Page 63 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

THE 1848 CAMPAIGN 61

proclamations that a French historian defined as a worthy parallel of those made
by Bonaparte: «The war grows; dangers increase. Your country needs you. The
man who is addressing these words to you has fought, to honour at his best the
Italian name on faraway lands; he rushed from Montevideo with a handful of
valiant men to help achieve the victory for his homeland or die on the Italian soil.
He trusts you; will you trust him? Rush up; rally around me. Italy needs ten,
twenty thousand volunteers: rally from every corner, as many as possible, and run
to the Alps! Let us show Italy and Europe that we want to win, and that we shall».
On that same day Mazzini, too, calling himself a «soldier of Garibaldi’s
legion», launched an appeal to «the youth», exhorting them to rush to the
«Italian camp, the bulwark of the Alps». In fact of the 13 th he enlisted in the
campaign led by Medici and became its standard bearer.
In the afternoon of July 30, the Italian legion left Milan. It was formed by:
Pavia Battalion, 4,000 men, Vicenza Battalion, 600 men; legionaries from
Montevideo, about 70 men; Genoa battalion and company enlisted in
Liguria, about 140 men: Senior Battalion, about 300 men. The Senior
Battalion, whose command Garibaldi gave to Medici, was formed by the best
among the recently enlisted volunteers and some hundred veterans of the bar-
ricades were among them; with some of his legionaries from Montevideo
Garibaldi also formed a cavalry squad. The volunteers had different arma-
ments, equipment and discipline. Apart from the Pavia Battalion command-
ed by Sacchi, the Vicenza Battalion and Montevideo legionaries who had
almost the same uniform, the others wore civil clothes or cassocks made of
canvas found in the Austrian deposits; their weapons were diversified.
On October 1, Garibaldi entered Bergamo and his soldiers joined the bat-
talion formed by Gabriele Camozzi with volunteers from Como and
Bergamo, equipped with 700 men and two mountain guns. That same day
the defence committee sent him a message asking him to garrison the upper
course of the Adda river from Lecco to Cassano and connect to the right wing
of the Piedmontese army, but he could not even begin to obey this order
since the Austrians took Crotta d’Adda and the royal army started its retreat
from the river towards Milan.
On October 3, Garibaldi issued a new proclamation to incite the people to
resist and, with an incisive statement, told them that «the people who defend
themselves never fall». But it seems that he continued to make false evaluations
about the real strength of the Sardinian army and the strength of the people
to implement an insurrectional war, and he cultivated these illusions also