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Naples was declared "off limits" with the exception of a few streets in the centre of the city. But the areas most frequented by the liberators were in fact those which were "off limits," i.e. the most infected and therefore forbidden areas, since it is in the nature of man, and especially soldiers of all ages and every army, to prefer forbidden things to those that are permitted. And so the contagion, whether it had been brought to Naples by the liberators, or whether the latter carried it from one part of the city to another, from the infected areas to the healthy, very soon reached a terrible pitch of violence, rendered abominable, almost diabolical, by its grotesque, obscene manifestations, which were suggestive of a macabre public celebration, a funereal kermis. Drunken negroes danced with women who were almost or completely naked in the squares and streets, in the midst of the wreckage of the houses that had been destroyed in the airraids. There was a mad orgy of drinking, eating, gaiety, singing, laughing, prodigality and revelry, amid the frightful stench that emanated from the countless hundreds of corpses buried beneath the ruins.
    This was a plague profoundly different from, but no less horrible than, the epidemics which from time to time devastated Europe during the Middle Ages. The extraordinary thing about this most modern of diseases was that it corrupted not the body but the soul. The limbs remained seemingly intact, but within the integument of the healthy flesh the soul festered and rotted. It was a kind of moral plague, against which it seemed that there was no defence. The first to be infected were the women, who in every nation constitute the weakest bulwark against vice, and an open door to every form of evil. And this seemed an amazing and most lamentable thing, inasmuch as during the years of slavery and war, right up to the day of the promised and eagerly awaited liberation, the women—not only in Naples, but throughout Italy and Europe—had proved, amid the universal wretchedness and misfortune, that they possessed greater dignity and greater strength of mind than the men. In Naples and in every other city of Europe the women had refused to give themselves to the Germans. Only the prostitutes had had relations with the enemy, and even they had not done so openly, but in secret, either to avoid having to endure the sharp revulsion of popular feeling or because they themselves considered that to have such relations was to be guilty of the most infamous crime that a woman could commit during those years.
    And now, as a result of this loathsome plague, which first corrupted the feminine sense of honour and dignity, prostitution on the most appalling scale had brought shame to every hovel and every mansion. But why call it shame? Such was the baneful power of the contagion that self-prostitution had become a praiseworthy act, almost a proof of patriotism, and all, men and women, far from blushing at the thought of it, seemed to glory in their own and the universal degradation. True, many, whose sense of justice was warped by despair, almost made excuses for the plague, implying that the women used the disease as a pretext for becoming prostitutes, and that they sought in the plague the justification of their shame.
    But a more intimate knowledge of the disease subsequently revealed that such a suspicion was mischievous. For the first to despair of their lot were the women; and I myself have heard many bewailing and cursing this pitiless plague which drove them, with an irresistible violence their feeble virtue was powerless to withstand, to prostitute themselves like bitches. Such, alas, is the nature of women, who often seek to buy with tears forgiveness for their deeds of shame, and pity too. But in this case one must perforce forgive them and have pity on them.
    If such was the lot of the women, no less piteous and horrible was that of the men. No sooner were they infected than they lost all