Word: hod
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Music, Cheers, and songs will come from the train of young women armed with red torchlights and banners, and dressed in costumes varying from those worn by big business men to the attire of a hod carrier...
...Socialist-patriot Cesare Battisti in the city of Trent, then Austrian, but ceded to Italy after the War. Editor Battisti, always short handed, was assisted by the General Secretary of the local Socialist trade unions, one Benito Mussolini, an Italian youth who had worked for a time as a hod carrier in Switzerland and then picked up enough French to earn his living by teaching it. Helper Mussolini wrote perhaps a quarter of each daily issue of Il Popolo. He cleaned up editorial and publicational odd jobs innumerable. Then he snatched time to write the paper's weekly feuilleton...
Said Il Duce, once a hod-carrier: "Madame, your poems have ravished my eyes, and, as I read them aloud, my ears and my whole being fell likewise under their spell." Soon, with a flourish, Signor Mussolini presented the Countess Bethlen with an Italian translation of one of her poems autographed by himself. Flushed and a little flabbergasted, she withdrew. Premier Count Bethlen remained with Il Duce, and the two statesmen got down to signing their treaty...
Bitter, perhaps, to Queen Elena is the thought that if her kin ever reign again, in Montenegro, it will be through the doing of a one-time hod-carrier, Benito Mussolini, and not due to any potency of her consort, King Vittorio Emanuele of Italy. Still less has Queen Elena herself been able to exert any real pressure on events in the kingdom of her father. In a word, she is respected but not admired, adored or heeded by Italians. She came, serious-minded, from her dark Balkan mountains, and the grandeur that was or is Rome has not quickened...
...Register before journeying on, inscribed his bold autograph: Benito Mussolini . . . Aug. 5, 1903. Last week an itinerant newsgatherer unearthed this autograph, sent news of it humming over the cables. Signor Mussolini's intimates, not displeased, reminded his detractors that even as a bricklayer and before that as a hod-carrier, the young Benito revealed the titanic spiritual vigor which later made him master of Italy. Few are possessed of so little "hindsight" that they cannot detect the hand of the present Dictator in a letter which the hodman wrote to a fellow laborer on Sept. 3, 1902. "Dear Friend...