Page 334 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

316 GENERAL GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

The General Staff of the Army-to-be was formed by few people: Canzio,
the aides-de-camp Tironi, Pasqua and Gattorno, a Captain Foulc and as pri-
vate secretary Giovanni Basso.
Garibaldi wanted to divide this Army into 4 Brigades; we will see what
these brigades were; to command them, he had just his sons Menotti and
Ricciotti, the Polish General Bosak-Hauke, his friend, and the French
General Marie appointed by Gambetta, who never showed up and was
replaces first by Delpech, the former prefect of Marseille, and then by Lobbia.
Three elements coming from a completely different enlistening and with
completely different operative characteristics formed the fight tool of
Garibaldi in that campaign: those who had been called up, the snipers and
the Italian volunteers; a very heterogeneous and improvised group.
The called up, moblots, mobile national guards, etc. were the worst part of
the Army and it could not have been otherwise, given the strange enlistment
and organisation system adopted by the provisional government.
All bachelors aged between 20 and 40 had been registered in the lists of the
mobilisés. Instead of giving the organisation and equippement of the newly
established units to the territorial military authorities, the government had
given that task to the prefects, totally incompetent for it. They had put togeth-
er elements of all kinds, age and military aptitude, they had organised them
into cadres with improvised officers and non-commissioned officers, taken
from the most different groups for their origin, morality and social standing;
they had equipped them in a rudimentary way, from the uniform to the civil-
ian dress, without any external mark indicating their military status, when
they did not look like brigands. As for the arms, the more active and scrupu-
lous prefects distributed the old and new weapons they had within reach: pis-
tols, percussion guns, Remington, Snuffbox Rifles, Swiss and English carbines,
etc.; but most of them sent the mobilisés to the front even unarmed. Needless
to talk about ammunitions, someone would have taken care of that. It can be
easily understood how such a collection of weapons could be transformed into
a regular and adequate supply and how the Battalions of mobilisés could face
the well armed Prussian Infantry troops of Dreyse with those museum pieces.
Divided into companies, Battalions, Regiments with no force criterion – the
size of the companies varied from 30 to 2000 men – with no means of trans-
port and services, the mobilisés were an heterogeneous crowd without any
cohesion, any principle of discipline, incapable of moving, not to mention