A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  If the partisan was no longer protected by the moral anonymity guaranteed a priori to the regular soldier at the moment in which he kills an equally anonymous soldier, the enemy also emerged from anonymity. Both as a German and, still more, as a Fascist, the enemy came to acquire a concrete and far more individualised physiognomy: the enemy ceased to be ‘only a collective identity’.37 The emotional and moral attitude towards him thus became in its turn more personal and all-absorbing. Even in regular wars, for that matter, as we have already seen, the combatants find themselves compelled to live one of these two alternative experiences: that of being an atom of an indistinct mass shooting in cold blood at the faceless enemy, preserving oneself from blind hatred but with the risk of slipping into indifference and cynicism; or else of shooting in hate, but running the risk of being dragged towards rage and ferocity against individual enemies. The arditi, for example, set off action ‘with an explosion of barbaric joy’ and, when they returned, ‘each boasted about how he had laid in with his knife’; and in March 1943 Gerarchia, Mussolini’s magazine, read: ‘War can’t be fought without hating the enemy.’38

  A letter to his fiancé written on 28 April 1917 by Fernando Schiavetti, who was to become a severe critic of the ‘the Fascist aesthetic of violence’, reveals clearly how difficult it was to strike a balance between the two positions:

  I am very aware that I don’t harbour blind hatred of the Austrians [in a letter written six days earlier he had spoken of a ‘personal resentment which was completely absent in me before’] and that I am capable of understanding that in war we die, they die and no one is a murderer: but I have no pity for them, none whatsoever. The other day we hit one and I was good enough to exclaim: I’m sorry for his mother but I’d hit him another time.39

  Just before being shot by the Germans, a Soviet partisan wrote: ‘Can you imagine with what courage, with what fury and with what boundless pleasure I would destroy these loathsome reptiles? Yet only two years ago I was afraid of killing a chicken!’40 And Roberto Battaglia would ask himself: ‘But how can you be so happy because you have killed other men?’41

  In the partisan war, ideological and civil, the knot that Fernando Schiavetti was attempting to unravel in the ‘regular’ war of 1915–18 became still more tangled. In a page of her diary, Ada Gobetti described the concern that she felt at how her son Paolo might react to the execution of a suspect that had been ordered by a partisan chief: ‘While Paolo was recounting it, I was observing his face with a certain anxiety, afraid that I would find there satisfaction or indifference. Instead he said, with restrained shame – ‘It rather upset me’ – and I heaved a sigh of relief. It may be necessary to kill, but heaven forbid that one should find it simple and natural.’42

  On the one hand it is precisely the not very ‘technological’ character of the partisan war that tended to make the enemy more visible; on the other hand there was the active, indeed growing, ‘totalitarian character of modern warfare, which made no distinction between soldiers and civilians, that – contrary to all expectations – recreated the conditions of band warfare.’43

  Nobility of ethical commitment and the risk of totalisation coexisted, therefore, in the partisan war waged against the enemy – Fascism and Nazism – which had all the prerequisites for being described as the total enemy. I have already drawn attention to the inhuman character that the enemy acquired when viewed in the light of extermination and inhumanity that, in this manner, he tended to reverberate on those who, precisely because he was like that, opposed him.44 And I have also recalled that one cannot free oneself from this tangle by invoking a rigorous autonomy of the political, in whose sphere the war ought to be circumscribed, in order to prevent ‘the logic of value and non-value from unfurling its full, devastating consequences’.45

  During the Resistance, the Catholic Communists came singularly close to this Schmittian position when, though following Saint Thomas’s teaching in vigorously practising the concept of a just war, thereby judging the partisan war as well in terms of value, they also saw politics and the war, which is its armed right hand, as being indispensable and neutral instruments that morality, without compromising itself, ‘employs just as they are’. The revealed law that man needs insofar as he is tainted with original sin regards the person, not the techniques that he or she uses – not therefore the medicine, not the chemistry, not that ‘technique of killing’ which is war, a mere mechanism to which it would be absurd to apply the Law, in this case the fifth commandment. The fullest exposition of this line of reasoning led Felice Balbo to write that when in the ‘construction of techniques’ it is necessary

  to be violent to men as persons even to the point, at times, of killing some of them; in such cases one is not going against the charity which religiously unites men, but frees it from facile and lazy good intention. In this way the claim that killing a man can be an act of charity will not seem paradoxical.46

  Positions springing from such different cultural contexts thus seem to converge, leaving aside Balbo’s tortuous and, indeed, paradoxical reasoning, towards a conception of wartime violence which, to get itself out of a fix, takes refuge in an apparent and ‘technical’ asepticity. But the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima would not be aseptic, just as Ernst Jünger had not been aseptic when he had written: ‘We are soldiers and the rifle is the instrument that distinguishes us. Killing is our trade, and it is our boast and duty to do this job well and carefully, in a workmanlike fashion.’47 It has to be recognised that on this path there seems to be no trace of sure, clear, definitive antidotes, given once and for all, to the risk of attributing a totalising value to violence against the enemy, if one tends to see him as absolute. Indeed the distinctions schematically appealed to above simplify, to the point almost of indecipherability, situations which on the one hand cannot but send one to the realm of ends – values – present in whoever practises violent action, and on the other hand arouse emotions and feed on symbols in which ends and means necessarily interweave. In an essay about Fascist violence, paraphrasing a passage from Natalie Zemon Davis, Adrian Lyttleton observes that, historically, what counts is ‘the meaning and direction of violence’, then warns that one should not interpret violent people only as crazy or frustrated, but rather ‘in terms of the aims of their actions and in terms of the behavioural roles and models permitted by their culture’.48

  There is some affinity between the resistenti and those souls full of contempt and violence, who have been credited only with the capacity to listen to the word of Jesus;49 or with those whom Saint-Just taught that ‘the war for freedom must be conducted with fury’;50 or, again, with those who recognise themselves in the maxim that ‘people do not become revolutionaries out of science, but out of indignation’.51 To a Catholic the contradiction might appear to be irenically appeased: only by virtue of the Resistance, one of them has written,

  have the Catholics (extremely timid at first) finally overcome the instinctive horror of arms: they have learned to fight – no longer unarmed – illegality and injustice; to do battle without hating; to love the unjust adversary, though killing him in order to re-establish law and justice, to the point of having ‘succeeded, even while dealing out death, in remaining charitable’.52

  In the letters written by those awaiting execution attitudes are more various and hard-won. The enemies may be the ‘cursed enemy’; they may be the ‘bloodthirsty human beasts’, on whom, however, it is asked that one’s blood should not rebound; they may be dubbed with many other equally crude and relentless expressions. But there may also be the enjoinder not to curse or bear hatred towards anyone, consigning the enemy to future popular justice, and to divine justice.53 What may certainly have a bearing in these cases, which are more frequent in the letters of condemned Italians than in those of other countries, is the wish to make one’s peace in extremis with the precept of the Gospel. But a Garibaldi brigade that had entitled its broadsheet Vendetta was taken to task as follows: ‘The title Vendetta is badl
y chosen and gives no indication of what it is intended to mean. If by vendetta one means the struggle that we are waging against our enemies to liberate Italy, it strikes us as more appropriate to speak of Giustizia and not of Vendetta.’54

  An apologue about the difficulty of getting final ends and the practice of violent means to coincide is recounted by Italo Calvino about himself and his younger brother. The elder brother was talking about Lenin and Gorki: ‘he was capable of explaining what democracy and Communism are, he knew stories of revolutions, poems against tyrants; things which were useful to know too, but which there was time to learn later, when the war was over’; the younger brother, instead, spoke about ‘the calibres of pistols and automatic weapons’.55 Calvino himself explained how the practice of violence, as an unavoidable means in those circumstances, involved, in some of its deep echoes, the risk of being confused with the enemy, from whom only an appeal to ends, which had acquired objective value in the course of history, could save one:

  That burden of evil which weighs on men of Righteousness, that burden which weighs on us all, and which gives vent to itself in shooting, in the killing of enemies, is the same as that which makes the Fascists shoot, and which leads them to kill with the same hope of purification, of redemption. But then there’s history. There’s the fact that we, in history, are on the side of redemption, while they are on the other side. Nothing must be lost by us, not a gesture, not a shot, must be lost, though identical to theirs – do you see what I mean? – everything will serve if not to liberate us, to liberate our children … This is the meaning of the struggle; the true, total, meaning, beyond the various official meanings.56

  Grief for a common existential predicament and the desire to discover an objective fact that might guarantee one’s difference fuse marvellously in this page. In another short story – it has been observed – the fact that of three German prisoners flung into a well one manages to save himself, fulfils ‘a desire of Calvino the man’.57

  The rift between thinking, saying and doing, the bridging of which should be identified as an essential factor in the decision to resist, reappeared at times in the very performance of the acts of violence which that decision gave rise to – almost as if the totalising commitment hesitated before the profundity of the prospects that were opening up, thus recreating from its bosom a new fracture. Franco Calamandrei tells of a priest who heard the confession of a Gappist in flight after an attack, got him to hand over his revolver and exhorted him to renounce violence.58 The ‘Anonimo romagnolo’ described the crisis of conscience suffered by a young man who immediately after 8 September kills a German taken by surprise in an osteria.59 A Garibaldini paper wrote edifyingly of a partisan who shoots at a Fascist marshal, and is then overwhelmed by anxiety and returns to his combat post only when he has prayed during the night ‘as when he was a child, with his mother’, because ‘praying has done me good’.60 Untroubled by doubts, in contrast, was the reply of another Garibaldino whose comrade Pietro Chiodi asked this question: ‘ “Bill, if you woke up with two machine-gun barrels in front of your belly what would you do?” Shrugging his shoulders he replied: “I’d spit in his face”.’61

  This reply ignores all the mediations and the artifices of the science and art of war. Among these artifices is an age-old one that could to a large extent be transferred to the partisan war and which, in being transferred, brings with it and amplifies the moral snare of war seen as a game. What I have in mind are ambushes, which St Augustine had authorised, though condemning ‘intemperate violence, profanation of temples, sacking, butchering or fires’, as well as ‘vendettas, atrocities and reprisals’.62

  Chiodi tells of partisans and peasants whose ‘faces are radiant’ because of a successful ambush of Fascists.63 Battaglia recalls that ‘every ambush on the road was greeted with an inhuman hilarity’.64 On this score there is a significant page in which Marc Bloch describes the Germans’ undisturbed entry into Rennes:

  I was badly tempted … to lie in wait for that damned column at the corner of some spinney of Breton countryside, which is so admirably suited by nature for the mounting of ambushes, even if we had nothing to fight with but the sparse equipment of an engineer detachment. Once we had produced enough confusion in the enemy ranks, it would have been easy enough for us to melt into the ‘wild’, and then repeat the same performance farther on. I am quite certain that three-quarters of the men would have jumped at the chance of playing a game like that. But, alas, the regulations had never envisaged such a possibility.65

  Even in active resistenti the departure of partisan warfare from the ‘regulations’ generated the vague scruple that ambushing was still always a kind of warfare that to some extent involved betrayal. Ermanno Gorrieri considered night-time ambushes against the German vehicles along the Apennine road a ‘harsh necessity’, and boasted that his Italia brigade ‘will distinguish itself more in open combat than in this kind of attack’.66

  But the backslidings that brought the partisans close to resembling their Fascist enemy were manifest most alarmingly in the practice of excessive violence – that excess which the veterans of all wars generally prefer not to speak about.67 Here, it is not enough to say that the cruel and sadistic can be found in every field and that there were incomparably more of them among the Fascists. We should look, rather, at the basic cultural structures sustaining the two warring parties, and ask why one party was better fitted than the other to select the cruel and sadistic and to bring out the darkest impulses of the human soul in the form of politically significant behaviour. For this fundamental reason, Communist Catholics are indulging in what is only a dialectical artifice when they deny the dignity of political status to the ‘technique of killing’ used for an unjust end, thereby deducing that when Mussolini and Italo Balbo had Giacomo Matteotti and don Minzoni murdered, ‘they did not act as politicians, since their so-called policy was not a technique of human progress, but was the wicked regressive machinery, an agglomeration of gestures which had the deceptive appearance of Politics’.68

  In a civil and ‘irregular’ war, politics and culture, the ends and the ‘techniques’ used to achieve them, interweave particularly closely in both fields, and the two different warps have some common threads running through them. At various levels of profundity and assimilation there were several kindred cultural substructures that could not be snapped overnight simply by taking opposite sides of the barricades, just as the viscosity of the language could not be eliminated.69

  Traces of this affinity have been identified in the songs and the literature of the Resistance.70 In Chapter 4 of this book some features that sprang from the matrix of Risorgimento culture were highlighted. Here we can give the example of the appeals to blood as a symbol of purification. A modern Italian version of this stereotype was clearly formulated in the words that Giovanni Gentile wrote to Adolfo Omodeo as early as 15 July 1915: ‘I have faith above all in the great moral forces that will develop purified by this great bloodbath, for all humanity!’71

  In 1945 one of two resistenti awaiting execution wrote that ‘it is with blood that the country in which one was born, has lived and has fought becomes great’, while the other asked that the hem of the bloodstained shirt of Duccio Galimberti which he was conserving be bathed in his own blood. True, they were two officers in permanent active service, though the second was a member of the Action Party, to which in fact he bequeathed the bloodstained relic.72 But even a Garibaldian song went like this:

  Rosso sangue il color della bandiera

  Siam d’Italia l’armata forte e fiera

  Sulle strade dal nemico assediate

  Lasciammo talvolta le carne straziate.73

  [Blood-red is the colour of the flag

  We are the strong, proud army of Italy

  On the enemy-besieged roads

  At times we leave our flesh in shreds.]

  This is a very different symbolic vision of blood and bodily suffering from the ‘rational’ one imbuing statements suc
h as ‘a greater contribution of blood would be met by greater Allied recognition’.74 Comparison should be made rather with documents such as the letter that a Fascist wrote to his wife on 29 August XIX (1941): ‘What does it matter if men’s flesh is in shreds, when the satisfaction of having done one’s duty is stronger?’;75 or like the ‘spiritual testament’ of Aldo Resega, federale of Milan and ardito of the First World War, where there is, furthermore, a specific element of Fascist culture too – the appeal to the ‘ “sacral” function of the shedding of blood’ as more authentic than democratic legitimisation.76 Resega’s ‘testament’ in a poster that the Fascists put up after he was killed by a GAP, contains these words: ‘The tragedy of Italy will perhaps be worth my blood. I am fighting with the impetus of my faith. Let it gush forth without parallel, without reprisals and without vendetta. Only in this way will it be dearer and more fecund for my patria.’77

  A Fascist captured during the days of the insurrection saw the shedding of his own blood as a pledge of pacification among Italians: ‘With the shedding of blood by us few, reasons for party hatred are done away with, for the future too. Thus everything will come about in that peace with justice for which all of us have fought, albeit with different ideas and opposite concepts.’78

  It is on this very terrain which is so difficult to explore that the resistenti and Fascists diverge over the point of the innocence professed by those who shed their own blood. In the letters of resistenti awaiting execution declarations of innocence are frequent, even allowing for the fact that some may have been dictated by the desire not to compromise the recipients and their imprisoned companions-in-arms. Let us also isolate those cases in which the profession of innocence was intended to exclude personal participation in the spilling of blood: ‘I have never killed nor had anyone killed … my hands are free of blood, thefts and robberies.’79 The fact remains that there were still many condemned men who, while firmly declaring their ideals and asking those left behind them to be proud of their deaths, affirmed their innocence with equal intensity. One of them wrote that he was ‘dying innocent and like a partisan’.80 This, then, is not an innocence that we could call ‘technical’ with respect to the event that led them to their death, nor even only a strong denial of legitimacy to those who had decided on that death. It is rather the vindication of a moral innocence which was not only identified with the very reasons for the choice they had made, but which gave the shedding of one’s own blood the value attributed to the sacrifice of an innocent victim. In this context, the ambiguous metaphor used by a man about to die, ‘it seems that I’m going to a wedding’,81 acquires the meaning of an offering up of one’s own innocence.