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Mr. Chamberlain recently went Rome to seek a deal with Mussolini. What kind of man did he encounter there? Here is the first chapter in the story of the Italian Dictator, his origins, his adventures, his character. his ambitions.
Mussolini is a peasant.
The approved picture of the Dicta- tor, Stripped to the belt, sweating in the cornfield among the petty farmers and farm hands of the reclaimed Pon- tine marshes is less fake publicity than any that has attended the bally- hoo of Il Duce. This man loves the land. He could eat the good earth.
Herein lies the brutal force of Mus- solini, his greed, his cunning, his courage, his realism and tenacity, his
meanness.
⚫ Mussolini comes from the Romagna region of Middle Italy, famed for the clanlike turbulence and violence of its people,
THE CHINA MAIL, FEBRUARY 18, 1939
Mussolini by FRANK OWEN
No. 1
March Of A Dictator
worldly wealth; of spiritual goods he bequeathed a treasure: an Idea. Sad- ly, his son concluded, "The period of mourning is over. Resolutely, he added, "Life must go on its way with all its rights."
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Mussolini loved his mother, Rosa, and, like Napoleon, he feared her. She was the Dictator in the house- hold. He hid from her the scars and bruises of his schoolboy fights. Не was afraid. at supper time to stretch out his hand for bread lest he should expose to her a new wound upon his wrist.
The family meal was modest. Week- days they ate vegetable soup for lunch and plain chicory for dinner Sundays they had mutton broth All dipped in a common bowl. Mussolini's sparing habits he does not drink or smoke and eats almost no heat-are the legacy of his hard youth.
a
'Mussolini was born on Sunday, July 29, 1883 at a tiny hamlet called Var- ano di Costa, overhanging the village of Dovia in the county of Predappio, which in turn looks down on
the lovely plain of Forli, a land of vines and clear springs and castles, testify- ing the eternal beauty and fertility of Italy and its sporadic power.
The Mussolinis, went to live in two-roomed apartment in an old build- ing in Dovia. Benito Mussolini slept with his brother Arnaldo, the future editor of Il Popolo d'Italia. His sister Edvige slept with her parents. In a third room Rosa Mussolini kept a day school. Furniture was sparse, and in winter the grate was bare. Mussolinis were glad to go to bed to forget hunger and to get warm.
The
In the parts of Wales and Ireland the roads, in moving words the self- At the French Revolution the Ro- yet unsullied by the ruthless march taught blacksmith wrote: "O pity the its wretched pariahs of society, loan, pals, magna was a home of extreme Jaco- of industrialist exploitation, with bin sympathisers; under the conqueror rise and fall of families within three sickly, that pass our own poor doors. same A worm-eaten box, a straw mattress, Napoleon the centre of the patriotic, generations, you will find the Becret, murderous Carbonari; in the ancient pride of genealogy among the two bed stools and a few other worth
They Losa trifles make up the equipment of perlod of Bourbon and Habsburg re- poorest shepherds and cottars.
likewise claim: descent, from Prince a tortured family. The father, sad action the hearth of republicanism
Rosa was devout. Often she pray- under the Italian Liberal Monarchy Owain Glyndwr and King Brian Boru. and silent, precedes his humble con
voy. His wife carries a baby in "ed for her husband. More often for the stronghold of anarchism and re- Who shall disprove them? These were
́prolific princes.
little basket, the other children, bare.
wayward son. And, like Ekaterina, volutionary Socialism.
THE RED BLACKSMITH
Life was harsh in peasant Italy footed and meagrely dressed cling to Josef Stalin's mother, she wanted her
her petticoat. Scanty, unwholesome
son to be a priest. She suffered the Alessandro Mussolini, blacksmith, when Mussolini was born. These were was the father of the Fascist Dicta- the days when modern Italian capita- food makes them faint and ill. Un same disappointment; for, like Stalin, fortunate souls! This fate is reserved Mussolini was expelled from the tor who this week greets the Prime lism was in its birth pangs
but church school to which he had been Minister of Britain in emperor's state drag of the towns upon the country- not only for poor farm hands at Rome. He, also, was a peasant son aide had begun, farm prices had col- for tonant farmers. It will last just sent. He stabbed a school-fellow with estates so long as people fail to learn the a knife. "I was not a good boy," he with his nose hard upon the soil. lapsed, the bankrupt great
To-day Il Duce, with an ancestral were breaking up, evictions enforced new gospel of revolt, the regeneration confesses. "I was then a restless be- vanity of which he who hammered his by soldiery daily re-enacted in Italy of human society." own fortune is himself half ashamed, the bitter and sometimes bloody scenes purports to trace his line from Giovan. of rural Ireland a generation earlier. ni Mussolini, tyrant of the commune Watching the pitiful pageant of the of Bologna in 1270.
'homeless peasants as they tramped.
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ing: I am still." Thus Alessandro, father of. Musso- His very first venture' into the little lini. He was at first the most furious world beyond his home was a
his anarchist in the red Romagna believ- civil war, if we are to believe ing in the violent destruction of all own account. He had to attend school forms of government.
in a village two miles off. According the Later in life he changed. Events, to him the boys there resented not theories, moulded him as they stranger and threw stones at him. He were to mould and change his son. threw one back which nearly killed He came to understand that even the ringleader. However, Mr. Ram- strikes and riots needed organising. say MacDonald used, to tell this same Alessandro gave up Anarchy--the story about himself. theory of no. government. He took up
$160.00
Once. Mussolini stole some decoy
the
swelling tributary streams in winter and built himself dams, like a beaver. He loved tracking down the birds and wept when he was sent away to school and had to leave behind him a gold-finch in a cage.
the idea of Communism-of govern- birds and, chased by the owner, swam ment so all-embracing that no private the river in flood. He stood in interest could stand against it. Black smith Alessandro became the most violent Communist in the Romagna.
Mussolini, his son, he named Benito Amilcare Andrea, after Benito Juarez, the Mexican peon revolutionary; after Amilcare Cipriani, a Romagna anar- chist; after Andrea Costa, a Romagna Socialist.
Father Alessandro was forever. in trouble with the authorities, often in gaol suffering for his opinions. But among his own people he was respect- ed. He founded a village co-operative and he became Mavor of Predappio. Mussolini has described him. in his own autobiography.
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"The blacksmith was a "heavy man with large powerful, fleshy hands, darkhaired good natured, not slow to laugh, with strong features and steady gaze. His intense sympathies mingled.. With doctrine and causes. Ho discuss- ed them in the evening with his friends and his eyes filled with light. So come and go men whose minds and souls are resolute for good ends. Each donference seems to them to touch the fate of the world sach talisman seems. to promise ita salvation each theory protonds to immortality."
EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL When his father died, in 1910, "Mussolini;; then the 27-year-old editor of Avantly the most inflammatory So- cialist - nov/spaper" in "Italy, paid him "a" moving "nfid ̈majestic tribute. Alon- sandro, has wrote, läft us, nothing of
(Continued on Page 3).
Mussolini's father; he bequeath.
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