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!"