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.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE FIFTEENTH OF JUNE, 1918
I happened to be the officer on duty in the Battery Command Post on the night of June 14th-15th. There had been a thick fog for several days and not much firing. No one expected anything unusual. The Battery was much below strength owing to the ravages of what the doctors in the mountains called "mountain fever" and the doctors on the plain called influenza. We had, if I remember rightly, about forty men in Hospital owing to this cause alone. I myself had a touch of it, but, thinking I could probably count on a quiet night, I refused the offer of a brother officer to take my place, coldly calculating that a few nights later, when it would be my turn to take his duty, I might have more to do. But my hopes of much sleep were soon dispersed.
Orders came in from Brigade for an elaborate counter-battery shoot with gas shell, in two parts, one between 11 p.m. and midnight, the other between 2 and 3 a.m. We had never fired gas shell from six-inch howitzers before, though we had been warned that we should soon be required to do so. We had no gas shell in the Battery, but we were informed by Brigade that a sufficient quantity would arrive by the time the shoot was to begin. In fact, however, the first consignment of gas shell was not delivered in time to enable us to take part in the first part of the bombardment, and I was told not to fire high explosive instead, as that would tend to disperse the gas which other Batteries would be simultaneously firing on the same targets. The method adopted on this and later occasions, when gas was used, was that a number of our own Batteries should concentrate for, say, five minutes at the fastest rate of fire possible on a particular enemy Battery, then all switch together to another enemy Battery, and so on, all coming back together on to the first enemy Battery after an interval sufficient to lull the human elements forming part of the target into a delusive sense of security and a return to slumber without their masks, or, alternatively, to make them wear their masks continously for prolonged hours of expectation, thus subjecting them to much discomfort, depriving them of sleep, lowering their morale, and making them likelier victims for fresh forms of devilment in the morning. War is a filthy thing, and must be stamped out ruthlessly. The facts of gas will have helped to drive this simple conviction into many a thick, egotistical, unsensitive head. But, as has been wisely said, you cannot half make a war of the modern sort, you cannot let a faint savour of regret hang about all your actions, and enervate your will. And, in plain, brutal truth, our employment of gas was a big factor in determining and hastening the end. Of the military efficiency of our gas tactics we had much evidence later on.