The Rest is Silence

Benito Mussolini's last interview as Duce was published last week. * On June 6, a month and a half before his downfall, Il Duce talked to a correspondent of Lugano's Carriere del Ticino, a minor Swiss, Italian-language newspaper. He was suffering from stomach ulcers, appeared lean and sad. But, above all, he seemed anxious to justify his great mistake:

"Times are hard. . . . [Italy] could have remained outside the struggle. As a neutral, she probably would have had great financial and commercial advantages. But Italy . . . had proclaimed her vital rights and placed before the conscience of the world her problems of expansion, raw materials and production. To have confined herself to a neutrality based on monetary gain would have been a definite renunciation of a century-old goal. That was the reason why we launched ourselves ardently into the battle."

* In 21 years the Duce averaged six a month, roughly 1,300 interviews.

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