An RSI soldier about to go on leave to Milan received this letter from a relative: ‘I advise you to come in civilian dress because the partisans are stopping trains and taking carabinieri and soldiers away with them, and they’re knocking the black shirts off on the trains themselves.’22
The dispatching of threatening letters ad personam to Fascist gerarchi and soldiers and to collaborationist bureaucrats was part of this policy aimed at terrorising the enemies. Threatening letters directed at Fascists by the Green Flames are reported by the censors – and one of them, from Bergamo, ends with these words: ‘However things turn out, you shall not escape the punishment you have merited.’23 The Florence CLN sent the vice-podestà Guido De Francisci, whom the Germans had enjoined to report vehicles and other material assigned for public services, the letter, mentioned earlier, that ended: ‘Should you decide to go against our wishes, you will be shot without further notice.’24
I have mentioned the peculiar character that the urban violence of the GAPs acquired and (see Chapter 6), the not always easy relationship between partisan warfare in the mountains and guerrilla warfare in the city. Let me add now that it was not just a strategic problem which, in the final phase, took the form of making sure that a descent into town was not too premature.25 And nor was this only an immediately political question. At the beginning of April 1945, for example, the Communists ordered the transfer into the mountains of about 1,500 Gappists and Sappists of the Carpi area, in order to regain control of the Modena division,26 while the descent into town was feared by Edgardo Sogno, head of the Franchi organisation, because he saw in it ‘baldly revolutionary intentions’.27 Again, in terms of a short-term political project, Leo Valiani attributed the summons, which he supported, of sending the best quadri (leaders) from the mountains down to the town with the intention of using them in the negotiations with the Allies, not to feelings of contempt harboured by town-dwellers for the mountain bands. This in fact had been the accusation levelled at him by Mario Giovana, who, in an impassioned defence of the ethos of the partisans of the upper Piedmont valleys, had taken things beyond the strictly political terms of the controversy.28 It was in fact precisely the overall figure of the mountain partisan that differentiated him not only from the politico who remained in town, but also from the urban fighter. Thus the Resistance too saw the re-emergence of the conflict between the ethic of the alpino and the ethic of the ardito, allowing for all the differences arising from the novelty of the times and the situation, and the obvious divergence between town and mountain. In fact, it is hard not to see in the name given to the ‘brigate e distaccamenti d’assalto Garibaldi’ (‘Garibaldi assault brigades and detachments’) some echo of the ‘reparti d’assalto’ (the arditi) of the First World War, filtered possibly by the albeit unorthodox memory of the ‘Arditi del popolo’. The same could be said about the use of the word fiamma (flame), which had particularly compromising associations (the Fiamme Nere, and so on), as the title adopted by some newspapers and the name chosen by the autonomi of the Green Flames.29
‘In order to act, dirty methods are necessary’, wrote a SAP command. (The SAPs, seen in terms of a mass organisation, at times let themselves take their cue from Gappist practice.30 But far from making these ‘scoundrel’s methods’ a symbol or a myth, as the arditi had taken such pleasure in doing – and which were still best left to complete scoundrels – the Command added: ‘This is how superficial and dishonest individuals went about things, troublemakers of our own and of other parties’, causing numerous arrests.31 Lest we overdo the comparison, it should be added that the ‘golden slumber’ of the arditi behind the lines, and the obsessively solitary and clandestine nature of the GAPs are two utterly contrasting situations.
At the suggestion of the Slovenians, the Natisone divisions decided to create units of arditi. But, as its commissar later wrote, ‘it was a mistake, from both the operational and the political point of view’: the non-arditi felt relegated to second-class combatants, while the arditi took to performing too many reckless acts. So those units were quickly dissolved.32 The Alpino Revelli speaks of colpisti (strikers) in the same spirit: ‘The most buccaneering colpista, if he is not sustained by conscientious courage, by a firm will, is worn down and collapses in combat. The “calm” courage of the colpista is not enough; what is needed is the courage that resists fatigue, exhaustion.’
Revelli draws a revealing comparison with an English paratrooper, Captain Flight, who, though finding himself with the opportunity to shoot at the Germans, did not do so: ‘Perhaps the courage of these people runs out in the mechanical act of jumping, it all finishes there: a very striking courage, which we shouldn’t set great store by, because it’s like that of our colpisti.’33 Dante Livio Bianco makes a clear-cut distinction between soldati and colpisti; he attributes greater ‘fundamental’ moral qualities to the former, and adds that the mountain band of the Cuneo area ‘was, contrary to what many said, not at all a clandestine army’.34 In the zone of the Piave Garibaldi brigade, its commander later recounted that ‘the GAPs never showed any reason for existing and represented, if anything, a disturbance for the brigade, creating confusion and difficulties through their undisciplined and irresponsible actions’.35
These comments, and other similar ones that could be cited, call to mind a fine passage by Marc Bloch: ‘It is a popular fallacy among officers that the man of hot temper, the adventurer or the hooligan, makes the best soldier. That is far from being the truth. I have always noticed that the brutal temperament is apt to break under the strain of prolonged danger.’36
It would be wrong, however, to put the Gappist on a par with the ardito and the colpista. To survive, the Gappists had to rely on an extremely difficult combination of qualities, and indeed there were very few of them, and not all managed to combine these qualities in an ideal fashion: coldness and determination of character, courage and physical dexterity, the most rigorous clandestinity, and solidity of political conviction which, given the need to interpret the struggle in the most severe, ruthless and relentless terms, was the only thing that could safeguard them from deviations and backslidings.
The commissar of the GAPs, says an instruction document,
has to see to it that the altogether special life led by the Gappists does not corrupt their honesty and character. He must make it his business to see that every man who kills feels himself to be an executioner, and not a murderer; that he who does a retrieval raid does so convinced of the justice of his action and not with the sense of feeling himself to be a thief.37
Another task that the commissar had, it was then recalled, was ‘to keep the combatants’ morale high, making clear to them the political aims of and ideals behind the actions, and to keep a check on their private lives, in order to avoid any form of degeneration’.38 Absolute respect for the conspiratorial norms figures in another text, as both a physical and moral safeguard:
The habit that some GAPs have of going to the café every day to play cards, or enjoying themselves at the cinema or clubs, must cease. We must explain that we are soldiers, and thus mobilised in the fight against Fascists and Germans; explain to them how the Party demands that each of its members act as a member of the advance-guard in the fight against the Germans and Fascists, requires the maximum daily activity in seeking out objectives and in the struggle for national liberation; [the Party must] explain to them the danger that lies in frequenting public bars and restaurants, clubs, et cetera.
The author of this document firmly criticised those Gappists who had decided not to perform an action because a woman had shouted, ‘Don’t do it because they’ll shoot my husband’:
This must not happen again. We cannot look after the interests of a single person, one must always look to the general interest. Today there are thousands of men giving their lives every day for liberty, so we must show them our solidarity: we cannot be sentimentalists. We must strike the Fascists and the Germans and strike them hard, men and objects. Each of us must learn to
hate the enemy … We must give the enemy no respite: both day and night the GAPs must be the terror of the Nazi-Fascists.39
Incitements to strike with absolute intransigence appear in ‘middle’- and ‘low’-level sources, as they do in ‘high’-level ones. An example of the former is the reprimand, made very early on, to a commissar because
several ringleaders have not been killed. Take note: no pity for the enemy. In town spies are more difficult to track down. These are doing us all the harm they can with the help of the SS. If they fall into your hands, why pardon or spare them? Exterminate them without pity: and let that serve as a warning to all.40
These draconian commanders’ orders on the field tend to disguise themselves not only as political appeals to fight relentlessly (as early as 10 September 1943 from Radio Milano Libertà, which is to say Radio Moscow, Togliatti had urged his listeners to ‘destroy without pity traitors who place themselves at the service of the foreigner’),41 but also as the directives, real or presumed, of the government of the South. Witness a document of 7 August 1944: ‘Nicoletta must be made to see that both the Allies and our Rome government have given clear instructions in this regard, that is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, wherever and whenever they are found.’42
Another feature appears in the testimonies regarding the Gappists: the tense and obsessive sense of loneliness that hung over this combatant, who was generally compelled to live in absolute and often solitary clandestinity: ‘An existence in which the sensation of being a hunted animal found respite only when it was overcome by the spur of action.’43 A Torinese Gappist has written: ‘The hardest thing to take was the complete isolation in which we were acting, an almost unbearable and at times pitiless isolation’; it had to be numbered among the reasons why ‘even the best among the mountain partisans did not feel up to acting as Gappists in town’.44 There are pages in the memoirs of a Bologna Gappist which well convey the atmosphere that was born when one had to spend days on end shut up in a tiny apartment: ‘Another three days went by, three interminable days of solitude and hunger. We would spend them listless and inert, looking out of the windows, leafing through the few remaining books, hunting down lice and cursing fate’.45
The book by one of the most intrepid and cool-headed Gappists, Giovanni Pesce, mentioned earlier, is full of yet more tragic expressions: ‘alone and hunted’; ‘here I am back at home stretched out on the bed, my eyes fixed on the ceiling’; ‘struggle against fear and solitude’; ‘it’s not the risk, it’s the isolation that wears down the Gappist’; the Gappist ‘no longer has a home, only addresses’; ‘anguished waiting’; ‘my own jailer’. The sublimation suggested to Pesce by a prestigious chief like Ilio Barontini is not enough to liberate him: ‘When you’re alone, the Party is you.’ Pesce well understood those who ‘rather than the terrible and draining isolated struggle prefer that of the mountain formations’, and looked back nostalgically on Spain, where ‘we faced the enemy in combat, face to face’.46 The personalisation of the enemy, for example through tailing him prior to the action, endowed him with a ‘private’ face and demanded of the Gappist a firmer and more ‘abstract’ determination to eliminate him. When in Milan Pesce saw a new comrade coming towards him ‘smiling and cordial’, he immediately said to himself: ‘no one smiles like that after the first actions’, and sent him off to ‘gain practical knowledge’ with the partisans of the Pavese Oltrepò. As for Pesce himself, when a bomb exploded prematurely at Milan station, he found himself a prey to the ‘absurd’ doubt that the Gappist who had been assigned the action, previously reprimanded for being half-hearted in combat, might think he had been deliberately sent to his death.47
Being alone and shut up was, as it were, the symbol of a solitude born above all from the wearing effort to keep morality and inflexibility united in taking the lives of others. Franco Calamandrei, a Gappist with no past experience of anti-Fascist militancy, lucidly described in his diary the tension with which he lived his dual activity as assailant and intellectual. It was a distinction of planes which, though practised to safeguard one’s own moral unity at its deepest level, was felt to be no less harrowing for that:
All day I’ve been dragging around with me a tiredness, a sense of heaviness, of nausea, and have had to struggle with myself not to fall back into the voids of conscience. Then it happens, at a certain point, that beyond disgust, when it is at its height, you find your strength, your faith, your will again … I’m translating Diderot lazily: I’m finding this translation work more and more extraneous.
Elsewhere Calamandrei speaks of the ‘voluptuousness of solitude’, and again of detachment, lack of interest, indifference, tiredness – and exclaims: ‘How much there still is to reclaim within myself!’ When he remembers Giorgio Labò and the joy that his comrade had felt when he had been asked to write an article on Communism and architecture, Calamandrei notes: ‘There was in him, in short, the more or less conscious anxiety to recover his terrain, to free himself from adventure, and the impossibility of actually being able to get away in practice, and the vain effort to resign himself to this condition that he had inadvertently imposed on himself.’
Labò yearned ‘to be sent out of Rome, into some band’; and faced with the death of his friend, Calamandrei needs to believe ‘that death is always just, that the individual prepares it himself, day by day, that each of us dies only when he has to die’.
Making no comment, Calamandrei records the tale of a comrade who, having taken up position in Piazza di Spagna to prepare for the Via Rasella attack, on seeing the German column who were to be exterminated, first says to himself that he couldn’t care less about the death of all those men, and then feels tears running down his cheeks. Calamandrei frees himself from the tragic sense of the situation with the successfully achieved action (‘and I felt full of an elementary, childlike joy’) and with the emotion he experienced at the immense misery of the refugees: ‘Precisely because grief appears so out of proportion with the remedy, precisely for this reason we need to fight and fight so that an end is put to the disproportion.’ Finally, Calamandrei appeals to political conscience as an antidote to the deviations that that type of fighting can lead to: ‘I urge you to resume political life more actively in order to remedy a certain sportismo that is infecting us.’48 In many Communist documents, ‘sporting activity’ meant military activity; and here possibly Calamandrei was keen to warn against the danger that might lurk in that conspiratorial formula.
A fine death and a gratuitous death were not in fact part of Resistance thinking, but of that of Fascism. Two Gappists wrote:
Our Gappists are gifted with courage and they have been demonstrating it for the past ten months, but that doesn’t mean that they feel themselves to be dedicated to certain death. A bullet through your head in a cornfield fighting against the enemy … That’s not how we see things. We love life and put up with death with dignity and pride. Like [Giuseppe] Perotti and [Eusebio] Giambone.49
The GAP action that has aroused most discussion is, together with that of Via Rasella, the killing of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, which occurred in Florence on 15 April 1944. The most considered comment to appear at the time, Carlo Dionisotti’s, begins with the words: ‘the violent end of Giovanni Gentile is only an episode in the crisis that Italy is going through’.50 Another resistente, Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, who had originally expressed disapproval at the attack, has recently written that ‘only the fame of the victim made him a special case’.51
These are opinions inspired by repugnance at giving preferential treatment to illustrious personages in the tragedy. But it is true that not only Gentile’s fame, but also his being a great intellectual give his case a symbolic value that, on the one hand, particularly highlights the civil war context in which his killing took place, and on the other raises the question of the relationship between the responsibility of the man of culture and that of the politician. ‘They are even killing philosophers’, was Benedetto Croce’s comment.52 Nece
ssary and useful, but marginal to this problem, appear the many investigations into the dynamics of the attack, into who its originators were, into when exactly the decision was taken to carry it out, into the possibility, claimed by some, of Fascists having been behind it.53
The essence of the problem was clearly formulated at the time by Antonio Banfi when, in an article devoted to the killing of the philosopher, he posed this question: ‘He was a scholar, they say, a philosopher, a man of culture and a man who protected, defended culture and always celebrated the values of the spirit, and was this not a sufficient shield against his political errors?’ The answer was a firm no, argued by denying whoever it might be in the ‘inebriating and terrible struggle’ that was in progress, a ‘privilege of salvation’, and all the more so in the case of someone who ‘has made his intelligence and his knowledge into an instrument of deceit and perversion’.54
The problem was therefore that of the political responsibility of the intellectual, understood, in this case, as the basis of the legitimacy of the action aimed at killing him. In other words, the problem of the relationship between thought, word, and action. What needs identifying is the point at which the function of the word as an instrument of action prevails over its function of expressing and transmitting thought.55 Any judgment on the link between Gentile’s philosophy and Fascism is, from this point of view, marginal, even if it is natural that in those circumstances his famous speech about the cudgel being equal to the sermon as an instrument of thought was widely recalled, not least by Banfi.56 But there is no doubt that the Gentile who supported the Social Republic and accepted important positions in it like that of president of the Accademia d’Italia, the Gentile who publicly thanked ‘il condottiere della grande Germania’, and who invoked ‘yes, the cessation of the struggles, save that vital one against treasonous instigators, whether they have sold themselves or are in good faith, but inebriated with extermination’, thereby faithfully repeating the words used by the Fascists, had stepped well beyond the threshold which, even with the flaring up of a civil war, ought to mark the zone of immunity accorded to a thinker.57 In Gentile’s case, however, his status as a philosopher conferred on him greater force as an active Fascist. It would have been odd if this circumstance had played in his favour.
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