The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      Having presented his credentials, he made his request, in the most insistent terms. ‘I pray, I beg … repeal this odious veto.’ He hinted that if he were not allowed to risk his life in his own way he would deliberately endanger it by going straight to the front. To bar one with ‘my past, my future’ from living the heroic life would be ‘to cripple me, to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing’. The troops, the press, the people of Italy all saw him as ‘the poet of the war’ – now the authorities were trying to treat him as an exhibit in a museum.

      Minister Martini scoffed at the suggestion that fox-hunting and jaunts in pleasure boats provided the necessary experience for the kind of role d’Annunzio was claiming. But Salandra was impressed by d’Annunzio’s earnest tone. The ban was lifted. The flight would go ahead.

      Exultant, d’Annunzio went shopping again. At the haberdashers he chose ribbons (red, white and green, the colours of the Italian flag) with which to adorn his missives to the people of Trieste. He filched a sandbag from among those banked up along the façade of St Mark’s. Its contents, sanctified by contact with the ancient building, the hub of the Venetian Empire, would give his little packets historical gravity as well as physical weight. He bought himself thick woollen vests and long johns and when all was ready, all the little bags stowed away in one big one, he danced ‘a pyrrhic dance of joy around them’.

      The date of the enterprise was fixed for 7 August, which d’Annunzio considered an auspicious date. He prepared himself – as was only realistic in those early days of flying – for death. He would write a few months later about the mornings on which he set out for such missions, ‘the thought of returning was left in the vestibule, despised, as a vile encumbrance’, and recall how he sat once with a pilot before a flight, talking easily about routes and equipment, but aware that ‘each of us, by noon, could be a fistful of charred flesh, a crushed skull with gold teeth glinting in the mess’. He drew up a will, and entrusted it to Albertini.

      On 6 August he and Miraglia made a test flight. D’Annunzio had flown before, but only rising briefly over airfields. Now he looked down on a great city, seeing Venice as only a handful of human beings had ever yet seen it. He was the first writer to record the experience. He wore, as all the aviators did, heavy leather gloves. When he took one off to help Miraglia tighten the elastic of his chinstrap he at once felt his fingers begin to freeze. All the same, belted into the forward seat, exposed to every wind in the shaky little flying machine, he persistently scribbled down his impressions. The diverging lines of a ship’s wake were like ‘the palms in the hand of Victory’. Venice’s islands, divided up by canals, resembled the segments of a loaf of bread. The long railway bridge was the stem to the city’s flower. The wind-ruffled water by the lagoon’s outlet was iridescent as a pigeon’s throat. The mainland – in August’s dryness – was blonde, feminine, girdled by the pale ribbons of dykes. Avidly absorbing these new sights, fixing them with similes, d’Annunzio makes no mention of discomfort, or vertigo or fear.

      On the morning of the seventh he performed his usual toilette – a vigorous massage administered by his servant followed by a bath – and thought about the possibility that the body he was tending might, by nightfall, be stripped and laid out dead. After breakfast (strong coffee) he went shopping again, for another woollen jumper: he must have felt the cold the day before. Walking back towards the Hotel Danieli he encountered the Countess Morosini, with her daughter, the Countess di Robilant. It is one of the oddities of d’Annunzio’s war experience that on his way into action of the most serious kind he might find himself chatting with an acquaintance about a social engagement. Annina Morosini, known to the gossip columns as the ‘uncrowned Queen of Venice’, was the chatelaine of the Palazzo da Mula on the Grand Canal and a generous friend to the poet. That morning he noticed how lovely her eyes were, and jotted in his notebook ‘still desirable’ (she was fifty-one). He told her what he was about to do and asked her playfully to give him a talisman. She demurred, offering him only her blessing, but saying she would telephone that evening. He was offhand about the latter promise. ‘I don’t know what she’s calling for,’ he noted. Given his thoughts at bathtime, the coming evening must have seemed remote. Back in his hotel room he filled a cigarette case with cartridges, laid out his woollen flying gear and wondered: ‘Will it be cold up there, or down there?’ (The underlining is his.) He was thinking of the sea bed. Remembering that he might not die but be taken prisoner, he put six of the laxative tablets he swore by, and some cash, in his pocket, then went down and took the waiting gondola to the airfield. Miraglia was ready for him. They set off on the flight which would take them further than any Italian pilot had flown before, and well within range of enemy guns.

      In the notebook d’Annunzio was carrying that day, his poet’s-eye observations – ‘the teeth of the breakwaters which gnaw at the unhappy sea’ – are interspersed with dialogue. The two men couldn’t speak to each other. The only complaint d’Annunzio makes about the physical circumstances of the flight are about the engine’s atrocious din: he regrets not having brought wax earplugs. He and Miraglia communicate by passing book and pen back and forth, d’Annunzio having to twist awkwardly in order to do so. Their initial exchanges are pleasantly companionable: ‘Are we still climbing?’. ‘You look like a bronze bonze [a Japanese Buddhist monk]’, says d’Annunzio to Miraglia. ‘Do you want some coffee? It’s really hot.’ Soon though, more urgent messages are passing between them. D’Annunzio was not just there to make notes on the landscape (‘in the pallor of the lagoon the twisting canals are green as malachite’), he was also the bombardier.

      They were carrying several bombs in cylinders fitted to the plane’s undercarriage. It became evident that one of them was jammed. D’Annunzio struggled to free it. ‘It’s impossible to pull it up.’ ‘Have we got any string?’

      Miraglia gave him anxious directions: ‘You absolutely must not turn the screw … See if you can push it so it falls out, but don’t twist it.’ It might explode at any moment. Even if it didn’t, unless they could free it first it would almost certainly blow up when they touched down. ‘When we’re landing I’ll hold onto it with both hands,’ d’Annunzio told Miraglia. There have been those who sneered at d’Annunzio’s war record, but the dangers he ran were real, and so was the courage with which he met them.

      They came in sight of Trieste, the white stone city luminous in the August sun against the backdrop of the Carso, the rocky wilderness which would be, for the next three years and more, a battlefield. They saw puffs of smoke way beneath them, signs that they were under fire. Soon they could hear the gunfire, and feel the hits (on their return they would find a bullet embedded in the fuselage a few inches from d’Annunzio’s elbow). They continued their descent. They saw the enemy submarines in the marina and dropped bombs on them. As they came in low, d’Annunzio hurled down his little bags, and watched the ribbons and pennants attached to them flutter down, some uselessly into the sea, others into Trieste’s grand waterfront piazza, with its palatial banks and customs houses. His purpose in dropping his pamphlets was not just to convey a message: it was also to show that where he had sent down words, he could have sent down explosives. He was there to encourage the pro-Italian population, but also to terrorise their Austrian rulers. Like most of his wartime exploits, this first flight was an attack not so much on enemy forces, as on enemy morale.

      It was as they turned back that he and Miraglia discovered the malfunctioning bomb. D’Annunzio struggled awkwardly with it in his tiny cockpit, deafened by the engine noise, careful not to make any abrupt movement for fear of unbalancing their fragile conveyance. He had often longed for an heroic death: now he was bothered by the idea that the plane – coming down only to bounce up as it exploded – would look not tragic but ridiculous. Somehow (it is a measure of his insouciance that we don’t know how) he managed to deal with the problem – perhaps, as his and Miraglia’s notes suggest, with the help of a rag and d’Annunzio’s belt. They came safely back to earth.

      From that moment onward, according to Damerini, the Venetian people engulfed d’Annunzio СКАЧАТЬ