Decima Mas

Decima Mas, the fascist marines who replace the German troops in Casaubon’s wartime town, are drawn into one of the Alley gang’s reckless pranks. Their brief appearance captures the unstable boundary between play and danger in the children’s wartime world; years later, Belbo remembers that world as a vanished period when violence and political allegiance seemed unmistakably real.

Arrival in the Town

Toward the end of 1943 or the beginning of 1944, German soldiers were stationed in the town before the partisans had become active there. The Alley gang’s early exploits included sneaking into a shed and stealing a few sticks of TNT while companions distracted the guard with flattery. The narrator doubts the explosive was ever used, although the gang’s leader, Martinetti, had planned to set it off in the countryside for spectacle.

The German troops were later replaced by Decima Mas, who established a roadblock near the river, at a crossroads where schoolgirls passed at six in the evening. The change brought a new armed presence into a familiar local scene, turning the girls’ route home into the setting for the gang’s most elaborate prank.

The Grenade Prank

Martinetti persuaded the Decima Mas marines, none apparently older than eighteen, to tie together German grenades with long pins and remove their safety devices. His plan was to time their detonation at the water’s edge for the moment the girls came around the corner. The account stresses that Martinetti knew how to calculate the timing and explained it to the marines.

The explosion sent a sheet of water up along the bank with a thunderous noise just as the girls appeared. They fled in alarm; the boys and the marines laughed together. The prank’s success depended on a precisely staged burst of danger, but the narrator’s description also makes clear how casually the young participants handled live explosives. The town later remembered the episode as a moment of local glory, second only to the burning of Molay.

War, Memory, and the Meaning of Courage

The episode belongs to a childhood shaped by the German occupation of Italy and by the abundance of war matériel: the Alley children collected shell casings, ammunition pouches, helmets, and other remnants. For them, military objects could become playthings and collectibles even as they remained dangerous. The marines’ willingness to join the prank further blurs the boundary between armed authority and children’s games without erasing the real danger of either.

Belbo later describes those wartime memories as sweet because they seemed to offer clarity: a bullet was a bullet, one either ducked or was hit, and the opposing sides appeared distinct by their red or black colors. That remembered certainty contrasts with the ambiguities surrounding Colonel Ardenti’s disappearance and the falsehoods Belbo encounters as an adult. His nostalgia is not proof that the period was simple; it records how clear the conflict seemed to him in retrospect.

Casaubon, meanwhile, questions whether his absence from a later demonstration against fascist conspiracies was a moral choice or another failure to seize the right moment. He says the march was not his generation’s conflict, yet wonders whether he could have taken the risk anyway. The contrast between the child’s proximity to wartime danger and the adult narrator’s self-questioning gives the Decima Mas episode a wider significance: courage, belonging, and political choice are judged differently when remembered from a distance.