LITMIR.BIZ

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last very long.²³

      The Church had hesitated to take sides in the conflict. Austria and Italy were both Catholic countries, but Italian Catholics had fewer qualms than Pope Benedict XV. Don Luigi Sturzo, the priest who would found the Partito popolare italiano (PPI) in 1919, was an interventionist himself. Military chaplains were in fact as war–loving as nationalist officers. Mussolini recollected in his diary that the most patriotic speech he had heard in sixteen months of war was in a church, on 31 December 1916, when he went to hear Mass.²⁴

      Thus the interventionist front was variegated. Its main pillar was constituted, of course, by the nationalist bloc, but alongside it was a motley crew of liberals and socialists of various hues. The interventionists had the advantage which in times of war always goes with those who wrap themselves in the national flag, since every defeat can be attributed to the demoralisation induced by the opponents of the war, while every victory is a vindication of one’s position. Thus the debacle suffered by the Italian armies at Caporetto in October 1917, essentially due to military causes, had spectacular political consequences, not only because it led to the replacement of General Luigi Cadorna as Chief of Staff and the resignation of Paolo Boselli as Prime Minister, but because it was used to excoriate the entire political establishment. The defeat, it was widely held, was due not just to Cadorna, but also to the defeatist attitude and the lack of patriotism of so many Italians (a view enhanced by the surrender of a large number of Italian troops at Caporetto), to the weakness and pusillanimity of those who had ruled Italy since unification – a judgement made not only by Cadorna, as was to be expected, but also by communists such as Antonio Gramsci and liberals such as Luigi Albertini, editor of the Corriere della sera.²⁵ Caporetto led to a renewed bout of febrile patriotism. By then this had also overtaken most socialist members of Parliament, including the veteran leader Filippo Turati, and leading trade unionists, even though the PSI refused to abandon, at least officially, the slogan of nè aderire nè sabotare. But there was also a corresponding surge of anti–war feeling. Economic difficulties compounded the opposition to the war, causing unrest in the countryside and in factories. Emergency measures and legislation permitting the banning by the military of religious processions and military–style parades were introduced. Legally binding agreements were introduced to achieve some social peace in the countryside.²⁶

      Mussolini’s early decision to support the war added to the complexity of the pro–war bloc. At first he had been a neutralist, but he soon changed his mind and embraced interventionism on the not unfounded ground that the war would bring about a major social transformation in Italy. As a member of the ‘left’ of the Socialist Party, he had long been disdainful of the timid reformism of traditional socialists like Turati. When, in the pages of the socialist paper Avanti!, Mussolini declared himself a supporter of ‘active neutrality’, arguing that ‘those who win will have a history, those who were absent will have none. If Italy is absent she will be the land of the dead, the land of the cowards,’ he was immediately expelled from the PSI (29 November 1914). Mussolini’s interventionism permitted him to break with the left of the Socialist Party and situated him in a political milieu far more profitable for his subsequent political career, even though at first his ‘revolutionary interventionism’ caused some anxieties in the Ministry of War and the high command of the armed forces.²⁷ He was still a man of the left, but as he was increasingly trusted by the nationalists, he became less and less ‘revolutionary’ and more and more nationalist. By January 1915 the motivations he gave for entering the war had become indistinguishable from those of the traditional nationalist right: ‘We have to decide: either war or let’s stop this farce about being a Great Power. Let’s build casinos, hotels, brothels and let’s get fat. A people can have even such ideals. Getting fat is the ideal of inferior zoological specimens.’²⁸

      The language used and the sentiments expressed tallied with the nationalist interventionist narrative which contrasted the new and young Italy, looking optimistically towards the future, with the old Italy – conservative, neutralist, dominated by parliamentary imbeciles whose vacuous debates paralysed the country. Mussolini’s polemical attacks on the old establishment were conducted vigorously from the columns of his new, staunchly pro–war, newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. This made him popular among young veterans as well as modernists and avant–garde poets à la Marinetti.

      Intellectuals such as Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini seized upon the occasion of the war to point out how ‘sick’ Italy had become under the existing political establishment. A revolution of ideas had become necessary, and it would have to be one which would not be afraid of using teppisti (thugs), for as Prezzolini wrote in 1914: ‘One doesn’t make revolutions either with scholars or with people who wear white gloves. A teppista counts for more than a university professor when one is trying to throw up a barricade or smash down the doors of a bank …’²⁹ Perhaps Prezzolini was already thinking of Mussolini.

      The ambiguity in Mussolini’s ideology, far from being a handicap, turned to his advantage. The ideological realignment occurring in the country as a whole favoured those in search of novelties, and as we know, new ideas are far more flexible and formless than old ones. The Italy which was coming out of the war was quite different from the country which had entered it. The ‘total’ nature of the war was evident in all belligerent countries, but it hit Italy more than France, Germany or Great Britain. Not in the sense that more people died – casualties were proportionately higher in France – but because, before the war, there had been less of a national consciousness in Italy than in most of the other participants. The war helped shape it.

      Southern peasants – hitherto barely aware they were Italians – had been drafted in large numbers, dressed in the same uniform beside students and workers from other parts of Italy, and led to fight under one flag in the north–easternmost corner of a country they hardly knew. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which these recruits developed a strong sense of national consciousness, but they certainly developed a discipline they had never experienced before, and a marked feeling of community for those who fought and died alongside them. They also experienced violence and brutality. The number of Italian casualties in the Great War was extremely high: 650,000 dead and one million wounded. The number of casualties would have been even higher had not the high command acted far more prudently in 1918 (when the casualties fell to 143,000, against 520,000 in 1917). The victory of Vittorio Veneto in 1918 partly compensated for the losses suffered at Caporetto, and was exploited to the utmost by the Italian chiefs of staff. In reality, by then the morale of the Austrian troops had completely collapsed, and many were in open rebellion against their officers.³⁰

      War anger united disparate veterans around the vision of a different Italy, where those who had paid a high price would see their suffering recognised by a grateful motherland. Most, of course, saw the war as an inevitable evil over which they had little control. Used to obey and to be subservient, they accepted the war as one accepts a natural catastrophe. Giuseppe Capacci, a soldier in 1915–16, kept a diary written with uncommon literary skill (in civilian life he was a Tuscan sharecropper who had had only three years of schooling), in which there is hardly a word of hatred towards the enemy or a whiff of patriotism. The main theme is a resigned acceptance of his fate: ‘We wanted to know where we would be taken,’ he wrote, ‘but it was useless: a soldier knows nothing until he has arrived. Some thought we were going to Albania, others to the Isonzo …’³¹ In October 1916 he got lucky: he was wounded in the arm and taken to the relative safety of a military hospital, where the presence of nurses from the Red Cross reminded him of the comfort of feminine company, of mothers and sisters: ‘Those who have not experienced the war do not know how pleasurable it is to return to a semblance of civilian life.’³² The only social criticism he expressed

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