The French arrived on the 29th, and on the same day Garibaldi advanced almost to the walls of Rome, still hoping for a revolutionary movement to break out within the city; but the information which he then received deprived him finally of this hope, and he gave the order to return to Monte Rotondo.  Volunteers have the defect of being soldiers who think; on this occasion they thought that the backward march was the beginning of the end—­that, in short, the game was up.  A third of the whole number deserted, and took the road towards the Italian frontier.  Garibaldi himself seems to have had a first idea of crossing into the Abruzzi, and there waiting to see what turn events would take; but he did not long entertain it, and, when he again left Monte Rotondo, it was with the fixed design of fighting a battle.  He expected, however, to fight the Papal troops alone, and not the French.

This was very nearly being the case.  On the 1st of November, the Papal General Kanzler called on General De Failly at Civita Vecchia, and found him, to his concern, by no means anxious to rush into the fray.  Even when sending the troops, Napoleon seems to have hoped to escape from being seriously compromised.  He probably thought that the moral effect of their landing would cause Garibaldi to retire, and that thus the whole affair would collapse.  But the Papal authorities did not want it to collapse; they wanted more bloodshed, and if the words which express the ungarnished truth as acknowledged by their own writers and apologists, sound indecent when describing the government of the Vicar of Christ, it only shows once more the irreconcilability of the offices of priest and king in the nineteenth century.  Kanzler insisted that a crushing blow must be inflicted on the volunteers before they had time to retreat.  He argued so long and so well that De Failly promised him a brigade under General Polhes to aid in the attack which he proposed to make on Monte Rotondo.

The Papal forces left Rome by Porta Pia, and took the Via Nomentana, which leads to Monte Rotondo by Mentana.  They were on the march at four o’clock a.m.  Garibaldi had ordered his men to be ready at dawn on the same day (it was the 3rd of November); but Menotti suggested that, before they started, there should be a distribution of shoes, a consignment of which had just reached the camp.  Many of the volunteers were barefoot, which gives a notion of their general equipment.  Garibaldi, who rarely took advice, yielded to his son.  Had he not done so, before the Papal army reached Mentana, he would have been at Tivoli.  One delay brings another, and it was midday when the march began.  Garibaldi looked sad, and spoke to no one, but hummed some bars of Riego’s hymn, the Spanish song of freedom, full of a wild, sweet pathos, to which his tanned-faced legionaries had marched under the Monte Videan sun.  Could he but have had with him those strong warriors now!  He mounted his horse, put it to a gallop, which he rarely did, and, riding down the ranks of the column, took his place at its head.  When he arrived at the village of Mentana, he heard that the Pontificals were close by, and he waited to give them battle.