LAST WEEK.
THE BATTLE OF VOLTURNO.
The 1st of October will henceforward be a sacred day in the calendar of free Italy. On that day was fought a battle as hotly contested as any of the great battles of modern times. The combatants engaged were only inferior in number to those who fought at Magenta and Solferino, when the struggle for freedom had just begun. In valour, in fortitude, in daring, the men who held the field under Garibaldi’s orders, on the first day of the present month, had little to learn from the disciplined regiments of France, Austria, and Sardinia, which had been engaged in the crowning battles of the Lombard campaign. Three times were the positions of the patriots taken and retaken at the bayonet’s point, while the grape-shot swept down the combatants without pause. Little mercy was asked on either side, and less given. We are told by those who saw the facts that, as the wounded lay upon the ground, the pistol and the stiletto finished up the work which had been begun with the rifle and the bayonet. Strange to say—for we are speaking of a southern race, a quick, impulsive people—the Italians for once fought in silence. With pale cheeks, and clenched teeth, they carried through the matter in hand. On the 1st of October no man, save some Sicilians and the Neapolitans of the city of Naples, had time or breath for idle clamour. The story of the slaughtered prisoners is denied and disbelieved as far as the Garibaldians are concerned. The Royalists had been taught to believe that they would receive no quarter, and they gave none.
On the 30th of September the situation of the young King was far from desperate. Could he have succeeded in forcing his way through the hasty levies of Garibaldi, and reaching Naples before the Sardinians had crossed his frontier, the splendid throne of the Two Sicilies was not wholly lost. With what show of justice could the Lombards, or the Tuscans, or the Sardinians who invoke the principle of non-intervention on their own account, have interfered with armed force to thrust liberal institutions at the bayonet’s point down the throats of an independent and reluctant people? The two parties—the Royalists and the Liberals—had fought it out, and victory had remained with the King. That was the only test by which the will of the majority could be ascertained. It had been applied, and the result was that Francis II. was back in his capital. The prisons were gorged with patriots. The blood of Saint Januarius had given propitious omens. The Toledo was illuminated in an orderly way under the auspices of the police, and the King was preparing to stamp out the last embers of the insurrection. The people of the Two Sicilies liked Francis and his ways just as the Lombards and the Sardinians liked Victor Emmanuel and his ways. Why should they be balked of their humour, and be cursed with the gift of political freedom which they neither esteemed nor desired?
The king was separated from his capital and his loving subjects but by a vineyard. The country between Capua and Naples by way of Aversa is but a garden filled with vines. The distance between the two cities is but seventeen miles, and they are connected by a railroad. Imagine a battle to be fought on Epsom Downs, or at Slough, and no further obstacle between the conqueror and London. As far as mere distance is concerned this would represent accurately enough the position of the young King with reference to his capital on the 1st of October. Could he even have cut his way through the Garibaldians without inflicting upon them an actual defeat, it would have been enough to amend his political situation. The Sardinians then could not—without a signal infraction of the public law of Europe—have crossed the borders of an independent State, and levied war against a Sovereign who had given them no sufficient cause of offence. Had they done so, the principle upon which they justified their intervention might at no distant day have been invoked against themselves. This difficulty has not arisen, thanks to the valour of the hero and the men who fought the other day by the banks of the Vulturnus.
It was no unfitting spot for the closing act of such a struggle. The prize of victory—that fair city of Naples itself—was almost in sight of the combatants. Close at hand, and on one edge of the battle-field is the splendid palace of Caserta, in which the ancestors of the young King had held royal state for more than a century past. It is the masterpiece of Vanvitelli, and amongst the most magnificent of Royal residences in Europe. Those who have visited the spot will remember the gardens with the cascades, and how the cascades are so arranged as to represent quaint combinations of statues and mystical emblems. The forests of ilex behind the palace swarm with game, and herein it was that the ancestors of the young King—being themselves Kings of Naples—used to take their pastime, and divert themselves with the slaughter of wild animals, when the affairs of state no longer claimed their attention. Francis II. all but played his last throw for empire in his own park. The position of the respective forces during the battle will be best learnt from a glance at the map, and by a recollection of the position which each had occupied during the previous days. The front of the Royalists was protected by the windings of the Volturno. It is a stream of not very considerable breadth, but still one which would be a formidable obstacle to young troops in presence of a well-served artillery. The King held Capua and Gaeta—two out of the three military stations of the first-class in the kingdom. The modern Capua is not the town which in ages long gone past contended with Rome for supremacy in the Italian peninsula, and in an evil hour for itself cast in its lot with the Carthaginian chief. That famous old town was two miles distant from the modern Capua, out of which Francis II. recently marched out on a Monday morning, and lost a throne. Gaeta would be reckoned a strong place anywhere, and is certainly the strongest in the kingdom of Naples. Englishmen have not forgotten how, by the help of their fleet, it was held by the stout old Prince of Hesse-Philipstadt against Massena and an overwhelming French force. A curse, however, has ever rested upon this citadel and place of arms, the result, perhaps, of its