[Footnote 1:  “They await the final resurrection.”  But “risorgimento” to most Italians suggests modern history more than theology.]

We visited last of all the Depot of the Bersaglieri in Trastevere, where is also the famous Bersagliere Museum.  Here we were received and shown round with great courtesy by the Colonel commanding the Depot, a handsome man with most sad eyes, but full of great regimental pride in this creation, intimately and characteristically Italian, of General La Marmora.

In the Museum, among much that was trivial, I found much that was interesting and even deeply moving:  the relics of Enrico Toti, an artist who, having only one leg, joined the Bersaglieri Ciclisti as a volunteer at the beginning of the war, and rode up mountain tracks on a bicycle with a single pedal, and died, after acts of the greatest heroism and after sustaining for many hours grave wounds, crying with his last breath “Avanti Savoia!”, upon whose dead body and brave departed spirit was conferred the most rare Gold Medal for Valour; photographs of all the Bersaglieri, who since the foundation of the Regiment have won the Gold Medal, some twenty of them, hanging together on one wall, all dead now; the steel helmet of a Bersagliere Major, killed on the Carso, while leading his men; this is all that they found of him, but it has three holes through the front, sufficient proof, said the Colonel, that he was not going backward when he died; a menu card, signed by all the officers of a Bersagliere Battalion, who dined together on the eve of the victorious action of Col Valbella last January, in which they played a worthy part.

The Colonel told me that his own son was killed and is buried beyond the Isonzo, near Cervignano.  It had been suggested to him that he should have the body brought home, but he preferred to leave it where it fell.  “C’e un’ idea che e morta li,” he said, “It is an idea which has died there.  Some day, if I live, I shall make a pilgrimage thither, but the Austrians may, by now, have destroyed the grave.”

Outside in the courtyard, where the Colonel took leave of us, I saw many young Bersaglieri, the latest batches of recruits, mere boys.  “They are splendid material,” he said, with a military pride, not without a half-regretful tenderness, “one can make anything out of them.”  They were, indeed, incomparable human stuff, whether for the purposes of peace or war.  They seemed to have the joy of the spring in their eyes, just as that middle-aged Regular soldier had in his the sadness of autumn.  And amid all the beauty of Rome in the spring, I was haunted by the grim refrain, “Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato,”—­“In the springtide men fight and die, young soldier.”

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