COUNTER-REVOLUTION 127
labourers were bound to the soil, where after lengthy
struggles they had won valuable concessions. This situation
gave the enemy the advantage of the offensive, of mobile as
against defensive tactics. In the fight between the lorry and
the People's House the former was bound to win.
The workers were further handicapped by psychological
difficulties which hindered the efficient organization of their
defensive tactics. The Italian people had no revolutionary
traditions and no taste for war. Those who had acquired
this taste at the front had been flung into the arms of the
fascists. When the militant worker took his revolver out of
his pocket he put himself and felt himself on the wrong side
of the law. A similar feeling paralysed Hanriot's gunners
outside the doors of the Convention on the gth Thermidor.
The fascist knew he was safe, and could even kill and burn
with impunity. Besides, in the eyes of the workers the People's
House and the Chamber of Labour were the fruit of two or
three generations of sacrifice, their capital, the concrete
proof of the progress made by their class and the symbol of
their hopes for the future. They were devoted to them and
hesitated involuntarily to use them as mere war material.
It is not-easy to turn a house one loves into a fortress, and
this is why the Italian workers showed none of the fierce
resolution of the last defenders of the Paris Commune,
building a barrier of fire between themselves and the
Versaillais. For the fascists the Houses were simply targets.
When their fine buildings went down in flames the workers
gave way to bitter despair, while the attackers yelled with
delight. The plain of the Po, covered with these socialist
oases, was a desert by the end of the civil war.
Could the workers have held up the fascists if they had
been properly organized ? They could certainly have made
life difficult for the fascists. If every expedition had suffered
heavy loss the fascists would have ceased to look on murder
as a sport, to use Mussolini's own description of certain
exploits of the squadristL But the more ground the socialists
lost in the political game the greater was the part played
by military factors. The events of the second half of 1921
up till October 1922 showed still more clearly that the
military inferiority of the working class was the consequence