28 THE RISE OF ITALIAN FASCISM
have mistresses, to combine the k will to power' with a life
of ease, far from dirt and misery. Money was not the sum of
his desires nor the deciding factor of his policy, but he had
come to realize that it was the sinews of war, and as war was
part of his programme he could not dispense with it. He
was not likely to forget that without money from Naldi
and Barrere in 1914 he would have been powerless. No one
who had known him as he was in 1912-13, shabby, hollow-
cheeked, with burning eyes, would recognize him to-day
in the Galleria in Milan, dressed in black, his powerful neck
set on his thickened toiso, his face squat and swollen. . . .
He appealed to mob opinion not because he agreed with it,
but because he wanted to gain time and avert summary
destruction. He ran with the mob, sometimes ahead of it,
but was never swept away. He stirred it up, in order to
outwit it, for all his tastes and needs called him to the other
side of the barricades.
Thus Mussolini hesitated no longer to break with the
'interventionist' democrats, who with Bissolati remained
faithful to their ideals, even after the armistice, and continued
to oppose Sonnino's short-sighted policy. Bissolati, himself
an ex-editor of Avanti> had been one of the four socialist
deputies expelled from the party in 1912, at Mussolini's
instigation, for their excessively nationalist attitude during
the Libyan war. After taking part in the agitation for Italy's
intervention, Ee joined up in May 1915, at the age of fifty-
eight, with his old rank as sergeant, and got himself sent
straight to the front, Twice wounded in July, during the
attack on Monte Nero, he refused to stay in Rome, though
weakened by a series of operations. He went back to the
front in mid-winter, still as a sergeant, and for his valour
won another medal in the great Austrian push of spring,
1916. The grave political crisis of June compelled Mm to
join the newly formed £ national * government. As a
minister he unceasingly opposed the policy of c sacred
egoism ', insisting that they were fighting for a nobler Ideal
than mere national unity, and preaching the necessity of
close collaboration with the peoples of the Austrian empire
in their struggle for independence. On the eve of the Paris
Conference the hitherto concealed differences between him