Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/39

 In Trento the police had gathered in the square of the Castello a villainous mob, mostly plainclothes's policemen, who had been paid to jeer Battisti. The police commissioner was impudent enough to say to Battisti: "Your Honor, here are your people greeting you." To which Battisti made the following rejoinder: "No, sir, the true people of the Trentino are not here; they are in the trenches, where they are fighting for Italy, or in the concentration camps or in the prisons, where yon have confined them, or in their homes, where they weep for the ruin which you have wrought upon their country."

He was to be executed on the 12th of July. Austria thought proper to place on the records of civilization the glorious event, for her, by reproducing in all the illustrated papers of the empire the photograph of Battisti, accompanied from his cell to the scaffold, with these words underneath the illustration: "The last walk of the arch traitor, Dr. Cesare Battisti."

In the illustration Battisti shows his wonted demeanor of a poet and a knight; those poor soldiers, whose duty it is to escort him, and the big, ignoble policeman at their head, look more like servile followers than executioners. The glorious light that irradiates from the hero contrasts with the expression of subdued shame in his custodians.

Before stepping on the scaffold, a priest of Czech extraction gave the hero the last religious rights. "I entreat you," Battisti said to him, "to make it known to my brothers that I am glad to die for Italy, without fear of the Austrians and their gallows."

Soon afterward, Lang, the hangman, placed the noose around his neck and pushed him off his feet so that the body would hang in empty space — but the rope, too weak to support his gigantic frame, snapped. Battisti, half-dead, fell to the ground; he loosened the rope, still taut around his neck, and once more, for the last time, shouted in a hoarse voice: "Viva l'Italia, abbasso l'Austria" (Italy forever, down with Austria!).

The hangman's second attempt was successful, he and the witnesses seem to be very proud of this Page thirty-seven