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All down the ages the dwellers along Italy's eastern seaboard have been terrorized by naval raids from across the Adriatic. And Italy has determined that they shall be terrorized no more. How history repeats itself!
The Germans, indeed, sneered a little and hinted that some day Italy would be made to regret her course, but now that the Teuton snake is scotched the importance of Italy's action has been perceived and appraised at its true value. The Germans from the very beginning understood the real danger that might come to the Central Powers through Italian action.
He liked to release his robust imagination upon those charms of hers those delicate, refined beauties that filled him with longings, delicious in their intensity, longings as primeval in kind as well as in force as those that set delirious the savage hordes from the German forests when they first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization.
Italy's sole claim to this region is that she wants it and that she is going to take it while the taking is good. There are, it is true, a few Italians along the coast, there are some Italian banks, and considerable Italian money has been invested in various local projects, but the population is overwhelmingly Turkish.
He held that the pledge of neutrality should be extended to Turkey as well as to Germany and Austria, and asked for the insertion of an extra clause in Article XI, providing that Italy's renunciation of further claims under Article VII of the Triple Alliance should cover all such advantages, territorial and otherwise, as Austria might gain from the treaty of peace which should terminate the war.
For more than a year Italy's position with regard to Germany had been an anomalous one, for although she withdrew from the Triple Alliance on May 25, 1915, and declared war against Austria, she remained officially at peace with Germany until August 27, 1916. After many months of hesitation, Rumania finally decided to enter the war on the side of the Allies and declared war on Austria, August 27.
If you will get out the atlas and turn to the map of Italy you will notice at the head of the Adriatic a peninsula shaped like the head of an Indian arrow, its tip aimed toward the unprotected flank of Italy's eastern coast. This arrow-shaped peninsula is Istria. In the western notch of the arrowhead, toward Italy, is Trieste terminus of the railway to Vienna.
Behind these long diplomatic exchanges, their foundation rather than the result of them, lay Italy's national aspirations and a gradual crystallization of public sentiment.
Germany had been successful in buying the cooeperation of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other words, the control of despotic, German rulers.
Many of Italy's men of genius have retired to these peaceful abodes, to recruit their health and meditate on those imperishable works of art and literature which are now the admiration of the whole world, adding greatly both to its pleasure and instruction.
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