A Civil War (42 page)

‘Pochi ma buoni' (‘Few but good') is the moral which Emanuele Artom drew from the roundups in late 1943; whereas in Tito Speri's Green Flames division this moral is tempered by frequent enjoinders not to send men away, both because they might talk, and because, as the commander Romolo Ragnoli writes, ‘not everyone is born a lion, but lions can be made'.
¹³²
‘Buoni', for Artom, means morally, even more than materially, fit for combat (he himself had a paralysed leg), while ‘pochi' had two meanings – one military, the other political – which did not always coincide.

The problem that emerges in these documents brings us back to the basic reasons for deciding to resist, above all when it was provoked by new circumstances that could not be avoided. The difference lay in the fact that those of the ‘innovatori' and ‘primi adottanti' who had weathered the test had created out of
nothing a complex armed organisation which the ‘first' partisans and ‘the latecomers' found themselves mixed together as a consequence of their choices.
¹³³
The voluntary nature of the resistance was constantly reiterated by the ‘innovatori' and ‘primi adottanti' above all by the very fact of persevering, and then by intransigent affirmations of principle: ‘Recruitment into our ranks is absolutely and strictly voluntary. We believe that any other criteria would only weaken our formations', is how a Garibaldi document that can be considered exemplary puts it.
¹³⁴
But there was no lack either of incitements to full mobilisation. ‘25 May call-up of volunteers of liberty' was how
L'Unità
entitled one of its articles;
¹³⁵
and however ambiguous or even distasteful the word ‘leva' (‘call-up' or ‘conscription') might have sounded (though possibly it contained a distant memory of the ‘leva in massa' of the great revolution and of the Commune), it did not go beyond a moral and political appeal. The same may be said of this appeal for all the forces to mobilise in the light of the enemy retreat: ‘Each person, be they man or woman, must be ready to carry a stone on the road, to fell a tree, a telephone pole, to contribute, in short, by every possible and imaginable means to interrupting or blocking the road.'
¹³⁶

Nevertheless, there were tendencies to transform these appeals into coercive measures, or at least there was the intention to do so. The controversial, independent-spirited and ‘extremist' commander Libero [Riccardo Fedel] responded to the Fascist enlistment proclamation for men born between 1922 to 1925 by issuing his own proclamation, threatening those who did not enrol with the partisans instead with penalties still harsher than the Fascist ones; and he was severely reprimanded.
¹³⁷
A similar initiative was taken by the Garibaldini of the Valsassina and the Valvarrone on 24 May (a date obviously not casually chosen)
1944,
¹³⁸
while in the area of Chiavenna all the men who had matriculated from 1910 to 1926 were mobilised.
¹³⁹
The Belluno division enjoined the able-bodied men to enlist at the commissions set up for the purpose, and the women to do likewise as dispatch riders and auxiliaries.
¹⁴⁰
The results of initiatives of this kind were scant or insignificant (the Belluno command had, moreover, been so inept as to organise this general mobilisation for a time following the arrival of the Allies, with the aim of continuing the struggle alongside them). But these ‘coercive and restrictive systems'
¹⁴¹
indicated not so much a brutish ‘militaristic' evolution as a certain blurring of the voluntary character of the struggle and a reversion to ‘regular' and institutionalised combative models which, by compelling men to practise violence, made it morally less problematic.

It is telling that a note about the unification plans, probably written by an Actionist, reads:

It was not just a question of names. But the name, or better to say names, that the movement gave to its protagonists and organisation are indicative of the stages of militarisation. In the first few weeks after 8 September, various names had appeared. The one that circulated most widely was ‘guardia nazionale', linked to the residual illusions of some form of collaboration with the remains of the Royal Army. In the days immediately preceding 8 September, the National Guard had been put forward, by the Communists, precisely in this key. A workers' delegation had said to the prefect of Milan: ‘The authorities must favour the formation of an armed National Guard, organised by officers of the Army, composed of the popular masses, to flank our Army in order to put an end to the Nazi-Fascist danger'.
¹⁴³
After the Armistice this path was attempted again in some cities, even if in Milan Ferruccio Parri appeared sceptical about ‘lawyers marching with muskets on their backs to Porta Ticinese'.
¹⁴⁴
The Communists stuck to this line for some time, probably because the name must have sounded reassuring to bourgeois ears. They launched appeals and spoke of the Guard as if it already definitely existed.
L'Unità
assured its readers that ‘the young men of the whole of Italy are flocking into the ranks of the National Guard created for the defence of peace in a wave of enthusiasm', and that the Guard and army units that had reorganised in the mountains ‘are repelling the barbarians'.
¹⁴⁵
The 1 October ‘general directives reserved for comrades alone' include that of ‘reinforcing the National Guard in the factories and in the districts, with ever more intense mobilisation'.
¹⁴⁶
But a letter of 7 October written by Mauro Scoccimarro from Rome to Milan already warned: ‘Bear in mind that here the name hasn't caught on: none of the parties have liked it because it is too old: it recalls 1848. To my mind, there has been no political sympathy for it, because the old, well-remembered Guardia Nazionale often had an anti-popular function.'
¹⁴⁷

A ‘report from Liguria' of 4 December was a sort of ‘extremist' countermelody to the Roman leader: ‘Actually, rather than speak of “national guard” formations mixed with Badoglian-nationalistic-Gascon cadets, it might be more appropriate to speak of formations that are highly agile, but primarily fired by the spirit of the party, manoeuvrable as the nucleus of a genuinely proletarian army.'
¹⁴⁸

The CLNA itself came to realise that the dissolution of the army had put paid to any project for a National Guard – a name that would be used by the Fascists with their GNR (Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana).
¹⁴⁹
Moreover, significant hendiadyses had appeared – ‘join the National Guard, reach the formations of the Partisans'
¹⁵⁰
– as well as less innocuous variants, like ‘Guardia Nazionale del Popolo' and ‘Guardia Nazionale Popolare'.
¹⁵¹
The latter then reappeared in various forms to denote more or less permanent organisms to put alongside the active partisan units. The Friuli Garibaldi division would provide ‘norms for the establishment and functioning of the Guardia del Popolo', which ‘will have to rise in all the inhabited centres' with men from sixteen to fifty-five;
¹⁵²
the name ‘Guardia del Popolo' was even given to the police of the free zone of Carnia;
¹⁵³
in some Tuscan
comuni
there would be talk of a ‘Guardia Civica' to flank the partisans.
¹⁵⁴
The SAP were partly to answer these needs.

The name
partigiani
, instantly popular though it was, thus encountered some difficulty in being assimilated at a high level. Officially it never was assimilated, preference being given to that extremely noble, but somewhat cold name ‘voluntari della libertà', which had already vanished from current usage,
¹⁵⁵
but
which was adopted in the internal statute of 9 January 1944 of the military Junta appointed by the Central Liberation Committee.
¹⁵⁶
A Communist document re-launched it in the form of ‘attivisti della libertà' (‘activists of liberty').
¹⁵⁷
In the word
partigiano
there was a remote meaning of defending one's own land, dating back to the war of independence that the Spaniards had waged against Napoleon; but there was also something red – ‘a reference to Lenin roused the partisans' – which exalted its aggressive and irregular component, and aroused distrust among the right-minded and orthodox.

‘All the representatives have rejected the name “partigiano” for the fighting forces; they must be called “esercito” or “armata”, etc.', states a Communist report from Turin.
¹⁵⁸
Albeit late in the day,
Il Popolo
, the Christian Democrat paper, took a clear contrary stance. Addressing the young men fighting ‘bare-breasted and bare-headed', it wrote: ‘You won't return as “partisans”, because even on the “partisan” mountains and scrublands you will never have been them, but will on the contrary have fought in order not to be them.'
¹⁵⁹

In Florence, the Action Party, too, showed some perplexity, and proposed the replacement of ‘partigiano' with ‘patriota'.
¹⁶⁰
The word ‘patriot' certainly rang more sweetly in the ears of all those who identified chiefly with the patriotic war (but the word was not to have too stirring a future since, in the official post-Liberation honour ceremonies, the term ‘patriota' was to be placed on a rung lower down the ladder than ‘partigiano combattente'). Dante Livio Bianco attributed the political success of the GL spirit to the fact that the word ‘partisan' had undermined both ‘patriot' and ‘rebel' – the latter, in his curious view, not exceeding ‘the limits of a phenomenon which was of interest only to the crime squad'.
¹⁶¹
A Vicenza document seems, for that matter, to bear him out, when it speaks of ‘our folk who say with moving faith “not rebels: partisans” and who consecrate this word, born elsewhere, which in principle we were surprised to pronounce, but which has been dear to us since we heard women on the roads of our hills greeting our armed youths with “God bless our partisans!”.'
¹⁶²

Risorgimento Liberale
wrote, with apparent detachment: ‘All right, let's accept this term, which has nothing offensive about it: the cause those partisans are defending is Italy.'
¹⁶³
In fact, the term ‘ribelle' (‘rebel') was never abandoned. It sounded distasteful to those who, in a rather legalistic fashion, feared it might imply a recognition of the Social Republic. But the root both of the aversion it aroused and of the way in which it was proudly adopted by those who recognised themselves in it, lay precisely in its ancient and profound semantic content. In this case too there are many variants: from the words of the partisan song
Fischia il vento
(The Wind Whistles), ‘every
contrada
is the rebel's
patria
', to the current phrase ‘ribelli della montagna' (‘rebels of the mountains'),
¹⁶⁴
to Teresio Olivelli's ‘ribelle per amore'.

Still more defiant were expressions such as ‘fuori legge' (‘outlaw')
¹⁶⁵
and ‘bandito'.
¹⁶⁶
The latter, while deriving literally from ‘bande' (‘bands') and/or ‘messo a bande' (‘banned'), and while rebutting the ‘Achtung! Banditen!' of the German road signs, contained the problem of the distinction between bandits and highwaymen, which I will come back to. ‘Guerriero' (‘warrior') is, by contrast, a word that was rarely adopted: destined in recent times to enjoy renewed fortune, the term must then have appeared a trifle
recherché
and archaic,
¹⁶⁷
even if the word ‘guerriglia' enjoyed wider circulation.
¹⁶⁸
A similar discussion could be devoted not just to the names the partisans were called by, but to the way in which the units into which they formed were designated. ‘Banda' is undoubtedly the original and most spontaneous name, used in the first few months even by the Military Command for Northern Italy. Giancarlo Pajetta has written: ‘The
giellisti
of Cuneo, fine and courageous … called their formations “bande”, to make it clear that platoons, companies, battalions, regiments and brigades
would no longer exist. We, on the other hand, said “brigades”, and dreamed of soon being able to call them “divisions”.'
¹⁶⁹

Indeed, the GL formations too ended up organising themselves into divisions, even if their Command re-divided them only into squads, detachments and brigades.
¹⁷⁰
The autonomous formations certainly had no semantic taboos about adopting names of the organic units of the army. Thus, when the ‘technical consultant' of the CMRP (Comando Militare Regionale Piemontese) advised against several Garibaldi brigades being grouped together into the 1
^st
Piedmont division, which had for that matter already been created, it is hard to know how much of this was a ‘technical' move and how much it may be put down to political caution.
¹⁷¹
‘Brigade' too was successful, in the wake of the Spanish international brigades. Towards the end of 1943 the PCI leadership was speaking of detachments, battalions and brigades;
¹⁷²
and ‘Garibaldi assault detachments and brigades' was to be the definitively adopted name (where that word ‘assault' recalled, with questionable opportuneness, the ‘reparti d'assalto' (‘assault units') of the First World War – the
arditi
).