All things considered 1916 had not been a good year for Mussolini the heroic warrior. Yet he began 1917 on a positive note. On 1 January he wrote that ‘1916 died while I was marching on the road from Doberdo. I greeted 1917 on the march. That augurs well’, while on 19 January he remarked: ‘I cross the Isonzo once again. Great deep blue river. Italy was born on the Tiber and reborn on the Isonzo.’ But unlike in 1915, Mussolini was heading for the rear, and the hope for an offensive had been illusory; in September 1915 he was fresh and enthusiastic, in 1917 he was tired, hungry and in many respects angry; he was also, as we shall see, gravely ill. Nor was the imminent rest going to remedy much for Mussolini and his fellow soldiers: the first ten days were spent in Palazzotto ‘in a muddy desert’ in ‘huts and fold-up beds’. This was for anti-cholera injections, disinfection and an examination of excrement. The real ‘rest’ period began on 10 January when the soldiers moved to Santo Stefano near Aquileia. From Mussolini’s war diary and the official regiment diary it is evident that most of this purported rest period was spent learning the use of grenade launchers. The official diary also informs that the time was spent practising frontal attacks in successive waves, an exercise which would hardly have taken the men’s minds off the war. Mussolini recounted how he visited the museum in Aquileia. This was certainly allowed. However, since 19 November 1916 measures had been taken to curtail what was considered unsol- dierly behaviour during rest periods. Men were now subject to Cadorna’s circular of that date which prohibited various forms of entertainment. Not only was theatrical amusement prohibited in the war zone but even visits to bars and public places were limited, since soldiers’ behaviour (and presumed misbehaviour and slovenliness) would have been on public view. One form of entertainment allowed was the use of prostitutes, though even here there was injustice: the officers benefited from the greatest comforts while the men were left in seedy, lurid and at times makeshift brothels (Melograni, 1969: 224-6).
After the 19 January entry, Mussolini’s diary was all bad news. On 21 January: ‘Bora [wind] of Trieste. Cold. Insignificant day. What great weather for dreadful “morale”. Murmuring.’ The entry of 27-28 January is short but crucial: ‘Snow, cold, infinite boredom.’ Following this Mussolini summed up his impressions with devastating brevity: ‘Orders, counter-orders, disorder.’ The month finished with the 30 January entry: ‘The soldiers who come back from leave have for some time had terrible “morale”. They murmur under their breaths about the chaos in Italy’ (Mussolini’s italics). Mussolini assigned responsibility for the chaos to the talk of peace, especially by women. Already on 30 December he had opined in his diary (removed from the 1923 version) that ‘the psychology of the woman barely touches the war and is absolutely incapable of penetrating its intimate tragic substance. For the woman, the man returned home from war presents the same “exotic” attraction as the man home from California and nothing more.’ This misogynous discourse was not fortuitous. Between 1 December 1916 and 15 April 1917 it is thought that around 500 demonstrations took place in Italy involving many thousands of women. Some protested regularly every Monday (allowance day) for the return of their husbands and sons (Melograni, 1969: 300). In a letter to his sister on 18 February 1917, Mussolini returned to this subject with vehemence. As usual, he denied that the protests were having any influence in the trenches: ‘As regards the women’s demonstrations, only an echo of them has reached us here.’ But he nevertheless called for harsh repression: ‘I fully agree with the severe sentences. You understand that a few unconscious or fanatical women - ignobly influenced by the red priests - cannot be allowed to sabotage Italy and the holy causeof the Quadruple and to play the game of the Kaiser and his criminal comrades. A few examples, and they’ll stop’ (Mancini Mussolini, 1957: 67-8; italics in the original).
Before finishing in February 1917 Mussolini’s war diary recovered slightly, most likely because on 1 February he was given command of a grenade launcher section. On 14 February he commented on a fallen soldier and how the dead consecrated and revitalized the conquered territory:
A dead soldier wrapped in tent canvas passes. Few soldiers follow him. A priest makes a few gestures. The passers-by take off their headwear and move on. Last night the Austrians threw some bombs into our trench. At the foot of these hills are the cemeteries which consecrate them. Ours increases in size . . . The brief funeral did not interrupt the traffic and the movement of other men. My melancholy thoughts turn to that unknown soldier of Italy who goes underground while with its warmth the sky announces spring.
And on 22 February Mussolini killed (or probably killed) enemy soldiers for the first time. That day he wrote: ‘This morning, at dawn, I gave the Germans their morning call, with an Excelsior bomb type B which landed right in their trench. The red point of a lighted cigarette went out and probably also the smoker.’ But no sooner had he placed this notch on his pistol than on the afternoon of 23 February 1917 he was, or so it has traditionally been claimed, involved in an accident. A friendly grenade launcher exploded and Mussolini was hit by flying metal splinters. He was taken to the dressing station at Doberdo, then to the field hospital in Ronchi and away from the battlefield forever.
Until some recent publications by the author, nobody had ever seriously doubted the proposition that Mussolini was injured at the front and that this accounted for his convalescent leave of one year which was extended in August 1918 by another six months. Professional analysis of Mussolini’s medical records (contained in ACS, SPDCR, FP/R ‘Mussolini Benito’, s.fasc. 5, ins. D) suggests, however, that he was not at all seriously injured. A handful of small pellet-type objects were removed from his body, and from his right thigh in particular; however, his hospitalization in Milan from 2 April to 11 August 1917 was for neurosyphilis in the form of tabes dorsalis, while the main treatment in late March at the field hospital, hence even before the transfer to Milan, was for the effects of a gumma (a kind of small, soft, rubbery tumour characteristic of advanced syphilis), which had caused inflammation of tissue in the marrow of Mussolini’s right shin bone. In the Red Cross hospital in Milan, Mussolini was looked after by Dr Ambrogio Binda, a close friend of the Mussolini family, who disguised the main symptoms of Mussolini’s syphilis by inventing an otherwise non-existent injury thus offering a viable explanation for the patient’s inability to walk (which was actually due to syphilitic nerve lesions of the spinal bone marrow). But there were limits to Binda’s loyalty: in his final report dated 24 July he recommended only two months’ convalescent leave. This document was subsequently modified by a hand that was not Binda’s, the sixty-day leave being struck out in favour of an unconvincingly (and illegally) inserted ‘one year’. The transcribed copy of the same document was not written by Binda, but was altered by him so that the original sixty days was crossed out and ‘one year’ inserted. Examination of these two documents by handwriting experts suggests that Binda wrote his original report and falsified the copy in a way that betrays his reluctance to be involved in the affair. Powers greater than Binda were obviously at work. Bissolati was once again the key figure most likely behind the cover-up, just as in November 1916. IL Secolo, a newspaper close to him, was omnipresent in the entire affair. The King may also have been consulted on the issue, and had quite likely been scrutinizing Mussolini for some time, given that he visited Mussolini’s bedside, remembered seeing the patient in hospital in 1915 and returned to say goodbye after doing his rounds. In short, this was no ordinary wounded soldier. The State authorities had clearly altered their perception of the danger represented by Mussolini the ‘socialist revolutionary’. On 20 September 1915 Mussolini’s colonel had sought to isolate him from the other soldiers by offering him an administrative job, while Zuppelli and Salandra had been reluctant to make him an officer in 1915-16, as we have seen. Also, in another diary entry, this time on 20 February 1916, that is in the days leading up to his 1 March 1916 promotion, Mussolini was once again sized up by a concerned colonel who wanted to know if he was still the same troublemaker that had caused him, as a member of the forces of law and order, so much aggravation in Milan. ‘“Old times!”’ Mussolini replied, and the promotion was granted ten days later. Now, in 1917, under the Boselli government, with Bissolati as a junior minister and with Mussolini having clearly established his pro-State credentials, the institutions were prepared to defend his mythopoeically constructed charismatic persona against the socially and politically destructive implications of syphilis, to cover all this in a shroud of war heroism and to sponsor his return to the home front to combat the enemy within (O’Brien 2002a; 2003).
Mussolini wrote little in the first couple of months after his presumed accident. On 16 April he sent a good wishes telegram to the Congress of Bissolati’s Partito Socialista Riformista (OO, VIII: 311), and on 18 April again wrote to his sister (Mancini Mussolini, 1957: 71). But progressively over the following six months, as war became revolution, he increased his journalistic output. The pen completely replaced the ‘bayonet’.