PARTISAN REVIEW
over, the high toll of the supporters has a tendency to remind the
country that the rate of casualties must have been at least as high
among the opponents, and revolutions, particularly when they come
of age, like better to consider themselves as heroic and not as bloody.
If,
on the other hand, few people die, as it happened in Italy, and
if, even worse, no general pool is set up from which martyrs might be
equitably apportioned, then the search may become harassing.
In 1923 the Provincial Secretary of Brescia was desperately short
of heroes. He had just lost to the Secretary of a neighboring province
an argument over a very nice case: a young nobleman who had
been killed by a group of peasants of his estate. True enough, the
young man had been shot mainly because he attempted to revive,
in the name of Fascism, certain rights which his feudal ancestors
had enjoyed over the feminine inhabitants of their fief. But still he
had been a regular and fervent member of the party. The other
Secretary, a meticulous man, had shown that the murder had oc–
curred in a section of the estate which lay within the boundary of
his province and not of Brescia's province, and had been perpetrated
by peasants who lived there. On the basis of this array of facts,
he had been able to secure the martyr.
Thus, when the Secretary of Brescia was reminded that there
was a politically unclaimed casualty of an encounter between Fascists
and ,anti-Fascists, he decided that the opportunity was too good to
be missed. It would be proclaimed, he resolved, that Mario had fallen
while fighting the treacherous enemies of Fascism.
He did not have an easy task, however. Brescia's Fascist martyrs
were to be given solemn final burial in a chapel which was adjacent to
one of the most illustrious churches of the city. Mario had been a
Jew, and the Prior of the church who, anyway, did not like the idea
of martyrs to a political cause trying to rank so close to martyrs to
the cause of religion, refused to accept him. Objections were also
raised by the family. Mario's mother and sister did not have any
strong religious beliefs, but they disliked Fascism deeply. Moreover,
they had loved first Mario and then their grief over his death with a
most jealous love. They found something indecent in the farce which,
by building up Mario as a hero, would take away from them the
privacy of their great sorrow.
But the Secretary was a man of great determination.
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