Fascist Queen: Eden Trap

Up early one morning last week were all of Italy's royal women, notably H. R. H. the Duchess of Aosta. blue-eyed Crown Princess Marie Jose and imposing Queen Elena, who at 8:45 a. m. in a drizzling rain mounted the marble stair of Rome's Monument to the Unknown Soldier.

Amid the dead silence of a massed throng which pack-jammed the enormous square and all side streets. Queen Elena opened her velvet handbag, extracted with visible emotion her gold wedding ring and the King's, dropped them into a large bronze urn. An Archbishop advanced and blessed two iron rings lying on a red velvet cushion while Her Majesty knelt with lips moving in silent prayer.

In trim blue suit and white collar the widow of General Turba, one of Italy's World War heroes, next presented the velvet cushion and Queen Elena, taking the two iron rings, dropped them into her handbag. Then in a low voice she broadcast: "These rings, symbols of our first joys, symbols of our extreme renunciation now, make the purest offering to our country. With them we invoke before God victory for the young sons of Italy who defend rights which are sacred. We pray for the triumph of Roman civilization in Africa."

Her Majesty at last gave the straight-armed Fascist salute, originally the Roman salute of the Caesars. After returning it the multitude of women began to file past the urn, dropping in gold rings all morning, all afternoon, well into the night. By this time Rome, with a population of approximately 1,000,000, had given some 250,000 gold rings, the day's total for all Italy being computed later as worth $80,000,000. Among the wives was the Dictator's. Millions of Italian women, unlike their Queen, reacted first to their new iron rings by at once trying them on. Since the warm Latin temperament packs super-sentiment into one's own particular wedding ring. Italians who could afford it pack-jammed every jewelry shop in the Kingdom to buy new gold rings for some 250 lire each ($20) to drop into the urns while they hide away their own golden treasures and wear the ugly iron of patriotism. Eight years ago at the watering place of Agnano, the present Emperor of Ethiopia gave a gold ring to his spinster bath attendant. Adele Chierchia, saying, "Let this be your wedding ring when you marry." Still a spinster and still a bathwoman, Adele dropped Haile Selassie's ring last week into one of Benito Mussolini's urns.

Such a day as this was not to be taken quietly by the Dictator. The fact that King Vittorio Emanuele's 44,000,000 subjects were giving $80,000,000 to a defiant cause, while the 46,000,000 subjects of King George V in Great Britain and Northern Ireland were in a confused state of mind under a Prime Minister who publicly deplored last week the telegraph and methods "speedy" or "modern" (see p. 14), infuriated and aroused Il Duce with his rapid-fire brain, his passion for driving fast cars and his penniless origin. In white-hot anger Benito Mussolini, addressing colonists on the Pontine Marshes, which he has drained and in which last week he opened on schedule another new little city, roared: "This is a day of Italian faith in this people's rights--a day of strong, inflexible faith in the destiny of the Fatherland! The war in East Africa is a war of civilization, a war which our people feel is a thing of their own. It is a war of the poor, a war of the proletariat against egotism and hypocrisy, against crooked Europe!

"We have engaged ourselves and we will fight to the end. It is not time which counts. It is Victory!"

When Il Duce got back to Rome he had his Grand Council cite The Deal as "repudiated" by Britain and had all Italy plastered with fresh slogan stickers reading: "There is always Reason in what Mussolini does!"

This was understood by Italians as a reference to the Chamber session with every Deputy in uniform at which Premier Mussolini reacted to original British blandishments which preceded The Deal (TIME, Dec. 16), thus: "The Italian people listen to words but base their judgment upon acts!" After the acts of the British in first holding out and then withdrawing favorable terms, the Fascist Press printed last week, and most Italians believed, that the whole maneuver had been an "Eden Trap." If Italy had walked into it by accepting the terms, Italians were told, the next British move would have been made by Captain Anthony Eden at Geneva to have the League of Nations reject the terms as morally odious and commence bargaining Italy down. In Italian eyes this week, war with England became increasingly probable as Benito Mussolini suddenly appeared tired, grave and grim in contrast to his high spirits and buoyant good humor up to the very hour last week before Sir Samuel Hoare resigned. In Italian opinion the last and most outrageous straw was the appointment this week of "Tony" Eden as British Foreign Secretary (see below).

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