Enzo Valentini loved nature, loved his native land, and loved his mother. She understood him and knew that because of his love for her he was willing to die for Italy and the mothers of Italy. Shortly before his death he wrote her this beautiful letter:—
"Little mother, in a very few days I am leaving for the front lines. For your dear sake I am writing this farewell which you will read only if I am killed. Let it be my good-by to father, to my brothers, and to all those in the world who cared for me.
"My heart in its love and gratitude to you has always brought its holiest thoughts to you; and now it is to you that I make known my last wishes.
"Many have loved me. To each of them give some little thing of mine in remembrance of me, after you have laid aside all those that you care for most. I wish that all who have loved me should possess something of the friend that is gone to rise like a flame above the clouds, above the flesh, into the sun, into the very soul of the universe.
"Try, if you can, not to weep for me too much. Believe that even though I do not come back to you, I am not dead. My body, the less important part of me, suffers and dies; but not I myself—I, the soul, cannot die, because I come from God and must return to God. I was made for happiness and through suffering I must return to the everlasting happiness. If I have been for a short time a prisoner in the body, I am not the less eternal. My death is freedom, the beginning of the real life, the return to the Infinite.
"Therefore do not mourn for me. If you consider the immortal beauty of the ideals for which my soul is willingly sacrificing my body, you will not mourn. But if your mother heart must weep, let the tears flow; a mother's tears are forever sacred. God will take account of them; they will be the stars of a crown.
"Be strong, little mother. From the great beyond, your son says farewell to you, to father, to brothers, to all who have loved him—your son, who has given his body in the fight against those who would put out the light of the world."
So read the "little mother" of Enzo Valentini after the assault upon Sano di Mezzodi. When his platoon charged he was the first to dash from the trench giving courage to all who hesitated. Together they made the mountains ring with the old Italian war cry, "Savoia! Italia!"
Enzo Valentini fell pierced by five pieces of shrapnel. They carried him back to a grotto where the surgeons dressed his wounds.
A comrade says, "We laid him down on the litter in the grotto, among the great rocks, under the dark vault of the sky, his face upturned to the stars. He was exhausted, and asked for a drink, and fainted. Then they carried him to the hospital and I never saw him again. I have been told they carried him down Mount Mesola to the side of the little lake he loved so well, 'his little lake,' and that he sleeps there in death. But for his comrades he is still living in the glory of his youth, there on the Alps, waving his cap with an edelweiss in it, and crying, 'Savoia! Italia!'"