On returning to the front in February Mussolini was positioned in the same sector as in 1915, though further upriver. This area was involved in the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo between 11 and 15 March 1916, carried out in response to French requests for relief following the German attack at Verdun beginning 21 February. Mussolini was not involved in the offensive, since he went on winter leave beginning 2 March and did not return to the front until 23 of that month. In any case, due to bad weather the fifth offensive effectively failed to take off. As regards action, Mussolini was at most engaged in rifle fire exchanges (diary entries of 17, 19, 23 and 26 February). It was, nevertheless, an important period for Mussolini, as on 1 March he was promoted to corporal. The nomination, which he transcribed in his war diary on 29 February, reads as follows: ‘For his exemplary activity, high Bersaglieresque spirit and calmness. Always first in every enterprise of work or daring. Heedless of discomforts, zealous and scrupulous in the carrying out of his duties.’ Things were even quieter in the Carnia, where Mussolini was stationed from 25 March to 12 November. Fighting in the area between May and June and then in October 1915 had seen no significant gains by either side. When Mussolini arrived, serious operations had long ceased. Mussolini was stationed close to the north-western part of the sector, to the right of the river Bordaglia, with Mount Vas directly in front. On 10 May he recognized that ‘this zone is perhaps the quietest of the entire front’. He was not under continuous artillery fire, most of which was going on in the distance, and he was directly involved in small skirmishes in only three entries (6, 15 and 26 April).
An important theme emerging from these militarily placid pages is Mussolini’s ongoing concern with the rapport between coercion and consent in the reconstruction of the nation, an issue which had so marked his home front journalistic endeavour in the winter of 1915-16. Straight away on 15 February there is evidence of the army’s intensification of repressive measures during a military tribunal. A sergeant was charged with desertion and the prosecutor asked for a life sentence. The tribunal rejected the charge and gave the sergeant twenty years for abandonment of post. A private was then brought before the judges on the same charge, but absolved. This diary entry is similar to the courtroom scene portrayed in the 11 September 1915 annotation, though something has undoubtedly altered in 1916 as regards the prosecutor’s demands and the sentences meted out. In 1915 a soldier was accused of abandoning his post, but only one year’s imprisonment was requested by the prosecutor and the soldier was acquitted by what Mussolini described as an indulgent, scrupulous and fraternal court. This rising curve of coercion reflected a growing rejection of the war on the part of the men, evidenced by an escalation in the number of convictions for desertions in the Italian Army as the war progressed: in the first year there were about 10,000, while in the second this rose to 28,000 (Forcella and Monticone, 1998: lxxv).
How did Mussolini deal with the rejection of the war on the part of his fellow soldiers? On 25 February he wrote of an attempted evasion of duty. An army doctor told him of a Sicilian soldier who claimed to have been placed under a spell while on leave. The soldier’s symptoms were weakness, lack of appetite, pains and homesickness. He in fact came from an area where anti-military sentiment was rife. On the islands and in Sicily in 1914 only four out of twenty-seven provinces reported draft evasion levels below the national average (10.4 per cent), as compared to the centre-north where only six out of forty-two provinces reported absences above the national average (Del Negro, 1979: 231). According to Antonio Gibelli, the methodological framework in which forms of rejection need to be analyzed cannot, however, be solely that of war. A peasant’s escape into anything from abandonment of post to self-inflicted injury is, in his view, better seen as rural rejection of modern society as crystallized in industrialized warfare. Homesickness was one of the forms which this type of rejection assumed, though this involved altogether different symptoms to those such as the melancholy which might arise on being away from home for extended periods. Rather, the normal symptoms fused with the horrors of industrialized warfare to create all types of hallucinations, including the sound of the voices of loved ones in cannon thunder and machine gun fire, or else the appearance of family members as visible images (Gibelli, 1998: 10, 30-34). Mussolini was not a psychoanalyst, but this hardly accounts for the dismissive manner in which he interpreted the Sicilian soldier’s symptoms (which he did not detail): ‘I understand how a Sicilian suffers from homesickness, homesickness for the sun among so much frost and snow!’ Thus in a world where soldiers were ‘responding to the collapse of meaning by seeking refuge in nonsense’ (Isnenghi and Rochat, 2000: 249), Mussolini’s authorial strategy was to remove the theme of refusal, to reject rejection, and to avoid the resort to coercion by making a nonsense out of what in reality was a serious incident, which was easily interpretable as an attempt to evade duty through simulation and thus potentially punishable with death by firing squad (Forcella and Monticone, 1998: 174-8).
Unlike the September-November 1915 or the February-March 1916 diary entries, the March-May 1916 Carnia section of the war diary furnishes no examples of rejection or consensus-building responses to it. Elements of intensified State repression are nevertheless visible. On 7 April Mussolini made a long entry which broke down a company at war into its morale-based components. Of the 250 men, 40 per cent - identifiable with the petty bourgeoisie and the professional classes, plus youth and men who returned from abroad - was said to fight the war willingly. Another 40 per cent accepted it with indifference, while 16 per cent was defined as oscillating between courageous and cowardly. The remaining 4 per cent was characterized in negative terms but as generally unwilling to reveal its point of view for fear of the military code. This is the point. Consensus building was achieved not only by non-coercive methods (heart-warming speeches by officers, accounts of valorous episodes, Mussolini’s charisma, making a joke out of rejection of the war) but also by the power of military penal law to which Mussolini alluded.
The lack of action on the high Isonzo and the Carnia between February and May 1916 meant that Mussolini had few if no opportunities to reaffirm and reinforce his qualities as a charismatic hero warrior. On 16 February a peasant soldier came up to him and asked: ‘“Brother, is it true that we have come here for an offensive?”’ Mussolini replied: ‘“I don’t know. And what if we have?”’ He urged the soldier to ‘“be brave”’, reiterating that ‘“I know nothing.”’ Once again we are here witnessing rejection (the soldier is clearly apprehensive and does not at all relish the thought of a frontal assault), and a proposal for a non-coercive solution to it (firm but friendly encouragement). This incident sharply contrasts with the September 1915 meeting with the peasant soldiers who desired to be led by Mussolini on the basis of their recognition of Mussolini’s heroic qualities (see Chapter 3). Moreover, there are no further references to peasants in the February-May 1916 section of the war diary. Worker soldiers appear only in an entry of 1 May, but not in a celebration of the international working-class holiday (which receives no mention). Rather, the reader is presented with the positive effects of militarized labour - a new road open to traffic. The absence of charisma in the February-May 1916 section thus reflects an intensification of the diary’s strategy of reframing the nation in conservative social and political terms. Since workers and peasants have been further removed from the diary’s social vision, there is no place for charisma in relation to them.
In the Carnia, Mussolini paid particular attention to culturally self-mobilized soldiers. On 30 March there is an account of a Tuscan soldier who had previously been declared a deserter. On Italian intervention, however, he decided for reasons of ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ to leave his sweet shop in Richmond, Virginia, and return home to stand a post. On 5 April we read of a Turkish-born soldier who expressed his identity as an Italian ‘by race and sentiment’ and who had also returned voluntarily to fight for Italy. On 10 April Mussolini transcribed a letter received by a soldier from his brother who had been in Canada and who had not received a reply from the consul to his request to be repatriated on war’s outbreak. He therefore joined the British Army. This particular soldier’s self-mobilization was based on his disdain for the ‘German barbarians’. He declared his readiness to die in battle, hoping first, however, that ‘a few Germans will pass through my hands’. Similar reasons for self-mobilization can be found in the 5 April entry where a seaman soldier (who had not returned from abroad) was said by Mussolini to fight the war willingly because he ‘hates the Germans’. In all of these instances, political discourse is replaced by hatred for the enemy, issues related to national identity, ‘sentiment’, and/or military values such as ‘honour’ and ‘duty’. Mobilization is culturally, not politically, informed.
When we examine the elitist corollary of Mussolini’s de-emphasizing of the working classes, namely, his relations with the officers, nothing has changed with respect to 1915. Then as now the primary alternative to the harsh world of military justice was the officers. On 21 February a lieutenant recounted to Mussolini how his sergeant had panicked during incoming artillery fire. Rather than admonish the sergeant he stood up on the trench even though surrounded by exploding grenades and shrapnel: ‘“My fearless gesture encouraged the Bersaglieri more than any punishment or excitation would have done. When I returned soon after, I found sergeant Brenna impassable and fresh among the raging of enemy projectiles.”’
As in the previous year, Mussolini’s contacts with the officers are informed by mutual recognition, fraternization, the recounting of valorous episodes, the handing out of copies of IL Popolo d’ltalia, and a willingness to enter political discourse. One example from each section will suffice here. First the high Isonzo, 24 February: ‘I bring a copy of [Il Popolo d’ltalia] to the battalion commander, Major Tentori [who] recounts the heroic end of a corporal who . . . died saying “I know I’m dying, but I die content for Italy. Long live Italy!” ’ Now the Carnia: ‘I met the captain commanding the 4th company of sappers. I stayed with him for several hours. His name is Simoni. A Piedmontese, an anti-Giolittian and a fervent interventionist’ (10 May). The reason for this ongoing identity with professional and non-commissioned officers while peasants and workers slip into the background is made abundantly clear in the Carnia, when on 3 May Mussolini reported how he had received a copy of Mazzini’s writings. He transcribed the following lines from Mazzini’s 1832 essay entitled D’alcune cause che impedirono finora lo sviluppo della liberta in Italia (Mazzini, 1976: 92-148):
‘Missing were the leaders; missing were the few to lead the many, strong men of faith and sacrifice capable of wholly grasping the fragmented concept of the masses; capable of immediately understanding the consequences of this and who, boiling over with passion, could then forge these fragments into a sole concept, that of victory; who could unite the dispersed elements and find the word of life and order for all.’ (Mussolini’s emphasis)
Mussolini finished the entry by asking: ‘But who among my 250 fellow soldiers knows [Mazzini’s writings]?’The answer, of course, is: Mussolini and a handful of self-mobilized interventionists, one of whom gave him the Mazzini volume. Mussolini and the officers are this elite force which had been ‘missing’ in Italian history to that point. But while, as we saw in Chapter 2, this elitism bears many of the hallmarks of Mazzini’s worldview, a further quotation from Mazzini, this time from his 1831 letter to Carles Albert of Savoy (Mazzini, 1976: 38-56), reveals most emphatically that Mussolini and the officers’ elitist tasks were not altogether Mazzinian: ‘“Great things are not achieved with protocols, but rather by gauging one’s own century. The secret of Power lies in Will.”’ Since Mazzini’s letter was quite a long one, Mussolini’s choice of this particular passage with its implications for the Nietzschean Superman’s will to power needs no comment.
There is a further twist to this entry, since it connects directly into other themes related to morale, weaponry and offensive warfare ideology dealt with in the 7 April entry where he had remarked:
The state of mind globally reducible to the term ‘morale’ is the fundamental coefficient of victory, and is pre-eminent in comparison to the technical or mechanical element. Who wants to win will win. Who disposes of the greater reserves of psychic and volitional energy will win. 100,000 cannons will not give victory if the soldiers are not capable of going on the assault, if they don’t have the courage at any given moment to ‘expose themselves’ and face death.
He concluded that in the last analysis the morale of Italian soldiers ‘depends on that of the officers who command them’, and that morale was therefore good. Mussolini claimed to know this because ‘I have “studied” those around me . . . I have “caught” their discourses, isolated their spiritual behaviour in the most varied contingencies of time and place which war imposes on the soldier.’ In short, on 7 April he had already been practising the elitist leader task which in his 3 May entry he then fortuitously ‘discovered’ to be a divination of Mazzini’s. The Nietzschean will to power of the 3 May entry was, therefore, the ideology of an elitist group of ‘Mazzinian’ leaders who would take the fragmented concepts of the vast majority of the soldiers, funnel them into a singular concept of victory, and hence encourage the men to go fearlessly on a frontal bayonet assault against enemy cannon. The ideology of the offensive which in the 1915 section of the war diary was enveloped in the symbolic garb of the liminal phase of a rite of passage is here stated in its non-refracted nudity.
Why? During his movements to and in the Carnia Mussolini encountered numerous rivers, streams and torrents such as the Tagliamento, the But, the Bordaglia, the Volaja, the Fleons (or Degano) and the Dogna. Yet unlike the baptismal Jordan at the Isonzo in September 1915, no sacred qualities are conferred on any of these waters. Since no holy water flows through this territory, it is likely that the territory itself is not sacred. This, then, may explain why in Mussolini’s war diary the Carnia does not readily lend itself to symbolic activity, thus providing more unmediated revelations about the socially vertical structures of the war community and its politically and militarily offensive strategy. Further weight is added to this view when we consider that the men who die or who are injured on that territory are reduced to the same non-sacred status as the water. Indeed, of the dead and injured reported in the Carnia between 25 March and 14 May 1916, none are worked into a symbolic system of national rebirth. They are merely reported dead or injured. By contrast, on the high Isonzo, on 15 February, Mussolini reported a visit to the cemetery at Caporetto and noted that on the side of the church wall was inscribed: ‘“To reclaim the sacred terms which nature posed on the border of the Nation they fearfully faced glorious death. Their generous blood renders sacred this redeemed land.”’ The Carnia is not conquered territory. This is why it reveals no territorial sacredness, no glorious death, no holy waters and why, therefore, it cannot be worked into a symbolic system premised on an expanded Italy achieved through a victorious offensive and the spilling of the nation’s blood on the newly claimed soil. But if territory is so crucial for the construction of meaning in the war diary, Mussolini would soon have plenty of symbolic material upon which to draw. On 15 May 1916 Italy had to come to terms with the fact that its adversary could also carry out offensive operations, and do so, moreover, with a vengeance.