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The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Scenes In The Great War - 1915, a non-fiction book by Hall Caine |
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How The War Entered Italy |
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_ Then, by one of the most vivid, if pathetic, of the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the drama of the past 365 days, we saw the actual war come to Italy. It came in a profoundly impressive form--the dead body of young Bruno Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator. Fighting for France, Bruno had fallen in a gallant charge at the front, and his brother, who was by his side, had carried his body out of the trenches and brought it home. We who know Rome do not need to be told how it was received there. We can see the dense mass of uncovered heads in the Piazza delle Terme, stretching from the doors of the railway station to the bronze fountain at the top of the Via Nazionale, and we can hear the deep swell of the Garibaldian hymn, which comes like a challenge as well as a moan from 50,000 throats. Not for the first time was a dead Garibaldi being borne through the streets of Rome, and those of us who remembered the earlier day knew well that with the body of this Italian boy the war had entered Italy. Then, at a crisis in Italy's internal government, our enemy, having failed to buy, bribe, or corrupt Italy, began to threaten her. Out of the delirium of his intoxicated conscience, which no longer shrank from crime, he told Italy that if she dared to break her neutrality her fate should be as the fate of Belgium. That frightened some of us for a moment. We thought of Venice, of Florence, of Assisi, of Subiaco, of Naples, and of Rome, and, remembering the methods by which Germany was beating and bludgeoning her way through the war, our hearts trembled and thrilled at a dreadful vision of the lovely and beloved Italian land under the heel of a ruthless aggressor--of the destruction of the history of Christendom as it had been written by great artists on canvas and by great architects in stone through the long calendar of nearly two thousand years. But we also thought of Savoy, of Palestro, of Cas-ale, of Caprera, and of "Roma o morte," and told ourselves that, come what might, victory or defeat, the children of Victor Emmanuel III would never allow themselves to buy the ease and safety of their bodies by the corruption and degradation of their souls. _ |
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