Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/33

 of the hamlet, and for the first time had the opportunity of seeing another kind of warfare, more awful than the high mountain warfare which was so well known to him. On December 24, 1915, he writes: "War here looks far more lugubrious and tragic than up in the mountains: here war is not only waged by soldiers against soldiers, but it vents its brutality against everything, against any kind of material, against defenseless people, against the land itself."

Fifteen days later he took part in the famous engagement at Malga Zures, above, where, as he wrote himself, "many patriots from Trentino fell, displaying such conspicuous heroism that it was noticed and recorded by the colonel in his daily records. The feeling on both sides ran so high during that engagement that when the munitions gave out the fight was continued with rocks and rifle-butt blows in a terrible, general mix-up."

After this engagement, he was cited again for another medal and advanced to the rank of first lieutenant for gallantry. As first lieutenant he was sent to the general headquarters of the First Army at Verona; his duties consisted in accompanying commissions of inspection to the front, and other special work.

With more leisure hours during the evenings, Battisti disposes of these, not for rest, but for more work; and this, after having been at the front for seven months without interruption, after having risked his life a thousand times, and just after emerging from a most terrible and bloody battle. Indeed, he appears like a hero from Plutarch. Trentino is, of course, the subject of these lucubrations wrenched from sleep and rest — Trentino, the great passion, the religion of his life — Trentino, for which he died.

"At the time I joined the army," he says, "I had left unfinished a historical work, entitled 'Forerunners and Martyrs of the Redemption of Trento.' It was a series of biographies, beginning with Gazzoletti and the politicians from 1848 and 1866, down to our Garibaldini, to Dr. Carlo de Bertolini, to Scipio Sighele; to these I ought now to add, unhappily. Albino Zenatti." Page thirty-one