Page 213 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

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THE 1860 CAMPAIGN IN SICILY 211

that allowed him to find a good solution on the spur of the moment
«From his mouth the Italian volunteers heard often the promise of hard
marches, nights spent in vigils, fights without rest, and hunger and thirst and
whatever is more cruel in war, and they found that he always kept these
promises, and did not complain.
No one could say they had ever seen Giuseppe Garibaldi force his soldiers
to obey by threatening them, or by the use of the force; no one has ever heard
the voice of that man pronounce frightening words, apart from those
moments in which he seemed to simulate a trumpet in inciting to the attack.
The universal reputation of justice, honesty and goodness that formed a halo
around that head of lion, the flash of those eyes, the sound of his words,
always calm and solemn, sufficed to subdue the arrogant, to make the restless
meek and the cowards brave. He was so serene, so simple in what he said, in
his habits and in his clothes, a certain something of majesty both attractive
and pleasant, that when people heard him they trembled at his presence and
they could not refrain from loving him and rushing joyfully to death under
his eyes, as if death had to be naturally beautiful and divine if it arrived under
his sight and with his admiration».
The more time goes on, the more Garibaldi’s figure grows and acquires a
magic light. When he was alive, political grudges and other types of grudges
sometimes prevented a serene judgment, and since the enormous importance
that he had as one of the greatest creators of our Risorgimento could not be
denied, his military glory was pruned and dwarfed. On the contrary,
Garibaldi was a valiant commander from all points of view: as organiser, as a
strategist and a tactician, as we said already. And this is not all; he represents
the typical Italian hero, the pure and unselfish and chivalrous hero who,
although very brave and daring, is always deeply human, with none of the
tracts of the cruel and greedy adventurer. As it has been recently written, he
represents in the Risorgimento “the participation of the population in the
undertaking, that without him would have been only a diplomatic action of
some limited middle-class and intellectual people”, and therefore the
Garibaldian philosophy underlined the more characteristic and spontaneous
qualities of the Italian people: sobriety, generosity, passion, love for the most
beautiful deeds that brought this great man of Nice to America and to Dijon
and brought his nephews to Domokos and Argonne.