A Civil War (23 page)

Alessandro Natta has recently recalled a heated discussion between himself and Gillo Pontecorvo, both pupils of the Pisa Scuola Normale Superiore, before the German attack on Russia. In the name of the PCI line, Pontecorvo considered the cause of peace the first priority, whereas Natta was convinced that war was indispensable to bring about the collapse of Fascism.
⁴⁴
In the Turin workers' circles, on the one hand, there was clear hostility to entering the war alongside the Germans;
⁴⁵
on the other, according to a Communist leader's testimony, the view was going around that ‘for our liberation war is needed'.
⁴⁶
These two positions were logically contradictory but emotionally convergent. Without mincing words Vittorio Benni, a painter and decorator from Foligno, wrote in a letter: ‘I wish a greater war would come about to destroy the three leaders who are commanding Italy', and the Special Tribunal condemned him to five years' imprisonment for having offended the king, the Duce and the Pope.
⁴⁷

A PCI document of March 1941 recognised that defeat would put an end to the relationship between Fascism and the country.
⁴⁸
The 1 May 1942 appeal by
now urged desertion in favour of the USSR, the Yugoslav partisans, ‘et cetera' (an et cetera which, discreetly, stood for the Anglo-Americans).
⁴⁹

Giorgio Amendola attributes to Concetto Marchesi the radical opinion, which he sets alongside that of Lelio Basso, that the catastrophe of the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and Fascism should be allowed to run its course, making way for Socialist revolution.
⁵⁰
Again, during the forty-five days a Florentine Communist newspaper was to write: ‘About eight years ago Mussolini began what from that point on our Russian comrades called the “beginning of the second imperialist war”.'
⁵¹
In the same period a party leader criticised the error of those comrades who, after 1941, had not concealed the
general
anti-imperialist character of the war at the very moment when the USSR ‘was trying, in our view, not to make capitalism anxious and to remain obscure about its own dangerous intentions'.
⁵²

Togliatti was to give an ambiguously reductive version of this complex and dramatic trajectory when, in his report to the Fifth Party Congress, he claimed that, ‘with the outbreak of war, we were never for the defeat … but for the salvation of the country'. On that occasion, Togliatti's purpose may well have been to reassure the ‘unfortunate combatants that we have never despised their sacrifice'; but, through excessive zeal, he impoverished the experience that so many of his comrades and so many Italians had gone through, by adding: ‘It is no pleasant thing to have foreseen the evil that befell the country, even if we did everything in our power to avoid it … This feeling of profound, insuperable bitterness made even the victory of the great democratic nations over Fascism sad for us.'
⁵³

I have indicated some of the attitudes that the anti-Fascist militants had to the war in order to identify some of the features that the political culture of anti-Fascism would offer to the way
resistenti
would behave and think. However, as the war ran its devastating course, the points of view of the moderate forces who were busy reorganising themselves in the country came into play. The first issue of
Ricostruzione
, which came out in April 1943, read: ‘Today, in the firing line, the soldier still feels the fascination of the flag, the solidarity of his unit, and is
dying for a cause he knows to be unjust; knowing, at the same time, that defeat is just … They call us defeatists. But it is they, those responsible for the present ruin, who are the defeatists.'
⁵⁴

This was a far cry from the invitation, come what may, to do your duty to your country in arms, which Giorgio Amendola remembers Benedetto Croce as having made,
⁵⁵
and as Croce himself wrote in a page of his autobiography.
⁵⁶
Defeat and the accumulation of sufferings that had clustered around it, by now utterly intolerable because patently useless, made it insufficient to take refuge in the widespread and resigned slogan, ‘Neither adhere nor sabotage', which distinguished the deep consciousness of so many Italians during the Second World War. The hope of getting through the gigantic conflict with the minimum of moral compromise and material damage had failed to stand the test, yielding almost to an unexpressed
drôle de guerre
, which was humiliating for the regime.

A Fascist Party informer wrote from Milan: ‘For many it seems impossible that Italy is at war and they have a job believing it, sunk as they are in the conviction that Germany would have managed things alone or that our intervention would have occurred only to gather the fruits of our political and military support.'
⁵⁷

The
questore
of Venice reported that ‘the war, though undesired, was accepted by the majority as a necessary evil', in view of its brevity and the advantages that could be obtained from it.
⁵⁸
Other reports – still in 1940 – speak of
a ‘deaf and opaque mass' and of ‘general weariness of a psychological nature';
⁵⁹
while a combatant in Russia uses this image: ‘The Italian army entered the war only little by little, like some poor wretch whose sleeve gets caught in a grinder and is swallowed up by it.'
⁶⁰

The Italian masses seemed then to have come to terms with the war – still more ‘taciturn and fatalist' than those of the Western democracies, following the definition given to the latter by Stefan Zweig, who compared the ‘ecstasy' of 1914 to the ‘tough, unemotional determination' of 1939.
⁶¹
“How do you win a war without waging it?' may be taken as the essence of the
drôle de guerre
Italian-style.
⁶²
Most Italians would sooner have fought as little as possible, or at least not far from home, leaving their powerful German allies to do the rest. As a July 1940 report by the prefect of Trieste says, registering a real fact, the population praised the Duce for having chosen the opportune moment – the thousand dead needed to sit down at the peace treaty table – ‘to assure Italy of the maximum advantage with the minimum necessary sacrifice'.
⁶³
On receiving the news brought by an officer back from the Russian front, where things were going from bad to worse, Roman military circles seem to have reacted by reproaching the Germans for having violated the rules of the game – namely ‘that they were to get down to it and win the war'.
⁶⁴
The Germans, for their part, sustained by their racial arrogance, were convinced that they were dealing with ‘jumped-up farmhands brought in for the harvest', led by officers who were ‘too touchy, too full of
themselves, too vain'.
⁶⁵
The Italians were to be compelled, in one way or another, to shake off the ‘sad apathy' which, according to a pungent judgment by Radio London, they shared with the ‘beaten French',
⁶⁶
only by defeat, and then by the lash of the occupying Germans. But meanwhile their sense of identity had been worn down – already it had been vulgarised by Fascism, then humiliated by allies and enemies, and reduced more ‘to a state of fact than to a self-operating force, more to a condition than a principle'.
⁶⁷
As we shall see, one of the highest aims of the Resistance would be precisely that of regaining a national identity, even if the outcome of this would be uncertain because, as Ferruccio Parri wrote, part of Italy ‘had suffered the misery of war, not the moral jolt of insurrection'.
⁶⁸

That considerable part of Italian society represented by the Catholic world participated in the events of the war along mobile and multiple lines, which have not yet been sufficiently investigated, where things specifically Italian and general interests of the Holy See intertwined. It is understandable that research into the incunabula of the Christian Democratic party, which governed Italy after the war, has been the main focus of scholars' attention. The result, though, has been that the field of a potentially far richer investigation has narrowed. For some time now, however, more complex and truly religious phenomena have also begun to be examined
⁶⁹
– at times too hastily reduced, by Catholic writers,
to the level of ‘pastoral' activity, chiefly of the bishops, where the need for political mediation was in fact already incorporated. The behaviour of those who, in one way or another – from straight faith to superstition
⁷⁰
– reacquired religious attitudes, has remained in the shadows; and this has also happened in the case of the Catholics during the two Resistance years.

In the great debate about war and peace, the evolution of the Catholic attitude could be said to have followed, by and large, a reverse course to that of the anti-Fascist lay forces. While the latter questioned an a priori pacifism, among the Catholics – compromised by pro-Fascism, the anti-Bolshevik crusade and the desire to ‘support the honour of our flag',
⁷¹
in order to show, as in 1915–18, that they were exemplary citizens – raising the question of war and peace meant having to start rethinking their relations with Fascism and the mission entrusted to it as a centuries-old weapon in the re-establishment of Christian society. I am not thinking so much of the Catholic peasant world's traditional aversion to war
⁷²
– and still less of mannered balancing acts such as the statement that the Pope wanted peace and that, at the same time, the Catholics, or rather the priests, ‘do not cease among us to be loyal Italian soldiers'.
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What I mean rather is the revival of the debate about the ‘just war', which obliged one to shake off the conformism according to which, before the orders of established authority, one was to refrain from making one's own personal judgment on the reasons for any conflict taking place.
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As we shall see, these were tensions that would come to a head – not for the Holy See, which would already have made its choices, but for individual consciences – in the war between the Social Republic and the Resistance.

Meanwhile, faced with the Fascist war, only small minorities of Catholics – among whom the figure of don Primo Mazzolari, parish priest of Bozzolo,
stands out – proved capable of tackling with radical energy the problem of the relationship between martial violence and the fifth commandment. Let us try a parallel reading of a crass pamphlet signed by don Sergio Pignedoli, circulated by the most enlightened Catholic organisation, the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI), and Primo Mazzolari's vigorous ‘Risposta a un aviatore' (‘Reply to an Airman').
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Pignedoli approvingly cites Mussolini, and even Pétain, who in the 1914–18 war would go to Mass with his officers; he finds that there is ‘an appealing beauty in scraping the bottom of a mess-tin with a spoon, when for twenty years we have been eating off a plate'; he reminds a university student that he no longer belongs to himself, but to the
patria
, to society, to the brotherhood of man, to God, to history; he rounds off in the name of ‘Christian and Imperial Rome, to whom a few days ago the Pope appealed'.

Mazzolari is replying to a young airman who has bared his conscience to him before the task, to which he has been summoned, of killing and getting himself killed, and who had criticised the Church's silence and ambiguity.
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The essence of Mazzolari's long reply lies in the maximum emphasis it lays on the terms of inner conflicts. Though not giving straight practical advice, which, in the circumstances, could only have been to rebel or desert, Mazzolari thus managed, undisguisedly, to transform back into a moral problem the practice, which Pignedoli and his ilk took for granted, of obeying the country's authorities when they ordered one to go to war. ‘The myth of duty, or on the limits of my loyalty,' was, for example, the heading of one of the sections of Mazzolari's reply. Mazzolari gave full moral, and not simply diplomatic, significance to the ‘useless slaughter' of Benedict XV's famous allocution, thereby implicitly raising another question too: Is the war to be condemned because it is useless or because it is unjust?

Was not dying and killing uselessly quite as harrowing a business as dying and killing unjustly? Mazzolari gave no reply, but remarked that the church had condemned war in general, not
this
war. And while Pignedoli, and so many of his kind, were speaking above all of the possibility of being killed, so as to alleviate the fear of it, Mazzolari, resorting even to a quotation from Remarque – ‘Tell me at least
why
I have to kill' – baldly recalled that war consisted also of killing. The parish priest of Bozzolo added that a Christian cannot hate anyone, and therefore not even the enemy; and it is easy to see how distant he was from another
priest, don Tullio Calcagno, the future promoter, under the Social Republic, of ‘Crociata italica' (‘Italian Crusade'), who on the contrary considered it indispensable to hate the enemy.
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Thus Mazzolari again raised a possibly insoluble question: whether it is therefore preferable to kill in cold blood.
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‘The soldier who dies without knowing why he is dying takes the kingdom of the servile to its utmost limit', Mazzolari concluded. Inscribed in the knowledge of why you are dying in effect is a conscious judgment of the enemy you have to kill: otherwise you would not be soldiers, but those martyrs who ‘inaugurated the kingdom of the sons of God and of truly free man'. This setting of martyrdom and war against each other was essentially Mazzolari's metapolitical and metahistorical answer.