Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Calandra’s first attempt to round up the band came within a few weeks of taking over the command of the station. It was a fiasco. He had completed his investigations and applied for one hundred and fifty warrants for the arrest of members or accomplices of the band. At that time many of the bandits, including Giuliano, frequently slept in their own houses in Montelepre, and Calandra, who had laid his plans on the basis of information supplied by police confidants in the civil population, expected to catch a large number by surprise. The arrest warrants were applied for on November 4th, 1944, a few extra pairs of boots were begged or borrowed from somewhere, and the twelve excited carabinieri awaited Calandra’s signal to pounce. But that very night, without any warning to Calandra, a large body of ordinary police – the Pubblica Sicurezza – descended on the town, provoking a mass stampede of wanted persons to the mountains. All the bandits were, of course, able to slip away in the rumpus. This was only the first of many frustrations to be endured by the Maresciallo in his one-sided battle with the bandit, which was to be terminated so abruptly, at the very moment when he felt victory to be within his reach, by his transfer to another part of Sicily.

  9

  ASERIES of discussions was arranged between Giuliano and Sicilian Separatist emissaries in an effort to work out some necessarily hasty plan of action for the projected rising. In the end, Giuliano demanded a meeting with the Separatist leaders themselves to settle the final arrangements. This encounter took place on the Sagana bridge on the Palermo highway, and only fifteen minutes from the centre of the city. Giuliano, still apparently not entirely convinced of the bona fides of the people he had to deal with, had chosen a position where the road crawled through a naked amphitheatre of rock, and the approaches to the bridge could be kept under observation for miles.

  The whole central executive of the Separatist party put in an appearance on this occasion, and, leaning on the parapet of this bridge while his bodyguard sauntered up and down, fingers on the triggers of their tommy-guns, Giuliano more or less dictated his conditions.

  Concetto Gallo, the Separatists’ commander-in-chief, had come in the hope of convincing Giuliano of the strategic necessity of moving his whole band right across Sicily to the Caltagirone district in the southeast of the island. The reason for this switch in Gallo’s plans was that, since the opening of negotiations with Giuliano, the Separatists had been successful in enrolling an important complex of outlaw bands operating in this area – which, by the way, was Gallo’s home country. These were known collectively as the Niscemesi. For a year or two they had been organised in small groups of ten or a dozen men and had plagued a wide area of roadless countryside centring on the small town of Niscemi, to the south of Caltagirone. More recently they had come together in a loose confederation. There were a lot of them, and Gallo seemed to think that, properly fed, armed, and disciplined, they could be turned into passable soldiers. The Niscemesi were to be joined, when the moment came, by several hundred young enthusiasts Gallo had enlisted in the towns of eastern Sicily. Now, if only Giuliano could be induced to make the move, the Separatists would possess a real army. The main force, dispersed through the wooded mountains round Niscemi, would fight a classic guerilla war of attrition with the government forces, and in the meanwhile the carabinieri, parcelled out in tiny groups of two, three, and four men in towns and villages all over Sicily would be pinned down by a series of attacks on their barracks.

  The Gallo plan was turned down emphatically. Giuliano quite simply refused to budge from the mountains of Montelepre. He proposed that his contribution to the revolt should be massive attacks on the various carabinieri headquarters in his own area, synchronised with the action planned by Gallo in eastern Sicily, in such a way as to confront the authorities virtually with a second front. He showed himself determined not to budge from this decision, and in the end the Separatists could do nothing but agree. And now the question of financing Giuliano’s campaign in western Sicily came up, and this called forth some strange proposals. An Italian White Paper, Armed Bands of the E.V.I.S. (Voluntary Army for Sicilian Independence) and their Criminal Activities, gives an account of what was said.

  … Giuliano asked for a payment of ten million lire to be enabled to put his plan into action, but the Duca di Carcaci, Baron La Motta, and Gallo showed themselves somewhat perplexed and undecided over this. Their friend Franzone intervened with the suggestion that it would be possible to raise the necessary funds by kidnapping wealthy persons and holding them to ransom. The suggestion was well received by Carcaci, Gallo and La Motta, the last-named offering to point out suitable victims chosen from people of his acquaintance. Giuliano, however, rejected the proposal with disdain. At this point La Motta undertook to hand over to Giuliano the sum of one million lire.

  One result of Giuliano’s refusal to move from Montelepre was that the date of the insurrection had to be put back so as to give Gallo time to enlist more volunteers for his eastern front. Most of these were students left at a loose end by the closing down of the universities, and young white-collared employees who were without work as a result of the postwar chaos. Recruiting went on all through October and November, and the volunteers arriving by train and bus in Caltagirone paraded the streets wearing Separatist armbands and singing patriotic songs. From Caltagirone they were taken to the Separatists’ camp in a wood on the top of the nearby mountain San Mauro, on Concetto Gallo’s estate. Here they were fitted out with uniforms and given guns. By comparison with the police, they were extremely well-armed. Baron La Motta had helped himself to a small arsenal left on his land by the retreating Italian forces at the time of the invasion, and these arms were duly distributed among his followers.

  At the San Mauro camp, the volunteers met for the first time the bandits who were to be their companions in arms, and their high spirits were a little chilled. Unlike the stalwart malefactors who formed the hard core of the Giuliano band, and in spite of their fearsome reputation, the Niscemesi were on the whole a scarecrow collection. Most of them were ex-day labourers or drovers who had committed some petty offence and had taken to the maquis to avoid the certainty of spending two or three years in prison while awaiting trial. Since then they had become of necessity robbers, but very few had committed a murder. There was little that was warlike in the appearance of the Niscemesi, but much that was pitiful and ridiculous. One man had a huge, clownish head, and bandy legs; another was quite bald and toothless; a third looked like the early Charlie Chaplin; yet another suffered from St Vitus’s dance. Their absurd names, in translation, are straight out of Henry IV: Muckrake, Tasty, Shuffle and Chewed-Nose. Concetto Gallo explained to the disconcerted townsmen that these men had all given an undertaking to desist henceforth from criminality and to repay their debt to society by dedicating their lives to the liberation of their country.

  There was no foofah about democracy in these transactions. The gentlemen volunteers were housed and fed separately and considered themselves officers, and the bandits cleaned up and ran errands for them, carrying out their orders with almost servile alacrity. Much as some of the young volunteers might have wanted to have their blood curdled with stories of desperate deeds, they soon found that this subject was taboo in bandit circles, and that all the Niscemesi really wanted to talk about was the families they had been driven to abandon, for whom they felt an extreme nostalgia. Most of them refused even to admit that they were criminals, and argued that any temporary irregularities of conduct should be blamed on the abnormal times. Above all, they longed to regain their respectability. As the White Paper puts it: ‘Persuaded and inflamed by Concetto Gallo’s diabolical suggestive powers, these men sought to camouflage a loss of moral virginity by sacrifice to an ideal.’ One thought constantly troubled them. Having in most cases robbed only, they would now be expected to kill. Taking the measure of the young city gentlemen, on whom they waited at table and whose soiled underlinen they washed, they realised that it was they, the Niscemesi, who would do most of the fighting when the
time came. The army commander, Concetto Gallo, had assured them that they were now regular combatants, and whereas before it had been absolutely wrong, for example, to steal sheep to keep from starving to death, it would now be right and commendable to shoot down carabinieri from ambush for a political cause. The trouble was, what was to happen if things did, after all, go wrong? The bandits’ instinct told them that the lads from good families would be let off lightly and regarded as misguided rather than vicious; but should the worst happen, they knew that they themselves need expect no mercy.

  * * *

  October, November, and most of December passed; time hung heavy and morale began to wilt. Concetto Gallo was expecting more volunteers to bring his force up to a minimum of a thousand; more weapons, including artillery; and especially more money. Nothing of this arrived. Recruiting declined to a trickle. A tank hidden in a cowshed on one of the barons’ estates was to have furnished at least a symbol of armoured might, but this could not be started. Rats had found their way into the engine and gnawed the insulation off the electrical wiring – an echo of the quandary of Sennacherib’s expedition against Israel, immobilised by bow-string-devouring field mice. Gallo did his best to combat the gathering dejection by tightening up discipline. One of the bandits, an ex-army NCO, undertook to drill the volunteers, and many otherwise unfruitful hours were used up in sloping, ordering and presenting arms. As for the bandits, they were kept busy scrubbing the floors of the farm buildings converted into barracks. When nothing else could be found for them to do, Gallo had them marched round and round the base of the mountain San Mauro, swinging their arms and shouting ‘Left-right! Left-right!’ until they croaked with fatigue.

  The niggardliness that Giuliano had encountered when he had asked for funds was much in evidence here too, and had a paralysing effect on the liberation army’s activities. Some of the volunteers had undoubtedly been attracted to the Separatists’ standard by the promise that they would be paid 400 lire a day – at that time about equal to the pay of a general in the Italian Army. But not a single recruit had received any money at all, and it was obvious that the news of this breakdown in the Separatists’ financial arrangements had reached the ears of many of those who had intended joining the movement, and caused them to change their minds. It began to look as though the multimillionaires who had organised the revolt expected to get their rebellion without having to pay for it. Two hundred volunteers who had been enlisted at Caltanissetta cried off at about this time, when their demand for pay in advance could not be met.

  Soon even food supplies began to run short, and now the time came when the bandits were to be called upon to place their special aptitudes at the service of the cause. For three months they had led a quiet and self-respecting life composed largely of guard duties and domestic chores. Now they listened unhappily while their leader, Gallo, assured them that to ransack farmhouses and carry off cattle could not be classed as banditry so long as they were provided with proper requisition orders signed by him. Thus exhorted, but still dubious, the bandits were dispatched to resume their reign of terror through the countryside. When they returned with the looted sacks of corn and the cows they had driven off, they thoughtfully brought a few women with them, and some of these, dazzled with the picture painted for them of their future in a free and joyously independent Sicily, were persuaded to remain.

  The difficulty was that hardly any of the volunteers, being townsmen, could ride, and the distances that had to be covered in this largely roadless countryside, across the swarthy mountains between one isolated farmhouse and the next, were too large to be attempted on foot. This meant that either the bandits had to be allowed a free hand, or that Gallo, their commander, had to accompany them in person and keep an eye on what went on. On one such occasion he was recognised by two of his neighbours, dressed in a city suit and unsuitably mounted on a recently purloined racehorse, at the head of a company of ten or eleven bandits, all of them dressed in black-market American uniforms.

  A full account of this singular expedition was later made public. It was undertaken at a time when the need for money to pay the waverers, as well as for rations to feed the half-starved men – reduced to a diet of American dried milk and salted horseflesh – had become crucial. The targets of the raid were rich landowners who had been ready to pay lip-service to the cause, but now could not be induced to part with a single lira. At the first call, the party drew an emphatic blank. Two previous frustrations had been experienced here. On the occasion of their first visit Gallo and his bandits had imposed a patriotic contribution of two million lire on the proprietor of the estate, and when four days later the money had not been forthcoming, the landowner had been fined an additional three million lire, and the bandits had ridden round smashing up a few agricultural machines by way of a warning. Such farmhouses – which in the case of one of the large estates would consist of a complex of administrative buildings, barns, and warehouses – would be as a matter of course defended by armed guards, traditionally recruited from the Mafia. On the third visit the band met with the same headshakes and bleak mafioso stares as before. The mafiosi were too few in numbers to fight off an armed band, but their refusal to knuckle under to Gallo’s threats showed that they believed that time was on their side. This time the bandits wrecked the outhouse where the landowner kept his wine, smashed up the wine barrels, and doused petrol over the floor. One of them then aimed a flame-thrower through the window. The result was an explosion which blew out the walls and brought the building down, burying the bandit with the flame-thrower under the ruins.

  The home journey proved to be almost equally unfruitful. The rich landowners let it be known through their guards that they had no intention of paying up. The bandits punished the first one by shooting all the cattle in sight, and from the second farm they carried off three horses. This was the day’s one success, but to offset it, they had failed to add a single lira to their funds, a member of the band had been killed, and they were now faced with the implacable hostility of the whole countryside.

  The Duca di Carcaci appeared on a morale-boosting visit, effusively embraced Gallo, wrung the officers’ hands, and pinned on medals. Like Gallo, he was an excellent and inspiring speaker. He congratulated the volunteers on their many sacrifices, and the bandits on their progress along the road to moral regeneration, but he had no money to give them. Another distinguished visitor to the camp was Giuliano, who inspected the troops, kept his thoughts to himself, and hastily departed. Introducing the great ally from the west, Gallo told his men: ‘Patience. In a few days we shall occupy Caltagirone.’

  But as the days became weeks and the possibility of action seemed to become even more remote, scepticism began to corrode the spirits of Gallo’s army. A more vigorous discipline, the posting of sentries, and the surrounding of the barracks with barbed wire, giving it the appearance of a prison camp, failed to prevent the desertions. By the beginning of December the Separatist army of eastern Sicily numbered fifty-eight men. At about this time two loiterers captured in the vicinity of the camp were presumed to be carabinieri in disguise, and a plan was conceived by which the suspects, if indeed they were members of the police, should carry a false report of the Separatist strength back to their superiors. The guards who led them blindfold about the camp, were instructed to let drop casual remarks about tanks and artillery hidden in the wood. In one way the trick was effective. The Italian military authorities were indeed misled into the belief that the Separatist force was much stronger and well equipped than it actually was. But their reaction was not to call off their projected attack, but enormously to strengthen the units employed to carry it out. By the end of December, Monte San Mauro was surrounded by five thousand troops with full armoured and artillery support. This imposing force was commanded by three generals. On the mountain top the 58 men of the Separatist army waited for battle to be joined.

  * * *

  The guiding principle of the battle that followed was caution, and this was adhered
to by both sides. The attack on the Separatists’ positions began soon after dawn, and by ten o’clock a spirited exchange of fire was continuing. The tanks lumbered into position, but as so often happens, turned out to be useless in rugged and wooded terrain and were withdrawn, leaving the artillery to pound away somewhat vaguely in the general direction of the enemy. There was a prodigious expenditure of ammunition on both sides. The Separatists made use of the cover given by a network of irrigation ditches on the mountain’s lower slopes continually to shift the position of their machine-guns – a tactic which served to confirm the three generals in command of the attack in their pessimistic evaluation of the strength of the force opposing them. An infantry attack was tried and then hastily called off when a fusillade of bullets whistled round the ears of the attackers, and the army settled down to mortar the Separatists’ positions for the next few hours. Several of the defenders’ machine-guns jammed as a result of the almost uninterrupted fire they kept up in reaction to this treatment, but by nightfall, when action was suspended, they appear to have suffered no losses.

  Next morning brought a brisk renewal of mortar fire from the government side plus a cannonade from anti-tank guns that had been manoeuvred into position during the night. The first newspaper reports of the conflict appeared. One of them described the mountain of San Mauro as being honeycombed, in the manner of the Maginot line, with reinforced concrete passages leading to a number of strong points, all of them linked to a main fortress on the summit of the mountain, which had been constructed in conformity with ‘the most up-to-date theories of defensive military technique’.