The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  ‘Perhaps I just wish he could have taken them all with him, instead of a couple of hundred.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Eleonora muses, ‘he didn’t think it was feasible. Getting all those men going again, after officially disbanding them. Did he leave anyone in command?’

  ‘Gaetano Sacchi, who had been with him in South America. And commanded the First Legion throughout the march.’

  ‘I can’t see how he could be fairer. He deprives himself of his main man.’

  The sunlight had turned pink. We declined a sweet. We still had a box full of blackberries in the hotel fridge. At Porta San Francesco, we looked out over the parapet across hills hardening into silhouettes, as if in a child’s pop-up book. The gorge below was already in darkness. There were no Austrian campfires tonight, but streetlights were coming on in the area called Borgo Maggiore, about halfway down the mountain and a little to the north, the opposite side to where the archduke’s men had camped. Garibaldi headed there around 11 p.m. with Badarlon, Anita and a half-dozen officers. They would then wait for the others. How these last faithful few were chosen, or how they chose themselves, we do not know.

  ‘In response to an absolute need to sleep,’ writes Ruggeri, ‘and unknown to their respective captains, some men had taken advantage of the hospitality of the citizens to rest in their houses, and so did not get the call. Others had given up all hope of success, considering the extreme difficulty of the enterprise.’

  Returning to the hotel, we passed a rose bed featuring a hybrid named after Anita. ‘A rose as symbol of hope, liberty and faithfulness, across the centuries.’

  ‘Perhaps the word “stubbornness” should be in there,’ Eleonora thought. ‘She should have stayed in town.’

  ‘Badarlon remembers she was “stubborn as a mule”.’

  Packing my bag to be ready for a pre-dawn departure, I decided to throw away The Republic of San Marino, Historic and Artistic Guide of the City of Castles. It was printed on glossy photographic paper and far too heavy. Then with that feeling of regret I always have when I part with a book, I pulled it out of the waste-paper basket and read the opening pages while we ate the blackberries.

  San Marino, it seemed, owed its foundation to a woman’s stubbornness. Marino, a stonecutter, had fled Christian persecution in Dalmatia in the third century and taken refuge in Rimini, where he worked on rebuilding the city’s walls, but also preaching and becoming saintly. Twelve years on, a woman arrived from Dalmatia, claiming she was his wife. Marino fled to Mount Titan, whose stone quarries he was already familiar with. It took her a year, but eventually she found him up there, at which point he shut himself away in a cave and refused to speak to her. After a six-day stand-off she gave up and left. Marino climbed to the top of Mount Titan, built a church and dedicated it to St Peter. San Marino would be his town.

  ‘Reminds me,’ Eleonora said, ‘of San Francesco’s miracle in Citerna. Ridding himself of the woman who bothered him.’

  This was something Garibaldi wasn’t able to do. Everybody, Badarlon noticed in that long evening in Simoncini’s café, was trying to persuade Anita to stay in San Marino, where she could be looked after. In his memoir Garibaldi writes, ‘A most dear but distressing hindrance was my Anita, well on with her pregnancy now and ill: I begged her to remain in that place of refuge. In vain. That generous heart of hers disdained all my warnings, and forbade me saying another word on the subject with the accusation: “You want to leave me.”’

  ‘Crazy, crazy jealousy!’ Eleonora is not so impressed by Anita as others are. ‘What did she think he was going to do, run after another woman?’

  ‘I suppose she felt insecure. She’d been left behind before.’

  We both woke in the early hours with serious stomach aches.

  DAY 26

  1 August 1849 – 19 August 2019

  San Marino, Borgo Maggiore, Torriana, San Giovanni in Galilea, Sogliano al Rubicone, Borghi, Musano, Cento – 25 miles

  Borgo Maggiore

  Garibaldi wrote his novel Clelia, or The Government of the Priests in 1868, long after the heroics that led to the unification of Italy but before Rome was added to the kingdom in 1870. His declared aims were to remember the dead, to denounce the Church’s continued possession of what must be Italy’s capital city and ‘to earn some money to make ends meet’. At the heart of the novel is a figure, evidently the General himself, named Il Solitario, who lives on a tiny island, La Solitaria. In his sixties then, despite a life spent among men willing to die for him and women of every social class eager for romance, this was how Garibaldi saw himself: solitary, making tough decisions alone, ever alert to betrayal and incompetence, obliged again and again to leave companions behind, wounded or dead, to move on, start over. Looking at the whole trajectory of his life, it could well have been in these first days of August 1849 that the General began to think of himself as Il Solitario.

  We rose at 5.30. Perhaps our miserable night and upset stomachs would bring us closer in spirit to those we were following. There was a long paved walkway down to Borgo Maggiore, a drop of 600 feet in moon- and lamplight, with a vertical rock wall rising to the right and the hillside falling sharply to the left. As we rounded Mount Titan, the sea was tinged with pink; it seemed extremely close.

  Down in the main square of Borgo Maggiore, Garibaldi waited for others to join him. Ruggeri was not among them. Nor Migliazza. Nor Marocchetti. The General had insisted that Major Cenni go back and fetch Ugo Bassi, who faced certain execution in the Papal States. They waited an hour, Hoffstetter remembers, speaking in whispers while something over a hundred cavalry and a hundred and fifty infantry gathered.

  Bassi arrived. Forbes was there. Pilhes, Ceccaldi, Ciceruacchio. Anita was so ill she had to be taken into a house to lie down. Garibaldi sent scouts ahead to check the way was free. We took a photograph of the plaque on the house in the square where Captain Regent Domenico Belzoppi was born. ‘With great political astuteness, he saved Garibaldi from Papal and Austrian rage, thus ensuring the freedom of Italy.’

  A generous assessment.

  Torriana

  Shortly after midnight they set off ‘at a brisk pace’, says Badarlon. Garibaldi was wearing his white poncho, riding about a hundred yards ahead of the main group. The guide was anxious about his visibility. ‘If we run into the Germans, the first bullets will be for you.’ Not at all, Garibaldi assured him. ‘If the Austrians fire, it will be at the main group, not the advance patrol.’

  I was far from calm on this stretch of the road. Suddenly the blackberries were back. With a vengeance. I was in urgent need of a toilet. Rounding a bend, providence provided. There was a camper park tucked under the cliff. In the park a little brick building. Emerging much relieved, I found Eleonora with a broad smile on her face. She had been studying Google Maps, which showed Il Sacello del Santo in the rocks right above us, the cave where San Marino had hidden from the woman who claimed to be his wife. You wonder what it smelled like after six days barricaded in there.

  Since the General’s scouts had reported that this part of the hillside was free from Austrian troops, Badarlon had chosen the fastest, easiest route. But now a ‘kind of ghost’ was seen, slinking off the road ahead into a vineyard. Garibaldi was quickly off his horse. It turned out to be a ‘thickset peasant in shirtsleeves’. When the man refused to say what he was about, he found a pistol at his chest. He had been asked, he said, to go up to San Marino and report on what Garibaldi was doing. By the Austrians. They were in Pietracuta, a village close to where the tiny San Marino river, flowing from the south, runs into the larger Marecchia and thence east to Rimini. Right on their route.

  Badarlon took them off the road and plunged down a stream, Il Fosso del Re. The King’s Ditch. It was steep. ‘All stones and mud.’ The men went down as quietly as they could. ‘At a trot.’ The infantry jogging after. No one spoke. The spy had been tied to a saddle in their midst.

  We didn’t feel ready for a muddy ditch so early in the morning. Stayin
g on the road, we met a thickset man in a white shirt, braces and puttees, leading a horse by the bridle. ‘It’s too steep to ride on the asphalt here,’ he explained. ‘The horseshoes slip.’ But down by the river there were paths. The animal needed exercise before the day got too hot.

  Never having ridden a horse myself, I was impressed, walking alongside it, by how large the beast was, a great glistening chestnut with a pink blanket under its saddle and a magnificent swishing black tail, beautifully groomed, excitingly aromatic. From time to time it turned its head to push against its master’s hand. Belatedly, it came home to me what an intimate relationship this must have been for a cavalryman, living day and night with his horse, with its strength and odour, alert to its peculiar disposition. How gratifying and involving. And what hard work. Finding food and water, checking hooves, grooming. What trust too, as the animal felt for its footing on a steep stony riverbed in the dark.

  When we asked our rider if there was a footbridge anywhere to cross the Marecchia, since the road bridges seemed to be either a mile to the left or two miles to the right, in Verucchio, he launched into impossibly detailed instructions. This church. That bend in the road. We would trust, we thought, to our app, and if we had to ford it, then we would. Saying goodbye to horse and horseman, we stopped to drink a little water beside a tree teeming with apricots, all glowing gold in the seven o’clock sun.

  The Fosso del Re is paved over for the 200 yards before it flows into the San Marino. To accommodate a small industrial area. This was where the garibaldini, in their royal ditch, must have passed fairly close to the Austrians. Unsurprisingly, their only advantage was surprise; the imperial troops wouldn’t expect boldness from men who had fled so abjectly the morning before.

  Finally on the flat, having descended 1200 feet, we zigzagged through woods and past factories and at last reached the Marecchia. It had taken two hours, exactly the time Hoffstetter gives. ‘A river about a thousand paces wide,’ he says, ‘but almost dry.’ It hasn’t changed. We found an expanse of whitish stones before a steep bank on the far side. A wild, empty place. In the middle nothing more than a shallow stream. But there was the luxury of a little wooden footbridge.

  For the garibaldini it was their point of maximum exposure. They hurried across the water, filed some way along the further bank to find the new path then struck up into the thick vegetation of the hillside. They had been climbing fast for some minutes ‘when suddenly a volley of gunfire’.

  Badarlon was frightened. ‘All I had was a pistol.’ Garibaldi called a halt and pulled out his telescope. In the moonlight two Austrian cavalry patrols, moving from opposite directions, had met on the dry riverbed. But why the shots? The General waited a minute or two, then ordered, ‘Onward.’

  We obeyed, trudging up a whitish mud track through dry, faintly scented foliage. Rocky outcrops everywhere. A medieval tower, squat and grey on the ridge ahead. San Marino a stark profile in the morning sky behind. The day was warming up.

  At this point in the adventure Badarlon’s version and Hoffstetter’s begin to diverge, radically, and ominously. Just as they had reached the Marecchia, Garibaldi had asked the German to ride back and urge on the infantry. Some were lagging. It was dark. They needed to stay tight. When he got to the stragglers they complained about the pace. It was hard keeping up with horsemen. Just two more hours, Hoffstetter urged, and they’d be able to ease off. Just! His account then launches into a wonderfully nerdish, military-man’s reflection on the speed that light infantry can move across rough country if unencumbered with mules and cannons. ‘Even poorly shod, the men were more or less matching the cavalry.’ He is quite unaware that he and his beloved general will never meet again.

  ‘Suddenly someone called my name,’ he writes, ‘and I saw Ugo Bassi riding towards me.’ The monk had fallen asleep on his horse. He was confused, lost. Together with the infantry, they arrived at the Marecchia, but having crossed the dry riverbed they couldn’t find the path up the further bank. They had their own guide, a friend of Badarlon, but he only knew the way this far. He promised to bring another local man. The group waited, exposed, by the water, on the white stones. ‘There were about sixty of us, including Forbes and other officers.’ The new guide eventually arrived – one wonders how these men found each other in the dead of night – and led the soldiers to the path. It was narrow. They would have to move in single file. The horses went first. But all at once an Austrian cavalry patrol was thundering towards them along the riverbed. Lancers, lowering their weapons. ‘Don’t shoot!’ Hoffstetter ordered. It would only alert more Austrians. There was a skirmish. Two wounded men were dragged into the thick trees on the steep slope where the enemy couldn’t follow.

  Was this the moment when the advanced group heard gunfire? The times don’t match, Hoffstetter had ordered his men not to fire. But if the Austrians had arrived earlier – as spied by Garibaldi with his telescope – how could Hoffstetter and the others have waited for their guide on the riverbed? Again and again in this long story you realize how much doesn’t fit, how impossible it is to know the past. People in different places experiencing different things, their sense of time quite different, depending on what they were going through, some men knowing the territory well, some disorientated, some in pain, some thirsty or hungry, some wide awake, others half asleep, some trudging, some fighting, some fleeing. Each man had his own experience, then his own account. All we know here is that the last exchange between Garibaldi and Hoffstetter was an order to go back and ensure the men stayed together. The German obeyed, and failed.

  San Giovanni in Galilea

  A word on the route is essential now. The goal is Cesenatico, a small fishing port thirteen miles up the coast from Rimini, where Hahne will soon be facing the wrath of Gorzkowsky. From San Marino the obvious route, taking the best roads, involved proceeding to Rimini then north. In Garibaldi’s circumstances this was impossible. An alternative would be to descend the Marecchia a little, somehow bypassing Verucchio, and then proceed diagonally across the plain. This too was risky. The men would be highly visible, constantly exposed to attack. Advised by the patriots in Simoncini’s café, Garibaldi had opted to stay in the hills as far north as Longiano, then go straight down to the coast, bypassing the towns of Savignano sul Rubicone and Gatteo. This limited their exposure to about nine miles. ‘If we get split up,’ the General had told Hoffstetter, ‘look for me near Savignano.’

  As a result of this strategy, they, and now we, were travelling against the run of the land and the drift of the roads and paths. No one in normal circumstances would follow such a route. ‘Up narrow tracks, across fields, along the ridges of the gullies,’ recalls Badarlon. So having climbed to Torriana, we now have to plunge straight down again to the river Uso, another sad trickle in the fierce summer heat, then steeply up again to San Giovanni in Galilea. These are rugged hills, far from the picturesque beauty of Tuscany or the grandeur of the high passes. The grass is white and brittle, alive with insects. We passed a huge quarry. The whole hillside had been demolished, leaving a near-vertical cliff of zigzagging chalk-white terraces. RIPA CALBANA, said a sign. Stone breaking. But the men must have been on holiday; the only sound was the baying of guard dogs running along the wire fencing.

  ‘We arrived in San Giovanni’ – the next hilltop – ‘tired, throats burning,’ says Badarlon, ‘hoping for a break.’ Garibaldi ordered them to keep going. Their only salvation was speed. We marched and sang behind. Perhaps thanks to yesterday’s conversation about women soldiers, I suddenly remembered ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’. It went pretty well to the click of the poles.

  As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed,

  A sudden strange fancy came into her head.

  ‘Nor father nor mother shall make me false prove,

  I’ll ’list as a soldier, and follow my love.’

  Amazingly I can remember this word for word from singing lessons in primary school. About fifty-five years ago. In Blackpool, Lancashire. Any and every mome
nt, I suppose, inevitably fuses the present with fragments of personal history; the older we are the greater the possibility of bizarre connections. Unfortunately, I could only remember the first verse. I sang it over and over, hoping the rest would follow. It wouldn’t. It was lost. With Hoffstetter.

  ‘Basta!’ Eleonora yelled. ‘The hell with Polly Oliver.’

  ‘What an intolerant young woman you are!’

  ‘And what a boring old man you are! So attached to your boring old England.’

  ‘Terruncella!’

  ‘Perfida Albione.’

  Suddenly our voices were drowned by barking. A dozen dogs came rushing to a makeshift wire gate: Labradors, terriers, collies, each determined to bark the loudest. Astonishingly, there was a little corgi that had lost a back leg, which had been replaced with two big back wheels. It rushed around with these two turquoise-blue wheels skidding and turning, barking quite as boldly as the others.

  ‘Reminds me,’ I said, ‘of Leggero.’

  ‘Who?’

  Eleonora has never heard of Leggero. She has no cause to. But he is soon to become a major figure in our story. Of course, no self-respecting novelist introduces important characters near the end. But this isn’t a novel. So as we tramp on from San Giovanni down towards Sogliano sul Rubicone, where Garibaldi at last allowed his men a rest, let’s take the prompt of our three-legged corgi to introduce Captain Giovanni Battista Culiolo, nicknamed Leggero ‘because of his extraordinary gifts of agility and speed’.

  Born 1813. On the island of Maddalena, off the north coast of Sardinia. Enrols shortly before his eleventh (!) birthday in the Sardinian navy. Serves fifteen years. Secretly joins Mazzini’s revolutionary movement, Young Italy. Jumps ship in Montevideo in 1839, to join Garibaldi’s Italian Legion. Fights in all the General’s battles in Uruguay, losing a number of fingertips and becoming an expert artilleryman. Returns to Italy with Garibaldi in 1848 and fights the Austrians in Varese. Is arrested in Genoa and condemned to death for his desertion nine years before but pardoned at the express request of Garibaldi. Distinguishes himself fighting for the Roman Republic when the French army is initially put to flight, 30 April 1849. Murders a fellow soldier during a later battle by firing a cannon into him at point-blank range, this in revenge for the man having killed a friend of his in a duel. Given the siege situation, the authorities turn a blind eye. Is wounded in head, hand and foot during fierce fighting outside Porta San Pancrazio and left for dead when Garibaldi is forced to retreat. Survives fourteen days hiding in enemy territory before re-entering the city and collapsing in a hospital on 29 June. On 14 July, still seriously lame, with Rome now in French hands, he flees the hospital and some days later procures a horse, escapes the city and, riding day and night, gleaning information where he can and avoiding French and Austrian patrols, finally catches up with Garibaldi’s column. Where exactly we’re not sure. Belluzzi mentions him for the first time on this day’s march, so perhaps it was San Marino. Commentators hail him as ‘the most garibaldino of the garibaldini’.