Duce ( 1922-43)

Over the Rome radio, at 11 p.m. of July 25, 1943, came 47 words:

The King has accepted the resignation from office of the Head of the Government, Prime Minister and State Secretary, tendered by His Excellency Cavaliere Benito Mussolini, and has appointed as Head of the Government, Prime Minister and State Secretary His Excellency Cavaliere Marshal of Italy Pietro Badoglio.

The crashing notes of Giovinezza did not end that evening's terse news. For the first time in more than two decades, the Fascist hymn was replaced by Italy's Marcia Reale.

The war had reached another of those points which Winston Churchill has called "climacterics." Fifteen days after the Allied invasion of Sicily, three years and 45 days after the Italian hand stabbed its French neighbor in the back, three years, ten months and 24 days after the Nazi march into Poland, the Rome-Berlin Axis tottered, and Italy's 46,000,000 war-sick, word-sick, hungry people strained toward an exit from bombardment, bombast and blockade.

For the United Nations, heady over the mounting triumph on the battlefronts, this was the headiest political event yet. Now the war's end, distant though it might be, seemed a long stride nearer.

The First Operation. No longer was there a Duce. But more than 20 years of Fascist power and preachment could not be wiped out in a day. Mussolini, as much as any man, had planted the cancer that had spread beyond his homeland into Germany, Spain, Central Europe and the Balkans. The removal of the Italian dictator was, in a sense, preliminary surgery on the malignance still afflicting mankind.

In Mussolini's place stood no democrat. Aging (71), stiff-backed Martinet Pietro Badoglio had never been counted an extreme Fascist. When the Blackshirts were marching on Rome he looked on contemptuously, offered to clean them up. He had opposed Mussolini's war against Greece, had become the scapegoat for the abject Fascist failure there. He had sided with high Italians who resented the alliance with Hitler and the swelling Nazi arrogance in Italy. The camera's eye had once caught him, alone and defiant among a group of officers, declining to follow the Duce in the Fascist salute (see cut). Yet, since 1936, he had been a member of the Fascist Party. He had acted as the unofficial leader of its right wing. He had paid public tribute to the Duce, masterminded the Fascist victory in Spain, defeated the Ethiopians and accepted from a grateful Mussolini the title of Viceroy and Duke of Addis Ababa.

The Final Decrees. Now Pietro Badoglio accepted from his King the task of governing Italy. First Vittorio Emanuele proclaimed: "Italians! I take over . . . the command of all armed forces. . . ." Then Pietro Badoglio proclaimed: "Italians! By order of His Majesty ... I take over the military government of the country with full powers. The war goes on.. . . Let us close our ranks around the King Emperor, the living soul of the fatherland. . . . Long live Italy! Long live the King."

Swiftly the new Premier decreed martial law, with a ban against all public gatherings and a dawn-to-dusk curfew, over restive, smoldering Italy. He formed a new cabinet sprinkled with military and professional names. In every action Pietro Badoglio and the aristocratic, clerical faction he represented showed the core of their ambition: They wanted a conservative, disciplined, monarchial Italy. They were not averse to keeping the gains of their league with fascismo. They still spoke of the "King Emperor," a title bestowed on the head of the House of Savoy after the conquest of Ethiopia.

The diminutive, testy, puppetlike Vittorio Emanuele was the symbol of a legality shrewdly wrapped around the fasces. The King could have broken up the March on Rome in 1922; instead, he gave power to Benito Mussolini and to an iron hand against liberalism. The King condoned the assault on Ethiopia with a calculating sentence: "If we win, I shall be King of Ethiopia. If we lose, I shall be King of Italy." Now the contract between his house and the house of fascismo had become dangerous; he had broken it.

It was not the first time that the thousand-year-old House of Savoy (rulers of Italy since 1861) had broken a contract. In 1915 Vittorio Emanuele had shifted Italy from its alliance with the Hohenzollern and the Habsburg into the Allied camp. Now perhaps he was trying to repeat the past, trying to assure the future for himself and his son, tall, fast-living Crown Prince Umberto.

The Rome radio told of popular demonstrations in the Italian cities against Fascism and for the King. This might be propaganda, designed to convince Washington and London that Italy had a truly fresh government. It might be the beginning of a bid for a peace with terms, despite the Allied insistence on "unconditional surrender." Many an allied citizen, still troubled by Darlanism in North Africa, had reason to be troubled lest Savoyism crop up in the Italian peninsula. The U.S. State Department would not say whether it classed the House of Savoy as Fascist; neatly it put that issue up to the Allied military command in Italy.

The Last Week. For Benito Mussolini his seven last days as Duce started somewhere in northern Italy. He met for the 14th time with Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. No one knew for certain what transpired between the two men. Where past meetings had been flamboyant, this one was subdued.

Perhaps, as speculation presented the scene, the haggard, thinning Duce made a last impassioned plea for military aid, then listened to an equally impassioned refusal (see p. 30). Surely it was a rendezvous with frustration. From it the Duce had gone again to Rome.

Perhaps in the familiar echoing halls of the Palazzo Venezia he had summoned his cabinet and the tough, diehard party bosses, such men as Roberto Farinacci and Carlo Scorza, for a final tempestuous session. Then, perhaps, he had conferred with the King and Marshal Badoglio. One fact stood out: the Fascist Grand Council met the day before the resignation, its first meeting since Italy entered the war. Mussolini, the wily politician who had made just one big. but fatal, mistake in his fustian career, might hope that lip service to legality would pay him. One unkind rumor had him relinquishing his power on condition that his personal safety be assured. Another rumor had him and his chief party colleagues arrested while seeking escape to Germany, then put under house guard near Rome.

From many sources came reports of Italy in upheaval. Bern and Stockholm told of peace riots in Bologna, Milan and Rome, of clashes between Italians and German soldiery. The Fascist Blackshirt militia, posted on the northern frontier, it was said, had been replaced by Badoglio's police; bad blood brewed between the factions; Italy might yet be plunged into civil war.

The Wheel of Fortune. If the ex-Duce were really under arrest, his political career had now run full cycle, and an old claustrophobia might be tormenting him. In his youth he had been a vociferous, stinging pleader for socialism and pacifism. For such views he had seen the inside of many a prison; he had come to loathe confining walls. In World War I his principles had shifted: he had become an imperialist and a nationalist; he had started on the path to lofty offices, an open balcony, spreading maps of empire and the windy vista of Fascism.

If, in a quiet moment now, Benito Mussolini's mind flashed back, what highlights might it dwell on? There were many: Varano di Costa, an old hamlet on a hill in northern Italy, where he was born 60 years ago; his schoolteacher mother and blacksmith father; the black columns of Popolo d'ltalia, "my most cherished child"; the day in Milan when he needlessly barricaded his newspaper shop while his comrades elsewhere marched on Rome and waited until he arrived by railroad sleeper; the following day when, in black shirt and hip pistol, he stood before Vittorio Emanuele and said: "I have just come from a bloodless battle that had to be fought. I bring back to your Majesty the Italy of Vittorio Veneto, consecrated by a new victory."

For Benito Mussolini it had been a Latin pageant: the refurbishing of old Roman monuments and the building of new ones; marshland drained and colonies settled; a corporative state and the Balilla; adventure in Corfu, Ethiopia, Spain, Albania, Greece and Egypt; the dream of Mare Nostrum and the grandest of Mediterranean empires.

But on that glory the ashes were already thick. The dead face of more than one rival might flood by in Benito Mussolini's remembrance: Giacomo Matteotti, the murdered Socialist who defied castor oil and clubs; Italo Balbo, cut down when he grew too popular in the Fascist State. Then there was the dead face of his son, Bruno, a casualty of the war the father had glorified. Then the dead faces of those hundreds of thousands of men lost with the empire in Africa, the dead and fear-racked faces of millions of civilians fleeing their bombed homes.

The Rest Is Silence. Benito Mussolini had studded his gaudy years with gaudy phrases:

> "I shall make my own life a masterpiece."

> "I am desperately Italian. I believe in the function of Latinity."

> "Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."

> "Imperialism [is] the eternal and immutable law of life."

> "War is the normal state of the people."

> "[Democracies consist of] people who are in a decline."

> "If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I die, avenge me."

Benito Mussolini's people had had enough of such phrases. Of late the trains had not even run on time.

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