BY EDMONDO DE AMICIS
Edmondo de Amicis, Italian publicist with a military training, born in 1846, is principally known as the author of “Il Cuore” (“The Heart of a Boy”), a simple classic intended for children, and which has had an incredible influence on school life in Italy. It pretends to be a child’s own day to day record of his school year.
His style has not crystallised into originality—it suggests on one page Washington Irving, with gentle, smooth, playful humor, broad tolerance, and on the next it suggests the word-painters like Théophile Gautier, with their keen observation and warm, rich coloring.
THE LITTLE SARDINIAN DRUMMER
BY EDMONDO DE AMICIS
Translated by Clou. E. Hard. Copyright, 1898, by The Current Literature Publishing Company.
On the 24th of July, 1848, the first day of the battle of Custoza, sixty soldiers belonging to one of our regiments of infantry, ordered to garrison a lonely house on a height near by, were suddenly attacked by two companies of Austrians, who, assaulting them on several sides, scarcely gave them time to take refuge within the house, and hastily barricade the door, leaving their dead and wounded on the field.
The door being well secured, our soldiers hastened to the windows on the ground floor, as well as to those on the upper floor, and opened a deadly fire on the besiegers, who replied vigorously as they slowly approached in the form of a semicircle.