had done wonders.'

Garibaldi left the field, haggard and aged, unable to reconcile
himself to a defeat which he thought that more discipline, more
steadiness in his rank and file, would have turned into a victory. He
had always demanded the impossible of his men; till now they had given
it to him. In time he judged more justly. Those miserably-armed lads
who lately had been glad to eat the herbs of the field, if haply they
found any, stood out for four hours against the pick of two regular
armies, one of which was supposed to be the finest in the world. They
had done well.

Mentana remained that night in the hands of 1500 Garibaldians, who
still occupied the castle and most of the houses when the general
retreat was ordered. In the morning the Garibaldian officer who held
the castle capitulated, on condition that the volunteers 'shut up in
Mentana' should be reconducted across the frontier; terms which the
French and Papal generals interpreted to embrace only the defenders of
the castle. Eight hundred of the others were taken in triumph to Rome.
It would have been wiser to let them go. The Romans had been told that
the Garibaldians were cut-throats, incendiaries, human bloodhounds
waiting to fly at them. What did they behold? 'The beast is gentle,'
as Euripides makes his captors say of Dionysius. The stalwart Romans
saw a host of boys, with pale, wistful, very young-looking faces. If
anything was wanting to seal the fate of the Temporal Power it was the
sight of that procession of famished and wounded Italians brought to
Rome by the foreigner.

The victors, however, were jubilant. Their inharmonious shouts of
_Vive Pie Neuf_ vexed the delicate Roman ears. It was the battle-cry
of the day of Mentana. Begun by the masked, finished by the unmasked
soldiers of France, Mentana was a French victory, and it was the last.

The Garibaldian retreat continued through the night to Passo Corese on
the Italian frontier. The silence of the Campagna was only broken by
little gusts of a chilly wind off the Tiber; it seemed as if a
spectral army moved without sound. Garibaldi rode with his hat pressed
down over his eyes; only once he spoke: 'It is the first time they
make me turn my back like this,' he said to an old comrade, 'it would
have been better ...' He stopped, but it was easy to supply the words:
'to die.'

As he was getting into the train at Figline, with the intention of
going straight to Caprera, he was placed under a