All the independent strength of my soul, all my intellectual or philosophical resources—even my deep religious beliefs—were helpless to comfort that great grief. For many days I was lost. From me had been taken the one dear and truly near living being, the one soul closest and eternally adherent to my own responses.
Words of condolence, letters from my friends, the attempt to comfort me by other members of the family, filled not one tiny corner of that great void, nor opened even one fraction of an inch of the closed door.
My mother had suffered for me—in so many ways. She had lived so many hours of anxiety for me because of my wandering and pugnacious life. She had predicted my ascent. She had toiled and hoped too much and died before she was yet forty-eight years old. She had, in her quiet manner, done superhuman labors.
She might be alive now. She might have lived and enjoyed, with the power of her maternal instinct, my political success. It was not to be. But to me it is a comfort to feel that she, even now, can see me and help me in my labors with her unequaled love.
I, alone, returned to the regiment. I finished my last months of military service. And then my life and my future were again distended with uncertainty.
I went to Opeglia as a teacher again, knowing all the time that teaching did not suit me. This time I was a master in a middle school. After a period, off I went with Cesare Battisti, then chief editor of the Popolo. Later he was destined to become one of the greatest of our national heroes—he who gave his life, he who was executed by the enemy Austrians in the war, he who then was giving his thought and will to obtaining freedom of the province of Trento from the rule of Austria. His nobility and proud soul are always in my memory. His aspirations as a socialist-patriot called to me.
One day I wrote an article maintaining that the Italian border was not at Ala, the little town which in those days stood on the old frontier between our kingdom and the old Austria. Whereupon I was expelled from Austria by the Imperial and Royal Government of Vienna.
I was becoming used to expulsions. Once more a wanderer, I went back to Forli.
The itch of journalism was in me. My opportunity was before me in the editorship of a local socialist newspaper. I understood now that the Gordian knot of Italian political life could only be undone by an act of violence.
Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and fire their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the World War began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.