a lover everywhere I
have drawn upon the conversations which Paolo Monelli and I
have had with people who knew him at these times. The account
of Mussolini’s discovery of syphilitic symptoms was given to
Monelli by Dr Riccardo Pascoli of Tolmezzo, who had the story
from his uncle, Dante Marpillero, the man who persuaded him
to see a doctor; and the account of Rachele Mussolini as a housewife
in Milan was given to Monelli by Aldo Parini. The account of
Mussolini’s demanding to live with Rachele Guidi and of his early
life in Via Merenda is taken from Rachele Mussolini’s La mia
vita con Benito (translated as M y Life with Mussolini). This is an
interesting but unsatisfactory and fundamentally inaccurate book.
Bruno d ’Agostini’s Colloqui con Rachele Mussolini covers the same
ground but is fresher and more evocative, and most of my quotations
from Rachele are taken from d’Agostini except where I have shown
otherwise. The history of Mussolini’s fight for power has been
written by Guido Dorso in Mussolini alla conquista del potere, and
I have found this the most useful book for the period between
1913 and 1922. Other books I have found of particular use for these
years are G. A. Chiruco’s Storia della rivoluzione fascista,
Cesare Rossi’s Mussolini compera, Edoardo Susmel’s Mussolini
e il suo tempo and Alatri’s Le origini del fascismo. Italo
Balbo’s Diario ig22 suffers from having been published in Italy
in 1932, when much of what he would have liked to say was sup
pressed.
Mussolini’s conversation with Michele Campana on their way
back from Cattolica is taken from Monelli, who was told about it
by Campana himself. My account of Mussolini’s superstitions and
lack of interest in art comes mainly from Sarfatti; the comments
of Alberto Moravia on Fascist censorship from the Paris Review,
Salvatorelli^ comments on Staracian discipline from Storia dyItalia
nel periodo fascista. The two stories relating to Mussolini’s senti
mentality come from M. H. H. Macartney’s One Man Alone and
G. Ward Price’s I Know These Dictators. Mussolini’s comment
after being shot by Miss Gibson also comes from Ward Price, and
the King’s comment after being shot at in Tirana from Ciano. The
sources for the accounts of Mussolini’s sexual activities after becom-
337
MUSSOLINI
ing Head of the Government are two of his former mistresses to

whom I spoke in Rome; a pornographic book published in Paris
after the Magda Corabceuf scandal and attributed to her; the
reminiscences of other women whose evidence has been used by
previous writers, including Monelli and (less frankly) Nino
D'Aroma; and the evidence of servants such as Quinto Navarra.
All these sources are necessarily suspect, but they all bear out the
general picture which I have drawn.
The full history of Mussolini's years in power is contained in
Salvatorelli and Mira. Particular aspects are dealt with in more
detail in Carlo Silvestri’s Matteotti, Mussolini e il dramma italiano
and Guido Leto’s O.V.R.A. Fascismo e antifascismo. I have found
the most interesting books written in English on Fascism or Fascist
policies, G. A. Borgese's Goliath, Cecil Sprigge's The Development
of Modern Italy and J. S. Barnes' The Universal Aspects of Fascism.
Roberto Farinacci's Storia del Fascismo gives a Fascist view and
Ignazio Silone's The School for Dictators an anti-Fascist view.
Silone and Anthony Rhodes, in his splendid book The Poet as
Superman, give wonderful impressions of the trappings of Fascism.
M u s s o l i n i ’s f o r e ig n p o l ic y , p a r t 2, chapter i
From 1937 Ciano's diaries are, of course, essential. All Musso

lini's comments in these chapters are taken from this source except
where I have indicated otherwise. The diaries are amplified by the
Diplomatic Papers, which are gradually being superseded by the
monumental Documenti diplomatici Italiani, although at the time
I write (May 1961) the ninth series (1939-43) has only reached
Volume IV, which does not go beyond the declaration of war.
Bernardo Attolico, his daughter tells me, kept no private notes or
diaries other than those which are now amongst the official docu
ments. These documents, dealing with the period of his ambassador
ship, are put into a more human context by Magistrati's UItalia
a Berlino; and this story is continued by Simoni's Berlino—Ambas
ciata dfItaliaf Anfuso’s Da Palazzo Venezia al Lago di Garda and
Alfieri's Due dittatori di fronte (translated as Dictators Face to
Face). Quotations by Magistrati, Simoni, Anfuso and Alfieri are
all taken from these books. Mussolini’s ideas and policies as
described by Schuschnigg and Starhemberg are taken from Schus-
chnigg’s Austrian Requiem and Starhemberg's Between Hitler and
Mussolini. The most valuable German authority for the meetings
between Hitler and Mussolini is Paul Schmidt. My quotations have
338
NOTES ON SOURCES
been taken from the Italian version of his book Da Versaglia a

Norimberga.
The 1952 edition of Mussolini diplomatico by Gaetano Salvemini
and Mario Donosti’s Mussolini e VEuropa are, I think, the best
accounts of the development of Mussolini’s foreign policy. Luigi
Villari’s Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini is a skilful essay
in apologetics. Elizabeth Wiskemann’s Rome-Berlin Axis is by far
the most reliable as well as the most entertaining study in English.
Alan Bullock's masterly Hitler and William Shirer’s The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich give excellent accounts from the German
viewpoint. A. J. P. Taylor’s alarming study The Origins of the
Second World War contains particularly valuable passages on the
Abyssinian crisis and on Italo-German relations over Austria.
André François-Poncet’s Souvenirs d9une ambassade à Berlin gives
some interesting personal details. Quoted comments by François-
Poncet are taken from this book. When I have quoted from Win
ston Churchill, Lord Vansittart and Duff Cooper, I have done so
from their books The Second World War, The Mist Procession, and
Old Men Forget. Neville Chamberlain’s observations on Musso
lini at Munich are taken from a letter in Keith Feiling’s biography.
The views expressed abroad about Mussolini in the early 1930s
come from What to Do with Italy by Gaetano Salvemini and George
La Piana and from Michael Foot’s The Trial of Mussolini. Lord
Lloyd’s British Council pamphlet is also taken from Michael Foot.
Hitler’s letter to Mussolini before the Anschluss comes from
Documents on German Foreign Policy, and Hitler’s subsequent
conversation with Prince Philip of Hesse comes from the Nurem
berg Documents. I have taken both these from Alan Bullock’s life
of Hitler. For several details about the diplomatic exchanges which
led to the signing of the Pact of Steel, for the meeting between
Hitler and his military commanders after the signing of the Pact
and for the translation of the Pact itself I am indebted to Elizabeth
Wiskemann’s Rome-Berlin Axis. My descriptions of the meeting
between Badoglio, Balbo and Mussolini on 28 May comes from
Badoglio’s Ultalia nella seconda guerra mondiale and of Rome on
the eve of war from M. H. H. Macartney’s One Man Alone. I am
grateful to the late Sir Percy Loraine for talking to me about the
events which led up to Mussolini’s declaration of war and to Sir
Ivone Kirkpatrick for answering some questions concerning Musso
lini’s behaviour at Munich. Sir Noel Charles has been good enough
to give me his views on the events which led to Italy’s declaration
of war.
339
MUSSOLINI
THE WAR, PART 2 , CHAPTER II, AND PART 3 , CHAPTER I
Italy's unpreparedness for war and her unsuccessful conduct of it

are best exemplified in Ciano, Quirino Armellini's Diario di guerra,
Emilio’s Canevari’s Graziarti mi ha detto, G. Carboni’s Memorie
segrete, Ugo Cavallero’s Comando supremo, Carlo Favagrossa’s
Perchè perdemmo la guerra, Albert Kesselring’s Memoirs, Von
Rintelen’s Mussolini Valleato, Mario Roatta’s Otto milioni di
baionette and Antonio Trizzino’s Navi e poltroni. Badoglio’s
Ultalia nella seconda guerra mondiale does not seem to be very
reliable. Nor are all of his self-exculpatory passages substantiated by
the official documents which have so far been published. The same
comments may be made on Rodolfo Graziani’s Ho difeso la patria.
Interesting sidelights on Mussolini's personal life during the war
are contained in d'Agostini and Arnaldo Pozzi's Come li ho visti
io. It seems necessary to treat both Quinto Navarra’s Memorie del
cameriere di Mussolini and Claretta Petacci's II mio diario with
caution, but there is much in them which is obviously authentic
and has been corroborated by others. The Petacci scandal is well
covered in Leto’s O.V.R.A. Fascismo e antifascismo.
THE CONSPIRACIES AND THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING AND THE

ARREST, PART 3 , CHAPTERS 2 AND 3
The most authentic accounts of the conspiracies are in Attilio

Tamaro’s Due anni di storia, and in Duilio and Susmel. I have
based my account on these and on Marshal Caviglia’s diary and on
Anfuso, Cassinelli's Appunti sul 25 luglio 1943, Galbiati’s II 25
luglio e la M .V.S.N., Carboni's Memorie segrete and Viana's La
monarchia e il fascismo. No stenographer was present and no
official record was kept of the Grand Council Meeting. My
account is based on an amalgam of conflicting reports by Giuseppe
Bottai, Dino Grandi, Enzio Galbiati, Buffarini-Guidi, Dino Alfieri,
the prisoners at the Verona trial and (least reliable) by Mussolini
himself. Piero Saporiti in Empty Balcony gives a good account
based on Bottai and on facts which Count Grandi gave the author
in Portugal. The conversations which Mussolini had after the meet
ing with Scorza, Albini and De Cesare are from Caudana.
The accounts of the events which led up to the arrest and of the
arrest itself are also confused and contradictory. The most con
vincing versions are in Caudana, and Pini and Susmel. I have taken
from Caudana the conversations between Castellano and Ambrosio,
340
NOTES ON SOURCES
between Acquarone and the King and between Mussolini and Cap
tain Vigneri. Montenelli’s and Lualdi’s articles in the Corriere della
Sera, Canevari’s article in Meridiano d’Italia and the article from
Epoca listed in the bibliography all add interesting but minor
details of which I have made use. The account of the interview
between the King and Mussolini is based on Mussolini’s two
accounts—one given in a broadcast during the following September
(quoted in Dal 25 luglio al io Settembre) and the other in his Storia
di un anno—and on the versions which the King subsequently gave
to members of his staff and which are recounted by Monelli.
Count Grandi’s meeting with Ciano at Montecitorio is recounted
by Anfuso. His actions and feelings before the Grand Council meet
ing have been described by Saporiti and in ‘ Dino Grandi Explains ’
in Life.
My account of Rome after the arrest of Mussolini is based on
Monelli’s Roma ig43 and Anfuso’s Da Palazzo Venezia al Lago di
Garda.
IMPRISONMENT AND RESCUE, PART 3 , CHAPTERS 5-7
Mussolini has given an account of these events in his Storia di un

anno (Benito Mussolini: Memoirs ig42-ig43 contains a translation
of this, also of Admiral Maugeri's report and the evidence of
Domenico Antonelli, the manager, and Flavia Iurato, the mana
geress of the Albergo-Rifugio). Appended to Maugeri’s Mussolini
mi ha detto is a chapter based on information supplied by Vero
Roberti, special correspondent of the Resto del Carlino, and this—
also translated in Benito Mussolini: Memoirs ig42-iç43—forms the
basis of my account of Mussolini at Ponza and Maddalena. This
has been supplemented by Caudana (to whom I am in particular
indebted for the comments of Dr Santillo, some further details of
conversation between Mussolini and Marini, Zaniboni’s comment
on seeing Mussolini approach Ponza and Polito’s conversation with
Mussolini), Duilio and Susmel, the Ponza priest Luigi Maria Dies
and his little book Istantanea mussoliniana a Ponza, and I dodici
giorni di Mussolini a Ponza by Muratore and Persia. General Castel
lano’s remark on the atmosphere at Palazzo Chigi after Mussolini’s
arrest comes from his book Come firmai l’armistizio di Cassabile.
Mussolini’s life on the Gran Sasso is based on the reports of
Domenico Antonelli and Flavia Iurato and on conversations I have
had with Ernesto Ricci, one of Mussolini’s guards. I have also
referred to the article Un pecoraio del Gran Sasso fu il confidente di
341
MUSSOLINI
Mussolini by Vincenzo Rovi in Tempo and Gino Cesaretti’s article

La commedia di Campo Imperatore in Europeo. Colonel Otto Skor-
zeny’s operation is described in his Geheimkommando (Skorzeny’s
Secret Missions is an abridged translation), and my account has been
amplified by information given to me by Colonel Skorzeny himself.
The article in Avanti! cCome Mussolini fu liberato da Campo
Imperatore \ is based on information supplied by General Soleti,
and I have found this useful also.
THE RESTORATION OF FASCISM, PART 3 , CHAPTER 8
The source for the interview between Mussolini and Hitler is

Fernando Mezzasoma, whose record of a conversation he had with
the Duce at the beginning of 1945 forms the basis of the accounts
given by Roman Dombrowski in his Mussolini: Twilight and Fall
and by Elizabeth Wiskemann. Mezzasoma’s account has been large
ly corroborated by Rudolf Rahn. The German attitude to Musso
lini’s rescue is best exemplified by the Goebbels diaries from which
I have quoted. Colonel Skorzeny has told me of the conversation he
had with Mussolini after the rescue, and these have been incor
porated in my narrative. Skorzeny was a witness of Mussolini’s final
meeting with Ciano.
THE SALÒ REPUBLIC, PART 3 , CHAPTERS 9 AND I I
The most interesting account is in Pini and Susmel (Vol. IV).

Others that I have found useful are Attilio Tamaro’s Due anni di
storia, Bruno Spampanato’s Contromemoriale, Edmondo Cione’s
Storia della repubblica italiana, Felice Bellotti’s La repubblica di
Mussolini, Rodolfo Graziani’s Ho difeso la patria and Ermanno
Amicucci’s I 600 giorni di Mussolini. Giovanni Dolfin’s descriptions
of Edda Ciano, of Mussolini’s behaviour at the time of the Verona
trial, and the various conversations he had with him at this and
other times are taken from his book, Con Mussolini nella tragedia.
The descriptions of Mussolini’s daily life at Gargnano comes from
Rachele Mussolini and, more often, from Professor Georg Zach-
ariae’s Mussolini si confessa. Other accounts of Mussolini’s life and
politics at Gargnano have been provided for me by Eugen Doll-
mann’s Roma Nazista, E. F. Möllhausen’s La carta perdente, Rudolf
Rahn’s Ambasciatore di Hitler a Vichy e a Salò and General Wolff's
memoirs published in Tempo. Both Zachariae and Rahn mention
Mussolini’s quarrels with Rachele. Ivanoe Fossani’s interview with
342
NOTES ON SOURCES
Mussolini comes from Mussolini confessa alle stelle, Madeleine

Mollier’s from her article *Così era Mussolini all vigilia dell9ultimo
tracollo9in La Nazione, Pierre Pascal’s from Mussolini alla vigilia
della sua morte and Pia Reggidori Corti’s from €Uultima intervista
di Mussolini9 in L 9Ariete. Remarks attributed to Mussolini in con
versation with Carlo Silvestri come from Mussolini, Graziani e
l9antifascismo, with Ottavio Dinale from Quarantanni di colloqui
con lui, with Edvige Mussolini from her Mio fratello Benito, with
Alberto Mellini from Guerra diplomatica a Salò and in conversation
with Mazzolini from Due anni di storia. My authorities for the
various Ministerial intrigues are Möllhausen, Dollmann and Rahn.
The German opinion as to why Salò was not bombed by the Allies is
given in Möllhausen. Graziani’s comment on Mussolini’s return to
power is contained in Dollmann, as is Mussolini’s irritated comment
about Farinacci.
THE VERONA TRIAL, PART 3 , CHAPTER 9
The best accounts are Domenico Mayer’s La verità sul processo

di Verona, Zenone Benini’s Vigilia a Verona and Renzo Montagna’s
Mussolini e il processo di Verona. The fullest account in English is
in Saporiti. For Edda Ciano’s part I have relied on Caudana, Duilio
and Susmel and on the articles in II Giornale del Mattino, Ultalia
Libera, Oggi and Le Soir listed in the bibliography. For Mussolini’s
attitude I have relied on Zachariae, Wolff, Dolfin, Dollmann, Rahn,
Möllhausen and Mazzolini. The account of the German attitude to
Ciano comes from Dollmann and of Mussolini’s telephone con
versation with WolfE on the morning of the executions from WolfE
and Möllhausen. The story about Donna Felicita comes from Doll
mann. The account of the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini
after the Stauffenberg bomb plot also comes from Dollmann and
from Allen Dulles’ Germany9s Underground.
CIVIL WAR, PART 3 , CHAPTER IO
General Cadorna, Ferruccio Parri and Battaglia give the most reli
able personal accounts in La Riscossa, Il movimento di liberazione
e gli alleati and Storia della resistenza italiana respectively. Luigi
Villari’s The Liberation of Italy is bitterly anti-British but reliable.
I have extracted from this Luigi Longo’s account of Communist
influence in the Partisan brigades. Mussolini’s visit to Germany in
February 1945 was described by Major Albonetti to Michele Cam
pana, who described it in turn to Monelli.
343
MUSSOLINI
THE GERMAN SURRENDER, PART 3 , CHAPTER 12
I have based my account on Saporiti, who has made use of a

series of articles in the Zürich weekly paper Die Weltwoche, and on
Dollmann and Wolff. The view that Mussolini was not kept in
formed by the Germans of their negotiations is supported by Sil
vestri, from whom I have taken the quoted assurances of General
Vietinghoff.
MUSSOLINI IN MILAN, PART 3 , CHAPTER 13
Father Eusebio’s and Don Pancino’s talks with Mussolini come

from Pini and Susmel, Ottavio Dinale’s from Quarantanni di col
loqui con lui, Edvige Mussolini’s from Mio fratello Benito, Vittorio
Mussolini’s from Vita con mio padre. The Cabella interview is from
Testamento politico di Mussolini. The account of the interview with
Cardinal Schuster is from Gli ultimi tempi di un regime and from
a translation of ‘ My Last Meeting with Mussolini ’ in Benito Mus
solini: Memoirs ^42-1943. Other accounts upon which I have relied
for my record of this meeting are those of Cadorna and of Achille
Marazza, whose account appears in Saporiti. Full descriptions are
provided by Caudana and by Pini and Susmel.
THE LAST DAYS, PART 3 , CHAPTERS 14 - 18
Numerous accounts have been written in Italian of Mussolini’s

last few days. The most interesting are Le ultime giornate di Musso
lini e di Claretta Petacci (n.d.) by Storicus, La notte di Dongo by
Ezio Saini, the final chapters of Bruno Spampanato’s Contromemori
ale (Vol. Ili) and Attilio Tamaro’s Due anni di storia. Personal
stories are told by Vanni Teodorani in his article in Asso di Bastoni
and by Vittorio Mussolini. A more recent book, Le ultime 95 ore di
Mussolini by Franco Bandini, offers not only a careful analysis of
all the existing evidence but some new evidence besides. I do not
agree with many of Bandini’s conclusions, but his is an extremely
useful book. I have made use of his accounts of the actions and
comments of the inhabitants of the Villa Belmonte and of the
driver Geminazza. I have also used his account of Sardagna’s con
versation with Palombo which he (and Sardagna) mistakenly
believed was with Cadorna. Birzer’s story appeared in Tempo
in 1951 and has been corroborated for me by Herr Hans Pächter.
Kisnatt’s story was published in Epoca in 1954. Don Mainetti’s
344
NOTES ON SOURCES
story appeared in Europeo in 1956, and a somewhat different ver

sion is to be found in translation in Saporiti. I have used Monelli’s
version of the De Marias’ story, and Elena Curti Cucciati’s story
is from her articles in Oggi. Mussolini’s letter to Rachele (the auth
enticity of which is doubted by Bandini but accepted by Monelli)
is taken from La mia vita con Benito, Giorgio Buffelli’s story from
Tempo, the conversation of the young frontier guards from Pini
and Susmel and the evidence of Count Bellini and Urbano Lazzaro
from a series of articles written under their joint names in the
Corriere della Sera. The frontier guards Francesco Nanci, Antonio
Scappin, Antonio Spadea and Francesco di Paolo all wrote short
accounts of their experiences, but none of them contain much of
interest. For details regarding Mussolini’s documents I have referred
to Emilio Re’s Storia di un archivio, Carlo Silvestri, Bandini and
the arride in 11 Risorgimento Liberale mentioned in the biblio-
graphy.
Walter Audisio has provided three different versions of his
activities: the first in a report dictated in Milan on 29 April 1945
which was subsequently published by II Corriere dfInformazione
in October 1945; the second in a series of articles in Unità in
November and December 1945, which were said to be ‘based on
Colonel Valerio’s report and other documents ’ in the hands of the
Italian Communist Party; the third in another series of articles in
Unità printed under his own name. I have made reference to these
accounts in the text, but only where his evidence is corroborated
by others and in particular by the evidence of Giuseppe Cantoni
given to the journalist Ferruccio Lanfranchi have I made use of
them. Signor Dino Rosselli and other residents of Musso, Dongo,
Como and Milan have provided me with several minor details from
their own experiences and observations.
345
BIBLIOGRAPHY
D ’A g o s t in i, Bruno, Colloqui con Rachele Mussolini (1946)

A l a t r i, P., Le origini del fascismo (1956)
A l b e r t i n o , L., In difesa della libertà (1947)
A l f i e r i , Dino, Due dittatori di fronte (1948) (translated as Dicta
tors Face to Face by David Moore, Elek Books. 1954)
A m e , C , Guerra Segreta in Italia ig4o-ig43 (1 9 5 4 )
A m ic u c c i , Ermanno, I 600 giorni di Mussolini (1948)
A n f u s o , Filippo, Da Palazzo Venezia al Lago di Garda (1957)
Roma-Berlino-Salò (1950)
A n i a n t e , Antonio, Mussolini (1932)
Archivio Società Romana di Storia Patria
Archivio Storico Italiano
UAriete (especially for UUltima intervista di Mussolini, by Pia
Reggidori Corti, 5 Aprii 1952)
A r m e l l i n i , Quirino, Diario di Guerra (1946); La crisi dell9esercito
(1945)
D ’A r o m a , Nino, Mussolini Segreto (1958)
A s h t o n , E. B., The Fascist (1957)
Avanti! (especially for Come Mussolini fu liberato da Campo
Imperatore y 19 July 1944, and for Parla il dottore che misurò il
cadavere di Mussolini, 18 May 1945)
B a d o g l io , Pietro, Ultalia nella seconda guerra mondiale (1946)
B a l a b a n o f f , Angelica, M y Life as a Rebel (Hamish Hamilton,
•938)
B a l b o , Italo, Diario ig22 (1932)
B a r n e s , J. S., The Universal Aspects of Fascism (Williams & Nor-
gate, 1928)
B a r t o l i , Domenico, Victor Emmanuel (1946)
B a s k e r v i l l e , Beatrice, What next, O Duce? (Longmans, 1937)
B a t t a g l ia , R., Storia della resistenza Italiana (1953)
B e d e s c h i , Edoardo, La giovinezza del Duce (1939)
d e B e g n a c , Ivon, Vita di Mussolini (1936-1940)
B e l l o t t i , F e l i c e , La repubblica di Mussolini (1 9 4 7 )
B e l t r a m e l l i , Antonio, Uuomo nuovo (1923)
B e n i n i , Zenone, Vigilia a Verona (1949)
B e r io , Alberto, Missione segreta (1946)
346
BIBLIOGRAPHY
B is s o l a t i, Leonida, La politica estera dell*Italia dal 1897 al 1920

(«923)
B it e l l i , Giovanni, Mussolini (1938)
B o ja n o , Filippo, In the Wake of the Goose-Step (Cassell, 1944)
B o n a v i t a , Francesco, Mussolini svelato (1933)
D e B o n o , Emilio, Anno XIII, The Conquest of an Empire
0937)
B o n o m i , Ivanoe, From Socialism to Fascism: A Study of Con
temporary Italy (1924)
B o r g e s e , G. A., Goliath (Viking Press, N.Y., 1938)
B o t t a i , Giuseppe, Ventanni e un giorno (1949)
B u l l o c k , Alan, Hitler (Odhams Press, 1952)
C a b e l l a , G. G., Testamento politico di Mussolini (1948)
C a d o r n a , Raffaele, La Riscossa (1948)
La caduta del fascismo e Varmistizio di Roma (1944)
C a l a m a n d r e i , Pietro, La partecipazione dellTtalia alla guerra contro
la Germania (1955)
C à m p i n i , Dino, Strano gioco di Mussolini (1952)
C a n e v a r i , Emilio, Graziani mi ha detto (1947)
C a r b o n i , Giacomo, Memorie segrete 1935-1948 (1955)
C a s s i n e l l i , Guido, Appunti sul 25 luglio, 1943 (1944)
Ç a u d a n a , Mino, Il Figlio del Fabbro ( i 9 6 0 )
C a v a l l e r o , Carlo, Il dramma del Maresciallo Cavallerò (1954)
Cav a l l e r ò , Ugo, Comando Supremo: Diario 1940-43 del capo di
Stato Maggiore Generale (1948)
C a v ig l ia , Enrico, Diario (1925-1945) (1952)
C e r r u t i , Elisabetta, Visti da vicino (1 9 5 1 )
C h iu r c o , C. A., Storia della rivoluzione fascista 1919-1922 (1929)
C h u r c h i l l , Winston Spencer, The Second World War, Vol. l ‘The
Gathering Storm* (Cassell, 1948); Vol. II ‘Their Finest Hour*
Cassell, 1949); Voi. Ill ‘The Grand Alliance* (Cassell, 1950)
C ia n o , Galeazzo, Diario 1937-1938 (1948) (English translation by
Andreas Mayor, Methuen, 1952); Diario 1939-1943 (1946)
(English translation edited by Malcolm Muggçridge, Heinemann,
1947); Europa verso la catastrofe (1948) (translated as Ciano*s
Diplomatie Papers, edited by Malcolm Muggeridge, Odhams
Press, 1948)
C iL iB r i z z i , Saverio, Pietro Badoglio rispetto a Mussolini e di fronte
alla storia (1949)
CiONE, Edmondo, Storia della Repubblica Sociale Italiana (1948)
Come cadde Mussolini (1944)
C o o p e r , Duff, Old Men Forget (Hart-Davis, 1953)
347
MUSSOLINI
Corriere della Sera (especially for A colloquio col generale A m

brosio, by Maner Lualdi, n March 1955; Rivelazioni di Dino
Grandi sulVarresìo di Mussolini, by Indro Montanelli, 9 Feb
ruary 1955; and Gli archivi segreti di Mussolini, 15 December
1946 )
Corriere d’informazione (especially for Ultimo colloquio a Gar-
gnano, by Gioacchino Nicoletti, 11 February 1948)
Corriere Lombardo (especially for Come fini Mussolini, October
•945)
Critica fascista
C r o c e , Benedetto, Pagine politiche (1945); Pensiero politico e
politico attuale (1946); Due anni di vita politica Italiana 1946-
ig4j (1948); Quando l’Italia era tagliata in due (1949)
Cucco, Alfredo, Non volevamo perdere (1950)
D e l a c r o ix , Carlo, Un uomo e un popolo (1928)
D i e s , Luigi Maria, Istantanea Mussoliniana a Ponza (1949)
D i n a l e , Ottavio, Quarantanni di colloqui con lui (1953)
Documents on British Foreign Policy (1946 et seq.)
Documents on German Foreign Policy igi8-ig45 (1948 et seq.)
Documents on International Affairs (1928 et seq.)
I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani (1952 et seq.)
D o l f in , Giovanni, Con Mussolini nella tragedia (1949)
D o l l m a n n , Eugen, Roma Nazista (1949)
D o m b r o w s k i , Roman, Mussolini: Twilight and Fall (Heinemann,
•956)
D o n a s t i , Mario, Mussolini e l’Europa (1945)
D o r s o , Guido, Mussolini alla conquista del potere (1949)
D u l l e s , Allen Welsh, Germany’s Underground (Macmillan, N.Y.,
•947)
Enciclopedia Italiana
Epoca (especially for Per la prima volta Umberto parla del 25
luglio, February and March 1955; Documentario di piazzale
Loreto, by Paolo Monelli, 21 May 1945, and Le previsione segrete
di Mussolini, by Paolo Monelli, 27 March 1955)
Europeo
F a r in a c c i , Roberto, Storia del Fascismo (1940)
F a v a g r o s s a , Carlo, Perchè perdemmo la guerra: Mussolini e la
produzione bellica (1946)
F e il in g , Keith, Neville Chamberlain (Macmillan, 1946)
F e r r a r i s , E., La Marcia su Roma veduta dal Viminale (1946)
F e r r i , Enrico, Il fascismo in Italia e l’opera di Benito Mussolini
(•927)
348
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Le Figaro (especially for Ciano et les derniers mois de Vavant-guerre

by André François-Poncet, 17 July 1945, and Le premier récit
authentique de la mort de Mussolini, 27 April 1946)
De F io r i , Vittorio, Mussolini: The Man of Destiny (translated by
Mario A. Pei, Dent, 1928)
F o o t , Michael (‘Cassius’), The Trial of Mussolini (Gollancz, 1943)
F o s s a n i , Ivanoe, Mussolini si confessa alle stelle (1952)
F r a n ç o i s - P o n c e t , André, Souvenirs d’une ambassade à Berlin
0946 )
G a l b ia t i , Enzo, Il 25 luglio e la M.V.S.N. (1950)
G e n o u d , François, (ed.) The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The
Hitler-Bormann Documents (Cassell, 1961)
Gerarchia
G e r m i n o , Dante L., The Italian Fascist Party in Power (University
of Minnesota Press, 1959)
G io l it t i , Giovanni, Memoirs of my Life (1923)
Il Giornale del Mattino (especially for Rottami e spettri del passato,
by Jader Jacobelli, 21 September 1945)
Il Giornale d’Italia
Giorno
G i s e v i u s , H. B., Bis zum bittern Ende (1946) (translation, Cape,
1948)
‘G.M.’ Dal 25 luglio al io settembre (1944)
G o b e t t i , Piero, La rivoluzione liberale (1948)
The Goebbels Diaries (translated and edited by Louis P. Lochner,
Hamish Hamilton, 1948)
G o r r e s c o , Vittorio, L ’esperienza di un dopoguerra (1943)
G r a v e l l i , Asvero, Mussolini Aneddotico (1943)
G r a z ia n i , Rodolfo, Ho difesa la patria (1947)
G u a r ig l ia , Raffaele, Ricordi 7922-/946 (1949)
G u t k i n d , Curt, (e d .) Mussolini e il suo fascismo (1 9 2 7 )
The von Hassell Diaries ig ^ß -ig ^ (Hamish Hamilton, 1948)
H e n d e r s o n , Sir Nevile, Failure of a Mission (Hodder & Stoughton,
1940)
H e n t z e , Margot, Pre-Fascist Italy (Allen & Unwin, 1939)
Hitler e Mussolini: lettere e documenti (1946)
H o a r e , Samuel, Nine Troubled Years (Collins, 1954)
L’Intransigeant
L ’Italia libera (especially for Edda Mussolini a Lipart, 21 Septem
ber 1945 and Un impressionante documento di cinismo e
d’irresponsabilità, 9 January 1945)
Italia nuova (especially for La fine del fascismo, July 1944)
349
MUSSOLINI
K em echey, L., Il Duce (translated by Magda Vamos, Williams &

Norgate, 1930)
K e s s e l r i n g , Albert, The Memoirs of Feld-Marshal Kesselring
translated by Lynton Hudson, (William Kimber, 1953)
K ir k p a t r ic k , Ivone, The Inner Circle (Collins, 1959)
K l i b a n s k y , Raymond, (ed.) Benito Mussolini: Memoirs 1942-1943
(translated by Frances Lobb, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1949)
L e t o , Guido, O.V.R.A. Fascismo e antifascismo (1951)
Libera Stampa (for Le Memorie del Marchese Pucci, September
»945)
Life (especially for Dino Grandi explains, 26 February 1945)
Look (especially for articles by Milton Bracker)
L u d w i g , Emil, Gespräche mit Mussolini (1932) (translated by Eden
and Cedar Paul as Talks with Mussolini, Allen & Unwin, 1933)
Lussu, Emilio, Marcia su Roma e dintorni (translated by Marion
Rawson as Enter Mussolini, Methuen, 1936)
M a c a r t n e y , M. H. H., One Man Alone (Chatto & Windus, 1944)
M a c a r t n e y , M. H. H., and C r e m o n a , Paul, Italy9s Foreign and
Colonial Policy 1914-1937 (Oxford University Press, 1938)
M a c k S m i t h , Denis, Italy (i960)
M a g is t r a t i , M., Ultalia a Berlino 1937-1939 (1956)
M a n v e l l , Roger (with Heinrich Fraenkel) Doctor Goebbels (Heine
mann, i960)
M a r v a s i , Roberto, Quartette: Le Roi, Mussolini, Le Pape,
D9Annunzio (1938)
M a u g e r i , Franco, Mussolini mi ha detto (1944)
M a y e r , Domenico, La Verità sul processo di Verona (1 9 4 5 )
M e c h e r i , Eno, Chi ha tradito (1 9 4 7 )
M e g a r o , Gaudens, Mussolini in the Making (Allen & Unwin, 1938)
M e l l in i P o n c e d e L e o n , Alberto, Guerra diplomatica a Salò (1950)
Mercurio
Meridiano d9Italia (especially for Un incontro segreto Mussolini-
Hitler, by Michele Campana, 14 October 1951, and II re, Grandi,
e Pietro Badoglio, by Emilio Canevari, 12 October 1952)
Il Messaggero
M i r a , Giovanni (s e e S a l v a t o r e l l i )
M i s s i r o l i , Mario, Il Colpo di Stato (1924); Ultalia d'Oggi (1932)
M ö l l h a u s e n , E. F., La carta perdente (1948)
M o l l ie r , M a d e le i n e , Pensieri e previsioni di Mussolini al tramonto
(I948)
Il Momento (especially for Memorie, by Roberto Farinacci, January
and February 1947)
350
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Il Mondo (especially for Di un dibattito che non intendo proseguire

by Benedetto Croce, 31 December 1949, and Mussolini e l'oro
francese, by Gaetano Salvemini, 7 January 1950)
M o n e l l i , Paolo, Mussolini: Piccolo Borghese (English translation :
Mussolini: A n Intimate Life, by Brigid Maxwell, Thames &
Hudson, 1953); Roma 1943 (1945)
M o n t a g n a , Renzo, Mussolini e il processo di Verona (1949)
M u r a t o r e , G. (with C. P e r s ia ), I dodici giorni di Mussolini a Ponza
(»944)
Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches (edited and trans-
lated by Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino, Dent, 1923)
M u s s o l i n i , Benito (see also S u s m e l ); Discorsi (1922 et seq.); La
Mia Vita (1947); M y Autobiography (translated by Richard
Washburn Child, Hutchinson, 1928); Il mio diario di guerra
(1931); La nuova politica dell'Italia (1928); Parlo con Bruno (1941);
Il Trentino visto da un socialista (1911); Storia di un anno (1945)
(see also K l i b a n s k y ); Vita di Sandro e di Arnaldo (1934)
M u s s o l i n i , Edvige, Mio fratello Benito (1957)
M u s s o l i n i , Rachele (with Michael Chinigo), La mia vita con Benito
(translated as M y Life with Mussolini, Hale, 1959)
M u s s o l i n i , Vittorio, Vita con mio padre (1 9 5 7 )
N a p o l it a n o , Vitantonio, 25 luglio (1944)
N a v a r r a , Quinto, Memorie del cameriere di Mussolini (1 9 4 6 )
Il Nazionale (especially for A Milano con Mussolini, by Hans Otto
Meissner, 5 August 1951)
La Nazione del Popolo (especially for Memorie politiche by Dino
Grandi, 2 July 1945, and Così era Mussolini, by Madeleine
Mollier, August and September 1947)
N e n n i , Pietro, Pagine di diario (1947); Storia di quattro anni 1919-
1922 (1946)
Neue Zürcher Zeitung (for Enthüllunger über Mussolini, 22 Octo-
ber 1945)
New York Times
N nri, Francesco, Meditazioni dell'esilio (1947)
Nuova Rivista Storica
Oggi (especially for Claretta Petacci al giudizio della storia by Fer
ruccio Lanfranchi, 19 December 1948-24 March 1949; In auto-
blindo col Duce sulla strada di Dongo, by Elena Curti Cucciatti,
29 December 1949; Edda mi ha detto, by Mino Caudana, June and
July 1947; Un'amica di Mussolini racconta, by Angela Curti,
November and December 1949, and Tentai di riconciliare Edda
Ciano e Mussolini, by Giusto Pancino, September 1954)
3 5 1
MUSSOLINI
O rano, Paolo, Mussolini da vicino (1 9 2 8 )

L’Osservatore Romano
P a c k a r d , Reynolds and Eleanor, Balcony Empire (Chatto & Win-
dus, 1943)
V o n P a p e n , Franz, Memoirs (translated by Brian Connell, Deutsch,
•952)
P a r r i , Ferruccio, Il movimento di liberazione e gli Alleati (1955)
P a s c a l , Pierre, Mussolini alla vigilia della sua morte e l’Europa
(1 9 4 8 )
P a sto r e, Luigi, Crollo del fascismo e invasione tedesca (1944)
P e t a c c i,Claretta, Il mio diario (1947)
P i n i , Giorgio, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia (1950); Itinerario
tragico (1956); Mussolini (translated into English by Luigi Villari,
Hutchinson, 1939); Mussolini: l’uomo e Vopera, with Duilio Sus-
Ilici (1953-1955)
Il Popolo di Alessandria
Il Popolo d’Italia
Popolo e Libertà (especially for Le ultime giornate dell’ex-Duce
Mussolini, July 1945)
Pozzi, Arnaldo, Come li ho visti io (1947)
R a h n , Rudolf, Ambasciatore di Hitler a Vichy e a Salò (1948)
Re, Emilio, Storia di un archivio: Le carte di Mussolini (1946)
Reader’s Digest (especially for The Last Days of Dictator Benito
Mussolini, by George Kent, November 1944)
11 Regime Fascista
Il Resto del Carlino
R h o d e s , Anthony, The Poet as Superman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
!959)
von R i n t e l e n , Enno, Mussolini l’alleato (1952) (a translation of
Mussolini als Bundesgenosse)
Il Risorgimento Liberale (especially for Come si giunse al ‘25
luglio’, August 1944, and Sono l’uomo più odiato d’Italia, 2
August 1944; La giornata degli inganni by Lorenzo Barbaro, 25
July 1944; Dichiarazioni di Togliatti sull’esecuzione di Mussolini,
14 March 1947, and Chi prese le carte di Mussolini? 3 Aprii 1947)
Rivista Romana
Rivista Storica Italiana
R o a t t a , Mario, Otto Milioni di Baionette (1946)
Rossi, A. (Angelo Tasca), La naissance du Fascisme (translated as
The Rise of Italian Fascism, by Peter and Dorothy Wait,
Methuen, 1938)
Rossi, Cesare, Mussolini com’era (1947)
35*
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roux, Georges, Mussolini (i960)

Saini, Ezio, La notte di Bongo (1950)
S a l v a t o r e l l i , Luigi, Casa Savoia nella storia d’Italia (1945); Il Fas
cismo nella politica internationale (1946); Ventanni fra due
guerre (1946); Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista with Giovanni
Mira (1956)
S a l v a t o r i , Renato, Nemesi (1 9 4 5 )
S a l v e m i n i , Gaetano, The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (Cape, 1928);
Mussolini diplomatico (edition of 1952); What to do with Italy
(1943) with George La Piana; La Terreur Fasciste igzz-igzó
(1930); Under the Axe of Fascism (Gollancz, 1936); Prelude to
World War II (Gollancz, 1953)
S a p o r i t i , Piero, Empty Balcony (Gollancz, 1947)
S a r f a t t i , Margherita, Dux (translated as The Life of Benito Musso
lini by Frederic Whyte, Thornton Butterworth, 1925)
S c h m i d t , Paul, Da Versaglia a Norimberga (1 9 5 1 )
S c h n e i d e r , Herbert W., The Fascist Government of Italy (Van Nos
trand, N.Y., 1936)
S c h u s c h n i g g , Kurt von, Requiem in Rot-Weiss-Rot (1946) (trans
lated as Austrian Requiem, Gollancz, 1947)
S c h u s t e r , Idelfonso, Gli ultimi tempi di un regime (1946)
Il Secolo d’Italia (especially for La convulsa e vibrante vigilia che
portò alla fondazione della R.S.I., by Domenico Pellegrini-Giam-
pietro, 24 November i960)
S e n i s e , Carmine, Quando ero capo della polizia (1946)
Settimana Incom (especially for Gli ultimi giorni di Mussolini by
Aniceto Del Massa, Aprii 1949)
S e t t i m e l l i , Emilio, Edda contro Benito (1946)
S f o r z a , Carlo, L ’Italia del 1gì4 al ig44 quale io la vidi (1944); Con-
temporary Italy (translated by Drake and Denise DeKay, Dutton,
N.Y., 1944)
S h i r e r , William, A Berlin Diary (Hamish Hamilton, 1941); The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Seeker & Warburg, i960)
SiLONE, Ignazio, The School for Dictators (translated by Gwenda
David and Eric Mosbacher, Cape, 1939)
S i l v e s t r i , Carlo, Turati l’ha detto (1 9 4 6 ); Matteotti, Mussolini e il
dramma italiano (1 9 4 7 ); Contro la vendetta (1 9 4 8 ); Mussolini,
Graziani e l’antifascismo (1 9 4 9 )
S i l v e s t r i , Giuseppe, Albergo agli Scalzi (1 9 4 6 )
S im o n i, Leonardo, Berlino-Ambasciata d’Italia ig3g-ig43 (1946)
S k o r z e n y , Otto, Geheimkommando (1950) (an abridged translation
is Skorzeny’s Secret Missions, Hale, 1957)
353
MUSSOLINI
Le Soir (Brussels) (especially for De Vexécution de Mussolini au

trésor de Dongo, 7 May 1947; La correspondance de la Comtesse
Ciano, 10 January 1946, and for La vérité vraie sur la fin de
Mussolini, 5 July 1946)
SoLERi, Marcello, Memorie (1949)
S p a m p a n a t o , Bruno, Contromemoriale (1951); L'ultimo Mussolini
(>949)
S p r ig g e , Cecil J. S ., The Development of M odem Italy (Duck
worth, 1943); Benedetto Croce (Duckworth, 1952)
La Stampa
S t a r h e m b e r g , Prince, Ernst Rüdiger, Between Hitler and Musso
lini (Hodder & Stoughton, 1942)
S t o r i c u s , Le ultime giornate di Mussolini e di Claretta Petacci
(n .d .)
Sturzo, Luigi, Italy and Fascismo (Faber, 1926); The Survey of
International Affairs (1952 et seq.)
S u s m e l , Edoardo, Mussolini e il suo tempo (1950)
S u s m e l , Edoardo and Duilio (eds.) (see also P in i) , Opera omnia di
Benito Mussolini, 23 vols (1951-1957); Scritti e discorsi di Benito
Mussolini, 12 vols (1934-1939)
T a m a r o , Attilio, Due anni di storia 1943-1945 (*948); Venti anni di
storia 1922-1943 (1954-1955)
T a y l o r , A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War (Hamish
Hamilton, 1961)
Tempo (especially for Vita sbagliata di Galeazzo Ciano, by Duilio
Susmel, October i960; Ecco la verità by Karl Wolff, January and
February 1951; Mussolini da Gargnano a Dongo, by Antonio
Bonino, March 1950; La Favorita by Paolo Monelli, November
and December 1947 and January 1948; Dalla campagna d'Etiopia
al colpo di stato, September, October and November 1952; Un
pecoraio del Gran Sasso, by Vincenzo Rovi, Aprii 1954; La Spia
acustica, November 1945, and Rivelazione su una tragicomica
seduta di Palazzo Venezia, 13 July 1944)
Time
The Times
T o s c a n o , M., Le origini diplomatiche del Patto di Acciaio (1948)
T r e v e s , Paolo, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini (1945)
T r i z z i n o , Antonio, Navi e poltroni (1954)
T u r c h i , Franz, Prefetto con Mussolini (1950)
Gli ultimi discorsi di Benito Mussolini (1950)
Gli ultimi giorni del fascismo (1944)
Unità (especially for L'esecuzione di Mussolini 30 Aprii 1945; Come
354
BIBLIOGRAPHY
giustiziai Mussolini, November and December 1945; and Edda

ricatta Mussolini, 23 June 1945)
V a n s i t t a r t , Lord, The Mist Procession (Hutchinson, 1958)
V e a l e , F. J. P., Crimes Discreetly Veiled (Cooper Book Co., 1958)
V ia n a , Mario, La monarchia e il fascismo (1951)
V iLLA Ri, Luigi, Affari Esteri (1948); Italian Foreign Policy Under
Mussolini (Nelson Publishing Co., Appleton, Wisconsin, 1956);
The Liberation of Italy (Nelson Publishing Co., Appleton, Wis
consin, 1959)
La Voce
W a r d P r i c e , G., I Know These Dictators (Harrap, 1937)
W e l l e s , Sumner, A Time for Decision (Harpers, N.Y., 1944)
W h e e l e r -B e n n e t t , John, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (Mac
millan, 1948)
W i c h t e r i n g , Richard, Benito Mussolini (1952)
W i s k e m a n n , Elizabeth, The Rome-Berlin Axis (Oxford University
Press, 1949)
Z a c h a r ia e , Georg, Mussolini si confessa (1948)
Z a n u s s i , Giacomo, Guerra e catastrofe d'Italia (1945)
355
IN D E X
Abruzzi, the, 217 Anti-Semitism. See Jews

Abyssinia, Italian war in, 2, 68-71, 73 Antonelli, Domenico, 232, 341
Acerbo Electoral Law, 47 Armellini, General, 132
Acquarone, Duke Pietro cT : plots against Athens, occupation of, 134
Mussolini, 160, 166; Grandi reports Atlantic Charter, 139
results of Grand Council to, 190; asks Attolico, Bernardo, 93-4, 99, 108; returns
king for order for Mussolini’s arrest, from Berlin to support Ciano, 112;
I91 asks Germans for supplies, 113
Addis Abbaba, anniversary of capture Audisio, Walter (or 'Giovanbattista di
of, 165-6 Cesare Magnoli * or ‘ Colonel Val
Africa, Italy’s scheme of public works erio ’), 322; leaves Milan to collect
in* 52 Mussolini, 323; receives no satisfac
Agostini, Bruno d*, 138 tion in Como, 324-5; further opposi
Airey, Major-General, and German sur tion in Dongo, 325-6; finds Musso
render negotiations in Italy, 283 lini, 328; shoots him, 330-1; accounts
Alamein, El, 140, 160 of his activities, 345
Albania: public works in, 52; invasion Austria: Italian policy towards, 71-2;
of, 103-4; Ciano’s interest in, 136m German policy in, 78-9, 83; the Ans
Albergo-Rifugio, the, 217 chluss, 87-9
Albertini, Senator, 49 Austro-German Agreement (1936), 78
Albini : cautious support for Grandi, Avanti/, 15, 18; pleasure at Mussolini’s
175; on his Grand Council vote, 187- defeat (1919), 27
8 Axis, the : first use of term, 80; Ciano’s
Albonetti, Major Fortunato, 275 criticism of, 101; Mussolini’s loyalty
Alfieri, Dino, 57, 340; on Ciano, 81; to, 160; collapse of, 214
discusses Greek invasion with Musso Azzano, Mussolini hidden at, 318
lini, 133; hears Hitler’s criticisms of
Italians, 134; at Pusch Conference, Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 124, 131, 135;
136-7; learns of attack on Russia, 138; retirement as Chief-of-Staff, 132; plots
Mussolini’s instructions to, 139-40; on against Mussolini, 161, 166; Victor
Hitler’s determination to defeat Rus Emmanuel’s choice as Head of Gov
sia, 164; admiration for Ambrosio, ernment, 190; announcement as, 197;
168; supports Grandi, 177 proclaims continuance of war, 198;
Alto Adige: Hitler suggests German asks Mussolini where he would like
occupation of, 237, 238 to be taken after arrest, 200; cautious
Ambrosio, General Vittorio : plots policy, 214; reassurances to Germans,
against Mussolini, 161; chosen as new 215; flight with government from
Chief-of-Staff, 163; asks Germans for Rome, 220; Cavallero’s evidence
help, 168; feels Mussolini’s removal against, 250; makes Italian units
essential, 161-70; tells Badoglio of available to Allies, 272
king’s decision, 190; protests at Ger Balabanoff, Angelica, 10 and n.; on
man occupation, 214; Cavallero’s evi Mussolini, 22, 24 n.
dence against, 250 Balbo, Marshal Italo, 29, 32, 64, 124;
Amendola, Giovanni, 48-9, 165 critical of Germany, 101; on Musso
Amicucci, Ermanno, upholds Musso lini, 150
lini, 171 Baldwin, ist Earl, 70
Ancona, Fascist attacks in, 32 Bandini, Franco, on Mussolini’s last
Anfuso, Filippo, 39, 112, 163, 171, 1900. days, 344
Anglo-German naval treaty (1935), 73, Barbarità, Rosita, 329
78 Barbieri, Captain Davide, 306, 308
Anglo-Italian Pact (1938), 90 Bardia, fall of, 135
Antichi, Sergeant-Major, 210, 216; Mus Barracu, Francesco Maria, 243, 290, 305,
solini’s walks and talks with, 219 306; joins discussions with National
Anti-Comintern Pact (1937), 85, 98, Liberation Committee, 292; shot in
127m leg and captured, 310
356
INDEX
Basso, General, 215 Britain : Mussolini on decadence of,
Bastianini, Giuseppe, 113, 188; succeeds 94; Ciano on, 100; Pact of Mutual
Ciano in Foreign Affairs, 162; presses Assistance with Poland, 113; attempts
Mussolini to ask for German help, to keep Italy out of war, 120-1; Mus
168; cautiously backs Grandi’s plot, solini’s hatred of, 152, 278
171; desire for separate peace, 174-5 Brivonesi, Admiral Bruno, in command
Battisti, Cesare, 13, 23 of naval base at Maddalena, 212-13
Bauer, Hitler’s personal pilot, 139 Buffarini-Guidi, Guido, 156, 157, 258,
Belgium, surrender of Army, 124 271, 340; has Mussolini warned of
Bellini, Bernardo, 330 plots, 162; at Grand Council, 186;
supports the Germans, 243; takes
Bellini, Teresa, 330 Rachele to see Claretta Petacci, 259;
Bellini Delle Stelle, Count Pierluigi, dismissal, 276; ad\ ises Duce to escape
313, 314-15, 345; reluctance to give up to Switzerland or Spain, 290, 298;
Mussolini to Audisio, 325-6; leaves to attempts to reach Switzerland, 304;
fetch Fascist prisoners from Ger- captured, 304
masino, 326 Budelli, Giorgio, 314, 345
Belluno, Germany demands from Aus
tria, 238 Cabella, G. G., interview with Musso
Belmonte, Villa, 330 lini, 289
Bertinelli, Gino, 315; reluctance to reveal Cabrini, Angiolo, 18
Mussolini’s whereabouts to Audisio, Cadematori, Remo, 316
323 Cadenabbia, 302
Bianchi, Anne, 327m Cadorna, Marshal Count Luigi, 268
Bianchi, Professor Cesare, 151 Cadorna, General Raffaele, 268, 292,
Bianchi, Michele, 32 293, 315, 316, 344
Bicchierai, Don Giuseppe, 282, 292, 294 Caminate, Rocca delle, 44, 242
Biggini, Carlo Alberto, 183, 186, 243 Campana, Michele, 20, 72, 337
Bignardi, Annio, 175 Campo Imperatore, 217
Birzer, Lieutenant Fritz, 287, 291, 296, Canali, Luigi (’ Captain N eri’), 317-
344; will not let Duce leave Como 18, 326 and n.
without escort, 301-2; fears Duce will Canaris, Admiral, 227
escape to Switzerland, 302; refuses to Caneva, 12
help other Fascists, 304; persuades Cantoni, Guglielmo (‘ Sandrino *), 317,
Mussolini to join German convoy, 318-20, 326m, 330, 345
305; stopped by partisans, 306; takes Carboni, General Pompeo, plots against
Mussolini on to Dongo, 308-9 Duce, 161
Bissolati, Leonida, 18, 23 ‘ Cadetto *, tries to join Audisio in find
Blevio, 316, 317 ing Mussolini, 325
Bocchini, Arturo, 56, 87, 122 Camera, Primo, 63
Bologna, 19; 1920 riots in, 29; fall of, Carradori, 296, 299, 305, 310
290 Casalinuovo, Colonel Vito, 299, 302,
Bolshevism, failure of in Italy, 40-1 305; captured, 310; executed, 332n.
Bolzano, 238 Cassibile, Italian surrender signed at,
Bombacci, Nicola, 244, 255, 296, 305; 215
gives himself up, 307-8; execution of, Cassino, fall of, 270
33211. Castellano, General Giuseppe, 341; plots
Bonomi, Ivanoe, 18; plots against Mus against Mussolini, 161, 166; orders
solini, 161, 166 Granatieri to Rome, 189; summons
Borano, Ercole, 169, 192 Carabinieri for Mussolini’s arrest, 191;
Borsani, Carlo, 296 negotiates Italian surrender, 215
Bottai, Giuseppe, 158, 340; on Musso Castelli, Emilio, 302
lini, 150, 153-4; plots against Musso Catholicism, and Mussolini, 53, 118-19
lini, 101; replaced as Minister of Edu Cavagnari, Admiral, 128
cation, 162; bitterness against Fas Cavallero, Marshal Count Ugo, 136, 140,
cist régime, 174; suggests bringing 141, 158; represents Italy on Military
Ciano into conspiracy, 176; speech at Commission (May 1939), 107; dis
Grand Council, 181, 185 missed as Chief-of-Staff, 163; death,
Bracciano, Lake, 216 250; written evidence of plot against
Brescia, fall of, 290 Mussolini, 250
Briand, Aristide: on Mussolini, 76; the Caviglia, Marshal, 161; suggested as
Duce on, 256 Head of Government, 190
Brigate Nere, the, 270-1 Cavour, quoted, 126
MUSSOLINI
Cerica, General Angelo, 156, 191, 203 Ciano, Count Galeazzo (coni.)
Cernobbia, Rachele at, 301 on Hitler’s French campaign, 129; an
Chamberlain, Sir Austen, on Mussolini, nounces Italy’s declaration of war to
74 British and French ambassadors, 125;
Chamberlain, Neville, 93; welcomes supports Mussolini in attack on
Anglo-Italian Pact, 90; asks for Mus Greece, 131; on defeat at Sidi Barrani,
solini’s intervention with Hitler, 93; 135; on Cavallero, 136 and n.; at
tells House of Hitler’s postponement Pusch Conference, 136-7; announces
of Czech invasion, 94; goes to Munich, Italy as being at war with Russia,
94-5; on Mussolini at Munich, 96; 138; on the meeting at Schloss Kless-
visits Rome (January 1939), 99-100 heim, 140; anxiety over Mussolini’s
Chamberlain, Lady, 74 health, 143; on the Petacci affair, 155,
Chambrun, Comte de, 58 157; as Ambassador to Holy See, 162-
Chiasso, 304 3; colder relations with Mussolini,
Chierici, Renzo, appointed Chief of 171-2; on Bottai, 174; attitude to
Police, 165 Grandi conspiracy, 176, 177; speech
Child, Richard Washburn, on Musso at Grand Council, 182-3; detained in
lini, 74 Munich, 235; sent back to Italy, 246;
Chirico, Lieutenant-Colonel, 199 arrest, 246; trial, 248, 249-51; refusal
Churchill, Sir Winston, 70, 301; on to reveal whereabouts of diaries, 251;
Mussolini and Fascism, 74; views on shot, 252-3
Anglo-Italian Pact, 90; plea to Mus Ciccotti, 22
solini to keep out of war, 121; Mus Cicognani, Bruno, 63
solini on, 200, 256 Cini, Vittorio, speaks against Musso
Cianetti, Tullio, 175, 185, 188; trial of, lini, 171
247, 249, 251 Cittadini, General, 34
Ciano, Admiral Count Costanzo, 57, Como : Mussolini leaves for, 295; arrives
80 there, 298; leaves for mountains, 302;
Ciano, Countess Edda (Mussolini’s Audisio tries to find him in, 324
daughter), 38, 124, 342; birth, 15; on Communism : struggle with Fascism
her father’s ill-health, 150-1; on his after World War I, 28-9; influence in
incomprehensible behaviour, 194; Italy from 1943, 209ff.; organization
sends him letter in exile, 210; inter of strikes, 272; determination of fol
view with him in Munich, 235; begs lowers on execution of Mussolini, 322
him to save husband from Germans, Cooper, Duff. See Norwich, ist Viscount
246, 247; threatens Hitler, 246; escapes Coppolo, Alfredo, execution of, 3320.
with some of husband’s diaries, 251 Coraboeuf, Magda. See Fontanges
Ciano, Count Galeazzo (son-in-law), 57, Cordazzo, Giuseppina, 330, 331
93; unpopularity with Germans, 82, Corporativism, 51; Lloyd George on, 94
237; marries Edda Mussolini, 80; per Correspondenza Repubblicana, 257, 262
sonality, 81; admiration of Duce, 80-1; Corridoni, Filippo, 21, 23
on Mussolini’s visit to Germany Corriere della Sera, i8n., 49, 63, 257
(1937), 84; suggests Anglo-Italian Corsica: Italy's claim to, 98, 99; Hitler
Pact, 90; on Hitler’s personal success and Mussolini discuss, 239
in Italy, 92; on Mussolini at Munich, Corti, Pia Reggidori, interview with
96; on Mussolini’s attitude to war, 97; Mussolini (1945), 280-1, 343
dislike of Ribbentrop, 98; on the Croce, Benedetto, 30, 56, 63
British, 100; criticism of the Axis, Cucciati, Elena Curti, 303, 304, 305, 308,
101; on the Albanian invasion, 103, 345
104; to Berlin to sign German-Italian Curti, Angela, 154, 303; warns Musso
alliance (May 1939), 106; on Musso lini of plots, 162, 163
lini’s attitude to Sir Percy Loraine, Curzon, Marquess, of Kedleston : on
107; meets Ribbentrop at Salzburg, Mussolini, 67; Mussolini’s dislike of,
108-9; on German determination to 67n.
go to war, 109-10; disgust at Germans, Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s intentions over,
111 ; attempts to make Mussolini re 89; Mussolini’s attitude to, 92-3; in
pudiate Pact of Steel, 112, 113; on vasion (March 1939), 101; Hitler and
Mussolini’s worry over his Polish Mussolini discuss, (September 1943),
policy, 115; on Hitler after fall of 239
Warsaw, 116; public speech on Ger
man treachery, 117; receives Collar of Daddario, Captain Emilio Q., 323
Annunziata from king, 122; on Musso Daily Mail, on Fascism, 74
lini's determination to go to war, 122; Daladier, Edouard, 94
358
INDEX
Dalmatia: Mussolini’s views on, 26, 27; Facta, Luigi, 33
Germany’s plans for future of, 239 Faenza, school at, 5-6
Dalser, Benito, 58 Faiola, Lieutenant, 215, 218, 219; Musso
Dalser, Ida, 58 lini asks him for revolver, 221; orders
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 23, 27, 42, 85, in event of German rescue, 222; and
256, 277 the Gran Sasso rescue, 230-1; refuses
Danzig, German policy over, 106, 107 to go with Duce, 232
Daquanno, Ernesto, execution of, 332m Fallmeyer, Lieutenant, 305; stopped by
D’Aroma, Nino, 338 Partisans, 306; takes Mussolini on to
De Ambris, Alceste, 21 Dongo, 309
De Bono, Marshal Emilio, 27, 32, 68; Farinacci, Roberto, 32, 49, 50, 119, 236,
critical of Germany, 101; on Starace, 241, 242-3, 271, 272; at Grand Council,
122; warnings to Mussolini, 128; on 181, 183; Mussolini's anger over, 256
Cavallero, 136; at Grand Council meet Farming, under Fascism, 52-3
ing, 181; trial, 247, 248-9, 251; execu Fascism: beginnings of, 26; growth, 28-
tion, 252-3 30; success in 1921 elections, 30; early
De Cesare, 156, 169, 188, 189, 192; pre successes in power, 40-1; propaganda
sented to king, 194; arrested with against Bolshevism, 41; emotionalism
Duce, 195, 196; they visit each other, of, 41-2; early benefits of, 44-5; crimes
201 of, 45-6; assumes complete control of
De Marias, the, 317-20, 329, 345 Italy, 5off.; Party Song, 48; youth
De Vecchi, General Cesare Maria, 27, organizations, 51; the Fascist Satur
32, 131, 175; at Grand Council, 181 day, 63-4; German influence on, 84;
Denmark, occupation by Germany, 120 asso romanot 84; campaign against
Dessi, Colonel Giovanni, tries to accom ourgeoisie (1938), 97; attitude to war,
pany Audisio, 325 100; anti-Semitism, 102; contradictory
Deutsches Nachrichten Büro, publishes policies of, 127 and n.; increasing
Salzburg communiqué, 111 opposition to (1942), 146; Mussolini
Diamanti, General, 294 attempts to revive enthusiasm for,
Dicheroff, Lieutenant, 257 165; death of, after Mussolini’s resig
Dies, Fr. Luigi Maria, on Mussolini in nation, 198; Hitler suggests revival of
exile, 209, 341 in Northern Italy, 236; reconstruction
Dietrich, Sepp, 77 as Partito Fascista Repubblicano, 241,
Dinale, Ottavio, 287, 343 261; Mussolini on, 255; the Grand
Dolfin, Giovanni, 271; on Edda Ciano, Council: establishment of, 50; pro
247; tells Mussolini of executions, 253 gramme of racial legislation, 86; told
Dollfuss, Engelbert, murder of, 71 of Italian policy in Poland, 115;
Dollmann, Colonel Eugen, 242, 244, 253, demands meeting (July 1943), 166-7;
354; on Mussolini, 281; negotiations preparations for, 173®-; the meeting
for surrender of German armies in and its consequences, 177!!., 340
Italy, 282ft.; wife taken by Gestapo, Favagrossa, General Carlo, 127-8, 129
*83 Federzoni, on saving the nation, 173,
Dongo, capture of Mussolini in, 311 *77
‘ Dongo, Palazzo', 2990. Felicita, Donna, 251
‘ Dongo Treasure *, 299 and n., 327m Feltre, meeting of Hitler and Musso
Dovia, 3-4, ii lini at, 167-9
Dulles, Allen, and Dollmann surrender Feltrinelli, Villa, air-raid shelter built
negotiations, 282-3 at, 265
Dunkirk, 122 Ferone, General, in charge of Mussolini,
199-201
Eden, Sir Anthony (ist Earl of Avon): Filippelli, Filippo, 49
and sanctions against Italy, 70; be Fiume: Italy's claims to, 26, 27; Tito
comes Foreign Secretary, 71; resigna occupies, 290
tion (1938), 90; Mussolini on, 256 Fontanges, Magda (Magda Coraboeuf),
Egypt: Mussolini considers attack on, 5 8 ,3 3 8
130; attack begins, 131 Foot, Michael, 99
Elena, Queen of Italy, 199 Forlì prison, Mussolini in, 3, 17
Eusebio, Fr., final conversation with Forlimpopoli, Giosuè Carducci school
Mussolini, 287, 344 at, 6
Fossani, Ivanoe, 245; interview with
Fabiani : accompanies Buffarini-Guidi Mussolini, (1945), 277-9, 342-3
in attempted escape, 304; returns to France : Italian sympathy for in World
Grandola, 304 War I, 20, 21; Mussolini’s policy to-
359
M USSOLINI
F ra n c e (c o n t .) / ’ Goebbels: on the Italians, io8n., 240;
wards, 69, 72; Italian campaign on Italian policy over Jews, 142; on
against, 97-8; request for Armistice, Mussolini’s power and loyalty to
129; German policy towards, 142 Axis, 160; on Ciano, 237; on Hitler’s
Franco, General, 132; Mussolini’s aid to, disillusionment with Duce, 237-8; on
„ 79 Duce’s health, 239; diaries, 342
François-Poncet, André, 94; hears Italy’s Goering, Reichsmarshal, 43; discussions
declaration of war, 125 with Mussolini (1937), 83; visit to
Frangi, Giuseppe, 317, 330; guards Rome (1939), 105; disappointment at
Mussolini, 318-20 Ribbentrop’s Italian decorations, 106;
Frank, Hans, 79, 82 at Pusch Conference, 137; visit to
Frugoni, Professor Cesare, 151 Rome (1942), 140; birthday telegram
to exiled Mussolini, 208; at Salzburg
Gaeta, 202-3 Conference, 264
Gaevernitz, Dr., and Dollmann’s sur Gottardi, Luciano: trial of, 247, 249,
render negotiations, 282-3 251; execution, 252-3
Gaggia, Senator Achille, 167 Gran Sasso, the: Mussolini taken to,
Gai, Silvio, 243 217; rescue from, 230-3
Galbiati, General Enzio, 166, 183, 186, Grand Council. See Fascism
340; advice to Mussolini, 188-9 Grandi, Count Dino, 32, 68; goes to
Gangi, Princess di, 155 U.S.A. with Mussolini, 51; critical of
Gargnano, Mussolini moves to, 244 Germany, 101; plots against Musso
Gasperi, Alcide de, 13 lini, 161-2; preparations to obtain
Gatti, Luigi, 296, 299, 302; execution Mussolini’s resignation, 173; inter
of, 332n. view with Mussolini, 175-6 and n.;
Gatti, Pietro. See Moretti speech before Grand Council, 181-2;
Geminazza, Audisio’s driver, 329, 330-1 speaks again, 186; his motion carried,
General Confederation of Labour, calls 186; disappears from public life, 190
general strike, 17 and n.; escapes to Spain, 247; Musso
Genoa: Fascist attacks in, 32; occupied lini on, 256; on Grand Council meet
by Partisans, 290 ing. 340, 341
Gentile, Giovanni, 41, 60; Education Act Grandola, 302-3
( • 913). 45 Graziani, Marshal Rodolfo, 130-1, 263;
George VI, King of England, coronation report on Army, 128-9; c°urt of in
of, 82 quiry on, 135; promises Duce con
Gerlach, Captain, 232-3 tinued support, 189; loyalty to Ger
German-Italian alliance. See Pact of man alliance, 243; difficulties in creat
Steel ing independent Italian Army, 268
German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: and n.; quarrels with Kesselring, 277;
first news of, 110; Ribbentrop prepares attacks Pavolini’s plans, 286, 290;
to sign, 112; Mussolini’s worry over, joins discussions with National Lib
116 eration Committee, 292; unwilling to
Germany: Mussolini’s early policy to negotiate capitulation without Ger
wards, 68; policy in Spanish Civil War, mans, 203-4; with Duce at Como, 298;
79 and n.; Duce’s visit to (1937), 83- leaves for Menaggio with him, 302;
4; policy towards Austria 71-2, 87-9; leaves him to join Army unit, 304
invasion of Czechoslovakia, 101; de Greece: compensation to Italy (1923),
signs on Poland, 105; success in Pol 65; Mussolini’s threats to, 107; Italy’s
and, 115; attack on France and Low attack on, 131-3; Britain obtains bases
Countries, 122; forced to help Italy in in, 133; German invasion, 134
Greece, 133, 134; attacks Russia, 138; Green Flames, the, 269
difficulties there, 138-9; deterioration Grevetto, Francesco, 217, 219, 221
of relations with Italy, 142; control Gualtieri, 6-7
of north-eastern Italy, 244-5; dose Guariglia, Raffaele, 81; meeting with
guard on Mussolini, 244-5; ta^k of Ribbentrop, 214, 215
secret weapons, 275 Guastoni, Dr., 323
Germasino, Mussolini moved to, 313 Gueli, Mussolini's warder, 218, 219, 232
Gibraltar, 142 Guidi, Anna, 14
Gibson, Hon. Violet, 54 Guidi, Augusta, 14
Giolitti, Giovanni, 16-17, 23, 28 Guidi, Rachele. See Mussolini, Rachele
Gnesi, Sauro, 325 Gustav Line, collapse of, 270
Gobbi, Pietro, 45 Guzzoni, General Alfredo, at Pusch
Godesberg ultimatum, 93 Conference, 137
360
INDEX
Haile Selassie, Emperor of Abyssinia, Hitler, Adolf (coni.)
55, 69; invited to King George Vi's Duce outside Milan (December 1944),
Coronation, 82 275; hears Wolff's report, 284
Halifax, ist Earl of: on Italian policy, Hoare, Sir Samuel (ist Viscount Tem-
67; accompanies Chamberlain to plewood), 71; the Hoare-Laval Pact
Rome, 99-100; preface to Lord Lloyd’s (1935), 7 1; Mussolini on, 256
pamphlet, 120 Hoffmann, Luigi, 306
Hassell, Ulrich von, 39, 79 Hussman, Professor, 282, 283
Hazon, General, death of, 191
Hidaka, Japanese Ambassador to Italy, Il Messaggero, 157
188 Il Mondo, 49
Himmler, Heinrich, 283, 284; plans for Il Pensiero Romagnolo, 3, 4, 11
Mussolini's rescue, 225; refuses nego Il Popolo di Alessandria, 289
tiations for Ciano's diaries, 251 Il Popolo d’Italia, 21, 43, 214
Hintermayer, execution of, 3320. Il Resto del Carlino, i8n., 21
Hirschberg, Schloss, Mussolini at, 241 Il Trentino, 13
Istria, Germany's plans for future of,
Hitler, Adolf: on Mussolini’s lack of
appreciation of art, 60; encourage 239
Italy: enters World War I, 23; situa
ment of Italy's African ambitions, 68; tion in after World War I, 28; General
Mussolini’s anger with, after Doll- Election of April 1924, 47; prosperity
fuss murder, 72; asks for signed after Fascist advent, 51; public works
photograph of Mussolini, 73; Musso programme, 52; anger at Austrian
lini’s first meeting with, 7^-8; his Anschluss, 89; air raids on Spanish
verbosity, 78, 82, 140; offers to recog towns, 91; invasion of Albania, 103-4;
nize Italian Empire, 79; hatred of anxiety of people not to fight on
Ciano, 82; on Mussolini, 82; and
Mussolini's visit to Germany (1937), Germany’s side, 122-3; declares war
83-4; gratitude to Duce for support (1940), 125; military weakness, 127;
ing Anschluss, 87-9, 339; visit to Italy subordinate position of after Greek
(1938), 90, 91-2; dislike of Victor failure, 134; troops sent to Eastern
Emmanuel, 92; agrees to delay Czech front, 138; cuts in shipments of coal
invasion, 94; at Munich, 95-6; and and oil, 141; German units enter, for
signing of Pact of Steel, 106; deter ’ training', 141 ; deterioration of rela
mines on conquest of Poland, no; tions with Germany, 142, 146; increas
fears indiscretion of Italians, 108 and ing opposition to Fascism, 146; black
n.; informs Mussolini of coming action market and rationing, 146; only air
raid on Britain, 149; allied attack on,
against Poland, 113; accepts Italian 166; surrender 215; violence of war
neutrality and limited support, 114; on, 220; terms of armistice, 221;
informs Mussolini of invasion of Verona trial, 245-53; growth of par
Denmark and Norway, 120; advises tisan movements, 268, 269; danger of
against invasion of Greece, 132; anger Italians fighting own countrymen,
at Duce, 132-3; opinion of Italian 272; factories kept out of German
alliance, i33n.; personal respect for control, 276; last stages of war in,
Duce, 136; Pusch Conference (1941), 281; last meeting of ministers of
136-7; Eastern Front meeting with Socialist Republic, 287; final military
Duce (1941), 137-8; Schloss Kless- disasters, 290
heim meeting (1942), 140; compares Iurato, Flavia, 218, 341
himself to Napoleon, 140; Treviso
meeting (1943), 167-9; insists Musso
lini’s letter to Badoglio is forgery, Jacomoni, Francesco, 1360.
20in.; sends books to exiled Duce, Japan, Mussolini’s praise of, 147
208-9; 2I3 ‘> orders Skorzeny to rescue Jews: Mussolini on anti-Semitism, 76-7;
Mussolini, 224-5; hears °f Mussolini’s introduction of into Italian life, 86; as
presence on Maddalena, 227; tele essential part of Fascist policy, 102;
phones him at Vienna after rescue, Mussolini’s attitude towards, 86, 102,
234; meets Duce in East Prussia, 236; 238, 242
suggests new Fascist government in Jodi, General, 140
northern Italy, 236; disappointment
in Mussolini, 237; worried by Edda Kahn, Otto, on Mussolini, 77
Ciano’s threats, 246; sees Mussolini Keitel, Field-Marshal, 140, 168, 264;
at Salzburg (1944), 263-5; on Italy’s meets Ambrosio at Tarvisio (August
contribution to the Axis, 268n.; meets >943 ). 214
361
MUSSOLINI
Kesselring, Field-Marshal, 141, 148; dis Mackensen, German Ambassador to
trust 01 Ambrosio, 163; on Grandi’s Italy, 113, 120, 148, 169
interview with Mussolini, 176 and n.; Maddalena Island, Mussolini removed
belief in Badoglio, 214-15; ignorance to, 211
of Mussolini’s whereabouts, 226; Mafalda, Princess, of Italy, 88
makes Italy behind German front Mainetti, Don, 306-7, 345
line a war zone, 238; attitude to Malta, abandonment of plans to cap
Mussolini, 266; becomes C-in-C. West, ture, 141
183 Manchester Guardian, on Mussolini, 74
Kirkpatrick, Sir Ivone, on Mussolini, 96, Mancini, 43
339 Manifesto di Verona, 261
Kisnatt, Captain Otto, 287, 291, 344-5 Mantua, fall of, 290
Klessheim, Schloss: Hitler and Musso Marazza, Achille, 292, 295, 344
lini meet at (1942), 140; (April 1943), Marche, the, general strike in (1914), 19
1 6 4 -5 Margherita, Queen of Italy, 54
Kufstein, Hitler joins Mussolini at, 95 Maria José, Princess, 160
Kulishov, Anna, i8n. Maria Pace, the, 210
Marinelli, Giovanni: trial of, 247, 249,
251; execution, 252-3
La Guardia, Fiorello, on Mussolini, 76 Marini, Sergeant-Major, conversations
La Lotta di Classe, 15, 16 with Mussolini, 207-8, 209, 210, 341
La Stampa, 49 Marioni, on Mussolini, 314
La Tribuna, 11 Marpillero, Dante, 337
La Vita Trentina, 13 Martinelli, Dr. Siiverio, 210
Lamp redi, Aldo (‘ Guidi '), accompanies Marzabotto, massacre at, 270
Audisio, 323, 324, 326 and n. Massa, occupation of by Allies, 281
Lansbury, George, Mussolini on, 256 Matteotti Brigades, 269
Lateran Pacts, 53 Matteotti, Giacomo, murder of, 49ff.
Lausanne, Mussolini’s life in, 8-9, 11 Maugeri, Rear-Admiral Franco, 128,
Lausanne Conference (1922), 67 203, 204-5, 206, 341; removes Musso
Lavagnini, Francesca, 290 lini to Maddalena Island, 211-12
Laval, Pierre, 70 Mazzolini, Count Serafino, 243, 245,
V Avvenire del Lavoratore, 13 263; on Mussolini’s contentment at
Lazzaro, Urbano, 311, 345 Italians fighting bravely, 272-3; death
League of Nations, sanctions against from blood-poisoning, 276; Mussolini
Italy, 70 on, 287n.
Leghorn, Fascist attacks in, 32 Medway, Italian air raid on, 149
Lemnitzer, General, and German sur Megaro, Gaudens, 14
render negotiations, 283 Meliini, Alberto, 284-5, 343
Libya, Mussolini visits, 140-1 Menaggio, Mussolini at, 302
Littorio, put out of action, 149 Meoli, Lieutenant-Colonel, 210, 212
Liverani, Augusto: gives himself up, Messe, General, 139
307; execution of, 3320. Mezzasoma, Fernando, 243, 255, 256,
Lloyd, Lord, pamphlet on Fascism, 120 342; on successful German counter
Lloyd George, 1st Earl : on Corporative attack, 277; on Mussolini’s loss of con
System, 74; Mussolini on, 256 tact with reality, 277; leaves for Como
Locarno Pact (1925), 67 with Mussolini, 297; gives himself up,
Lombardi, Riccardo, 292, 293 307; execution, 332m
Lombardy, Plain of, American advance Milan: Socialist National Congress in
in. 317 (1911), 17; general strike (1914), 19-
London Conference (1930), 67 20; Socialist Party in expels Musso
Longo, Luigi, 269, 312-13, 343 lini (1914), 21-2; formation of Fascio
Loraine, Sir Percy : and Mussolini’s di Combattimento in (1919), 26; Fas
attitude, 107-8 and n., 339; hears cists break up printing presses (1922),
Italy’s declaration of war, 125 32; Mussolini cheered in (December
Lorenzo, Lieutenant Elio di, 210 1944), 272; Germans advise against
UOsservatore Romano, 119 moving seat of government there
Lucerne, Mussolini in prison in, 3 (April 1945), 287 and n.; Mussolini
Ludwig, Emil, interviews with Musso establishes himself there, 289; display
lini, 13m, 39, 56, 335-6 of shot Fascists to crowd, 333-4
Minsk, Russian resistance at, 139
Macartney, M. H. H., on Mussolini, 57, Mira, Giovanni, 64
337 Mische, General, 298
362
INDEX
Miscordi, Lisa, 220 M usso lin i, B en ito (c o n t .)
Modena, fall of, 290 trade union appointment in Trento,
Möllhausen, E. F., 253, 262, 264 13; expulsion from Austria, 14;
Mollier, Madeleine, interview with Mus secretary of Forlì Socialist Federa
solini (1945), 279-80, 343 tion, 15-16; protests against Govern
Mol trasio, 317 ment sending troops to Tripolitania
Monchiero, meeting of Volunteer Free and Cyrenaica, 16-17; in prison in
dom Corps, 269 Forlì, 17; defeat as Socialist Can
Monelli, Paolo, on Mussolini, 335, 337, didate for Forlì, 19; anti-war
338 speeches at beginning of World
Montagna, General, 274, 291 War I, 20; expelled from Milan
Monte Corno, 217 Socialist Party, 21-2; fights duels
Montgomery, Field-Marshal Viscount, with his opponents, 22, 23; as
of Alamein, 160 soldier in World War I, 24;
Monza, 287n. wounded, 25; advocates dictator
Moravia, Alberto, on Fascist censorship, ship, 25; forms Fascio di Combatti
337 mento in Milan, 26; defeat in Oc
Morbegno, Partisans' Command H/Q tober 1919 Election, 27; arrest and
at, 306-7 release, 27; elected to Chamber of
Mordini, Riccardo, accompanies Audi- Deputies, 30; threat to seize govern
sio, 323, 324 ment, 32; March on Rome, 32-3;
Morell, Professor, 239 asked by king to form government,
Moretti, Michele (‘ Pietro Gatti'), 317, 33-4
326 and n., 331 Exile and Rescue: taken to Gaeta,
Morgagni, Senator Manlio, 170, 199 202-3; on to Ventotene, 204-5;
Moroni, Edoardo, 243 thence to Ponza, 205(1.; birthday
Munich : Conference and Agreement in exile, 208; life on Ponza, 209-11;
(September 1938), 94-6 Mussolini's removed to Maddalena Island, 211;
arrival at after rescue, 234; meeting anxiety at learning of possible
of Hitler and Mussolini near (Decern- German commando rescue, 211; life
ber 1944), 275 on Maddalena, 213-15; removed to
Musso, Rocca di, 306 Gran Sasso, 215-17; life there, 2i8ff.;
Mussolini, Alessandro (father), 3-4, 14 interview with shepherd, 220-1; his
Mussolini, Anna Maria (daughter), 57, rescue, 230-3; arrival in Vienna,
257 and n., 300 234; meets Rachele at Munich, 234;
Mussolini, Arnaldo (brother), 4; death, his broadcast to Italian people from
59 Munich, 240; moved to Schloss Hir
Mussolini, Benito: schberg, 241; returns to Rocca delle
Childhood, 3-4; schooldays in Faenza Caminate, 242
and Forlimpopoli, 5-6 Head of Government, and Dictator:
Conspiracy against, and arrest: plots head of government, 35fr.; idolatry
against, 161-3; reshuffle of Ministers of ill-educated, 42m; success in 1924
after warning letter, 162; coldness election, 47; the Matteotti murder,
to Grandi, 175-6; attends Grand 48-9; suppression of press opposi
Council, 178; his speech there, 179- tion, 49, 50; makes Italy completely
81; returns to meeting after pause, totalitarian, 5öS.; agreement with
184-5; resolution against him car U.S.A. on war debts, 51; becomes
ried, 186; makes appointment to idol of Italian people, 53, 55; signs
see king, 188; keeps appointment, Lateran Pacts with Vatican, 53;
192-3, 340-1; king insists on his hears of brother's death, 57; his
resignation, 193-4; arrest, 195; foreign policy, 66ff.; Abyssinian
refuses to believe arrest, 196-7; war, 68-9; held in high regard in
agrees to go to Rocca delle la m Europe and America, 73; aid to
inate under escort, 200; Submissive- Franco, 79; dislike of Goering, 83;
ness to Badoglio, 200-1 visit to Germany (1937); 83-4; im
Early Career : works as mason, 8; sec- patience with king, 85-6; anti-Sem
Vv 'retary o f’^Lausantte Association of itic policy, 86-7; attitude to A n
4Bricklayers and Manual Labourers, schluss, 87-9; desire to impress the
8-9; his reading, 9; arrest and ex Germans, 91; attitude to Czecho
pulsion from Switzerland, 9-10; slovak problem, 92-3; at Munich,
returns, 10; escapes military ser 05-6; Chamberlain visits, 99-100;
vice, 10; mother's death, 11; teaches anger at Germany's not informing
ang
in Italy, 12; in prison again, 12; him of Czech invasion, 101; deci-
363
MUSSOLINI
Mussolini, Benito (coni.) Mussolini, Benito (cont.)
sion on Albania, 103; advocates war questioned by partisans and towns
of nerves rather than force, 107; people, 312; moved to Germasino,
concern at approach of war, 108-9; 313; reaches Azzano, 318; arrival
reactions to realization of Ger of Audisio, 328; killed, 331; body
many's disloyalty, in-12; last displayed to crowd in Milan, 383-4
minute attempts for conference, Personality: violent nature, 5-7; ex
114; announces Italian policy over citement of power, 30-1; contradic
Poland, 115; suggests mediation tory in his declarations, 31; sup
after fall of Warsaw, 116; anger posed modesty, 42.; indifference to
against Papacy and King, 118; money, 43 and n.; indulgence in
determination to enter war, 121, whims, 43-4; superstitious, 53-4;
122; speech as Italy enters war, 124- love for his children, 57; lack of
5; invades Greece, 131; anxiety appreciation of works of art, 60;
over, 132; Pusch Conference, 136; refusal to listen to advice or criti
refuses to ask Hitler's help, 137; cism, 101-2; sudden changes of
hears of attack on Russia, 138; un mood, 103, 112, 113, 142, 254; in
happy visit to Libya, 140-1; increas creased belligerence, 105; capacity
ing bitterness towards Germans, for self-deception, 128; anger at
142; opposition to, among peasants, Italian people, 129-30, 147, 149-50;
146; speeches in favour of Japan, ruthless moods, 148-9; increasingly
147; increasingly vituperative, 152; vituperative, 152; growing reluc
withholding of information from tance to show himself in public,
him, 158 153-4; indifference towards oppon
Hitler, relations with : opinion of, ents, 164; refusal to listen to warn
after Dollfuss murder, 71-2; first ings, 170, 194-5; his press-cuttings,
meets, 77; 4Rome-Berlin axis ', 80; 254; self-analysis 255-6; violin play
promises him only limited support, ing, 257; affection for proletariat,
113; letter of protest to, 117; ner 261-2; his reading, 263; vindictive
vousness at Pusch, 136-7; meeting ness against Germans, 263; depres
on Eastern front, 138; pilots his air sion, 218, 265, 276-7, 286-7
craft, 139; Schloss Klessheim meet President : forms Government of
ing, 140; suggests Hitler should ‘ end Repubblica Sociale Italiana, 242-4;
Russian episode ', 164; second Kless moves to Gargnano, 244; is adamant
heim meeting, 164-5; Treviso and about Ciano's trial, 246-7; reaction
Feltre, 167-9; meeting in East to news of executions, 253-4; in
Prussia, 23611; accepts Hitler's creasing time spent at office desk,
terms, 238; Salzburg visits, 263-4; 200; tours the front, 266; arms
meeting near Munich, 275 Blackshirts against Partisans, 270;
Ideas: on Malthusianism, 13 and n.; belief in attitude of conciliation,
on Roman Catholicism, 13-14; 260- 271; socialization of industry in
i ; on National Socialism, 72, 76; on north, 272; ovation in Milan (Dec
decadence of England, 94; on Fas ember 1944), 274; hears rumour of
cism, 255; on biological decadence German surrender negotiations,
of France, 255; on Socialism, 261 284-5; his overture to Allies re
Ill-health: signs of, 143; 150; psycho jected, 285; realizes war is lost, 286;
somatic troubles, 151; increas says goodbye to Rachele and Ed
ing signs of illness, 242; state of vige, 289; restorative effect of
collapse, 272 Milan, 289; refuses suggestions of
Journalists, interviews with : with escape, 290-1; arranges Rachele's
Fossani, 277-9; with Madeleine escape, 290; visits Cardinal Schuster
Mollier, 279-80; with Pierre Pascal, for discussions with National Lib
280; with Pia Reggidori Corti, 280; eration Committee, 29iff.; hears of
with G. G. Cabella, 289 German surrender, 294
Last Days: departs for Como, 296; Women: early love affairs, 7; as don-
arrives at Como, 298; concern for naiulo, 36-40, 57-9; relations with
his files, 299; last letter to Rachele, Claretta Petacci, 153-6, 317ff
300; she visits him at Como, 301; Writings: for II Popolof 13; for La
departure for Menaggio, 301-2; on Vita Trentina, for L’Avvenire del
to Grandola 302-3; joins German Lavoratore, 13; Claudia Particella,
convoy, 305; stopped by partisans, 14; runs La Lotta di Classe, 15, 16;
306; on to Dongo in German dis edits Avanti!, 18; works for II
guise, 308-9; capture at Dongo, 311; Popolo d’Italia, 21, 25; Vita di
INDEX
Mussolini, Benito (coni.) Norwich, ist Viscount (Duff Cooper),
Sandro e di Arnaldo, 59-60, 337; 75; on the Abyssinian War, 99
Pensieri di Maddalena e di Ponza, Nudi, Mario, execution of, 372m
214; Storia di un Anno, 217, 341; Nyon, Franco-British agreement at
translations, 257; La Mia Vita, 335, 0 9 3 7 )» 8^-3
337; Scritti e discorsi, 336
Mussolini, Bruno (son), 38; death, 57 O'Connell, Cardinal, on Mussolini, 76
Mussolini, Edda (daughter). See Ciano, Oggi, suppression of, 146
Countess Opera Vigilanza Reprissione Antifas
Mussolini, Edvige (sister), 5, 156, 343; cismo, 56, 87
warns brother of plots against him, Operti, General, 271
163 Oppizzi family, 330
Mussolini, Gina (daughter-in-law), 257 Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 166
Mussolini, Marina (granddaughter), 57 Oxford and Asquith, Margot Countess
Mussolini, Rachele (wife), 38, 138, 151, of, on Mussolini’s voice, 2
158, 162; courtship and marriage, 14-
15; warns her husband of plots, 163, Pacelli, Cardinal. See Pius XII
178; advises him not to go to king, Pächter, Otto, 344
189; meets him again at Munich, 234; Pact of Steel, 106-7, 122* 339
hatred of Ciano, 235; jealousy of Cla- Pancino, Don, final visit to Mussolini,
retta Petacci, 258, 259-60; on her hus *8 7 . 3 4 4
band in late 1944, 266-7; on his ova Panthère, the, 211
tion in Milan, 274; causes Buffarini- Paolo, Francesco di, 345
Guidi’s dismissal, 276; says goodbye Papen, Franz von, on Mussolini, 76
to Benito, 289; last letter from him, Parelli, Baron Luigi, and peace nego
300; visits him in Como, 301; turned tiations, 282, 283-4
back at frontier, 304; La mia vita con Pareschi, Carlo: supports Grandi, 186;
Benito y 337, 345 trial, 247, 249, 251; execution, 252-3
Mussolini, Romano (son), 257 and n., Pareto, Vilfredo, 11
300 Pariani, Genera], 128
Mussolini, Rosa (mother), 3, 4; illness, Parini, Aldo, 337
10; death, 11 Parma, fall of, 290
Mussolini, Vittorio (son), 38, 60, 151, Parri, Ferruccio, 271, 283, 285
236, 241-2, 257 and n., 258; delivers Partisans. See National Liberation,
father’s proposals to Cardinal Schu Committees of
ster, 285; suggests escape to father, Partito d’Azionet 271
195-6 Partito Fascista Repubblicano. See
Muti, Ettore, 122; anxiety over Musso under Fascism
lini, 143 Pascal, Pierre, interview with Musso-
lini (1945), 180, 343
Naldi, Filippo, 21, 22n., 49 Pascoli, Dr. Riccardo, 337
Nanci, Francesco, 345 Pater, an architect, 158
Naples: Fascist Party congress in, 32; Pavolini, Alessandro, 156, 236, 241, 252,
air raids in, 149; meeting of General 271; gives plans for final gesture of
Confederation of Workers in, 261 Fascist faith, 286, 290; anxiety over,
National Liberation, Committees of, 303; arrives at Grandola, 305; stopped
268-9; and Mussolini’s capture, 311- in German convoy, 306-7; wounded
13; meeting in Milan on hearing of and captured, 310; execution, 332m
Mussolini's arrest, 322-3 Pelaghi, Colonel, 203, 204
National Socialism, Mussolini on, 72, 76 Pellegrini, Domenico, 243
Navarra, Quinto, 150, 265, 266, 338 Persefonet the, 203
Negri, Giuseppe, 311 Perth, Lord, 90, 91; and British attitude
Nenni, Pietro, 17, 205; Mussolini on, to Czech crisis, 93; submits speech to
256 . Ciano for approval, 100
*Neri, Captain See Canali, Luigi Pertini, Alessandro, 295
Netherlands: concern at German and Petacci, Claretta, 58, 153-6, 191; dep
Italian conquests, 105 endence on Buffarini-Guidi, 162; ad
Neurath, Constantin von, 77 vises Mussolini not to go to king, 189;
New Order for Europe, 139 arrested, 258; returns to Mussolini,
Nice, Italy’s claim to, 99 258-9; meeting with Rachele, 259-60;
Nitti, Francesco, 27-8 suggests staging a car accident, 290;
Norway, occupation of by Germany, refuses to leave for Spain, 290-1;
120 leaves for Como with Mussolini, 296;
M USSOLINI
P e tac ci, C la re tta (c o n t.) Regime Fascista, 119, 243, 276

follows on to Menaggio, 302; and to Repubblica Sociale Italiana, announce
Grandola, 303; jealousy of Elena Cuc ment of, 241
ciati, 303-4; retreats with Mussolini Revel, Thaon di, 128
in German convoy, 305; rejoins Mus Ribbentrop, Joachim, 93, 264; hatred of
solini at Rocca di Musso, 308; Ciano, 82, 235; tries to bring Italy
detained in Dongo, 314; asks to be into military alliance with Germany,
locked up with Mussolini, 315; rejoins 98; signs Declaration in Paris, 99;
him, 317; hidden with him at Azzano, assures Ciano of Germany's desire
318; final journey with him, 328; for peace (May 1939), 105; awarded
killed, 331; body displayed to crowd, Order of the Annunziata, 106; meets
333'4 Ciano at Salzburg, 108-9; determina
Petacci, Marcello, 156-7, 258, 296, 305; tion on war; 109; and Soviet Non-
follows German convoy to Dongo, Aggression Pact, 112; meets Stalin
310; detained at Dongo, 315; execu to divide Poland, 116; visits Rome
tion 3320. (March 1940), 19-20; gives news of
Petacci, Miriam, 157 German attack on Russia, 138; meets
Petacci family, 155, 156-8, 340 Ambrosio at Tarvisio (August 1943),
Pétain, Marshal, meets Hitler at Mon- 214; distrust of Italians, 215
toire, 132 Riccardi, Raftaelo, 128, 158
Peverelli, Giuseppe, 243 Ricci, Ernesto, 341
Philip, Prince, 01 Hesse, 87-8, 95, 101 Ricci, Renato, 236, 241
Pieche, General, 191 Ricci, Rolando, advises Mussolini
Pieve di Saliceto, 6 against trial of Ciano, 246-7
Pius XI, Pope, 118 Rintelen, General von, 105
Pius XII, Pope: on desire for peace, 118, Ri tossa, Zita, 154
119; warning to Mussolini, 163-4 Rocco, Professor Alfredo, 41
Poland: German designs on, 105, 107; Romagna, the, general strike in (1914),
Pact of Mutual Assistance with l9
Britain, 113; success of German Romagno, Colonel Torella di, 194
armies in, 115; Hitler and Mussolini Romano, Constantino, 307
discuss (September 1943), 239 Romano, Ruggero : gives himself up,
Polito, Brigadier-General Saverio, 202, 307-8; execution, 3320.
203, 204, 206, visits Mussolini on Rome: the March on, 32; Fascist altera
Maddalena, 214, 341 tions to, 52; Protocols, 71; air raid
Polverelli, Gaetano, 171, 183, 185-6 on, 168; damage from, 171; rumours
Ponza, Mussolini taken to, 205 in (July 1943), 197; excitement on
Porta, Paolo, 298; execution, 332m hearing of Mussolini’s resignation,
Porlezza, 304 197; outrage of 23 March 1944, 270
Pozzi, Dr., 150, 151 Rommel, Field-Marshal, 135, 142;
Predappio, 3, 12 retreat, 164
Preziosi, Giovanni, 236, 241, 276, 277 Roosevelt, President F. D., of United
Price, G. Ward, on Mussolini, 337 States of America : sends Sumner
Prussia, East, meeting of Hitler and Welles to Rome, 119; Mussolini’s
Mussolini in (September 1943), 236ft. hatred of, 152; proposes ten years’
Pucci, Marquis Emilio, 251 truce to Italy (1939), 155; Mussolini
Puccini, 30 on, 256
Pusch Conference, 136-7 Rosselli, Dino, 345
Putoni, General, 191 Rossi, Cesare, 21, 45, 49, 58, 202
Rothermere, Lord, on Mussolini, 74
Rubini, Dr. Giuseppe, 312
Quadrumviri, the, 32 Rumania, German occupation of, 131-2
Quermer, Gruppenführer, 234 Runstedt, Field-Marshal von, 139; re
placed by Kesselring, 283
Russia: German attack on, 138; Ger
Radi, Karl, 223, 229 man advance, 141; situation after
Raeder, Admiral, io8n. Stalingrad, 164
Rahn, Rudolf, 237, 244, 262, 264, 285, Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact,
342; on Milan ovation to Mussolini, no, 112, 116
274; Mussolini’s last conversation
with, 289-90
Rauft, Colonel, 284 Salandra, Antonio, 23, 33
Reggio, fall of, 290 Salerno, Allies land at, 215
366
INDEX
Salò, as H/Q of Mussolini’s new Govern Spain: Civil War begins (1936), 79; fall
ment, 244 of Madrid (March 1939), 104; reasons
Salustri, Pietro, 305; execution, 332m for not entering World War II, 142
Salvatorelli, Luigi, 64, 123, 2650. Spögler, Major Franz, 259
Salzburg: Ciano and Ribbentrop meet Stalin : meets Ribbentrop to divide
at, no-11; Hitler and Mussolini meet Poland, 116; Mussolini on, 256
at, 263-4 Starace, Achille, 62-4, 91, 99, 100; dis
Sant'Anna di Stazzema, massacre at, missal as secretary of Fascist Party,
270 122; on Italian troops, 132; financial
Santillo, Dr., 197, 201, 341 scandal over, 1850.; shot, 334
Sarfatti, Margherita, on Mussolini, ion., Starhemberg, Prince, 69, 72
14, 18, 19, 25, 48, 53, 57, 60, 103, 154, Stauffenberg, Colonel Graf von, attempt
*5 7 . 3 3 6 . 3 3 7 on Hitler’s life, 264
Sardagna, Colonel Baron Giovanni, 315, Stefani News Agency, 139, 175
324; ordered to bring Mussolini to Stra, Hitler and Mussolini meet at, 77
Milan, 316 Stresa, anti-German front at, 72
Sardinia, public works in, 52 Student, General, 225; plans Mussolini’s
Schirach, Baldur von, 42 rescue, 228-9
Schmidt, Paul, 77, 83 Suardo, Count Giacomo, 175, 185, 186
Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 78; and the Ans- Suffer, Serrano, 155
schluss, 87 Suvich, Fulvio, 72, 78
Schuster, Cardinal Idelfonso, Arch
bishop of Milan: arranges German Tacchi-Venturi, Fr. Pietro, 119
negotiations with partisans, 282ff.; Tamburini, 254, 276, 290
arranges discussions between Musso Tancredi, Libero, 23
lini and National Liberation Com Taranto, naval battle at, 149
mittee, 291ft. Tarchi, Angelo : accompanies Buffarini-
Scorza, Carlo: appointed secretary of Guidi in escape, 304; captured, 304
Fascist Party, 165; warnings to Mus Tarvisio, Italo-German meeting at
solini, 170, 188; shows copy of (August 1943), 114
Grandi’s resolution to Mussolini, 175; Taylor, A. J. P., 87
at Grand Council, 178; his counter Tazzari, Captain, 203
proposals, 185, 186; unable to mobi Teliini, General Enrico, 66
lize Fascists in Rome, following Mus Templewood, Viscount. See Hoare, Sir
solini’s resignation, 198 Samuel
Senise, Carmine, 127; dismissal as Chief Terzi, Francesco, 313
of Police, 165 Tiengo, Carlo, 294, 296
Shirer, William, on Ciano, 82 Times, The, on Fascism, 74
Sicily: public works in, 52; invasion of, Tito, occupies Fiume, 290
166 Tobruk, Italian army driven back to,
Sidi Barrani, 131; British assault on, *35
*34"5 Togliatti, Paimiro, 322
Siena, Allied H/Q at, 323 Toi mezzo, 12
Silone, Ignazio, 55, 6on. Torlonia, Prince Giovanni, 36, 44; Villa
Silvestri, Carlo, 48, 244, 272, 299, 343 Torlonia, 44
Skorzeny, Colonel Otto, 2140., 342; Toscanini, 30
meets Hitler, 224-5; prepares for res Trentino, the, Hitler suggests German
cue of Mussolini, 225; seeks clues in occupation of, 237
Rome, 226; plans for Maddalena res Trento, 13; Germany demands, for
cue, too late, 227; Gran Sasso rescue, Austria, 238
229-31; difficulties in taking-off, 232-3; Treves, Claudio, 23
on Mussolini after his rescue, 234; Treviso, Mussolini meets Hitler at,
on Mussolini late in 1944, 266 167-9
Trieste, Germany’s plans for future of,
Socialism, Mussolini on, 261-2
Socialists : Mussolini considers colla 239
Trimellone Island, interview with Mus
boration with, 47-8; their withdrawal solini on, 277
after Matteotti murder, 48 Tringali-Casanova, Antonio, 183, 243
Soddu, General Ubaldo, 132, 133-4 Tripoli, British army in, 160
Soleti, General, takes part in Mussolini Tuissi, Giuseppina, 317, 327m
rescue, 229, 231 Tunis: Italy’s claims to, 99; situation
Sorice, General Antonio, 191 in (1943)1 164; Hitler and Mussolini
Spadea, Antonio, 345 discuss (September 1943), 239
367
MUSSOLINI
Tùratì, Filippo, i8n. Victor Emmanuel III (coni.)
Tuscany, German armies retreat Council, 188; gives order for Duce’s
through, 281 arrest, 191; greets him at Villa Savoia,
192; tells him Badoglio is to succeed
Umberto, Crown Prince of Italy, 161; him, 193; says goodbye to him, 194;
birth, 11 ; disapproval of generals’ discusses his arrest, 199; flight from
methods, 199m; ignorance of Musso Rome, 220
lini’s whereabouts, 226 Vidussoni, Aldo, 157; dismissed from
Unità, 322 secretaryship of Party, 165
United States of America : reduction of Vienna, Mussolini’s arrival at, after
Italy’s war debt, 51; advance in Italy rescue, 234
in World War II, 317 Vietinghoff, General, 283; agrees to sur
Urach, Fürst, 244, 263 render, 284
Usmiani, 283 Vigneri, Captain, arrests Mussolini, 195
Utimperghe, Idreno, 305; captured, 310 Volpi, Count, 123
Volunteer Freedom Corps, 269; meeting
' Valerio, Colonel \ See Audisio, Walter in Milan on hearing of Mussolini’s
Valle, General, 128 arrest, 322
Valtellina, the, plans for final Fascist
stand in, 286 Warger, Lieutenant, 227
Vansittart, Lord: on Mussolini, 75; on Warsaw, capture of, 116
Ciano, 81 Welles, Sumner: mission to Rome
Varano dei Costa, 3 (February 1940), 119; on Mussolini,
Vatican, the: Lateran Pact, 53; Musso
lini’s relations with, 60, 261 ! 43
Wening, General, 286, 295, 296
Vecchini, Aldo, appointed President of Wolff, General Karl, 253; accompanies
Tribunal for Ciano’s trial, 247 Mussolini back to Italy, 242; nego
Venezia Giulia: Hitler suggests Ger tiates for surrender of German
man occupation of, 237; Communists armies in Italy, 282ff.; family taken
in, 271 by Gestapo, 283; reports to Hitler,
Venice, Hitler and Mussolini meet at, 284; hears Pavolini’s plans, 286
7 7 -8 World War I: begins, 20; Italy enters,
Ventotene, 203
Verona trial, the, 248-53, 342, 343 23
World War II: Italy enters, 125;
Versailles, Treaty of, demand for modi French collapse, 129; events in Libya,
fication of, 67 140-1; capture of all Axis forces in
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy: Africa, 166; attack on Italy, 166;
refuses to declare martial law in Italy's surrender, 215; Allies* hope of
March on Rome, 33; sends for Musso Italian civil war, 272n.
lini to form government, 33-4; criti
cism of friendship with Germany, 85;
pity for Jews, 86; physical courage of, Yugoslavia: Italian agreements with,
54n.; dislike of Hitler, 92; congratu 67; Mussolini’s threats against, 107;
lates Mussolini after Munich, 96; he considers attack on, 130; coup
opposes Albanian war, 104; deprecates d'état in (1941), 134; German attacks
German alliance, 118; awards Ciano on, 134; surrender of, 134
Collar of the Annunziata, 122; in
volved in plots against Mussolini, Zachariae, Professor Georg, 239, 242,
160-1, 163-4; decides to arrest Mus 244, 257, 262, 265-6, 275, 290, 342
solini, 166; Mussolini reports to him Zaniboni, Tito, 54, 205, 276, 341
on Feltre meeting, 170; Mussolini Zerbino, Paolo, 292, 294; gives himself
makes appointment with, after Grand up, 307; execution, 332m

Il Duce

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Il Duce

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

IL DUCE

The Life of Benito Mussolini

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

ALL RI GHTS RESERVED. NO P A R T OF T H I S BOOK MAY BE R E P R O ­

Published in England under the title of b e n i t o m u s s o lin i

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

‘No one understands him/ wrote Fernando Mezzasoma of Mussolini

in addition to those who have asked to remain nameless—Professor G.

Family Tree Showing Mussolini's Ancestry and Des­

TH E FIG H T FOR POWER

1 The Young Rebel 29 July 1883-December 1912 2

2 The Interventionist October 1913-24 May 79/5 19

3 The Fascist in the Making August 79/5 - 28 October 1922 24

4 The head of the Government

5 The Dictator 13 June 1924-10 June 1940 47

1 The Diplomat 28 October 1922-10 June 1940 66

2 The Commander-in-Chief 10 June 1940-23 October 1942 127

1 1The War is Going Badly ’

2 The Conspirators November 1942-24 July 1943 160

4 The Arrest at Villa Savoia 25 July 1943 192

5 The Prisoner 25 July 1943 -28 August 1943 196

6 On the Gran Sasso 28 August 1943 - 12 September 1943 217

7 The Rescue from Gran Sasso 12 September 1943 223

8 The Meeting at the Führers Headquarters

9 The President at G argnano-The First Year

10 The Civil War November 1943- December 1944 268

11 The President at G argnano-The Final Months

12 The Germans Surrender February-April 1945 282

13 The Move to Milan 19-25 April 1945 286

14 The Flight from Milan 25-27 April 1945 298

15 The Capture 27 April 1945 310

16 ‘Colonel Valerio' 27-28 April 1945 322

17 Death at Villa Belmonte 28 April 1945 328

18 The Piazzale Loreto 29 April 1945 333

Notes on Sources 335

The house at Dovia where Mussolini was born 80

As a Socialist agitator inSwitzerland 81

As a soldier in the Bersaglieri 81

Inspecting Blackshirts at the Fascist rally in Naples in 1922 96

Surrounded by members of the ‘London Fascisti’ in London

Rachele, Anna Maria, Romano, Benito, Edda, Bruno, Vittorio 97

In the grounds of Villa Torlonia with Romano 97

Playing the violin at Villa Torlonia 160

With his fencing master 160

On a visit to Gabriele D’Annunzio at Gardone 161

With Austen Chamberlain at a hotel in Florence 161

Giving the Fascist salute at a parade in Rome 176

Standing beside his writing-table in the Sala del Mappamondo

Giving instructions to a Fascist journalist 177

An anniversary parade celebrating the March on Rome with

Reviewing troops home from Abyssinia in Piazza Venezia 209

Making a speech in the reclaimed Pontine marshes, July 1938 210

Greeting the King during the Army manoeuvres in the Abruzzi

Accepting a presentation from Count Grandi during the seven­

With Bruno and Vittorio before the war 224

With Ciano, Halifax and Chamberlain in Rome in 1939 225

With Hitler and Ciano at the Brenner in October 1940 225

Making a speech from the balcony at Palazzo Venezia 304

Claretta Petacci 304

Walking out of the Albergo-Rifugio after his rescue in

Welcomed by Hitler in East Prussia in September 1943 305

At Villa Feltrinelli in 1945 320

De Bono, Pareschi, Gottardi, Ciano and Marinelli await

Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 29 April, 1945 321

ALL RI GHTS RESERVED. NO P A R T OF T H I S BOOK MAY BE R E P R O

Family Tree Showing Mussolini's Ancestry and Des

Accepting a presentation from Count Grandi during the seven

his own imagination and his insatiable appetite for self-dramatiza

1 Margherita Sarfatti, then a fellow-Socialist and later to become one of Musso

back from the war attacked Communists and Communist sympa

critics said, was a fraudulent substitute, a kind of mental and politi

staff; he liked films—particularly newsreels that showed him im

tion of the twentieth century \ In this Corporativism, a less com

occasional appearances he made abroad—in Lausanne and in Lon

revival to extract concessions from France; but the French, sus