A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The veterans suspected that they had before them people who regarded being a partisan as a mere refuge. A GL commissar inveighed ‘against that way of considering the partisan formations as a sort of charity organisation, aimed at welcoming, protecting and assisting draft dodgers and deserters, so as to prevent their meeting a worse end, imprisonment in Germany or dispatch to the battlefields’.115

  Still more unsparing was a Garibaldi commissar concerning Colonel Libero Descalzi, ‘squadrista, persecutor of the people of Stradella, volunteer in Spain etc.’, who had formed a brigade near Varzi ‘composed essentially of daddy’s boys whose fathers financed Descalzi to make sure that he saved their sons. No combative spirit animated those dodgers, who had come into the mountains to play the dandy and save their skins.’116 ‘Butter and jam’ partisans or ‘evacuee partisans’ were the names given to those who poured into the mountains in summer 1944, convinced of being able to tranquilly await ‘the good moment’.117 These stances reflect the problem of the evolution from mere self-defence to the exercise of even aggressive violence, which, furthermore, required different and greater armaments. The fact is that at a certain point the influx of men exceeded the availability of weapons, as well as the means of subsistence. The presence in the mountains of so many unarmed men could only be a cause for concern. ‘When the fighting starts I’m going to disappear. I’m not going to stay here and get myself killed’,118 said an unarmed partisan, expressing a point of view that was widespread among those who did not intend to risk their lives in a challenge that was too unevenly matched.

  In this matter there were two schools of thought among the leaders. The first, in the name of political and human responsibility, claimed that it was not possible to turn anyone away. A Garibaldi document reads: ‘To find excuses and fail to do everything possible to solve the inevitable difficulties stemming from such an influx of men indicates poor political work with little understanding.’119 And in another one: ‘We have deemed it opportune, despite the fact that they are unarmed, not to reject them, so as to remove them from the enemy’s clutches.’120 On 18 October 1944, the provincial military command of Vicenza issued a circular ordering the suspension of new enrolments for lack of weapons and because ‘it is all too easy to present oneself at 11.55 [i.e. the eleventh hour] and enjoy the same recognition as those who presented themselves at zero hour’. But the general command of the Garibaldi brigades severely criticised this attitude of the veterans, and reminded them that weapons can be won and that the only condition to be put to anyone asking to enlist is that he be ‘fired by a firm will to fight’.121 These Garibaldi directives undoubtedly contained an attempt to re-launch the volunteer spirit on that terrain of combat whose arguments were invoked by those who balked before the influx of so many unarmed men. But there was wavering even among the Communist and Garibaldi leadership, initially above all for practical reasons, and then in a second phase above all because of the resistance of the now consolidated formations, animated by a growing esprit de corps, to being diluted by too many newcomers. A report from Emilia at the end of 1943 observed: ‘It does not seem to us advisable to send them into the mountains without weapons and with the near certainty of not being able to supply them. We will in short make every effort to find the best solution for them: the important thing is that they don’t fall back into the clutches of the Germans.’122 Similar perplexities existed in the GL formations, where the concern was for the ‘disturbance’ that might be caused by the continuous influx of men, and there was the warning not ‘to be fanatical about the number’; but alongside this, it was recommended to leave the doors open ‘to the workers who are on strike and to avoid their being deported to Germany’.123 In another GL document satisfaction is expressed that ‘the number of regular officers has always been deliberately kept low through a process of rigorous selection’, contrary to what was happening in the Garibaldi brigades, which take ‘whoever presents himself’124 – though we have seen that this was not always true.

  The problem went beyond the political differences between the formations. The Communist Bernardo was not tender towards indiscriminate recruitment, on which, using an identical argument to that of the GL document quoted above, he laid much of the blame for the disastrous outcome of the September 1944 roundup on the Grappa.125 ‘In the band or in the district’, was the bald invitation of a poster put up in the Canavese region by GL and Matteotti formations, addressed to young re-draftees; and the area command remarked: ‘This poster has appeared at a moment when we are having difficulty keeping within reasonable limits the influx of recruits who are arriving from everywhere, in order not to increase excessively the load of dangerous unarmed men in this period. The way it is expressed seems inopportune.’126

  Since February 1944 the military Command for Northern Italy had been urging that ‘the temptation be resisted to swell the ranks in the bands by indiscriminately taking in disbanded men who take to the mountains. Let those who after a fit period of moral and material preparation prove their worth as combatants be accepted.’127 In this prose, in which Parri’s hand is recognisable, the meaning of ‘non combattente’, of ‘disarmata’, tends to assume a morally negative connotation. This tallies with the spirit of the bands, who not only feared the presence of the unarmed men during the recruitment sessions, but came to regard the sessions themselves as an instrument of selection, a sort of God’s judgment which served to sort the wheat from the tares.

  It is necessary to proceed with an energetic and inexorable purging in grand style of all those unreliable elements who have entered the brigades only to seek refuge or to eat or steal. In other words, we need to free ourselves of all the dead weights, of all the rotten, cowardly elements, who are only ready to take advantage of the situation.

  – so runs a report about a recruiting session in Emilia.128 And Nuto Revelli, after a severe roundup in Valle Stura, observes: ‘The selection is starting. The sick, the flat-footed, the accidental partisans will go. Our attitude is sympathetic: we are almost inviting them to leave the formation.’129 At the other end of the Alpine arc, the Garibaldi-Osoppo division felt the need for similar reasons to rid itself of ‘much dead weight’.130 Writing about the winter of 1944–45, the ever rigorous Ferdinando Mautino says:

  Some individuals of no moral substance, who flocked into the partisan ranks when it looked as if there was going to be an easy and imminent triumph, who have now fallen into the hands of the Nazi-Fascists or are just plain terrified of the latter’s temporary excessive power, had turned into the vilest of spies … The purged formations are stronger from the point of view of these dangers as well.131

  ‘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 i
t.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:

  Army of National Liberation [Esercito di Liberazione Nazionale – the formula used also by Mauri] no longer CVL. ELN is a no less political or progressive denomination. It better expresses the imperative character of our military organism which, answerable to the CLN, draws from the latter, which is a government, the necessary, and also present, authority to order requisitions of means and materials, to compel men to perform specific tasks, to establish conscription, to proceed to mobilisation. None of this would be possible if the corps continued to be exclusively voluntary. Furthermore, the ELN is tomorrow’s army in the making, which will absorb the one that they are laboriously scraping together in liberated Italy. Also, the concept of liberty in the name CVL is more limited than that of liberation, which means political liberty within and independence of our country from the foreign foe.142

  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 B
ianco 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’.