Read Online The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson - Free Book Online

should give ‘not a man, not a penny’ to the cause of war, nor spill ‘one drop of blood’ for a cause that had ‘nothing to do with it’. If the government failed to declare neutrality, the proletariat would force it to do so.
    When the executive committee of the Socialist International met in Brussels on 29 July, the Austrian Social Democrats refused to support a general strike. The workers in Vienna were clamouring for revenge on Serbia, they said, and it was better to be wrong with the working class than right against it. Other parties, too, refused to condemn their own governments. The German Social Democrats held out longest against the war, but in early August they buckled under the pressure. Only the Italian party stuck to an anti-war position. Holding firm, in mid- September 1914 Mussolini lamented (admittedly to a female comrade whom he hoped to get into bed) that his Socialist comrades were switching sides, becoming ‘apologists for war! It is a contagion that spares no one. But I mean to hold the rampart until the end.’ He drafted a manifesto on the ‘profound antithesis’ between war and socialism. For war ‘amounted to the annihilation of individual autonomy and the sacrifice of freedom of thought to the State and militarism’.
    He abandoned the rampart in October. When the party reaffirmed its commitment to neutrality, and denounced the betrayals of socialism in Germany and elsewhere, only Mussolini voted against the resolution. In mid-November he resigned the editorship of Avanti! and launched a new newspaper with French and Belgian money. Il Popolo d’Italia (‘The People of Italy’) called for intervention on the Allied side. The other party leaders denounced his treachery, and he was expelled on 24 November.
    This switch did not come out of the blue. There was a wobble in his neutralism from the outset, for he always divided the warring countries into aggressors and defenders. This proved to be the thin end of a wedge: by mid-October, he was close to arguing for pre-emptive action against ‘possible future reprisals’. As the historian Paul O’Brien argues, Mussolini was latently pro-intervention and – like the government – waited for the outcome of the Battle of the Marne before declaring himself for war. With Germany bogged down in France, the odds had shifted far enough in the Allies’ favour for intervention to look sensible.
    In the end, Mussolini’s about-face was ordained by character. When the balance of energy and likely success favoured intervention – with its inspiring vistas of limitless political tumult – his switch of allegiance was only a matter of time. A former comrade in the Socialist Party later alleged, rightly, that the only cause Mussolini ever recognised ‘was his own’, and his 
only use for ideas was to enable him to dispense with ideas … The whole object of his intellectual researches was to collect everything which detracted, or appeared to detract from the reality or binding nature of principles … Only action counted, and on the plane of action betrayal did not exist, only victory or defeat. 
    At first, he claimed to be rescuing Socialism from the ‘docile herd’ in the party. Defining his position as national but not nationalist, he denounced Salandra’s appeal to ‘sacred egoism’ and continued to invoke anti-imperialism as the basis for intervention. Even for a man with Mussolini’s power of self-conviction, anti-Socialist socialism was an uncomfortable stretch. This is why Filippo Corridoni was so important to him. For Corridoni was a trades union leader who wanted Italy to intervene because war would create the best conditions for socialist revolution. The July Crisis found him in prison for fomenting a general strike. Released in August 1914, he threw himself into the pro-war campaign. Italian workers should support the ‘revolutionary war’. Only neutered men wanted neutrality, Corridoni cried, for we who oppose the bourgeoisie,