D'ANNUNZIO'S DREAM.

When Gabriele D'Annunzio seized Flume, he saw himself as a second Garlbaldi and imagined that his little band of adventurers would occupy as dramatic a place in history as the thousand "Red Shirts" who had conquered Naples 60 years before. Today, uncompromisingly opposed by the Great Powers, rebuffed by the government at Rome, and with his tenure of control of Flume but a matter of weeks at most, the Italian soldier-poet speaks with the same old air of bravado.

Give up Flume? Never. "Sooner than hand over Flume I will blow up the bridges, I will blow up the railroad and I will blow up the city," he said to a newspaper correspondent, and added modestly, "I have no right to give way. For Flume counts upon me, for Italy counts upon me, for all the oppressed nations count upon me. I am a symbol of protest against the iniquity of the treaty of Versailles." As for the Allies taking Flume, he goes on to say, "They will do nothing. They will say nothing. Here at Flume we are stronger than the Allies."

Poor D'Annunzio! As a pre-war poet he was a great success, as an aviator his daring raid over Vienna will rank with the most thrilling exploits of the war, but as a post-war dictator who holds that he is more powerful than the Allies, his inevitable fate is disillusionment.