"Miserable Austria!"

Anyone who has ever read an editorial by Signor Mario Carli, personal friend of Signor Benito Mussolini and editor of the arch-Fascist daily L'Impero ("Orders is Orders"), will recognize his characteristic style in the following comment on a football game played last week in Vienna:

"Italy will argue with Austria no more! Austria is nothing but a miserable spittoon. If we speak to her again it will be with bombs!"

In other words the Italian team, champions of all Italy, had been defeated 3-0 by Austrians who are now the champions of Central Europe. After "spittoon" came epithets so violent, similes so obscene, that presently the French government--no committee of prudes--banned the sale in France of L'Impero and its foul-tongued sister sheet // Tevere. Unfortunately the episode did not end there. Stung by the knowledge that despised and hated Austrians are now the "champions of champions," almost the whole Italian press spent the week in working itself up to a purple pitch of fury--even demanding that Italy, as one of the seven guarantors of the first League of Nations loan to Austria, should use her veto power to prevent the Austrian government from floating another loan (TIME, April 15).

In passionate defense of "our team." Italian editors shrieked to highest heaven that the Austrian team had "played foul," that the flag of Italy had not floated over the stadium, and that the Austrian brass band had played the old Italian royal hymn--obviously a gross insult to Fascisti who never sing anything except their own anthem, "Youth! Youth! Springtime of Beauty!" The umpire of the match, an Englishman, disqualified two Italians for roughness. Broken lanyards prevented the hoisting of the Italian flag. The Austrian bandmaster had no Fascist sheet music, supposed that the Italian royal anthem was the correct thing to play.