A DAY IN JULY 1917
Paolo Monelli witnesses the execution of two deserters
Dawn. The whole company is standing waiting in a small woodland glade. The firing squad is also there, as is the doctor. And the priest, who is trembling with fear at what is to happen. The first of the two prisoners arrives:
Look, there is the first of the condemned men. Weeping but without tears. A rattle from his tight throat. Not a word. His eyes no longer express anything. His face just shows the dull fear of an animal about to be slaughtered. When he is led up to a fir tree his legs will not hold him and he crumples. He has to be tied to the trunk with some telephone cable. The priest, pale as a corpse himself, embraces him. Meanwhile the platoon is formed up in two ranks. The front rank will do the shooting. The adjutant of the regiment has already explained to them: "Til give the signal with my hand—then fire."
The two soldiers are men from his own unit. During the dreadful fighting up on Monte Ortigara they were sent down to the valley on fatigue duty. But after three days in the front line they had had enough and they did not come back. A military tribunal down in Enego condemned them to death for desertion. Discipline in the Italian army is harsh to the point of being draconian.* After being sentenced the men were returned to their unit, which is responsible for carrying out the execution itself (in the presence of all the men, to act as a terrifying example), escorted by two military policemen who did not have the heart to tell them the fate that awaited them. Locked up in a small hut, the two men screamed, shouted, wept, pleaded and tried to negotiate: "We promise to go out on patrol every night, Lieutenant." No use. So they stopped screaming, shouting, pleading and trying to negotiate. The only sound to be heard from the locked hut was weeping. Both of them are experienced soldiers who have been in the army since the beginning of the war. All armies function on a mixture of external compulsion and consent (spontaneous or orchestrated); indeed, this whole war originated in a meeting of those two concepts. And the shakier the consent becomes, the harsher the compulsion applied. But only up to a certain point. When the only thing remaining is compulsion, there is nothing left and the whole edifice collapses.
The adjutant raises his hand and gives the silent signal.
Nothing happens.
The soldiers look at the adjutant, look at the blindfolded man tied to the tree. Among the soldiers in the firing squad there are comrades, brothers-in-arms, "perhaps even relations" of the condemned man.
Another sign is given.
Nothing happens.
The adjutant claps his hands nervously. It is as if some sound is necessary to convince the soldiers that it is time for them to shoot.
A salvo crashes out.
The condemned man falls forward but is held up by the wire with which he is bound and slides down the tree trunk a little instead. In this short movement he has changed from a man to a body, from subject to object, from being to thing, from he to it. The doctor steps forward and after a short token examination pronounces him dead. No one can be in any doubt of that. Monelli sees that half his head has been blown away.
Then the other man is led forward.
In contrast to his fellow deserter he is quite calm and has something resembling a smile on his lips. He speaks to the members of the firing squad in a strange, almost ecstatic tone of voice and says, "This is right and just. Just make sure that you aim properly—and don't do what I did!" Confusion breaks out in the firing squad. Some of them want to be excused on the grounds that they have already shot one man. Words are exchanged. The adjutant swears and threatens and manages to reestablish order in the squad.
Shots ring out. The man crumples. He too is dead.
The firing squad is dismissed and the men walk slowly away. Monelli can see how shaken they are, and he sees fear and pain on all their faces. Nothing else is talked about all day and their voices are quiet and unobtrusive, from shame or from shock:
Questions, doubts arise in our reluctant minds, and we push them away fearfully because they sully our high principles too much—the very principles that we accept with our eyes shut as though they were matters of faith—and because we are afraid that without them it would be too difficult for us to do our duty as soldiers. Fatherland, necessity, discipline—a line in our instructional manual, words whose meaning we don't really know and which are just sounds to us. Death by firing squad—that makes the words clear and comprehensible to our sad minds. But those gentlemen down in Enego, no, they did not come here to witness the reality of the words of the sentence they pronounced.
* The Italian army executed just over 1,000 of its own men during the war, which is far more than the number executed in the British army (361), not to mention the German army (48). Over 15,000 Italian troops were condemned to life imprisonment for crimes against military discipline and many of them remained in prison long after the war was over, in some cases until 1945. The Italian commander-in-chief, Luigi Cadorna, insisted on "iron discipline."