Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  What was probably Mussolini’s last duel took place in 1921: the editor-in-chief of Paese, Francesco Ciccotti-Scozzese, challenged him to a duel because Mussolini had described him as being “morally confused”. The two men had difficulties in arranging their duel. The police were onto them, and they had to resort to various stratagems before they could finally meet on 27th October. In the fourteenth round Ciccotti collapsed, out of breath. His seconds put him in one of the beds in the villa where the duel was being fought; the doctors injected him with camphor oil and said the duel could not continue with Ciccotti in such a condition. “Colonel Basso and the Hon. Finzi [Mussolini’s seconds] together with their duellist declare that they are at the service of the Hon. Ciccotti’s representatives. They are of the opinion that the encounter cannot be allowed to proceed since it is not possible – and never has been – to continue a duel in the absence of medical assistance.”6

  These sword fights were a regular occurrence throughout Mussolini’s tumultuous journalistic career. Il Popolo d’Italia was continually full of threats, challenges, insults, polemics. “Only a bullet in the head can silence me,” he wrote in an editorial; the newspaper’s readership – which increased every day – was inflamed by his rhetoric. Later on, Mussolini expressed his opinion on duelling in his long interview with Ludwig: “Duelling is certainly a more chivalric form of conflict – I fought duels on many occasions. But war is an extraordinary experience: it’s a school where you learn about life, when you see men in all their naked reality.”7

  War was Mussolini’s new and overriding goal. He took ample advantage of the weaknesses of Italian democracy, which could easily be overrun by determined partisan initiatives, by using his newspaper as the focus for the creation of the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria (Leagues for Revolutionary Action), which brought together a heterogeneous group of volunteers who were in theory prepared to go to war against the central European empires. Margherita Sarfatti asserts that by January 1915 these groups or, as she called them, “nuclei of the brave and willing” totalled around five thousand members throughout various Italian towns and cities. They were not properly organized: they followed no rules and didn’t have a political programme; their single goal was to make sure Italy entered the war. Renzo De Felice has calculated the number of these early Fasci: there were 105 of them with around nine thousand members overall. Together with other groups of intransigent republicans, Mazzinians and left-wing supporters of Italian military intervention, they were intent on provoking the situation with a sudden attack which could provide a casus belli – for example, by invading Austrian territory and attacking one of their army barracks. They had built up secret stockpiles of arms and drawn up plans. “Mussolini’s role in all this was a double one. He was responsible – with the evident aim of keeping personal control of the developments – for maintaining contact with a Russian agent working in Italy by the name of Matvei Gedenstrom, who could provide the funds needed to organize a military sortie into Austrian territory, and he was also working to keep all the revolutionary groups in favour of Italian intervention together in a united front…”8

  Money was forthcoming, but not from the Russians. The activities of the early Fasci were kept more or less under wraps, but in the public political arena Mussolini soon carved out for himself a key role as the main proponent on the left for Italian intervention in the war, in the process weakening considerably the appeal of the Socialist Party. Indeed numerous leading figures from the party, together with revolutionaries and republicans, joined sides with Mussolini; many would go on to become his bitterest opponents during the Fascist regime. Pietro Nenni had been friendly with Mussolini when they were in prison together, as we have seen, and he now joined him as a passionate advocate for Italy’s participation in the European conflict, which he believed was necessary if the country was to complete the work of the Risorgimento and become truly unified. Mussolini struck Nenni as being more interested in the war in terms of internal politics, as a means of acquiring power, but his misgivings did not prevent him from starting to contribute regularly to Il Popolo d’Italia. The newspaper was glad to welcome him to its pages: his first article, published on 20th January 1915 and entitled ‘Which War?’, was actually printed in place of the usual editorial. With its new contributors the newspaper soon moved to the centre of the contemporary debate on Italian intervention, necessary reading for supporters and opponents of the policy alike. In the eyes of the Allied powers’ intelligence services the paper was a useful tool, and they funded its campaign to convince the country to enter the conflict. Gaetano Salvemini has also shown how Mussolini obtained financial backing from the French and the Belgians by using a network of contacts in their respective socialist parties, consisting in a large initial payment of perhaps as much as 100,000 lire followed by monthly deposits of about 10,000 lire. In her memoirs, Rachele Mussolini tries to defend her husband’s activities in this period by maintaining that the sums of money which were supplied did not amount to as much as was reported; she also points out that the regular salaries of journalists were often paid with considerable delay. She admits that the leading French socialist Marcel Cachin was a frequent visitor to the their home, but writes that she had no memory of his ever having brought money with him. Her naivety here may be excused: on the perhaps erroneous assumption that envelopes containing banknotes passed hands on these occasions, no one would have bothered to show Rachele the packet. Their apartment was a suitable place to hold private meetings. Rachele recalls one exceptional visitor in particular: Lenin. She was no linguist and her conversation with their Russian guest cannot have been very extensive but she seems to have understood from the few words she managed to exchange with him that Lenin wanted to encourage her husband to “reunite the Italian Socialist Party and fight against the reformers from within the party. […] Many years later my husband remarked to me that ‘Lenin had one stroke of luck in life – he died before Stalin could do away with him’.”9 Il Popolo d’Italia would later welcome the revolution in Russia in 1918 with enthusiasm, announcing the event with a banner headline: “Victory of Russian Revolution over Germanophile Reactionaries”. The historian Peter Martland, whose work is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of the British secret services Defence of the Realm, has recently shown that Mussolini was also financed by the British, after discovering documents among the private papers of Sir Samuel Hoare, Viscount Templewood (known as the Templewood papers) in Cambridge University Library. Hoare had worked for the British intelligence services in Rome during this period and was in close contact with Captain Vernon Kell, the head of the external affairs department of the secret service. Mussolini received £100 a week in cash from Hoare in return for his promise to unleash the Fasci and keep the pacifists out of the picture.

  When Italy finally entered the war on 24th May 1915, the Fasci were dissolved so that their members could enlist as regular soldiers in the armed forces. The experience of organizing the Fasci would prove useful to Mussolini after the war. On 27th May Pietro Nenni was sent to join the third coastal-artillery regiment; Mussolini, however, was blocked by new military measures which put him in a category which was excluded from volunteering. He decided to show up anyway at the Bersaglieri barracks, but his request to enrol was turned down. He wrote of his disappointment in the newspaper, but also stated that he was certain he would eventually be called up – only the naive, the foolish and the hardliners for neutrality could believe that the war would be over quickly. On 31st August 1915 he was called up and sent to join the Bersaglieri troops. He applied for officer training, and on 6th November his divisional commander received a telephone call instructing him to send Mussolini to do an intensive course in Vernazzo. After he had completed his first week, a courier on a motorbike brought a counter-order: Mussolini was to return to his regiment. It appears that he did so without undue protest – as we shall see, he had other matters to worry about at the time.

  The same treatment was meted out to Nenni and other
left-wing leaders marked down as subversives. General Staff had received a confidential report which informed them of a plot to spread revolutionary propaganda among the troops: Mussolini was one of the leaders of the plot and had to be blocked from becoming an officer, along with his fellow extremists, whether they were socialists, republicans or radicals. Mussolini planned to exploit the new military and political situation brought about by Italy’s entry into the war, but his plans involved more than merely drumming up support among the soldiers. He asked for permission to send reports back to Il Popolo d’Italia from the front, thus turning himself into a war correspondent on active service. On 25th December 1915 the newspaper carried this announcement: “In the next few days a new feature will appear in our pages: the ‘War Diary’ of our chief editor, Benito Mussolini. This will show us the war as it is experienced from day to day, in all its strange fascination and all its horror. These pages are written in the heat of battle, with machine guns firing and cannon thundering – they’re not about fine writing, but about the truth.”

  There were many writers on the war’s front lines: some were there as soldiers while others, like Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton, were there to assist the troops, living among them and above all writing about what was happening. But Mussolini didn’t set out to be a writer in this sense. His reports from the front, fifteen in all, were a journalistic coup which enabled him to live in the midst of the ranks, one of the men in this new mass army, but recognized by all. He didn’t need or want to propagandize for the revolution by trying to convert his fellow soldiers, which is what the senior army command feared. General Cadorna had instructed all the divisional commanders to keep an eye out for the revolutionary socialists who had enlisted and who would spread their cause within the ranks with the aim of carrying out the revolution after the war. Cadorna’s concerns were well founded, but he didn’t and couldn’t understand the methods that might be used, above all the new forms of mass communication such as the popular press and also cinema, since the first filmed reports from the war were made in this period. Mussolini as a journalist, on the other hand, was quick to grasp the importance of the new techniques of communication and was willing to put the day-to-day running of the newspaper at risk in order to experiment with them. Although Mussolini tried to dedicate the few days of leave he was granted to running the paper, the publication soon ran into problems, especially financial ones.

  The first instalment of his war diary appeared in issue No. 359 in December 1915 and covered the period from the 9th to the 17th of September. He started off by highlighting his role as the editor on active military service: “While we were queuing up in the mess for our rations, a medical officer picked me out and said: ‘I’d like to shake the hand of the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia.’” A few lines later he writes: “A Bersagliere from Mantua came up to me and said, ‘Signor Mussolini, we’ve seen how courageous you are and how you led us on the march while grenades were being thrown – we wish we were under your command…’”10

  Mussolini frequently puts himself in the spotlight, a journalistic device aimed at convincing his readers that the reports they were reading were important: “My squadron leader is a Calabrian by the name of Lorenzo Pinna, from Nicastro. His father is a civil engineer. He said to me, ‘Who’d ever have thought I’d be fighting side by side with Mussolini, as two ordinary soldiers together. I must write and tell my father – he’s often mentioned your name to me.’”11

  Mussolini was certainly no Hemingway, and in any case he wasn’t interested in literary effects. Yet all his reports, even the banal ones, are intended to play on his readers’ nascent nationalist sympathies: “We soon reached the line of the old frontier. By the road there was a house and a sentry post; the Austrian flags had all gone. It was a moving moment for me as I remembered being expelled, in October 1909, from ‘all the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’. The lieutenant shouted: ‘Long live Italy!’ I was at the head of the column and echoed him, whereupon I heard four hundred voices shout out in unison: ‘Long live Italy!’”12

  Or this passage, from the entry for 18th October: “No soldier who’s been wounded wants to show weakness and fear in front of his comrades. But there’s a deeper reason behind this reluctance: you don’t groan about a wound when you’re constantly in danger of death. Being wounded is not so bad as getting killed. But to see these young lads, the humble sons of our motherland, proudly refusing to cry out and complain as the surgeon’s hot steel cuts into their flesh is a proof of the magnificent determination of our nation’s race.”13

  On 25th and 26th November 1916, while he was on sick leave and grappling with a series of personal problems to do with his mistresses, Mussolini published two articles in Il Popolo d’Italia which broke up the united front of those on the left who were in favour of Italy’s intervention in the war by coming out in support of the nationalists. Fiume must belong to Italy, he declared in the second piece, a reference to the fact that the strategically significant Adriatic port, currently under Austro-Hungarian rule, had not been included in the list of territorial gains promised to Italy by the terms of the secret 1915 Treaty of London. His socialist convictions were receding, as is also apparent in some offhand remarks he makes in the reports sent from the front. Colonel Giuseppe Beruto, the new commanding officer in charge of Mussolini’s regiment, had asked to see him. Mussolini’s account continues:

  I presented myself and greeted him. We shook hands warmly. “I asked to meet you in your rest break after you’ve been on sentry watch in the trenches all day and night. I’ve heard you’re a good soldier and I’ve never doubted it.” The colonel continued: “I’ve often been on military picket duty in Milan because of you and your friends.” “Well, that’s all in the past,” I replied. The colonel lived alongside us, like an ordinary soldier, putting up with all the discomforts of an ordinary soldier’s life.14

  The articles Mussolini sends back from the front respond to a broader political and communicative strategy, but he never forgets that he’s a journalist, and on occasion uses his reports to win the support of the factory workers and agricultural labourers who made up the army’s rank and file, sometimes at the risk of provoking military censorship:

  When rations are handed out unequally, the men start to shout “Camorra! We don’t want the Camorra!” It’s unfortunately true that the Camorra exists in the army. Only a very small part of what soldiers fighting on the front line – the men who should be seen as “sacred” – are entitled to, as stipulated by army regulations, ever reaches them. Coffee, chocolate, wine, grappa – all these supplies pass through the hands of too many drivers, corporals, orderlies. The “Camorra” is a fact of army life, but it infuriates the rank and file, especially in wartime. You sometimes hear them muttering that the government is a bunch of thieves. The “Camorra” can end up lowering the morale of the troops.15

  Mussolini’s military career – and his articles from the front line – were brought to an abrupt end by a fairly serious incident in battle, as was reported in every newspaper in Italy, and also by some abroad. On 23rd February 1917, during some troop exercises, a grenade exploded next to him. Five Bersaglieri were killed on the spot; Mussolini had dozens of shrapnel wounds and was taken to hospital. The medical officer who operated on him, Dr Piccagnoni, described the operation:

  I extracted the first two pieces from the right thigh.

  On 27th February I carried out a further operation to extract a fairly large piece from the back of the left hand. It was extremely painful – the piece had lodged itself between two bones and proved very difficult to remove – but Mussolini bore the operation with great courage.

  Two more pieces were removed from the right shoulder and another from the right tibia. […]

  Two days after this operation the patient’s temperature reached forty; the pain in his leg had become atrocious. I was alarmed and decided to operate again; this time I managed to extract three more fragments with the use of an electrical vibr
ator. They varied in size from a grain of rice to a grain of maize. Most of the pieces were found in the right leg; there were just two in the region of the left Achilles tendon.”16

  Twenty years later, in 1937, Mussolini recalled the incident in conversation with Claretta Petacci:

  I can still hear the noise of the explosion. I was seriously wounded. I remember doing one thing which not many people know about: when the bomb fragments hit me and cut into my skin the first thing I did was to touch myself here (he pointed to his…). I touched myself there while I was still just conscious, and as soon as I felt everything was still there I fainted. All the soldiers were scared of losing their testicles. Many had them blown off completely or damaged. He laughs. Yes, I touched myself to make sure and then I felt OK.17

  While he was serving with the Bersaglieri, Mussolini had been in hospital once before, for paratyphoid fever, and the King, Victor Emmanuel III, who was a fairly assiduous visitor to the areas behind the front lines, had asked to see him. On hearing that he was in critical condition after the grenade explosion, the King asked to be taken to visit him again. On 7th March he went to the hospital; he walked along the wards watched by the other patients who had by now become used to the bustle and the visitors around Mussolini’s bed. The King’s visit was reported in Il secolo in a piece written by Raffaele Garinei:

  The King approached Mussolini’s bed and asked: “How are you feeling, Mussolini?” “Not too well, Your Majesty.” […] The King kept his eyes on Mussolini’s face and listened. “Not being able to move must be very painful for an active man like you!” “It’s indeed a torture, Your Majesty, but I must put up with it.” Then the King asked Mussolini to tell him what had happened, and the patient gave him a detailed account.