They said he could not die. The men who fought under him in Tripoli, the men who stood beside him in the bloody capture of Ala, looked on Antonio Cantore with almost superstitious awe. For he ought to have been killed a hundred times. A hundred times he came back, smiling quietly behind his spectacles, out of perils through which other men could not live. So the legend grew up among the Italian Alpini that their commander led a charmed life; they said he had the camicia della madonna and that bullets could not harm him. Death got him at last, but those boys of his—as he used to call his soldiers—will not believe it, even though they carved his tomb out of the rock and heaped the earth over his body.
Gen. Cantore was not a bit like a hero, as one pictures heroes. One might have taken him for a schoolmaster, a clerk in the post office, a retired commercial traveller. He was not tall, nor was his bearing martial. His kind blue eyes looked mildly through his round spectacles. His mouth laughed under his white mustache. He wore a black mackintosh and walked with his head a little on one side and his hands in his pockets. But he was not afraid. Neither was he foolhardy. He neither feared nor courted death; he merely ignored it. He had the sublime courage of the man who knows the danger so well that he will let no one else face it, but will brave it all alone.
The veterans of the Tripoli campaign talked in this wise to the young recruits of the Alpini:
"Look at that old man, with his kind face and gentle soul. He is the father of the Alpini. He has seen them born and has brought them up, all of them. They are his sons, his boys. With a word he has moulded them according to his own heart of bronze; with a smile he has forged them a heart of steel. You don't know him? Then you were not in Libya! But go to him, say 'Good morning, General!' and tell him your name. Ten years from now he will remember the name. And some night when you are on outpost duty and the hail of bullets is most furious, and the miaowing of the shells is maddest, when the air seems a-quiver with death, and the darkness is shot through with arrows and flashes, and the silence is shattered with bangs and explosions and roars, if your heart trembles a moment as you think of your little ones at home and the bells of the far-away village church ringing the Angelus, you will see the old man, the General, Antonio Cantore, rise suddenly before you, place himself between you and the enemy, shield you with his body.
"For, you see, Antonio Cantore is everywhere and always ahead of everybody. When you leap first into an enemy's trench, eyes aflame, hands clawing, bayonet between your teeth, look ahead from the trench in which you are battling, and between it and the second line of trenches from which the enemy is still bombarding you with rapid-fire guns you will see a kind old man, his eyes twinkling behind his spectacles, his mouth smiling under its white mustaches, his hands in his pockets, his head slightly bent and inclined to one side. It will be Antonio Cantore.
"For that old man, you see, is always everywhere and ahead of everybody. And he cannot die. We have seen him return unscathed from places where hundreds and hundreds have been killed. We have seen him march without flinching right up to the cannon and the mitrailleuse. Shells and bullets fall before him; they are afraid of his smile!"
II—"MY GOD! A GENERAL!"
Thus the lengend grew and spread from the Adige to Leno, from the Altissimo to Coni Zugna, from Pasubio to the Col Santo, wherever the Alpini were engaged.
And every hardy mountaineer who was called to the colors cheered his loved ones on parting with the words: "Never fear! I am going to join Antonio Cantore's brigade."
One night on the slopes of Monte Campo, Gen. Cantore was on reconnoitring patrol. For he was his own scout. Most commanders ask for two or three volunteers for a night reconnaissance. This general, instead, would say: "Are there two men who would like to come with me to-night and inspect the enemy's barbed wire entanglements?" And all the men would want to go. He would pick out two, saying to the others: "No, no, boys; I need only two of you. Thank you, just the same. Your time will come." To the chosen ones it was like a promotion or receiving a medal of honor.