The iron necessity of violence already had been confirmed. Every one of us felt it. Now came the moment to move to action with a clear sense of the definite issue. The formation of squads and battling units which I had drawn up by intuition had been accomplished. I had given them, in precise directions, well-specified tasks within clean limits. They began their work of discipline and retaliation.
Our violence had to possess impetuosity. It had been trained to be loyal, as were the legions of Garibaldi, and above all chivalrous. The Central Committee of the Italian Bundles of Fight co-ordinated, under my direction, the whole work of the local executives and of the action squads, not only in the provinces but even in the towns. Valiant and vigorous elements joined us from the universities. Italian schools are enriched by the glorious names of students who quitted their halls for political life and Fascism. These eager boys left, without regret and without wavering, a merry existence to face mortal dangers during punitive actions against betrayers of our country. Later on, to these heroes of bold youth I ordered the awarding of degrees ad honorem; they had given their blood freely so that their nation might be saved. Among them was the best type of Italian young manhood, who by disciplined methodical action, full of impetus, as were the actors, met and destroyed the social-communist spiders which in the web of foolishness and ignorance were exterminating every life germ of the Italian people. Wherever there popped up a vexation, a ransom, a case of blackmail, an extortion, a disorder, a reprisal—there would gather the Fascist squads of action. The black shirt—symbol of hardihood—was our uniform of war.
The Liberal-Democratic government quite naturally put difficulties in the way of the Fascist movement. It relied principally on the royal guards—Guardia Regia—blind instrument of anti-national hatred. But we, who had sane courage, resource and ability, accepted the fact of facing ambush, traps and death. When instead we were taken to prison, we remained there long periods waiting for trial. I had an effect on my soldiers which seemed to me almost mystical. The boys saw in me the avenger of our wronged Italy. The dying said, “Give us our black shirts for winding sheets.” I could not remain unmoved when I knew that their last thoughts were of “Our native land and the Duce.” Love and songs bloomed. A revival of youth, filled with Italian boldness, swamped by its virile male beauty the unrestrained rages of the irresponsibles, painted out the fear of the Socialists, obliterated the ambiguity of the Liberals. The poesy of battle, the voices of an awakening race were multiplying, in those years of revival, the energies of our nation.
Our dead were innumerable. Italy’s imps, the red dabblers, our organization of so-called Freemasons who were steeped in political intrigue, already were seeing the danger, menacing to them, of the coming of Fascism. Therefore they used every means to put us down; they created their snares and ambushes more and more carefully and built their pitfalls more and more cunningly. Every day both the public streets and the open rural fields of Italy were smeared with the blood of frightful conflicts. Sundays, holidays and any occasions for gatherings seemed particularly marked out for attack.
I restrained our own violence to the strict limit of necessity. I enforced that view-point with lieutenants and with the rank and file. At times they obeyed me with regret and pain. They were thinking of companions treacherously murdered. But they always submitted to my orders against reprisals. They accepted my authority voluntarily and completely. If I had had a mind to do so, I could have ordered a pitched battle. The boys would have leaped at the chance; they were looking to me as to a chief whose word was law.
There were evidences of such a deep attachment to me that I felt lifted up and refined by it. It created in me a deep sense of responsibility. Among the episodes I remember the death of a young man, twenty years old, the Count Nicolo’ Foscari, treacherously stabbed to death by a communist dagger. This fine boy died after two days of agony. In the agony of the wound and at the point of death, he wanted to have always near him my photograph. He declared himself glad and proud to die and through me he knew how to die.
I was calloused to political battles. My inclination, however, has always been against all but chivalrous battles. I understood the sadness of civil strife; but in desperate political crises, when the bow happens to be too much bent, the arrow either flies off or the cord breaks. In a few months of action and violence we had to win no less than fifty years lost in empty parliamentary skirmishes, lost in the marshes of little political intrigues, lost in the wretchedness of an atmosphere defiled by selfish interest and petty personal ambition, lost in the maze of attempts to treat government as if it were a jam pot to attract the flies.
In 1921 I tried a political agreement and truce with our adversaries under the protection of the government. The utter incomprehension of the Socialists and Liberals was enormous. My gesture, prodigal and generous, created solely by me, served only to raise new fogs, miasmas and equivocations. The truce had been signed by the Socialists but not by the communists. The latter continued the open struggle, helped in every way by the Socialists themselves. A generous experiment in pacificism had been quite useless. Socialism had corrupted Italian life. There would be always some irreconcilable antagonists, and so the struggle, after a short parenthesis, was taken up again. It lasted until the final outcome, but its renewal was the beginning of the great political battle of 1921.
I will not set forth all the deadly frays of this year. They have gone into the past. But in the houses of my men are burning perennially the votive lamps of the survivors and on their hearths is the living memory of the fallen. The Fascist legions are of every age and of every condition. Many died when the victory was as yet uncertain, but the God of just men will guide all the fallen to eternal light and will reward the soul who lived nobly and who wrote in blood the goodness and ardor of his faith.
The first months of 1921 were characterized by an extreme violence in the Po Valley. The Socialists came to the point where they were even willing to shoot at the funeral processions of the Fascists. It happened even in Rome. It was at that time that in Leghorn there was held the congress of the Socialist party. A schism broke out. On that occasion the autonomous Communist party was created, which afterward in all the manifestations of Italian political life played such a loathsome part. I knew—and it was evident to every one in spite of concealment—that the new Communist party was inspired and supported and even directed from Moscow. We were invaded just as other lands have since been invaded.