A Civil War (121 page)

Elsa Oliva's stance, writ larger no doubt in memory, is crowned by a series of episodes – and it is this coherence of hers that bears out the truth of this testimony. ‘As commander' she was ‘very severe' and had the men tied to poles. She respected the Muti brigade lieutenant who kept her prisoner for some time because he was courageous (just as the lieutenant respected her for the same reason). Without a moment's hesitation, together with other comrades, she executed a Fascist who had taken them prisoner and who, in the days of the Liberation, was sickeningly applauding the partisans, but said to him: ‘Idiot, couldn't you stay hidden away in some hole?' The only thing that she didn't understand, because it was in fact hard to understand, was how this Fascist died crying ‘Viva Stalin!': ‘Did he think he'd save himself that way?' Finally, after the Liberation, she admitted: ‘All of us had guns at home because we thought we'd still have to use them. With the liberation we hadn't seen what we had dreamed about so much in the mountains.'
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By contrast, there were women who refused to shoot and kill out of individual choice and conviction. Testimonies of this kind are numerous. Albina Caviglione Lusso tells of women partisans who took care of the wounded and brought arms and ammunition to the combatants: ‘They never fired, though.' Tersilla Fenoglio declares: ‘I never used arms; I would never have used them and I would never have fired, because I've always had a great fear of doing harm to my neighbour. I only performed defensive actions. It's absurd, but that's the way it was, perhaps because of the residual Catholicism that I had.'
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Even a Communist partisan in so fierce a Resistance movement as the Yugoslav one writes that the Ustasha are killing her ‘because she is honest and has not killed anyone, has never harmed anyone, has helped her brothers and comrades with her thoughts only for them'.
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These women were convinced that life was not in itself an absolute value (‘it's better to die honestly than live unworthily', the Yugoslav writes) but refused to take the lives of others by their own hand. Though having made a clear choice of sides, they did not intend to sacrifice the claims of pity to the political and armed struggle. This model seems to be exemplified not only in women such as ‘mamma Lucia' (Lucia Apicella), who at Cava dei Tirreni buried both German and Anglo-American soldiers,
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but also mothers, like that of the partisan Nelia Benissone Costa, who, in idealistic solidarity with her daughter, devoted herself to honouring and burying the dead.
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Another partisan, Teresa Cirio, speaks of women who ‘when they learned that that there were dead people in town … cut the hanged men down from the gallows, washed them, and laid them out. Others took red carnations to the cemetery. The graves of the partisans were always all adorned with flowers.'
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After the Liberation there would be mothers who would prevent those responsible for the killing of their sons from being executed: ‘There's already one dead person, why do you want to kill another one … who's a child [14 years old]? You mustn't take them; you people are guilty too.'
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Male perplexities, oscillations and contradictions before the women combatants are numerous, for all the encouragement and acknowledgment of the contribution of women in general to the Resistance cause. One command complained of the failure to form women's SAPs.
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Rumours circulated of the presence of exclusively women's bands in the area of the Turchino pass in Liguria.
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But, while accentuating the armed presence of individual volunteers, the prevailing tendency was to assign to women tasks that were technically more suitable in that they aroused less suspicion in the enemy, like those of dispatch-riders and informers, or else the more traditional, separate and subaltern ones, of nurse, cook, darner and the like. The general command of the CVL issued a report to all the formations, thereby setting it up as an example, announcing the establishment of a unit of women who ‘iron, sew and darn', commanded by ‘a Garibaldino who is also head-tailor'. ‘These women', the report concludes, ‘are
given a medical check-up weekly', this provision being indignantly condemned by the Piedmontese GL.
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‘Putting clothes away, wrapping parcels … treating the wounded, organising first-aid stations, nursery schools, et cetera' were the duties that the Communist Party indicated to the women's sections that were being created in the South, ‘bearing in mind the southern mentality',
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but clearly this mentality was equally widespread in the North as well.

What stands out here is a rare and explicit appeal to the combative pacifist tradition of women: ‘You are the worthy daughters of those women who in 1915–18, to prevent the departure for the front of young men who were due to go off and get themselves killed by the Germans, lay down across the railroad tracks heedless of the danger to their lives. Your gestures are as admirable as those of your mothers.'
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Male reticence is particularly visible at the moment of the final parade, after the victory. In Milan – again it is Elsa Oliva who is telling the story – ‘in the march-pasts, the dispatch-riders were made to wear nurses' arm-bands!':
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and dispatch-riding was, as I have already said, a function recognised as being particularly suitable for women. When the partisans had entered Alba on 10 October 1944, thereby initiating the brief experience of the free zone, ‘with the men', wrote Fenoglio,

In the final parade in Turin the Garibaldi formations decreed that the women were not to participate in the march-pasts, to avoid unpleasant reactions, including the risk of their being called whores. Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano, who recounts the episode, recalls the disappointment and anger that she and her companions felt at seeing that in the autonomous formations the women paraded with the men as equals, but then adds that she recognises the justness of the ban.
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Evidently ‘Mauri' (Ilario Tabarri) and his men, who were bourgeoisly open-minded, felt free not to give a damn whether their women were called whores; not so with the Communists, both because their policy of alliance with the petit-bourgeois classes and the Catholics led them to cultivate their prejudices, and because several of the Garibaldi women at least were themselves sensitive to that risk.

In fact, at times the partisans themselves mirrored this tendency by calling Fascist women auxiliaries whores. On both sides, this was the most rapid way of avoiding the conflict between political and military commitment, regulated by new and uncertain codes, and sexual morality, regulated by ancient and solid codes.
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The protective attitude towards women and the limited function assigned to them are borne out in the name given to the unitary women's organisation sponsored above all by the Communists: ‘Gruppi di difesa della donna per l'assistenza ai combattenti della libertà' (‘Groups for the defence of women for the assistance of the freedom fighters'). On the one hand, women were seen here as beings to defend – on a par, it should be noted, with the peasants; on the other hand, the only active role they were assigned was that of assistance. Because of this, many women did not like the formula, Ada Gobetti included.
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The Italian name followed the French one: ‘marraines des francs-tireurs et partisans'. The still fresh memory of the grey Fascist invention
madrine di guerra
(godmothers of war) probably advised against using an identical formula. In France, however, the
madrine
declared themselves ready to fight, thereby vindicating their descent from the women of the great Revolution.
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Perhaps the only people comparable to the women in their two-sided attitude to the armed struggle are those priests who chose to become chaplains with the partisan formations, and who therefore saw the contradictions of the Catholics at first hand.

In 1946 a periodical vindicating the clergy's contribution to the Resistance wrote: ‘It's true: no priest took up arms, even if he was a chaplain of bands, because his pacific mission of love prevented him from using violent instruments of hate.'
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When he went over from the Di Dio
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to the Garibaldi formations, Don Sisto Bighiani, caressing his machine-gun, said to Moscatelli ‘that he had prayed and was praying to the Lord never to be compelled to use it with his hands'.
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By contrast, a chaplain to the Osoppo brigades, which took their inspiration from Don Aldo Moretti (a Resistance priest), fired and the next day said Mass, leaving a British major who witnessed the scene somewhat perplexed; and another priest had no qualms about shooting but did not want the political commissar in the band.
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Commitment for a good cause never completely cancelled the defensive character in Resistance violence. The decision to kill came later; it was a consequence of the fundamental decision to oppose the violence of the other side. Resistance violence could therefore be placed, broadly, in the category of legitimate defence, which involved the possibility of being killed oneself.
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Rousseau had written: ‘Every man has the right to risk his life in order to preserve it … He who wills the end wills the means also, and the means must involve some risks, and even some losses. He who wishes to preserve his life at others' expense should also, when it is necessary, be ready to give it up for their sake.'
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Many Resistance documents insist on the need to resort to violence. ‘When we are compelled to kill one of our fellow men, one of our fellow countrymen, at times even an old friend, our hand does not tremble because we know we have had to act to defend ourselves, in that he wanted our death', says a GL newspaper – and adds immediately, almost as if it fears that a purely defensive vision might risk taking the colour out of the ultimate ends of the struggle: ‘When, moreover, we remember again the sanctity of the cause for which our comrades are dying, we feel all the more that we are performing an act of true justice.'
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A Garibaldi unit's report expresses almost in the form of a fable this theme of defence that cannot help becoming offence: ‘Two comrades were stopped by two militia-men of the Black Brigade, but on hearing their threat raised their pistols and shot them dead. In their enthusiasm at having captured them the Fascists had shouted: Partisan dogs, we'll kill you. And they were killed.'
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‘Resentment at man-hunting' is indicated as one of the causes that led to the ‘Four Days of Naples'.
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Killing as a necessity helped to preserve one, at least as far as one's intentions were concerned, from taking pleasure in it, and from cruelty, that is from that
di più
(surplus) which was, by contrast, so greatly vaunted by the Fascists. ‘We are not fighting to kill and exterminate', declared a Tuscan Garibaldino.
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A Liberal newspaper wrote – and it is no easy business distinguishing the affirmation of how one should be from the statement of how things really are – that when one of the enemy dies there is no exultation, as there is with the sadistic Fascists: killing is always a grievous thing, even if today it is necessary.
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In Emanuele Artom's diary three subtly linked passages occur at a close distance from each other:

Three days later Artom explained the reasons why he had not wanted to set a mousetrap and concluded: ‘Last reason – last or first? – the desire to put this subtle examination of my conscience down in my diary'. Finally, Artom takes satisfaction in recalling a speech by his commander who, quoting D'Annunzio's motto ‘I dare, I don't scheme', had recommended his men to ‘dare as little as possible, in order to achieve the end, but not to make daring an end in itself '.
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The insistence on the defensive character of the struggle – in itself neither original nor significant, given that the aggressors too were in the habit of resorting to it brazenly – was therefore valuable for the
resistenti
above all as a moral guarantee, which was all the more necessary for the fact that the exercise of violence was the result of a personal choice. In many cases, direct and indirect, but always clear, manifestations of this conviction are identifiable; while in other cases the reasons for defence interwove in various ways, to the point of becoming almost invisible, with the active ‘motivations' that sustained the struggle and that encountered the ‘technical' reasons according to which the best defence is attack, above all in guerrilla warfare. Recalling our earlier examination of the
noms de guerres
with patriotic and class references, we can now underline that violent and truculent names appear only rarely, that they are best interpreted, as Fenoglio interpreted them, as ‘formidable',
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and that, when they do appear, they can often be taken as being ironical. For example, Fenoglio describes the crowd in Alba ‘reading as one reads the numbers on the backs of cyclists' the
noms de guerre
that the partisans wore embroidered on their scarves, red and light blue alike, wrapped around their shoulders.
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Names bearing the mark of real or feigned violence, self-attributed or attributed by others, include for example: ‘Mitra' (‘Machine-gun'), ‘Mauser', ‘Tritolo' (‘TNT'), ‘Bestione' (‘Beast'), ‘Boia' (‘Hangman'), ‘Caino' (‘Cain'); and also the bad taste of ‘Menefrego' (‘I don't give a damn'), ‘Ras', ‘Ardito', ‘Bastanaro'. For similar reasons, it is hard to say whether a partisan called Gandhi was a pacifist or a skinny lad with lightweight spectacles.