Enter Mussolini (RLE Responding to Fascism) by Lussu Emilio;

Author:Lussu, Emilio;
Language: jpn
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

TERRANOVA is a little town on the north-east coast of Sardinia, at the point nearest to Civitavecchia, on the Italian mainland. The population was anti-Fascist, with the exception of a few commercial families. These latter put themselves in communication with the Fascists of Civitavecchia, and together they organized an armed expedition.

Two hundred Fascists, armed with rifles, bombs, and two machine-guns, set out from Civitavecchia at nightfall by the mail-boat for Terranova. It was to be a surprise attack, only the police being in the secret. A few Fascists from Terranova acted as guides.

The next morning at daybreak the steamer anchored at Terranova. The populace, in total ignorance of what was in store for them, were still asleep, when bombs suddenly began to explode and machine-guns to fire in the streets. The Fascists, divided into squads, surrounded the houses of all the well-known anti-Fascists and forced their way in. Meanwhile the police and the carabineers, fully cognizant of what was going on, obeyed their instructions and remained in barracks.

Some thirty anti-Fascists were surprised in their beds, bound, and dragged out into the streets. Others succeeded in escaping from their houses by way of windows and roofs into the open country, the Fascists having failed to block all the ways leading out of the town, as they had intended. The noise of rifle-fire and the exploding of bombs resounded in the half-dark streets behind the fugitives.

The Fascists forced an entrance into the house of a doctor friend of mine by climbing through the windows. As luck would have it he himself was absent, but his sick and aged mother was alone in the house and was so overcome with terror that she lost her reason.

The premises of the labour organizations and the ex-servicemen’s clubs were all sacked and their banners seized as trophies of victory. The well-maintained secrecy of the undertaking had ensured its success, and the sun rose on a conquered city. The captives, barefooted and clad for the most part only in their shirts, just as they had been dragged from their houses, were then marched into the principal square of the town. They were nearly all of them ex-combatants. The Blackshirts, with fixed bayonets, herded them along as though they were prisoners of war.

A great gathering followed in the principal square of the town, to which every one had been summoned, and in accordance with all the rules of the accustomed ceremonial, a ‘patriotic baptism’ thereupon took place.

It was a ceremony originally instituted by the Fascists of northern and central Italy, who had been practising it for some time. In this so-called baptism, holy water was usually replaced by castor oil, which the neophite was called upon to swallow, voluntarily or by force. Many, in Turin, Milan, Florence and Bologna, had been compelled to drink as much as a couple of pints, and on such occasions the ‘baptism’ acquired a character of greater sanctity. Just as man, according to Catholic teaching, is redeemed from original sin by holy

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