Page 60 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

58 GENERAL GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

bility of establishing volunteer corps together with the regular army corps.
These two meetings had no witnesses; Garibaldi briefly recalls them with
bitter words, and the divergent opinions of historians offer no certainty about
the truth. Perhaps Guerzoni comes closest to the truth when he ascribes the
refusal to the mistrust of the King, his ministers and his generals towards peo-
ple’s armies, a mistrust justified by the poor performance of some Lombard
volunteer corps who, once fighting together with the regular army, had cor-
rupted the discipline of the regular army with their insubordinate behaviour.
And the commanders of those corps, then, had addressed the commanders of
the Piedmontese troops with a tone that was far from being in line with the
rigid traditions and regulations of that army; suffice it to say that often their
letters, sent to the generals, began with the motto ‘Viva the Italian Republic!’.
Therefore, to regard this refusal as culpable, as some historians do, is to
overlook the times and circumstances in which it took place; it involves not
considering the ideas, feelings, visions and sentiments of the King and his
ministers, who could not consent to the bold undertaking of welcoming into
the regular army a man that, despite having been accepted into the volunteer
corps, had been sentenced to death and received a pardon, had, up to a few
months before, been a supporter of Republican States, and finally despite his
recent and repeated statements of loyalty to the King had been publicly exalt-
ed by Mazzini just a few days before.
However, were Garibaldi’s military talents known? The news had certain-
ly spread in Italy that an Italian, leading an army of Italians, had fought over-
seas for the independence of other people and had won, and the souls of the
Italian patriots had been excited by that. Since 1846, after the battle of Salto,
Mazzini and other writers had exalted his actions in newspapers and maga-
zines; De Laugier set about publishing the documents of the actions around
Montevideo; a petition, started in Tuscany to offer the commander a sword
of honour, had received much consent, but despite all these manifestations of
enthusiasm, in April the Government of Tuscany refused to entrust him with
the command of the army; after the refusal of the Sardinian minister, the pro-
visional Lombard government, as we will explain later on, would welcome
him as an unemployed person to whom a job is granted as an act of mercy,
and Mazzini himself, the following year, during the siege of Rome, would
consider Roselli superior to him.
Why these contradictions? Of course, politics had a great deal of influence
in this, and sometimes it prevailed decisively, but we should not forget that,