I


_Italy Hesitates_

Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"
of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict
censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining
with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was
known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army--boots and
food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhat
cynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war;
that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity to
concede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heard
much, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral until
the conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the best
opportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May:
"I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!"

The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a
tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in
America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when
suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision
and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her
"sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna,
there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war
preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance,