A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The Fascists, though holders of so much vaunted power, had a paroxysmal fear of not being taken seriously, and this fear drove them to imitate and outdo the Germans in the practice of reprisals. The podestà and political secretary of Saluzzo insisted on the Germans shooting six hostages, and the secretary said that he wanted the town to have a ‘Christmas of blood’.132 ‘All the soldiers stationed in Florence were to be made to see with our own eyes that one was not joking’, recounts one of them who was forced to witness the shooting of five draft-dodgers.133 ‘This will be your end’, said the Fascists to a captured partisan, pointing to his comrades who were hanging from the gallows.134 And we have already recalled Farinacci’s comment on the Ferrara massacres.

  When presently we come to examine the theme of reprisals, we shall return to the real significance of the exemplary effect of these bloody spectacles. What needs registering here are the disturbing effects they had on the minds of those who were compelled to witness or even collaborate in them. In the Florence episode recalled above, the conscripts who had been pressed into the firing squad and had fired at the victims, if only minimally, so that it had become necessary for the orderly officer to use his revolver,

  sometimes regarded themselves as voluntary perpetrators of that massacre, sometimes as victims of the officers’ high-handedness. They yelled, wept and often woke up suddenly in the night crying ‘no, no’ or repeating the same cries as the executed. They would appeal to their mothers, say that they did not want to die, let out yells of terror and invocations of help.135

  A prisoner aware that his end was nigh said to one of his comrades: ‘Hanging leaves an ugly memory for those who remain.’136 The specific and, intentionally, infamous horror of hanging lies in the fact that rifles and machine-guns are weapons, while the gallows is not. Hanging cannot therefore even simulate the final act of a combat engagement. It is telling that the hanging of two of the leading and most detested local gerarchi in Turin, immediately after the Liberation, had to be authorised by the governing regional council ‘notwithstanding the provisions in force’.137

  Hanging, moreover, lay utterly outside that personal relationship that a weapon creates in combatants. This relationship was felt particularly intensely by the Fascists, being part of their culture, but it can also be found in the partisans:

  Ma la mitragliatrice non la lascio

  Gridò ferito il legionario al passo

  Grondava sangue al conteso sasso

  Il costato che a Cristo somigliò

  Ma la mitragliatrice non la lascio

  E l’arma bella a un tratto lo lasciò.

  [The machine-gun I will not abandon

  Cried the wounded legionnaire at the pass

  As his blood poured on the contested stone

  The machine-gun I will not abandon

  but the beautiful weapon he did leave behind.]

  – ran a verse of the legionary’s song.138

  After 8 September this value attributed to one’s weapon became still more exclusive in the Fascists:

  We had witnessed the collapse of an army, we had seen weapons rejected, dispersed, become useless overnight, faint-hearted, worthless. They had acquired a mythical value in our imaginations … The more patent the unreality of that war became, and little by little the more confused the aims, the motivations of that life, the more we clung to our weapons as the only thing in which we could recognise ourselves … It became a kind of fetishism.139

  In the partisans a wider and less clear-cut range of attitudes can be observed, running from shame and trembling at handling an instrument of death for the first time, to attractions of an ambiguous kind: from satisfaction at finally being able to fight as equals, to pride at having done so thanks to the weapons captured from the enemy. The many controversies about the Allied airdrops and the distribution of weapons raining down from the sky may be explained in these terms as well.

  A Garibaldini commander distributed the much longed-for submachine Stens to his men, and noted in his diary: ‘I don’t know quite how to put it, but in their eyes I can see a light that I shall never forget again’.140 And Ada Gobetti: ‘They were a bit riled at the order to hand over their weapons to me (the almost amorous jealousy these boys have for the weapons is curious).’141 The Gappist Franco Calamandrei, describing the attack on the Flora hotel in Rome, occupied by the Germans, recalled: ‘Having torn off the paper in which my rifle was wrapped I put it on the window-sill there in front of me. It was again a pleasant, reassuring sensation placing that metallic solidity on the solid surface of the marble.’142

  It was at the moment of the final surrender of weapons that these feelings were to prove particularly powerful, in the form of disappointment, but mixed with hope in those weapons that had, instead, been hidden. A Terni partisan recounts: ‘That clause about surrendering weapons was immediately applied, but arrogantly. I remember how painful some partisans found it to part with their weapons’.143 In Belluno, the scene of the disarmament is described in the following way:

  Disarmament at the barracks took place with great pomp, great eulogies and declarations of gratitude that were never to be forgotten. The partisan was laying down his machine-gun, his Sten, his rifle, and with his weapon he was prostrating his soul. For months his weapon had been his faithful daytime and nighttime companion, in her he had placed all his trust for twenty months. In that weapon which now he had to give up and in whose hands he already knew where it would end up, for twenty years he had seen the key to his freedom. The moral shock was very violent and found expression in forms of distrust of democracy, of disorientation and often of useless rebellion.144

  Mirroring this love for one’s weapons was the frequent manifestation of reluctance or even repugnance about using them. Here I do not mean those who had chosen not to participate, but those who had openly taken sides. This was particularly true with the women, for whom the age-old affirmation of difference seemed, in that emergency situation, to be summed up in the choice between shooting and not shooting. The problem is present even among the Fascist women auxiliaries, who were not allowed by regulations to use cosmetics, smoke or bear arms, for the use of which they were to train only for legitimate defence: a conjunction of prohibitions which nicely symbolises Fascism’s contradictory attitude to the objective of militarising the ‘exemplary wives and mothers’.145

  A female auxiliary, shortly before being shot in Turin on 30 April 1945, wrote in her last letter, which still bore the Fascist-era date: ‘I know that I have not shed blood: this comforts me in these last moments.’146 But another, on the eve of the final catastrophe, had written to her mother: ‘All I do is wash piles of plates, bed linen, sew, tidy the rooms we sleep in and deal with all the office work, telephone left, right and centre, decipher coded messages’; and had added with satisfaction that ‘the boys’ called her ‘their little sister’ and the commander ‘who is very nice and is pleased with us’ had promised to take them in turns up to the front line. When, however, she puts on the camouflaged uniform, this woman feels like ‘a real clown’, though she does then pick up: ‘I finally feel in my element.’147

  A Red Cross nurse, after expressing the hope that ‘those cursed rebels all croak’, wrote:

  You know, when they go out on the roundups I always try to sneak in too. The other day I went with papa [who had asked to enlist in the SS] – I was so happy, you know. The soldiers are always saying I shouldn’t because I bring bad luck (Red Cross nurses must stay at home) but I, you know … when I can I go.148

  The reactions of the anti-Fascist men and women to the appearance of the bush-jacketed Fascist women-soldiers ranged from vulgar jibes depicting the auxiliaries as ugly and unfitted for the kinds of combat that best suited their sex to the more thoughtful ones which started from the observation that they enlisted even though they were not obliged to do so, and concluded that ‘the women of the Republic are demonstrating this today: that a certain female energy exists, only it hasn’t been guided and directed’
.149

  Even the partisans were not so easily convinced that women could and indeed had to shoot. A very impassioned letter written by an imprisoned Communist (‘and then I will take revenge because an idea is an idea’) reads: ‘There is no legitimate pretext for a lack of weapons; there are weapons for everyone, children, men and old men’, but says nothing about women.150

  They had rather discarded me, insofar as we’re women, the usual problem. So I escaped, reached the hillock where they were. I remember I was wearing a light blue sweater and they all shouted ‘down’ at me, because with a light blue sweater, in full daylight … I didn’t even know that there were any arms at my home. Then – in those days, the world was very different, and in the period I was with them, I saw how they cleaned them, I had my own little revolver which I didn’t give to anyone … I tried it out, it worked well. There were wounded, dead, but whether I was the artificer, I can’t say.151

  In this account by a Terni woman partisan shooting at the enemy is seen, despite the distancing that comes at the end, a challenge won (including the pale blue sweater) not least over one’s own comrades. The climate of partisan life – ‘go, shoot and escape, right?’ – is directly expressed by this other testimony:

  The commander was very wary; he said that women were most useful at home. At first I was worried because I was afraid of not being up to it. In short, it seemed to me to be more a man’s job than a woman’s, but, finding myself having to and then seeing that there was no way out … Yes, I was proud … At first, I wasn’t.152

  ‘I should have been born a man’ is how one woman sums up her regret at not having participated actively in the Resistance.153

  A case in some respects extreme, but in others exemplary, is that of Elsa Oliva. A rebellious girl, she escaped from home at the age of fourteen. In Ortisei, during the war, she quarrelled with the inhabitants of Upper Adige to defend the good name of the Italian soldier. After 8 September in Bolzano she witnessed the first acts of violence against the Italians and ‘from that moment I understood that all I could do was kill them, the Germans. The choice came immediately.’ She was convinced that ‘the liberation struggle was a complete non-experience, a complete invention’. She blew up with a bomb the automobile containing the fiancée of a friend of hers at whom, to obtain permission to enter the barracks, she had ‘made eyes’.154 When, in Maderno, she saw the ‘mugs’ of ‘all those Fascists’, she said to herself: ‘There are not only the Germans to bump off, there are the Fascists too.’ She made her way to the partisans of the Valtoce division, commanded by the anti-Communist Catholic, regular lieutenant Alfredo Di Dio – a curious choice, dictated no doubt by the fact that they were autonomi, a name that must have made them appear more in line with her expectations. But she was then compelled to recognise that, if it had not been for the reaction of her men, the clero (clergy) would have had her removed from the command of the unit assigned to her. Indeed, if they had had their way, the Valtoce leaders would have made her only a dispatch-rider and nurse. But she ‘wanted to shoot, take part in the engagements’, and replied:

  I haven’t come here to look for a sweetheart. I’m here to fight and I’ll stay here only if you give me a gun and put me in the ranks of those who have to stand guard and fight in the actions. Added to that, I’ll be a nurse. If it’s all right by you I’ll stay, if not I’ll be off … In the first engagement I showed that I wasn’t holding my gun just for show but to take aim and fire … I looked after my comrades but I didn’t serve them … the men were often lazy.

  Elsa Oliva’s stance, writ larger no doubt in memory, is crowned by a series of episodes – and it is this coherence of hers that bears out the truth of this testimony. ‘As commander’ she was ‘very severe’ and had the men tied to poles. She respected the Muti brigade lieutenant who kept her prisoner for some time because he was courageous (just as the lieutenant respected her for the same reason). Without a moment’s hesitation, together with other comrades, she executed a Fascist who had taken them prisoner and who, in the days of the Liberation, was sickeningly applauding the partisans, but said to him: ‘Idiot, couldn’t you stay hidden away in some hole?’ The only thing that she didn’t understand, because it was in fact hard to understand, was how this Fascist died crying ‘Viva Stalin!’: ‘Did he think he’d save himself that way?’ Finally, after the Liberation, she admitted: ‘All of us had guns at home because we thought we’d still have to use them. With the liberation we hadn’t seen what we had dreamed about so much in the mountains.’155

  By contrast, there were women who refused to shoot and kill out of individual choice and conviction. Testimonies of this kind are numerous. Albina Caviglione Lusso tells of women partisans who took care of the wounded and brought arms and ammunition to the combatants: ‘They never fired, though.’ Tersilla Fenoglio declares: ‘I never used arms; I would never have used them and I would never have fired, because I’ve always had a great fear of doing harm to my neighbour. I only performed defensive actions. It’s absurd, but that’s the way it was, perhaps because of the residual Catholicism that I had.’156

  Even a Communist partisan in so fierce a Resistance movement as the Yugoslav one writes that the Ustasha are killing her ‘because she is honest and has not killed anyone, has never harmed anyone, has helped her brothers and comrades with her thoughts only for them’.157

  These women were convinced that life was not in itself an absolute value (‘it’s better to die honestly than live unworthily’, the Yugoslav writes) but refused to take the lives of others by their own hand. Though having made a clear choice of sides, they did not intend to sacrifice the claims of pity to the political and armed struggle. This model seems to be exemplified not only in women such as ‘mamma Lucia’ (Lucia Apicella), who at Cava dei Tirreni buried both German and Anglo-American soldiers,158 but also mothers, like that of the partisan Nelia Benissone Costa, who, in idealistic solidarity with her daughter, devoted herself to honouring and burying the dead.159 Another partisan, Teresa Cirio, speaks of women who ‘when they learned that that there were dead people in town … cut the hanged men down from the gallows, washed them, and laid them out. Others took red carnations to the cemetery. The graves of the partisans were always all adorned with flowers.’160

  After the Liberation there would be mothers who would prevent those responsible for the killing of their sons from being executed: ‘There’s already one dead person, why do you want to kill another one … who’s a child [14 years old]? You mustn’t take them; you people are guilty too.’161

  Male perplexities, oscillations and contradictions before the women combatants are numerous, for all the encouragement and acknowledgment of the contribution of women in general to the Resistance cause. One command complained of the failure to form women’s SAPs.162 Rumours circulated of the presence of exclusively women’s bands in the area of the Turchino pass in Liguria.163 But, while accentuating the armed presence of individual volunteers, the prevailing tendency was to assign to women tasks that were technically more suitable in that they aroused less suspicion in the enemy, like those of dispatch-riders and informers, or else the more traditional, separate and subaltern ones, of nurse, cook, darner and the like. The general command of the CVL issued a report to all the formations, thereby setting it up as an example, announcing the establishment of a unit of women who ‘iron, sew and darn’, commanded by ‘a Garibaldino who is also head-tailor’. ‘These women’, the report concludes, ‘are given a medical check-up weekly’, this provision being indignantly condemned by the Piedmontese GL.164 ‘Putting clothes away, wrapping parcels … treating the wounded, organising first-aid stations, nursery schools, et cetera’ were the duties that the Communist Party indicated to the women’s sections that were being created in the South, ‘bearing in mind the southern mentality’,165 but clearly this mentality was equally widespread in the North as well.

  What stands out here is a rare and explicit appeal to the combative pacifist tradition of women: ‘You are the wor
thy daughters of those women who in 1915–18, to prevent the departure for the front of young men who were due to go off and get themselves killed by the Germans, lay down across the railroad tracks heedless of the danger to their lives. Your gestures are as admirable as those of your mothers.’166

  Male reticence is particularly visible at the moment of the final parade, after the victory. In Milan – again it is Elsa Oliva who is telling the story – ‘in the march-pasts, the dispatch-riders were made to wear nurses’ arm-bands!’:167 and dispatch-riding was, as I have already said, a function recognised as being particularly suitable for women. When the partisans had entered Alba on 10 October 1944, thereby initiating the brief experience of the free zone, ‘with the men’, wrote Fenoglio,

  the women partisans paraded, in men’s dress, and here some folk began to murmur: ‘Ah, povera Italia!’ [‘Heaven help Italy!’] – because these girls had expressions and bearings that made the citizens start winking. On the eve of the descent the commanders, who had no illusions on this score, had given orders for the women partisans at all costs to stay up in the hills, but the latter had told them where to get off and had come rushing down into the town.168