The Wrack of the Storm | Page 8

stock. She was therefore, thanks to her racial affinities, better able than
any other to understand the culture that was being offered her, together
with the imputation of dishonour which it included. She understood it
so well that she rejected it with an outbreak of horror and disgust
unparalleled in violence, spontaneous, unanimous and irresistible, thus
pronouncing a verdict from which there was no appeal and giving the
world a peremptory lesson sealed with every drop of her blood.
4
But to-day she is at the end of her resources. She has exhausted not her
courage but her strength. She has paid with all that she possesses for
the immense service which she has rendered to mankind. Thousands
and thousands of her children are dead; all her riches have perished;
almost all her historic memories, which were her pride and her delight,
almost all her artistic treasures, which were numbered among the fairest
in this world, are destroyed for ever. She is nothing more than a desert
whence stand out, more or less intact, four great towns alone, four
towns which the Rhenish hordes, for whom the epithet of barbarians is
in point of fact too honourable, appear to have spared only so that they
may keep back one last and monstrous revenge for the day of the
inevitable rout. It is certain that Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels
are doomed beyond recall. In particular, the admirable Grand'Place, the
Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral at Brussels are, I know, undermined: I
repeat, I know it from private and trustworthy testimony against which
no denial can prevail. A spark will be enough to turn one of the
recognized marvels of Europe into a heap of ruins like those of Ypres,
Malines and Louvain. Soon after--for, short of immediate intervention,
the disaster is as certain as though it were already
accomplished--Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent will suffer the same fate;
and in a moment, as I was saying the other day, there will vanish from
sight one of the corners of this earth in which the greatest store of
memories, of historic matter and artistic beauties had been
accumulated.

5
The time has come to end this foolery! The time has come for
everything that draws breath to rise up against these systematic, insane
and stupid acts of destruction, perpetrated without any military excuse
or strategic object. The reason why we are at last uttering a great cry of
distress, we who are above all a silent people, the reason why we turn
to your mighty and noble country is that Italy is to-day the only
European power that is still in a position to stop the unchained brute on
the brink of his crime. You are ready. You have but to stretch out a
hand to save us. We have not come to beg for our lives: these no longer
count with us and we have already offered them up. But, in the name of
the last beautiful things that the barbarians have left us, we come with
our prayers to the land of all beautiful things. It must not be, it shall not
be that, on the day when at last we return, not to our homes, for most of
these are destroyed, but to our native soil, that soil is so laid waste as to
have become an unrecognizable desert. You know better than any
others what memories mean, what masterpieces mean to a nation, for
your country is covered with memories and masterpieces. It is also the
land of justice and the cradle of the law, which is simply justice that
has taken cognizance of itself. On this account, Italy owes us justice.
And she owes it to herself to put a stop to the greatest iniquity in the
annals of history, for not to put a stop to it when one has the power is
almost tantamount to taking part in it. It is for Italy as much as for
France that we have suffered. She is the source, she is the very mother
of the ideal for which we have fought and for which the last of our
soldiers are still fighting in the last of our trenches.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Delivered at the Scala Theatre, Milan, 30 November,
1914.]
* * * * *

HEROISM

VI
HEROISM
1
One of the consoling surprises of this war is the unlooked-for and, so to
speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the nations
taking part in it.
We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral
fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of comfort,
the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death belonged
only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent nations,
to the nations least capable