Strange Times Special 3: The Socialists Have Taken Revenge
Strange Times Special 3: The Socialists Have Taken Revenge
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This week I launched a Kickstarter for Comrades, a new game about the dangerous lives of leftist revolutionaries. To celebrate, I wanted to share this addendum to “Strange Times 60,” which is a wonderful example of the kinds of stories I created Comrades to tell. Check out the Kickstarter and share it with your friends—if you like this newsletter, you’ll like the game, too.
This is a front page dispatch from the March 1 paper, interesting not just because of the content but because, since it was presumably cobbled together from wire reports, it has no narrative, instead jumping around from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph to give an impressionistic picture of a country beginning to lose the fight against fascism.
MILAN, Feb. 28.—Another sanguinary Sunday disgraced numerous Italian towns yesterday through bitter strife between Nationalist and Communist factions.
Florence was again the centre of the worst excesses. A procession of patriotic students was assailed near the Antonioni Palace, where a big bomb was flung into a group of Carabinieri. Besides killing one man outright, it struck down all the officers and wounded twenty-six persons. While the wounded were being removed a train guard who refused to obey the brusque injunction of some Fascisti (Nationalist Extremists) to doff his cap was shot dead by the Carabinieri.
Savage scenes ensued. The Nationalists penetrated the restaurant of a waiters’ club, where preparations were in progress for an evening ball, and wrecked and fired the premises, after blowing out the brains of Signor Lavagaini, managing editor of La Difesa, who was also a Provincial Councilor and Secretary of the Railway Men’s Federation. The premises of the Proletarian League of Mutilated Soldiers was likewise sacked.
As soon as the tidings spread the railway men struck work, and all incoming trains were held up outside Florence. An hour later the street car and electric light staffs followed the railway men’s example, so that the city was plunged in gloom, and the newspapers could not be published.
All public resorts have been closed and the city is patrolled by cavalry and armored cars.
The Socialists have taken revenge by burning down the Fascisti’s headquarters at Sesto.
At Sant’ Ilario, near Reggio Emilia, a two-hour battle was fought between the occupants of the Peoples’ Palace and a surging mob of besiegers. The reckless use of firearms and hand bombs resulted in the wounding of sixty persons, including twenty-one Socialists, four of whom are in a dying condition.
Signor Cantarilli, the Mayor, two Councilors and 102 other demonstrators were arrested. The Peoples’ Palace was afterward deluged with petroleum and set on fire.
At Spezia a Royal Guard was killed, and several persons were disabled by bullets. A general strike has been proclaimed there, and also at Vercelli, where a leading workingman named Brusa was shot through the lungs, and two women were wounded. That city, in which the Communist Congress is being held, is deprived of drinking water.
Two Town Councilors were captured among the ringleaders at Spezia.
On the outskirts of Lucca a Nationalist leader was stabbed in the neck and some demonstrators were badly cut.
The Corriere newspaper offices, and the adjacent National Insurance Institute at Reggio Calabria, were destroyed by incendiaries in the early morning, the damage amounting to $125,000. The Parliamentary Deputy Argentieri, while attending a Socialist Congress there, was severely beaten about the head, but saved his life by escaping on a steamer.
At Palermo the military were subjected to a merciless hail of bricks and tiles from the roofs of the university. They delivered a counterattack from the steeple of the Church of St. Joseph, and an unoffending student who was conversing with a professor in the chemical laboratory was shot in the head. Eighteen students were seriously injured and six of them are dying in a hospital.