Cuore (Heart) - Edmondo De Amicis (speed reading book txt) 📗

To-day is a day of national mourning. Garibaldi died last night. Do you know who he is? He is the man who liberated ten millions of Italians from the tyranny of the Bourbons. He died at the age of seventy-five. He was born at Nice, the son of a ship captain. At eight years of age, he saved a woman’s life; at thirteen, he dragged into safety a boat-load of his companions who were shipwrecked; at twenty-seven, he rescued from the water at Marseilles a drowning youth; at forty-one, he saved a ship from burning on the ocean. He fought for ten years in America for the liberty of a strange people; he fought in three wars against the Austrians, for the liberation of Lombardy and Trentino; he defended Rome from the French in 1849; he delivered Naples and Palermo in 1860; he fought again for Rome in 1867; he combated with the Germans in defence of France in 1870. He was possessed of the flame of heroism and the genius of war. He was engaged in forty battles, and won thirty-seven of them.

When he was not fighting, he was laboring for his living, or he shut himself up in a solitary island, and tilled the soil. He was teacher, sailor, workman, trader, soldier, general, dictator. He was simple, great, and good. He hated all oppressors, he loved all peoples, he protected all the weak; he had no other aspiration than good, he refused honors, he scorned death, he adored Italy. When he uttered his war-cry, legions of valorous men hastened to him from all quarters; gentlemen left their palaces, workmen their ships, youths their schools, to go and fight in the sunshine of his glory. In time of war he wore a red shirt. He was strong, blond, and handsome. On the field of battle he was a thunder-bolt, in his affections he was a child, in affliction a saint. Thousands of Italians have died for their country, happy, if, when dying, they saw him pass victorious in the distance; thousands would have allowed themselves to be killed for him; millions have blessed and will bless him.

He is dead. The whole world mourns him. You do not understand him now. But you will read of his deeds, you will constantly hear him spoken of in the course of your life; and gradually, as you grow up, his image will grow before you; when you become a man, you will behold him as a giant; and when you are no longer in the world, when your sons’ sons and those who shall be born from them are no longer among the living, the generations will still behold on high his luminous head as a redeemer of the peoples, crowned by the names of his victories as with a circlet of stars; and the brow and the soul of every Italian will beam when he utters his name.

Thy Father.

Sunday, 11th.
The National Festival Day. Postponed for a week on
account of the death of Garibaldi.

We have been to the Piazza Castello, to see the review of soldiers, who defiled before the commandant of the army corps, between two vast lines of people. As they marched past to the sound of flourishes from trumpets and bands, my father pointed out to me the Corps and the glories of the banners. First, the pupils of the Academy, those who will become officers in the Engineers and the Artillery, about three hundred in number, dressed in black, passed with the bold and easy elegance of students and soldiers. After them defiled the infantry, the brigade of Aosta, which fought at Goito and at San Martino, and the Bergamo brigade, which fought at Castelfidardo, four regiments of them, company after company, thousands of red aiguillettes, which seemed like so many double and very long garlands of blood-colored flowers, extended and agitated from the two ends, and borne athwart the crowd. After the infantry, the soldiers of the Mining Corps advanced,—the workingmen of war, with their plumes of black horse-tails, and their crimson bands; and while these were passing, we beheld advancing behind them hundreds of long, straight plumes, which rose above the heads of the spectators; they were the mountaineers, the defenders of the portals of Italy, all tall, rosy, and stalwart, with hats of Calabrian fashion, and revers of a beautiful, bright green, the color of the grass on their native mountains. The mountaineers were still marching past, when a quiver ran through the crowd, and the bersaglieri, the old twelfth battalion, the first who entered Rome through the breach at the Porta Pia, bronzed, alert, brisk, with fluttering plumes, passed like a wave in a sea of black, making the piazza ring with the shrill blasts of their trumpets, which seemed shouts of joy. But their trumpeting was drowned by a broken and hollow rumble, which announced the field artillery; and then the latter passed in triumph, seated on their lofty caissons, drawn by three hundred pairs of fiery horses,—those fine soldiers with yellow lacings, and their long cannons of brass and steel gleaming on the light carriages, as they jolted and resounded, and made the earth tremble.

And then came the mountain artillery, slowly, gravely, beautiful in its laborious and rude semblance, with its large soldiers, with its powerful mules—that mountain artillery which carries dismay and death wherever man can set his foot. And last of all, the fine regiment of the Genoese cavalry, which had wheeled down like a whirlwind on ten fields of battle, from Santa Lucia to Villafranca, passed at a gallop, with their helmets glittering in the sun, their lances erect, their pennons floating in the air, sparkling with gold and silver, filling the air with jingling and neighing.

“How beautiful it is!” I exclaimed. My father almost reproved me for these words, and said to me:—

“You are not to regard the army as a fine spectacle. All these young men, so full of strength and hope, may be called upon any day to defend our country, and fall in a few hours, crushed to fragments by bullets and grape-shot. Every time that you hear the cry, at a feast, ‘Hurrah for the army! hurrah for Italy!’ picture to yourself, behind the regiments which are passing, a plain covered with corpses, and inundated with blood, and then the greeting to the army will proceed from the very depths of your heart, and the image of Italy will appear to you more severe and grand.”

Tuesday, 14th.