GARIBALDI RECRUITS HIS LEGION

89

Italy was the heir of great glory, and that freedom had been the watchword both of the classical Republics and of the medieval cities in their best days. Therefore, by interest and conviction alike, the students were partisans of the movement of emancipation, and not only supplied the prophets, theorists, and statesmen who redeemed Italy, but offered themselves by scores and hundreds as the common food for powder.

One element in the Legion, which gave its enemies a right to blaspheme, consisted of a few convicts whom Garibaldi had admitted, under the characteristic delusion that to fight for Italy would cure all moral diseases—a point on which some of these gentlemen eventually undeceived him.'

2

But, on the whole, he was not far wrong when he called his Legionaries 'the cultivated classes of the towns.' And these shopkeepers, workmen, and students were quite equal, as the event proved, to pass the severest physical tests of war, which must indeed have tried the pluck of the numerous lads of fourteen to sixteen years of age, who were in this, as in subsequent campaigns, a familiar feature in the armies of Garibaldi. Sufferings were more readily borne because of the example set by a chief who, even in the midst of plenty, ate and drank most sparingly, and accepted the return of privation as the natural lot of man. His followers

were ready to endure much at the request of a famous soldier, the more so since he, being himself a man of the people, and withal of a most tender and human heart, was able to speak with them on terms of equality about those whom they loved, to share their private griefs and hopes, especially when they were wounded, and to show a particular care and kindness for the younger volunteers who had run away from school to fight for

Loev. ii. 15-21.

2 The Dutch artist, Koelman, describes how, at a midnight watch at one of the old gates of Rome, in May 1849, he was thrilled by hearing the common sentry (of Garibaldi's Legion) sing to the stars a stanza of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Koelman, ii. 35-40.

Italy, and to whom he stood in some sort in place of a father.1

From the first the Legionaries had much to endure, since their chief had as yet no war-chest, and no support from Government. When they left Ravenna they were ill-armed, ill-clad, and without uniform-except Masina's handful of Bolognese lancers, equipped at their own expense and that of their wealthy Colonel, and the redshirted staff officers and orderlies from South America, who alone represented the pomp and circumstance of war.2

3

And so this ragged regiment of fine fellows wandered about for the rest of the winter through Umbria and the Marches, spreading the democratic gospel, and creating for themselves a reputation of many colours. When they entered a town, the inhabitants, instructed by the fears of priests and of Moderates, looked anxiously from their windows at the entrance of the 'bandits,' though they often became friendly when they had seen and spoken to the young men, who were above the average of education and intelligence. But the decided and often unpleasing manner in which the Legionaries expressed their Republicanism gave offence to some; others were alienated by the insults occasionally offered to monks, priests, and their relics, though Garibaldi punished such conduct most severely. By the discipline of the pillory (berlina), prison and capital punishment, he restrained the plundering propensities of his corps within closer limits than those usually observed by the soldiers of the period. But though his privates were not allowed to rob, the official requisitions which he was forced to make, as General, from the half-willing communes in order to feed and pay his men at all, and the uncertainty whether the Central Government would ever reimburse the localities, made it difficult to be enthusiastic for such expensive guests.*

Loev. ii. 201-204; Koelman, ii. 109-114, for 1849. Garibaldian literature passim, and private information from old Garibaldini, about later wars.

2 Loev. i. 43-51 and passim ; Guerrazzi, 760.

3 Mem. 219; Foglietti, 2.

1 Loev. i. and ii. passim, especially ii., chap. xiv., where the whole question

HIS SECOND VISIT TO ROME

91

In the middle of December, Garibaldi, accompanied by Masina, left his men for a few days and paid a flying visit to Rome, which he had not seen since his memorable journey with his father twenty-three years before. He now once more went to gaze on the Capitol and the Coliseum, which to him were the symbols, not merely (as they are to us) of time at war with human splendour and permanence, but of the past and future of his own dear land, and of the cause which inspired his life. These ruins were to him the titledeeds of Italy.

But he had the good sense to forbid the Clubs to conduct him in procession to the Capitol. Such triumphs, he said, had first to be won; when Italy was freed, he would himself invite them to come with him. The rebuke was well timed, for it was his part to teach the Italians, and the Romans not least, how much of the bitter bread of war and suffering was needed to justify the intolerable deal of sack represented by so many speeches, processions, and classical allusions. He made friends, however, with Ciceruacchio and the other Republican leaders. The Provisional Government, not yet completely in touch with democratic sentiment, looked askance at him, and would do little to help his Legion, which was again suffering from want in the cold of the Apennine winter. So he returned, discontented, to his men at Foligno in Umbria.'

But events were moving inevitably towards a Republic, to which form of government, since the Pope would not treat, there was no alternative. In February a Constituent Assembly was summoned, and Garibaldi again went to Rome, as representative of the City of Macerata,2 where his presence with the Legion had won him popularity. On February 8, 1849, he took an enthusiastic part in the proclamation of the Roman Republic.

of the discipline of the Legion is discussed in extenso and in great detail from very numerous documents. For the system of paying the Legion see Roman MSS. Ruoli Gen. 80 F.F. 1-3, and Loev. i. 42; ii. 77-81.

Loev. i. 66-75; Mem. 218, 219.

In the Marches, south of Ancona; not Macerata Feltria. (See Foglietti, passim on his stay there.)

One of the first acts of the new State, carried by a unanimous vote of the Assembly, was to naturalise Mazzini, who at the beginning of March arrived in Rome, welcomed as its latest and greatest citizen. The sordid period of the Democratic revolution was over, and its period of idealism and heroism had begun. Mazzini speedily removed the elements of crime and coercion from the popular Government, and replaced them by a spirit of tolerance and liberty almost unexampled in time of national danger. Garibaldi gave to the warfare of the extreme Republicans something of the spirit of Thermopylæ, so often mouthed by orators whose stock-in-trade was classical history, but at last brought by the red-shirts into the region of fact. Little as they liked one another, these two men between them turned a rather limp revolutionary movement, begun in murder and frothy talk of the Clubs, into one of the great scenes of history. The Roman Republic showed the faults, but it showed yet more abundantly the virtues, of its origin as the work of an extreme faction. Its history is full of that appeal to the ideal in man that often guides the life of individuals, but finds little direct representation in the government of the world, except in those rare, brief moments of crisis and of concentrated passion when some despised 'ideologue is lifted to the top of the plunging wave.

'I entered the City one evening (writes Mazzini) with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship. Rome was to me as, in spite of her present degradation she still is, the Temple of humanity. From Rome will one day spring the religious transformation destined for the third time to bestow moral unity upon Europe. As I passed through the Porta del Popolo, I felt an electric thrill run through me-a spring of new life.'

CHAPTER VI

THE REPUBLIC, MAZZINI, AND THE POWERS-OUDINOT
ADVANCES ON ROME

'We must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.'-MAZZINI, in the Assembly, Rome, 1849.

ONE of the first things that Mazzini did after his entry into Rome was to visit the American lady whom he had met so often in England with the Carlyles and others of that circle.

'Last night,' wrote Margaret Fuller, on March 9, 'I heard a ring; then somebody speak my name; the voice struck me at once. He looks more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings. . . He stayed two hours, and we talked, though rapidly, of everything. He hopes to come often, but the crisis is tremendous and all will come on him; since, if any one can save Italy from her foes, inward and outward, it will be he. But he is very doubtful whether this be possible; the foes are too many, too strong, too subtle.'

Six weeks later he again admitted to Arthur Clough the probability that the Roman Republic would fall.'

Mazzini's Government, the defence of the Janiculum, and the battles and marches of Garibaldi, could not save the new State. Yet these events hastened the gradual

1 Fuller, iii. 208; Clough's P. R., 148. Here is another stranger's impres sion of Mazzini at this period, by the American, William Wetmore Story, a disciple neither of Miss Fuller nor of Mazzini : 'Called on Mazzini, the Triumvir. . . . His practicality, I cannot but think, has been veneered over his mind by his English life. Essentially, like almost all Italians, he is a visionary. But he sees and understands the virtue of simple, direct action.' Story, i. 157.