A Civil War (41 page)

One of Nuto Revelli's annotations almost gives the lie to this: after a harsh rounding up, out of twenty-four men who abandoned the formation, nine were from the same village.
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And what should also be noted is the greater security that fellow-villagers, and dialect, offered against infiltration by spies. Ada Gobetti tells of a man ‘small, very, very dark, a southerner, as you can hear from his accent', who for these reasons alone was suspected in Susa of being a spy.
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According to Fenoglio, the mere fact of speaking Italian was already a bad sign.
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Of a group that formed in the mountains around Modena between Communists, Action Party members and Catholics from Sassuolo, Ermanno Gorrieri writes: ‘I think one can say that the Sassuolesi, who constituted a fair share of the partisans active in the mountains, at least in the initial phase, felt greater solidarity with their fellow villagers than with the party.'
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Still with regard to the Modenese Appennines, behind ‘the old idea of creating a robust and determined local formation', launched again in autumn 1944, were ‘apolitical' and anti-Communist aims.
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But even the Command of the ‘13 Martyrs' Garibaldi Brigade of Lovere not only adopted the criterion of ‘pochi ma buoni' (‘few but good'), but made the ‘buoni' coincide with local lads, and dubbed the city folk with the pejorative militarist term ‘vaselina'. For this attitude the formations were sternly rebuked,
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just as a La Spezia Giustizia e Libertà formation was taunted with the epithet of ‘patrioti casalinghi' (‘stay-at-home patriots').
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Another Garibaldi document, respectable by contrast, describes the mountain dwellers of the Oltrepò around Pavia as ‘excellent elements, but difficult to drag into operations outside their village; while they fight like lions near the walls of their houses, the moment they have to move away from the area many of them abandon the formation'.
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This attitude, another report explains,
meant that, as soon as the Anglo-Americans arrived, these units disbanded and each member returned home.
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A group commanded by a certain captain Raul – well-armed, and composed for the most part of Communist sympathisers, almost all fellow villagers who carried home with them spoils they had captured – not having wanted to move in time, is said to have been attacked and decimated.
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The Valtellina only to Valtellinese partisans, as their commander Retico seemed to want? But that way – ran the answer – ‘you are treading on Fascist ground. There is no worse policy, no worse action than to divide one Italian from another, whether he be a Sicilian, a native of Veneto, a Piedmontese or a Tuscan'.
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A Garibaldi detachment from Boves was criticised because ‘it smacks rather too much of the local situation insofar as the majority are from the village and before general interests come local ones: this could be prejudicial.'
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Alongside these criticisms inspired by strong national pedantry, there appear others that are more immediately connected with contingent situations. The local partisans – it is claimed – revealed themselves to be particularly sensitive to the risk of reprisals against the hearths that sweetened their existence. This gave rise to
attesismo
(waiting on events) and, with the formation of free zones, an excess of defensive attitudes.
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On those occasions the local elements could ‘fuel the general euphoria',
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then be ruinously involved in dispersal and gradual ebbing away. In that way they offered the enemy the opportunity to concentrate forces each time on a single point, allowing them to ‘arrange their attacks in grades, using first one formation, then another' and ‘to be always
stronger than us'.
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Finally, we should not forget those homeless villagers, the southerners blocked in the North. Among them there seemed to be the reappearance of the tendency to group themselves according to their areas of origin, as in the Royal Army.
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Revelli recalls the case of forty disbanded Sicilians from the 4
^th
Army who on no account wanted to be separated from a
carabiniere
who was their fellow villager, and in whom they had recognised a leader's authority: when the
carabiniere
was killed, the Sicilians dispersed.
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With the Sardinians of the Natisone division and the Triestine brigade at a certain moment there was the idea of creating a Sardinian battalion.
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We do not know what came of that proposal, most likely nothing, just as we are unable to say whether similar episodes occurred elsewhere.

It is revealing however to compare this with the different behaviour of the Sicilian soldiers who were on the island at the time of the Allied landing and, still more, with the view of the landing given them by a
paracadutista
officer who believed in the Fascist war: ‘It was a grave psychological error, too ingenuous not to have been deliberate, to send the inhabitants to defend their own land. When a soldier is close to home he is unlikely to make a good combatant.'
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At times, the local character of the bands led to mimicking the only lively and popular rite in Italian military tradition, the festival of the young recruits. In June 1944, in the province of Biella, the new partisans

The problem of the growing number of bands, of which the local character is but one aspect, reached a turning-point with the beginning of the influx of the youths who had wanted to dodge the drafts improvidently issued by the Fascist
government (the so-called Graziani bands), and the various German call-ups. These new partisans gave rise to problems of cohabitation with the older ones, who already tended to swathe the memory of the initial phase, the dawn of the movement, in jealous nostalgia. ‘Things, Nuto, aren't what they used to be! Everything's changed! There were few of us, then, in the fine times of Palanfré! How wonderful the evenings were, all of us gathered together singing our songs, joking, laughing':
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that's how Nini of the GL Rosselli brigade, by now deployed on the French side of the Alpine front, recalled beginnings which were not actually that distant.

The veterans suspected that they had before them people who regarded being a partisan as a mere refuge. A GL commissar inveighed ‘against that way of considering the partisan formations as a sort of charity organisation, aimed at welcoming, protecting and assisting draft dodgers and deserters, so as to prevent their meeting a worse end, imprisonment in Germany or dispatch to the battlefields'.
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Still more unsparing was a Garibaldi commissar concerning Colonel Libero Descalzi, ‘squadrista, persecutor of the people of Stradella, volunteer in Spain etc.', who had formed a brigade near Varzi ‘composed essentially of daddy's boys whose fathers financed Descalzi to make sure that he saved their sons. No combative spirit animated those dodgers, who had come into the mountains to play the dandy and save their skins.'
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‘Butter and jam' partisans or ‘evacuee partisans' were the names given to those who poured into the mountains in summer 1944, convinced of being able to tranquilly await ‘the good moment'.
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These stances reflect the problem of the evolution from mere self-defence to the exercise of even aggressive violence, which, furthermore, required different and greater armaments. The fact is that at a certain point the influx of men exceeded the availability of weapons, as well as the means of subsistence. The presence in the mountains of so many unarmed men could only be a cause for concern. ‘When the fighting starts I'm going to disappear. I'm not going to stay here and get myself killed',
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said an unarmed partisan, expressing a point of view that was widespread among those who did not intend to risk their lives in a challenge that was too unevenly matched.

In this matter there were two schools of thought among the leaders. The first, in the name of political and human responsibility, claimed that it was not
possible to turn anyone away. A Garibaldi document reads: ‘To find excuses and fail to do everything possible to solve the inevitable difficulties stemming from such an influx of men indicates poor political work with little understanding.'
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And in another one: ‘We have deemed it opportune, despite the fact that they are unarmed, not to reject them, so as to remove them from the enemy's clutches.'
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On 18 October 1944, the provincial military command of Vicenza issued a circular ordering the suspension of new enrolments for lack of weapons and because ‘it is all too easy to present oneself at 11.55 [i.e. the eleventh hour] and enjoy the same recognition as those who presented themselves at zero hour'. But the general command of the Garibaldi brigades severely criticised this attitude of the veterans, and reminded them that weapons can be won and that the only condition to be put to anyone asking to enlist is that he be ‘fired by a firm will to fight'.
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These Garibaldi directives undoubtedly contained an attempt to re-launch the volunteer spirit on that terrain of combat whose arguments were invoked by those who balked before the influx of so many unarmed men. But there was wavering even among the Communist and Garibaldi leadership, initially above all for practical reasons, and then in a second phase above all because of the resistance of the now consolidated formations, animated by a growing
esprit de corps
, to being diluted by too many newcomers. A report from Emilia at the end of 1943 observed: ‘It does not seem to us advisable to send them into the mountains without weapons and with the near certainty of not being able to supply them. We will in short make every effort to find the best solution for them: the important thing is that they don't fall back into the clutches of the Germans.'
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Similar perplexities existed in the GL formations, where the concern was for the ‘disturbance' that might be caused by the continuous influx of men, and there was the warning not ‘to be fanatical about the number'; but alongside this, it was recommended to leave the doors open ‘to the workers who are on strike and to avoid their being deported to Germany'.
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In another GL document satisfaction
is expressed that ‘the number of regular officers has always been deliberately kept low through a process of rigorous selection', contrary to what was happening in the Garibaldi brigades, which take ‘whoever presents himself'
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– though we have seen that this was not always true.

The problem went beyond the political differences between the formations. The Communist Bernardo was not tender towards indiscriminate recruitment, on which, using an identical argument to that of the GL document quoted above, he laid much of the blame for the disastrous outcome of the September 1944 roundup on the Grappa.
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‘In the band or in the district', was the bald invitation of a poster put up in the Canavese region by GL and Matteotti formations, addressed to young re-draftees; and the area command remarked: ‘This poster has appeared at a moment when we are having difficulty keeping within reasonable limits the influx of recruits who are arriving from everywhere, in order not to increase excessively the load of dangerous unarmed men in this period. The way it is expressed seems inopportune.'
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Since February 1944 the military Command for Northern Italy had been urging that ‘the temptation be resisted to swell the ranks in the bands by indiscriminately taking in disbanded men who take to the mountains. Let those who after a fit period of moral and material preparation prove their worth as combatants be accepted.'
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In this prose, in which Parri's hand is recognisable, the meaning of ‘non combattente', of ‘disarmata', tends to assume a morally negative connotation. This tallies with the spirit of the bands, who not only feared the presence of the unarmed men during the recruitment sessions, but came to regard the sessions themselves as an instrument of selection, a sort of God's judgment which served to sort the wheat from the tares.

– so runs a report about a recruiting session in Emilia.
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And Nuto Revelli, after a severe roundup in Valle Stura, observes: ‘The selection is starting. The sick, the flat-footed, the accidental partisans will go. Our attitude is sympathetic: we are almost inviting them to leave the formation.'
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At the other end of the Alpine arc, the Garibaldi-Osoppo division felt the need for similar reasons to rid itself of ‘much dead weight'.
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Writing about the winter of 1944–45, the ever rigorous Ferdinando Mautino says: