Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's, and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild, empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Bülow ever spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts the newer city? Probably not.
Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German.