The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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From the Fabricio Bridge, the two friends see smoke clouds at midday over the Trastevere neighbourhood. Buildings are going up in flames. The French against the patriots, the patriots against the French.
"You see that mill on the sandbank below us?" Sandor says. "The French will cut the water supplies, and this mill and the others will stop. Already tomorrow there will be no bread."
Eleonora hears him say that as she arrives; she has just spoon-fed the weakest of the patients in her ward and wonders if she'll be able to give them anything to eat tomorrow. "What happens next?" she groans, stretching her arms out towards the city.
"We listen for the bells," says Goffredo. He put his hands on his friends' shoulders. "Then we attack the French, the Austrians, all of them. We free Italy."
He is right about the bells, anyway.
Friday morning, June 1st. The bells, first in Trastevere and then around Campo de' Fiori begin to peal: the French have crossed the Tiber to the south and occupied the Basilica of St Paul–without-the-walls. More and more bells ring and echo, ring, clang, and echo. Their ruckus slows the movements of the already stupefied people in the street, in their kitchen gardens, or at their windows. Unarmed French soldiers with white peace banners gallop into the principal squares and affix signs on the church gates which announce that the armistice between the Republic of France and the Republic of Rome has been terminated: 'By the power given him by President Louis Napoleon, Gen. Oudinot shall give all French citizens until June 4th to leave Rome, after which the attacks by the French Army will resume.'
They have three days.
It is reckoned in most piazzas that Oudinot now has, with his arrived reinforcements, twenty-thousand men camped within a mile or two of the city, together with six batteries of artillery. There are also, according to the eleven- and twelve-year-olds who form a loose band of camp spies, another ten thousand French soldiers due to arrive at fixed dates during the month.
Three days to get ready, and thank God Garibaldi has managed to get back to Rome.
Many things happen in a city which is suddenly and silently again at war.
Sandor knows that an upcoming battle is like a slowly rising flood. Its imminent happening encourages coordination, non-stop activity. It infuses a logical attitude and instilled cooperation…among those who stay. The fresh barriers that are going up every day, the Papal warehouses down the Tiber which have been raided for ammunition—all this proves that the battle is drawing near.
Two days.
Many foreigners are abandoning the city, together with the last of the old aristocracy close to the Pope. Eleonora happens by her old family palazzo; she knows how to read the signs of its 'closing up', she knows they have been gone already for some time. They would not want to witness any of the crude, uncontrollable reality, let alone the bloodshed to come. That's right. Run away, Mama, she thinks bitterly.
Sunday June 3rd begins early—too early. There is the anticipated start to daylight typical of June, and there is something more: muffled cannoning in the distance and then bells, insistent early bells, far too early to be good news. Next to Sandor and Goffredo, lying asleep in their blankets under the lean-to, the sheep bleat and the goat stamps. The two friends sit up in a daze, which ignites into a fury of purpose in the time it takes for them to fathom the wagons rolling past their feet, the shouting boys, and then—close up—a shouting Pasquale, the peasant farmer who puts them up.
"Bastardi! Bastardi!"
The French have attacked a day in advance.
Lines of shuffling, trotting, half-dressed cursing men with rifles run through the streets of Rome—Sandor and Goffredo with them—heading for the river and for their comrades on that small precious hill.
They don't know it yet but they will try to defend the Janiculum against the attacking French for sixteen hours straight—six thousand of them against Oudinot's twenty thousand men and seventy-six cannons. In the parks of the 'country villas' of the noble families on the Janiculum, they chase down the French with bayonets, and they are chased down in turn by the French on the stairs and in the parlours of the same. Sandor and Goffredo get through these sixteen hours unscathed, but seven hundred of their comrades—those caught in the direct line of the cannon fire, including many young but already legendary officers—are not so lucky. Their desperate counterattack and slaughter do however prevent the French general from achieving nothing more than a precarious dominating position. At the same time, that cannon fire sends mangled men by the groves to Eleonora's hospital ward on Tiber Island.
It is two or three in the morning, and Eleonora has just come from the bedside of a man without an arm and part of his face, who has fallen asleep, a man who might or might not open his eyes again come dawn. She sees Margaret Fuller coming towards her, white-faced, her hands on her cheeks. Margaret is so horrified by all the amputated bodies that she can't function properly. "These men, these poor men," she whispers fiercely in Eleonora's ear. "I know each cannon shell I hear hits someone, injures someone, kills someone!"
"Margaret, please go and rest."
The American shakes her head. "I've already seen Ossoli."
Eleonora sees that her friend can't even take comfort from the short visit from her husband—or lover or whatever he was, her timid, affectionate, aristocratic, inarticulate 'Ossoli' (she likes to call him by his surname name)—on an hour's leave from the Civil Guard.
"Rome is as mutilated as these men," she continues frantically. "And it is impossible to write about the truth—impossible to break through the lies perpetuated by the French and the Austrians! Even in America, they are beginning to think of the Romans as 'ingrates.' Can you believe that, Eleonora? What by God has happened in the last month? France and Oudinot came here as self-proclaimed friends, as our protector, not as an enemy! All that is gone. This enemy army is here to crush every manifestation of generous and spontaneous life. The Roman Republic is abandoned unto itself," she rasps. "And where in all this, I ask, is America? Why aren't we helping?! Something must be done to alter public opinion. Something—."
She is interrupted by a soldier with a white binding over his eyes, who sits up in bed to yell in pain. Eleonora rushes to sooth him and Margaret goes to the cabinet for the whiskey.
The simple necessary way of things has stopped Margaret Fuller from arguing further; it makes Margaret Fuller, like anyone, comply.
On the evening of June 20th, the two military lines are so close that each platoon or patrol can hear the voices of their counterpart 'enemy.' Against that background of sound from the men who might finish them off the next day, they are to rest, eat, drink, and sleep. Goffredo is too bothered by this and retreats towards the rear; surmising the reason, Sandor joins him. Along with a handful of other garibaldini, they had found themselves another dry fountain to sleep in—this time it has a monumental white granite gate inscribed with papal hats and keys; the Romans call it Fontana Acqua Paola. The two friends lie down spread-eagle, their eyes on the rising moon and the fiery line of cannonading by some French battery unit that just won't stop fighting, even in the twilight. The shelling comes from the direction of the Vascello, once a splendid villa carved to look like a ship, but now that Garibaldi has made it the center of his desperate defense line, it has been reduced to rubble.
"You know what I think, Sandor? "says Goffredo after some minutes. "Those shells should be pointed at our soldiers at the Vascello, not coming from there." He lifts his head to observe what reaction this is getting from the men with them. They are all too weary, or tending to their flesh wounds, to notice.
"Sandor?" He checks to see if his friend's eyes are open. They are.
After a long silence Sandor answers, "They want to bomb that church."
"Where?"
"Over there." He gestures.
When the bombs make more light, Goffredo can make out a forlorn grey building with bulbous extensions on one side and a square annex of cloisters, in the midst of the sloping trees where the hill begins its drop.
"You're