Having done is military service with the Bersaglieri between 1905 and 1906 (De Felice, 1965, Appendix: 665-7), Mussolini was assigned to the same corps as a private in the 33rd battalion of the 11th regiment. The Bersaglieri corps was formed in Piedmont in 1836 for the purpose of upsetting the enemy with accurate marksmanship and speed, defending mountain positions, protecting retreats and assisting in ambushes. These tasks were symbolically represented in the distinct design of the corps’ hat: in particular its wide brim had been devised to prevent soldiers from dosing off on the ground, whereas the plumes were for camouflage behind trees and bushes from where the soldier was to leap unexpectedly (Anon, 1976: 1-9). To be sure, by 1914 all this had long since formed part of a mythical cachet. For one thing, the tasks of the Bersaglieri were by then indistinguishable from the infantry in general, particularly as regards the task of domestic policing (Rochat, 1991: 45-50). For another, entrenched stasis and long-range weapons had necessitated the abandonment of decorative luxuries in battle, since these rendered the soldier unnecessarily visible and more easily picked off. In the opening phases of the Great War, for example, many a Frenchman had paid with his life for the fancy red stripe down the side of his trousers (Keegan, 1999: 85). Likewise, the plumes in the Bersaglieri’s hat had become a dangerously outdated nicety, useful only as a component of dress uniform, whereas the wide brim was clearly not indicated for cramped trench conditions. Even so, the 30 kg backpack was not the only weight carried by Mussolini as he headed for the front: he also bore a symbolic baggage the significance of which he would have to reassess in the context of trench warfare immobility.
Mussolini was positioned on the far northern sector of the Isonzo front in the area between Monte Nero and the Iavorcek, approached via Udine and Caporetto (see Fig. 3.1). On arrival at Udine, on 13 September, Mussolini noted ‘interminable supply trains immobile along kilometres and kilometres of track’. He commented: ‘What an enormous amount of effort is required to supply and provision a fighting army!’ The following day he again observed ‘interminable lines of trucks and lorries of all types coming and going incessantly . . . One has the impression that the war is near.’ Then: ‘The sound of cannon thunder reaches us from afar. I love this life of movement, rich with great and humble things.’
Already, then, Mussolini had begun to observe the enormous quantities of supplies needed to put and keep a modern army at the front. He had also heard the sound of the weapon that was predominating in the present war. Yet he was still immersed in a concept of ‘movement’. As he was moving forward on 15 September he passed through San Pietro Natisone, one of seven towns on the Italian side of the border where Slovene was spoken. Then he approached the old border, noting that the Italians were beginning to make themselves at home: ‘The Austrian road signs have gone.’ However, the removal of signs did not alter the contradiction underlying the Mazzinian conception of Italy’s frontiers. Once beyond the old border, in the village of Robich, Mussolini asked a boy his name. ‘“Stanko”’, replied the boy. ‘“Then what?”’ asked Mussolini inquisitively. But the boy did not reply. Mussolini was then informed that the boy’s surname was Robancich. ‘A decidedly Slav name’, wrote the diarist. Mussolini’s investigation into the local population finished without further comment. How did he give expression to the new but contradictory Italy emerging in this early phase of the war? Having passed through Caporetto he reached the river Isonzo on 16 September and wrote: ‘The Isonzo! I have never seen clearer waters than those of the Isonzo. Strange! I knelt upon the cold water and drank a sip with devotion. Sacred river!’
According to anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, events such as this represent the first of three phases of rites of passage. Following a baptismal separation from a profane and impure world, the initiate goes through a period of trial on the margin (liminal phase) without which he/she cannot be integrated (or reintegrated) into the community. When the water used is not ordinary but sacred (as it is in Mussolini’s definition of the Isonzo) initiates are accepted into a religious fraternal order (Van Gennep, 1981: 10ff, 55, 66). Mussolini, too, characterized the community into which he had entered as a religious-fraternal one, though he was keen to establish that the religion in question was of a secular type. He had a long-standing aversion to religion and the Catholic Church, the most recent expression of which was his anything but commiserating comment on the death of Giuseppe Sarto, Pope Pius X, on 20 August 1914 (OO, VI: 333). In a diary entry of 19 September he reported how his captain referred to war as ‘“the most sacred and most bitter of duties a citizen has towards the Nation”’ and how another spoke of ‘“the religion of duty!”’ The religion of duty and sacred devotion to the nation: Mazzini is present in all but name. On 19 October Mussolini observed that ‘Father Michele, the regiment chaplain, has arrived. But he’s itching to be off.’ He wrote on 1 November that ‘it has been announced that Father Michele will say mass to the Command. But from my company nobody moves.’ The day after he asked: ‘Are these men religious?’ and answered: ‘I hardly think so. They swear often and with pleasure. They almost all carry a medal of a saint or the Madonna, but this is equivalent to a lucky charm. It’s a type of sacred mascot.’ The evidence supports Mussolini’s representation of the soldiers’ approach to religion. Despite claiming later that they were for the most part satisfied with their wartime work, chaplains were actually convinced that, with the exception of the Alpini, soldiers were not particularly religious. The men swore a lot and at times this had an anti-clerical and even anti-God content. As regards Father Michele’s uneasiness, chaplains in fact spent little time among the men, and were often in a hurry to get away from the front lines. They ran through confessions and were seen by the soldiers as malingerers (Morozzo della Rocca, 1980: esp. Chs 1, 4 and 5).
The religious-fraternal Mazzinian community of Mussolini’s war diary was one in which class distinctions and military rank were disappearing. On 19 September he wrote: ‘I note - with pleasure, with joy - that between officers and soldiers the most cordial camaraderie reigns.’ Officers were ‘more . . . like brothers . . . than superiors’. In his first morale-boosting talk that same day the captain assured the men that in him they would find ‘“not only a superior, but a father, and a brother” ’. Mussolini observed: ‘You can speak with an officer without having to stand to attention.’ The uniform was ‘almost abolished’. Captains and lieutenants, and especially non-commissioned lieutenants, underpinned the fraternal and popular nature of the warrior community: ‘With these officers’, he again stated on 19 September, ‘anyone who speaks of a reinforcement of militarism with the inevitable Italian victory is living in another world.’ This was because the present war was ‘made by peoples and not by traditional armies’. Indeed, ‘the enormous majority of Italian officers have come, with mobilization, from civilian life. All the subalterns are non-commissioned lieutenants or junior grade lieutenants and they fight and die valiantly.’ The evidence bears out Mussolini’s observations. Of the 45,000 officers available in August 1914, about 20,000 were non-commissioned, and in 1914 almost all of these were lieutenants or junior lieutenants (Rochat, 1991: 114-15). For Mussolini, the large presence of this socio-military stratum meant that the fraternal warrior community was underpinned by consent rather than coercion. On 30 September he defined one captain as ‘a man who knows men, a soldier who knows soldiers. He doesn’t need to resort to disciplinary measures to make sure that everyone carries out their duties.’ On 14 November a lieutenant admonished a private who was complaining about the cold. Mussolini wrote that even so the officer adopted a ‘subdued voice’, recognized the cold was unbearable and sought a change of guard, which was duly conceded by the captain. All this contributed to the fact that, as Mussolini wrote on 16 October, ‘nobody says “I’m going back to my home town”; what they say is “I’m going back to Italy”. For perhaps the first time Italy appears as a sole and living reality, as the common Nation, in the consciences of so many of its sons.’
To what degree did the experience of combat in the second phase of Van Gennep’s schema correspond to the Isonzo baptism and its fraternal communal corollary? The baptismal ceremony at the Isonzo was not the only community- forging ritual of its kind. The following day, 17 September, a soldier was injured by an enemy shell. Another shell detonated near Mussolini, covering him and others with leaves and earth. That evening Mussolini noted that they had been ‘baptized by the fire of cannon’. Unlike its ritual cousin on the Isonzo, this baptismal ceremony was more overtly associated with the forging of a fraternal community: on 19 September Mussolini wrote that ‘the life of continued risks binds our spirits together’. Brotherhood produced from this type of experience is what during the Second World War American psychologists and sociologists noted as the ‘small group’ or ‘buddy’ syndrome. Acts of group solidarity, loyalty towards fighting comrades and fear of letting others down are crucial in generating group cohesion and improving military performance (Stouffer, 1949, II: 118-27). Anthropologists see the phenomenon as a ‘kinship morality’. This goes beyond ‘fictive brotherhood’ (such as adoption) and conflates kinship and friendship into what Meyer Fortes called ‘amity’. The fraternal order becomes a peculiarly morally charged one in which the readiness to risk one’s life for one’s ‘kin’ is informed by the desire to guarantee the continuation of the social order in-the- making (Fortes, 1969: 110). Joseph Henderson relays that individual altruistic gestures and the renouncing of all personal ambition during the liminal phase are symbolic of death as a necessary prelude to rebirth (Henderson, 1984: 32).
Mussolini’s war diary reveals elements of these socio-psychological and anthropological categories. We read how on 18 September in the heat of rifle and machine gun exchanges ‘the fire is of an infernal intensity’, with the real (rifle and machine gun) and metaphorical (hell) functions of ‘fire’ here at work. Right at that point, following a cry of ‘“Hit the deck! Hit the deck!”’ Mussolini wrote: ‘But I must get up and give my place to an injured soldier whose arms have been shattered by the explosion of a bomb.’ He then took a blanket and covered the soldier, letting the reader know in passing that the blanket was his own (la mia coperta), that the weather was cold and hence that he was making a personal sacrifice. Mussolini also made the confrontation with death necessary for the return to life. On 10 October he noted that ‘today, for the first time, my life was in danger’. He had in fact narrowly escaped being struck by flying shrapnel. An identical event occurred on 17 October, and Mussolini kept count: ‘For the second time in seven days I have run the serious and immediate risk of death.’
Mussolini was not documenting only his own experiences of war. The intermingling of the real and symbolic confrontation with death was the experience of the entire warrior community. This he demonstrated with particular reference to injuries. On 19 September he wrote of a soldier who, despite having had a leg torn apart by a bomb, had a ‘serene face and delicate profile. He asks for a sip of coffee. A cigarette. And they carry him away.’ The following day a corporal fell into Mussolini’s arms. The diarist wrote: ‘He is only injured. His face is covered with dust and blood. The injuries are on his legs . . . He is calm, tranquil. Not a cry, not a moan. He keeps it in like a good soldier.’ On 9 October: ‘There is an injured man of the 8th company being carried on a stretcher. A bullet hit him while he was warming himself at the fire. He hums and smokes.’ In summing up his impressions of his various contacts with the injured men, and how they made light of their injuries, Mussolini wrote on 18 October: ‘This is the product of the environment in which we live. No injured soldier wants to appear weak and afraid at the sight of his own blood in front of his comrades. But there’s a deeper reason. You don’t moan over an injury when you run the continued risk of death. The injury is the lesser evil.’
Injury was therefore a surrogate for death and hence for rebirth which could only come through death. This interpretation is confirmed by an article written by Mussolini on 24 March 1915, in which he quoted the poet Enotrio Romano as saying that behind Giuseppe Mazzini ‘“a dead people placed itself”’, to which Mussolini added that the Italian people ‘slept a profound sleep, like that of death’ (OO, VII: 275-7). In the war diary entry of 2 November we read: ‘If old Enotrio Romano came back to the world and saw these men who are marvellous in their tenacity, in their resistance, in their abnegation, he would not say as he once said: Our Nation is contemptible!’ (Mussolini’s italics). Enotrio Romano was the pseudonym which the poet Giosue Carducci (1835-1907) used for his ardently impatient patriotic works. The two poems quoted by Mussolini are from the collection Giambi ed epodi (1867-72). The first is from the sonnet ‘Mazzini’ (c. 1870) in which Carducci referred to the third Italy (after Rome and the Communes) as a cemetery (Carducci, 1959: 171-3). The second quotation is from the ode ‘In morte di Giovanni Cairoli’ (1870). This poem is strongly Jacobin in its accusations against Italy’s ‘traitors and cowards’, and melancholic over Cairoli’s death in 1869 (due to wounds received in 1867 in the Papal territories), not to mention the incompleteness of Italian unification (Carducci, 1959: 89-99). Carducci was strongly anti-clerical, since he saw Papal power as an obstacle to national unity (Salinari and Ricci, 1975: 799-832). But while his Mazzinianism and anti-clericalism were also key elements of Mussolini’s war diary, unlike the world of Giambi ed epodi Mussolini’s diary reveals a fully realized Mazzinian Italy reborn in the confrontation with death.
What role did Mussolini ascribe to himself in this symbolic universe? In an article published in IL Popolo d’ltalia six weeks before Italian intervention he wrote:
Spread out through the divisions of the army, the ‘interventionists’ will spur on the others, and will be the best soldiers because they know the ‘reasons’ why the war is being fought. Given the essentially rural composition of the army, the infusion of ‘idealist’ elements will without doubt have positive repercussions on the outcome of the war. (OO, VII: 323-5)
The army considered such proposals to be dangerous. On 10 June 1915 Vittorio Zuppelli, Minister for War since 10 October 1914, ordered all army, division and regiment commanders to ban revolutionary propaganda in the trenches and to keep a close eye on Mussolini in particular (De Felice, 1965: 319-20). On 20 September 1915 Mussolini reported in his war diary how his colonel sought to isolate him with an administrative job (which he declined). What, though, did Mussolini’s preintervention proposals for enthusing the peasant soldiers amount to in practice?
On 17 September he was marching under shell fire for the first time, ‘encouraging those who are near me’. He wrote that following this a soldier from ‘the lowest plains of [northern] Italy’, hence a peasant soldier, approached him and said: ‘“Signor Mussolini, since we have seen that you have much spirit (courage) and have led us in the march under grenade fire, we wish to be commanded by you”’ (Mussolini’s italics and parenthesis). If examined through the grid of sociological categories, and in particular Max Weber’s understanding of the charismatic leader, this small incident may be quite revealing. For Weber, charismatic leadership is a form of authority which differs radically from scientifically verifiable bureaucratic leadership and from traditional leadership which derives its authority from the past. It is legitimated by the followers after they have received some sort of proof of the qualities of their prospective leader through a heroic, supernatural or superhuman act (Weber, 1968, I: 241-2). Both the heroic act on Mussolini’s part and the recognition of this on the part of the peasant soldier have clearly occurred in the above incident. Other factors justify interpreting this episode along these lines. On 15 October Mussolini informed his readers that ‘in war, money is frowned upon. Whoever has any sends it home.’ This finds direct resonance in Weberian theory, according to which the charismatic community is one which is ‘specifically foreign to economic considerations’ (Weber, 1968, I: 244). Also, the peasant soldier who addressed Mussolini did so using the first person plural. He was therefore speaking on behalf of a wider group of soldiers which formed the social base of the charismatic relationship.
We have so far isolated what for anthropologist Clifford Geertz is the role of religious symbols in fusing the worldview of a community with its ethos. By ‘worldview’ is meant ‘the picture [it has] of the way things in sheer actuality are, [its] most comprehensive ideas of order’ (Geertz, 1975: 89). Mussolini’s war diary community saw itself in essentially Mazzinian terms, as a fully realized lay religious national community which had been resurrected to life from the ashes of the old, ‘dead’ Italy. By ‘ethos’ Geertz means ‘the tone, character, and quality of [the community’s] life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood’ (Geertz, 1975: 91). The war diary community’s ethos was its group solidarity, its morally based kinship which was emotionally charged by the common danger of death and the readiness to sacrifice for one’s brothers in arms. Mussolini was recognized by the peasant soldiers as the charismatic champion of their cause and all of these themes were crystallized in the baptism ceremony on the Isonzo.