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.