“How many dead?” asked Israel Zangwill. He was astonished to learn that there had been no bloodshed anywhere in Tuscany. “Apparently then,” he said, “your revolution is much more serious at Bologna and Cremona than here.” In October 1917 the Bolshevik insurrection had occurred almost without losses. The only deaths recorded were on the occasion of the counter-revolution some days after the Bolshevik capture of the State, when the Red Guards of Trotsky had the task of downing the movement of the officers, repelling Kerenski’s Cossacks and dealing with General Krasnoff. So I remarked, “By the bloodshed in Bologna and Cremona it is demonstrated that there was some fault there in the Fascist mechanism of insurrection. Where the machine runs perfectly, as in Tuscany, accidents are very rare.” Israel Zangwill could not but smile ironically. “Your King,” he said, “is a sound mechanic. It is due to him that your machine can run without faults.”

At that moment a train arrived in a cloud of smoke and a din of shouts, songs and drumbeats. “Those are the Fascists from Romagna,” remarked a railway employee who was pacing the station with rifle in hand. In a few minutes we were in the midst of a crowd of Black Shirts, a picturesque but uncomfortable-looking set of fellows, with their death’s heads embroidered on their shirt fronts, their steel helmets painted red, and their bayonets stuck in large leather belts. Sunburnt faces they had with the hard features common among the peasants of the Romagna and with little pointed beards. They appeared adventurous, fierce, even menacing, and Zangwill was obviously disquieted. He smiled pleasantly however and tried to make his way through the middle of this noisy throng with polite gestures, at which the armed youths showed much astonishment. “They look a pretty rough lot,” he complained to me. “Well, you’d hardly expect smoothness in the shock troops of a revolution, would you?” I replied. “Mussolini’s political battle in the last four years has not been fought with gentleness or cunning, but with violence, the hardest, the most inexorable scientific violence.”

Israel Zangwill was really having an extraordinary adventure. Arrested by a patrol of Black-Shirted Jacobins, and then released, now he was being transported by automobile in the middle of the night to see for himself the signs that the revolution of the Fascists was not a comedy. “I must not look like Candide among the Jesuits,” he remarked smilingly. He looked indeed somewhat like Candide in the middle of these warriors, if it is conceivable that an Englishman with the name of Israel should be like Candide. These Herculean peasants with their hard eyes, stout jaws, and big rough hands, surveyed him from head to feet, staring and contemptuous, and furthermore astonished and rather vexed to find perched among them a gentleman in a white collar with shy polite manners who did not even look like a police official or a bourgeois member of Parliament.

We mounted our conveyance again and as we dashed through the empty streets I remarked to Israel Zangwill, “Your contempt for the Fascist revolution which you call a comedy is surely in contradiction with your hatred of the Black Shirts whom English Liberals every day denounce for their use of violence. If the revolutionaries are men of violence how can the revolution be mere play-acting? But I tell you the Black Shirts are not only violent, they are pitiless. It is true that sometimes their newspapers protest against what their opponents say about their violence. But that is hypocrisy for the consolation of the lower middle classes. After all Mussolini himself is not a vegetarian, a Christian Scientist or a Social Democrat. He was brought up as a Marxist and is thus quite free of Tolstoyan scruples: he never learned at Oxford to behave like a gentleman in politics, and any tastes for romance or philanthropy have been expelled by his acquaintance with Nietzsche. If Mussolini were a mild-eyed little gentleman with a quiet voice his followers would certainly leave him for some other leader. Why, a year ago when Mussolini did propose making a truce with the Socialists there were actually rebellions and disputes within the Fascist Party. The great majority of the Black Shirts stood out for continuing the civil war. You must remember that the Black Shirts originate mostly from the parties of the extreme Left. Many of them are ex-soldiers with hearts hardened by four years of war. Many again are young men with strong emotions. And don’t forget that the God of armed men must be a God of violence.”

“I shall not forget it,” Zangwill replied.

When we returned to Florence at dawn Israel Zangwill had had a close view, in epitome, of the events throughout Italy during those days. I had driven him swiftly across the Florentine countryside from Empoli to Mugello, from Pistoia to San Giovanni Valdarno. Bridges, stations, crossroads, viaducts, canal-locks, granaries, munition depots, gas and electricity works, all these strategic positions were occupied by Fascist squads. Suddenly out of the darkness patrols would put the question to us, “Who goes there?” At intervals of two hundred yards all along the railway lines Black Shirt sentinels were posted. At the stations of Pistoia, Empoli, and San Giovanni Valdarno gangs of railwaymen, fully equipped, were ready to interrupt traffic in case of extreme necessity. In fact every measure to ensure or to prevent the passage of traffic had been taken. The one danger was that reinforcements of carabineers and soldiers should be sent to Umbria and Latium to attack the legions of Black Shirts in the rear as they marched on the capital. One train full of carabineers proceeding from Bologna had been stopped near Pistoia some hundreds of metres away from famous bride of Vaioni. Rifle shots had been exchanged, after which the train had shunted backwards, the driver not daring to risk the bridge. There had been skirmishes also at Serravalle on the way to Lucca. Lorries loaded with Royal Guards had been fired at by the machine-gunners who guarded the access to the plain of Pistoia.

“No doubt you have read in Machiavelli’s life of Castracane the story of the battle of Serravalle,” I remarked to my companion. “I do not read Machiavelli,” replied Zangwill. It was already daylight when we passed through Prato, a small town in the neighbourhood of Florence, an important centre of the textile industry with twenty-five thousand workmen in two hundred factories. It is known as the Manchester of Italy. Francesco di Marco Datini was born there, said to have been the inventor of the Bill of Exchange. Politically, Prato has a bad reputation. It is a town notorious for strikes and labour troubles, and is the birthplace of Bresci, who killed Humbert, the second King of Italy, in 1900. The people of Prato are good-hearted, but apt to see red.

All the roads were full of workman on their way to their occupations. They appeared indifferent to events, and paced along in silence, not even glancing at the proclamations of the Military Revolutionary Committee posted up on the walls during the night. “Perhaps you’re interested to know that D’Annunzio received his classical education at the Cicognini College here in Prato?” I asked. “At the present moment,” Israel Zangwill replied, “what I’m interested to know is what your workmen are doing about the revolution. The danger for you, is not anything the Government can do, but a strike.”

At the end of 1922 the problem which Fascism had to solve was not how to overcome the Liberal Government or a Socialist Party which had become more and more parliamentary, and at the same time increasingly an element of trouble in the constitutional life of the country. Fascist’s problem was how to overcome the trade unions, the only revolutionary force capable of defending the bourgeois State against the Communists and Fascists.”

Giolitti had understood the part which the workers’ organizations had played when they were used by Bauer in March 1920 against the insurrectional attempt of Kapp. He had learned that lesson, though cautiously. The political parties were powerless to oppose Fascism, which was fighting by non-political methods, justified as a retort to the violence of the Communist Red Guards. The programme of the political parties was to outlaw all the revolutionary forces which refused to submit to the process of “parliamentarisation” or (as was said) to “return to legality.” This was no way of forcing Fascists or Communists to renounce methods of violence. What could the Government do to oppose the revolutionary activities of the Black Shirts and the Red Guards? The only use to which the parties of the masses, Socialist and Catholic, could be put, once they had been reduced to the role of constitutional parties, was to support and in a manner to justify as constitutional any repressive action undertaken by the Government. But something more was needed than police measures to reduce the disorder in which Italy was tormented.

Instead of sending out the armed forces to withstand the revolutionary drive of the Fascists and Communists, Giolitti had prudently decided to neutralize it by confronting it with the action of organized labour. This was Bauer’s method, applied as a preventive measure against revolution. But the method which Bauer had applied as a Marxist Giolitti applied as a Liberal. Thus the Trade Unions became an instrument in the service of the Government for combatting, by illegal methods, the illegal action of the Black Shirts and Red Guards. In Giolitti’s hands the strike became a weapon as dangerous for the Fascists and the Communists as it had been hitherto for the Government. The epidemic of strikes by which the years 1920 and 1921 were marked, appeared to the bourgeois and even to the working class as a malady of the State, an advance signal of the proletarian revolution, a necessary crisis of which the outcome must be the seizure of power by the masses. In reality it was only a symptom of a profound change in the situation. These strikes were not, as in 1919, directed against the State, but against the revolutionary forces which proposed to seize the power independently of the workers’ trade unions, and perhaps in the teeth of their opposition. The origin of the long-existing cleft between workers’ trade unions and the Socialist Party was the question of the independence of the unions. But the working classes now had to defend against the designs of the revolutionary forces not only the independence but the very existence of their organizations. The workers were defending the liberty of their class against the Fascists. The attitude of the trade unions towards the Communists was just like that of the Russian Unions against the Bolsheviks on the eve of the seizure of power of October 1917. But Giolitti’s notion of applying, on liberal lines, Bauer’s Marxist method, only aggravated the situation. Giolitti’s liberalism was simply unscrupulous optimism. Giolitti was cynical and distrustful: he is best described as a parliamentary dictator, too clever for belief in any ideas, too prejudiced to respect any men. Somehow he had succeeded in conciliating in his own mind cynicism and distrust with optimism. Thus he would concoct situations without appearing to take any interest in them, and would complicate them with numberless small intrigues, while apparently waiting for them to mature. He had not the smallest belief in the State: on the contrary the secret of his policy was precisely his contempt for the State. His Liberal interpretation of Bauer’s Marxist method consisted in substituting the revolutionary force of the trade unions for the repressive force of the State. To the trade unions he committed the defence of the bourgeois State against Fascists and Communists so that he could have his own hands free for the task of parliamentarising, that is corrupting the Proletariat.

Towards the end of 1920 a situation had developed in Italy which was unparalleled in the political history of modern Europe. D’Annunzio having captured Fiume threatened at any moment to march into Italy at the head of his legionaries with the aim of getting control of the Government. Even among the organized workers he had friends. Relations were notoriously cordial between the Seamen’s Union and the Government of Fiume. The chiefs of the trade union movement considered D’Annunzio not as an enemy but as a dangerous fellow who might entangle the country in international troubles. In any case however he was not seriously taken into account as a possible ally in the struggle against Fascism despite his known jealousy of Mussolini and of the part played by his revolutionary organization in Italian internal politics. But this rivalry between D’Annunzio and Mussolini was no mean card in the hands of Giolitti, who always played his bad cards properly though he could never play his good cards honestly. The Communists meanwhile caught between the assaults of the Fascists on one side and of the Government on the other had lost all influence over the mass of the workers. They had come to be a mere secondary element in the struggle for power in the State by reason of the criminal foolishness of their terrorist methods. Totally misunderstanding the revolutionary problem in Italy they were quite unable to abandon the tactics of isolated assaults and assassinations and sporadic revolts in the barracks and the factories leading to a useless series of street skirmishes in the suburbs. At most their part was that of bold and savage protagonists in an obviously lost cause. Over and over again opportunities were lost or utterly mismanaged during the Red Year of 1919 when any little Trotsky, any little provincial Catiline with a little spirit, a handful of men and few rifle shots could have captured the State without greatly upsetting either the King or the Government or the history of Italy. In the Kremlin the romantic helplessness of the Italian Communists was a regular topic of light conversation. The wise and cheery Lenin used to roar with laughter over the news from Italy: “The Italian Communists, ha, ha, ha.” He took a childish delight in the messages which D’Annunzio used to send him from Fiume.

Meanwhile the problem of Fiume was becoming more and more a problem of foreign policy. Since D’Annunzio in September 1919 had created a State of Fiume, the clock of history in that place had been put back centuries in the course of a few months. D’Annunzio’s notion was that the State of Fiume should be a first nucleus of a powerful revolutionary organization, and that from Fiume an army of insurrection should go forth to conquer Rome. By the end of 1920 the State of Fiume was an Italian despotism of the Renaissance, rent with internal struggles, distraught by the ambition, the luxury, and the rhetoric of a Prince too fond of words to follow the advice of Machiavelli. Besides the defect of its anachronism the State of Fiume was afflicted in that its existence was a problem of foreign policy rather than of home policy. The State of Fiume had not been captured by way of revolution nor had its creation modified the internal situation of Italy.

The only effect of that creation had been that an international settlement for Fiume contrary to the principle of the self-determination of peoples had been frustrated. That was D’Annunzio’s great achievement, but it was also the cause of his weakness in the internal revolutionary struggle in Italy. Through the creation of the State of Fiume he had come to be a basic element in the foreign policy of Italy, but he had dropped out of internal politics, at all events as a direct influence. The role assigned by D’Annunzio through his legionary army fell naturally to the Black Shirts… While D’Annunzio kept State at Fiume as Prince of an independent realm with its constitutional government, army, finances and ambassadors, Mussolini spread his revolutionary organization ever wider throughout Italy. People used to say that D’Annunzio was “The Prince” and Mussolini his Machiavelli. But for the youth of Italy D’Annunzio was only a symbol, a kind of national Jupiter and the Fiume question was simply a pretext for Mussolini to attack the Government’s foreign policy.

Mussolini might profit by the position in Fiume through the elimination of a dangerous rival from the revolutionary struggle, yet he had also reason to be disturbed by it. The effect of his rivalry with D’Annunzio was considerable upon the rank and file of his followers. Those who had originated in the parties of the Right were disturbingly attached to D’Annunzio. Those who came from the party of the Left, Republicans, Socialists, and Communists, in fact the better part of the Fascist shock-troops were undisguisedly hostile towards the resuscitator of the Fifteenth Century.

In Giolitti’s hands this rivalry was a card with which repeatedly but unsuccessfully he tried to falsify the game. He thought at first that he could provoke an open struggle between D’Annunzio and Mussolini, but soon realised that he was losing his time on such a project. But the question of Fiume had to be settled quickly, and he made up his mind to capture D’Annunzio’s State by force of arms. On Christmas Eve 1920 he profited by a coincidence of favourable circumstances to send several regiments to attack Fiume.

The pained protests of D’Annunzio’s legionaries were echoed in an indignant chorus throughout Italy. The Fascists were not yet ready for a general insurrection. The struggle was to be severe. In the countryside and at the outskirts of the cities Black flags and Red flags were already waving, emblems of civil war, in the cold wind of that anxious winter of forebodings. Mussolini’s task was not simply to avenge the dead legionaries of Fiume. He had to defend himself against the reactionaries who would have stifled Fascism amid the ruins of D’Annunzio’s state. The Government and the workers’ organizations were already in the field with police persecutions on the one side and provocation to bloodshed on the other side: for the workers had now become the aggressors. Giolitti planned to seize the opportunity afforded by the internal struggle within the Fascist Party after the tragic Christmastide of Fiume, and to outlaw Mussolini. The trade union leaders opened their campaign with a series of strikes. Whole towns, provinces and even great regions would be suddenly put out of action through some disturbance in any little village. As soon as the first shot was fired the workers came out on strike. At the alarm signal of the factory hooters the men would troop out of the works, house doors and windows would be bolted, traffic stopped, and the deserted road took on the grim appearance of a man-of-war cleared for action. In the factories the workers were getting ready for the struggle. Arms were being piled up on every side, behind the chimneys, among the looms, the dynamos and the boilers. In among heaped-up coal could be espied masses of rifles and cartridges. In among the arrested machinery, amid the pistons, the presses, the anvils, the cranes, men passed with oil-smeared faces, calmly intent. They climbed the iron steps of factory chimneys, the swinging bridges, the peaked glass roofs. Their task was to convert every factory into a fortress. High on the chimneys were perched red flags. In the areas the workmen thronged together, organized companies, sections and squads. Chosen leaders marked out by red arm-badges gave orders, and patrols were sent out to spy the land. On their return the workmen would leave the factory and move silently under the cover of the walls towards the strategic points of the town. Squads specially trained for street warfare were drafted to the labour exchanges, to defend the headquarters of the trade unions against Black Shirt assaults. Machine-guns were posted at every exit, at the angle of the stairways, at the end of passages and on the roofs. Hand grenades were heaped up in the offices near the windows. Engine drivers disconnected their engines, dropped the trains in the middle of the country and steamed at high speed into the stations. In the villages farmers’ wagons were piled up across the roads to prevent transport of Black Shirts from one town to another. The peasants of the Red Guard were in ambush behind the hedges armed with sporting guns, pitchforks, spades and sickles to spy out the passage of the Fascist lorries. Along the roads of the railways from village to village shots rang out at intervals, right up to the suburbs of the cities, with their profusion of red bunting. As soon as the strike was announced by the hoot of factory whistles, carabineers royal guards and police retired to their barracks. Giolitti was too much of a Liberal to interfere in the struggle which the workers were conducting so admirably all by themselves against the enemies of the State.

Thus dangerously isolated by the strike, the Fascist squads specially trained for 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 manoeuvres, 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 assigned 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 Labour 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 round the Labour Exchanges and the Workmen’s Clubs, and in the streets of the quarter or village. But 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 shock-troops 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 Labour 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 Labour 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 ever 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 at 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, Labour 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 knock out blow at the State as well as the working classes.

The tactics by which Mussolini conquered power in the State could only have been thought out by a Marxist: never forget that Mussolini was brought up to be a Marxist. The astonishing thing about the revolutionary situation in Italy in the view of Lenin and Trotsky was that the Communists were unable to take advantage of any exceptional coincidence of favourable circumstances. In the general insurrectional strikes of 1919 and 1920 the factories of the north of Italy had, as a culmination, been occupied by the workers, but not one man had emerged capable of leading a handful of followers to capture the State. With the support of a general strike, any little provincial Trotsky could have obtained control without asking leave of the King.

Mussolini judged the situation as a Marxist: he could not believe in the success of insurrection directed simultaneously against the power of the Government and the power of the working classes. While he despised the Socialist and Communist leaders, he also despised all those who like D’Annunzio planned to overthrow the Government without at least making sure of the support or neutrality of the working class organizations. Mussolini was not indeed to be knocked out by a general strike. Nor like that national Jupiter, D’Annunzio, did he underestimate the importance of the working class in a revolution. He was far too modern in feeling; he had absorbed the Marxist view of modern political and social problems far too thoroughly to be deluded into copying in the year 1920 the nationalist theories of Blanqui.

It was not with reactionary tactics that the Fascists set out to conquer the State. Mussolini was very different from D’Annunzio or from Kapp, Primo de Rivera or Hitler. He summed up the strength of the proletariat and their part in the revolutionary situation of 1920 from the Marxist standpoint; and from that standpoint he concluded that the first task was to smash the workers’ unions on which the Government would rely for the defence of the State. Taught by the history of Kapp and Bauer he feared the general strike. The official historians of Fascism support their argument that Mussolini was no reactionary by recalling his programme of the year 1919. And in truth that programme in which the Black Shirts sincerely believed, fruit of the same spirit to which the Fascist veterans are still faithful, was a republic and democratic programme. But Mussolini’s Marxist upbringing was not shown in the programme of 1919 but in the tactics with which Fascism set out to capture the State and in the consistent method with which he applies those principles. It will be shown later how Marxist tactics are deformed when attempted by a reactionary like Hitler.

Those who were eager to consider Fascism simply as a bulwark of the State against the Communist peril, a mere reaction against the political and social conquests of the proletariat considered that by the middle of 1921 Mussolini had accomplished his task and played his part. Giolitti reached the same conclusion in March 1921, though on quite different grounds, immediately after the general strikes in which the dangerous power of Fascism had been so plainly revealed. The civil war was now at a high pitch of violence with heavy losses recorded on both sides, but the conclusion of these savage struggles, the end of all the astounding episodes of the Red years was the defeat of the proletarian forces. Giolitti having used the trade unions as a card against Fascism suddenly found his bluff called, and the workers’ organizations had crumbled to pieces. The Fascists issued from the fray in an aggressive mood and with unconcealed intentions. Moreover they were formidably equipped to take the field against the State. What had Giolitti to oppose to Fascism? The defence constituted by the trade unions was done for. The political parties forming a parliamentary majority were powerless against a strongly armed organization which was ready to give the assault both within the constitution and in terms of physical force.

Giolitti had one further possibility: it was to try and parliamentarise the Fascists. This was the familiar plan of a Liberal Minister who during the preceding thirty years had played the part in Italy of a parliamentary dictator serving a Monarchy without over-scrupulous concern for the constitution. Mussolini whose political programme in no way interfered with his revolutionary tactics, responded to these overtures only with the utmost caution. In the course of the elections of May 1921 the Fascists consented to enter the National bloc by which Giolitti hoped to compromise and corrupt the Black Shirt army. The movement was to be dissolved by universal suffrage.

He had great difficulty in forming the National bloc. The constitutional parties objected strongly to taking their place in it on the-same basis as an armed organization with a frankly republican programme. But Giolitti was not thinking about the programme, with its republican and democratic tinge, of 1919: he was thinking about the objective of the Fascist tactics. For the objective of Mussolini was to capture the State. Evidently the Fascist programme must be accepted for the purposes of the election if Fascism was to be diverted from its revolutionary objective. Giolitti could play his bad cards in a masterly manner, but not his good cards. Once again he was no more successful than when he had tried to muddle the issue by fomenting D’Annunzio’s jealousy of Mussolini. Far from submitting to being parliamentarised Fascism held firmly to its objective. While a score or so of Fascists, elected to the Chamber, were actively breaking up the unity of the National bloc, the Black Shirts were turning upon the Republican and Catholic Unions, in order to smash them with the same violence that had lately been so successfully used against the Socialist trade unions.

In preparation for the capture of the State the ground had to be cleared of all other organized forces, whether of the Left or the Right or the Centre. None must be left in a condition to support the Government or to hinder Fascism at the crucial moment of the insurrection with a disabling blow. Precautions must be taken not only against the general strike but against united action by the Government, Parliament, Proletariat. The Fascists could not but strive to clear the whole ground around them, eliminating every rival organized force, were it political or syndicalist, of the working class of the middle class. Trade Unions, Co-operatives, Workers’ Clubs, Labour Exchanges, newspapers, political parties—the whole lot must be-swept away. Great was the surprise of the reactionary and Liberal middle classes. They had supposed that the task of Fascism was completed, when, to the delight of the workers and peasants the Black Shirts having already disbanded the Republican and Catholic organizations, now made a set at the Liberals, the Democrats, Freemasons, the Conservatives, and every kind of respectable section of the middle classes.

The Fascists on their side undertook the downing of the middle classes with much more enthusiasm than when their enemies had been the proletariat. The Fascists’ shock-troops were largely composed of workmen, small artisans and peasants. The struggle against the middle class was moreover really directed against the Government, and the State itself. The Liberals, Democrats, Conservatives when they had brought the Fascists into the national bloc had conferred upon Mussolini, as upon so many before him, the unofficial title “Savior of his country.” For the last fifty years Italy has swarmed with “Saviors to the country.” It has degenerated into a kind of official profession—a great peril, for no country can safely be “saved” too frequently. And now these same respectable people were not at all disposed to recognise that

Mussolini had any other aim beyond “saving” Italy in the traditional manner. They could not grasp that he was out to capture the State, a much more sincerely cherished ambition than anything in the programme of 1919. The violence of the Fascists which had been so warmly applauded so long as it was used against the working class organizations now appeared painfully illegal and disagreeable to the liberal middle classes. Who could have believed that Mussolini, the excellent patriot who had fought the Communists, the Socialists, the Republicans would suddenly become a dangerous fellow free of bourgeois scruples determined to capture power against the wishes of the King and Parliament?

But if Fascism had become a danger to the State Giolitti was to blame. The movement should have been suppressed and outlawed long before when there was still time, crushed by force of arms as D’Annunzio had been. But now “Nationalist Bolshevism” had become much more dangerous than that Bolshevism of the Russian type from fear of which the middle classes were now released. The question was whether a new Government under Bonomi could repair the errors of the Giolitti Government. Bonomi had been a Socialist: the only means he knew of dealing with Fascism was by police measures. Towards the end of 1921 the fiercest struggle was engaged between Bonomi, the Marxist who was out to suppress Fascism by police measures before it was ready to capture the State and Mussolini was out to gain time; a pitiless struggle in terms of persecution, violence and bloodshed. Bonomi succeeded in consolidating the middle classes and working classes. against the Black Shirts. With the support of the Government the workers did much to reconstitute their class organizations. But Mussolini systematically developed his plans. A truce at arms between Socialists and Fascists was attempted in vain. The workers were demoralised by the spineless and shortsighted conduct of the middle-class party and by the utter selfishness of those whose retort to Black Shirt violence was nothing better, than crude intrigue veiled with loquacious patriotism.

In the opening months of 1922 the following vague and unhappy state of affairs prevailed. With methodical violence the Fascists were gradually getting control of all the vital centres of the country; the political, military and syndical organization of Fascism was spread over the whole of Italy. Mussolini held in his hand the whole map of Italy, replete with cities, townships and their ardent quarrelsome populations. That map was as it were tattooed upon Mussolini’s right hand. Bonomi had been overwhelmed in the dust and ruins of political parties and trade unions. The State was at the mercy of the Black Shirts who besieged Rome and occupied the whole country. The authority of the State was maintained wholly in a few hundred isolated positions, where Prefects, Mayors and police officials were beleaguered in their quarters while in between the force of the revolution ruled daily. The King and the Government drifted apart, both fearing to take responsibility. They resorted to an old constitutional dodge; the King relied on the Army and Senate, the Government upon the police and the Lower House. The Liberal middle classes and the workers were both deeply disquieted.

In August 1922 Mussolini informed the country that Fascism was ready to take power. With a great final effort the Government sought to anticipate the insurrection, stimulating a revolt of the workers and peasants in order to break through the siege lines of the Fascists. On the order of a kind of Committee of Public Safety in which the Democratic, Socialist and Republican parties were associated with the Trade Union Congress, a general strike was proclaimed in August. This was called the legal or constitutional strike; it was the last struggle put up by the defenders of liberty, democracy, legality and the State against the Black Shirt army. At last Mussolini was going to face his most dangerous adversary, the only serious obstacle to the Fascist capture of the State. He was going to face and overcome the general strike which had been threatened for three years as a knockout blow to the revolution, the general strike against the revolution which it had been the aim of his three years’ struggle against the working class organizations to disable. The Government and the Liberal and reactionary middle classes let loose the workers’ counter-revolution, counting upon sapping the enthusiasm of the Black Shirts for the insurrection and removing from the State for a time at least the overhanging threat of a sudden assault. But the Fascists sent from their own ranks relays of experts and of specialist workmen to take the place of the strikers in the public services, while at the same time with a terrible display of violence the Black Shirts in twenty-four hours smashed the army of the defenders of the State ranged under the Red Flag of the Trade Union Congress. The decisive victory for the conquest of the State was won by Fascism not in October but in August. After the fiasco of the “constitutional strike” Facta, a weak but honourable politician, retained office solely to give countenance to the King.

Meanwhile however the King had no further need for that kind of loyalty. The Fascist programme of 1919 still reverenced the Fascist old guard, was republican, but on the eve of the insurrection Mussolini gave the signal “Long Live the King.”

Certain official chroniclers, drunk with rhetoric and literature, have given theatrical accounts of the Fascist insurrection. These are false. There were no great sayings or brilliant poses, no gestures recalling Julius Caesar, Cromwell or Bonaparte. The Legions which marched on Rome were not, mercifully enough, Caesar’s veterans returning from Gaul, nor was Mussolini attired in Roman costume. Newspaper illustrations and official paintings are both bad guides to the writing of history. When one observes David’s portrait of Napoleon it is hard to conceive that Napoleon was the clear precise modern genius we know him to have been. The historical Napoleon was as different from the painting by David and sculpture by Canova as Mussolini is different from Julius Caesar or from Bartolomeo Colleoni. In certain colour prints the Black Shirts are shown advancing in October 1922 across an Italy crowded with imperial arches, tombs, mausoleums, columns, porticos and statues, while the sky is thick with eagles; as though the Fascist insurrection had been staged in the Italy of Ovid and Horace, with Roman legionaries for its heroes, and Jupiter himself managing the scene in such a manner as to save the constitutional appearances of classical tradition. In other illustrations, Mussolini, the man of 1922, is shown with eyes like a hero of 1830. A romantic figure discovered wandering through a neo-classic countryside, now on foot, now on horseback he heads his legions, a pale and smiling personage perfectly harmonious with history as recorded in coloured plates. Against a background of ruined aqueducts in the severe and baleful landscape of the Roman Campagna Mussolini appears like a figure from a picture of Poussin, an elegy of Goethe, a drama of Pietrocossa; a poem of Carducci or D’Annunzio: the pockets of his breeches seemed to be stuffed with volumes of Nietzsche. But these coloured plates are the summit of bad taste in the culture and literature of Italy of the last fifty years. In the face of these illustrations of the insurrection it is hard to believe that Mussolini could overthrow Facta’s Government and capture power.

But the true Mussolini of October 1922 is not shown in the colour plates. The true Mussolini was a modern man cold, audacious, violent and calculating. On the eve of the insurrection all the opponents of Fascism, the Workers’ Trade Unions, Communists, the political parties—Socialist, Republican, Catholic, Democratic and Liberal were out of action. The general strike had been downed in August, the insurrection was never again to be disabled by that means, for the workers would no longer dare leave their work and come out in the streets. The bloody reprisals against the “Constitutional strikers” had finally broken the combative spirit of the workers.

When Mussolini raised the black flag of insurrection in Milan the Fascist relays of technicians and expert workers rapidly captured the strategic points of the technical organization of the State. Within twenty-four hours all Italy was in the military occupation of 200,000 Black Shirts. The police, the carabineers and the Royal Guards were incapable of restoring order. Wherever the police tried to dispel Black Shirts from their positions they were repulsed by machine-gun fire. The four members of the Military Committee of the Revolution, Bianchi, Balbo, de Vecchi and de Bono supervised the workings of the insurrection on a plan which had been fixed by Mussolini in every detail. Perugia was the headquarters of the revolution and it was thence that the Four issued their orders. Fifty thousand men were massed in the Roman Campagna, ready to march on the capital. The army of Black Shirts besieged Rome shouting “Long Live the King” and Rome is the seat not only of the Government but also of the King. Mussolini’s loyalty to the King, as he marched at the head of his revolutionary army, was of very recent date, but from the point of view of the constitutional King it was more valuable than that of a disarmed Government. When the Cabinet decided to submit an order establishing a state of siege throughout Italy for the King’s signature, the King is said to have refused to sign. Exactly what happened is not known, but it is certain that the state of siege was proclaimed and then withdrawn after half a day. This was all too short if the King signed the decree, but all too long if he truly did not sign it.

In reality Fascism had captured the State long before the entry of the Black Shirts into Rome, during the whole course of three years systematic revolutionary tactics. The insurrection only overturned the Government. In 1922 the capture of the State by Fascism could not have been averted by a state of siege nor yet by outlawing Mussolini nor by any kind of armed resistance. Giolitti remarked, “Mussolini taught me the lesson that a State has to be defended not against the programme of a revolution but against its tactics.” He confessed with a smile that he had not been able to profit by the lesson.