I cannot recall the two years that I spent there without being beset by
a throng of memories from which I can free myself only by passing them
all in review, one after another, like pictures in a magic-lantern; now
laughing, now sighing, now shaking my head, but feeling all the while
that each episode is dear to me and will never be forgotten while I
live.
How well I remember the first grief of my military life, a blow that
befell me a few days after I had entered college all aglow with the
poetry of war. It was the morning on which caps were distributed. Each
new recruit of the company found one that fitted him, but all were too
small for me, and the captain turned upon me furiously.
"Are you aware that the commissary stores will have to be reopened just
for you?" And I heard him mutter after a pause, "What are you going to
do with a head like that?"
Great God, what I underwent at that moment! What--be a soldier? I
thought. Never! Better beg my bread in the streets--better die and have
done with it!
Then I remember an officer, an old soldier, gruff but kindly, who had a
way of smiling whenever he looked at me. How that smile used to
exasperate me! I had made up my mind to demand an explanation, to let
him know that I didn't propose to be any man's butt, when one evening
he called me to him, and having given me to understand that he had
heard something about me and that he wanted to know if it were really
true (I was to speak frankly, for it would do me no harm), he finally,
with many coughs and smiles and furtive glances, whispered in my ear:
"Is it true that you write poetry?"
I recall, too, the insuperable difficulty of accomplishing the manual
tasks imposed upon me, especially that of sewing on my buttons--how
every few seconds the needle would slip through my fingers, till the
thread was tangled up in a veritable spider's web, while the button
hung as loose as ever, to the derision of my companions and the disgust
of the drill-sergeant, whose contemptuous--"You may be a great hand at
rhyming, but when it comes to sewing on buttons you're a hundred years
behind the times," seemed to exile me to the depths of the eighteenth
century.
I see the great refectory, where a battalion might have drilled; I see
the long tables, the five hundred heads bent above the plates, the
rapid motion of five hundred forks, of a thousand hands and sixteen
thousand teeth; the swarm of servants running here and there, called
to, scolded, hurried, on every side at once; I hear the clatter of
dishes, the deafening noise, the voices choked with food crying out:
"Bread--bread!" and I feel once more the formidable appetite, the
herculean strength of jaw, the exuberant life and spirits of those
far-off days.
The scene changes, and I see myself locked in a narrow cell on the
fifth floor, a jug of water at my side, a piece of black bread in my
hand, with unkempt hair and unshorn chin, and the image of Silvio
Pellico before me; condemned to ten days' imprisonment for having made
an address of thanks to the professor of chemistry on the occasion of
his closing lecture, thereby committing an infraction of article number
so-and-so of the regulation forbidding any cadet to speak in public in
the name of his companions. And to this day I can hear the Major
saying: "Take my advice and never let your imagination run away with
you;" citing the example of his old school-fellow, the poet Regaldi,
who had got into just such a scrape, and concluding with the warning
that "poetry always made men make asses of themselves."
Yes, I see it all as vividly as though I were reliving the very same
life again--the silent march of the companies at night down the long,
faintly-lit corridors; the professors behind their desks, deafening us
with their Gustavus-Adolphuses, their Fredericks the Great, and their
Napoleons; the great lecture-rooms full of motionless faces; the huge,
dim dormitories, resounding with the respirations of a hundred pairs of
lungs; the garden, the piazza, the ramparts, the winding Modenese
sheets, the cafis full of graduates devouring pastry, the picnics in
the country, the excursions to neighboring villages, the intrigues, the
studies, the rivalries, the sadnesses, the enmities, the friendships.