These two — wife and mother — were ruled by clerics, and made his life melancholy when he began a course of ecclesiastical reform. One person in every two hundred and fourteen in Sardinia was an ecclesiastic, and the Church had control of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction and could shelter criminals, among other mediæval privileges. To reform these abuses, the king, in 1849, approached the pope with deferential requests, but the pope absolutely refused to make any changes.
However, the work of reform was firmly pushed on, and a law was passed by which the priestly privileges were sensibly cut down, although the king’s wife and mother wrung their hands, and the religious press shrieked denunciation. At this time Santa Rosa, the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, died, and the Church refused him the last sacrament, though he was a blameless and devout member of the Roman Church. This hateful act of intolerance reacted on the clergy, as a matter of course, and gave an impetus to church reform.
When, in 1855, Victor Emmanuel was so unfortunate as to lose his wife, his mother, and his brother, within a month, and the nation as a whole mourned with him, his clerical friends embittered his affliction by insisting with venomous frankness that it was the judgment of Heaven that he had brought upon himself for his religious persecutions.
Strength was Victor Emmanuel’s genius: he was not intellectual in any marked degree, but his ministers could work with him and rely upon him. A union between him and Cavour, the two great men of the kingdom, was inevitable. Up to this time Cavour had no general fame except as a journalist, but the king had the insight to recognise his extraordinary powers, and when Santa Rosa died (unshriven) Cavour in his place became Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. “Look out!” said the king to his prime minister, d’Azeglio, when this had come to pass, “Cavour will soon be taking all your portfolios. He will never rest till he is prime minister himself.”
Under the régime of Cavour, railways and telegraph wires lined the kingdom in all directions; he took off foolish tariffs and concluded commercial treaties with England, France, Belgium, and other powers. “Milord Cavour” was a nickname showing the dislike aroused by his English predilections, but through him Piedmont repaired the damage of the war of 1848, and grew steadily in prosperity.
Cavour’s brilliant intellectual powers seem to have been so limitless that it is rather a relief to think of him personally as only a dumpy little man with an overbig head. Although a born aristocrat, and living in the manner becoming one, he was capable of quite demonstrative behaviour. The occasion for this was a dinner given by dAzeglio. Cavour, seated at table, joked the premier about his jealousy of Ratazzi; the premier replied angrily; whereupon the greatest of diplomats arose, seized his plate, lifting it as high as he could, and dashed it to the floor, where it broke into fragments. Then he rushed out of the house, crying:
“He is a beast! He is a beast!”
This quarrel, which sounds like an act from a nursery drama, led to a change in the cabinet, with Cavour left out. But a little later on dAzeglio resigned, and Cavour was prime minister.
A marvellous stroke of statesmanship on behalf of his country was Cavour’s intervention in the Crimean War in 1855, — three years after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état. It seemed an act of folly to send fifteen thousand troops from the little Italian state — which had no standing among European powers — to help England and France. The undertaking seemed to Sardinians an act of insanity; Cavour’s colleagues were violently against him. But the king stood by him; so the troops were sent and the ministers resigned.
Never was an action more fully justified. At the close of the Crimean War Sardinia had two powerful allies — France and England; and for the first time she was admitted on terms of equality among the “Powers.” A significant thing had been said, too, in 1855: “What can I do for Italy?” asked the Emperor Napoleon of Cavour. Cavour was not slow to tell him what could be done; he was convinced that he must look for aid to the vanity and ambition of Napoleon III.
No diplomatic pressure of his, however, availed. During the next two years the attitude of Austria became constantly more unendurable, but still Napoleon would make no move.
It proved to be the most unlikely of events that brought about a consummation of the wishes of Cavour.
On the evening of January 14, 1858, a carriage drove through the Paris streets on its way to the opera. With the appearance of its two occupants all the world is familiar; the wonderful Spanish eyes of the lady, the exquisite lines of her figure — who has not seen them pictured? The smallish man with her had been described by the Crown Prince of Prussia as having “strangely immobile features and almost extinguished eyes.” His huge moustache had exaggeratedly long waxed ends, and his chin was covered with an “imperial.’’
The terrible crash of Orsini’s bombs, thrown underneath their carriage, failed to carry out the conspirators’ purpose. The emperor had a slight wound on the nose, and the empress felt a blow on the eye. That was all, except that her silks and laces were spattered with blood from the wounded outside the carriage. They continued their drive and saw the opera to its finish before they were told of the tragedy that had befallen. Eight people had been killed and one hundred and fifty-six wounded by the explosion.
The Empress Eugenie, it is said, showed the greatest composure over the event, but this was not true of her husband. Probably no man of modern times had had so many attempts made on his life as Louis Napoleon, and always, before, he made light of them; but this last one, resulting in such cruel slaughter, completely unnerved him. He now lived in a tremor, dreading the vengeance of still others of the revolutionary ex-friends of his youth; but he dared not relax the despotic grip with which he ruled his land. How could he placate them? He wore a cuirass under his coat; he had wires netted over the chimneys of the Tuileries, so that bombs should not burst on his hearth; a swarm of detectives were around him wherever he went, and always the question asked itself in his mind: What should he do to take off the curse of fear from his life? —
Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, the whole of Italy, were filled with rage and disgust at the news of Orsini’s attempt. Orsini — an Italian! That must be the end of all their hopes of help from France! But in the summer of 1848 Cavour was summoned to the emperor at Plombières, and during two days there the agreement was formulated by which France and Italy united against Austria. This was Louis Napoleon’s solution of his problem — to help Italy at least sufficiently to annul the hate of every assassin on the peninsula. According to the Prince Regent of Prussia, he chose “la guerre” instead of “le poignard.”
No written record was made of the bargain between Napoleon and Cavour; but we know that it gave Savoy and Nice to France, and made one innocent royal victim, the young Princess Clotilde, Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, who was there betrothed by proxy to Prince Jerome Napoleon.
It was at Plombières that Napoleon with some naïveté said to Cavour: “Do you know, there are but three men in all Europe: one is myself, the second is you, and the third is one whose name I will not mention.” Napoleon was not alone in his high estimate of Cavour. In Turin they said: “We have a ministry, a parliament, a constitution; all that spells Cavour.”
At his reception on New Year’s Day, 1859, Napoleon astounded every one by greeting the Austrian ambassador with these words: “I regret that our relations with your government are not so good as they have been hitherto.” This ostentatious expression was equal to publication in a journal. Immediate war was looked for by every one. Piedmont, France, and Austria openly made bellicose preparations.
Although on the 18th of January, 1859, a formal treaty was made, by which France was bound to support Piedmont if attacked by Austria, Napoleon hesitated and tried to back out of his agreement. It will never be known by what tortuous system of diplomacy Cavour compelled Austria herself to declare war, but it was done, April 27.
Cavour’s intrigues during these days were dazzlingly complicated; he had to deal on one hand with his imperial ally, and on
the other with shady revolutionary elements — and to keep his right hand in ignorance of what his left hand did. He summoned Garibaldi to Turin; Garibaldi, in his loose red shirt and sombrero, with its plume, with his tumultuous hair and beard, struck dismay to the heart of the servant who opened the door. He refused to admit him, but finally agreed to consult his master. “Let him come in,” said Cavour. “It is probably some poor devil who has a petition to make to me.” This was the first meeting of the statesman and the warrior. When told of the French alliance, Garibaldi exclaimed: “Mind what you are about! Never forget that the aid of foreign armies must be, in some way or other, dearly paid for!” But his adherence was whole-heartedly given to Victor Emmanuel, and at the end of the short campaign Italy rang with his name.
For months past Austria had been pouring troops into Italy — there seemed no limit to them. Garibaldi, by the end of April, was in command of a band of Cacciatori delli Alpi, a small force, but made up of the iron men of North Italy, worthy of their leader.
On May 2 Victor Emmanuel took the command of his army; it comprised fifty-six thousand infantry in five divisions, one division of cavalry in sixteen squadrons, with twelve field-guns and two batteries of horse artillery. On May 12 the French emperor rode through the streets of Genoa amid loud acclamations; the city was hung with draperies and garlands in his honour. At Alessandria he rode under an arch on which was inscribed, “To the descendant of the Conqueror of Marengo!” In all he had one hundred and twenty-eight thousand men, including ten thousand cavalry.
It was a short campaign, but the weeks were thick with battles, and the battlefields with the slain.
The first engagement was at Genestrello, May 20. The Austrians, driven out, made a stand at Montebello, where, though twenty thousand strong, they were routed by six thousand Sardinians. The armies of the emperor and king forced the Austrians to cross the Po, and there retire behind the Sesia. On the 30th the allies crossed the Sesia and drove the foe from the fortified positions of Palestro, Venzaglio, and Casalino.
Next came Magenta — a splendid triumph for MacMahon; the Austrian loss was ten thousand men; that of the French between four thousand and five thousand. Meantime, Garibaldi had led his Cacciatori to the Lombard shores of Lake Maggiore, had beaten the Austrians at Varese, entered Como, routed the enemy again at San Fermo, and was now proceeding to Bergamo and Brescia with the purpose of cutting off the enemy’s retreat through the Alps of the Trentino.
On the 8th of June Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III. made their triumphal entry into Milan, from whence every Austrian had fled. Every one remembers how MacMahon, now Duke of Magenta, caught up to his saddle-bow a child who was in danger of being crushed by the crowd.
The emperor and the king soon moved on from Milan. By the 23rd their headquarters were fixed at Montechiaro, close to the site of the coming battle of Solferino.
On the day before the battle the lines of the allies lay near the Austrian lines, from the shore of the Lake of Garda at San Martino to Cavriana on the extreme right. On the evening of the 23rd there was issued a general order regulating the movements of the allied forces: Victor Emmanuel’s army was sent to the extreme left, near Lake Garda; Baraguay d’Hilliers was given the centre in front of Solferino, which was the Austrian centre; to his right was MacMahon, next Marshal Niel, and then Canrobert at the extreme right, while the emperor’s guards were ordered here and there in the changes of the battle.
The enemy, under Field - Marshal Stadion, held the entire line of battle strongly, with one hundred and forty thousand men.
Solferino has been the scene of many combats; it is a natural fighting-ground, and the Austrians had barricaded themselves at all the strong points of vantage.
At five in the morning of the 24th, Louis Napoleon sat in his shirt-sleeves, after his early coffee, smoking a cigar, when tidings came to him that the fighting had begun. In a few minutes he was driving at full speed to Castiglione, and on the way he said to an aide: “The fate of Italy is perhaps to be decided to-day.” It was he indeed who decided it; whatever else is said of him, it was he who struck a great blow for Italy at Solferino.
It was the great day of Napoleon III.; he has never been considered a notable soldier, but throughout this day, in every command issued, he displayed consummate military ability.
The sun glared in the intense blue above with tropical heat, when, at Castiglione, Napoleon climbed the steeple of St. Peter’s Church and beheld the expanse of Lake Garda, growing dim towards the Tyrolean Alps. There was the remnant of an ancient castle — a sturdy tower — guarding the village of Solferino, called the “Spy of Italy.” Already a deadly fire from its loopholes poured on Baraguay d’Hilliers’s men, who faced it bravely, but were falling in terrible numbers.
He could seethe Austrian masses swarming along the heights uniting Cavriana with Solferino. The Piedmontese cannon booming from the left told that Victor Emmanuel was fighting hard, but his forces were hidden by hills. It was at once plain to him, from his church steeple, that the object of the Austrians was to divert the attack on Solferino — the key of their position — by outflanking the French right, filling up the gap between the Second and Fourth Corps, and thus cutting the emperor’s army in two. Coming down from his height, Napoleon at once sent orders to the cavalry of the Imperial Guard to join MacMahon, to prevent his forces from being divided. Altogether the emperor’s plan seems to have been clear and definite; his design was to carry Solferino at any cost, and then, by a flank movement, to beat the enemy out of his positions at Cavriana. Galloping to the top of Monte Fenil, the emperor beheld a thick phalanx of bayonets thrust its way suddenly through the trees of the valley; it was a huge body of Austrians sent to cut off the line of the French. There was not a minute to be lost; he sent orders to General Manêque, of the Guard, to advance at once against the Austrian columns. With magnificent rapidity the order was executed, and the Austrians — a great number — were beaten back far from the line of battle.
The Austrian batteries placed on the Mount of Cypresses and on the Cemetery Hill of Solferino were keeping up a deadly fire on the French.
Baraguay d’Hilliers brought Bazaine’s brigade into action against the one, and the First Regiment of zouaves rushed up the other, only to be hurled back by the enemy as they reached the steep slope. A horrible confusion followed these two repulses, the zouaves and General Negrier’s division being fatally mixed and fighting with each other like furies. But General Negrier kept his head and collected his troops, scattered all over the hillocks and valleys. Then, with the Sixty-first Regiment of the line and a battalion of the One Hundredth Regiment, he started resolutely to mount the Cemetery Hill. It was a deadly march; the enemy; holding the advantage, disputed every turn and twist of the ascent. Twice Negrier’s troops rushed up along the ridge-like path, but the circular wall of the cemetery, bored with thousands of holes, through which rifles sent a scathing hail, was strong as a fortress to resist them. It was sheer murder to take his men up again; Negrier abandoned the attack.
The enemy’s cannon-balls from the three defended heights fell thick and fast on Mount Fenil, where Napoleon and his aides breathlessly watched the progress of the drama.
Many of the Cent-Gardes who formed the imperial escort were shot down; the emperor was in the midst of death. The Austrians had been strongly reinforced, and held to the defence of Solferino more obstinately than ever.
But, notwithstanding this, the French were gaining ground; the left flank of the Austrians was at last broken by the artillery of the French reserve, and the whole army felt a thrill of encouragement.
A number of French battalions were now massing themselves about the spur of the Tower Hill of Solferino, but it was impossible to proceed to the attack while solid Austrian masses stood ready to pounce upon their flank.
A few fiery charges scattered the enemy in all directions, and a tempest of shouts rang out when Forey gave the order to storm the Tower Hill. The drum beat, the trumpets sounded. “V
ive l’Empereur!” echoed from the encircling hills. “Quick” is too slow a word for French soldiers. The Imperial Guard,. chasseurs, and battalions of the line rushed up with such fierce velocity that it was no time at all before the heights of Solferino were covered with Napoleon’s men. Nothing could stand against such an electric shock — the Tower Hill was carried, and General Lebœuf turned the artillery on the defeated masses of Austrians choking up the road that led to Cavriana.
The convent and adjoining church, strongly barricaded, yielded after repeated attacks, and then Baraguay d’Hilliers and Negrier made a last attempt on the Cemetery Hill. The narrow path that led up to it was strewn with bloody corpses, but neither the dead resting in their graves nor these new dead could be held sacred. A strong artillery fire on the gate and walls stopped the rifles from firing through the holes, and in this pause Colonel Laffaile led the Seventy-eighth Regiment up. They burst in the gate of the cemetery, — there were not many there to kill! — they were soon on their way towards the village.
Their way lay through a checker-board of tiny farms and fields, separated by stone walls wreathed with ivy. Little chapels, dedicated to favourite saints, stood in every enclosure. Houses, walls, and chapels had all been turned into barricades by the Austrians. Douay’s and Negrier’s men had to fight their way to the village through a rain of bullets from unseen enemies. Now they took the narrow path winding up by the Tower Hill into the streets of the village; when nearly at the top the clanking of heavy artillery-wheels told them that the enemy were retreating and carrying off the very guns that had played such havoc on their ranks from the top of Tower Hill. It took but a short time to capture them, and then they were fairly in the village, chasing the last straggling Austrians through the streets.
Solferino was in the hands of the French; but the fate of the battle was not yet decided, for Cavriana was a strong position, and Stadion and his generals had made a careful study of its possibilities.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 179
