Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/346

312 of soldiers, who filed before the commandant of the army corps, between two long lines of people. As they marched past to the sound of trumpets and bands, my father pointed out to me the Corps and the glories of the banners.

First, the pupils of the Academy, those who will become officers in the Engineers and the Artillery, about three hundred in number, dressed in black, passed with the bold easy elegance of students and soldiers. After them defiled the infantry, the brigade of Aosta, which fought at Goito and at San Martino, and the Bergamo brigade, which fought at Castelfidardo,—four regiments of them, company after company, thousands of red aiguillettes, which seemed like so many double and very long garlands of blood-colored flowers, extended and shaken from the two ends, and borne across the crowd.

After the infantry, the soldiers of the Mining Corps advanced,—the workingmen of war, with their plumes of black horse-tails, and their crimson bands; and while these were passing, we beheld advancing behind them hundreds of long, straight plumes, which rose above the heads of the spectators; they were the Alpine troops, the defenders of the portals of Italy, all tall, rosy, and stalwart, with hats of Calabrian fashion, and lapels of a beautiful, bright green, the color of the grass on their native mountains.

The mountaineers were still marching past, when a stir ran through the crowd, and the “bersaglieri,” the old twelfth battalion, the first to enter Rome through the breach at the Porta Pia, bronzed, alert, brisk with fluttering plumes, passed like a wave in a