E. Alexander Powell

“ Though the Slav population of the Dalmatian hinterland is, according to the assertions of Belgrade, bitterly hostile to Italian rule, I did not detect a single symptom of animosity toward the Italian officers who were my companions on the part of the peasants whom we passed. They displayed, on the contrary, the utmost courtesy and good feeling, the women, looking like huge and gaudily dressed dolls in their snowy blouses and embroidered aprons, courtesying, while the tall, fine-looking men gravely touched the little round caps which are the national head-gear of Dalmatia. ”

“ The next time you are in the Adriatic you should not fail to go there. Time and the hand of man—for the people are a color-loving race—have given many tints, soft and bright, to its roofs, towers, and ramparts. It is a town of dim, narrow, winding streets, of steep flights of worn stone steps, of moss-covered archways, and of some of the most splendid specimens of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages that exist outside of the Street of the Crusaders in Rhodes. The sole modern touches are the costumes of the islanders, and they are sufficiently picturesque not to spoil the picture. ”

“ Sophia, Stamboul, the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge, the heights of Pera, Dolmabagtche, Yildiz—slowly unfold, revealing new beauties, new mysteries, with each revolution of the steamer's screw, I have declared that in all the world there is no city so lovely as this capital of the Caliphs. Yet, beautiful though Constantinople is, it combines the moral squalor of Southern Europe with the physical squalor of the Orient to a greater degree than any city in the Levant. ”

“ But cross the Rieka by the single wooden bridge which connects Fiume with Sussak and you find yourself in a wholly different atmosphere. In a hundred paces you pass from a city which is three-quarters Italian to a town which is overwhelmingly Slav. There are about 4,500 people in Sussak, of whom only one-eighth are Italian. But let it be perfectly clear that Sussak is not Fiume. In proclaiming its annexation to Italy on the ground of self-determination, the National Council of Fiume did not include Sussak, which is a Croatian village in historically Croatian territory. ”

“ Being perfectly aware that neither England nor Italy would consent to her becoming the mandatary for Constantinople, she proposes to do the next best thing and rule Turkey in the future, as in the past, through the medium of her financial interests. Sophisticated men who have read the remarkable tributes to Turkey which have been appearing in the French press, and its palliation of her long list of crimes, have been aware that something was afoot, but only those who have been on the inside of recent events realize how enormous are the stakes, and how shrewd and subtle a game France is playing. ”

“ Italy has no stancher friend than I, but neither my profound admiration for what she achieved during the war nor my deep sympathy for the staggering losses she suffered can blind me to the unwisdom, let us call it, of certain of her demands. I am convinced that, when the passions aroused by the controversy have had time to cool, the Italians will themselves question the wisdom of accumulating for themselves future troubles by creating new lost provinces and a new Irredenta by annexing against their will thousands of people of an alien race. ”

“ Everything considered, I am convinced that the highest interests of Armenia, of America, and of civilization would be best served by making Armenia an independent state, having much the same relation to the United States as Cuba. Let us finance the Armenian Republic by all means, let us lend it officers to organize its gendarmerie and teachers for its schools, let us send it agricultural and sanitary and building and financial experts, and let us give the rest of the world, particularly the Turks, to understand that we will tolerate no infringement of its sovereignly. ”

“ Five minutes' walk from the center of the city, on a promontory commanding a superb view of the Danube and its junction with the Save, is a really charming park known as the Slopes of Dreaming, where, on fine evenings, almost the entire population of the capital appears to be promenading, the rather drab appearance of an urban crowd being brightened by the gaily embroidered costumes of the peasants and the silver-trimmed uniforms of the Serbian officers. ”

“ The hospitable wayside inns, the quaint villages, the picturesque peasant cottages which the tourist in this region knew and loved are but blackened ruins now. And the people are gone too—refugees, no doubt, in the camps which the Government has erected for them near the larger towns. One no longer hears the tinkle of cow-bells on the mountain slopes, peasants no longer wave a friendly greeting from their doors: it is a stricken and deserted land. ”

“ Pola Is a strange mélange of the ancient and the modern, for from the topmost tiers of the great Roman Arena—scarcely less imposing than the Coliseum at Rome—we looked down upon a harbor dotted with the fighting monsters of the Italian navy, while all day long Italian seaplanes swooped and circled over the splendid arch, erected by a Roman emperor in the dim dawn of European history, to commemorate his triumph over the barbarians. ”

“ When the congestion becomes so great that it threatens to hold up the unending stream of motor-lorries which rolls through the city, day and night, between the great cantonments in the outskirts and the port, a tall British military policeman suddenly appears from nowhere, shoulders the Greek gendarme aside, and with a few curt orders untangles the snarl into which the traffic has gotten itself and sets it going again. ”

“ We Americans, of all peoples, should realize that a small nation is as jealous of its independence as a large one. As a matter of fact, Rumania and her sister-states of Southeastern Europe, who still bear the scars of Turkish oppression, are super-sensitive in this respect, the fact that they have so often been the victims of intriguing neighbors making them more than ordinarily suspicious and resentful toward any action which tends to limit their mastery of their own households. ”

“ Not only is there not a single naval base on Italy's Adriatic coast south of Venice, but there is no harbor or inlet that can be transformed into one. Yet across the Adriatic, barely four hours steam by destroyer away, is a wilderness of islands and deep harbors where an enemy's fleet could lie safely hidden, from which it could emerge to attack Italian commerce or to bombard Italy's unprotected coast towns, and where it could take refuge when the pursuit became too hot. All down the ages the dwellers along Italy's eastern seaboard have been terrorized by naval raids from across the Adriatic. ”

“ Strange indeed are the changes which have been brought about by the greatest conflict. Ferdinand, descendant of a long line of princes, kings and emperors, has passed round that dark corner whence no man returns, but his ambitious dreams of a triple kingdom which would include the Southern Slavs have survived him, though in a somewhat modified form. But he who sits on the throne of the new kingdom, and who rules to-day over a great portion of the former dominions of the Hapsburgs, instead of being a scion of the Imperial House of Austria, is the great-grandson of a Serbian blacksmith. ”

“ It seems to me that it is time to subordinate sentiment to common sense in discussing the question of Armenia. I have known many Armenians and I have the deepest sympathy for the woes of that tragic race, but if the Armenians are in danger of extermination their fate is a matter for the Allies as a whole, or for the League of Nations, if there ever is one, but not for the United States alone. ”

“ There are few more splendid panoramas in the world; there is none over which history has cast so magic a spell, for this barren, dusty land has been the arena in which the races of eastern Europe have battled since history began. Within its borders are represented all the peoples who are disputing the reversion of the Turkish possessions in Europe. Macedonia might be described, indeed, as the very quintessence of the near eastern question. ”

“ Innsbruck was one of the proudest cities of the Austrian Empire, its inhabitants being noted for their loyalty to the Hapsburgs, yet I did not observe the slightest sign of resentment toward the Italian soldiers, who strolled the streets and made purchases in the shops as unconcernedly as though they were in Milan or Rome. The Italians, on their part, showed the most marked consideration for the sensibilities of the population, displaying none of the hatred and contempt for their former enemies which characterized the French armies of occupation on the Rhine. ”

“ Barring a few municipal improvements which were made in the European quarter of Pera and in the fashionable residential districts between Dolmabagtche and Yildiz, the Turkish capital has scarcely a bowing acquaintance with modern sanitation, the windows of some of the finest residences in Stamboul looking out on open sewers down which refuse of every description floats slowly to the sea or takes lodgment on the banks, these masses of decaying matter attracting great swarms of pestilence-breeding flies. ”

“ In the first place, though both England and France are perfectly willing to have the United States accept a mandate for European Turkey, Armenia and even Anatolia, I doubt if England would welcome with enthusiasm a proposal that she should evacuate Palestine and Mesopotamia, the conquest of which has cost her so much in blood and gold, or whether France would consent to renounce her claims to Syria, of which she has always considered herself the legatee. ”

“ Trieste, which, with its suburbs, has a population of not far from 400,000, with its splendid terminal facilities, its vast harbor-works, its dry-docks and foundries, its railway communications with the hinterland, and, above all else, its position as the natural outlet for the trade of Austria, Bavaria and Czecho-Slovakia, constitutes not only Italy's most valuable prize of war, but, everything considered, probably the most important city, commercially at least, to change hands as a result of the conflict. ”

“ Any one who has entered Italy from the north must have instinctively felt, as he reached the summit of this mighty mountain wall and looked down on the warm and fertile slopes sweeping southward to the plains, "Here Italy begins."
Italy further justifies her annexation of the German-speaking Upper Adige on the ground of national security. She must, she insists, possess henceforward a strong and easily defended northern frontier. She is tired of crouching in the valleys while her enemies dominate her from the mountain-tops. ”

“ After having long dreamed of the day when they would themselves be arbiters of the destinies of the nations of Southeastern Europe, they see their political supremacy challenged by the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, behind which they discern the power and influence of France. When the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire began, Rumania demanded and expected the whole of the great rich province of the Banat, with the Maros River for her northern and the Danube for her southern frontier. ”

“ All of the new districts, German and Italian-speaking alike, will be included in the new province of Trent. It is entirely probable that Italy's German-speaking subjects of the present generation will prove, if not actually irreconcilable, at least mistrustful and resentful, but, by adhering to a policy of patience, sympathy, generosity and tact, I can see no reason why the next generation of these mountaineers should not prove as loyal Italians as though their fathers had been born under the cross of the House of Savoy instead of under the double-eagle of the Hapsburgs. ”

“ But I was deceived, for shortly afterward I saw the Italian army, which had seemed to be in the advanced stages of an utter rout, form a solid line on the Piave and hold it with miraculous persistence, permitting the English and French reenforcements to take up the positions assigned to them without once coming in contact with the enemy."
I have heard it said by critics of Italy that the retreat from Caporetto showed the lack of courage of the Italian soldier. To gauge the courage of an army a single disaster is as unjust as it is unintelligent. ”

“ Dotting the Venetian plain are many quaint and charming towns of whose existence the tourist, traveling by train, never dreams, their massive walls, sometimes defended by moats and draw-bridges, bearing mute witness to this region's stormy and romantic past. Towering above the red-tiled roofs of each of these Venetian plain-towns is its slender campanile, and, as each campanile is of distinctive design, it serves as a landmark by which the town can be identified from afar. ”

“ Even the architecture changes, the slender, four-square campaniles surmounted by bulging Byzantine domes, so characteristic of the Trentino, giving place to pointed steeples faced with colored slates or tiles. On the German side the towns are better kept, the houses better built, the streets wider and cleaner than in the Italian districts. Instead of the low, white-walled, red-tiled dwellings so characteristic of Italy, the houses begin to assume the aspect of Alpine chalets, with carved wooden balconies and steep-pitched roofs to prevent the settling of the winter snows. ”

“ On the other hand, those Italians whose vision has not been distorted by their passions clearly foresee that, should the final disposition of Fiume prove unacceptable to the Jugoslavs, they will almost certainly divert the trade of the interior to some Slav port, leaving Fiume to drowse in idleness beside her moss-grown wharfs and crumbling warehouses, dreaming dreams of her one-time prosperity. ”