" But this was what no one could do.
Colonel Alingdon was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a
Giottesque triptych, or the attribution of a disputed master; but on
the history of his early life he was habitually silent.
It was perhaps because I recognized this silence and respected it
that it afterward came to be broken for me. Or it was perhaps merely
because, as the failure of Colonel Alingdon's sight cut him off from
his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to revert from the
empty present to the crowded past. For one cause or another he _did_
talk to me in the last year of his life; and I felt myself mingled,
to an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history, with the
passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. Colonel
Alingdon had been mixed with it in all its phases: he had known the
last Carbonari and the Young Italy of Mazzini; he had been in
Perugia when the mercenaries of a liberal Pope slaughtered women and
children in the streets; he had been in Sicily with the Thousand,
and in Milan during the _Cinque Giornate_.
"They say the Italians didn't know how to fight," he said one day,
musingly--"that the French had to come down and do their work for
them. People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting
to do. But they hadn't forgotten how to suffer and hold their
tongues; how to die and take their secrets with them. The Italian
war of independence was really carried on underground: it was one of
those awful silent struggles which are so much more terrible than
the roar of a battle.
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