Accumulation of Dignity

To cliff-girt Malta Harbor, still showing the scars of Axis bombs, royalist Marshal Pietro Badoglio and a retinue of aides went last week. They were piped aboard H.M.S. Nelson.

To rally the Italian people and army "against the common enemy," the Allied High Command seemed to have worked out this pattern at Malta: >The U.S. and Britain would accept the Badoglio regime as a cobelligerent. But the line between cobelligerent and ally was hard to draw. Allied soldiers were already finding Badoglio officials unwilling to be treated as defeated enemies.

>Vittorio Emanuele III would stand as the legitimate fountainhead of Italian authority. Over the radio from Allied-held Bari the King spoke last week: "Italians, follow me!"

>The Badoglio Government would be asked to take in liberals and other oppositionists.

Italy's fate could not be determined by a simple choice between "Democracy" and "Fascism." Many an Italian realized that, like German Naziism (see p. 25), Italian Fascism sprang from the national body, and that the nation would have to make full retribution. In the first days after the Duce's downfall Milan's Sette Giorni said:

"It is not possible in a single day for an accumulation of dignity to reenter the soul through the tiny hole through which it went out drop by drop for 20 years. The fact is that after the last war we were so unworthy of liberty that we deserved the dictatorship. . . . Liberty must be deserved."

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