My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyand he gave them what he thought suitable and what he judged they wanted. Here hediffered sharply from some of our Anglo-Saxon politicians; he may sometimes havedeceived others, but he never deceived himself. This was a refreshing aspect of aremarkable character, reflected also in his buoyant humour. He never expressedhimself to me in those terms, but I always sensed after one of his histrionic efforts anattitude equivalent to—a dig in the ribs, and that got 'em. It would be unjust to suggestthat he was insincere—he was a passionate patriot with a profound sense of hismission as an Italian and to some extent as an European—but he was not taken in byhis own performances. With so many politicians the contrary is the case; they arecompletely engrossed in their own performance and moved by nothing else. WithMussolini demagogy was not an end, but a means to an end which he clearlyunderstood.His humour was simple and direct; it had almost a barrack-room savour. He said tome on arrival one day: 'Do you know who sat in that chair yesterday?—The ChiefRabbi of Italy. Do you know what he said to me?—We Jews rise on top of youGentiles like oil on water.—The effrontery of him. Do you know what happened lastnight?—he dropped dead.' Mussolini slapped his big thigh and roared with laughter.He was in no way anti-semitic —I understood that the Rabbi's death was entirely dueto natural causes—but he had a peculiar sense of fun, a lively appreciation of life'sups and downs. Anti-semitism or any form of racialism is quite unknown amongItalians, but Mussolini had an acute sense of the contrasts of life, of the 'mutability ofhuman fortune, the whirligig of fate', as Asquith used to call it. The incident may givea rather brutal impression as baldly recorded, but this effect at the time was mitigatedby the sense that he felt these sudden reversals of fortune could equally affect anyother mortal at any moment, including himself, in a sad prescience of things to come.He seemed to me completely cool and realistic in his calculations; his mistakes, forexample his entry into the war, were made for reasons which were at least discernible.I should say that his morality consisted chiefly in advancing the interests of hiscountry and in a general sense of serving the renaissance of European man. I shouldmuch doubt from my observation of him that he was guilty of the relatively fewcrimes imputed to him, such as the murder of Matteotti, for he would certainly haveregarded it as a stupidity, a crime in which the risk and discredit far outweighed anypossible advantage. Mussolini was ruthless, but not a fool. 'Never take an unnecessaryrisk,' said Caesar. Yet the record of men even in the highest category of achievementhas on occasions been stained without purpose by impulse of sheer, brutal passion; aswitness the fate of Vercingetorix or the duc d'Enghien.Mussolini at that time was obviously having a good deal of trouble with some of hisold companions. He said to me one day: 'Apres la revolution il se pose toujours laquestion des revolutionnaires'. Caesar solved the problem by putting the legionarieson the land; Mussolini began to do something of the same kind in the PontineMarshes and in Libya, and before the war he had this situation well under control. Itwas his habit with forethought and decision to keep a grip on even trivial detail; whenI stood beside him at one of his blackshirt parades he mounted on a foot-stoolpreviously placed in the box of the saluting base, which made him several inchestaller than me in the photograph instead of the reverse. His detailed grasp of largeraffairs in the last period of his power seems in some measure to have deserted him;partly as the result of increased pressure in the stress of war and partly because of the301 of 424