"Excelsior!"

One hundred Italian generals of division--such at least was their number and rank according to the Italian Press--were summoned by War Minister Benito Mussolini to his great office in Palazzo Venezia at Rome last week for one of the Dictator's famed unilateral "discussions." Among the 100 generals fidgeted Crown Prince Umberto Nicolo Tomaso Jean Maria, Prince of Piedmont, General of the 25th infantry brigade and father of an infant on the verge of birth. A few years ago Crown Prince Umberto used to be the last hope of antiFascists who tried to believe that he once challenged Mussolini to a duel. Last week H. R. H. cooled his heels in respectful silence while Il Duce opened the discussion. Though the session was secret, leaks indicated that the Dictator, who had never before summoned all the King's generals, wanted to know if they had any objection to still further reducing the term of Italian compulsory military service from 18 months to one year. In their splendid olive green uniforms the generals gravely agreed that Mussolini is, as always, right.

He is right, from the Fascist point of view, because his blackshirt youth organizations are machine-tailoring more soldiers than the Army conscript system. The Army numbers 250,000, but the Fascist Volunteer Militia, armed, drilled and equipped with every modern weapon, has reached nearly 400,000, with more youths constantly pushing up from the Avanguardisti which is fed in turn by the Fascist-drilled moppets who grow up constantly out of the Balilla.

Last week 23,000 picked Avanguardisti, smart young Fascist zealots culled from 100 summer training camps all over Italy, had the honor of marching past Il Duce and the 100 generals. For the first time the boys were given real rifles. One hundred yards from the reviewing stand each unit clicked into Mussolini's latest invention, the new Fascist half-goosestep which is executed with the left arm and left leg swinging out stiff.

All this was very fine but good Fascist morale requires the production of certified heroes. Last week the Fascist Militia moved to immortalize a young militiaman named Di Valero as its idea of a certified peacetime hero. In a competitive mountain-climbing hike he scrambled so far, so fast and so high that at last his nearest competitor gave up in exhaustion. Di Valero, emulating the "youth who bore 'mid snow and ice a banner with the strange device Excelsior!" kept climbing until finally he fainted and died of heart failure. This exploit, according to the editor of Milizia Fascista last week, typifies the "will to win" so lacking in pre-Fascist Italians. "The heroism of Di Valero," exulted the official militia organ, "is the supreme gesture of a Black Shirt who, facing the alternative of failing in duty or dying, accepted without an instant's hesitation the choice of death."

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