“See that she has all she wants; fill up her basket,” was the order sent out to the cook. And then, as the grateful little old dame backed, bowing, out of the door: “Feed him up well, madre; a man has to have something under his belt to fight in these mountains, doesn’t he?”
“Brother Sante usually looks after callers of this kind for me,” said my host with a laugh; “but Sante is away for a day or two, and I have no buffer. You will observe, by the way, that I am not quite at one with my distinguished grandfather in the matter of rations. What was it he said to the men who had assembled to follow him in his flight after the unsuccessful fight for the Roman Republic? ‘I offer neither pay, quarters nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst forced marches, battle, and death.’ Well, I too have plenty of fighting to offer my men, but no more of the other ‘inducements’ than I can possibly help. And when they have to die, I like to feel that it’s on a full stomach.
“Perhaps you heard,” he went on, “what a stir it made up here when I first asked for marmalade for my men. They started out by laughing at me. ‘Of course,’ they said, ‘we know that your mother is English; but that is no reason why, much as you may crave it, your men should need marmalade!’ Then they said that marmellata would cost too much, and finally tried to prove that it would be bad for the men’s health. But I had seen what troops had done in South Africa on a generous marmalade allowance; also what they were doing in France. So I stuck to it, and—well, we took the Marmolada on marmellata, and a good many Austrians besides.”
We were still laughing over the little joke when the door opened, and the telephone operator from the room across the hall entered to report in a low voice some news that had just reached him. The Colonel’s face changed from gay to grave in an instant; but it was with voice and manner of quiet restraint that he asked a couple of quick questions and then gave a brief order, evidently to be transmitted back whence the news had come.
“It must have been either A—— or B——,” he said musingly, turning again to the big slice of caramel cake he had just cut for himself when the interruption occurred. “Oh I beg pardon; but I’ve just had word that the middle teleferica serving the Marmolada has been carried away by an avalanche, and that one of the engineers is killed. I was just speculating as to which one it was. They were both good men—men I can ill afford to lose. This puts an end, by the way, to the trip we had planned for you for to-morrow. You will have to go to the position at the—— instead; providing, of course, that teleferica doesn’t meet a like fate.”
South American revolution (in vivid reminiscence) had raised its hydra-head many times before I saw my way clear to turn the conversation into the channel where I was so interested to direct its flow.
“Won’t you tell me, Colonel,” I said finally, “something of how the young Garibaldi have carried on the tradition of the old Garibaldi in this war? Tell me how it came about that you all foregathered in France in the early months of the war, what you did there, and what you have done since; and, especially, tell me how you took the Col di Lana.”
“That’s (as you Americans say) rather a tall order,” was the laughing reply; “but I’ll gladly do what I can to fill it.”
He drained his glass of cognac, waited till the occult rite of lighting his “Virginia” over its little spirit-lamp was complete, and then began his story (as I had hoped he would) at the beginning. The narration which follows was punctuated by the steady drip of the eaves and the not infrequent rumble of a distant avalanche as the hot south wind called fun breathed its relaxing breath on a half winter’s accumulation of hanging snow.
“My father—and even my grandfather—had foreseen that Europe must ultimately fight its way to freedom through a great war; that the two irreconcilable forces (fairly represented by what France, England, Italy, and the United States stood for, on the one hand, and what Prussia and its satellites stood for on the other) made no other alternative possible. The same feelings which led my father and grandfather to fight for France in 1870 led me and my brothers to offer ourselves to fight for France and her Allies in 1914.