The Masochists

The bell of the University of Padua (home of St. Anthony, whom the faithful invoke to find lost articles) tolled for nine hours. Five thousand Romans jeered U.S. and British troops in Piazza del Popolo. Mobs paraded in Florence, Modena, Reggio Calabria. At Trieste, which Italy considered lost by a Paris conference decision, 10,000 nationalist firebrands stormed right up to the bow of the berthed cruiser U.S.S. Fargo and screamed: "Down with the Allied traitors! Get out of Italy and let us settle the score! Why don't you go back home to America?"

Troops of the U.S. 88th Infantry Division used jeeps, cavalry fashion, to prevent a clash between 25,000 nationalist Italians and 15,000 Italian leftists and Slovenes. Said one G.I., nursing his stone-bruised right arm: "If we ever let those two mobs get at each other, there won't be enough hospitals and morgues in all Venezia Giulia to take care of the casualties."

Italy's tantrum of outraged national pride over Trieste recalled similar symptoms of hyper-nationalism after the last war. Then, as now, Italians insulted their friends, wallowed in self-pity and exaggerated every setback into a catastrophe. A wise but polysyllabic Italian, Giuseppe Borgese, described the national mood: "The nation, masochism-stricken, exulted in frustration."

The 1946 arguments for keeping Trieste out of Yugoslav hands were good ones, and Secretary Byrnes and Foreign Secretary Bevin had made them. For the sake of getting on with the peace, they had compromised with Molotov on a French proposal to internationalize the city (which has a preponderantly Italian population, but is economically an outlet for Central Europe and the Balkans). Italian nationalist extremists, who cheered the 1940 attack on France with the land-greedy slogan "Corsica, Nice, Savoy," would scarcely improve their claims to Trieste by demonstrations against the West.

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