Page 19 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

THE AMERICAN CAMPAIGNS 1836 - 1848 17

ships, transporting them on wagons: a very original idea, but extremely dif-
ficult to carry out, a feat that would have seemed impossible to anybody else.
And still, with his strong will that had by then acquired a particular power
of irradiation on the will of his followers, the crazy project succeeded. The
biggest cutters placed on strong and wheeled ladders and towed by 25 pairs
of oxes each, were able to slowly go up the rocky bed of the stream reaching
the middle course lake after a few days. From there, once unloaded, they
sailed again and surrounded by all kind of difficulties, went down to the
shores of the Atlantic. But the outlet of the estuary was blocked by shallow
water practicable at high tide but beaten by violent currents and lashed by
very dangerous breakers. However, through work of arms and oars, among
shoals and breakers, in the darkness of the night to escape the surveillance of
enemy ships that sailed across that coast, the enormous task was crowned by
total success and Garibaldi was able to sail the ocean with his two famous
armed cutters, bound to the north as ordered.
Even this ingenious and bold, if small, logistic operation, reveals one of
the most characteristic abilities of Garibaldi as commander, that is a wider
and certain sense of the possibilities than in average men, and way superior
to what is normally expected in the theoretical treatise of military art. The
true commander, trained in the burning fire of reality, finds deep inside him-
self, when confronted with the hardest and dark situations, those ingenious
resources that would escape any methodological calculation of common pos-
sibilities. Not to exaggerate by making comparisons with greater feats, as for
example that of Hannibal crossing the western Alps, Cesar crossing the Rhine
with makeshift resources and Napoleon descending into Italy with an army
from the San Bernardo. But even the much more modest trial described
above and overcome so brilliantly by the future commander of the Mille,
reveals the seeds of that ability particular of the great men of action of push-
ing further and further away the barrier between those things that are deemed
to be possible and impossible by common men.

It was July 1839 and soon after the episode just related, a terrible storm
suddenly hit the shores of the Atlantic. The storm was so violent that the fleet
of Garibaldi was severely tested and one of the cutters, the one he himself
commanded, sank. This hard event brought out again, in all its splendour,