ement
to break out within the city; but the information which he then
received deprived him finally of this hope, and he gave the order to
return to Monte Rotondo. Volunteers have the defect of being soldiers
who _think_; on this occasion they thought that the backward march was
the beginning of the end--that, in short, the game was up. A third of
the whole number deserted, and took the road towards the Italian
frontier. Garibaldi himself seems to have had a first idea of crossing
into the Abruzzi, and there waiting to see what turn events would
take; but he did not long entertain it, and, when he again left Monte
Rotondo, it was with the fixed design of fighting a battle. He
expected, however, to fight the Papal troops alone, and not the
French.

This was very nearly being the case. On the 1st of November, the Papal
General Kanzler called on General De Failly at Civita Vecchia, and
found him, to his concern, by no means anxious to rush into the fray.
Even when sending the troops, Napoleon seems to have hoped to escape
from being seriously compromised. He probably thought that the moral
effect of their landing would cause Garibaldi to retire, and that thus
the whole affair would collapse. But the Papal authorities did not
want it to collapse; they wanted more bloodshed, and if the words
which express the ungarnished truth as acknowledged by their own
writers and apologists, sound indecent when describing the government
of the Vicar of Christ, it only shows once more the irreconcilability
of the offices of priest and king in the nineteenth century. Kanzler
insisted that a crushing blow must be inflicted on the volunteers
before they had time to retreat. He argued so long and so well that De
Failly promised him a brigade under General Polhes to aid in the
attack which he proposed to make on Monte Rotondo.

The Papal forces left Rome by Porta Pia, and took the Via Nomentana,
which leads to Monte Rotondo by Mentana. They were on the march at
four o'clock a.m. Garibaldi had ordered his men to be ready at dawn on
the same day (it was the 3rd of November); but Menotti suggested that,
before they started, there should be a distribution of shoes, a
consignment of which had just reached the camp. Many of the volunteers
were barefoot, which gives a notion of their general equipment.
Garibaldi, who rarely took advice, yielded to his son. Had he not done
so, before the Papal army reached Mentana, he would have been at
Tivoli. One