In October, after a meeting between Hitler and Ciano at Berchtesgaden, Germany and Italy increased their aid to Franco; an entente was declared, ‘an axis’, as Mussolini announced, ‘around which can unite all those European countries who believe in collaboration and peace’. Hitler sent more Junker planes and raised the Condor Legion; Mussolini signed a secret agreement with the rebels and opened a recruiting office in Rome’s Piazza Navona for ‘volunteers’ to fight alongside Franco’s soldiers. Russia too was busy sending military advisers to Spain to help the Republicans; fighter planes, trucks and tanks would follow. The war was settling in. More Catholic priests were murdered, more Republican supporters shot, more old scores paid off. On 1 October, Franco was named head of state and installed in Burgos; his troops advanced to the southern and western suburbs of Madrid.
In Aragon, more Italians kept arriving to join the Ascaso, but the mood of comradeship was turning sour. Faced by the reality of the scorching and dusty plain, the anarchists among Carlo’s men were quarrelsome and surly. He spent much of his time trying to keep the peace. Nothing was made easier by the fact that the Catalan militia behaved like conquering occupiers, laying waste to the countryside, executing their captives and looting what little the local people still possessed. His friends remarked on how very patient Carlo remained, ‘which indeed I am’, he wrote to Marion. ‘One has to keep one’s mind fixed firmly on the essential objective.’ What he did not know was that Enrico Brichetti, an unkempt, bespectacled friend from Paris, who had come to join the anti-fascists in Spain, was in fact sending back secret reports to Bocchino.
Carlo was in Barcelona in early November when he was asked to broadcast to Italy on behalf of the Republicans. He managed to send a message to Nello giving both the time and the radio frequency of his talk, and in Forte dei Marmi, where the Rossellis had gone on holiday to a little hotel among the pine trees, they gathered to listen to him. Carlo spoke with passion, and his pauses, timing and repetitions were those of a skilled orator. ‘Companions, brothers, Italians,’ he began, ‘listen. An Italian volunteer is speaking to you from Barcelona . . . The revolution in Spain is triumphant . . . a new order has been born, based on liberty and social justice.’ Soon it would spread to Italy. But, he went on, Italian fascist planes were dropping Italian fascist bombs every day on to innocent women and children, and Italians needed to wake up and bring an end to such shame and dishonour. ‘Italians, help the Spanish revolution. Free men, rise up! Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.’ It was an echo of the phrase that ends the Passover Seder: ‘Next year in Jerusalem’. His words were picked up, reported, printed all over the world.
Four days later, a police report was placed on Ciano’s desk in Rome. Rosselli, it said, had become the most prominent of the Italian anti-fascists fighting in Spain, and he enjoyed ‘great popularity’. What was more, his name was being mentioned as the ‘only possible successor to Mussolini’. For Ciano, there was only one heir to the Duce: Ciano himself.
In public Carlo kept insisting that the war was going well, that the Catalan soldiers were disciplined and his own men well armed. In private he was struggling, bumping over the dirt tracks from one ill-tempered meeting to another in an old Chevrolet car he had got hold of. He was wearing a discarded airman’s uniform, with pockets on the knees which made him think of letter boxes, and he looked, he told Marion, ‘like a cross between an old revolutionary and a tramp, but more tramp than revolutionary’. Italian anti-fascists were now fighting in several different units, and his old friend and collaborator Pietro Nenni was in Spain, the socialists and communists in Paris having overcome their resistance to joining the Republicans. Casualties among them were mounting. Fernando de Rosa, the young man who had fired a shot at Prince Umberto, was dead, killed by a bullet while trying to regroup his men.
On 20 November, the Ascaso went into battle at Almudévar, but the attack failed through lack of coordination, even though Carlo, covered in mud, scrambled around, radiating energy and confidence. His men had fallen out among themselves, with the anarchists refusing any kind of military discipline. He was beginning to think in terms of a new group, without any anarchists, better organised and trained; he wanted to call it the Battaglione Matteotti. By early December, the Ascaso was in full crisis.
The autumn had brought cold and rain and the men were camped in a field between olive trees and vines; Carlo, in his letters home, remained determinedly cheerful. ‘I feel that I have reached a state of equilibrium and understanding that I never had when I was young,’ he told Marion. He made little of the fact that his wound had brought back his old phlebitis, which had kept him in bed so often as a boy, and that he had been forced to go for treatment to the Swiss field hospital. Relations between the anarchists and the other men grew worse. Carlo was blamed for the failures and sidelined by the anarchists. He wrote to Cianca angrily that they had taken advantage of his absence and indulged in jealousies and idiotic intrigues; his views on them had changed and he now considered them ‘totally useless’.
On 6 December he decided that there was no longer a role for him and he resigned. ‘I have realised’, he wrote sadly, ‘that I love humanity in the abstract and individuals concretely, but that groups, other than in exceptional circumstances, seem to me every day more impossible and sometimes even unbearable.’ The pain in one leg had now spread to the other, and he had developed sciatica.
The anarchists drifted off; fighters were being recruited for the International Brigades and assigned to units according to their experience and origins. Carlo did not regret his first impulse to come to Spain, because he had shown solidarity at a time when his Republican comrades were without many other foreign friends, and he felt that he and his companions had fought valiantly. He took pleasure in the popularity of his Italian recruits, portrayed by one reporter as combining ‘a passionate chivalry and devotion with supreme courage and resourcefulness and discipline’, though this was not how Carlo would have described the anarchists among them. (The Swiss volunteers, by contrast, were seen as dour and impatient, the Poles as dashing and fearless, the Americans as sober and intelligent.)
He was recovering only very slowly, however, and he had to keep delaying his return to Paris. To the children he wrote a charming letter, asking Mirtillino, who was learning fractions, to devote a fraction of every third day to writing him a letter, and including a story for Aghi and Melina about a clock that ran backwards, so that the man who owned it was forced also to do everything backwards. ‘How sick I am of feeling such constant anguish about him,’ Marion wrote to Amelia from Montreux, where she had taken the children for a holiday. ‘Do you think it possible that this torment may perhaps be over?’
Having been away for almost six months, apart from a quick week-long visit in October, Carlo reached home on 7 January 1937.
Though he arrived looking thin and ill, with his leg continuing to ache, and though Marion and his doctors tried to make him rest, Carlo immediately resumed his customary frenetic pace. On 18 December, the first Italian fascist troops had sailed to join Franco’s forces in Spain. The newly formed Italian antifascist battalion, the Garibaldi, needed men. Determined to help recruit them, he told a group of volunteers assembled in Argenteuil at the beginning of February that in Spain they would be able to dispel for ever the notion that anti-fascists were not true fighters. The Spanish Civil War was something for which, if necessary, it was worth dying. And then he repeated the words that he had used on Ràdio Barcelona: ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.’
Marion’s health was slightly better and she wrote to Amelia that she and Carlo were making plans for trips. ‘I am full of longings these days, for journeys, for new clothes, even for a bit of Tuscany.’ She told Amelia how grateful she was for the interest that her mother-in-law took in the minutiae of their domestic lives, but as both women knew, there was not much else they could safely discuss in their letters. Melina, she reported to Amelia, remained as impossible as ever to reason with, but responded better i
f dealt with gently. Pleasure for the little girl was not so much enjoyment as passion.
In March came news that the Garibaldi Battalion had played a decisive part in the Battle of Guadalajara, the first in which Italian fascists and anti-fascists fought against each other. Mussolini’s Lupi di Toscana were routed, 500 men taken prisoner and tanks, trucks, machine guns and cannons lost to the Republicans. Communist planes had strafed the Italian fascist troops as they fled ‘because no one fired back, and all were running, and most of all the many officers’. Though the cold, the lack of hot food, the fear of being captured by an enemy known to torture and kill its captives were all blamed, the defeat for Mussolini was ignominious. In Paris, L’Oeuvre carried a headline: ‘The Italians are showing their heels’. From Rome, Ciano gave orders that while the Spaniards taken prisoner should be treated correctly, all Italian mercenaries should be shot.
Carlo was jubilant. In the next Giustizia e Libertà Quaderni he gave full coverage to the battle, printing photographs of the rout and of the Italian soldiers taken prisoner or who had deserted. Many of these men, he wrote, had only joined out of economic necessity, and had never been told where they were being sent. Forty-nine thousand Italian soldiers had already been despatched to support Franco.
Carlo’s revelations received much international attention. The spies in Paris reported that he was in an excellent mood, telling everyone that the way things were going it was likely he himself would be back in Italy by the summer. Mussolini cut short a trip to Libya to deal with the disaster, and wrote in Il Popolo d’Italia that the anti-fascists were ‘hyenas in human form’, feasting on the pure blood of Italian youth ‘as if it were whisky’. One thing was certain, he wrote, and that was that those who died at Guadalajara would be ‘vindicated’. Carlo kept up the attack. He published the secret orders from Mussolini to the Italian press, demonstrating how servile it had become, and how obediently it printed lies. Then he had his article translated into French and circulated it to foreign newspapers.
Even if not everyone agreed with his views, Carlo’s place as the most prominent leader of the non-communist anti-fascist opposition was now uncontested. He continued to argue passionately for the involvement of the young, and was thinking of bringing out a French edition of the Quaderni. He told Salvemini that he was beginning to understand that his real function was to ‘serve as the yeast with which others will bake the bread, both intellectually and practically’. Personally, he had been moving towards the left; he had not lost his hostility towards what he saw as the rigidity and sectarianism of the USSR, but had come to appreciate its discipline and efficiency. What he felt about their brutality in Spain he did not say. While he continued to press, as he always had, for a united movement of all the anti-fascists, whatever their politics, he felt little sympathy for the socialists and their obsessive desire to hold on to the past. Sometimes, now, he sounded a little weary. He spoke wistfully of humanity, humanism, the ‘religion of man, of the human being, man as a morally superior being’.
After several short-tempered brushes, Salvemini and Carlo were again on affectionate terms. Salvemini had settled in the US and was based at Harvard, where Ruth Draper had endowed a chair in European history in de Bosis’ name, and he had become its first incumbent. He longed for Europe, but saw no other way of earning his living. ‘As for America,’ he had told Carlo, ‘I am going there as to a prison.’ But at least he was far from a country in which people were ‘driven mad by fear’.
Despite their resolve to carry out no more flights, Carlo, Tarchiani and Cianca were now planning another sortie, going as far as to buy a plane, print leaflets to drop over Milan and Turin, and recruit a pilot. Every step of this was known to Bocchini in Rome, who received regular updates from a new spy, Alfredo Zanella, who had wormed his way so effectively into Carlo’s trust that he had been made administrator for Giustizia e Libertà. The mission ended when the plane was seized by the French police in Grenoble.
Carlo’s dossier in Rome was growing fat. Surveillance had become ‘massive and extremely efficacious’. There were said to be some 100 OVRA men stationed in Paris alone, some of them grouped under a Baron Fassini, a personal friend of Mussolini’s. Report after report spoke of how dangerous, ruthless and single-minded Carlo was. Another of Bocchini’s recruits, passing himself off as a smuggler and therefore able to cross in and out of Italy without fear of capture, had become so close to Carlo that he was put in charge of all Giustizia e Libertà’s plans for Italy, where Carlo was trying to help organise a new clandestine network. He had also given Antonio Bondi – ‘Arsace’, number 693 – the job of printing the new membership cards. Bocchini thus had the names and addresses of all Carlo’s Italian contacts. Of the few women among the Italian spies, Elisabeth Schulz was ‘dark-haired, very elegant and very distinguished’, spoke four languages and stayed at the Negresco when in Nice. Another, Graziella Roda, former mistress of the anarchist Assunto Zamboni, was a manipulative and clever young woman, an excellent actress, venal and boastful. ‘Do you want to get rid of Lussu, Bassanesi?’ she wrote to Rome. ‘I can get it done.’
After Carlo’s return from Spain, his friends begged him to be more wary and watchful, but he remained stubbornly trusting towards those who approached him with stories of fascist persecution. Mirtillino would later remember how even total strangers would invariably be welcomed warmly to the house. As Pitigrilli observed: ‘Rosselli lets himself be approached by everyone.’
In Florence, Nello, Maria and Amelia continued to be followed and watched, but spies reported that none of them was showing any signs of political activity. Intercepted letters were about presents of snowdrops and carnations, and the need for galoshes for Parisian trips. Maria was seven months pregnant with her fourth child and it had not been an easy pregnancy. The family spent as much time as possible at L’Apparita, where Nello rose early to do gymnastics, in order ‘to put a brake on my stomach, which grows at a terrifying rate every day’. He had sent his manuscript on British and Italian diplomatic relations to Volpe, and was thinking of writing a life of Giuseppe Montanelli, the Tuscan law professor who fought for the unification of Italy and helped Verdi with the libretto for Simon Boccanegra. Montanelli, Nello told Einaudi, was a much misunderstood and neglected hero, and he would write his book along the lines of an English biography, telling his story through his character as much as through his times. He had also amassed some 800 pages of notes towards a new history of Italy, to cover the years 1870 to 1930, but was unsure how to proceed. For all his chronic self-doubt, and fears about what he kept insisting was his own ‘superlative social unusefulness’, Nello was a highly competent researcher, with a clear, lively style and a total disregard for hyperbole, and was much admired by fellow historians. Surreptitiously, he continued to keep in touch with friends such as Barbara Allason, and to send money to Ernesto Rossi and Traquandi in prison.
Florence itself had become an uneasy place, particularly for the Florentine Jews, who for the first time worried about their own safety. Mussolini’s views on Italy’s tiny Jewish population – no more than 50,000 people – had always been contradictory, as was so much else of his thinking, and he had rapidly backed off when some of his diatribes against Judaeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspirators fell on deaf ears. Jews had played a significant part in the rise of fascism – 230 had taken part in the March on Rome, and were thus described as ‘fascists of the first hour’ – but like the Freemasons, they were guilty of having competing loyalties. As long as he considered his role to be a mediator between Germany and the European democracies, Mussolini’s policy towards the Jews remained ambiguous, willing on the one hand to take in those persecuted by the Nazis and to ridicule Hitler’s social theories, referring to them as ‘anti-scientific drivel’, while on the other hand encouraging anti-semitic campaigns. Lists of all known Italian Jews had already been drawn up.
In Florence, those Jews who had made a show of supporting the fascists spoke of ‘washing out the shame’ of those who ha
d not, and a militant new Jewish movement, with its own paper, La Nostra Bandiera (‘Our Flag’), made it clear that Italy’s Jews were among the regime’s most loyal supporters. During Italy’s Day of Faith, when women had given their wedding rings to be melted down for the war in Abyssinia, ‘Giovinezza’ had been played in virtually every synagogue.
In Florence, fascist literary circles had taken on a definite tone of anti-semitism, not least because their members identified Jews with all that they most disliked about cosmopolitan, modern life. Early in 1937, Paolo Orano, rector of Perugia university, produced what purported to be a history of the Jews of Italy, but was in fact a vitriolic attack on Zionism. Angiolo Orvieto, one of Amelia’s very few remaining friends still in Italy, had been forced out of his presidency of the Leonardo, and had retired to spend his days studying Judaism and doing crossword puzzles. His wife Laura had a chapter with the title ‘The King is Jewish’ removed from one of her successful children’s books. Amelia herself had long since stopped attending the Lyceum, where some of the more openly anti-semitic ladies made little effort to conceal their distaste for all things Jewish. Amelia’s own position on her religion had never wavered: she was, she would say to anyone who asked her, Italian first and Jewish second. (Fascist Jews had been heard to say that they were fascist first and Jewish second.) The notion that she might not be considered a real Italian was so absurd to her as to be unthinkable.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 39
