The fact that I was born among the common
people put the trump cards into my hands.

AT about half past ten on the night of 9 May 1936 a sudden roar,
which a journalist described as being like the noise of a volcanic
eruption, broke out from a crowd of some four hundred thousand
people standing shoulder to shoulder around Palazzo Venezia in
Rome. Benito Mussolini, il Duce del Fascismo, had stepped out
on to the palace balcony above their heads and gazed silently down
at them. His hands were on his hips, his immense jaw thrust out,
his legs splayed apart in a pose which was familiar to them all. He
was wearing the black shirt, grey uniform and round black cap of
the Fascist Militia, and for a few moments he stood in front of
the floodlit latticed windows as motionless as the symbol of his
régime--the axe and the lictor's rods--carved in stone on the wall
beside him.

He lifted his hand. The crowd fell into silence. Not only in Rome
but all over Italy millions of people were listening and waiting for
the sound of the Duce's voice. In the warm spring evening, already
given a strangely augural air by a moon of unusual clarity, crowds
of excited listeners, summoned out of doors by church bells and
sirens, looked up at the loudspeakers in the squares.

'Officers, non-commissioned officers and men,' Mussolini an-
nounced at last in a deep, sonorous voice which Lady Oxford had
described as one of the most beautiful she had ever heard, 'Black-
shirts of the Revolution, Italian men and women at home and
throughout the world, hearken: a great event has been accom-
plished. The destiny of Abyssinia has been sealed today in the
fourteenth year of the Fascist era. Every knot has been cut by our
shining sword, and the Abyssinian victory will remain in the history
of our country, complete and pure like the legionari who have
fallen. Italy has her Empire. . . .'

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