THE RED SHIRT IN WAR

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2417, 24 March 1915, Page 6

THE RED SHIRT IN WAR

GARIBALDI AND HIS BROTHERS (By a Correspondent to the "Manchester Guardian.") I made a long journey in August last to see Peppino Garibaldi. Costante Garibaldi was my companion. We met rather oddly,. I had penetrated to an underground den where strange figures in red shirts were enrolling for the war under the shadow of texts from Mazzini. At length Costante appeared with the buoyant president of the Marseilles Garibaldian Volunteers' Committee. Ho talked English perfectly and gladly, as do all the Garibaldis, and invited me to accompany him to a review of the Marseilles company of volunteers that day. After, the review there was a vin d'honneur, to which the hospitable brothers invited the company, Later I left with Costante for Montelimar, where Peppino Garibaldi was at that time. Costante had his dreams for Italy But they were not castles in the air. The card he gave me wh?n we parted was inscribed "Perito mecanico," "Skilled mechanic," and the ne* Italy he dreamed of was to (/rise upon a sure basis of education. "Perito mecanico" was a title of the past. . The young Garibaldi had earned the thorough confidence of his employer, and was, if I remember rightly, to go- back to a steel works managership after the war.

The Legion. Very late we came to Montelimar. In a villa outside the town General Garibaldi spoke to me of the part Italian volunteers have played, and are playing, in the war. "There are many of all classes of society. Two of tho officers in the room there are.,aristocrats. .We have labourers, professional men—all classes. They are banded together by the one idea. They fight for nationality, for the freedom of the Latin race." _ General Peppino Garibaldi has been m many campaigns. ■ As a boy he ran away from school to join the Greeks in the Graeco-Turkish War in 1897, in which his father, Ricciotti Garibaldi, commanded a Garibaldian legion. He was in Venezuela: in the South African War, where he fought with the British under Kitchener; in the Balkan War, and in two campaigns in Mexico. The Italians who have enlisted in the present struggle have eitner served in the regular army or in one or other of the campaigns mentioned above.

A Sacred Symbol. ''Are you going to war'in th'e old red shirt?" I asked him. He took out cf a packet a brilliant garment. "Every one of us has one of these," he said. "They are very visible." "Yes, they are visible'. But it is not so easy t<i aim at a red object. Try. It dances before you." "But you see it?" "The visibility of it," said tie General, earnestly, "is as a disadvantage nothing when you take the enormous moral cffect it has on every man who wears it. He feels lie is fighting for a great tradition. It is the symbol of a sacred idea." "There is another matter —a point where red is an actual advaatage. It is as regards numbers extraordinarily difficult to gauge. Try to count a line of poppies. You will find you have much over-estimated them." My interview with General Garibaldi took place in English, which he speaks perfectly, partly because English has always been the language of the family circle, Bicciotti Garibaldi having chosen his wife from our people. In appearance he suggested the Englishman—clean shaven, close cropped) fair face, and blue eyes—and a suit of khaki colour brightened the resemblance. Between ono and five, he said, he slept or lay down; the rest of the four-and-twenty hours ho found more work for them than he could get into them. Ha speaks with rapidity and decision.