Of respectable Neapolitans who held responsible posts under the late regime not one joined the bands, but they contained French, Austrian and Belgian officers, and one Prussian.  A nephew of Mgr. de Merode, the young Marquis de Trazegnies, was with Chiavone; the Carlist, Jose Borjes, was with a scoundrel named Crocco.  Borjes’ case is a hard one.  He had been made to believe in the genuine character of the insurrection and thought that he was giving his sword to an honourable cause.  The melancholy disillusion can be traced in the pages of a note-book which he kept from day to day, and which fell into the hands of the Italians when he was captured.  The brief entries show a poetic mind; he observes the fertile soil, deploring, only, that it is not better cultivated; he admires the smiling valleys and the magnificent woods whose kings of the forest show no mark of the centuries that passed over their fresh verdure.  At first Borjes was pleased with the peasants who came to him, but as they were few, he was obliged to join Crocco’s large band, and he now began to see, with horror, what kind of associates he had fallen amongst.  He had no authority; the brigands laughed at his rebukes; never in his life, he writes, had he come across such thieves.  Before the enemy they ran away like a flock of sheep, but when it was safe to do so, they murdered both men and women.  In desperation, Borjes resolved to try and get to Rome, that he might lay the whole truth before the King, but after suffering many hardships, he was taken with a few others close to the Papal frontier and was immediately shot.  He died bravely, chanting a Spanish litany.

Borjes’ journal notes the opposition of all classes, except the very poorest and most ignorant.  Was it to be believed, therefore, that this mountain warfare, however long drawn out, could alter one iota the course of events?  If Francis II. supposed the insurrection to be the work of a virtuous peasantry, why did he allow them to rush to their destruction?

The task of restoring order was assigned to General Cialdini.  He found the whole country, from the Abruzzi to Calabria, terrorised by the league of native assassins and foreign noblemen.  The Modenese general was a severe officer who had learnt war in Spain, not a gentle school.  If he exceeded the bounds of dire necessity he merits blame; but no one then hoped in the efficacy of half measures.

One element in the epidemic of brigandage, and looking forward, the most serious of all, was an unconscious but profoundly real socialism.  If half-a-dozen socialistic emissaries had assumed the office of guides and instructors, it is even odds that the red flag of communism would have displaced the white one of Bourbon.  This feature became more accentuated as the struggle wore on, and after experience had been made of the new political state.  The economic condition of a great part of the southern population was deplorable, but liberty, so many thought, would exercise an instantaneous effect, filling the mouths of the hungry, clothing the naked, providing firing in winter, sending rain or sunshine as it was wanted.  But liberty does none of these things.  The disappointment of the discovery did not count for nothing in the difficulties of that period; it counts for everything in the difficulties of this.