"Just see what they have made of me. I can't go on this way.... I am not presentable. Without an ear, with a slash on the cheek, half my beard gone ... I look like a wild animal to be shown at a circus. Lord! How many kicks I'd like to give those dogs! They've botched me so I'm no longer fit for this world.... It's against the regulations, but before I die I want to devour heaps of those curs! Who allows them to make war like this? Who permits them to reduce a captain of Alpine troops to such a sight? It would be better for me to die at once. I'm not good for anything, and that dog of a Cutemup might have made a better job of me. Let him show himself and I'll give him a piece of my mind."
Poor Teschisso! He was right! His ugly scar did disfigure him. Another man would have wept at seeing himself thus; he trembled with eagerness to be revenged.
Pinocchio, too, was grumbling like a stewpot, giving vent to his ill humor. They had put on him a wooden leg that was a real triumph of mechanism. It was jointed like a real one and moved with an automatic motion in harmony with his sound leg. Pinocchio had tried to run, to jump, and to balance, and had to convince himself that he had not lost anything by the exchange. But the leg had one fault—when he extended it it unbent too rapidly, hitting the heel on the ground with a noisy and annoying sound. And in addition to this the mechanism, which was still so new, rattled.
"Plague take it! My own didn't need to be oiled. Who knows how much oil this one will expect me to give it? But that I'll make Mr. Cutemup pay for. If he comes up to me and repeats that I am better than I used to be I'll plant another kick in his stomach, then I'll ask how he would manage to walk if it were his, on the tip of his toes, with this heel that beats like a drumstick."
The Bersaglierino, too, had a wooden left arm. You wouldn't even have noticed it. He could move it in any direction, and the gloved artificial hand which came out of the sleeve of his gray jacket, although a little stiff, could be moved as easily as a real hand. The wound that furrowed his forehead didn't disfigure him; indeed, it gave to his gentle features a certain air of nobility and fierceness. But the Bersaglierino was sad, so sad that if you had looked into his eyes you would have been certain that he had to make a great effort not to cry. Pinocchio noticed it.
"Tell me, Bersaglierino, what was your business before the war?"
"What's that to you?"
"Oh, I just want to know."
"I was a journalist, a writer."