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Italian Patriot and Soldier of Fortune

3 AND 5 JUNE 1882

GARIBALDI IS DEAD. The spell attached to his name has partly been broken by the prolongation of his life beyond its sphere of possible use-fulness; but the worth of his character will bear inspection, even when sober criticism had done its utmost to strip it of all the glitter with which popular enthusiasm had invested it.

In the first place, this hero of a hundred fights has been made almost too much of as a warrior, but justice has hardly, perhaps, been done to his abilities as a leader. Garibaldi was no strategist. He knew little and cared less about organisation, equipment, or discipline; never looked to means of transport or commissariat, but simply marched at the head of a few officers, hardly turning to see how the troops would follow. He never had a competent head of the staff. He thought he had found one in his friend Anzani, at Montevideo, a man of whose abilities and actual genius Garibaldi had the most transcendent ideas, who had often brought order in the Legion where before his arrival all was confusion, and of whom Garibaldi said that ‘had such a genius as Anzani’s conducted the Lombard campaign of 1848 or commanded at the battle of Novara or the siege of Rome the stranger would from that moment have ceased to tread with impunity the bones of Italy’s bravest combatants.’ But Anzani died, as we have seen, on his landing at Genoa in 1848, and Garibaldi was left only with valiant and heroic, but inexperienced and incapable men.

The army which conquered Naples in 1860 trailed up a long straggling line from Reggio to Salerno, picking up the arms with which the fugitive Neapolitans strewed the fields, living as they could on the grapes and fruits providentially at that season ripening everywhere on the roadside. At Varese and Como, in the previous year, the Italian guerrillero astonished Urban by appearing before him where the Austrian was sure Garibaldi could not be, and where, indeed, the Volunteer Chief was almost alone; ‘his 2,000 volunteers,’ as he said, ‘straggling behind, while his adversary had 14,000 men at hand.’ What was mere rash confidence of the Italian struck the Austrian as deep stratagem, and he was put to flight by a mere trick of audacity analogous to that which had served the purposes of Bonaparte and compelled the Austrian commanders of his own time to surrender, 62 years before, in those same North Italian districts and only a little more to the east.

Garibaldi, however, was a tactician. and would have creditably handled an army had a ready-made one, well-armed and trained and led, been placed under his orders on the eve of battle. He had the sure glance, the quick resolution, the prompt resource of that Enfant gâté de la victoire, his townsman Massena. As the Lombard volunteer, Emilio Dandolo, quoted by Dumas, graphically paints his chief– ‘On the approach of a foe, Garibaldi would ride up to a culminating point in the landscape, survey the ground for hours with the spy-glass in brooding silence, and come down with a swoop on the enemy, acting upon some well-contrived combination of movements by which advantage had been taken of all circumstances in his favour.’

And he possessed, besides in a supreme degree that glamour which enslaved his volunteers’ minds and hearts to his will. Though there was no order or discipline in his army, there was always the most blind and passsive obedience wherever he was. Even with his crew on board his privateer sloop at Rio Grande he tells us he had ordered the life, honour, and property of the passengers of a vessel he had captured to be respected – ‘I was almost saying under the penalty of death,’ he adds, ‘but it would have been wrong to say that for nobody ever disputed my orders. There was never anybody to be punished.’ A great craven must he be who would not fire up at sight of that calm and secure lion-face.

Garibaldi had faith in himself. He looked upon that handful of ‘the Thousand,’ who had been a match for 60,000 Neapolitans, as equally fit to cope with all the hosts of France and Austria, singly or conjointly. To make anything possible he had only to will it, to order it, and he never failed to find men ready and willing to attempt it. He called out in one instance in Rome for ‘40 volunteers wanted for an operation in which half of them would be sure to be killed and the other half mortally wounded.’ ’The whole battalion,’ he adds ‘rushed forward to offer themselves, and we had to draw lots.’ On another occasion, also at Rome, he ‘called all well-disposed men to follow him.’ ’Officers and soldiers instantly sprang up as if the ground had brought them forth.’ At the close of the siege, when, upon the surrender being voted by the Assembly, he had made up his mind to depart, he put forth this singular order of the day – ‘Whoever chooses to follow me will be received among my own men. All I ask of them is a heart full of love for our country. They will have no pay, no rest. They will get bread and water when chance may supply them. Whoever likes not this may remain behind. Once out of the gates of Rome every step will be one step nearer to death.’ Four thousand infantry and 500 horsemen, two-thirds of what was left of the defenders of Rome, accepted these conditions.

And it was in peace as in war. In leisure hours in his wanderings, and more in his solitude at Caprera, Garibaldi read a good deal, and accumulated an ill-digested mass of knowledge, of which the utopian mysticisms of Mazzini and the paradoxical vagaries of Victor Hugo constituted the chief ingredients. But, in politics as in arms, his mind lacked the basis of a rudimental education. He rushed to conclusions without troubling his head about arguments. His crude notions of Democracy, of Communism, of Cosmopolitanism, of Positivism, were jumbled together in his brain and jostled one another in hopeless confusion, involving him in unconscious contradiction notwithstanding all his efforts to maintain a character for consistency.

In sober moments he seemed to acknowledge his intellectual deficiencies, his imperfect education, the facility with which he allowed his own fancy or the advice of dangerous friends to run away with his better judgment; but presently he would lay aside all diffidence, harangue, indite letters, preside at meetings, address multitudes, talk with the greatest boldness about what he least understood, and put his friends to the blush by his emphatic, trenchant, absolute tone, by his wild theories and sweeping assertions, as he did at Geneva at one of the Peace Society Congresses, when, before a bigoted Calvinistic audience, he settled the question whether St. Peter ever had or had not been in Rome – ‘a futile question,’ he said, ‘for I can tell you no such person as Peter has ever existed.’

His sword was a fine cavalry blade, forged in England and the gift of English friends. The sabre did good slashing work at need, and at Milazzo, in Sicily, it bore him out safely from a knot of Neopolitan troopers who caught him by surprise and fancied they had him at their discretion. Garibaldi carried no other weapons, though the officers in his suite had pistols and daggers at their belts; and his negro groom, by name Aguyar, who for a long time followed him as his shadow, like Napoleon’s Mameluke, and was shot dead by his side at Rome, was armed with a long lance with a crimson pennon, used as his chief’s banner. His staff officers were a numerous, quaint, and motley crew, men of all ages and conditions, mostly devoted personal friends – not all of them available for personal strength or technical knowledge but all to be relied upon for their readiness to die with or for him. Some of the most distinguished, like Nino Bixio, Medici, Sirtori, Cosenz, &c, had all the headlong bravery of their General – more than that no man could boast – and were his superiors in intelligence and in professional experience, ably conducting as his lieutenants field operations which he was, from some cause or other, unable to attend.

The veterans he brought with him from Montevideo, a Genoese battalion whom his friend Augusto Vecchi helped to enlist, and the Lombard Legion, under Manara, were all men of tried valour, well trained to the use of the rifle, inured to hardships and privations, and they constituted the nucleus of the Garibaldian force throughout its campaigns. The remainder was a shapeless mass of raw recruits from all parts of Italy, joining or leaving the band almost at their pleasure – mere boys from the Universities, youths of noble and rich family, lean artisans from the towns, stout peasants and labourers from the country, adventurers of indifferent character, deserters from the army, and the like, all marching in loose companies, like Falstaff’s recruits, under improvised officers and non-commissioned officers; but all, or most of them, entirely disinterested about pay or promotion, putting up with long fasts and heavy marches, only asking to be brought face to face with the enemy, and when under the immediate influence of Garibaldi himself or of his trusty friends seldom guilty of soldierly excesses or of any breach of discipline. The effect the presence of the hero had among them was surprising. A word addressed to them in his clear, ringing, silver voice electrified even the dullest. An order coming from him was never questioned, never disregarded. No one waited for a second bidding or an explanation. ‘Your business is not to inquire how you are to storm that position. You must only go and do it.’ And it was done.

This extract from the obituary of Garibaldi published in The Times of 3rd and 5th June 1882 deals with his life as a military commander. He had two great qualities that every soldier yearns to see in his leader: he knew what to do in every situation that confronted him-and he won.