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trained 3r street warfare were posted at the crossroads, while those assigned to
the task of attacking and defending houses were held in readiness to reinforce
weak points, to defend threatened positions or to deliver short, sharp attacks at
the heart of the enemy organization. The shock-troops composed of Black Shirts
trained to percolate amid crowds, to carry off sudden maneuvers sometimes in
isolation, armed with bayonets, bombs and firebrands, stood by near the lorries
destined to transport them to the field of struggle. They were specially designed
to inflict reprisals. Reprisals were a very important part of Black Shirt tactics. As
soon as the death of a Fascist was reported from an outlying quarter or a village
the shock-troops went off to inflict reprisals. The Labor Exchanges, the
Workmen s Clubs, the houses of the Socialist leaders were attacked, sacked and
burned. At the beginning when reprisals were still a novelty the Red Guards
fired upon their assailants, and a bloody struggle would be opened around the
Labor Exchanges and the Workmen s Clubs, and in the streets of the quarter or
village. Rut soon the terrible weapon of reprisals proved successful. The fighting
spirit of the Red Guards was sapped. They lost the courage to defend themselves,
the resistance of the workers organizations was broken at the very heart. On the
approach of the Black Shirts, Red Guards, Socialist leaders, trade union
secretaries, strike agitators would make off for the country and hide in the
woods. Thither they would be hunted-the terrible chase without horns or
halloing was often prolonged throughout the night. Sometimes the entire
population of a village where a Fascist had been killed took to its heels. The
shocktroops arrived to find empty houses, deserted roads, and a single Black
Shirt corpse extended on the pavement.
The leaders of the trade unions did more however to oppose the rapid,
violent, pitiless tactics of the Fascist than merely to offer what they called
unarmed resistance. Officially indeed they took responsibility for nothing but
strikes, yet they were at pains to rouse the fighting spirit of the workers in every
possible way. They pretended not to know that in the Labor Exchanges and the
Workers Clubs there were stocks of guns and bombs, but they never intended
the strike to be a peaceful demonstration. It was to be an act of war, the necessary
background for the street war tactics of the workers. - The strike is our way of
reprisal, they declared. Unarmed resistance is what we oppose to the
bludgeons and daggers of the Fascists. But they knew very well that the
workers went to arm themselves at the Labor Exchanges. In the hot, heavy
atmosphere of the strike the worker was led on to armed struggle. The attitude of
the Socialists as innocent unarmed victims of Fascist violence, red lambs bled by
black wolves, was as ridiculous as the Tolstoyan scruples of certain Fascists of
liberal origin who refused to allow that Mussolini s followers had el ier fired a
bullet, wielded a bludgeon or forced a single drop of castor oil down an
opponent s throat.
For all the hypocrisy of the Trade Union leaders, there were casualties
among the Black Shirts too. It is altogether false to suppose that the Fascists
suffered no serious reverses. Suburbs, villages, whole regions sometimes rose in
arms against them, signal being given by the general strike. The Black Shirts
were attacked in their homes, barricades were raised in the streets, while bands
of workers and peasants armed with guns and grenades occupied the villages,
invaded the towns and hunted the Fascists. That the workers were less
hypocritical than their leaders is proved by the massacre of Sarzana. In this town
in July 1921, fifty Black Shirts were massacred, those merely wounded having
their throats cut as they lay in litters in front of the hospital. A hundred others
who had sought safety in flight in the countryside were chased to the woods by
women armed with pitchforks and sickles. The story of the Civil War in Italy in
1920 and 1921, the preface of the Fascist capture of power, is made up of episodes
of such ferocious violence.
To put an end to revolutionary strikes and insurrections of the workers
and peasants which were becoming more frequent, more widely organized, and
more serious, putting a stop to the activity of whole regions : it a time, the
Fascists adopted the tactics of systematically occupying the threatened regions.
From one day to another Black Shirts would be concentrated according to a
mobilization plan at the points indicated. Thousands upon thousands of armed
men, sometimes not less than fifteen or twenty thousand, would be massed on a
single town, country or village area, being rapidly transported in lorries from
one province to another. In a few hours the whole occupied region was in a state
of siege. All that remained of the Socialist, Communist organizations, Labor
Exchanges, Trade Unions, Workers Clubs, newspapers and co-operatives would
be methodically dissolved or smashed up. The Red Guards who had not had
time to clear out were dosed, drubbed, turned inside out. In two or three days
the bludgeons would be at work over hundreds of square miles. By the end of
1921 these tactics ever more widely and systematically applied had been
successful : political and syndicalist organization of the proletariat had received a
knockout blow.
The danger of a Red revolution had now been averted forever: Citizen
Mussolini had deserved well of his country. So now, thought respectable
citizens of every class, the Black Shirts will go home to their beds. But soon they
discovered that Fascism had delivered a knockout blow at the State as well as the
working classes.
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