M: Son of the Century

1919

MILAN, PIAZZA SAN SEPOLCRO, MARCH 23, 1919

THE FORMATION OF THE FASCI DI COMBATTIMENTO

WE STAND FACING out over Piazza San Sepolcro. Scarcely a hundred people, all men of little worth. We are few and we are dead.

They are waiting for me to speak, but I have nothing to say.

The set is empty, submerged under eleven million corpses, a tide of cadavers—reduced to sludge, liquefied—rising from the trenches of the Carso, Ortigara, the Isonzo. Our heroes have already been killed or will be. We love every last one of them, without distinction. We sit on the sacred mound of the dead.

The reality that follows every deluge has opened my eyes: Europe is now a stage without actors. All gone: the bearded sages, the monumental, histrionic fathers, the whining, magnanimous liberals, the grandiloquent, cultured, florid orators, the moderates to whose common sense we have owed our ruin from time immemorial, the bankrupt politicians who live in terror of imminent ruin, each day pleading to put off the inevitable event. For all of them the bell has tolled. The men of old will be overrun by this huge mass, five million soldiers bearing down on the territorial borders, five million returning veterans. We must get in step, lockstep. The forecast is not about to change, bad times still lie ahead. War is still on the agenda. The world is moving towards two big alignments: those who were and those who will be.

I see it, I see it all clearly in this audience of fanatics and derelicts, and yet I have nothing to say. We are a populace of ex-soldiers, a humanity of survivors, of dregs. On nights of carnage, hunkering in foxholes, we are seized by a sensation similar to the ecstasy experienced by epileptics. We speak in volleys, briefly, tersely, forcefully. We fire out ideas we do not have, then immediately sink back into silence. We are like ghosts of the unburied dead who have yielded the floor to those behind the lines.

Yet these, and these alone are my people. I am well aware of it. I am the misfit par excellence, the protector of the demobilized, the lost drifter searching for the way. But there is business here that must be run. Nostrils flared, in this nearly empty room, I pick up the century’s scent and reach out to feel the crowd’s pulse, and I am certain that my public is there.

The first rally of the Fasci di Combattimento, trumpeted for weeks by Il Popolo d’Italia as a momentous event, had been scheduled to take place at the Teatro dal Verme, with its 2,000-seat capacity. But the vast venue was canceled. Given the choice between an immense desert and a lesser disgrace, we chose the latter. We resorted to this meeting room at the Association of Traders and Merchants. This is where I must now speak. Inside four walls covered in a drab greenish-brown, overlooking the bleakness of a desolate parish square, with gilding that unsuccessfully tries to brighten the dreariness of the Biedermeier armchairs, amidst a few scruffy hairy heads, bald pates, and stumps, emaciated veterans breathing the mild asthma of ordinary trades, age-old circumspections and scrupulous budgetary avarice. At the back of the room, from time to time, a member of the association looks in, curious. A soap dealer, a copper importer, that sort of thing. He glances in, puzzled, then goes back to smoking his cigar and drinking a Campari.

Why should I speak?!

The presidency of the assembly has been assumed by Ferruccio Vecchi, a fervent interventionist, captain of the Arditi, placed on leave for health reasons. Dark-haired, tall, pale, skinny, with sunken eyes: the stigmata of pathological degeneration. An excitable, impulsive tubercular, who preaches violently, without substance or moderation, and at key moments during public demonstrations gets carried away like a man possessed, seized by a demagogic delirium and then … then he becomes truly dangerous. The role of secretary of the movement will almost certainly be given to Attilio Longoni, an ignorant former railwayman, as eager and foolish as only an honest man can be. To him, or to Umberto Pasella, born in prison with a jailer as a father, later a business agent, a revolutionary trade unionist, a Garibaldian in Greece, and a juggler with itinerant circuses. The other principals will be chosen at random among those who made the most noise in the front ranks.

Why should I speak to these people?! Because of them events have exceeded anything imaginable. These are men who take life by storm like commandos. I have before me only the trenches, the spume of days, the sphere of combatants, the arena of madmen, the furrows of fields plowed by cannon rounds, rioters, misfits, felons, erratic eccentrics, idlers, petit bourgeois bon vivants, schizophrenics, the neglected, the defeated, the irregulars, fly-by-nighters, ex-convicts, convicted offenders, anarchists, incendiary union leaders, desperate hacks, a bohemian platform of veterans, officers and non-coms, men skilled in the handling of firearms or blades, those who have proved themselves violent on re-entry to normal life, fanatics unable to clearly define their ideas, survivors who, thinking they are heroes committed to death, mistake mistreated syphilis as a sign of destiny.

I know, I see them here before me, I know them by heart: they are the men of war. Of war or of its myth. I desire them, the way a man desires a woman and, at the same time, I look down on them. I scorn them, true, but it doesn’t matter: one era is over and another has begun. Debris accumulates, the wrecks call to one another. I am the man for afterwards. And I am determined to be that. It is with this shabby material—with this human wreckage—that history is made.

In any case, this is what I have before me. And behind me, nothing. Behind me I have October 24, 1917. Caporetto. The death throes of our era, the greatest military defeat of all time. An army of a million soldiers destroyed in a weekend. Behind me I have November 24, 1914. The day of my expulsion from the Socialist Party, the hall of the Società Umanitaria where the workers who idolized me up until the day before cursed my name and fell all over one another for the honor of attacking me. Now I receive their death wishes every day. They wish it upon me, upon D’Annunzio, upon Marinetti, upon De Ambris, even Corridoni, who perished four years ago in the third battle of the Isonzo. They wish death upon those already dead. At this point they despise us for having betrayed them.

The red masses foresee the imminence of their triumph. In the course of six months, three empires collapsed, three dynasties that had ruled Europe for six centuries. The Spanish flu epidemic has already infected tens of millions of victims. Events correspond to apocalyptic tremors. The Third Communist International met in Moscow last week. The party of global civil war. The party of those who want me dead. From Moscow to Mexico City, throughout the entire terrestrial orb. The age of mass politics has begun and we, here in this room, are fewer than a hundred.

But that doesn’t matter either. No one believes in victory anymore. It already came and it was mired in slime. This fervor of ours—giovinezza, giovinezza! ah, Youth!—is a suicidal form of despair. We are with the dead, they respond to our call by the millions in this half-empty room.

Down in the street the workers’ shouts invoke a revolution. It makes us laugh. We already had a revolution. By dragging this country kicking and screaming into war on May 10th, 1915. Now everyone says the war is over. But again we laugh. We are the war. The future belongs to us. It’s no use, it’s hopeless, I’m like an animal: I can smell the times ahead.

Benito Mussolini has a sturdy physical constitution despite the fact that he suffers from syphilis.

This robustness enables him to work tirelessly.

He sleeps until late in the morning, leaves the house at noon and doesn’t return home before three in the morning. Those fifteen hours, minus a short break for meals, are spent in journalistic and political activities.

He is a sensual man, as demonstrated by the numerous relationships he’s had with various women.

He is emotional and impulsive. These traits make him stimulating and persuasive in his speeches. Though he speaks well, he cannot properly be described as an orator.

He is basically a sentimentalist, and this wins him much popularity and many friendships.

He is without self-interest, generous, and this has earned him a reputation for being altruistic and philanthropic.

He is very intelligent, shrewd, measured, reflective, and a good judge of men, their qualities and their faults.

Prone to form quick likes and dislikes, capable of making sacrifices for friends, he is relentless when it comes to enemies and those he hates.

He is courageous and daring; he has organizational skills, and is able to make decisions quickly; but he is not tenacious in his convictions and objectives.

He is extremely ambitious. He is driven by the certitude that he represents a considerable force in Italy’s destiny and he is determined to assert that force. He is a man who is not content with second place. He wants to surpass all others and dominate.

Within the ranks of official socialism, he quickly rose from obscure origins to a position of prominence. Before the war, he was the ideal editor of Avanti!, the newspaper that guides all socialists. In that capacity he was much esteemed and much loved. Some of his old comrades and admirers still admit today that there was no one better than he was at understanding and interpreting the spirit of the proletariat, which was grieved to see his betrayal (apostasy) when in a matter of weeks he went from being a sincere, fervent advocate of absolute neutrality to being a sincere, fervent advocate of intervention in the war.

I do not believe that this came about for reasons of self-interest or personal gain.

Then too, it is impossible to determine to what extent his socialist convictions, which he never publicly repudiated, were sacrificed in the financial dealings indispensable for continuing the struggle through Il Popolo d’Italia, the new newspaper that he founded; in his interactions with individuals and factions of different persuasions; and in friction with his former comrades, subject as he was to the constant pressure of indomitable hatred, bitter ill-will, accusations, insults, and incessant slander by his one-time followers. But if these innermost changes occurred, swallowed up in the shadow of more pressing matters, Mussolini will never let it show and will always want to appear to be—perhaps will always delude himself that he is—a socialist.

This, according to my findings, is the moral figure of the man, in contrast to the opinion held by his former trusted comrades and followers.

That said, if a person of intelligence and high authority were to find the path of least resistance in his psychological makeup, if he were first of all likable to him and were able to worm his way into his heart, if he could show him what is truly in Italy’s best interest (because I believe in his patriotism), if he were to very tactfully offer him the necessary funds for the agreed-upon political action, without giving the impression of a brash attempt at rigging, Mussolini would gradually be won over.

But with his temperament one would never be certain that, at some turning point along the way, he might not defect. He is, as already mentioned, emotional and impulsive.

Of course, on the offensive line, Mussolini, a man of thought and action, an effective, incisive writer, a persuasive, dynamic speaker, could become a commanding leader, a formidable intimidator.

Report of the Commissioner of Public Security

Giovanni Gasti, spring 1919

ACTION FASCI AMONG INTERVENTIONIST GROUPS

In a room of the Association of Traders and Merchants, a meeting was held yesterday for the formation of regional fasci among groups of interventionists. Speakers at the gathering included auto manufacturer Enzo Ferrari, commander Vecchi of the Arditi and several others. Mr. Mussolini outlined the cornerstones on which the action of the fasci should be based, namely: validating the war and those who fought the war; demonstrating that imperialism, of which Italians are accused, is an imperialism desired by all peoples, not excluding Belgium and Portugal; opposing foreign imperialisms that are detrimental to our own country; opposing any eventual Italian imperialism against other nations; and finally accepting an electoral battle on the war issue and opposing all parties and candidates that were contrary to the war.

After numerous speakers had taken the floor, Mussolini’s proposals were approved. Various Italian cities were represented at the meeting.

Corriere della Sera, March 24, 1919,

Le conferenze domenicali column

THREE TONS OF SOAP STOLEN

Several thieves broke into the warehouse of Giuseppe Blen on Via Pomponazzi 4, and managed to carry off no less than sixty-four cases of soap weighing over one hundred pounds each.

Clearly there must have been a sizeable number of perpetrators to handle such a heavy, cumbersome load of goods, and to move over three tons of merchandise they had to have had horses and wagons or trucks at their disposal.

The fact is that such a lengthy, noisy, visible operation was carried out without a shred of useful information gathered on the brazen culprits. The value of the stolen goods is said to amount to approximately 15 thousand liras.

Corriere della Sera, March 24, 1919,

Le conferenze domenicali column

BENITO MUSSOLINI

MILAN, EARLY SPRING 1919

ONLY A FEW streets separate Via Paolo da Cannobio, where the editorial offices of Il Popolo d’Italia—the so-called number 2 lair—are located, from the Milan section of the Arditi Association at 23 Via Cerva, the number 1 lair. They are fetid, squalid, dangerous streets in the spring of 1919, when Benito Mussolini leaves his office to dine in a trattoria.

The Bottonuto is a slice of medieval Milan subcutaneously entrenched in the twentieth-century city. A warren of narrow passageways and shops, early Christian churches and brothels, taverns and dives, teeming with peddlers, whores and vagrants. The origin of the name is uncertain. It perhaps comes from the postern that once opened on the southern side, through which armies passed. Some say that the word, reminiscent of swollen glands, is a mispronunciation of the patronymic name of a German mercenary who had come down as a follower of Barbarossa. In any case, the Bottonuto is a putrid bog just behind the Piazza del Duomo, the geometric and monumental center of Milan.

To pass through its streets, you need to hold your nose. Filth oozes from the walls, Vicolo delle Quaglie is reduced to a public urinal, the people are as fetid as mold in cellars, everything and anything is sold there, robberies and beatings take place in broad daylight, while soldiers cluster around the doorways of the bordellos. Everyone, directly or indirectly, gets by on prostitution.

Mussolini eats late. It is after ten o’clock in the evening when he emerges from his editor’s den—a cubicle overlooking a narrow little courtyard, a sort of vertical passage connected to the editorial office by a shared balcony—lights a cigarette, and sets out briskly, contentedly, through the pestilential sac. Gangs of barefoot urchins point at him excitedly—"el matt," the lunatic, they take turns shouting—beggars sitting in filth at the street curbs stretch out their hands, pimps leaning in doorways greet him with a respectful but familiar nod of the head. He acknowledges their greetings. With some he stops to exchange a word or two, arranging things, making appointments, minor agreements. He hears cases at his court of miracles. He passes those caged men like a general in search of an army.

Haven’t revolutions always been started this way: by arming the dregs of society with guns and hand grenades? What’s the difference, after all, between a maladjusted veteran, demobilized long-term, who for two liras acts as watchman for the newspaper, and a "racheté, a habitual criminal who lives by exploiting prostitution? All skilled labor. That’s what he always says to Cesare Rossi—his closest collaborator, perhaps his only true adviser—who is appalled by his indiscriminate association with those people. We are still too weak to do without them," he often tells Rossi, to appease his indignation. Too weak, unquestionably: the Corriere della Sera, the newspaper of the arrogant liberal bourgeoisie, devoted a brief news item of only a few lines to the formation of the Fasci di Combattimento, the same space it gave to the theft of sixty-four cases of soap.

Be that as it may, Benito Mussolini, on this evening in early April, contemplates his court of miracles for a few more moments, then, jutting his neck out, he clenches his jaw and searches for breathable air, his already nearly bald cranium tilted up to the sky. Turning up the collar of his jacket, he crushes the cigarette under his heel and picks up his pace. The darkened city, the alleys of depravity, trudge along behind him like a huge depleted organism, a gigantic wounded predator limping towards its end.

Via Cerva, on the other hand, is a calm, quiet, aristocratic old street. A touch of romance is conferred by the two-story patrician homes, with their spacious architectural courtyards. Every step echoes in the night on the lustrous asphalt, disturbing the cloistered atmosphere. The Arditi occupied a space with a shop in the back owned by a Mr. Putato, the father of one of them, right in front of the Palazzo dei Visconti di Modrone. It wasn’t easy to find lodgings for those feverish veterans, who upset civilians by going around in winter with their uniforms undone to expose their bare chests and a dagger at their belts. Formidable soldiers when it came to attacking enemy positions, prized in wartime, but loathsome in periods of peace. Now, when they aren’t sprawled out in a brothel or camped out in a cafe, the Arditi bivouac in those two empty rooms, getting drunk in the middle of the day, ranting about future battles and sleeping on the floor. That’s how they get through the interminable postwar period: they mythicize the recent past, elaborate on a pending future and glaze over the present, smoking one cigarette after another.

It was the Arditi who won the war or, at least, so they tell you. They mythicize themselves to the point that Gianni Brambillaschi, one of the most hotheaded twenty-year-olds, went so far as to write in L’Ardito, the new association’s official organ: Those who did not fight in the assault battalions, even if they were killed at war, did not fight the war. Certainly, however, without them the Piave front would not have been breached with the counteroffensive that in November 1918 enabled the victory over the Austro-Hungarian armies.

The Arditi’s fierce epic began with the so-called Death Squads, special companies of sappers charged with preparing the terrain for assaults by the trench infantry. At night they severed barbed wire fencing and blasted unexploded mines. By day they advanced crawling forward on their bellies, protected by utterly useless armor, dismembered by artillery fire. Then every corps—infantry, Bersaglieri, Alpines—had begun forming their own assault squads, choosing the bravest and most experienced soldiers of the line regiments to be trained in hand grenades, flame-throwers and machine guns. But it was the provision of the dagger, the Latin weapon par excellence, that made the difference. The legend had begun there.

In a war that had annihilated the traditional concept of the soldier as aggressor, in which it was the stinging gases and the tons of steel shot from a remote position that left men unmoving in the trenches, in a technological slaughter owing to the superiority of defensive fire over the mobility of the soldier bent on assault, the Arditi had brought back the intimacy of hand-to-hand combat, the intense clash of physical contact, the dying man’s convulsion transmitted to the killer’s wrist through the blade’s vibration. Trench warfare, rather than producing aggressors, had shaped a defensive personality in millions of soldiers, modeled on an empathetic identification with the victims of an ineluctable cosmic catastrophe. In that war of sheep led to the slaughterhouse, the Arditi had restored the self-confidence that only skill in quartering a man with a short-blade weapon can provide. Under a sky hailing volleys of steel, in the midst of anonymous mass death, of slaughter as a large-scale industrial product, they had restored an individuality driven to the extreme, the heroic cult of ancient warriors and the singular terror that can only be inspired by a slasher who has come in person to your hidey-hole to kill you with his own hands.

In addition, the Arditi had cultivated all the advantages of schizophrenia. The elite units were not subject to the discipline of the troops, they did not march, they were not assigned to grueling shifts in the trenches, they did not break their backs digging burrows or chiseling passages in rock, but lived free and easy behind the front lines, where on days of battle military trucks picked them up and deposited them at the foot of the positions to be captured. Those men could slaughter an Austrian officer for breakfast and, the same day, enjoy baccalà mantecato, creamed codfish, in a Vicenza trattoria for supper. Normality and killing, morning till night.

After his expulsion from the Socialist Party, having lost the armies of the proletariat, Benito Mussolini had immediately, instinctively, recruited the Arditi. Indeed, on November 10th, 1918, the day of celebrations over the victory, following the speech by senator Giovanni Agnelli at Milan’s Monument to the Cinque Giornate, the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia had sat among the Arditi on the truck flying the black flag with the skull. At the Caffè Borsa, raising glasses of spumante, he had toasted them in particular among the millions of soldiers:

Comrades-in-arms! I defended you when the cowardly philistines defamed you. I sense something of myself in you and maybe you recognize yourself in me.

And they, those valiant combatants, who in those very days of glory were humiliated by high command with long marches on the Venetian plain between the Piave and the Adige—marches that served no military purpose other than to make use of troops who had suddenly become inconvenient and useless—they had identified with him. He, hated and a hater by profession, knew that their rancor was mounting, that they would soon be castaways dissatisfied with everything. He knew that at night, in the tents, they cursed politicians, high commanders, socialists and civilians. The Spanish flu was in the air, and on the low plains, towards the sea, malaria. As an honorable death faded from their thoughts, the Arditi, already outcasts, languished with fevers and passed around a flask of cognac as they read aloud the words of the man who from his office in Milan exalted their life without languor, death without dishonor. For three years they had been an aristocracy of warriors, a heroicized phalanx on the covers of children’s magazines: collars turned up, grenades in hand and a dagger between their teeth. Back to civilian life, within weeks they would become a bunch of misfits. Forty thousand loose cannons.

The Trattoria Grande Italia is a modest, greasy, smoky place. The atmosphere is unassuming, the price modest, the clientele habitual but alternating. At this time of night, mostly journalists and actors, authors, comedians, no dancers. In the gloom only the red-and-white checkered tablecloths stand out, set with flasks of Gutturnio dei colli piacentini, the wine from the hilly vineyards south of Piacenza. The customers are all male and almost all quite drunk.

Mussolini makes his way to a corner table where three men await him. It is a secluded table, away from the windows, from which it is easy to keep an eye on the entrance. On the right is a private room in which a table of socialist printers are making quite a racket. When Benito Mussolini takes off his jacket and hat and sits down, it quietens for a moment. Then the excitement grows. He’s been recognized. Suddenly he is the center of the conversation.

His table companions are also well-known individuals. On his right is Ferruccio Vecchi, an engineering student, from Romagna like Mussolini, an exponent of the Futurist movement, an interventionist and highly decorated captain of the Arditi. In January he founded the Cassa di Mutuo Aiuto (mutual aid fund) and the National Arditi Federation of Italy. A black musketeer’s goatee, emaciated, sunken eyes, tubercular, a relentless seducer. Unbelievable and extraordinary stories are told about him: wounded more than twenty times, he is said to have stormed an Austrian trench with nothing but hand grenades, and to have fucked his colonel’s wife at night as she lay beside her sleeping husband.

The sanguinary side of the table, however, is the one opposite him. Sitting there is a short, stocky man, his bullish neck making his head look like it’s set directly on his trunk. The moist lips and idiotic smile on his chubby face recall the utter cruelties of childhood. From time to time the bull-child raises his head, holds his breath and stares into space as though in front of a photographer’s lens. In addition to the posing, his clothing is also theatrical: under a gray-green military jacket he’s wearing a black turtleneck sweater adorned with a white skull clutching a dagger between its teeth. Another dagger, a real one, with a mother-of-pearl handle, hangs from the belt holding up his pants.

He is Albino Volpi, thirty years old, a carpenter, enlisted in the Arditi. Multiple charges for non-political crimes, convicted by the civil courts for insulting a public official, theft, breaking and entering, and aggravated assaults, and by the military court for desertion. His extraordinary deeds are not spoken aloud, they are whispered in a low voice. There are two legends surrounding him, a heroic and a criminal one. Possessed by violence, apparently during the war he would venture out on his own initiative at night. Sneaking out of the last trench, in total silence, armed only with a dagger, he would crawl on all fours to the enemy lines, and, for the pure joy of hearing the hissing of arterial blood in contact with the air, slit the throat of the sleeping sentinel. They say he had his own unique way of gripping the knife. Without doubt he was a Caiman of the Piave, one of the elite commandos who specialized in crossing the river at night to assassinate the lookouts on the bank held by the Austrians. Naked, their bodies smeared with muddy clay to blend in with the vegetation along the shore, the Caimans swam across the current of icy October floods to bring inconsequential savage death into the enemy’s camp. They served practically no purpose, either on a tactical or on a strategic level, yet the Caimans had been indispensable in winning the war. Legendary creatures—maybe even non-existent, perhaps created by propaganda—they guarded a secret handed down from the beginning of time: that the night is dark and full of terrors.

Close combat no longer exists, he’d said to himself, regretfully, about the Great War. No criminal has ever been a war hero, the righteous officials, the honest ones, always used to say. The man who sits in front of Mussolini and buries his head in cabbage stew seasoned with pork rinds, pig feet and boar heads, the way an animal would sink his bloody snout into his prey’s entrails, would seem to belie both statements.

At Mussolini’s table no one speaks much. The meal is consumed in silence, glumly contemplating the bottom of the glass. Everything is already known. But a loud, corpulent guy approaches the table, black tie loosened, wide-brimmed hat askew, and starts babbling vaguely about serious accidents, explosions, bloody fights. It’s not clear whether it’s news or a threat. Mussolini motions him to be quiet. The ranting, menacing individual is left standing there, open-mouthed, displaying a crater where the two upper incisors had been before they were broken by a rock thrown during a rally in the piazza. His name is Domenico Ghetti, he too is from Romagna; an exile in Switzerland with Mussolini as a young man, he is anticlerical, turbulent, and violent, a conspirator and outcast.

Then, however, Mussolini motions for him to sit down and orders him a bowl of lasagna with tomato sauce. If the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia is able to walk home alone at night, it is partly thanks to the fondness that, despite everything, he earns in the circles of violent Milanese anarchy. Ghetti starts to eat and silence returns to the Arditis’ table.

By contrast, the din mounts in the private room next door. Wine is downed and songs are raised. The staff of Avanti!, the socialist newspaper that has its offices on Via San Damiano, just behind Via Cerva, intone "Bandiera rossa trionferà!" (the red flag will triumph!) at the top of their lungs. Now a toast is made to February 17, the day when Milan and Italy, having sobered up following the nation’s victory over its historic Austrian enemies, had discovered with dismay that there was a new enemy in its future: the Bolshevik revolution.

That memorable day forty thousand striking workers had marched to the arena accompanied by the sound of thirty bands, waving thousands of red flags and holding up signs cursing the victorious war that had just ended. A sadistic saraband in which the wounded were displayed as horrific living proof against a war willed by the "padroni" in command. The socialists spat in the face of the uniformed officers who until the day before had ordered them to attack, called for a division of land, and demanded amnesty for deserters.

To the other Milan, the nationalist, patriotic, petit bourgeois one, which in 1915 had given ten thousand volunteers to the war, to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, it had seemed as if the monsters of decadence had been resurrected in that crowd of demonstrators, as if the world newly restored to peace had succumbed to an illness.

Mussolini and those like him had been particularly struck by the fact that the socialists had made women and children march at the head of the parade. Political hatred shouted from the sensual mouths of females and kids still wet behind the ears was shocking, disconcerting and unsettling to the kind of adult male who’d wanted the war. The reason was very simple. To that type of authoritarian, patriarchal and misogynistic individual, the anti-militarist and unpatriotic shouts of women and children presaged something terrifying and unheard of: a future that did not include him. As the parade wound through the streets, the bourgeoisie, tradesmen and hoteliers had hastily shut the windows, lowered the shutters and barred the doors. Faced with that future, they walled themselves up in the prison of the present.

The following day Mussolini had written a strong editorial, "Contro la bestia ritornante (Against the Returning Beast). The paladin of military intervention had solemnly promised to defend the war’s dead, whom he said had been affronted by the protesters—to defend every last one of them even at the cost of digging trenches in the streets and piazzas of our city."

At the socialists’ table they have now moved on to liqueurs and grappa. The noisy party is in full swing. Sharpened by alcohol, their hatred is becoming more explicit. The name of Mussolini, the traitor, can be clearly heard, shouted by a hoarse voice.

At the corner table, Albino Volpi, busy cutting up pork rinds, instinctively changes his grip on the knife. Mussolini, pale, offended by the insults of his old comrades but prudent, stops him with an imperceptible shake of his head. Squeezing his eyes shut, he parts his lips slightly and breathes between his teeth, as though pained by the slow gangrene of an old affliction, a youthful love affair, a brother who died of smallpox.

Then the traitor pulls himself together. He turns his head to look for his accuser. His eyes meet those of a small young man—he must be barely twenty years old—with red hair and freckles on his fair skin. The boy holds his gaze with the bold pride of someone contributing to the redemption of an oppressed humanity.

Mussolini grabs his hat. He briskly refuses an escort from the Arditi. As he heads for the door, he seems to see from the corner of his eye that Albino Volpi has again changed his grip of the knife.

Mussolini turns his head and goes out into the street. Arditi against pacifists, socialists against fascists, bourgeoisie against workers, men of yesterday against men of tomorrow. Milan’s night enfolds him like a field of two mixed forces that exist alongside one another in his arteries, with a clear, constant feeling that one of the two must kill the other.

At home, in Foro Bonaparte, Rachele, his wife, and their two children await him. But it’s still early. He decides to go back through Bottonuto, to make a stop in Vicolo delle Quaglie, to pour out the toxins of the day into a prostitute, one of those women, desired and scorned, that he and the veterans like him love to describe as flesh and blood urinals.

As Benito Mussolini walks back up Via Cerva, he thinks he can hear a harrowed scream coming from the restaurant. But he isn’t sure. Maybe it’s only the city screaming in its sleep.

To you, Mussolini, our good man, for your work; but continue hitting hard, by God, for there is still so much old thinking blocking our way. We are with you in spirit but soon we will be standing alongside you.

Telegram from the officers

of the 27th assault battalion

published in Il Popolo d’Italia,

January 7, 1919

All the dregs of society armed themselves with revolvers and daggers, muskets and hand grenades … Joining these lowlifes were young students, imbued with militaristic romanticism, heads full of patriotic hot air, who see us socialists as Germans.

Giacinto Menotti Serrati,

leader of the maximalist wing

of the Italian Socialist Party

AMERIGO DÙMINI

FLORENCE, LATE MARCH 1919

EVERYTHING IS GOING badly. They haven’t got a cent. Sometimes they even go hungry. What did they fight for?

The man leaving the military hospital on Via dei Mille has a slight limp. His lopsided gait looks out of whack because of his bandaged left arm that hangs suspended from his massive neck. He’s wearing the open jacket of the Arditi, with the black flames on the collar and the side slits designed to quickly extract grenades. On his left arm, hidden by the bandage, a shield-shaped badge bears the design of a Roman gladius, a short sword with a sphinx-head handle. The real dagger hanging from his belt is clearly visible. His stocky, heavy build, off-centered due to his infirmities, takes up the entire sidewalk on the railroad side. Passersby who encounter him on Via dei Mille swerve to avoid him. Some even cross the street.

At the military hospital all the veterans of the assault battalions repeat the same furious litany: it’s a disgrace, they were discharged just like that, out of the blue, the way you fire a servant. First the generals humiliated them by making them march in the rain and mud for months, after the war was over, to impose some discipline on them which no one had ever dared subject them to when they conveniently attacked the enemy trenches. Then the politicians humiliated them by demobilizing them at night, in silence. Not to provoke anyone, they were told. And who was it who shouldn’t be provoked? The draft dodgers, the defeatists, the socialists who had demoralized the troops causing the rout at Caporetto, those like Claudio Treves who in parliament had shouted never again a winter in the trenches, the papal bigots who had termed the massacre of their comrades useless slaughter. And to satisfy those scumbags they had been discharged without ado, in the dark, not an anthem, not one flower, no street full of flags. The heroes crept back to civilian life as furtive as thieves in the house of the Lord.

The man trudges along Via degli Artisti, in borgo dei Pinti, towards the center of Florence. He’d been told that maybe they could help him at the Confraternità della Misericordia. They have a public transport service for the disabled there. Maybe there’s something for him too. Right, because, while they were risking their lives for their country, the deserters at home stole their jobs and now the shirker is all set while the soldier goes hungry. In France the victorious veterans marched under Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, in every country they were greeted with songs of praise, whereas Italy’s veterans, who destroyed one of the greatest empires in history, who went all-out in a gigantic epic struggle, were sent packing in the dark and on tiptoe. No march on Vienna, no parades, no colonies, no Fiume, no compensation, no nothing. Everything is going badly. Living from hand to mouth. What did they fight for?

The Duomo’s facade in polychrome marble gleams in the spring sunshine. Brunelleschi’s immense cupola, the largest masonry dome ever built, seems to celebrate the glory of a people who, after Caporetto, found the strength to triumph. But now Italy is plunging back into the abyss, into strikes, sabotage by the reds who want to sign it over to Moscow, as if they too weren’t Italians, as if glory were something to be ashamed of. To atone for. Atone for the spirit of the war. That’s what deputy Treves shouted in parliament. And now they would like to make those who have already paid with their own sweat and blood, the interventionists, the veterans, the wounded, the brethren who resisted during those nights on the plateaus—now they want to make them pay for the victory. The Nitti government endorses the fraud. It humiliates the young men of the Piave by granting amnesty to the deserters, it wants to dismiss the victorious war as a failed endeavor. It even asked veterans to leave their uniforms at home, so as not to provoke. Avanti! echoes this, proclaiming that Italians are the losers among the winners. And it’s right. Everything is falling apart in this never-ending retreat. Everything is going badly.

Down with capitalism! The shout comes from a group of masons who are paving the piazza in front of Santa Maria del Fiore’s side entrance. They have it in for him, they insult the brazen soldier in uniform who hobbles along, an arm suspended from his neck, towards the head office of the Misericordia. They accuse him of having supported the imperialist war of the padroni. They yell killer, traitor.

The entrance to the charitable association is only a few steps away, there are probably half a dozen pavers, the soldier is alone, in bad shape. But he is also pale with rage. He had voluntarily enlisted in Baseggio’s Death Squad not to avoid hard work but because he liked adventure, as when he was a boy in America, the continent whose name he carries. He took part in the battle of Monte Sant’Osvaldo, in Valsugana, where the entire battalion was destroyed in a frontal attack on enemy positions. In the days of Vittorio Veneto, on Monte Pertica, an impregnable peak of Mount Grappa over 4,900 feet high, fighting the Austrians hand-to-hand, he was wounded by a barrage of machine gun fire from enemy aircraft but refused medical care and went back to the front line where, three days later, he was wounded a second time by a fragment of a shell case that exploded in the battery. He was publicly praised by Baseggio in front of General Grazioli for the conquest of a stronghold in Valsugana, and was awarded a silver medal and a military cross in the war whose effects he still bears in the stiffened bones of his left hand. He used his special leave for an anguished trip to Albania, together with his fellow soldier Banchelli, to search in vain for the grave where his brother Albert lies, a lieutenant in the 35th battalion of the Bersaglieri regiment who had fallen in combat the previous year. He, this man who carries the name of an adventurous continent, is called traitor by those cowards.

It’s intolerable. He would have been better off staying up there, fertilizing the soil among the dolines of Mount Grappa.

The soldier plants himself in the middle of the piazza. Draft dodgers! he yells. He puts a hand on his dagger.

They are on him in an instant. A short, thickset guy in shirtsleeves leaps in front of him and punches him twice in the teeth. The medal-winning soldier is already on the ground, spat on and kicked. He remains silent, doesn’t cry out, doesn’t plead, but his powerful adult body, having regressed twenty-five years in a few seconds to now huddle in a fetal position, proclaims his unmistakable, pitiful appeal to the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore. No one answers it. The first paver who attacked him rips the Arditi insignia off his jacket and stuffs them in his mouth.

The Misericordia’s stretcher-bearers find him like that, still curled up like a fully grown fetus. They load him on the stretcher in that position. He is not seriously injured—only bruises, abrasions, some broken teeth—but in this man’s world there no longer seems to be one good reason to get back to an upright position. Only later does he begin to speak again, to clarify a question of accents with the policeman who takes down his particulars in order to draft a report.

Dùmini, he states clearly, Amerigo Dùmini. With the accent on the first syllable. Tuscan style.

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI, BENITO MUSSOLINI

MILAN, APRIL 15, 1919

TODAY EVERYTHING IS silent. Milan is holding its breath.

Tram drivers and night-shift gas fitters haven’t been back to work since midnight. None of the lines north of the city are operating. Public services are suspended. The hundreds of factories that employ the huge population of Italy’s most industrialized city are all closed. With no exception. Not a single worker showed up at work.

The proletarian masses lie entirely in the outskirts but this time the strike has also affected the center. All the shops, the gathering places along Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the Piazza del Duomo, and the Galleria are closed. As is everything in every district of the city. The banks are guarded by the police or the army, but they are closed. The municipal offices are closed. Business offices are closed.

Two days ago, on the morning of April 13, a socialist rally on Via Garigliano ended with several people injured and one dead after an exchange of fire with the police. Filippo Turati was supposed to give a talk, but for some reason the old leader of reformist, humanist socialism did not show up. Ezio Schiaroli then took the floor in his place. The revolutionary anarchist violently attacked Mussolini and incited the workers, urging them to use violence to seize power. When the mounted police brutally charged the demonstrators along Via Borsieri, the crowd reacted for the first time. Rock throwing, vandalism, bludgeoning. The melee was intense. Police and carabinieri were stunned. They were forced to retreat, pushed back by the mass of rabble-rousers who would not give up. At that point they resorted to the artillery division: the agents opened fire on the crowd, as they had been doing for nearly a century. The people countered by proclaiming a general strike on September 15th. Now everything points to the possibility that more blood will be shed. As usual the spiral of violence escalates from one proletarian massacre to another.

For forty-eight hours Milan has been experiencing an uninterrupted battle vigil. No one breathes anymore. The nervous tension has become unbearable. An imbecilic panic has spread, Mussolini comments in his newspaper, similar to that which takes hold when an enemy offensive is announced. But for months now the agonized waiting has become the dominant, almost constant, state of mind. L’Avanti!, edited by Giacinto Menotti Serrati—a former Leninist stevedore who unloaded coal, and who in 1914 replaced Mussolini as editor of the socialist daily—keeps the proletarians in a daily state of alarm over the imminent revolutionary wave. The wave that is already submerging Europe.

In November, in Munich, Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a socialist republic. In February, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, a Munich aristocrat rejected by extreme right-wing secret lodges for being the son of a Jewess, shot him. On April 6th, the socialists fighting with the communists for the vacant supremacy proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic governed by Ernst Toller, an utterly incompetent playwright. His foreign affairs appointee, already treated several times in a psychiatric hospital, declared war on Switzerland because it refused to lend sixty locomotives to Soviet Bavaria. Toller’s government collapsed after six days, replaced by the communists, led by Eugen Levine, hailed by workers as the German Lenin. A few days earlier, on March 21st, in Budapest, Sàndor Garbai and Béla Kun had proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Hungary; having formed an alliance with Lenin’s Russia, to recover territories that were lost as a result of being defeated in the war they had invaded Slovakia and attacked Romania.

In short, for months each day has been a vigil. As they listen to the inflammatory words of their tribunes, the tens of thousands of proletarians who have flocked to the rally at the Milan arena on this morning of April 15, 1919, sniff the faint smell of blood in the air and feel the revolution, its terror, approaching. In everyone, absolutely everyone, there is the expectation of some cataclysm.

In the early afternoon, with no preordained plan, as if attracted by the magnetism of disaster, an avant-garde made up of several thousand demonstrators breaks away from the enormous procession and marches into Via Orefici, heading for the Duomo. The protest overflows from the stadium to the piazza, advancing towards the revolution. The postwar period is in a hurry. You can’t live each day with an apocalypse on the horizon.

In Piazza del Duomo, beyond the cordon of troops which the socialist procession immediately engulfs, a man is heatedly addressing the small crowd of civilians, officers, university students, Arditi and fascists, while clinging to the marble lion sculpted at the base of the equestrian monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Italy. The man is a poet, his name is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and in 1909 he founded the first historical avant-garde of twentieth-century Italy. His manifesto for a Futurist poetic movement has resonated throughout Europe, from Paris to Moscow; he proposes destroying museums, libraries, and academies of all kinds, murdering the moonlight, singing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure or rebellion, and glorifying war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism; patriotism; the destructive acts of liberators; beautiful ideas for which one dies; and contempt for women.

After using words to celebrate war as a civilian, in 1915 the poet came to personally know the war he so extolled. Leaving behind the bourgeois luxuries of his Corso Venezia home, furnished in neo-Egyptian style, he voluntarily enlisted in the Alpines, fought and was wounded, and then returned to the front; he got a taste of defeat at Caporetto and savored triumph at Vittorio Veneto behind the wheel of a Lancia model 1Z armored car.

Now, after climbing down from the lion at the foot of the king’s equestrian monument, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with a commanding tone, orders the bystanders, looking at him perplexed in their gray frock coats and bowler hats, to join the column of counter-demonstrators. The struggle makes no allowance for third-party stances, there is no room for neutrality. No spectators! the founder of futurism shouts to the neutral civilians walking through the Galleria. No onlookers!

Around the monument, meanwhile, everyone feels the socialists’ attack is close. Here they are! Here they come! someone shouts. False alarm. Chemical industrialist Ettore Candiani, who takes over from Marinetti, starts talking. Nobody listens. There they come. They’re here! The Arditi pull out their revolvers.

For a moment the two factions face one another on either side of the cordon of carabinieri which has blocked the outlet from Via dei Mercanti. At the head of the socialist column are once again women, holding high a portrait of Lenin and the red flag. Unrestrained and joyful, they are singing their songs of liberation. They’re calling for a better life for their children. They still believe they’ve come to march in their parade, to dance their minuet of revolution. At the head of the other cortege, much less numerous, are men who for the last four years have coexisted with killing on a daily basis. The discrepancy is grotesque. A different association with death creates an abyss between the two groups.

The carabinieri’s cordon opens up. On the Piazza Duomo side, the uniformed officers and the Arditi advance in twos and threes, randomly, as if everything were normal, revolver in hand. The actual battle lasts about a minute.

From the socialists’ side, thousands of them, rocks go flying, a few clubs. From the side of the officers, Arditi and Futurists, who amount to hundreds, gunshots erupt. They are first fired into the air, then at the socialist column. For a few moments the marchers persist, then stunned, fall silent. In that brief interlude there is no more singing. Confused, women and men stare at the monsters in uniform arrayed before them. The Arditi burst on the scene like unexpected actors.

Another instant and the socialist column falls apart. The collapse is precipitous, driven by a demented panic. Two thousand men and women, who until a minute ago were singing the praises of the revolution, are on the ground. From there, terrified, they watch the enemies who, on their feet, advance slowly, in no particular order, calmly reloading their revolvers. Many flatten themselves on the ground, huddled between the arches of the Loggia dei Mercanti. The officers on their feet, however, put away the regulation firearm issued for their military rank and grab a weapon they consider more appropriate for menial retribution. Now they start running. The masses of terrified workers are bludgeoned. Blood runs down the steps. As they club the demonstrators, the officers and Arditi ridicule them: Let’s hear you shout viva Lenin, now. Shout viva Lenin! A young man on the ground, distraught, holds out a few liras, as if he could buy their mercy.

Marinetti, scuffling with a burly worker, ends up in the window of a porter’s lodge. Two Arditi grab the guy from below. The poet has to intercede so they don’t kill him.

Now all of them, revolvers in hand, march down Via Dante, walls on either side of them, shooting into the air. Wielding clubs. The street empties. The brother of Filippo Corridoni, an interventionist martyr who fell in the first year of the war, returns from Foro Bonaparte with his right arm bloody. Over there, 200 yards away, the socialist demonstrators are still crowding around the marble monument to Garibaldi. A speaker, atop the base, is still rallying. Still shouting the ritual viva Lenin! as if hypnotized by a mantra.

An Ardito draws his dagger and, on his own, tears through the deserted street like a speeding bullet. He clambers up the monument, stabs the communist. Suddenly the monument blanches. The rally is over.

Returning triumphantly to Piazza Duomo, the aggressors again gather round the monument from which they’d started, the one with the king on horseback. Marinetti is bushed, done in, his chest bruised. They insist that the poet speak again. None of his words will be remembered.

After the enemy is trounced, his home must be burned down. And the home of the socialists is their newspaper. The Milanese headquarters of Avanti!, the flagship of Italian socialism, is located on Via San Damiano, through which a naviglio (canal) still flows. When the assailants arrive towards evening, they find it defended by a cordon of uniformed soldiers. Their opposition is half-hearted, however: many of the activists had been their commanders during the war. The defense soon turns into a siege.

Then all of a sudden a rifle shot, almost certainly fired by the socialists inside the building, most likely triggered by terror, brings down one of the military guards. His name is Michele Speroni, he is twenty-two years old, and he is hit from behind. Blood gushes from the back of his neck. One of the officers steps away from the group of Arditi and fascists, bends down and raises the helmet of the soldier killed by the socialists. The officer speaks, shouts, but here too nobody listens. A small opening appears in the cordon to allow the stretcher carrying the victim to pass through. The aggressors move in through it.

Still more gunshots from inside before the windows are scaled by Arditi using the ground-floor iron grilles as footholds. Once inside, they find no one left to defend the home. The socialists have all cleared out through the back door. The looting begins. Methodical, competent, unchallenged.

They smash everything. They drizzle flammable liquids in every room, empty the cans on the bound volumes, overturn desks, wreck typewriters and file cabinets. The archive of historical material is attacked with a hammer. Everything crashes to the floor, the plaster starts peeling from the ceilings due to the incandescent heat, thousands of lithographed photographs of Lenin, ready to be shipped all over Italy, fly out the window. Everything trashed. Coolly, with precision, like skilled experts of destruction. There is no hand-to-hand combat in the assault, no contention. There are no thoughts, not even brutal and vindictive ones. Pure devastation.

The only obstacle is posed by the rotary presses. The heavy typesetting machinery doesn’t lend itself to being grazed by the clubs or daggers of the Arditi circling around the printers, spellbound, like big apes around a meteorite dropped out of the sky and fallen to earth.

After a few minutes of uncertainty, a gigantic young man steps forward, pushes the soldiers aside and conspicuously brandishes an iron bar. The pipe conveys a lesson. The young man, whose name is Edmondo Mazzucato, is wearing the Arditi uniform with the black flames on the jacket lapels and various medals under the insignia. Orphaned, propertyless, shut away since childhood in a Salesian boarding school, Mazzucato lost his first job at fifteen for joining the general strike of 1904. Intolerant, rebellious, and violent, after moving to Milan and embracing the ideas of anarchy, he was imprisoned several times by both civil and military authorities. In 1909 he brutally beat a corporal who, out of pure spite, had denied him leave. The antisocial outcast worked as a warehouseman, salesman, clerk, and sales representative from the time he was a boy, then found his calling by learning the trade of typesetter-typographer, continuing to work for anarchist, libertarian and revolutionary publications. When the war broke out, he also found his vocation: having enlisted as a volunteer, he was promoted and decorated several times for distinguished service in the field.

Like many other fascists, Mazzucato has also defected from the socialist camp to go over to that of its opponents. Now he evidently has one last exemplary lesson for his fellow soldiers: raising the iron bar, he shows it clearly to everyone, shoves it through the gears of the printing equipment with scientific expertise, then starts the rotary presses. The blunt force of the machine destroys itself. The young ex-printer of the revolutionary press destroys his own past.

Half an hour later the whole building is in flames. On Via San Damiano, the police watch the spectacle of the blaze shoulder to shoulder with the men who ignited it. Firefighters are prevented from stepping in to allow the fire time to burn itself out.

It is already night when, at Il Popolo d’Italia, Marinetti relates the events of that memorable day to the editor who did not take part in them. Actually, there had been a secret huddle with the activists on the evening of the 14th, but afterwards Mussolini had not moved from his tiny office for the entire eventful day. He didn’t even go out to eat. At noon lunch was ordered in from a nearby trattoria. The editor ate it sitting at a small table on the landing of the staircase, constantly checking, between one bite and another, that his short-barreled revolver with the reserve cylinder was working. But he never set foot outside the newspaper.

Now he listens, seated behind the desk of his dismal office. Hanging behind him, on the wall papered in a yellowed, flowery pattern, is the Arditi flag. On the desk, among the jumble of papers, days-old tabloids and a crank phone, are three SIPE grenades and a revolver. On the left, a five-shelf étagère holds a tea service; beside it stand a wastepaper basket and a stool, both unsteady on the uneven, filthy old terrazzo tile floor with white and magenta hexagons.

As Marinetti talks, Mussolini nods his head. His gaze, however, is fixed on the small wooden board that Ferruccio Vecchi has been holding since he entered the room. It’s the sign that was torn off the door of the Avanti! office and it’s clear that in a few minutes, once the poet has completed his chanson de geste, the war trophy will be presented to him with ritual homage. Benito Mussolini will have to take the slain enemy’s scalp and display it from the balcony to the Arditi who are clamoring in the courtyard. The editor’s tiny office is filled, in fact, with goliardic songs coming from the street: "Hey, hey … Avanti! is no more! Hey, hey … Avanti! is no more! Hey, hey …" Mussolini listens and strokes his bald head, with its fuzzy gray-blue skullcap of regrowth. Five years ago he was the editor of Avanti! Much loved by his readers, he had elevated the paper to a circulation never before achieved. Now he is about to trample on its corpse.

Marinetti has finished. Vecchi hands him the wooden sign. For an instant Mussolini recoils, in a sudden urge of refusal. His guts loosen, his viscera spill out, yard by yard, onto the terrazzo tiled floor. There are two men and two editors sitting in that one chair under the grotesque flag nailed to the flowery yellowed wallpaper. There are fathers and sons.

This is a day of our revolution, the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia proclaims after a few minutes to the Arditi crowded into the filthy courtyard.

The first episode of the civil war has taken place.

The decree is pronounced. From that moment on, a small patrol of armed veterans will bivouac in the basement to guard the newspaper. An old Fiat machine gun will be installed on the roof to scour the street, along with chevaux de frises in barbed wire at the entrance to the alleyway, in order to defend a nationally circulated newspaper as though guarding the command center of a war zone.

Tonight, however, Mussolini insists on returning home alone. After the pages are typeset, at three in the morning, he hails a public conveyance drawn by an old nag. Directs it to Foro Bonaparte, at the corner of Via Legnano.

As the worn-out beast trudges along the cobblestones, the passenger’s solitude is complete. An unbridgeable distance separates him from humanity.

On the day of April 15 we had absolutely decided, with Mussolini, not to hold any counter-demonstrations because we envisioned a clash and the idea of shedding Italian blood horrifies us.