Nevermore

While the bombers, southward flocking,

set Italian cities rocking,

Suddenly there came a knocking

at Il Duce's office door.

He, with fiery decision,

opened to admit a vision

An expected apparition

who had often called before--

Destiny at hand once more.

Britain's "Sagittarius" (real name Olga Katzin) has a nasty knack of rhyming world political events into their proper perspective. Her parody of Poe's The Raven was given documentation last week by events in Italy.

Bomb-panicked families in Turin brushed aside the call of destiny, left their war jobs and trudged, across Alpine snows to Savoy and the French Riviera. They took their money out of the banks, tossed away their Party badges, spread their panic like a disease. From Turin south to Naples and on to Sicily the mass evacuation of city dwellers strained Italian railways. They carried bundles on their shoulders, slept in stables, begged food from farmers.

Reports that Rome might be declared an open city because of the Vatican and historical treasures caused an influx there from other cities. Speculators took options on all available flats and rooms, charged fantastic prices.

All Italy awaited the Pope's Christmas Day broadcast. A fortnight previously police had stood by helpless to interfere when thousands gathered before St. Peter's at Papal services, chanting: "Long live peace!" Embarrassed, the Italian press had tried to explain away the demonstrations as "obviously a tribute to the Pope's efforts for peace before the war."

Still more embarrassed were Government propagandists who had just issued pamphlets urging the Italian people to be as brave as the British were during the blitz. The Neapolitans had an answer for that. In the Cathedral of San Gennaro they knelt in prayer, mumbling: "Dear God. direct the bombers on to Rome. That is where Mussolini is."

For the first time Rome radio admitted the retreat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's German and Italian troops in North Africa, but tried to explain that in fluid desert warfare the Rommel tactic was to lead the British on. A popular quip became: "A clock moves forward saying tictac; Rommel moves backward saying tac-tic."

Along with the sledgehammer blow of air raids, the Allies kept up a propaganda war on frazzled nerves by promising more and greater bombings. The Germans moved anti-aircraft out of northern cities to danger points in the south.

The Germans took over the Italian air fleet of 3,000 bombers and fighters and demanded control of the island of Pantelleria, Italian naval base in the Mediterranean. Mussolini was either too ill (of ulcers or mental distress) or too busy to attend the reception for Pierre Laval in Germany (see p. 23). More likely he was too busy, for he still behaved like an aged errand,boy. He shook up his Party directorate and was reported to have fired General Vittorio Ambrosio, Army Chief of Staff, and General Ettore Bastico, Marshal of Italy and onetime Governor of Libya, for "unprincipled pacifism." His own unprincipled imperialism was given its epitaph by Sagittarius' second verse of parody:

Into that apartment regal

slunk instead a Roman eagle,

Moping, molting, and bedraggled

and extremely sick and sore,

With its plumage torn and tattered,

beak and talons badly battered

And morale completely shattered,

flapped and flopped upon the floor--

Only that and nothing more.

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