COUNTER-REVOLUTION 87
joined at Fiume, will not for a single moment leave their
Christmas gluttony and festivities \ D5Annunzio was an
actor who could not play to an empty house, the super-man
in him could not do without his public.
On December 31 an agreement was signed and a pro-
visional government formed in Fiume. D'Annunzio left
the town and went to Italy where, in spite of all his and his
friends' efforts, he was no longer able to play a leading part.
The fasci made a great deal of noise about events in
Fiume, and Mussolini in the Popolo d'Italia spread himself in
headlines and abusive language, but no gesture of sympathy
was attempted. While the Fiume affair was going on and
he was dreaming of leading a national and social crusade,
at the head of an army of the oppressed, d'Anmmzio had
lost touch with the country.
c The horizon and spirit of Fiume ', he had declared, c is
as wide as the earth. Wherever one of the oppressed sets
his teeth under the oppression, wherever a rebel keeps
watch, armed with a stick or a stone against machine-
guns and cannons, there shines the light of Fiume . . .
and force will be met with force . . . and the new
crusade of the poor and the free against the predatory
races and the tribe of usurers who yesterday exploited
war in order to exploit peace to-day, our nobilissima
crusade, will restore true justice.3
This resembled the revolutionary nationalism that the
genuine leaders in Moscow were preparing to exploit: the
congress of eastern peoples was held in Baku in September
1920. But the workers who had occupied the factories and
the peasants who were still occupying the land knew
nothing of d5 Annunzio, and the socialists looked on the Fiume
episode merely as a grotesque adventure. Serrati, the editor
of Avanti) was astonished and quite shocked when Lenin
described d3Annunzio to him as a revolutionary. An Italian
maximalist could never recognize an ally, even a temporary
one, in the d'Annunzio, c who has never hesitated to lead
the most dangerous forces in the service of a noble cause'.
The more d3 Annunzio saw of the chaotic state of the world,
the more he turned away from Italian politics. Once more