THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION OF IQIQ II
And again :
' May 1915 was the first episode of the revolution, its
beginning. The revolution continued, under the name
of war, for forty months. It is not yet over. It may or
may not follow this dramatic and striking course. Its
tempo may be quick, or slow. But it goes on. ... As to
methods, we have no prejudices ; we accept whatever
becomes necessary, whether legal or so-called illegal. A
new historical epoch is beginning, an epoch of mass
politics and democratic inflation. We cannot stand In
the way of this movement. We must guide it towards
political and economic democracy.'
Such was the exalted atmosphere to which the demobilized
soldiers returned, after four years of war, which had brought
them nothing but suffering, bitterness and disillusion. The
The peasants, particularly those of the south, came back to
insist on their right to the land. The workers looked to
Russia, where for two years the bolsheviks had carried on a
superhuman struggle.
The outlook in Europe became daily more tragically
dramatic.
c The fall of the Hohenzollerns in Germany/ writes
Pietro Nenni, an ex-combatant, 6 the break-up of the
Habsburg empire and the flight of its last emperor, the
Spartacist movement in Berlin, the Soviet revolution in
Hungary and Bavaria : in short, all the extraordinary
and sensational events of the end of 1918 and the beginning
of 1919 fired the imagination and inspired the hope that
the old world was on the point of crumbling away and
that humanity was on the threshold of a new era and a
new social order.'
The ex-soldiers were for the most part Wilsonian and
democratic, with a vague but sincere desire for reconstruction
mixed with distrust for the old political cliques. Groups of
ex-soldiers uniting here and there were shortly joined
together in the National Association of Ex-service Men,
with an independent part to play, outside the traditional
parties. * No party, no class, no vested interest, no paper