A Civil War (118 page)

Grief for a common existential predicament and the desire to discover an objective fact that might guarantee one's difference fuse marvellously in this page. In another short story – it has been observed – the fact that of three German prisoners flung into a well one manages to save himself, fulfils ‘a desire of Calvino the man'.
⁵⁷

The rift between thinking, saying and doing, the bridging of which should be identified as an essential factor in the decision to resist, reappeared at times in the very performance of the acts of violence which that decision gave rise to – almost as if the totalising commitment hesitated before the profundity of the prospects that were opening up, thus recreating from its bosom a new fracture. Franco Calamandrei tells of a priest who heard the confession of a Gappist in flight after an attack, got him to hand over his revolver and exhorted him to renounce violence.
⁵⁸
The ‘Anonimo romagnolo' described the crisis of conscience suffered by a young man who immediately after 8 September kills a German taken by surprise in an
osteria
.
⁵⁹
A Garibaldini paper wrote edifyingly of a partisan who shoots at a Fascist marshal, and is then overwhelmed by anxiety and returns to his combat post only when he has prayed during the night ‘as when he was a child, with his mother', because ‘praying has done me good'.
⁶⁰
Untroubled by doubts, in contrast, was the reply of another Garibaldino whose comrade Pietro Chiodi asked this question: ‘ “Bill, if you woke up with two machine-gun barrels in front of your belly what would you do?” Shrugging his shoulders he replied: “I'd spit in his face”.'
⁶¹

This reply ignores all the mediations and the artifices of the science and art of war. Among these artifices is an age-old one that could to a large extent be transferred to the partisan war and which, in being transferred, brings with it and amplifies the moral snare of war seen as a game. What I have in mind are ambushes, which St Augustine had authorised, though condemning
‘intemperate violence, profanation of temples, sacking, butchering or fires', as well as ‘vendettas, atrocities and reprisals'.
⁶²

Chiodi tells of partisans and peasants whose ‘faces are radiant' because of a successful ambush of Fascists.
⁶³
Battaglia recalls that ‘every ambush on the road was greeted with an inhuman hilarity'.
⁶⁴
On this score there is a significant page in which Marc Bloch describes the Germans' undisturbed entry into Rennes:

Even in active
resistenti
the departure of partisan warfare from the ‘regulations' generated the vague scruple that ambushing was still always a kind of warfare that to some extent involved betrayal. Ermanno Gorrieri considered night-time ambushes against the German vehicles along the Apennine road a ‘harsh necessity', and boasted that his Italia brigade ‘will distinguish itself more in open combat than in this kind of attack'.
⁶⁶

But the backslidings that brought the partisans close to resembling their Fascist enemy were manifest most alarmingly in the practice of excessive violence – that excess which the veterans of all wars generally prefer not to speak about.
⁶⁷
Here, it is not enough to say that the cruel and sadistic can be found in every field and that there were incomparably more of them among the Fascists. We should look, rather, at the basic cultural structures sustaining the two warring parties, and ask why one party was better fitted than the other to select the cruel and sadistic and to bring out the darkest impulses of the human soul in the form of politically significant behaviour. For this fundamental reason, Communist
Catholics are indulging in what is only a dialectical artifice when they deny the dignity of political status to the ‘technique of killing' used for an unjust end, thereby deducing that when Mussolini and Italo Balbo had Giacomo Matteotti and don Minzoni murdered, ‘they did not act as politicians, since their so-called policy was not a technique of human progress, but was the wicked regressive machinery, an agglomeration of gestures which had the deceptive appearance of Politics'.
⁶⁸

In a civil and ‘irregular' war, politics and culture, the ends and the ‘techniques' used to achieve them, interweave particularly closely in both fields, and the two different warps have some common threads running through them. At various levels of profundity and assimilation there were several kindred cultural substructures that could not be snapped overnight simply by taking opposite sides of the barricades, just as the viscosity of the language could not be eliminated.
⁶⁹

Traces of this affinity have been identified in the songs and the literature of the Resistance.
⁷⁰
In
Chapter 4
of this book some features that sprang from the matrix of Risorgimento culture were highlighted. Here we can give the example of the appeals to blood as a symbol of purification. A modern Italian version of this stereotype was clearly formulated in the words that Giovanni Gentile wrote to Adolfo Omodeo as early as 15 July 1915: ‘I have faith above all in the great moral forces that will develop purified by this great bloodbath, for all humanity!'
⁷¹

In 1945 one of two
resistenti
awaiting execution wrote that ‘it is with blood
that the country in which one was born, has lived and has fought becomes great', while the other asked that the hem of the bloodstained shirt of Duccio Galimberti which he was conserving be bathed in his own blood. True, they were two officers in permanent active service, though the second was a member of the Action Party, to which in fact he bequeathed the bloodstained relic.
⁷²
But even a Garibaldian song went like this:

This is a very different symbolic vision of blood and bodily suffering from the ‘rational' one imbuing statements such as ‘a greater contribution of blood would be met by greater Allied recognition'.
⁷⁴
Comparison should be made rather with documents such as the letter that a Fascist wrote to his wife on 29 August XIX (1941): ‘What does it matter if men's flesh is in shreds, when the satisfaction of having done one's duty is stronger?';
⁷⁵
or like the ‘spiritual testament' of Aldo Resega,
federale
of Milan and
ardito
of the First World War, where there is, furthermore, a specific element of Fascist culture too – the appeal to the ‘ “sacral” function of the shedding of blood' as more authentic than democratic legitimisation.
⁷⁶
Resega's ‘testament' in a poster that the Fascists put up after he was killed by a GAP, contains these words: ‘The tragedy of Italy will perhaps be worth my blood. I am fighting with the impetus of my faith. Let it gush forth without parallel, without reprisals and without vendetta. Only in this way will it be dearer and more fecund for my
patria
.'
⁷⁷

A Fascist captured during the days of the insurrection saw the shedding of his own blood as a pledge of pacification among Italians: ‘With the shedding of blood by us few, reasons for party hatred are done away with, for the future too. Thus everything will come about in that peace with justice for which all of us have fought, albeit with different ideas and opposite concepts.'
⁷⁸

It is on this very terrain which is so difficult to explore that the
resistenti
and Fascists diverge over the point of the innocence professed by those who shed their own blood. In the letters of
resistenti
awaiting execution declarations of innocence are frequent, even allowing for the fact that some may have been dictated by the desire not to compromise the recipients and their imprisoned companions-in-arms. Let us also isolate those cases in which the profession of innocence was intended to exclude personal participation in the spilling of blood: ‘I have never killed nor had anyone killed … my hands are free of blood, thefts and robberies.'
⁷⁹
The fact remains that there were still many condemned men who, while firmly declaring their ideals and asking those left behind them to be proud of their deaths, affirmed their innocence with equal intensity. One of them wrote that he was ‘dying innocent and like a partisan'.
⁸⁰
This, then, is not an innocence that we could call ‘technical' with respect to the event that led them to their death, nor even only a strong denial of legitimacy to those who had decided on that death. It is rather the vindication of a moral innocence which was not only identified with the very reasons for the choice they had made, but which gave the shedding of one's own blood the value attributed to the sacrifice of an innocent victim. In this context, the ambiguous metaphor used by a man about to die, ‘it seems that I'm going to a wedding',
⁸¹
acquires the meaning of an offering up of one's own innocence.

In the Fascists too the culture of death did not exclude the figure of the innocent victim. But between the crucifix and the lictorian fasces, as Georges Bataille had seen in 1938, the symbol that the Fascists found most congenial was the latter, including as it did the executioner's axe.
⁸²
When in Terni in 1936 a monument had been unveiled to those who had died in accidents at the Acciao
steelworks, the newspaper of the local
fascio
had written: ‘Not “victims”, but virilely and Fascistically “caduti” [“fallen in battle”].'
⁸³

Fascism is well known for its abundant use of appeals to virility and of sexual metaphors, as for its intimacy with the metaphors and symbols of war.
⁸⁴
Equally well known is how
arditismo
had been the cultural terrain for this symbolism: ‘Youth … which casts its smile at death, limpid as a virgin's kiss. The war in which we are going towards death as towards love.'
⁸⁵

Both before and after 8 September, the Second World War paratroopers, of the Social Republic as of the Kingdom of the South, nourished themselves with the same food. In spring 1943 one of them wrote to his commander: ‘One day, speaking to the company, you said that we
paracadutisti
must make war as we make love. You exhorted us to make love a lot because we would be making a lot of war.' Likewise, a member of the Italian Liberation Corps (CIL): ‘And we went into battle to joke with death as we had joked with girls.'
⁸⁶

Still in 1986, the RSI volunteer Carlo Mazzantini writes: ‘The inebriation of that violation gave greater strength to our voices', and recalls the effect that the Fascist songs had on women ‘with incredulous eyes' and men who ‘shuffled off uncertainly'. A few pages later, to make things clear, Mazzantini says: ‘We were exalted by that sense of violation, the impression of penetrating a hostile body which our songs made tremble'. And, to remove any residual doubts, he concludes: ‘These songs were our whole culture'.
⁸⁷

Death dealt to others by attacking them is part of Fascist culture: both one's own death and the deaths of those fighting alongside one are an integrating element of this mysticism of death, which even drove the Fascists to exaggerate the numbers of their own dead.
⁸⁸
In the
resistenti
, by contrast, as we shall see better presently, the possibility of being killed appears above all as a pledge given to one's conscience before the right one recognises in it to kill;
⁸⁹
and in partisan
bulletins the number of enemy killed increases, often excessively, but never that of one's own dead.

Carlo Mazzantini puts the following words into the mouth of one of his comrades engaged in roundups and executions: