No Peace

One month after Fascismo's downfall the people of Italy still cried: "Pace! Pace!" But now they could not have peace. Their peninsula had become a battlefield, Air bombardment shattered its cities, lashed refugees over its countryside. Up the boot's length the Germans would probably fight a hard delaying action before an Allied invasion army. Up in the boot's flaps, perhaps in the strategic Po Valley, perhaps in the mountain passes to the Rhone and Danube

Basins, the Germans would probably make a stand. Where would the Italians stand?

Giustizia e Liberia, the underground coalition of five liberal and leftist parties, still spoke of "peace demonstrations everywhere . . . proceeding satisfactorily." But now a new note crept in. The clandestine radio called for a general strike in defiance of "the Badoglio dictatorship"; it referred to "the democratic peoples of the world whom Italians consider as their allies rather than enemies."

No Comfort. The shaky Badoglio dictatorship still proposed to continue the war to an "honorable conclusion." Over the Rome radio came three voices:

>Said Vittorio Emanuele III, worried over a republican separatist movement in Sicily: "Brothers of Sicily. . . . Your King ... is the first ... to believe firmly in the unfailing recovery of your land . . . faithful under all circumstances to ... my dynasty."*

>Said Premier Marshal Pietro Badoglio: "No event can ever separate you [Sicilians] from Italy, for the tie which unites you with her is the power of blood."

>Said Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, 83, World War I Premier, one of the "Big Four" of Versailles and an off-&-on friend of Fascismo: "As an old Sicilian, I am sad . . . [but] no recriminations. . . . May I raise to the Lord, our Savior, the prayer: 'Lord let Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation and rebirth of my country. So be it.' " The people, reported Bern, were "dangerously disappointed" over these messages. Commented New York's Herald Tribune: the appeals "only deepened . . . the air of defeat, senility and decay."

*Cracked Sumner Welles in Washington: "The King must have in mind that the Allies will soon be occupying Italy as well as Sicily."

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