A Civil War (27 page)

To those who had fought in the 1940–43 war, the old-guard anti-Fascists generally showed an attitude in which obvious pragmatism prevailed (the important
thing is that they join us); it also included respect for the sufferings they had endured; recognition (at times with a fair share of opportunistic rhetoric),
¹¹³
however it had been deployed; satisfaction at noting so great a capacity to set things right, so much ‘profound moral rebellion which had matured particularly in the course of the war'.
¹¹⁴
There was less of an urge to get to the heart of the complexity and contradictions in the itineraries of so many individual lives. Some expressed the fear that scepticism would take hold of the ex-combatants, ‘save the minority who had chosen the Resistance and the (slimmer) one that had chosen the Social Republic'.
¹¹⁵

As if to reassure the mass of ex-servicemen who began to flock down into the South, Adolfo Omodeo, trying to make good use of what he had written about the 1915–18 combatants, said: ‘The rejection that has accompanied the military venture from the beginning does not mean failure to recognise the positive value of the rich human experience gained on the battlefields … Thus the energies lavished by the combatants do not seem vain to the men who are now setting about restoring Italian society.'
¹¹⁶

The anti-Fascist leaders were, in fact, mainly concerned with the problems of the imminent post-war period, when the great mass of survivors who had not been filtered through the Resistance, nor foundered into the Social Republic, might represent a huge political problem that would have to be handled differently from the way it had been handled after 1918. The line taken towards the soldiers enrolled in the Royal Army, which during the war had been chiefly a matter of principle, an invitation, with little hope of immediate success, not to leave the bodies and souls of soldiers to the Fascist generals,
¹¹⁷
became, at the
end of the war, a thorny question that had to be solved if the reconstruction of democracy was well and truly to get under way.

The corollary of the
resistenti
's ethico–political condemnation of the Fascist war was their bitter and contemptuous dissociation from what had been its instrument, the Royal Army, both as a military institution and ruling class, and as a style of life. Testimonies of this repudiation, which seemed obvious to many
resistenti
, abound. The most drastic and unequivocal are those that speak baldly of the Royal Army as of a ‘dissolved' army. This, literally, is how it is put by a document – which is nevertheless very ‘military' in form, insofar as it forbids political activity in the nascent partisan formations – written at the end of December 1943 for the Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy.
¹
And it was likewise to be expressed again by the ‘internal regulation of the Corpo volontari della libertà' of 18 April 1945.
²
Ugo La Malfa trenchantly wrote: ‘Badoglio's great army succumbed and died in Italy on 8 September 1943.'
³
At the end of March 1944 a circular of the Justice and Liberty political commissar for the 2
^nd
sector asked that ‘it be made quite clear to the partisans that they are soldiers of a new and revolutionary army, the National Liberation Army, which does not identify with, nor even succeed, as heir and continuer of the old Royal Army, which has failed so miserably'.
⁴

In November 1944, and then towards the end of the war, two authoritative Communist leaders, careful as ever, though at times with evident effort, to toe the political line that their party had indicated for relations with the institutions, also spoke of the ‘dissolved royal army'.
⁵
If the epithet
disciolto
(dissolved)
registers a reality that can by now, one hopes, be taken for granted,
fallito
(failed), or similar epithets, which were also recurrent, express a political and moral verdict that was taken to be equally incontestable. A Verona CLN leaflet reads: ‘Our army has come to a tragic end, but an array of Patriots still holds high Italian valour.'
⁶

A few fundamental points account for the condemnation of the Royal Army. To this day, in a survivor's memory, these can be said to come under the heading of betrayal: ‘There was no longer any doubt. We had been ignobly betrayed [by the High Commands] and handed over to the Germans.'
⁷

The attitudes towards the high-ranking officers had been severe and unsparing, and not just in the days immediately following the collapse. Dante Livio Bianco tells of an Alpini lieutenant turned partisan leader who, in Cuneo, ‘proposed to kill without hesitation the colonel commanding the regiment, and possibly those superior officers who had wanted to throw in their lot with him', and remarked: ‘Events would then show that what might at the time have appeared brusque ruthlessness was actually proof of wise foresight.'
⁸

In a bitter attack on the regular officers,
Il Segno
, a Roman young people's Catholic paper, already noted for a certain freedom of spirit, spoke of a ‘caste' which ‘was the direct parallel of the party hierarchs'.
⁹
Even the 1 October edition of
Risorgimento Liberale
, though crediting the army, ‘badly armed and badly run', with the wish to ‘fight against its real enemy, against the Nazi oppressor', recognised that it had been ‘deceived, disoriented, made to disarm, dispersed'. As we shall presently see, a smaller clandestine group like the Italian Labour Party (present almost exclusively in Romagna and Milan) was induced to reject the war against the Germans for fear that it might once again fall under the hegemony of the Royal Army. Its paper,
La Voce del Popolo
, reads: ‘We don't want our young men to be enrolled in the monarchic army, which they joyously abandoned on 9 September, and to be compelled to fight under incompetent – as well as dishonest – generals and by mainly cowardly and spineless officers.'
¹⁰

The book published clandestinely by this movement is shot through with
a withering indictment of the high-ranking officers of the ARMIR.
¹¹
The ‘military' and ‘autonomous' formations, who appeared to the Justice and Liberty and Garibaldi ones as a more or less direct continuation of the Royal Army, often paid dearly for this hostility, whatever the line pursued by the political parties that the
giellisti
(members of GL) and Garibaldini followed. ‘May all our comrades rest assured that there are no Badogliani in our midst', the joint Osoppo-Garibaldi Command reassured its men in the brief period of its existence.
¹²
The ‘committee for the Faenza zone' was enjoined to overcome the repugnance that the partisans felt at fighting alongside Badoglio's officers.
¹³
But another Communist document lets slips the word
purtroppo
(unfortunately) when having to explain the reasons inducing one to avail oneself also of high-ranking officers from the army.
¹⁴
A symptomatic episode is recounted by Vittorio Cerri, second lieutenant of the Green Flames (Fiamme Verdi), who, on 1 May 1945, immediately after the Liberation, was surrounded by a group of Garibaldini from the Pavese Oltrepò bent on tearing off his stripes, plumes, Alpine cap and eagles, who partly succeeded in doing so; as they moved off, the Garibaldini ‘made jeering remarks about the army'.
¹⁵

‘Because of the prejudice against the officers in [Effective Permanent Service] I found myself, as everyone knows, in a moral condition of dire humiliation' – this was how, on 27 August 1944, Colonel Roncioni, who had become commander of the
patria
battalion of the 4
^th
Osoppo Friuli brigade, complained about a formation in which, it should be recalled, Catholic influence and anti-Communist (and anti-Slav) polemic were rife even at those moments when formal agreements were reached with the Garibaldi brigades. Speaking of the armed forces being put together again in the South, the colonel added polemically: ‘An army which is said to be destroyed and no longer existent, despite the fact that it is continuing to fight with the allies, as we are repeatedly informed by the radio.'
¹⁶

It was in its behaviour that the Royal Army appeared to the
resistenti
as something remote, squalid and immoral. In his diary Guido Quazza wrote: ‘one is cleansed from the detritus of the army'.
¹⁷
The profound difference of the
partisan bands was declared with pride. This too is a fact that became imprinted on people's memories, according to formulae like ‘there was draft as in the Italian army', ‘the commander was always the first into action', ‘before an action, we all discussed it together'; ‘there were neither those who commanded nor those who simply obeyed'.
¹⁸

Distrust was mutual. When the Gappist Giovanni Pesce reported to an HQ that was to supply him with arms, he was asked: ‘Are you an officer? What rank are you?' Furious, Pesce managed to restrain himself from voicing this reflection: ‘So, everything that's happened in Italy and the world, the 8 September breakup, the partisan recovery, had not the slightest effect on that man's way of conceiving existence in terms of fixed and immutable hierarchies.'
¹⁹

Ferdinando Mautino speaks of officers who conserved ‘a gangrened putrified mentality of supremacy and privilege', regarding a group of them who were ‘far more intent on finding a bolt-hole than a place of combat', and who would soon move off ‘in search of a less uncomfortable patriotic job'.
²⁰
In a Garabaldi brigade document of autumn 1944, the ‘social disparity and consequently the disparity of treatment between officers and troops' was stoutly denounced as ‘one of the reasons that have caused the collapse of the Royal Army'. In contrast with this, ‘in our formations we have got off on a footing of absolute democracy, and it is on that basis that we intend to remain'; and therefore ‘the establishment of an officers' mess' is incomprehensible. ‘The Garibaldino officer shares his bread, pallet and fire with the private.'
²¹

When, in homage to unification, the political commissars became war commissars, Francesco Moranino stressed that they had to share mess-tins, pallets, scabs and lice with their men.
²²
In a party document, Vincenzo Moscatelli candidly reiterated the verdict on the Royal Army, describing it as a ‘bourgeois army'.
²³
Giovanni Battista Lazagna was convinced that the only useful job that
could be found for the officers after the war was to send them for ten years to clear up the rubble.
²⁴

Even at their stormiest, relations between comrades were very different from the tantrums that occurred in the
naja
(regular army), warned Moscatelli;
²⁵
and, again in the Ossola zone, fear was expressed that the return home of many officers interned in Switzerland, with a view to the final dissolution of the army, was accompanied by a style which was by now intolerable.
²⁶
In one of the first Giustizia e Libertà (GL) bands in the village of Paralup in the Cuneo area, rejection of everything that smacked of the Royal Army was such that a partisan refused to don a grey-green greatcoat in the rain. On this score Dante Livio Bianco, who recounts the episode, recalls what Carlo Rosselli had written in his
Giornale di un miliziano
: that, as they trooped through the streets of Barcelona, they did their level best not to march in step.
²⁷

‘I made a rather demagogic little speech,' Emanuele Artom, political commissar of a GL division, wrote in his diary: ‘The soldiers of Badoglio's bands would do well to come here and see how you are living: those who are on their best behaviour with the officers and live as they used to in the old army, where a soldier worked and got a lira a day and the officer commanded and got fifty.'
²⁸

The trust placed in some cases, immediately after the Armistice, in military formations that were, or were supposed to be, to a greater or lesser extent organic, and which had repaired to the mountains – traces of which can be found even in the wary
L'Italia libera
²⁹
– and the shortly ensuing disillusion contributed to increasing contempt for the army and its leaders and the distrust of the ‘military' bands on the part of the ‘political' ones. In a ‘Report on the military situation in the Biella area' (November 1943), the condition of the ‘soldiers who had taken refuge in the mountains' (about 700 men at the end of October) is described as disastrous because of the inertia, the political and organisational incapacity, the lack of surveillance, the nonexistent or contradictory commands. Thus, when the final, total breakup occurred at the beginning of November, only on new Garibaldini bases was it possible to start the work of reconstruction. And, as
the Communist author of the report was keen to point out, this was done in the teeth of the sabotage work of the ‘Military Committee', which, in cahoots with the industrialists, ‘spread the rumour that the Communists wanted to use the soldiers for their own ends'.
³⁰
Another report, on the Belluno area, speaks of the disbanded soldiers of the Royal Army, passive and fence-sitting, organising themselves into squads, leaving one no option but to organise other, Garibaldi ones;
³¹
while a former combatant in Spain, who became the commander of the 8
^th
Garibaldi brigade in Romagna, spoke ironically of the generals' and colonels' pretentious claim to create a regular army in the Apennines immediately after 8 September.
³²
Such episodes are but a few of the many that Resistance historiography has generally placed in its ‘first phase', the one called in very approximate terms ‘military', and soon to be superseded by the more mature phase that saw the birth and flowering of the bands connected in various ways with the political parties.