In its ‘internal regulations’ issued after unification – as late as 18 April 1945 – the general Command of the CVL would content itself with prescribing that, without prejudice to the use of the partisan badge and/or armband, ‘if possible one should aim at having uniformity in the equipment. The essential items of the uniform are: windbreaker and long skier’s trousers’.57 A Garibaldi chief noted: ‘It’s strange to observe how the uniform would raise us in the esteem as much of the civilian population as of the enemy’;58 in fact it was not that strange, but it is interesting that a Garibaldino should have considered it so.
Uniforms meant that recognisable ranks were adopted. On this score the general Command of the CVL issued meticulous instructions, taking care among other things to point out, after initially taking a different line, that ‘there are no ranks in the CVL, but only command assignments’;59 and this had for example been the practice of the Lunense division60 and the Italia Libera band of the Val Maira.61 Cino and Ciro, though aiming at a firm military organisation of their formations, had urged: ‘Symbols of rank will have to be simple and not too conspicuous.’62 The Biella zone Command was to complain that ‘the badges of duties indicated seem to us to be real badges of rank’.63 In short, if one really couldn’t do without them, let there be ranks, but with discretion. A discretion which, at a distance of years, Pajetta no longer felt the need to respect when he wrote: ‘We established the forms and the colour of the ranks, even if the Garibaldini continued to sing: “There’s no lieutenant nor captain”, echoing the infancy of the Red Army.’64
In almost all the expressions issued to outline the most suitable discipline for the partisans, there is the dialectic between the necessity that it be firm and incontrovertible and the need felt equally strongly that it be based on self-conviction. Even the infelicitous formula used in a Garibaldi document – ‘prompt, unconditional, absolute obedience’ – is ennobled by the motivation sustaining it – ‘because my chiefs have been freely accepted by me’ – and by the duty given to each combatant to check that his chief did not degenerate.65 It is a document which, much as it recommends ‘getting the men used to discipline towards hierarchies’, feels the need to specify: ‘We certainly don’t want bourgeois barrack-room discipline, but nor do we want anarchy.’66 The advice that Antonio Prearo, the commander of the GL column of the Val Pellice, gave to his partisans included that of ‘being disciplined not in the sense and style of the old naja but disciplined in spirit … Remember that our discipline is the discipline of the volunteer: it may turn a blind eye to trifles but is inflexible in the things that are essential for us.’67 General joint discussions, ‘where the bond of close dependence on and disciplined obedience to hierarchical bonds disappears for a few moments’ are recommended by a Garibaldi political commissar.68
The insistence on reserving discipline only for the great occasions was extremely widespread: ‘However, while discipline leaves a lot to be desired in moments of truce and calm, when there is alarm or the need to come out for actions, the response is unanimous and at such times discipline is felt.’69 A highly mannered reconciliation between discipline as habitus and discipline as mere military necessity is proposed in a letter by Cino and Ciro: ‘Iron discipline in combat or on duty, free-and-easy behaviour off duty, contempt for the sterility of formal discipline.’70
Indicative here is a certain diehard distrust of the partisan police:71 these police, for whom the need was felt at a certain point, might not appear ‘that distant from the all-too-well-remembered royal carabinieri’.72 But championing ‘Garibaldi humanism’ against ‘the traditional Teutonic automaton’73 produced a variety of attitudes that cannot be defined that easily in terms of discipline, whatever adjective might accompany it.
What proved to be a particularly sticky issue was the ‘soldo’ (soldier’s pay) paid to the partisans, the object of widespread distrust, despite acknowledgments of its opportuneness as a channel for financing the bands.74 Neither salaries for the officers nor pay for the men, insisted Dante Livio Bianco with regard to the Cuneo GL.75 On 9 November 1943 the Communist representative of the Turin CLN declared:
We regard the projected increase of pay of thirty lire to the soldiers and relative salaries to the officers as politically mistaken. This is a people’s war fought on a volunteer basis and animated by a lofty patriotic spirit. If it must be introduced, the soldo should not exceed five lire, that is, the small change necessary for small personal expenses.76
But a year later a Garibaldi chief, Achille, who had reported that his men refused to accept differentiated pay according to rank, first of all received compliments on his style as an ‘old partisan, the jealous guardian of the fraternal egalitarianism of the bands’, and immediately after a lesson against
‘flat’ high-quality egalitarianism, to define it from a class point of view, utterly petit-bourgeois … In any case, the history of the edification of socialism in the USSR itself teaches us that salary differentiations are necessary and that to stimulate emulation it is necessary to apply the principle that distinguishes this phase from that of Communism, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to his work’.77
The issue involved is well summed up by the GAP commander Elio Cicchetti:
One day Ambro arrived and brought us a thousand lire. He said that the Command had decided to let us have that small sum every month, a kind of salary, to enable us to meet our most elementary needs. All in all the measure in itself was right, but there and then it seemed to me distasteful and even offensive. I was repelled by the idea of being paid to be a partisan; I hadn’t seen a lira for at least six months and all the same had always managed to get by, without needing to turn to the laws of the market to survive. I didn’t want to accept that money. The question acquired a symbolic significance for me. It was certainly exaggerated to take it that way, but pride prevented me from seeing the thing in a practical light.78
In other documents there is a rejection of any economic differentiation whatsoever between commanders and simple partisans. ‘Giving different pay to officers, NCOs and soldiers’, Pajetta wrote, ‘would be doing things more army style; the way we want it, egalitarianism means doing things more partisan style, which suits us fine.’ The Green Flames, who in fact wanted ‘to do things army style’, established a monthly allowance of 1,000 lire for the commander and vice-commander, and 500 lire ‘per la truppa’.79 Inadmissible, on the other hand, in the view of the Biella zone Command, were ‘the awarding of command allowances and the differences in family allowances’.80 The allowance granted to dependents was already regarded as a different and acceptable practice.81 The same could probably be said of the one-off gratuities, like that decreed by the Action Party, for Christmas 1944, of 1,000 lire for each GL partisan.82 The weekly awards decided on in November 1944 by the government junta of the free zone of Alto Montferrato provided for differences only between unmarried men, married men, and married men with children.83 But a cash reward for a successful action could give rise to the comment: ‘come si trattasse di mercenari’ (‘as if we were mercenaries’).84 In the same spirit, the ‘financial recompenses for acts of sabotage’ were considered by Roberto Battaglia a sign of the intemperance of the highly courageous Diavolo Nero (Black Devil), before he and his band were called to order by the Communist Party.85
Indeed, what was to be avoided at all costs was the figure of the mercenary: the partisan had to remain a volunteer out of pure ethical and political choice. Understandable therefore was the disdain with which a Garibaldi document reacted against manoeuvres, attributed to Major Gufo (‘Owl’ – Tito Cavalleri), to get the Garibaldini detachments of the Valle d’Intelvi under his command by offering them higher pay: ‘cornering soldiers by means of money (120 lire a day coming from the dollar exchange, rather than the Garibaldine 5 lire) is no longer practised in any civilised army in the world’.86 A document characteristic of partisan (and sub-Alpino) moralism complains: ‘The Turin CLN money began to pour in, contributi
ng to making the environment less healthy.’87 And this is negatively confirmed by the fact that, among even the most scrupulous orders issued gradually by the CVL general headquarters, there are none relating to the ‘soldo’ – uncertainty and shame, probably, rather than an oversight.
The process of militarisation interwove with the local character of the bands. To those drives towards centralisation, inherent in this process as in that of politicisation, local recruitment acted as a counterweight. Particularly close bonds of solidarity grew between the men, even when it did not previously exist, underpinned by the use of dialect, and a greater propensity to fight in defence of what was, obviously one’s own land. The small local patria was felt to be threatened in a more immediate way than the large patria, Italy, and the motivations necessary to inspire men to take up arms could not always be transferred onto the plane of the great ideals of political and human redemption. Roberto Battaglia speaks of ‘regional interests that had weakened the guerrilla movement’ in Umbria; but for the Apuan and Garfagnana zone, he recognises the importance both of regional recruitment, which meant that almost every family had a young man among the partisans, and the wide and complementary presence of those whom he calls ‘partigiani contadini’ (‘peasant partisans’), who did not abandon their work in the fields.88
‘Le quattro giornate di Napoli’ (The four days of Naples’), remembered in the whole story of the Resistance as the glorious and spontaneous episode of auroral promise, have a truly exemplary significance from the point of view of the struggle pro aris et focis (for the altars and the hearths). A stone placed in the park of Capodimonte reads: ‘Died fighting for the defence of the hearth. 29 September 1943’.89 It was the first time in history that the ‘lazzari’ found themselves on the right side. They therefore deserved to be recalled in the appeal that Benedetto Croce prepared, in the name of the ‘National Liberation Front’, for the call-up of volunteers of the ‘Gruppi combattenti Italia’: ‘Men, women, children of Naples have demonstrated, despite the few weapons they have managed to procure for themselves, that heart and that pugnacious spirit and that spontaneous heroism which in the past shone in famous defences of our city against foreigners.’90 Palmiro Togliatti, too, speaking to the Neapolitan partisan leaders, would first recall the Jacobins of 1799, but then add that in the ‘people’s struggle against an invading army … whatever explanation one might wish to give to it, one is however compelled to recognise the dawn of an instinctive manifestation of national force and patriotic spirit’.91 Nor was this just a Neapolitan phenomenon. Pai nestris fogolârs (For our Hearths) is, for example, the title of a periodical of the Friulian Osoppo brigade.92 The Resistance does, indeed, have this dichotomy running subtly through it: on the one hand, the solidity guaranteed by moral and material rootedness in loco; on the other hand, the risk, which could stem from it, of there being a shrinking of the ideal and political horizon. The leading national Resistance movements gave the first characteristic its due, but were at the same time concerned about the second. In a report ‘on the feats of arms from 13 to 17 March 1944’ in the Monregalese valleys, Major Mauri wrote:
As regards recruitment, I prefer that, for the time being, it be done directly under the charge of the group leaders, who thus have the opportunity to choose their men: as a general rule I aim also to form the groups with elements from the same village or from a specific area, so as to avoid the enrolment of untrustworthy or suspicious individuals.93
One of Nuto Revelli’s annotations almost gives the lie to this: after a harsh rounding up, out of twenty-four men who abandoned the formation, nine were from the same village.94 And what should also be noted is the greater security that fellow-villagers, and dialect, offered against infiltration by spies. Ada Gobetti tells of a man ‘small, very, very dark, a southerner, as you can hear from his accent’, who for these reasons alone was suspected in Susa of being a spy.95 According to Fenoglio, the mere fact of speaking Italian was already a bad sign.96
Of a group that formed in the mountains around Modena between Communists, Action Party members and Catholics from Sassuolo, Ermanno Gorrieri writes: ‘I think one can say that the Sassuolesi, who constituted a fair share of the partisans active in the mountains, at least in the initial phase, felt greater solidarity with their fellow villagers than with the party.’97 Still with regard to the Modenese Appennines, behind ‘the old idea of creating a robust and determined local formation’, launched again in autumn 1944, were ‘apolitical’ and anti-Communist aims.98 But even the Command of the ‘13 Martyrs’ Garibaldi Brigade of Lovere not only adopted the criterion of ‘pochi ma buoni’ (‘few but good’), but made the ‘buoni’ coincide with local lads, and dubbed the city folk with the pejorative militarist term ‘vaselina’. For this attitude the formations were sternly rebuked,99 just as a La Spezia Giustizia e Libertà formation was taunted with the epithet of ‘patrioti casalinghi’ (‘stay-at-home patriots’).100 Another Garibaldi document, respectable by contrast, describes the mountain dwellers of the Oltrepò around Pavia as ‘excellent elements, but difficult to drag into operations outside their village; while they fight like lions near the walls of their houses, the moment they have to move away from the area many of them abandon the formation’.101 This attitude, another report explains, meant that, as soon as the Anglo-Americans arrived, these units disbanded and each member returned home.102 A group commanded by a certain captain Raul – well-armed, and composed for the most part of Communist sympathisers, almost all fellow villagers who carried home with them spoils they had captured – not having wanted to move in time, is said to have been attacked and decimated.103
The Valtellina only to Valtellinese partisans, as their commander Retico seemed to want? But that way – ran the answer – ‘you are treading on Fascist ground. There is no worse policy, no worse action than to divide one Italian from another, whether he be a Sicilian, a native of Veneto, a Piedmontese or a Tuscan’.104 A Garibaldi detachment from Boves was criticised because ‘it smacks rather too much of the local situation insofar as the majority are from the village and before general interests come local ones: this could be prejudicial.’105
Alongside these criticisms inspired by strong national pedantry, there appear others that are more immediately connected with contingent situations. The local partisans – it is claimed – revealed themselves to be particularly sensitive to the risk of reprisals against the hearths that sweetened their existence. This gave rise to attesismo (waiting on events) and, with the formation of free zones, an excess of defensive attitudes.106 On those occasions the local elements could ‘fuel the general euphoria’,107 then be ruinously involved in dispersal and gradual ebbing away. In that way they offered the enemy the opportunity to concentrate forces each time on a single point, allowing them to ‘arrange their attacks in grades, using first one formation, then another’ and ‘to be always stronger than us’.108 Finally, we should not forget those homeless villagers, the southerners blocked in the North. Among them there seemed to be the reappearance of the tendency to group themselves according to their areas of origin, as in the Royal Army.109 Revelli recalls the case of forty disbanded Sicilians from the 4th Army who on no account wanted to be separated from a carabiniere who was their fellow villager, and in whom they had recognised a leader’s authority: when the carabiniere was killed, the Sicilians dispersed.110 With the Sardinians of the Natisone division and the Triestine brigade at a certain moment there was the idea of creating a Sardinian battalion.111 We do not know what came of that proposal, most likely nothing, just as we are unable to say whether similar episodes occurred elsewhere.
It is revealing however to compare this with the different behaviour of the Sicilian soldiers who were on the island at the time of the Allied landing and, still more, with the view of the landing given them by a paracadutista officer who believed in the Fascist war: ‘It was a grave psychological error, too ingenuous not to have been deliberate, to send the inhabitants to defend their own land. When a soldier is close to
home he is unlikely to make a good combatant.’112
At times, the local character of the bands led to mimicking the only lively and popular rite in Italian military tradition, the festival of the young recruits. In June 1944, in the province of Biella, the new partisans
even took the country bus up to the assembly points, celebrating the occasion with the same enthusiasm with which the date of conscription was celebrated in the villages. From the plain and from the city of Vercelli as well a large group of youths reached Postua by bicycle accompanied by their wives and girlfriends.113
The problem of the growing number of bands, of which the local character is but one aspect, reached a turning-point with the beginning of the influx of the youths who had wanted to dodge the drafts improvidently issued by the Fascist government (the so-called Graziani bands), and the various German call-ups. These new partisans gave rise to problems of cohabitation with the older ones, who already tended to swathe the memory of the initial phase, the dawn of the movement, in jealous nostalgia. ‘Things, Nuto, aren’t what they used to be! Everything’s changed! There were few of us, then, in the fine times of Palanfré! How wonderful the evenings were, all of us gathered together singing our songs, joking, laughing’:114 that’s how Nini of the GL Rosselli brigade, by now deployed on the French side of the Alpine front, recalled beginnings which were not actually that distant.
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