The Romans had been told that the Garibaldians were cut-throats, incendiaries, human bloodhounds waiting to fly at them.  What did they behold?  ‘The beast is gentle,’ as Euripides makes his captors say of Dionysius.  The stalwart Romans saw a host of boys, with pale, wistful, very young-looking faces.  If anything was wanting to seal the fate of the Temporal Power it was the sight of that procession of famished and wounded Italians brought to Rome by the foreigner.

The victors, however, were jubilant.  Their inharmonious shouts of Vive Pie Neuf vexed the delicate Roman ears.  It was the battle-cry of the day of Mentana.  Begun by the masked, finished by the unmasked soldiers of France, Mentana was a French victory, and it was the last.

The Garibaldian retreat continued through the night to Passo Corese on the Italian frontier.  The silence of the Campagna was only broken by little gusts of a chilly wind off the Tiber; it seemed as if a spectral army moved without sound.  Garibaldi rode with his hat pressed down over his eyes; only once he spoke:  ’It is the first time they make me turn my back like this,’ he said to an old comrade, ’it would have been better ...’  He stopped, but it was easy to supply the words:  ‘to die.’

As he was getting into the train at Figline, with the intention of going straight to Caprera, he was placed under arrest by order of the Italian Government.  His officers had their hands on their swords, but he forbade their using force.  The arrest seemed an unnecessary slight on the beaten man, who had loved Italy too well.  But General Menabrea, who ordered it, believes that he thereby saved Italian unity.  According to an account given by him many years after to the correspondent of an English newspaper, Napoleon wrote at this juncture to King Victor Emmanuel, that as he was not strong enough to govern his kingdom, he, Napoleon, was about to help him by relieving him of all parts of it except Piedmont, Lombardy and Venetia.  The arrest of Garibaldi, by showing that the King ‘could govern,’ averted the impending danger.  In communicating it to Napoleon, the King is said to have added ’that Italians would lose their last drop of blood before consenting to disruption,’ a warning which he was not unlikely to give, but the whole story lacks verisimilitude.  It appears more credible that an old man’s memory is at fault than that a letter, so colossally insolent, was actually written.  Menabrea, and even the King, may have feared that something of the kind was in the mind of the Emperor.

As after Aspromonte so after Mentana; Garibaldi was confined in the fortress of Varignano, on the bay of Spezia.  A few weeks later he was released and sent to Caprera.  As he left the fortress-prison he wrote the words:  ’Farewell, Rome; farewell, Capitol; who knows who will think of thee, and when?’

The last crusade was over; destiny would do the rest.

CHAPTER XX