The Garibaldi Code
“To Be Ready Ever to Fight for the Cause They Think Is Right”
Italy at war without a Garibaldi somewhere in the fighting columns is unthinkable. Even before the days of the famous Liberator, Giuseppe himself, there were Garibaldi who had arms and hearts ready to strike for freedom; but since the days when the great patriot and lover of liberty made romance as well as history out of his revolutionary spirit, arms and the defense of freedom are tenets of religion with the Garibaldi. With the exception of the Russian-Japanese War, it is said there has been no conflict of powers or revolutionary struggle without its Garibaldi bearing gun or sword. It goes sans dire, then, that the outbreak of war which arrayed western democracy against the encroachments of German autocracy was like a clarion call to the blood of the Garibaldi. They did not wait for Italy to speak—France was calling and that sufficed.
The son of the Great Garibaldi wrote letters to five of his seven sons scattered about the world. Two of them were in New York (Giuseppe, named for his grandfather, and Ricciotti, on his way to South America), one (Merotti) was in China, and one (Bruno) was in Cuba, and one (Sante) was in Upper Egypt. The two youngest, Costante and Ezio, were pursuing their studies in Italy. There was a sister, Italia, in Rio de Janeiro, who devoted herself to Red Cross organization. In the letters the sons were told to hold themselves in readiness for the receipt of a telegram appointing a rendezvous for which they were to start at once.
The cablegram came; the rendezvous was Paris. Giuseppe and Ricciotti sailed from New York by the next available steamer. They found Costante and Ezio awaiting them. Bruno and Sante arrived a few days later. But Merotti could not come from China until several months later, when Italy had entered the war. Other Italians were there also to tender their services to France and they organized an Italian Legion that was incorporated with that famous multiple battalion, the Foreign Legion. The Italians were soldiers of fortune all, and the brothers had hoped to be sent to the Balkans, Giuseppe frankly confessing that guerrilla warfare was his preference. But Ezio, who was sent to drive a camion at Salonika, was the only Garibaldi who got to the Balkans.
The Foreign Legion, as everyone knows, was made up of all sorts of adventurers, many of whom knew the meaning of grated windows and ankle chains, but “it isn’t where you come from in the battle-line but what you do that counts.” The world pretty well understands what the Foreign Legion did and how it was honored by grateful France. Elsewhere is told how they were given the place of honor in the attack on the Prussian Guard which they drove back, but with a loss that wrecked them as a legion.
In a talk with Lewis R. Freeman, published in The World’s Work, Giuseppe Garibaldi is quoted as saying:
“I don’t recall anything that was actually said between us on the subject, but it seemed to be generally understood among us brothers that the shedding of some Garibaldi blood—or, better still, the sacrificing of a Garibaldi life—would be calculated to throw a great, perhaps a decisive, weight into the wavering balance in Italy, where a growing sympathy for the cause of the Allies only needed a touch to quicken it to action. Indeed, I am under the impression that my father said something to that effect to the two younger boys before he sent them on to France. At any rate, all three of the youngsters behaved exactly as though their only object in life was to get in the way of German bullets. Well—Bruno got his in the last week in December, ten or twelve days ahead of Costante, who fell on the 5th of January. Ezio—the youngest of the three fire-eaters—though through no fault of his own, had to wait and take his bullet from the Austrians on our own front.
“The attack in which Bruno fell was one of the finest things I have ever seen. General Gouraud sent for me in person to explain why a certain system of trenches, which we were ordered to attack, must be taken and held, no matter what the price. We mustered for mass at midnight—it was Christmas, or the day after, I believe—and the memory of that icicle-framed altar in the ruined, roofless church, with the flickering candles throwing just light enough to silhouette the tall form of Gouraud, who stood in front of me, will never fade from my mind.
“We went over the parapet before daybreak, and it was in the first light of the cold winter dawn that I saw Bruno—plainly hit—straighten up from his running crouch and topple into the first of the German trenches, across which the leading wave of our attack was sweeping. He was up before I could reach him, however (I don’t think he ever looked to see where he was hit), and I saw him clamber up the other side, and, running without a hitch or stagger, lead his men in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. I never saw him alive again.
“They found his body, with six bullet wounds upon it, lying where the gust from a machine gun had caught him as he tried to climb out and lead his men on beyond the last of the trenches we had been ordered to take and hold. He had charged into the trench, thrown out the enemy, and made—for whatever it was worth—the first sacrifice of his own generation of Garibaldi. We sent his body to my father and mother in Rome, where, as you will remember, his funeral was made the occasion of the most remarkable patriotic demonstration Italy has known in recent years. From that moment the participation of our country in the war became only a matter of time. Costante’s death a few days later only gave added impulse to the wave of popular feeling which was soon to align Italy where she belonged in the forefront of the fight for the freedom of Europe.”
After Italy came into the war, Giuseppe Garibaldi fought with his own countrymen, having the name of Colonel with those soldiers whose Herculean feats in the Alps made one of the most striking chapters in the war’s history of unprecedented achievements.