. . . 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 announced at last in a deep, sonorous voice which Lady Oxford had described as one of the most beautiful she had ever heard, 'Blackshirts of the Revolution, Italian men and women at home and throughout the world, hearken: a great event has been accomplished. 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. . . '

His final words were lost in a wild torrent of cheers, in the swelling, repetitive, ululating chant, 'Duce! Duce! Duce!', in the screams of hysterical women, in the shouts of adoration and protestations of loyalty to death. And the Duce stood looking down calmly, not acknowledging the cheers, his hands gripping the stone balustrade, his massive face expressionless in the brilliant light of the floodlamps.

'He is like a god,' one of his gerarchi said as he watched him standing there with such Olympian impassivity. 'No, not like a god,' his companion replied, 'he is one.' . . .