Page 14 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

12 GENERAL GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

rior…in all my life, I always believed that it is better to strike than to crouch”.
In the same way, we will skip the well known heroic events of his captivi-
ty after being wounded; his escape; his eventful liberation and pick up from
the time when after a fantastic ride of 500km across the Uruguay pampas and
travelling in escortero (that is with an entire herd of riderless foals that he rode
later to travel faster) arrives at the headquarters of the insurgents of the Rio
Grande do Sul, ever more determined to serve with ardour the cause of that
free Repubblica.
It is noteworthy at this point, for our purpose, to pick up from his
unadorned but incisive “Biographical memoirs” the repeated vibrant expres-
sions of his moved enthusiasm both for the strange, almost virgin, country
that was by now the favourite field of action for his exploits, and for his
almost wild and independent life of freedom almost like a gaucho, that he
conducted in that eventful campaign. It stands out in each passage of his
pages, written with the manly and rough naivety of soldier descent, that inde-
finable taste for nomadic and simple life typical of those endless regions: a
taste that (as all those who fought in far away lands are well aware of) plays
such a powerful attraction and those souls thirsty for free and vast action and
adventurous existence.
His passion for such a varied and original kind of warfare that took place
in that war scenario and in that situation emerges even more clearly from
those pages. Maybe more of big guerrilla warfare rather than war but all
imbued with astuteness, aggression, sharp perception, and resolution. In
other words, operations in which the personality of the commander was
everything and a positive outcome depended on the knowledgeable and time-
ly use of moral factors, through which it was possible to hugely increase
strength at the decisive moment, rather than the quantity and the quality of
the available means. It was in this kind of war that Garibaldi found, in the
vivid memories of the people among which he lived, eminent models, in the
famous names of Bolivar, Artigas, Rivera and Belgrano all of them half gau-
cho and half general figures, but undoubtedly all leaders of great style and of
a grand scale.

Another known characteristic is also highlighted from his “Memoirs”.
The pride to honour, as an Italian, with his war actions, the traditional mili-
tary spirit of the Italians, so often unjustly underestimated by foreigners of