The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

      Without any kind of amplification, he could make himself heard by thousands. The German caricaturist, Trier, depicted him later that year as a ranter, his face contorted, his mouth gaping wide. But the image is misleading. Even when inciting his hearers to make war, his strategy was not to harangue but to fascinate and seduce. His language was violent, his manner dulcet. His oration at Quarto was a magnificent piece of word-music. In it d’Annunzio paid tribute to the heroism of ‘The Thousand’, thus appropriating their glory for himself. He quoted Garibaldi’s most famous line: ‘Here we make Italy, or we die!’ He spoke of the noble aspirations of Rome’s ancient heroes. He flattered his audience and challenged them, daring them to be worthy of their great antecedents. He wrapped his provocative politics in the lulling grandeur of liturgical rhythms. He ended with a series of beatitudes:

      Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be satisfied …

      Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be called upon to staunch a splendid flow of blood, and dress a wonderful wound …

      Blessed are they that have most, because they can give most, dare most …

      Blessed are they who return with victories, for they shall see the new face of Rome.

      It was incantatory. It was enthralling. It was blasphemy. ‘This man!’ wrote Romain Rolland, outraged. ‘This man, who is the incarnation of literary falsehood, dares to pose as Jesus!’ Rolland had once enjoyed d’Annunzio’s company, but they were now diametrically opposed in their attitudes to war. Rolland was a pacifist, while d’Annunzio had recreated ‘the Sermon on the Mount to incite Italy to violate her treaties and make war on her allies’.

      There were those who thought d’Annunzio’s showmanship too contrived and his speech preposterously over-erudite. But d’Annunzio knew what he was doing. He was aware that politics was a performance art. Later in the year he noted how dull and patronising was a priest who spoke over-simply to uneducated solders, ‘believing that humble hearts don’t know how to understand high and noble eloquence’. That was not a mistake he ever made. He offered intoxicating rhythms, clanging declarations, the invocation of grand abstractions and resonant myth. Whether or not his audience followed the meaning of everything he said, they responded fervently to the hypnotic way he said it. At Quarto the crowd surged forward, sang the Marseillaise in sign of their support for their ‘Latin sister’ France, and shouted out for war.

      The city was full of fervent nationalists. Again and again d’Annunzio was called upon to address them. In four days he spoke seven times. His speeches were reported all over Europe. Italian government ministers were nervous: they were engaged in secret negotiations of the utmost delicacy and d’Annunzio was a dangerously loose cannon. Sonnino called his appearance at Quarto ‘clowning’. Foreign Minister Marini dismissed it as ‘stupid’. But French reporters were full of admiration and gratitude. His enemies were respectful too: a German cartoon, showing him ranting and frenzied, was captioned ‘all would go well if we had cannon of the calibre of his big mouth’.

      What seemed to be taking place in Genoa was the transfiguration of d’Annunzio from dandy-poet into national redeemer. But when he stepped back into the privacy of his hotel room he was still the incorrigible spendthrift and libertine. Ugo Ojetti, who had arrived in Genoa with him, wrote to their mutual editor and friend Luigi Albertini that week, imploring Albertini to use his influence on the poet, who was in danger of compromising his own reputation and the interventionist cause. ‘He’s only interested in snouting around under the most disreputable skirts.’ A hostile deputy was soon asking a parliamentary question expecting the answer ‘yes’ – whether it was true that Signor d’Annunzio had left Genoa’s Hotel Eden Palace without paying the startlingly large bill run up by himself and the two unidentified women who were accompanying him there?

      It wasn’t only d’Annunzio’s personal renaissance that was less simple than it seemed. So too was his part in the political drama in which he claimed such a stellar role. He had come to urge his compatriots to repudiate the Triple Alliance and to agree to go to war alongside France, Britain and Russia, the nations subscribing to the Entente. Over the next two weeks he was repeatedly, and in increasingly virulent language, to denounce the government ministers who apparently hung back from doing so. But without his knowledge they had already done precisely that which he was urging them to do.

      Throughout the winter, Prime Minister Salandra and his Foreign Minister Sonnino had been negotiating with both sides, and concluded that the terms offered by the Entente were the more attractive. On 26 April, while d’Annunzio was still in Paris, Italy’s rulers had secretly signed the Treaty of London with Britain and France, agreeing to enter the war on their side. On 1 May, Sonnino asked the cabinet to repudiate the Triple Alliance, so that he could reach an agreement with the Entente (an agreement that had in fact already been reached). On 3 May, the day before d’Annunzio took the train south, Salandra’s government formally (but still secretly) severed Italy’s ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

      Later, d’Annunzio was to claim to have been privy to the government’s secrets all along, but he was lying. During the last few weeks of his time in France, he was gleaning information from the secondhand gossip of the press corps and peripheral politicians. He had no secret collusion with the authorities he was shortly to be subjecting to such furious verbal abuse. He didn’t know it, but in calling for intervention he was banging, noisily and with big gestures, on an already open door.

      The morning after he spoke at Quarto, the city of Genoa presented d’Annunzio with an 800 kilo plaster cast of a fourteenth-century stone lion. He accepted the lion (emblem of St Mark and of the Venetian Empire he was intent on reviving) by delivering his first oration of the day. Homeless as he was, he was always pleased with titanic bric-a-brac. At noon he was speaking again, this time to Garibaldi’s veterans. That evening he was presented with a bronze shield by the mayor, and responded with more speechifying. With each oration he became more incendiary. He told the university students: ‘Go! You are the flying sparks of the sacred blaze. Go start the fire!’

      After five days’ rest and recreation with his two female friends, he moved on to Rome. Salandra’s administration, secretly committed to military intervention, was at an impasse. The majority of Italians, including the King, the Pope and a large proportion of military leaders, still favoured neutrality, and so did parliament. The peace party was headed by Giovanni Giolitti, the liberal statesman whose canny pragmatism had already made him a hate figure for d’Annunzio. Giolitti had been premier four times. He was out of office in 1915 but he still dominated parliament, as he had done for nearly two decades. There he repeatedly argued against intervention in a war from which, in his view, Italy would gain next to nothing (he was to be proved correct). He had many supporters. Over 300 deputies left their visiting cards on him that month as a sign of solidarity.

      Giolitti’s opponents, though, were more vociferous. All over Italy pro-war demonstrations were taking place. British visitor and aspiring politician Hugh Dalton reported there were ‘hundreds and thousands of good people of all classes walking slowly through the streets of Rome and other Italian cities, intoning with a slow and interminable repetition, “Death to Giolitti, Death to Giolitti”.’ In Rome the British ambassador Sir Renell Rodd estimated that the crowd assembled in the Piazza del Popolo to demonstrate in favour of intervention was 200,000 strong. ‘They were not the type which ordinarily furnishes demonstrations, but an orderly and disciplined throng which seemed