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.’8 Tallying with this picture is the ‘supreme superior condescension’ with which Mauri greeted the Garibaldini’s overtures to him.9 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.10 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.11 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’.12 In another major autonomous formation, the DeVitis (Piedmont), the anti-militarist spirit gained ground widely.13
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:
I know almost all my men. I talk to them a lot, I never tire of listening to them. I’m interested to know why they came up into the mountains and where they were before and what job they had. This is the life I dreamed about in Modena, before I became an officer: this is what I thought military life was like.
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”.’14 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.15
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,16 and that contorted equality that, in time of war, cohabits with hierarchical order, becoming a function of it.17 While the first kind of equality permits, and actually strengthens, the preservation of individuality, the second mortifies it.18 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’19 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’.20 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.21
Agostino Piol, vice-commander of a Garibaldi brigade, who had ‘lost all his loved ones in the struggle for liberation’, protested against the attempt to impose discipline on the unit, against the introduction of ranks, against the political commissars ‘sitting there at their desks’; all this struck Piol as being a return to the naja. The divisional Command firmly but affectionately reprimanded Piol, reminding him that in the naja ‘only a bestial system of direction reigned, not the fraternity that exists among us’. Unconvinced, Piol went his own way with some hundred men; and news then came that he had been gravely wounded, ‘and by now may no longer be alive’.22 The tragic fate of this Garibaldino, convinced as he was that, at the end of the war, ‘they’ll put us in a concentration camp’, is a good indication of the tension I hinted at above. With a crudity that makes him miss the full complexity of the situation, Vincenzo Moscatelli (Cino) dealt with the same problem as follows:
Everything that is a healthy mark of a military education in our formations is vaguely dubbed by that lot as naja, while personal habits, disorder, improvisation, lice, scabies and hanging about for hours or whole days on end, either lying or sitting by the fire in a state of utter mental inertia, in short what is characteristic of the banda, of the gypsy-like camp, is passed off as ‘true partisan life’.
In reproaching these men, his own men, for their scant political conscience, Moscatelli remarked that if they were questioned about the reasons for their choice, they would reply: ‘To drive out the Germans and Fascists. That’s all. No more than that.’ As for the future, all they can think about is ‘a fine parade through the city’, and above all home. ‘At most’, Cino added, ‘they talk of liberty, of finally being able to express “our opinion”, of a few people to sort out’.23 Actually, this was no mean achievement; and in underrating it, Moscatelli revealed the tendency of many Communist chiefs to conceive of the growth of the bands in terms of the two exclusive routes of militarisation and indoctrination along party lines – with the consequent disparagement of that profound humus which gave birth not least to the capacity to bear lice and scabies. Besides, the political commissar of one of Moscatelli’s divisions himself appeared horrified at a brigade commissar’s order of the day proposing ‘the military system of a genuine army’ as a model, and prescribing the salute formerly used in the Royal Army.24
There were also curious cases of contamination between the ‘old-style military imprint’, ‘which is to be applied a hundred percent’, and new partisan ways, seen almost as a sublimation of military virtues. (This we have already noted in the case of Revelli, but it did not always occur with the same humanity.) Thus a circular on the subject of ‘discipline’ even prescribes an hour a day of ‘closed order instruction’, and in the same breath orders that ‘the detachment commanders live together with the men serving under them’, because, as a subsequent document repeats, ‘you don’t get to know the partisans by idling about at the café or strolling around town with girls’.25
Criticism of militarisation could be accompanied by that bureaucratisation and a combatant’s intolerance of politicians. Both of these criticisms were present within the Communist organisation. This must have been the state of mind of those who reproached the Garibaldi commands for contenting themselves with ‘sending directives and asking for reports’.26 Accusations of bureaucratisation were exchanged between the Commands of various levels. One of these wrote resentfully:
This Command would like to know what specific aspects of organisation you are reproaching us for. We have always made it a rule to prevent the bureaucratisation of the Commands in order to keep as close as possible to the men and urge them continually along the path of action. When it has not been possible we have not hesitated to leave them the circulars for using machine-guns.27
For some time L’Unità had warned against the re-establishment of antiquated and reactionary hierarchies, claiming the superiority of working-class leaders over fence-sitting ‘competenti’ (‘experts’) and ‘technicians’.28 Even the Christian Democrat commander Claudio writes, with regard to the Republic of Montefiorino (the free zone established in the Modenese Apennines from 18 June to 31 July 1944), that there was no need for ‘officers transplanted at the last moment in
the place of the natural leaders of the units’, but of leaders experienced in the partisan struggle and who acted as an expression of the Resistance29
In fact, the selection of the leaders reveals a characteristic feature of partisan ways, which would have to reckon with the growth of the formations and, in the final phase, with their unification. What Guido Quazza has called a ‘microcosm of direct democracy’30 required the election and, if necessary, the dismissal of chiefs; but it became increasingly difficult to follow this practice, apart from the already arduous problem of introducing ‘technical’ leaders from the Royal Army. On several occasions Bianco speaks of appointing commanders from below.31 In the statute of the ‘1st Mazzini brigade’ (Valle d’Aosta) things appear more fully worked out:
The military commanders and vice-commanders of the brigade and group are assigned and designated by the Command of the 7th GL division, which will appoint elements internal and external to the brigade according to military capacity and aptitude, moral gifts and qualities, influence over the men, and length of service in partisan life. The vote of confidence by the men, required only in exceptional cases, and decided only at the discretion of the brigade political commissar, may constitute for the Command of the 7th GL division an expression of opinion and not a determining element.
On the other hand:
The squad and nucleus commanders are elected by the men and appointed by the GL 7th divisional command, which will make appointments after consulting the brigade commander and political commissar. The brigade and group political commissars are elected by the men and appointed by the GL 7th division Command, and those elected can be dismissed only in ‘exceptional cases’.32
Another Actionist saw the indiscipline among the Garibaldini, again from the Valle d’Aosta, as the fruit of having concentrated exclusively on the partisans’ rights and ‘the principle of the elective nature of their chiefs’.33 Indicating just how confused things had become in the Rosselli GL brigade deployed on the French side of the Alps, Nuto Revelli himself noted: ‘In one band they’ve reached the point of holding a referendum among the men to choose the commander!’34
The ‘responsabile militari’ (‘person responsible for military affairs’ – note the formula used in the place of ‘commander’) of a Garibaldi detachment was elected ‘by secret vote’; but the higher command, to whom the report was addressed, put a question-mark in the margin by way of comment.35 It was Lazagna’s boast that in his formation the chiefs were elected, and that their power, ‘except in case of emergency’, was subject to the approval of the whole formation, even in the matter of dismissal.36 This question is raised in a highly polemical letter in which the commander is accused of refusing to submit himself to the judgment of his men:
Hadn’t we made it clear in the discussion that the commanders are such only if they have the unanimous approval of their Garibaldini? In this struggle … it is the gregari [privates] (which in any case remains an ugly military term) who elect commanders and not those who impose themselves by virtue of the stripes they received from a regime whose last representatives we are now fighting.37
As I suggested in the last chapter, being a Royal Army officer could even count against one. In order to be elected commander of the Arno division, Aligi Barducci first had to overcome the distrust aroused by the fact that he had been a second lieutenant of the Arditi.38 An officer’s past could become a point in his favour only after all the other necessary qualities were recognised; but even where this criterion was applied, one saw former captains being placed under former lieutenants.39 A ‘regime of progressive democracy’ is how a Garibaldi document describes a situation in which the chiefs spring not from ties of wealth, family genealogy or the authoritarian designation of restricted political circles, but from the free choice of those concerned based on the value of the actions of individuals; this happens when positions of command are well and truly positions of responsibility, guidance, sacrifice:40 – a principle aimed at combating the regressive tendency that had surfaced here and there that ‘length of service had to create merit’.41
Possibly the most interesting criticism of rank-and-file appointments, in view of what motivated it, is the one, inevitable enough in itself, made by General Raffaele Cadorna after being parachuted into the North to take command of the CVL:
Two characteristics strike one immediately: the political nature of most of the formations; the election of the chiefs by grassroots consensus rather than designation from above and their close political control. These characteristics, which are clearly incompatible with the requirements of a national army in a democratic nation and regime, have their raison d’être in this wretched phase of civil war.42
Comparison of this document with the one quoted above appealing to ‘progressive democracy’ helps throw light on the two profoundly different meanings that could be given to the word ‘democracy’ as applied to the fighting men. The latter could be seen merely as the age-old arm of a will, albeit democratic, that had been formed elsewhere; or else as bearers in their own right of values, practices, and democratic ends. General Cadorna must at least be credited with having realised, albeit reluctantly, how difficult it was to apply the first of these two models to a civil war.
A danger in some respects more subtle than that feared by Cadorna lay in the possibility of the partisan chief slipping into the role of the charismatic leader, insofar as he was recognised as having proved himself to possess a ‘quality … considered extraordinary’.43 The same could happen among the partisans as what Jean-Jacques Langendorf imagined for his hero von Lignitz, who during the battle of Jena came across a squad of scattered hussars: ‘Without hesitating, he took command of them. None of them asked himself what right that civilian had to give them orders. His natural authority commanded their respect.’44
The ‘irrational’ character of this kind of power – in the sense that ‘it has no system of formal rules’45 – was somehow rationalised in the Resistance by appointments through election from below. The charisma gained on the field became the de facto premise guiding the group’s choice. This is why the partisans were so often reluctant to be deprived of their ‘natural’ chiefs, in whom they saw a natural synthesis of charismatic and democratic power; the partisans saw that their natural leaders recognized hard facts and had respect for standards that they themselves had adopted. A British officer penetratingly described partisan discipline as ‘based on the personal relationship which exists between the leader, who is elected, and the man who selected him to be his officer. This makes their discipline a curiously personal thing.’46
A woman partisan was convinced that, ‘while the bureaucratic assignment of commanders may be all right for a regular army it might mean the downfall of a partisan formation whose cohesion is due above all to the prestige enjoyed by the leader’. Therefore, she continued, the men would regard the substitution of the commander Montagna ‘as an impairment or an act of high-handedness and this would lead to the break-up of the group’.47 The ‘bond that best keeps a band together is political conviction or trust in its leader’, wrote the chief of an autonomous formation who was not insensitive to political considerations;48 and a political commander saw trust in and human harmony with the chief that one chose for oneself as a channel of that very same politicisation.49 At times the leader’s glamour provoked excesses. A Communist in the province of Brescia who had addressed a brigade commander (who came, what is more, from the Green Flame autonomous units) with expressions like ‘you, only you are the commander’, ‘your brigade’, ‘the brigade is entrusted to you’ and the like, was reprimanded as follows: ‘In our party all the best comrades are valued but in such a way as to avoid the adulation that marks the parties we are fighting against … The brigade does not belong to a person, a commander may even be transferred. The brigade is entrusted to the Command and not to one man.’50
It was worse still when the commander, however valorous, abandoned himself to the arbitrary exercise of his power in an
‘utterly bourgeois’ way insofar as he cuffed his comrades and even threatened them with a pistol. He made the actions seem like banditry, got the young men to blacken their faces, put on fake beards and moustaches, and got bed linen and silverware included in the spoils.51
It has been pointed out that, in partisan fiction, the commanders often play the lion’s role.52 This is probably a consequence of the chief’s glamour, as well as of the adoption of an easier literary model. The truth is that, though in some cases there was a tendency to make the Command a collegial organ, militarisation led to this collegial character being reduced in practical terms to very little. Commenting on the Communist proposal ‘for the transformation of the partisan units into regular formations of the Italian army’, Cino (Vincenzo Moscatelli) and Ciro (Eraldo Gastone) advanced a number of modifications which, while reiterating the supremacy in operative decisions of the commander and commissar, tried to leave space in all other matters to some form of collegiality, with a view to ‘avoiding the tendency of some commanders towards centralisation’, especially if they were regular officers.53
In a later chapter we shall see how the exercise of justice constituted one of the channels leading to a more or less definite institutional order. Likewise in the field of discipline and its visible signs. For example, the first partisans did not wear uniforms, refusing to regard themselves as the possible shreds of those of the Royal Army. Hatred of the uniform was a part not only of what I have called the repudiation of the Royal Army, but of a more radical feeling of repulsion for militarism.54 Gian Carlo Pajetta recounts that he had always imagined a ‘popular army’ in workers’ overalls.55 Then, little by little, dress with at least some common features begins to become a distinctive sign of group identities. An imaginative and whimsical liking for individual variants persists, revealing a deep repugnance for ‘the uniform’.56 Even the armed corps of the RSI often wore somewhat motley uniforms; but in their case the model was that of the ‘non-regulation uniform’, an extravagance conceded to the confused desire, which they in turn had, to appear irregulars. It is no accident that the most distinctive corps on this score – the paracadutisti, the Decima Mas, the Muti – flaunted, even in the name of elegance, these deviations from complete uniformity.
A Civil War Page 28
