A Civil War (25 page)

Proceeding in a way that was possibly an attempt to resemble Renato Serra's famous
Esame di coscienza
, a Sardinian university student wrote:

In his diary Giaime Pintor wrote that ‘among sluggard men war seemed to be a way out'.
³²
Even a combatant who does not spare his words in describing the horrors of the war and who does the rare thing of calling ‘sticking bayonets into others' bellies … murdering human beings', goes on to say that he finds in ‘love of the unknown and of adventures' the only motivation that sustains him – not, certainly, the ‘mania for greatness or empires'.
³³
Instead of adventure, which is after all always an individual and dynamic experience, a peasant, to reassure his
family and himself – ‘we resign ourselves and realise that it is a great party for us youngsters' – equates departure for the front with the traditional and cheerful demeanor of raw recruits.
³⁴

The spirit of adventure could, in true Fascist style, become expectation of an easy victory. ‘They'd like to stab, win, deck themselves with glory, come out of it in one piece and get back to Italy as soon as possible … greeted as conquerors', a lieutenant colonel wrote from the Russian front.
³⁵
The superficiality denounced by this serious officer on the one hand clashed with the stereotypical idea of the war as a forger of character – ‘We need to be men, by God, and here we learn to become so, take my word for it'
³⁶
– and on the other hand with the harsh impact with reality. This was true whether one wished to see this, intellectually, as ‘a first step towards possessing something concrete',
³⁷
or described it as ‘falling on your back into the mud and drowning your face in the mire', which put paid to any myth of ‘dying with a bullet through your heart, kissed by the sun'.
³⁸
The impact with reality did in fact have contradictory results. In the keenest men, it might at first make them stubbornly deny that very reality – ‘We shall win because we must win, otherwise it would be too great a disaster'
³⁹
– after which it could induce them to feel betrayed, by men and/or fate – a reaction which can be called proto–Social Republic.
⁴⁰
In those who were not motivated, or only dimly so, the counterblow was the feeling that they were victims, with
a further, successive doubling of results: to cease being so as soon as one could by heaving oneself out of those waters, or by finding in it a cause for reflection and a desire for a positive response. The latter reaction could be called proto-Resistance, while the former is
proto-attesistico
(proto-fence-sitting).
⁴¹
Pity for the enemy, confused with pity for oneself, appears as a first and simple way of placing oneself again in a humanly tolerable position. ‘There, there'll be Greeks, poor and decent mountain folk perhaps, who'll put out the white flag', wrote an Alpini second lieutenant;
⁴²
and this is how another describes a female literature professor whom he had met in Rostov: ‘An eye and a face that struck one for their patient resignation beneath the blows of misfortune'.
⁴³

There are by now numerous testimonies about the contradictory reactions kindled in the Italians by contact with Russia – its land, people, army and regime. Possibly the most widespread sentiment is that of stupor – both stupor that aroused fear, and stupor that generated admiration in various forms and degrees (for example, for the widespread education and great industrial complexes that prompted one officer to give an elaborate discourse on ‘modernisation').
⁴⁴
One thing that aroused particular surprise was the coexistence in the Russian populations of the occupied territories of a determined Soviet patriotism and a civil and even kindly manner towards the Italians as individuals.
⁴⁵
There was here a sort of rediscovery of the possibility that human relations might survive the crushing blow that the Germans were ruthlessly dealing them for reasons of war. That this rediscovery was nourished by the Italian soldier's tendency to make another family for himself
⁴⁶
wherever he might be only made it more persuasive.

However, the event that left the greatest mark on the Italian experience in Russia was the terrible retreat. This was not only ‘a major turning-point in the relations between the two countries [Italy and Germany], and indeed the decisive psychological failure in “Fascist” warfare',
⁴⁷
but for many of those involved it marked the beginning of a radical reappraisal of their own position regarding Fascism and the war, a lesson certainly more incisive than the Soviet appeals to rebel against Mussolini who ‘is drinking your blood'.
⁴⁸
An emblematic figure of this new tendency is certainly Nuto Revelli.
⁴⁹

‘Che Dio maledica chi ci ha tradito/ Portandoci su Don e poi fuggito' (‘God curse him who betrayed us/Taking us to the Don, then escaping'), are lines from ‘
Pietà l'è morta
', the partisan song inspired by Revelli, who wrote in his diary: ‘We have christened our formation:
la compagnia Rivendicazione caduti
. We want to avenge those who fell in Russia. Our oath says: “For every Italian who died in Russia ten Fascists and ten Germans are to be done in”.'
⁵⁰
The memorial tablet in the main square in Boves is a document of this kind of continuity between the Russian retreat and the Resistance: ‘died in Russia 95', ‘died in the Resistance 134', plus 11 in the German camps (when the figure for each of the other fronts does not exceed thirteen). True, this was an Alpini recruitment zone (of about 20,500 men from the Cuneo division, no more than 3,000 made it home);
⁵¹
while in the immediate post-war climate the fate of the prisoners in Russian hands was to unleash passions of an opposite kind to those witnessed by Revelli. But, even steering clear of hasty generalisations, the fact remains that the survivors were, at the very least, vehicles of mistrust and disheartenment – ‘horrible things heard, which I don't intend to recount'
⁵²
– that is when they did not transmit acutely, as has been written of one of them, ‘a tormenting guilt complex and, together with this, an anxious desire for liberation, mixed with an almost religious sentiment of expiation'.
⁵³

Giorgio Rochat justly writes that the majority of the testimonies (which are by officers) register ‘the abandonment or, better to say, the shelving during the retreat of many of the traditional values of society and of the Italian army', but that, ‘as soon as they were out of danger', the officers ‘once again started demanding observation of that very code of values which they had by their own confession infringed'.
⁵⁴
But meanwhile the code had shown cracks and reversals that were premonitory of the 8 September collapse and the repudiation of the Royal Army.
⁵⁵

Two encounters left their mark, albeit to very different degrees, on the Italians dispatched to occupy the lands of Russia and the Balkans. As is well known, the scant knowledge of the extermination of the Jews that the Germans had begun is a phenomenon regarding not only the Italian soldiers. The failure to see even where things were all too visible and to recount the little, or much, one had seen makes testimonies on this score extremely scarce. The Jews working along the railway, one survivor from Russia and the German concentration camps has written, ‘looked thin, exhausted, continually threatened by the Germans. And that was when I began to understand what the Germans were like' – not least because they explained to him that Jews themselves had been made to dig the ditches there alongside them for their own bodies.
⁵⁶
When he heard a German officer's calm account of the massacre of the Kiev Jews, a chaplain who was a keen supporter of the anti-Bolshevik crusade said: ‘I too am beginning to believe that this war can't be won.'
⁵⁷

The impact with the partisans, which one was to be on one's guard against, was harder to avoid. In Vorošilovgrad, Revelli encountered some twenty of them, prisoners, in civilian dress, on their way to be shot with their heads held high: ‘We were mere wretches with gentlemen's airs and pretensions. I watched those partisans with great admiration. I felt humiliated.'
⁵⁸
Another Italian, who called them ‘Russian partisan bandits', was astonished by the presence of women among the combatants: ‘There, three young women driving the tank disarmed me.'
⁵⁹

The experience of coming suddenly face to face with the partisan war could give rise to troubled consciences, inurement to witnessing and passively practising violence, education in repressive ferocity. ‘Lieutenant, if you'd been a rebel you wouldn't have reacted like this, yet a rebel is a man', was how a soldier answered the officer who had reprimanded him for killing a deer. And yet this lieutenant, Falco Marin, who was killed in Slovenia in July 1943, was a sensitive and reflective man. He wrote in a letter:

In the memoirs of the officers interned in Germany, the counter-guerrilla operations in the Balkans are mentioned more than any other wartime episode. Rochat, who has noted this fact, attributes this to the desire to ‘underline the change of sides and role brought about by the Armistice':
⁶¹
almost as if they were applying to themselves the law of retaliation …

The deep impression made by the Yugoslav partisans was to have a maturing effect on Aligi Barducci (‘Potente') and others like him;
⁶²
and for other partisan chiefs the impression of the guerrilla activity they had been sent to repress acted as a veritable school of partisan warfare. This is what Giulio Nicoletta, commander of the autonomous De Vitis division, has recalled.
⁶³
Mario Gordini was spurred to form the Ravenna battalion in the Apennines around Faenza by a veteran from Yugoslavia.
⁶⁴
After the initial setbacks,
several officers took to reorganising the bands in the light of their experience in the Balkans.
⁶⁵

The presence in Italy of Yugoslav partisans who, on 8 September, had escaped from the concentration camps would intersect with these personal experiences of Italians, which at times bore the label, taken precisely from the Slav example, of ‘extremism'.
⁶⁶
It was in paradoxical terms that the Garibaldi commander Primo (Giovanni Rocca), formerly a member of the PNF, who had fought in Croatia for three years, was presented: in the Langhe, Primo ‘waged a hard, ferocious war without quarter', following in fact the Yugoslav example, but also because he was ‘self-taught, with no guide, under the influence of Fascist propaganda, convincing himself that he was a Communist partisan as the Fascist papers describe the Communist partisans (revolution, extremism, ferocity)'.
⁶⁷

As I have already suggested, anti-partisan repression, including the shooting of hostages, practised above all in the Balkans, but also in Venezia Giulia,
⁶⁸
was a sorry precedent for the Fascists of the Social Republic, more so certainly than a stimulus, for everyone critically to reappraise the myth of the ‘goodness of the Italians'. A soldier wrote from Yugoslavia: ‘We have orders to kill everyone and to set fire to everything we come across, so we reckon we'll finish things off rapidly'; and another: ‘We've destroyed everything from top to bottom without sparing innocents … We're killing entire families, every night, beating them to death or shooting them. If they try to make so much as a move we shoot without pity and whoever dies, dies.'
⁶⁹

We know that quotations of this kind can be counterbalanced by those telling a different story, testifying to acts of great humanity.
⁷⁰
Here, let me make just two points.

The first is that the Resistance press, for understandable enough reasons, was keen to emphasise the differences in the ways the Italians and the Germans behaved in the occupied territories. ‘The sons of the
popolo
in grey-green did not fight furiously on any front and did not commit those acts of ferocity against the helpless populations which have disgraced the Hitlerian hordes and the few M battalions'; and again: ‘Where they conquered they brought, in contrast with the Germans, kindness and mildness; and in Greece and Croatia they fed the starving, and saved the lives of Jews, and always defended the persecuted, whatever their race and religion.'
⁷¹

It should also be borne in mind that the ‘goodness of the Italians' is a largely pre-political fact. At that level, the Italian soldier might very well not have made that much distinction between his friend and his enemy (witness what was observed above in his relations with the Russian population). But this kind of ‘goodness', which is extremely difficult to practise in wartime, where it fostered the stereotype of the Italian as incapable of fighting, a songster and buffoon, made him defenceless before orders to commit, and before examples of, indescribable violence, whether those orders came from the Italian commands, the Germans or local collaborationists.
⁷²
The violence practised during the Resistance would, by contrast, be ‘political', and its relations with ‘bontà' (‘goodness') were thus different.