How cheerily we talked, and how bright our anticipations were!  After two years of imprisonment, home, freedom, and epaulets were suddenly within our reach.  Aside from the common satisfaction of being promoted to be an officer, each one of us had his own special reasons for rejoicing.  With one of us it was the satisfaction of being able to say to the family that had pinched and denied itself to pay for his schooling, “Here I am, good people, nineteen years old and able to shift for myself;” with another, the fun of swaggering in full uniform, with clanking heels and rattling sword, into the quiet house where the old uncle who had been so generous sat waiting to welcome him home; with a third, the joy of mounting a familiar staircase, brevet in pocket, and knocking at a certain door, behind which a girlish voice would be heard exclaiming, “There he is!”—­the voice of the little cousin to whom he had said good-bye, two years before, in her parents’ presence, reassured only by the non-committal phrase:  “Well, well, go to college first and make a man of yourself; then we’ll see.”

Already we saw ourselves surrounded by children eager to finger our sabres, by girls who signed to us as we passed, by old men who clapped us on the shoulder, by mothers crying, “How splendidly he looks!” So that it was with the greatest difficulty that we shook off this importunate folk, saying to ourselves:  “Presently, presently, all in good time; but just now, really, you must let us be!”

Then, each following the bent of his disposition, his habits, and his plans, we confided to one another the regiment, province, and city to which we hoped to be assigned.  Some of us longed for the noise and merriment of the Milanese carnivals, and dreamed of theatres, balls and convivial suppers.  One sighed for a sweet Tuscan village, perched on a hilltop, where, in command of his thirty men, he might spend the peaceful spring days in collecting songs and proverbs among the country-folk.  Another longed to carry on his studies in the unbroken solitude of a lonely Alpine fortress, hemmed in by ravines and precipices.  One of us craved a life of adventure in the Calabrian forests; another, the activities of some great seaboard city; a third, an island of the Tyrrhenian Sea.  We divided up Italy among ourselves a hundred times a day, as though we had been staking off plots in a garden; and each of us detailed to the others the beauties of his chosen home, and all agreed that every one of the places selected would be beautiful and delightful to live in.

And then—­war!  It was sure to come sooner or later.  Hardly was the word mentioned when our books were hurled into a corner and we were all talking at once, our faces flushed, our voices loud and excited.  War, to us, was a superhuman vision in which the spirit lost itself as in some strange intoxication; a far-off, rose-colored horizon, etched with the black profiles of gigantic mountains; legion after legion, with flying banners and the sound of music, endlessly ascending the mountain-side; and high up, on the topmost ridges, surrounded by the enemy, our own figures far in advance of the others, dashing forward with brandished swords; while down the farther slope a torrent of foot, horse, and artillery plunged wildly through darkness to an unknown abyss.