A Civil War (24 page)

Altogether different in inspiration was the reappearance of that current of Catholic apologetics which, from de Maistre onward, had indicated war as a castigation that God sends men because of their sins. The fearsome scale of the castigation that was taking place could only be proportional to the greatest of sins: the de-Christianisation of society. The war, from whatever angle it was viewed, thus ceased to be a struggle between warring parties and became a scourge sent indiscriminately to all men. From the pulpit in a Roman church, a preacher translated this awesome theological message into petty scolding of ‘children who have not listened to their mother', and of mothers ‘who have failed to hold their children in check. And vainly does the Madonna implore Jesus to save men. Irritated, Jesus refuses to listen to her.'
⁷⁹

The interiorisation of a sense of guilt, to the point of desperation, is to be found in the letters of civilians and soldiers alike: ‘This is a castigation by God because we are too bad'; ‘Ask the Lord what we have done wrong in this world to be tortured in this way'.
⁸⁰
This is a far cry from the presentation, found in some Catholic texts, of the current war as a holy war, insofar as it was a ‘titanic struggle in defence of European, Roman and Christian civilisation, threatened by the hordes of militant atheism'.
⁸¹

One thing that many of the surviving testimonies have in common is that the vast majority of the combatants felt they had been thrown into an enterprise whose proportions, intensity and significance it was not only beyond their direct power to control, but even simply to comprehend. As Nuto Revelli wrote: ‘We knew nothing. We viewed modern warfare like folk from another age, and were alien to it.'
¹

In fact, not only do General Staffs often face a war with the technical culture of their predecessor (the most glaring example certainly being that of the stolid French General Staff of 1939–40), but the very men who have to fight it have difficulty shaking off the memory that has been transmitted to them by veterans' tales, literature, and myth-making. To many Italian soldiers their German ally – and the British, Soviet and American foes – must have appeared like people from another world and another age. The memory of the Germans, whether in the African desert or in the frozen wastes of Russia, fleeing in automobiles while the Italians fled on foot, has become widely known and consolidated, beyond the real episodes that triggered it, precisely because of the significance it has acquired as an index of how alien the mass of Italian soldiers felt to that technical and ruthless war.

Except for the few convinced Fascists and the very few who were already clearly anti-Fascist, the majority of Italian soldiers cannot be said to have been altogether devoid of motivation: had motivation been totally absent, the desire to survive and the
spirito di corpo
, seen as a factor making for group cohesion, would not always have sufficed to save them from suicidal rebellion or madness. But the motivations involved were uncertain, in the sense that they were unable to give unitary firmness to the men's consciences, and, even when they appeared firmer and rooted in long-standing tradition, such as loyalty to the institutions, the line separating them from resignation remained uncertain and jagged.

A little earlier I recalled the sense of
sub specie
Catholic expiation. But no explicitly religious anchorage was needed to cultivate, in a good many combatants, a sentiment that took the form of the sublimation of sufferings endured for an uncertain and obscure cause, in the name of a duty regarded a priori as unavoidable. It was thus a desire for expiation with tragic overtones, for it lacked hope; whereas the analogous aspiration of the
resistenti
, which we have seen in at least some of them, was to be illuminated and, as it were, sweetened by confident hopes deferred to a future guaranteed by the justice of their cause. Some of the
Fascists of the Social Republic were also to display this spirit of dedication; but in their case it would be wrapped in the mortuary rhetorical shroud of sacrifice as an end in itself.
²

The more expiation is detached from the prospect of a feasible and morally certain future, the more – as appears evident even in the noblest of its expressions of 1940–43 – it places all its hope of not being vain in the very fact of laying down one's life. Combatants uncertain of what they are fighting for can thus paradoxically seek it in offering their lives. Perhaps the formula that it is always the best ones who die – used in the most varied contexts, Resistance and post-Resistance included – has a non-rhetorical motivation in this essentially religious substructure, which leaves survivors with an insidious and persistent sense of guilt. Even sacrifice accepted in the name of the
patria
can be experienced as an ‘act of divine clemency'. ‘I think that the Lord has had pity on us, after our corrupt existence, in having me die for the great, infinite Italian
patria
', wrote a corporal who was to die in Marmarica.
³
More tersely and resolutely, a Catholic who was subsequently to be killed during the Resistance wrote from the front: ‘Before God, I am doing my duty to the full as an Italian. But any kind of Fascist ideal is utterly alien to me.'
⁴

While in those soldiers who felt the first glimmerings of an anti-Fascist conscience, ‘we must expiate everything' was transformed into the commitment to self-redemption by making good the privileges they had enjoyed as officers and students,
⁵
in others this process took, and seemed to keep, the form of solidarity – come risk, come misfortune – with one's compatriots who had been hurled into the same predicament.

A second lieutenant in the Alpini wrote from Russia of the ‘moral and purely moral value of our sacrifice', and of the desire that ‘our privileged condition as students should not save us from the common destiny of expiation
and suffering'.
⁶
Another officer wrote to his wife, again from the Russian front: ‘Marina, I can't abandon my soldiers who are in danger, to return to Rome to work in a ministry.'
⁷
Or again:

In another testimony the invitation, in Catholic form, to do what was commanded of one, whatever the circumstances, merges with the duty to participate ‘in this great doleful destiny that has befallen our generation'. According to these combatants, the war was ‘un grande fatto' (‘a great event') transcending the will of those who had decided to wage it, and those who did not go to war ‘betray human solidarity, snap the bond linking them to others and basically, out of cowardice, go against fundamental moral law … possibly regretting that there is not another war instead, against another enemy, in which case, they say, they would become fierce'.
⁹
The tragic thing here is that the sense, albeit confused, of the existence of a great historic alternative is taken as being a mere matter of personal convenience. This is present in the account of a survivor of the death camps: ‘When I was called up to leave Novi for Albania, my father said to me: “Look, those you are off to fight as your enemies aren't enemies: try, if you can, to save your skin and not to hurt anyone.” He said that to me at the station and I have held those words sacred.'
¹⁰

Among the reasons for the proverbial passivity of the Italian soldier is also this uncertainty as to the figure of the enemy, who seemed by contrast to be a good deal more highly motivated. An intelligent National Fascist Party (PNF)
inspector reported from Albania that the ‘divisions, large and small alike, seemed to be afflicted by a morbid form of melancholy and resigned fatalism, which grew, the closer they got to the firing line [against] an enemy imbued with a sort of religious mania and ready to die unsparingly'.
¹¹
A censor noted down that, in the troops' letters, ‘even when there are encouraging and patriotic words, these spring forth as an act directed
towards
the person one is writing to but reveal the depression of the
man writing
'.
¹²
Giorgio Rochat has pointed out a paradoxical indicator of the shaky conviction even in those who sacrificed themselves in the name of duty: the low number of executions ordered by the military tribunals compared with those carried out in the Great War. In fact, only a strong faith in the justice of the cause can induce the body of officers to take initiatives of drastic repression on a large scale and with a clear conscience.
¹³

Obviously, I am not denying the presence in the Italian armed forces of men with Fascist or para-Fascist motivations. These motivations were at times explicit, at other times attributable to ideological graftings that they had been taught at school. Thus a volunteer who, in Albania, invokes vendetta (not ‘rehabilitation') for the Alpini brackets together in the one list – culminating in Mussolini – Mazzini, Gioberti, Cavour, Garibaldi, ‘Crispi of the Sicilian revolution', ‘two kings of the House of Savoy', D'Annunzio, Carducci and Verdi.
¹⁴
One soldier declares that he is fighting ‘for the great empire of Rome'; one writes: ‘I was born for Mussolini's war and for him I wish to die'; one refuses to take part in singing instruction because he has ‘left the shop, my mother and my girl to fight, not to sing'.
¹⁵
Even in letters of this kind a distinction needs to be made between propagandist stereotypes, adopted with different degrees of sincerity and self-consolation, which are hard to gauge (and their limited presence in letters from the front is itself indicative),
¹⁶
from more personal letters. For
example, a fifty-year-old soldier writes: ‘When I was at home I was an ardent Fascist and was always saying we needed to fight this war; now I'd be ashamed to return home.'
¹⁷

Large numbers often participated in the demonstrations of anti-British hatred, inspired by that motto ‘Dio stramaledica gli inglesi' (‘God curse the English') which figured on a specially minted badge. The English were in fact seen as richer and more successful competitors in imperialism. This point of view had existed for some time in Italian nationalism; but to it the Fascists added a plebeian resentment and racist fear-cum-envy: ‘I've seen so many of these curs whom we've taken prisoner and have given them a solemn raspberry.'
¹⁸
Writing to a comrade, a Blackshirt savours the prospect of the time when the English will have to ‘learn to eat two meals a day and have done with their five traditional ones'; conversely, ‘presently it will be our turn to have, for once at least, five meals a day, like the English, and a good pipe of Oriental tobacco'.
¹⁹

Fascist stereotypes were upset by the recognition that a declared nation of shopkeepers should know how to make war.
²⁰
The accent then shifted to denouncing the fact that the English made their subject peoples – and what's more, coloured ones – fight for their own profit. Sometimes sympathy is expressed for the latter: ‘It's almost always coloured troops who are put there for the defence of their blond masters and skinny spinsters. Our tank-crews compel these poor Indians to put their hands up.'
²¹
But more often there are manifestations of racist contempt and fear, which we shall encounter again in the Social
Republic, both in the official propaganda
²²
and in the newest young recruits: ‘The dead must be avenged. Italy needs us young men to prevent the niggers, in the service of England, from contaminating her sacred soil!'
²³
In short, hatred of the British could become a ‘more than ever supernatural' hate.
²⁴

Nor were manifestations of openly ideological aversion to the Russians lacking, as was evident when they were dubbed ‘reds' or ‘Bolsheviks', or when Catholic motivations became intertwined with Fascist ones. ‘The pride of those who want to destroy the Roman Catholic Church will certainly pass … Christ has always won', is the prediction of a soldier who seems to have found in Russia, against the godless, that motivation he had been hard put to discern in Albania.
²⁵
In another letter the Russians are spoken of as ‘people without faith'.
²⁶
‘Either Rome or Moscow', the Fascist propaganda slogan, in any case seemed tailor-made to please Fascist and Catholic ears alike, given the centuries-old polysemy of the word ‘Rome'.

The Russian campaign, like the occupation of the Balkans, was to offer, by contrast, that contact with the invaded and exploited peoples that was lacking in the war waged in North Africa, and that would provide the first occasion for reflection for many combatants of the Fascist war.
²⁷

Meanwhile, besides political and ideological motivations, identifiable in the fighting men were attitudes and sympathetic support offered above all to themselves, which, as we have seen, were to be found, in another key, in some
resistenti
as well: the urge for adventure, supported ‘by hatred of the humdrum routine of life; the monotony of certain family habits; a certain senselessness of
social life'.
²⁸
Some youths from Rutino (in the province of Salerno) asked to be drafted into the paratroop corps because ‘here life is no longer tolerable'.
²⁹
‘We were very young; like all young men [we sought] adventure; for us, the war was an adventure, we were thoroughly irresponsible … And then the war was adventure, something new that might just break the dreary routine'.
³⁰