of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the
Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft
sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a
large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision
to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or
whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first
woke to her own mind at the shock of the Lusitania murders....

The news came to me in my peaceful room above the Barberini Gardens.
The fountain was softly dripping below, the spring air was full of the
song of birds as another perfect day opened. The warm sunshine reached
lovingly up the yellowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the
little, old, familiar things of a long past, which pull so strongly
here in Rome at the human heart, were moving in the new day. The life
of men, so troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May morning, with
the suave beauty of ideals that for centuries have coursed through the
blood of Italy.... Luigi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad who brought
the morning coffee and newspapers, was telling me of the horrid crime.
With his outstretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he said the
words, then, dropping the paper with its heavy headlines, cursed it as
if it too symbolically represented the hideous thing that Germany had
become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We shall fight them, the
swine!" A few days afterward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on
some Alpine pass.

Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was typical of all
Rome, all Italy. The same burst of execration and horror was in every
mouth. "Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-German sheet
that was appearing in Rome: it got a new significance as it hung in
the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry