Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/347

Rh sea of black, making the piazza ring with the shrill blasts of their trumpets, which seemed like shouts of joy. But their trumpeting was drowned by a broken and hollow rumble, which announced the field artillery; and the latter passed in triumph, seated on their lofty caissons, drawn by three hundred teams of fiery horses,—those fine soldiers with yellow lacings, and their long cannons of brass and steel gleaming on the light carriages, as they jolted and resounded, and made the earth tremble.

Then came the mountain artillery, slowly, gravely, fine in its heavy, solid way, with its large soldiers, and its powerful mules—that mountain artillery which carries dismay and death wherever man can set his foot. And last of all, the fine regiment of the Genoese cavalry, which had wheeled down like a whirlwind on ten fields of battle, from Santa Lucia to Villafranca, passed at a gallop, their helmets glittering in the sun, their lances erect, their pennons floating in the air, sparkling with gold and silver, filling the air with jingling and neighing.

“How beautiful it is!” I exclaimed. My father almost reproved me for the words, and said:—

“You are not to regard the army as a fine show. All these young men, so full of strength and hope, may be called upon any day to defend our country, and fall in a few hours, crushed to fragments by bullets and grape-shot. Every time that you hear the cry, at a feast, 'Hurrah for the army! hurrah for Italy!' picture to yourself, behind the regiments which are passing, a plain covered with corpses, and red with blood, and then the greeting to the army will proceed