A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The questore of Venice reported that ‘the war, though undesired, was accepted by the majority as a necessary evil’, in view of its brevity and the advantages that could be obtained from it.58 Other reports – still in 1940 – speak of a ‘deaf and opaque mass’ and of ‘general weariness of a psychological nature’;59 while a combatant in Russia uses this image: ‘The Italian army entered the war only little by little, like some poor wretch whose sleeve gets caught in a grinder and is swallowed up by it.’60

  The Italian masses seemed then to have come to terms with the war – still more ‘taciturn and fatalist’ than those of the Western democracies, following the definition given to the latter by Stefan Zweig, who compared the ‘ecstasy’ of 1914 to the ‘tough, unemotional determination’ of 1939.61 “How do you win a war without waging it?’ may be taken as the essence of the drôle de guerre Italian-style.62 Most Italians would sooner have fought as little as possible, or at least not far from home, leaving their powerful German allies to do the rest. As a July 1940 report by the prefect of Trieste says, registering a real fact, the population praised the Duce for having chosen the opportune moment – the thousand dead needed to sit down at the peace treaty table – ‘to assure Italy of the maximum advantage with the minimum necessary sacrifice’.63 On receiving the news brought by an officer back from the Russian front, where things were going from bad to worse, Roman military circles seem to have reacted by reproaching the Germans for having violated the rules of the game – namely ‘that they were to get down to it and win the war’.64 The Germans, for their part, sustained by their racial arrogance, were convinced that they were dealing with ‘jumped-up farmhands brought in for the harvest’, led by officers who were ‘too touchy, too full of themselves, too vain’.65 The Italians were to be compelled, in one way or another, to shake off the ‘sad apathy’ which, according to a pungent judgment by Radio London, they shared with the ‘beaten French’,66 only by defeat, and then by the lash of the occupying Germans. But meanwhile their sense of identity had been worn down – already it had been vulgarised by Fascism, then humiliated by allies and enemies, and reduced more ‘to a state of fact than to a self-operating force, more to a condition than a principle’.67 As we shall see, one of the highest aims of the Resistance would be precisely that of regaining a national identity, even if the outcome of this would be uncertain because, as Ferruccio Parri wrote, part of Italy ‘had suffered the misery of war, not the moral jolt of insurrection’.68

  That considerable part of Italian society represented by the Catholic world participated in the events of the war along mobile and multiple lines, which have not yet been sufficiently investigated, where things specifically Italian and general interests of the Holy See intertwined. It is understandable that research into the incunabula of the Christian Democratic party, which governed Italy after the war, has been the main focus of scholars’ attention. The result, though, has been that the field of a potentially far richer investigation has narrowed. For some time now, however, more complex and truly religious phenomena have also begun to be examined69 – at times too hastily reduced, by Catholic writers, to the level of ‘pastoral’ activity, chiefly of the bishops, where the need for political mediation was in fact already incorporated. The behaviour of those who, in one way or another – from straight faith to superstition70 – reacquired religious attitudes, has remained in the shadows; and this has also happened in the case of the Catholics during the two Resistance years.

  In the great debate about war and peace, the evolution of the Catholic attitude could be said to have followed, by and large, a reverse course to that of the anti-Fascist lay forces. While the latter questioned an a priori pacifism, among the Catholics – compromised by pro-Fascism, the anti-Bolshevik crusade and the desire to ‘support the honour of our flag’,71 in order to show, as in 1915–18, that they were exemplary citizens – raising the question of war and peace meant having to start rethinking their relations with Fascism and the mission entrusted to it as a centuries-old weapon in the re-establishment of Christian society. I am not thinking so much of the Catholic peasant world’s traditional aversion to war72 – and still less of mannered balancing acts such as the statement that the Pope wanted peace and that, at the same time, the Catholics, or rather the priests, ‘do not cease among us to be loyal Italian soldiers’.73 What I mean rather is the revival of the debate about the ‘just war’, which obliged one to shake off the conformism according to which, before the orders of established authority, one was to refrain from making one’s own personal judgment on the reasons for any conflict taking place.74 As we shall see, these were tensions that would come to a head – not for the Holy See, which would already have made its choices, but for individual consciences – in the war between the Social Republic and the Resistance.

  Meanwhile, faced with the Fascist war, only small minorities of Catholics – among whom the figure of don Primo Mazzolari, parish priest of Bozzolo, stands out – proved capable of tackling with radical energy the problem of the relationship between martial violence and the fifth commandment. Let us try a parallel reading of a crass pamphlet signed by don Sergio Pignedoli, circulated by the most enlightened Catholic organisation, the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI), and Primo Mazzolari’s vigorous ‘Risposta a un aviatore’ (‘Reply to an Airman’).75 Pignedoli approvingly cites Mussolini, and even Pétain, who in the 1914–18 war would go to Mass with his officers; he finds that there is ‘an appealing beauty in scraping the bottom of a mess-tin with a spoon, when for twenty years we have been eating off a plate’; he reminds a university student that he no longer belongs to himself, but to the patria, to society, to the brotherhood of man, to God, to history; he rounds off in the name of ‘Christian and Imperial Rome, to whom a few days ago the Pope appealed’.

  Mazzolari is replying to a young airman who has bared his conscience to him before the task, to which he has been summoned, of killing and getting himself killed, and who had criticised the Church’s silence and ambiguity.76 The essence of Mazzolari’s long reply lies in the maximum emphasis it lays on the terms of inner conflicts. Though not giving straight practical advice, which, in the circumstances, could only have been to rebel or desert, Mazzolari thus managed, undisguisedly, to transform back into a moral problem the practice, which Pignedoli and his ilk took for granted, of obeying the country’s authorities when they ordered one to go to war. ‘The myth of duty, or on the limits of my loyalty,’ was, for example, the heading of one of the sections of Mazzolari’s reply. Mazzolari gave full moral, and not simply diplomatic, significance to the ‘useless slaughter’ of Benedict XV’s famous allocution, thereby implicitly raising another question too: Is the war to be condemned because it is useless or because it is unjust?

  Was not dying and killing uselessly quite as harrowing a business as dying and killing unjustly? Mazzolari gave no reply, but remarked that the church had condemned war in general, not this war. And while Pignedoli, and so many of his kind, were speaking above all of the possibility of being killed, so as to alleviate the fear of it, Mazzolari, resorting even to a quotation from Remarque – ‘Tell me at least why I have to kill’ – baldly recalled that war consisted also of killing. The parish priest of Bozzolo added that a Christian cannot hate anyone, and therefore not even the enemy; and it is easy to see how distant he was from another priest, don Tullio Calcagno, the future promoter, under the Social Republic, of ‘Crociata italica’ (‘Italian Crusade’), who on the contrary considered it indispensable to hate the enemy.77 Thus Mazzolari again raised a possibly insoluble question: whether it is therefore preferable to kill in cold blood.78 ‘The soldier who dies without knowing why he is dying takes the kingdom of the servile to its utmost limit’, Mazzolari concluded. Inscribed in the knowledge of why you are dying in effect is a conscious judgment of the enemy you have to kill: otherwise you would not be soldiers, but those martyrs who ‘inaugurated the kingdom of the sons of God and of truly free man’. This setting of martyrdom and
war against each other was essentially Mazzolari’s metapolitical and metahistorical answer.

  Altogether different in inspiration was the reappearance of that current of Catholic apologetics which, from de Maistre onward, had indicated war as a castigation that God sends men because of their sins. The fearsome scale of the castigation that was taking place could only be proportional to the greatest of sins: the de-Christianisation of society. The war, from whatever angle it was viewed, thus ceased to be a struggle between warring parties and became a scourge sent indiscriminately to all men. From the pulpit in a Roman church, a preacher translated this awesome theological message into petty scolding of ‘children who have not listened to their mother’, and of mothers ‘who have failed to hold their children in check. And vainly does the Madonna implore Jesus to save men. Irritated, Jesus refuses to listen to her.’79

  The interiorisation of a sense of guilt, to the point of desperation, is to be found in the letters of civilians and soldiers alike: ‘This is a castigation by God because we are too bad’; ‘Ask the Lord what we have done wrong in this world to be tortured in this way’.80 This is a far cry from the presentation, found in some Catholic texts, of the current war as a holy war, insofar as it was a ‘titanic struggle in defence of European, Roman and Christian civilisation, threatened by the hordes of militant atheism’.81

  2. THE UNCERTAIN MOTIVATIONS OF THE COMBATANTS

  One thing that many of the surviving testimonies have in common is that the vast majority of the combatants felt they had been thrown into an enterprise whose proportions, intensity and significance it was not only beyond their direct power to control, but even simply to comprehend. As Nuto Revelli wrote: ‘We knew nothing. We viewed modern warfare like folk from another age, and were alien to it.’1

  In fact, not only do General Staffs often face a war with the technical culture of their predecessor (the most glaring example certainly being that of the stolid French General Staff of 1939–40), but the very men who have to fight it have difficulty shaking off the memory that has been transmitted to them by veterans’ tales, literature, and myth-making. To many Italian soldiers their German ally – and the British, Soviet and American foes – must have appeared like people from another world and another age. The memory of the Germans, whether in the African desert or in the frozen wastes of Russia, fleeing in automobiles while the Italians fled on foot, has become widely known and consolidated, beyond the real episodes that triggered it, precisely because of the significance it has acquired as an index of how alien the mass of Italian soldiers felt to that technical and ruthless war.

  Except for the few convinced Fascists and the very few who were already clearly anti-Fascist, the majority of Italian soldiers cannot be said to have been altogether devoid of motivation: had motivation been totally absent, the desire to survive and the spirito di corpo, seen as a factor making for group cohesion, would not always have sufficed to save them from suicidal rebellion or madness. But the motivations involved were uncertain, in the sense that they were unable to give unitary firmness to the men’s consciences, and, even when they appeared firmer and rooted in long-standing tradition, such as loyalty to the institutions, the line separating them from resignation remained uncertain and jagged.

  A little earlier I recalled the sense of sub specie Catholic expiation. But no explicitly religious anchorage was needed to cultivate, in a good many combatants, a sentiment that took the form of the sublimation of sufferings endured for an uncertain and obscure cause, in the name of a duty regarded a priori as unavoidable. It was thus a desire for expiation with tragic overtones, for it lacked hope; whereas the analogous aspiration of the resistenti, which we have seen in at least some of them, was to be illuminated and, as it were, sweetened by confident hopes deferred to a future guaranteed by the justice of their cause. Some of the Fascists of the Social Republic were also to display this spirit of dedication; but in their case it would be wrapped in the mortuary rhetorical shroud of sacrifice as an end in itself.2

  The more expiation is detached from the prospect of a feasible and morally certain future, the more – as appears evident even in the noblest of its expressions of 1940–43 – it places all its hope of not being vain in the very fact of laying down one’s life. Combatants uncertain of what they are fighting for can thus paradoxically seek it in offering their lives. Perhaps the formula that it is always the best ones who die – used in the most varied contexts, Resistance and post-Resistance included – has a non-rhetorical motivation in this essentially religious substructure, which leaves survivors with an insidious and persistent sense of guilt. Even sacrifice accepted in the name of the patria can be experienced as an ‘act of divine clemency’. ‘I think that the Lord has had pity on us, after our corrupt existence, in having me die for the great, infinite Italian patria’, wrote a corporal who was to die in Marmarica.3 More tersely and resolutely, a Catholic who was subsequently to be killed during the Resistance wrote from the front: ‘Before God, I am doing my duty to the full as an Italian. But any kind of Fascist ideal is utterly alien to me.’4

  While in those soldiers who felt the first glimmerings of an anti-Fascist conscience, ‘we must expiate everything’ was transformed into the commitment to self-redemption by making good the privileges they had enjoyed as officers and students,5 in others this process took, and seemed to keep, the form of solidarity – come risk, come misfortune – with one’s compatriots who had been hurled into the same predicament.

  A second lieutenant in the Alpini wrote from Russia of the ‘moral and purely moral value of our sacrifice’, and of the desire that ‘our privileged condition as students should not save us from the common destiny of expiation and suffering’.6 Another officer wrote to his wife, again from the Russian front: ‘Marina, I can’t abandon my soldiers who are in danger, to return to Rome to work in a ministry.’7 Or again:

  When I have lost my life in the trenches of the Don, I shall only have done my duty as an Italian. I have no cause at all to hate the wretches who over on the other bank are doing what we are doing; but I am sure that my place as an Italian is this one alone, among my soldiers whom I love … The politics, responsibility and motives of this war don’t count here; Italy is at war and this alone is where I should be.8

  In another testimony the invitation, in Catholic form, to do what was commanded of one, whatever the circumstances, merges with the duty to participate ‘in this great doleful destiny that has befallen our generation’. According to these combatants, the war was ‘un grande fatto’ (‘a great event’) transcending the will of those who had decided to wage it, and those who did not go to war ‘betray human solidarity, snap the bond linking them to others and basically, out of cowardice, go against fundamental moral law … possibly regretting that there is not another war instead, against another enemy, in which case, they say, they would become fierce’.9 The tragic thing here is that the sense, albeit confused, of the existence of a great historic alternative is taken as being a mere matter of personal convenience. This is present in the account of a survivor of the death camps: ‘When I was called up to leave Novi for Albania, my father said to me: “Look, those you are off to fight as your enemies aren’t enemies: try, if you can, to save your skin and not to hurt anyone.” He said that to me at the station and I have held those words sacred.’10

  Among the reasons for the proverbial passivity of the Italian soldier is also this uncertainty as to the figure of the enemy, who seemed by contrast to be a good deal more highly motivated. An intelligent National Fascist Party (PNF) inspector reported from Albania that the ‘divisions, large and small alike, seemed to be afflicted by a morbid form of melancholy and resigned fatalism, which grew, the closer they got to the firing line [against] an enemy imbued with a sort of religious mania and ready to die unsparingly’.11 A censor noted down that, in the troops’ letters, ‘even when there are encouraging and patriotic words, these spring forth as an act directed towards the person one is writing to but reveal the depressi
on of the man writing’.12 Giorgio Rochat has pointed out a paradoxical indicator of the shaky conviction even in those who sacrificed themselves in the name of duty: the low number of executions ordered by the military tribunals compared with those carried out in the Great War. In fact, only a strong faith in the justice of the cause can induce the body of officers to take initiatives of drastic repression on a large scale and with a clear conscience.13

  Obviously, I am not denying the presence in the Italian armed forces of men with Fascist or para-Fascist motivations. These motivations were at times explicit, at other times attributable to ideological graftings that they had been taught at school. Thus a volunteer who, in Albania, invokes vendetta (not ‘rehabilitation’) for the Alpini brackets together in the one list – culminating in Mussolini – Mazzini, Gioberti, Cavour, Garibaldi, ‘Crispi of the Sicilian revolution’, ‘two kings of the House of Savoy’, D’Annunzio, Carducci and Verdi.14 One soldier declares that he is fighting ‘for the great empire of Rome’; one writes: ‘I was born for Mussolini’s war and for him I wish to die’; one refuses to take part in singing instruction because he has ‘left the shop, my mother and my girl to fight, not to sing’.15 Even in letters of this kind a distinction needs to be made between propagandist stereotypes, adopted with different degrees of sincerity and self-consolation, which are hard to gauge (and their limited presence in letters from the front is itself indicative),16 from more personal letters. For example, a fifty-year-old soldier writes: ‘When I was at home I was an ardent Fascist and was always saying we needed to fight this war; now I’d be ashamed to return home.’17