Italy, might consider his policy absurd and romantic; he exposed himself to their censures, sure that all generous hearts would sympathise with the attempt to call back to life a nation which for centuries had been shut up in a horrible tomb.  If he failed, he reckoned on his friend reserving him a place among the “eminent vanquished” who gathered round her; in any case she would take the vent he had given to his feelings as the avowal that all his life was consecrated to one sole work, the emancipation of his country.  This was not a boast uttered to bring down the plaudits of the Senate; it was a confession which escaped from Cavour in one of the rare moments when, even in private, he allowed himself to say what he felt.  But it speaks to posterity with a voice which silences calumny.

After the point had been gained and the war embarked upon, the anxieties of the minister who was solely responsible for it did not decrease.  The House of Savoy had survived Novara; one royal sacrifice served the purpose of an ancient immolation; it propitiated fate.  But a Novara in the East would have been serious indeed.  What Cavour feared, however, was not defeat—­it was inaction, of which the moral effect would have been nearly as bad.  What if the laurels he had spoken of were never won at all?  The position of the Sardinian contingent on the first line was not secured without endless diplomacy; Napoleon wished to keep it out of sight as a reserve corps at Constantinople.  When, with the aid of England, it was shipped for Balaclava, there still seemed a disposition to hold it back.  Cavour wrote bitterly of the prospect of the Sardinian troops being sent by the allies to perish of disease in the trenches while they advanced at the pace of a yard a month.  He described himself and his colleagues as waiting with cruel impatience for tidings of the first engagement:  “Still no news from the army; it is distracting!” Meanwhile the “Reds” and the “Blacks” were happy.  Cavour did not fear the first, except, perhaps, at Genoa; but he did fear the deeply-rooted forces of reaction, which were only too likely to regain the ascendant if things went wrong with the war.

At last the long-desired, almost despaired-of news arrived.  On August 16 the Piedmontese fought an engagement on the Tchernaia; it was not a great battle, but it was a success, and the men showed courage and steadiness.  It was hailed at Turin as a veritable godsend.  The king, jaded and worn out by the trials which this year had brought him, rejoiced as sovereign and soldier at the prowess of his young troops.  The public underwent a general conversion to the war policy; every one thought in secret he had always approved of it.  The little flash of glory called attention to the other merits of the Piedmontese soldier besides those he displayed in the field.  These merits were truly great.  The troops bore with the utmost patience the terrible scourge of the cholera, which cost them 1200 lives.  Their English allies