A Civil War (38 page)

The partisan bands, born of an initial reaction against institutions, or at least as an attempt to fill the void left by their eclipse, evolved rapidly and originally, becoming, in Weberian terms, no longer a simple ‘community' or ‘association' but a ‘social group' governed by a ‘set of regulations' in which conduct is orientated ‘(on average and approximately)' ‘towards determinable maxims' that are ‘in some way obligatory or exemplary'.
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Experience itself seemed to call for new and adequate rules. ‘There's a wish for everything to be set in order, for everything to be legalised', wrote Roberto Battaglia, commenting on the desire he saw among the men of the Lunense division to ‘regain also the written expression of their thoughts, the documents to which they were accustomed: laws or sentences or orders'.
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This re-emergent desire to establish normative standards may be interpreted in two ways, according to the frame of reference one adopts. The first reading is based on the premise that every movement born in society denies its origin and betrays its true nature when it takes even the most approximate institutional or juridical path. This reading is reductive because, while indicating a real risk, it ignores the opposite risk that those very initial driving forces will be dispersed and rapidly ebb away. To use organisation as a means of countering this process takes firmness of conviction and tenacity of intention that do not necessarily conflict with the fundamental values at stake. It is as if, at a certain point, one were to realise that putting one's life at risk is not enough to guarantee the pursuit of one's heart's desires. Only analysis can help us understand who, in this recurrent dialectic, the palm goes to – the most desirable victory being one that somehow manages to synthesise the two principles. While this reductive reading errs on the side of excessive generosity, the other, by contrast, belongs to that type of realism which transforms the viewpoint of established power into a criterion of value. According to this second reading, the
irregular must look to legitimising itself with the regular, otherwise it becomes ‘purely criminal because it loses the positive interconnectedness with some available regularity'.
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All the European Resistance movements were, in fact, beset with the problem of whether there really did exist a pre-constituted ‘regularity' ‘somewhere' to appeal to: the different ways they answered this question might indeed serve as a criterion for distinguishing between the Resistance movements of the various countries, from Denmark to Yugoslavia. In Italy the most authentic resistance impulse lay in not feeling the need for any ‘other legitimising parties'. This ‘extremely hard alternative', which aimed at the ‘imposition of a new regularity relying solely on its own strengths',
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had to reckon with the slow re-emergence in the distant South of a government which was, furthermore, the only one recognised by the Allies. The only aspect of this question that we shall examine here, which culminated in the delegation of powers to the CLNAI by the Rome government,
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is the process illustrated by the historiography of the Resistance as the militarisation and politicisation of the partisan bands. These two forms of institutionalisation, born as they were on the field from within the movement, would, however, eventually come to perform the work of mediation between the spontaneity of the movement itself and the ‘regular' institutional order that was destined to re-emerge. Here a further distinction needs to be made. While the ‘autonomous' formations believed that they could limit themselves to the first aspect, militarisation, and indeed saw it as a guarantee against the risks they regarded as implicit in the second, the formations that were in fact ‘political' – and above all the Garibaldi and Justice and Liberty brigades – tended consciously to interweave one aspect with the other, though making every effort to keep them distinct.

During the Spanish Civil War, in an interview given to an English journalist, the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri had said: ‘Militarisation is certainly a good thing. But one needs to distinguish between military formalism, which is not just ridiculous but also dangerous, and self-discipline, even rigorously exercised, as it exists in the Durruti Column'.
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Berneri's distinction, after the arduous experience of the first anarchic formations nourished by equal measures of
enthusiasm and disorder, was as simple to formulate as it was difficult to practise. The autonomous formations, only very few of whom had turned against the Royal Army, generally tended to position themselves on the basis of the more traditional ‘formalism'. Nevertheless, the peculiarity of a situation unanticipated by the regulations in which they too found themselves immersed, gave rise to effects like those described by Beppe Fenoglio, with regard to Mauri's ‘Blues', in a page whose realism is slightly tinged with irony:

Dante Livio Bianco's testimony relating to the ‘military' band of Boves is similar: ‘The uniform was identical to the Royal Army's, with
stellette
[stars], insignias and badges of the traditional rank.'
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Tallying with this picture is the ‘supreme superior condescension' with which Mauri greeted the Garibaldini's overtures to him.
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But the security that the regular – career or reserve – officers managed in some cases to give to the ‘truppa' can at times be identified in the documents as felt even among the more politicised.
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Midway between military tradition and the new spirit of the times were certain instructions issued by another important group of autonomous formations, the Osoppo. Superiors were to be addressed as ‘comandante' – not as ‘signor tenente' and the like, but neither simply by their battle name. Fine, call your superiors by their first names (‘si dia pure il tu'), they add, but remember that ‘patriots are allowed no right to criticise among themselves the actions of their commanders': complaints were to go through hierarchical channels. However, even in the Osoppo there were those, including don Moretti, who opposed the use of Royal Army stars and
ranks.
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The Green Flames of the Brescia area were at that time using expressions such as ‘gregari, ufficiali, truppa'; but ‘if they recognise the necessity of hierarchical differences, they are all united in brotherhood by the equality of free men'.
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In another major autonomous formation, the DeVitis (Piedmont), the anti-militarist spirit gained ground widely.
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An exemplary case of the transition from pure militarisation to its fusion with politicisation is provided by Nuto Revelli. This passage is nourished by the high concept Revelli had of military life:

Earlier Revelli had written: ‘I was uncertain, I didn't want to bow to the fact: I didn't want to admit that the “politicians” are better than the “military”.'
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Piedmontese and mountain-dweller's seriousness favoured an encounter that appears to be embodied, not without some resistance from the officers in the band, in the partisan chief Marcellin, who belonged first to an autonomous, then to a GL band, a sergeant-major and skiing instructor, in whom Ada Gobetti traced ‘the happy fusion, the just balance' between social and military qualities.
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Equally important for our present purposes are the tensions that military requirements created among the partisans. These tensions lay in the conflict between equality felt as a value founded on the choice of liberty and the common acceptance of risk,
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and that contorted equality that, in time of war, cohabits with hierarchical order, becoming a function of it.
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While the first kind of equality permits, and actually strengthens, the preservation of individuality, the second mortifies it.
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This seems to me an indispensable key to understanding resistance to, and the contradictions regarding, militarisation – and not just in terms of the intractability, the indiscipline, and the scant understanding of higher political and military needs. The same irritability at the revival of a ‘bloody and
oppressive'
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military service acquires a deeper significance than that springing from the mere rejection of the misdeeds of the Royal Army. In the mouths of the partisans, someone observed, the word
naja
(military service) could be ‘the unconsidered expression of elements damaging to the formation', but it could also express a just rebellion against ‘anti-democratic forms'.
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In other words, one had to protect the new behavioural habits that had caused three sailors who joined a Garibaldi band to hesitate to call the commanders by their first names, and to be amazed that the chiefs were criticised at the meetings.
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