Part 19 (2/2)

Garibaldi rode into the cathedral, where he fixed his quarters for the night. In Italy churches have ever been applied to such uses. After the reduction of Milan, Francesco Sforza rode into the Duomo, and when King Ladislaus of Naples conquered Rome, he rode into the basilica of St John Lateran. The guerilla chief bivouacked in a confessional, while his Red-s.h.i.+rts slept where they could on the cathedral floor.

Four hundred of them had been killed or wounded in the a.s.sault.

The prisoners of war were brought before Garibaldi, who praised their valour and sent them under an escort to the Italian frontier. Two or three were retained for the following reason. Garibaldi had heard of the Cairolis' heroic failure, and after his victory his first thought was of them and of their sorrowing mother. He asked Signora Mario if there were any notabilities among the Papal prisoners. She mentioned Captain Quatrebras and others, and he sent her into Rome on a mission to the Papal commander with a view to exchanging these prisoners for the wounded Giovanni and for his brother's body. The proposal was accepted, and the compact kept after Mentana had changed the aspect of affairs.

'Garibaldi at the gates!' was the news that spread like wildfire through Rome on the evening of the 26th of October. Terror, real terror, and no less real joy filled all hearts; but the sides were soon to be reversed. Another piece of news was not long in coming: 'The French at Civita Vecchia!'

The French arrived on the 29th, and on the same day Garibaldi advanced almost to the walls of Rome, still hoping for a revolutionary movement to break out within the city; but the information which he then received deprived him finally of this hope, and he gave the order to return to Monte Rotondo. Volunteers have the defect of being soldiers who _think_; on this occasion they thought that the backward march was the beginning of the end--that, in short, the game was up. A third of the whole number deserted, and took the road towards the Italian frontier. Garibaldi himself seems to have had a first idea of crossing into the Abruzzi, and there waiting to see what turn events would take; but he did not long entertain it, and, when he again left Monte Rotondo, it was with the fixed design of fighting a battle. He expected, however, to fight the Papal troops alone, and not the French.

This was very nearly being the case. On the 1st of November, the Papal General Kanzler called on General De Failly at Civita Vecchia, and found him, to his concern, by no means anxious to rush into the fray.

Even when sending the troops, Napoleon seems to have hoped to escape from being seriously compromised. He probably thought that the moral effect of their landing would cause Garibaldi to retire, and that thus the whole affair would collapse. But the Papal authorities did not want it to collapse; they wanted more bloodshed, and if the words which express the ungarnished truth as acknowledged by their own writers and apologists, sound indecent when describing the government of the Vicar of Christ, it only shows once more the irreconcilability of the offices of priest and king in the nineteenth century. Kanzler insisted that a crus.h.i.+ng blow must be inflicted on the volunteers before they had time to retreat. He argued so long and so well that De Failly promised him a brigade under General Polhes to aid in the attack which he proposed to make on Monte Rotondo.

The Papal forces left Rome by Porta Pia, and took the Via Nomentana, which leads to Monte Rotondo by Mentana. They were on the march at four o'clock a.m. Garibaldi had ordered his men to be ready at dawn on the same day (it was the 3rd of November); but Menotti suggested that, before they started, there should be a distribution of shoes, a consignment of which had just reached the camp. Many of the volunteers were barefoot, which gives a notion of their general equipment.

Garibaldi, who rarely took advice, yielded to his son. Had he not done so, before the Papal army reached Mentana, he would have been at Tivoli. One delay brings another, and it was midday when the march began. Garibaldi looked sad, and spoke to no one, but hummed some bars of Riego's hymn, the Spanish song of freedom, full of a wild, sweet pathos, to which his tanned-faced legionaries had marched under the Monte Videan sun. Could he but have had with him those strong warriors now! He mounted his horse, put it to a gallop, which he rarely did, and, riding down the ranks of the column, took his place at its head.

When he arrived at the village of Mentana, he heard that the Pontificals were close by, and he waited to give them battle.

Mentana lies in a depression commanded by the neighbouring mounds, not a good configuration for defence. This village in the Roman Campagna sprang into history on a November day one thousand and sixty-seven years before, as the meeting-place of Charlemagne and Leo III. Here they shook hands over their bargain: that the Pope should crown the great Charles Emperor, and that the Emperor should a.s.sure to the Pope his temporal power. And now the ragged band of Italian youths was come to say that of bargains between Popes and Emperors there had been enough.

They numbered less than 5000. General De Failly reckoned the Papal troops engaged at 3000 and the French at 2000, but Italian authorities compute the former at a higher figure. The most experienced of the Garibaldian officers thought that the attackers were twice as numerous as they were. At the first onslaught great confusion prevailed among the volunteers. Mentana seemed lost, but the sound of the guns they had captured at Monte Rotondo restored their _moral_, and making a gallant rush forward they retook the princ.i.p.al positions with the bayonet. As they saw the Pontificals swerve back they uttered cries of joy. It was two o'clock. The enemy's fire slackened; something was going on which the volunteers could not make out. All at once there was a sharp unfamiliar detonation, resembling the whirring sound of a machine. The French had come into action.

A hailstorm of bullets mowed down the Garibaldian ranks. Their two guns were useless, for the ammunition, seventy rounds in all, was exhausted. They fought till four o'clock--till nearly their last cartridge was gone; then they slowly retreated. Very few of them guessed what that peculiar sound meant, or imagined that they had been engaged with the French, but next morning Europe knew from General De Failly's report that 'the Cha.s.sepots had done wonders.'

Garibaldi left the field, haggard and aged, unable to reconcile himself to a defeat which he thought that more discipline, more steadiness in his rank and file, would have turned into a victory. He had always demanded the impossible of his men; till now they had given it to him. In time he judged more justly. Those miserably-armed lads who lately had been glad to eat the herbs of the field, if haply they found any, stood out for four hours against the pick of two regular armies, one of which was supposed to be the finest in the world. They had done well.

Mentana remained that night in the hands of 1500 Garibaldians, who still occupied the castle and most of the houses when the general retreat was ordered. In the morning the Garibaldian officer who held the castle capitulated, on condition that the volunteers 'shut up in Mentana' should be reconducted across the frontier; terms which the French and Papal generals interpreted to embrace only the defenders of the castle. Eight hundred of the others were taken in triumph to Rome.

It would have been wiser to let them go. The Romans had been told that the Garibaldians were cut-throats, incendiaries, human bloodhounds waiting to fly at them. What did they behold? 'The beast is gentle,'

as Euripides makes his captors say of Dionysius. The stalwart Romans saw a host of boys, with pale, wistful, very young-looking faces. If anything was wanting to seal the fate of the Temporal Power it was the sight of that procession of famished and wounded Italians brought to Rome by the foreigner.

The victors, however, were jubilant. Their inharmonious shouts of _Vive Pie Neuf_ vexed the delicate Roman ears. It was the battle-cry of the day of Mentana. Begun by the masked, finished by the unmasked soldiers of France, Mentana was a French victory, and it was the last.

The Garibaldian retreat continued through the night to Pa.s.so Corese on the Italian frontier. The silence of the Campagna was only broken by little gusts of a chilly wind off the Tiber; it seemed as if a spectral army moved without sound. Garibaldi rode with his hat pressed down over his eyes; only once he spoke: 'It is the first time they make me turn my back like this,' he said to an old comrade, 'it would have been better ...' He stopped, but it was easy to supply the words: 'to die.'

As he was getting into the train at Figline, with the intention of going straight to Caprera, he was placed under arrest by order of the Italian Government. His officers had their hands on their swords, but he forbade their using force. The arrest seemed an unnecessary slight on the beaten man, who had loved Italy too well. But General Menabrea, who ordered it, believes that he thereby saved Italian unity.

According to an account given by him many years after to the correspondent of an English newspaper, Napoleon wrote at this juncture to King Victor Emmanuel, that as he was not strong enough to govern his kingdom, he, Napoleon, was about to help him by relieving him of all parts of it except Piedmont, Lombardy and Venetia. The arrest of Garibaldi, by showing that the King 'could govern,' averted the impending danger. In communicating it to Napoleon, the King is said to have added 'that Italians would lose their last drop of blood before consenting to disruption,' a warning which he was not unlikely to give, but the whole story lacks verisimilitude. It appears more credible that an old man's memory is at fault than that a letter, so colossally insolent, was actually written. Menabrea, and even the King, may have feared that something of the kind was in the mind of the Emperor.

As after Aspromonte so after Mentana; Garibaldi was confined in the fortress of Varignano, on the bay of Spezia. A few weeks later he was released and sent to Caprera. As he left the fortress-prison he wrote the words: 'Farewell, Rome; farewell, Capitol; who knows who will think of thee, and when?'

The last crusade was over; destiny would do the rest.

CHAPTER XX

ROME, THE CAPITAL

1867-1870

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