Dismay entered all hearts. Rome was once more to whet her savage sword. And the mountaineers, helpless, defenceless, could only die, since submission to such edicts could not be.
They remembered 1655, and the way in which a handful of men had beaten back Pianezza and his hordes.
The courage that had nerved Janavel and his heroes was still alight in the valleys. They too would fight for their homes and their churches, for the honour of their wives, for the faith of their little ones.
So entrenchments were thrown up in the ravines, and turf and rough stones piled up on every point of vantage; stores were hastily collected, and the corn-stacks were threshed out. The women did their part; even the children were busy as bees.
Henri Botta heard the careless laughter of a string of boys and girls as they ran up the steps of the mill, carrying each one a burden of wheat or rye, and his grave face grew sterner still as he harkened.
‘Little they know! little they know!’ he muttered in his beard. ‘Laugh! ‘tis the last laughter that will sound in Luserna for many and many a day.’
The horrors of the months that followed cannot here be told. Is it not an awful thing that men have committed atrocities of which one cannot speak—that living bodies and tortured souls have borne what our ears cannot suffer to hear—what our minds cannot endure to conceive? Frail women, modest and gentle girls, the babies too young to know the terror of the sword that slew them, the old men whose white hairs were but signals for scoff and insult—all these helpless ones were the butt and playthings of the brutal soldiers, whose most merciful dealing was death. Aye, happy were those whose doom was only death!
Botta and his two sons fought at the barricade which crossed the road above Casiana. Emile was amongst the first to fall. His father saw him stagger, and rushed forward to his help; but, as he reached upwards to where Emile lay on the ridge of the earthwork, a second ball crashed into the prostrate figure. The boy was shot through the heart.
‘Let him lie there,’ muttered Botta, with a quietude more sad than tears. ‘Let him lie there, on the crest of the barricade. Even in death he shall defend the valleys.’
Yet the heroism and devotion so lavishly poured out in those days and weeks of struggle were in vain. Once more the valleys were swept from north to south, from the Palavas Alps to the Po River—once more the red flames raged and triumphed above the cottage roofs; and over the fields, and by the swift torrent water, the flying people were hunted down and slain.