Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to say about D'Annunzio.
German sympathizers in America as well as the German Chancellor have
sneered at the influence wielded in Italy's crisis by a "decadent"
poet. Even among American lovers of Italy there has been skepticism
of the sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a man who "is
not nice to women." A peculiarly American view that hardly needs
comment!

Is it not wiser to assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really
the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest passion in the
poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed
the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger.
Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of
the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the
heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw
with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the
Allies were fighting for, was not territorial gains or glory or even
altogether selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply, for
the existence of a certain humanity. This world war he realized is no
local quarrel: it is the greatest of world decisions in the making.
And the man himself was transfigured by it: he found himself in his
greatest passion as Italy found herself at her greatest crisis. Latin
that he is, he divined the inner meaning of the confused issues presented
to the puzzled world. He was fired with the desire to light from his
inspiration his own hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the
call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For Italy, most Latin of all
the heirs of Rome, with her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not
a winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeeming of a few lost
Italians, but a fight for the world's best tradition against the forces