MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
0 NE of the lessons which we ought to have learnt from the last war, as from this war, is that courage or timidity have little to do with physical type. The boy who, when at school, was regarded by his masters as the perfection of manliness is often confused and frightened when he gets to the front line ; conversely the boy who at school may have been despised as an aesthete or an intellectual often develops in battle qualities of unexpected initiative - and daring. This may be due to the fact that upon the unimagina- tive the horrors of war fall with so sudden an impact as to cause nervous concussion ; whereas to the imaginative the reality is not so continuously horrible as they had pictured and foreseen. It may be also that the athlete, finding that physical prowess is not in itself as .effective on the battle-field as it was on the football-field, is assailed by self-distrust ; whereas the intellectual, when he dis- covers that quickness of mind furnishes him with superior capacity, acquires in battle a degree of confidence and emulation which were not his when coping with the shaming intricacies of bat or ball. In France, for instance, the writers, the artists and the scholars manifested, as a body, qualities of outstanding heroism ; there was, in fact, but little trahison des clercs. The professors and the teachers, the scientists and the university lecturers, displayed • a corporate courage which was in -striking contrast to the moral cowardice of the German academic class. There were, of course, a few collaborationists among the intellectuals, and their subservience has been given undue publicity. But 95 per cent. of the French intellectuals showed fine independence, and have earned, and will retain, the respect, of the younger generation from whom so much is to be hoped. It was the frail and the nervous who inspired the Resistance; many of the hearty sportsmen either collaborated or stood aside.
* * * *- Thirty years ago I had a French friend of the name of Louis Gautier Vignal, who at the age of nineteen had become a permanent invalid.' He was afflicted with some weakness of the heart, and the doctors appeared to have had slight hope that he would survive. He used to lie all afternoon upon a sofa, his legs covered by a pink eiderdown, and surrounded by affectionate friends and relations, who would deplore to each other the tragic fact that a man so gifted and so beautiful should die so young. Week after week he would remain in his room, sometimes playing listless little tunes on the piano, sometimes painting water-colours of irises or magnolia, reading continuously, and from time to time writing a few hundred words of delicate but incisive prose. The years passed, and as he became older he .ceased to be a permanent, and became only an intermittent, invalid. He lived in the south of France, where his parents had a- sumptuous property. And when, early last year, I went to Algiers and got into contact with some of the resistance leaders, I found to my astonishment that he had played a part which was not courageous only, which I might have expected, but extremely active. Night after night he would creep out in the dark and bicycle for twenty miles in order to carry messages from one section to another. He would leave at midnight and return in wind and rain at four in the morning. They could not speak too highly of his heroism and endurance. My memory flashed back to his wan face thirty years ago, lying there against the cushions with purple rings around his eyes. And I reflected that the conduct of one's friends in times of crisis is something which one is totally unable to predict.
* * * - * It was thus with sorrow rather than with surprise that I read the other day of the death in action of Enrico Visconti Venosta at the age of sixty-two. He had been attached with the rank of major to the r5th Army Group fighting the Germans in the Appenines ; he had applied to be transferred to a front-line unit ; his request was granted, and almost immediately he was killed. Never have I known a man less combative by temperament. Even when he
was a young man at Oxford his gentleness was only equalled by his lethargy. Bearing a name which had been honourably identified with the finest chapters in the history of the Risorgimento, descended as he was both from Alfieri and Cavour, he adopted a Hamlet attitude towards this tremendous heritage. He was older in years, and far older in experience, than his contemporaries at Christ Church, and he observed their undergraduate frolics with amused if sleepy eyes. He acquired a deep liking, rare in an Italian, for the unemphatic beauty of the English countryside, and felt himself specially attuned to the soft somnolence of the Thames Valley. During one Long Vacation he took a cottage at Iffley, where he lived on bread and cheese and beer, and spent summer hours reading Hegel in a punt. Dreamy and somewhat solitary he strolled through life, enjoying beauty with effortless placidity, staying very quietly in lovely places, reading many books and studying many pictures, surrounded by an easy circle of agreeable friends. Never in his middle years did he seem to take any ardent interest in politics ; his distaste for the Fascist system appeared in the early Mussolini years to go no deeper than the vague dislike felt by the fastidious for the crude. It was only gradually that this aloof contempt developed into ardent hatred. The vulgarity and vaunting of the whole system aroused in him unsuspected resources of energy and courage ; and in the end, when long past the age of combative adventures, he died, as he- would have wished it, fighting by our side. It was the least wasteful thing that he had ever done. By this sacrifice, apparently 1-o futile, he has reminded us that the' great Italian tradition, in which Fascism was but an episode, is akin to our own.
* * * * For in the end he rose to his birthright. His father, the Marchese Emilio Visconti Venosta, had been a follower both of Mazzini and Cavour. He had held the post of Foreign Secretary during the diffi- cult years of unification between 1863 and 1876. When he again became Foreign Minister in 1896 he sought to adjust Italy's position as an ally of Germany and Austria to a close understanding with France. He believed with Garibaldi that Italy would lose her soul if she became a mere satellite of the Central Powers, and he sought by every means to loosen the bonds which connected Rome and Berlin and to seek for some accommodation with the west. At the age of seventy-seven this magnificent veteran appeared suddenly at the Algeciras Conference as chief Italian delegate. It was a time when the new balance of power created by the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 was being subjected to a Kraft probe on the part of Germany. With superb and imperturbable dignity the aged Visconti Venosta dissociated himself from the violent menaces and objurgations in which Graf Tattenbach indulged. He made it abundantly clear that the principles which had inspired the Risorgimento ',ere the prin- ciples which inspired the policies of Great Britain and the United States. Through him Italy displayed independence of action and a belief that expediency and opportunism were unworthy either of her past or of her future. As a demonstration it was superb. * * * * This leonine old man did not live to see Italy's entry into the last war by the side of France and Britain: he died in November, 1914. But the tradition which he personified and transmitted was con- sistent, liberal and dignified. It is by that tradition that Italy, through all her terrible sufferings, will live and prosper again. Whatever trials may await her, whatever discords may arise, there can be no need for pessimism so long as she recalls the heroes of her own Risorgimento, and remembers that for them principles were more important than ingenuity, and the respect of neighbours more vital to Italy than any temporary success. The high hopes which our English liberals placed in Italy's achievement of unity have not all been falsified ; nor do the paeans of Swinburne's " Scngs before Sunrise" ring entirely false. The spirit of Mazzini and Cavour, of Alfieri and Carducci is still a living spirit ; it was in rzch a spirit that Enrico Visconti Venosta fought and died.
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