What can you hope from the victory promised to you by the Prussian
generals? Their decisive victory is like the bread of the Ukraine,--one
dies while awaiting it. People of Vienna, think of your dear ones,
awake! Long live Italy, Liberty and the Entente!
It was said that copies of this proclamation in Vienna had a value of
fifty dollars a copy. D'Annunzio's great fame had seized upon the
popular imagination. His career in the war would have been interesting
in itself, but when one recognizes that he was already a world figure,
the greatest modern Italian dramatist and novelist, his life seems
almost like a fairy story. Before the war began he made addresses all
over his country, urging Italy's participation in the war, and when war
was declared, to him, as much as to any other man, was due the credit.
He entered the navy, and has written some fascinating descriptions of
his life on board ship. Later he joined the airplane corps, and now was
showering down upon the gaping populace of Vienna appeals to rise
against its Hapsburg masters. D'Annunzio was extraordinary in his
literary career. He had been the poet of passion, a writer of novels and
plays, which, although artistic in the highest degree, showed him to be
an egotist and a decadent. But long before the war he had tired of his
erotic productions and had begun to write the praises of Nature and of
heroes.
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