April 16, 1919

I told the Colonel today that further talks with the Italians, with Orlando, with Di Cellere and Company, were a pure waste of time. When pushed, and certainly we have .pushed them at times diplomatically and at others somewhat forcibly, they always come back to the ninth of the Fourteen Points, which authorizes for Italy a readjustment of frontiers along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. We can recognize them, geographers and ethnologists can recognize them, but apparently no Italian can. At this vital point of the discussion they simply “go blind.”

Orlando, the smooth and silky Sicilian, is at once obliging, courteous, and impossible. First off, he accepts with grateful enthusiasm House’s proposal that Wilson should act as a mediating umpire between Italy and new-born Yugoslavia. Then suddenly his sunny countenance darkens and he whimpers that we shall live to regret the day we brought into the world the “new-born Yugoslavia, the unhappy mixture of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.”

I tell him we had nothing to do with it; that on October 28, 1918, they proclaimed themselves a happy band of brothers and launched their ship upon the angry waters of Europe as a sovereign state—a sovereignty won through much suffering. Then the brow of the Sicilian Premier lightens and he says: “We are fighting side by side with your President. He is our sword and buckler.” Then he quotes the oft-repeated creed of his foreign minister, Baron Sidney Sonnino: “Although always acting in full and complete conformity with the fundamental principles of President Wilson, Italy must uphold her territorial claims based on the conventions that govern and regulate our participation in the war.” (He refers, of course, to the bribe, the bait that brought the Italians into the conflict, the Treaty of London, April, 1915, which promised Italy much territory on the Adriatic, but not Fiume.