For all measures, even the most difficult, that the Government will take, we will place the following dilemma before the citizens: either accept them out of high patriotic spirit or have them imposed.
Mussolini, Reply to the Minister for
Finance, 7 March 1923
Consent is as variable as the sand on the sea shore . . . Posed as axiomatic that all government measures create malcontents, what will you do to prevent the disquiet from spreading and representing a danger for the solidity of the State? You will avoid it by resorting to force.
Mussolini, Forza e consenso, March 1923
No hierarch is he who does not know how to go down among the people in order to glean its sentiments and interpret its needs.
Mussolini, Speech at the Foro, 28 October 1937
On 24 November Mussolini developed a viral infection (or so it is presumed, since this remains an open question, for which see O’Brien, 2002a: 13, n. 48) and was transferred to the military hospital in Cividale where he remained for thirteen days, upon which he was transferred to Treviglio (about 60 km from Milan) for further treatment. He had therefore left the front line community and was distant from the final spasm of the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo. Mussolini was granted a month’s convalescent leave to expire on 16 January. He did not, however, reach the front until 11 February. The period between 16 January and 11 February has never been adequately accounted for, though it seems that Mussolini spent some time in a Bersagliere depot on the way back to the front (Pini and Susmel, 1953, I: 306). Once back in Milan, he swapped the war diary for commentaries in II Popolo d’ltalia. The paper, for which circulation figures are not available, apparently remained on a sound financial basis, as Mussolini confirmed in a 19 January letter to his sister, Edwige (Mancini Mussolini, 1957: 57).
The home front to which Mussolini returned was beginning to confront the military stalemate and dashed hopes of immediate victory. During his sojourn he contributed to the ‘war culture’ that was created in Italy as in other belligerent societies. This phenomenon emerged as an expression of the ‘total’ nature of the First World War and the ‘brutalization’ of conflict which it provoked in the collective imagination as on the battlefield. It was a vision based on a simplified and extreme polarization of the nation and its enemies. At one end of the cosmos stood a negative image of the enemy as an ideological absolute, as the supreme evil, an aggressor, an out and out barbarian and a veritable menace to humanity and to civilization. At the other stood the supreme good, the national collective, the righteous allies and the just war for freedom and national defence. Then there was the obverse of the nation/enemy dichotomy, that is the enemy within, whose scheming and plotting undermined national will and played the game of the external foe. Finally, all this was measured over against sacrifice, defined principally (but not solely) by the suffering and death of the soldier for the salvation of the nation. Hence ‘war culture’ represented a cultural mobilization, a mustering and focusing of hatred for the enemy and a subsequent and interrelated reinforcement of pronational and pro-war sentiment and identity (Becker, J.-J., Becker, A., Audoin- Rouzeau, Krumeich, Winter, 1994: 7-10; Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 1997; Horne, 1999: 331-3).
To these elements of ‘war culture’ Mussolini added the voice of the veteran who bore direct witness to the soldiers’ sacrifice. He conceptually polarized the external enemy on 24 December by presenting Germany as the real culprit behind the war aims of the Central Powers even though Italy was only at war with Austria-Hungary, and by arguing that any German-inspired peace would be a peace on German terms (OO, VIII: 206-9). Mussolini also developed the subordinate category of allies. In an end-of-year analysis he gave a positive assessment of the Entente in contrast to the Central Powers (OO, VIII: 214-16). As regards the internal enemies, on 27 December he showed his readiness to resort to vitriol to condemn them as traitors. He denounced ‘the saboteurs . . . of the national war’, warning that ‘the impatient should take note and avoid depressing - in any way - the spirit of the nation’. He added that ‘we need to put a brake on abstract peace- loving propaganda’ which was circulating ‘even among fighting soldiers’ (Mussolini’s emphasis), and insisted that ‘whoever speaks of peace, when the Nation is engaged in a life and death struggle, consciously or unconsciously helps the enemy’, and that ‘Gemir, c’est trahir!’ (OO, VIII: 210-13).
The background to this last statement is undoubtedly that during the fifteen-day winter leave periods granted after the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo the experiences suffered at the front by officers and men strongly contrasted with the normal bar- and theatre-going activities of the middle classes which soldiers observed in the cities. Soldiers met with statements and questions from people, including loved ones, which more often than not revealed a substantial ignorance of what was happening at the front. Two differing worlds of representation interacted to produce negative effects among both soldiers and civilians. In a circular of 12 January 1916 Cadorna accused the soldiers of spreading bad news, warned that offenders would be severely punished, and even considered suspending leave permits (Melograni, 1969: 95-104). It is difficult to know for sure if Mussolini’s 27 December invective was also aimed at the soldiers on leave. Either way, in using the word ‘unconsciously’ he appears to have extended the olive branch to the internal enemies, suggesting that a window of opportunity was open for them to become aware of the deleterious effects of their actions and consequently to mend their ways. In the same piece he proposed that the government should not resort to openly coercive measures against those who were sapping the national energy but adopt ‘purely administrative means’. Alarmists, he claimed, could be silenced by explaining that the lack of major gains was a result of the war’s military character, while a purge of the ‘Giolittian bureaucracy’ would furnish ‘the example from above’ which would have ‘immediate and almost automatic repercussions below’ (OO, VIII: 210-13).
Nonetheless, the continued neutralism of the PSI remained Mussolini’s principal target. His condemnation of even the most critical elements of German social democracy was a veiled warning that international contacts during the war by Italian socialists would amount to playing the enemy’s game (OO, VIII: 206-9). On 4 January he confronted the PSI directly with the impossibility of remaining neutral in an international conflict between democracy and reaction (OO, VIII: 217-19). Four days later he rejected Claudio Treves’ theory according to which neither the Entente nor the Central Powers was conducting a democratic war and hence the temporal power of the Papacy would be reinforced regardless of who won. Mussolini accepted, ‘for the simple love of polemic’, that the war being fought by the Entente was not a democratic one, but then presented Treves with the blunt choice between the two belligerent blocs: ‘Is there more “democracy” in the regimes of the Quadruple Entente or the Quadruple enemy?’ His point was that should the Central Powers win, the world would return not to the pre-Franco- Prussian war days but to the days before the French Revolution. Again, however, while Mussolini accused the socialists of ‘consciously’ working to facilitate the victory of the enemy, he added the adverbs ‘more or less’ and put the word ‘worked’ in inverted commas, thereby attenuating the accusation. In the main, this article was against the Papacy’s neutrality and tried to get Treves and the PSI to draw proEntente conclusions from their anti-Vatican standpoint (OO, VIII: 220-23).
The final aspect of the ‘war culture’ elaborated by Mussolini was the invocation of the front line soldiers as the fulcrum of the national effort. Mussolini projected himself as both embodiment and witness of the soldiers’ experience, and of the supreme virtue of sacrifice for the nation that it represented. During his convalescent leave IL Popolo d’ltalia, as noted, published his war diary. This process, as we argued in the previous chapter, was mythopoeic, deliberately endowing Mussolini with the persona of the front line hero. The process had some effect. Scrutiny of Avanti! and La Stampa shows that they ignored the war diary. But on 4 January IL Corriere della Sera, the leading paper of the Milanese elites and middle classes, quoted two passages from the 18 October entry. One of these pointed to the stoicism of the injured and the other to the elevation of morale on hearing one’s own artillery go into action. On 9 January IL Popolo d’Italia published two letters, the first of which was from a certain Prof. A. Francisi who on reading Mussolini’s war diary claimed to have completed his transition to interventionism. The other was from a soldier on the Carso who had been reading the diary and wished Mussolini well. The following day, Mussolini’s paper published a letter from Lieutenant Giraud, Mussolini’s direct superior who was out of action through injury and who thanked Mussolini for referring to him in such kind terms. By the same token, however, Mussolini had to defend his construction of a front line persona against sceptics and scoffers. His catholic and socialist opponents naturally seized on anything they could to discredit his military pretensions. For example, in late December IL Mattino of Naples (a catholic paper) suggested that Mussolini had been nominated as a junior lieutenant in the territorial militia, had attended officer school, and from there had gone to the front where ‘his weak constitution did not resist the discomforts’. It added that he had written an emotional letter to the editors of IL Popolo d’Italia lamenting the fact that he had been struck not by the enemy but by a microbe in a glass of water. It finished by announcing that he had been declared unfit for combat and that he would most likely be returning to journalism (Anon, 1915). This attack was responded to by Arturo Rossato of IL Popolo d’Italia, who pointed out that Mussolini was and always had been a private. Rossato further emphasized that Mussolini had not been pronounced unfit for further duties at the front and that he had never written a moving letter, as this was not in his nature (Arros, 1915).
Overall, then, Mussolini followed the kind of propaganda drive that he considered himself especially capable of providing to stiffen civilian morale in the face of military difficulties. The demonized enemy within was necessary to stimulate such cohesion, but consensus was also crucial in forging an all-embracing ideology. That this was the case was seen again when, just before reaching his regiment in mid-February, Mussolini read of the incursion over Milan by Austrian aircraft, whose bombs killed a number of civilians. The editors of IL Popolo d’Italia had no difficulties identifying the guilty party. In their view, the government of Milan, headed by socialist mayor Emilio Caldara, had basically invited the Austrians in, had insured a major German company before the bombing, and had taken its time before informing citizens of the imminent raid. Mussolini wrote to his colleagues as follows:
That delay of over an hour in the telephone transmission announcing the arrival of the enemy aircraft is mysterious. So too is that total insuring of a German company made a few days beforehand . . . Let the Germans come . . . said and say the red neutralists, and the Germans arrive. Wasn’t it only yesterday that mayor Caldara absented himself from the opening of the French hospital in Milan? . . . [T]he intimidators, the overhead brigands count on their accomplices who are the underground saboteurs of the Nation’s energy. (OO, VIII: 298-9; Mussolini’s italics).
In reality, telegrams dated 15, 16, 17 and 18 February 1916 from the Civil Commissioner in Milan to the Ministry of the Interior reveal nothing of socialist plotting. They only note the immense participation of citizens and civilian authorities at the funerals of the fifteen dead (ACS, A5G, b. 18, fasc. 31, s.fasc. 1, ins. 19). If anything, the evidence from the press agencies suggests that at 08.30 the Command of Military Division informed the Telephone Office of the arrival of enemy aircraft, but that neither the Prefect, the police, the Mayor nor the fire brigade was subsequently informed in time (see, for example, La Stampa of 14 February 1916). Hence the slow response was of military origin. In a letter to Luigi Albertini of 17 February 1916, Colonel Giulio Douhet, a sharp critic of Cadorna who would later pay the price for his insubordination, argued that the defence of the many centres such as Milan was impossible, and that counter-missions by Italian aircraft against Austrian territory were the only solution, along with attacks on the Austrian aircraft as they left Italian territory (Albertini, 1968, II: 473-5). What the air incursions showed, therefore, was that without correct information to hand, Mussolini had a ready-made socialist scapegoat with which to explain away what were in fact serious shortcomings of the military command during an enemy invasion of national territory. And the latter would not be long in coming. In the meantime, Mussolini returned to the war.