With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement

by Baron Hugh Dalton Dalton

CHAPTER XXXI

ROME IN THE SPRING

I was at Rome in May. Of the many things and persons I saw there, not much is relevant here. But there is an intoxication and a beauty and a sense of wonder in Rome in the Spring, as great as I have found at any time elsewhere. Rome grew upon me, rapidly and ceaselessly, during the few days that I spent there, and sent me back to the mountains, clothed with their pinewoods and their graves of much brave youth, uplifted in heart and purified in spirit.

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Early one afternoon in the Piazza Venezia I fell in with two Italian officers, an Alpino and an Engineer, both wounded and not yet fit to go back to the Front. We rapidly made friends, and, having drunk beer together, we took a carrozza and drove to the Villa Borghese Gardens, where we walked and sat for several hours. Then we went back to the Piazza Venezia, and walked in the neighbourhood and contemplated the monuments. My friends said that Rome was the capital city of the world, and praised also the giant memorial to Italian Unity and Victor Emmanuel II., which, still unfinished, dominates the Piazza, and indeed a large part of the city. This memorial is, I believe, condemned by the greater part of foreign aesthetic opinion, the Germans alone conspicuously dissenting. Personally I like it in the fading light from close at hand, and in a bright light from a distance, as one sees it, for instance, from the Pincio.

We spoke a little, but not much, of the war. They were both for fighting on till final victory, whatever the cost, and both spoke with admiration of the inflexible and stubborn spirit of the British nation. Very wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini. My Alpino friend had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked lame. He told me of incidents which he had witnessed, of Alpini charging across and through uncut enemy wire, with the wounded and the dying crying to their comrades, "Ciao![1] Ciao! Avanti!" He sang me also certain songs of the Alpini, in one of which they sing that in the Italian tricolour the green stands for the Alpini,[2] the white for the snow on their mountains and the red for their blood. O these "fiamme verdi," who can talk and sing themselves into such transfigured ecstasies, as to turn, death and pain almost into easy glories!

[Footnote 1: "Ciao" is a colloquialism, much the same as our own "so long," or "good-bye and good luck!" It is an intimate word, used only between friends at parting.]

[Footnote 2: The regimental colours of the Alpini are plain green, worn on the collar.]

The three of us dined at a little restaurant near the Pantheon, and my friends wrote their names and a greeting to my wife on a post card, and an old man at the next table ordered a bottle of wine, in which we all drank the health of the Allies, and a party at another table began to sing, and went on singing for nearly an hour. We stayed in that restaurant talking till eleven p.m., when the lights were turned out, and then my friends demanded that we should make another "giro artistico," which terminated beneath Trajan's Column, where in the warm air we sat and talked for half an hour more, and separated about midnight, I having had eight hours of continuous practice in the use of the second person singular of Italian verbs.

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Next day I lunched with my friends the Marinis, at their charming Villa on Monte Parioli, and in the afternoon Signor Marini offered to act as my guide to places of interest. We took the tram to the Piazza del Popolo, which was laid out in 1810 under the French Empire, perfectly circular and symmetrical, thus differing from the more Italian of Roman Piazzas, such as the elongated and quite unsymmetrical Piazza di Spagna. We passed along the broad embankment beside the Tiber and through the Square of St Peter's. Just outside the gates of the Vatican, my guide pointed out to me the little shabby building occupied by the Giordano Bruno Society, symbolic of the brave defiance thrown out, all down the ages, by poverty and the spirit of freedom and intellectual honesty, in the face of wealth and power and oppression, intellectual bondage and the dead weight of tradition.

My guide thought that, out of the wreck of her material defeat and disaster, Russia would perhaps give a new spiritual religion to the western world, to take the place of old forms now dead, and historic organisations which, having lacked the audacity and the wisdom to remain poor when riches were within easy reach, had now become visibly and irremediably detached from the life of the people. He did not fear, as some did for France, a clerical revival in Italy after the war. For the Italian branch of clerical power had shown itself in the hour of Italy's deadly peril to be largely lacking in Italian patriotism, and to have been scheming for the maintenance, if not the expansion, of Austrian dominion, and, perhaps, for the re-establishment by the aid of Austrian and German bayonets, or Turkish, if it had been necessary to solicit them, of the Temporal Power of the Papacy over Italian citizens and Italian soil. I saw one of the Swiss mercenaries of the Papacy gazing forth a little contemptuously through a door of the Vatican upon the secular outer world.

From St Peter's we drove up the Janiculum, stopping on the way at the convent of S. Onofrio, where Tasso passed the last three weeks of his life and where a Tasso Museum has been accumulated. Very admirable is the equestrian statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum, both as sculpture and for its details of intention, such as that sideways turning of his head, looking down hill at the Vatican, as though saying, "Non ti dimentico,"—"I do not forget you, my old enemy." The view of Rome from this point is magnificent, the best that I have seen, though the view from the Pincio only just falls short of it.

Thence, passing outside the old city walls through the Porta San Pancrazio, we stood on ground made memorable by Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic in 1849, and went down, past the. Pope's monument to the French who died fighting to defend his Temporal Power against the Garibaldini, into the beautiful garden of the Villa Pamfili. "Attendono il finale risorgimento,"[1] says the Pope's Italian version on the monument. It is an ironical phrase in view of the history of the next twenty years. "They did not have long to wait," I said, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." And my guide said, I thought well, of the French that they are a people of great gifts and of most generous mind, but that their rulers have often showed "un po' di volubilità, un po' di fantasia."

[Footnote 1: "They await the final resurrection." But "risorgimento" to most Italians suggests modern history more than theology.]

We visited last of all the Depôt of the Bersaglieri in Trastevere, where is also the famous Bersagliere Museum. Here we were received and shown round with great courtesy by the Colonel commanding the Depôt, a handsome man with most sad eyes, but full of great regimental pride in this creation, intimately and characteristically Italian, of General La Marmora.

In the Museum, among much that was trivial, I found much that was interesting and even deeply moving: the relics of Enrico Toti, an artist who, having only one leg, joined the Bersaglieri Ciclisti as a volunteer at the beginning of the war, and rode up mountain tracks on a bicycle with a single pedal, and died, after acts of the greatest heroism and after sustaining for many hours grave wounds, crying with his last breath "Avanti Savoia!", upon whose dead body and brave departed spirit was conferred the most rare Gold Medal for Valour; photographs of all the Bersaglieri, who since the foundation of the Regiment have won the Gold Medal, some twenty of them, hanging together on one wall, all dead now; the steel helmet of a Bersagliere Major, killed on the Carso, while leading his men; this is all that they found of him, but it has three holes through the front, sufficient proof, said the Colonel, that he was not going backward when he died; a menu card, signed by all the officers of a Bersagliere Battalion, who dined together on the eve of the victorious action of Col Valbella last January, in which they played a worthy part.

The Colonel told me that his own son was killed and is buried beyond the Isonzo, near Cervignano. It had been suggested to him that he should have the body brought home, but he preferred to leave it where it fell. "C'è un' idea che è morta lì," he said, "It is an idea which has died there. Some day, if I live, I shall make a pilgrimage thither, but the Austrians may, by now, have destroyed the grave."

Outside in the courtyard, where the Colonel took leave of us, I saw many young Bersaglieri, the latest batches of recruits, mere boys. "They are splendid material," he said, with a military pride, not without a half-regretful tenderness, "one can make anything out of them." They were, indeed, incomparable human stuff, whether for the purposes of peace or war. They seemed to have the joy of the spring in their eyes, just as that middle-aged Regular soldier had in his the sadness of autumn. And amid all the beauty of Rome in the spring, I was haunted by the grim refrain, "Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato,"—"In the springtide men fight and die, young soldier."

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I went away from Rome strengthened in my previous judgment that the Italians are not a militarist nation. There was no sign of the militarist, as distinct from the military, spirit at the Bersagliere Depôt. The relations of the Colonel and Signer Marini illustrated this. They had never met, nor, I think, heard of one another before. Yet this little civilian seemed to find it quite natural to march into a military barracks without any preliminary inquiries, to walk upstairs and straight into the Commanding Officer's office and, not finding the Commanding Officer there, to send a message into the Officer's Mess, and, the Commanding Officer having come out, to present his card, without any appearance of servility or undue deference, and to ask to be taken round. And the Colonel seemed to see nothing odd in these proceedings, but placed himself at once at our disposal and showed us everything and talked without aloofness and without reserve to both of us. I could not help thinking that things would not have happened quite like this at the Depôt of a crack regiment in most other European capitals.