A Civil War (26 page)

In the collection of servicemen's letters that I have drawn on widely, Bianca Ceva observes that one has the sensation of ‘finding oneself before human beings, not citizens'.
⁷³
This view is borne out by the subsequent publication of letters and memoirs, and more than any other sums up the failure of the Fascist war. Certainly, Ceva's point of reference are the letters of the First World War combatants collected by Adolfo Omodeo in
Momenti della vita di guerra
– namely the letters of those officers, above all reserve officers, whose quality as ‘citizens' heirs of the Risorgimento Omodeo had been especially intent on celebrating.
⁷⁴
But if one looks at the ‘umili' (‘the humble') – tucked away by Omodeo in a slim appendix to the second edition of his book, and retrieved for history first by Leo Spitzer
⁷⁵
and then by more recent studies by Forcella, Isnenghi, Monticone and Rochard (to name but the leaders) – one finds in the trenches of Carso also ‘human beings', noble or fragile, more than ‘citizens'.
⁷⁶
In any case, these two qualities tend to converge a good deal more in a defensive war fought on one's own soil – like the war after Caporetto – than in a war of aggression taken into distant and inhospitable lands. What Ceva highlights acquires greater significance in that it referred not only to the ‘umili', but, as we have seen, involved the officer corps as well.

On 14 February 1941 a note of the chief of police's secretariat registered the ‘lack of a genuine spiritual preparation for the war'; and the following 26 December, the
questore
of Venice touched on a sore point by observing that ‘one would have expected men's spirits and resources to be better prepared after twenty years of totalitarian rule'.
⁷⁷

Fascism's supreme ambition had indeed been to fuse politics with war – that is, the citizen with the soldier, or better still the warrior. In 1937 Giuseppe Bottai had, incautiously, taken it for granted that this fusion had already come about, on the model of the Fascist assault troops' fighting spirit. The Blackshirts were
‘the first champion of the “political” army as we intend and practise it (bearer and defender of
one
idea, and therefore not party biased)'.
⁷⁸
Today we know that, in the internal equilibrium of the Fascist power system, the full unfolding of this drive to politicise the armed forces was checked by the logic of compromise between the party and the military hierarchies, leaving the traditional military with a fairly wide leeway for self-management as both a corps and a career.
⁷⁹

But the war obeyed a yet more stringent logic, which put paid to any compromise between velleity and opportunism, and showed how vain it was to attempt to ‘mobilise' the masses after having gone to such pains to ‘demobilise' them.
⁸⁰
In his speech to the party directorate on 17 April 1943, Mussolini himself had to acknowledge that the ideal of the political army – for which he held up the SS as a model – was still a long way from being achieved.
⁸¹
In an earlier speech to the same audience, on 3 January of the same year, Mussolini had declared that ‘the Armed Forces can never be political enough, never Fascist enough … Because this is a war of religion, of ideas.' The question as to ‘whether twenty years of Fascist rule have changed things only on the surface, leaving them much the same below', was for Mussolini purely rhetorical. The answer was ‘that the Italian people will hold firm and astound the world'.
⁸²
But it was precisely the Fascist ‘new man' who did not appear on the battlefields, however much the trial of war had been taken as the elective testing-ground for him to manifest himself.
⁸³
An RSI soldier was to number this very ‘absence of the
homus novus
' among the ‘three squalors, one greater than the others', that he saw as weighing on his death.
⁸⁴
As early as the beginning of the war, a major in the Royal Army had
written to his son that Fascism ‘had failed to create a new youth, and with this terrible crime Fascism has foreclosed its outlet towards the future'.
⁸⁵

These different attitudes to being at war, briefly outlined above, fostered germs of
reducismo
(diehard veteran's spirit) partly akin to the experience of the First World War,
⁸⁶
as it has been studied, and indeed partly peculiar to the Italians of the Second World War. In general, it has been rightly observed that trench warfare ‘seems to have left a more salient psychological mark than earlier or more recent experiences of combat', and that consequently ‘the Second World War generated less sense of political mission in its former soldiers than the First'.
⁸⁷

The Italian war had this peculiarity: in the Resistance (and, in its way, in the RSI as well) vent was given to some of the tensions we might call
protoreducistiche
that had built up during the conflict. They were condensed in formulae like, ‘When we return, we'll put things in order', generated by the illusion of being able to transfer into civilian and normal life the exceptional and totalising character of the wartime experience, whose traumatic aspects one believed one had the right to redress.
⁸⁸
Obviously, the shirkers (
imboscati
) were the first and immediate targets of this resentment. They were despised as those who ‘complain about the radiator, about the inconvenient timetables of the theatres'; they were hated as ‘scum' who deserved to be sent ‘into the desert and then see what they have to say', as ‘armchair heroes who make high-sounding utterances in the cafés and write
vincere
to you on every scrap of paper they can find'; like those who ‘are here in town laughing and living it up … while the women forget their most sacred duties in the arms of profiteers'.
⁸⁹

The desire to take revenge on all such people is equally apparent: ‘but let's hope to find these malingerers one day and settle accounts with them!'; ‘but
the day will also come when I'll be able to get my own back'; ‘but God will keep our memory in shape'; ‘sooner or later you'll be found out'; ‘we'll make a clean sweep of the defeatists (
mormoratori –
‘murmurers'); and that whole rabble of individuals who are now looking contemptuously at the army will have to pay or think differently after the Victory'.
⁹⁰
These utterances already reveal the variety of possible directions the combatants' reactions might take.

Certainly the most absurd anger was that of the staunch Fascists, for it was an anger against themselves and their own myths. If a woman could write to her husband in Russia, ‘It's nonsense for them to write that this was a war for all – for all the poor yes, but not for the rich who are the ones making millions out of the war',
⁹¹
the only way a Fascist could vent his feelings against ‘i signori della doppia camicia' (‘the double-shirted signori'), against the ‘ “let's-arm-ourselves-and-off-you-go” gang', was by swathing himself again in his language: ‘It is better to die in war than live uselessly … We are Italians and Fascists only when we have smelled the scent of the trench, the whistle of the machine-gun.'
⁹²

Paradoxically, the Fascists at the front had to take issue with other Fascists, the ones who had stayed at home – thus anticipating one of the themes of the contradictory polemic of the Republican Fascist Party against the Fascist National Party. Carlo Scorza himself, soon to become the last secretary of the PNF, was to say to Fidia Gambetti, who was departing for Russia in the summer of 1942: ‘Make sure you come back; then we'll settle up with everyone, even the Duce, if necessary.'
⁹³
At a certain point Edgardo Preti, lieutenant-general of the militia in the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR) Command, began to speak of ‘counter-revolution when the war's over' and pronounced grim threats against ‘those signori in Rome'.
⁹⁴
Berto Ricci, an intellectual of the so-called Fascist left, expressed a similar point of view: ‘For the time being let's get on with winning the war … We'll sort out the English in our ranks later.'
⁹⁵

It is not surprising that the officer who, from the end of 1942, edited the paratroopers' newspaper
Folgore
, where many diehard positions appear, later found himself in the Social Republic.
⁹⁶
We should add, however, that even in the Social Republic the diehard component had, as such, limited room for political
action, as witness the failed ‘conspiracy' promoted by the ‘party of the “
medaglie d'oro
” '.
⁹⁷

Many other former combatants wanted to ‘sort things out', in a deeper and more global sense – that is, by participating in the Resistance. When the hardship of wartime experience fused with repudiation of the military hierarchies and the values they embodied (or should have embodied), the way was paved for this, whatever paths individuals might have taken.
⁹⁸
To this day, a survivor of deportation still writes resentfully: ‘I've read a lot about the events of those few days on the western front, but I've never read anything about the shitty idiocies the officers committed and which I witnessed.'
⁹⁹
A soldier's letter says: ‘I never expected to be treated so badly or that the officers would be such a crew.'
¹⁰⁰
With candid malice, another soldier recounts from the Marmarica desert: ‘Here I can see officers who were so cocky in Italy, and yet in only a few, in only a very few days they've bowed their heads and their morale and no longer seem to be even privates.'
¹⁰¹

In the next section we shall see how the repudiation of the Royal Army accounts for much about the attitudes and behaviour of the partisans. Here I only wish to recall the lieutenant described by Primo Levi, where this rejection was kept problematically bottled up, finding, as yet, no outward expression:

On 2 April a ‘captain of the Alpini' revealed the existence of
reducismo
‘andato a bene' (‘for a good cause'); or, if one prefers, of ‘
reducista
anti-Fascism',
¹⁰³
sending this letter to a clandestine paper:

Hard on the heels of this, and aggressively, came a young man's broadsheet:

As if in distant countermelody to this, in the same period Giaime Pintor was reflecting on his own ‘anti-militarism … which took shape in a privileged military atmosphere.'
¹⁰⁶

To discredit the heir to the throne, Prince Umberto, who ‘is staying afloat … in that distant Italy', Nuto Revelli called him an ‘imboscato', or draft-dodger (‘we'll have to shoot him'); and in another page of his diary Revelli gave an exemplary outline of the
itinerarium mentis militaris in Resistentiam
(itinerary of the
Resistance military mind) – an itinerary following which a regular officer like himself, who had believed in the military virtues, had come to reconvert, integrate and sublimate them into partisan life.
¹⁰⁷
The ‘poetry of military life', which in August 1942 an officer of the occupying troops in Greece had recognised as something that could not possibly be felt by ‘thirty or thirty-one-year-old men, veterans of two wars, some of whom had been away from their homes, some for two years, some for three', was, we can infer, found again among the partisans in command of whom that officer was to die.
¹⁰⁸
We can see proto-
reducismo
taking an anti-Fascist turn in many other testimonies. Witness this passage: ‘Once again the war has surprised our good faith, playing upon young men's instinctive patriotism – this war! the culmination of the twenty-year-old crime … each one of us has a friend who has died far off, in the ranks of a prostitute army.'
¹⁰⁹

A few months earlier, a university students' underground paper had spoken about young men ‘exploited until only yesterday on the battlefields in a senseless war'.
¹¹⁰
This link between proto-
reducismo
and anti-Fascism is endorsed by many biographies, and emerges too from other passages in this book.
¹¹¹
In a vain attempt to save himself, a youth who failed to report for service in the Social Republic, about to be shot in Florence in March 1944, invokes his past as an honest combatant: they shouldn't do it because I've always done my duty, I've always fought, ‘and I've never been punished'.
¹¹²