So long as the fighting lasted, the Arditis violence was rewarded, their antisocial tendencies condoned. But once the war was over the public wanted no more to do with them. As some of them wrote bitterly, after having risked their lives for the fatherland they were received by the fatherland as undesirable guests. Thousands of Italian soldiers - whole battalions - deserted their posts and flocked to Fiume, stowing away on trains, chugging down the coast in little MAS boats, or walking over the Corso to join [dAnnunzio]. Sailors mutinied and steered their ships there. Fighter pilots flew in with their planes. DAnnunzio had once complained of the tedium of life in which commercialism had replaced the magnificent crimes of a grander, bloodier age. Fiume was provisioned by piracy. Arditi in civilian clothes would leave the city in small groups, to reconvene in a port and hide themselves on board. When the moment came they would strip off their nondescript jackets to reveal black shirts spangled with medals, and allow their fearsome forelocks to swing out from concealing caps. In most cases the crews allowed their officers to be overpowered and altered course without much argument, bringing their ships into Fiume laden with supplies. Four bands patrolled the streets, playing by day and night, trains of followers forming up to march or dance along behind them. Every day in Fiume there were parades. Every night there were torchlit processions and firework displays. There were people living rough in the idle shipyards - deserters, criminals, underage fugitives who had arrived in Fiume without documents. Nittis agents reported that these turbid elements lived in vast warehouses alongside armored cars, whose engines they kept turning over day and night, despite the chronic shortages of fuel. Fiumes Action Secretary, Guido Keller (an artist, nudist and decorated WW1 fighter pilot), paying a visit to investigate, found a titanic adventure playground full of half-naked men, heavy metal and aggressive song: a Vorticist underworld peopled by Hells angels. He formed them into a troop of irregulars variously known as Centurions of Death, and offered them to dAnnunzio, who made them his private guard. Handsome, rowdy and violent, they paraded through the streets bare-chested. At night they played war games using live grenades. Some of them died. Fiume in 1919 was as magnetic to an international confraternity of discontented idealists as San Franciscos Haight-Asbury would be in 1968. But, unlike the hippies, dAnnunzios followers intended to make war as well as love. [From DAnnunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War] https://youtube/watch?v=1ar27ChFKqA
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:30:54 +0000
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