The Sun.
London, England, 1861-02-28 00:00:00

TIM- SUN, LONDON,

and useful artisans of every description. The conse-
quence is that they are skilful at every trade, and
are naturally laborious and painstaking, exhibiting
much cleverness, as well as good will, patience,
and cheerfulness under the most unremitting toil.
Truly, the campaigns of the two last years have
brought into light all the best qualities of the Ita-
lian army, and it is impossible to deny that, with a
steady discipline and a proper training the people
of this country may be made to feel as much at
home in a campaign as their forefathers were in the
palmiest days of the old Roman Legions. Of course
they have as yet met with no reverse, and I find
them in the first flush of recent success. Still it is
impossible to imagine a look of greater cheerfulness,
good nature, good companionship, mutual trust and
sympathy, between the men, more unconstrained,
cordial deference towards the officers—a more per-
fect accord among the members of so numerous anti
happy a family. From my own observation, and
what I hear from all testimonies, there is no doubt
but that the stronger Piedmontese nature has fully
pervaded and absorbed all the other national ele-
ments in the army, and the newly annexed proviucs
supply as good, firm, and efficient soldiers as the lon g
drilled, ancient, hereditary States of the House of
Savoy. This is perfectly true of the fine Lombard
grenadier regiments, and it equally applies to the
gentler Tuscans, whose high intelligence and keen
sense of honour more than make up for any
deficiency of native physical strength and hardi-
hood. Nay, the success of the men who have been
busy at the organisation of the national armament
has been so full and general, that they have no ap-
prehension of their inability to mould according to
their own views the raw material which they intend
to draw out of these later Southern acquisitions ;
although the fragments of the Royal Bourbon army
certainly give little hope of being controvertible to
any good use. I must say that as I rode yesterday
across the vast parks of artillery, or skirted the gay
camps of Beesaglieri and troops of the line, remind-
ing one of the liveliest descriptions we had of the
Crimean quarters, which they resemble even in the
look and nature of the soil, I fell in with groups of
such healthy, merry men, as gave me the idea that
the work they have been engaged in for the last
four winter months has proved more beneficial to
them than a whole year of the easiest and healthiest
garrison life. The commissariat seems to have
been faultless throughout, and the hospitals and
ambulance, which are also admirably managed,
have had almost an idle time of it,
I cannot bring myself to close this letter, reserv-
ing to myself a description of the state of the van-
quished town after a repetition of my first hurried
visit of yesterday without dispelling from other
people's minds some erroneous notions which I had
brought with me from Turin. They were univer-
sally current there at the time of my departure, and
may perhaps still prevail in the minds of some of
those readers who had no opportunity to rectify
them by personal experience.
In the first place, there is no doubt that the
defenders of Gaeta, at the time of its capitulation,
were certainly not short of 11,000 men; and it is
far from true, as it had been asserted, that all the
native Neapolitans had fallen from their allegiance
to their King, and that the men who shared his
fortunes to the last were Swiss, Bavarians, and other
foreign hirelings. The number of foreign troops in
Gaeta was not, I am positively assured, above 350.
Nor is it true that, in the lack of artillerymen, the
batteries of the place had in many instances to be
served by riflemen and other light troops, chiefly
Swiss, who, unused to handle artillery, proved to
be bat clumsy and inefficient gunners. The light
troops aided in the conveyance of ammunition,
but well-trained artillerymen, in more than suffi-
cient numbers, had the management of their pieces to
the last moment.
I was curious, as a matter of course, to ascertain
what foundation there was in the reports which re-
presented King Francis 11. as lavish of his own life,
performing prodigies of valour at the head of the
defenders of the place, and animating the drooping
spirits of his soldiers by the example of right Royal
intrepidity and devotion. The deserters who came
over to Mola di Gaeta, by seven or eight on an
average daily, if pressed upon this point, used to say
that the King "certainly used to show himself,"
adding, however, in the same breath, "of course
when there was no firing," The evidence from that
quarter is of little worth, however unanimous, but
yesterday I spoke myself with an Artillery ser-
geant who had in his keeping the casemate which
was the last abode of the Bourbon in his domains,
and who, having always been in close contact with
the Royal family, had contracted and exhibited
warm, enthusiastic feelings in their behalf; and he
assured me in an exulting tone that " whenever a
cannon was fired the King's brother instantly came
out of shelter and ran to the most exposed places ;"
"the King also," the fellow added, in a more sub-
dued voice, " sometimes showed himself;" as to the
Queen, " Die Heldin von Gaeta," the theme of Ger-
man song, after a few days' parade, was very soon
persuaded to run into no unprofitable danger. There
is, in short, as it strikes me, sufficient evidence that
the King and his family were not by any means the
most arrant cravens within the fortress, though
there is perhaps a long distance between the gal-
lantry of the last Neapolitan Bourbon and the
desperate resolution not to survive his defeat which
signalised the fall of the last Palteologus.
Another far more important point I was anxious
to settle to my own satisfaction, and this was the
amount of hindrance raised against the success of
the Piedmontese by the presence of the French
fleet, and by other agencies interfering in the name
and by the authority of that potentate who set up
and vindicated the inviolability of the non-interven-
tion principle. Well, the fact is, if I can rely on the
testimony of unbiassed witnesses, that, had the
Sardinian fleet been allowed to proclaim and enforce
the blockade of the place at the moment that the
troops of Sonnaz, victorious at Mole di Gaeta, in-
vested the place by land, the King and the garri-
son would have been at their enemy's discretion,
almost without delay. Certainly, while the French
fleet hindered all maritime operations, General
Cialdini, and his chief of the Staff, Menabrea, had
leisure to carry into execution those admirable
earthworks which I can never eulogise in suffi-
ciently high terms, and which would have deter-
mined the fall of the stronghold, even without any
co-operation from the squadron under Persatio ;
but all the help in arms, ammunition, able officers,
and volunteer partisans, which came to uphold the
sinking fortunes of the King, the power he had to
sift and choose his most efficient combatants, to re-
move the disaffected, the sick and wounded, and to
clear the town of the incumbrance of all useless, or
worse than useless, inhabitants—all this was due to
the good offices of the French Emperor, and his
anxiety to honour "a great misfortune nobly borne."
Thanks to the presence of the French fleet, and to
the freedom of the sea, the place was till lately sup-
plied with everything it could desire, and had only
to suffer from its own vile mismanagement of the
hospitals, and the little attention it paid to the com-
fort and health of its defenders. The French, it
must be added, for truth's sake, and contrary to
what had been generally asserted, limited them-
selves to a neutral and perfectly fair and dignified
attitude. But the Spaniards, under cover of their
mighty French allies, did duty as very active and
meddlesome spies; they ran their man-of-war boats
along shore, gathered such information as they
could, and pointed out to the Neapolitan Generals
the spots where their artillery could be fired with
the most deadly effect. The only fresh water spring
at which the Sardinian vessels could fill their casks
was, thanks to the Spaniards' officious vigilance,
made the butt of the most savage attacks from the
fortress's fire. It was, no doubt, by such means as
these that the siege of Gaeta was made to drag to
its weary length, and entailed upon Southern Italy
all that series of disorder, brigandage, and civil
war which the capitulation of the 14th, it is to be
hoped, will soon bring to a close.
The greatest damage to the besieged fortress was
inflicted by the successive bursting of four of its
own powder magazines. Under the ruins caused
by these disasters it is supposed that no less than 400
victims still lie buried. The stench of dead bodies
as you walk over all that tremendous havoc is in-
sufferable, nor are the effluvia from the relics of
mortality the most abominable of smells which
make battered Gaeta a very pest-house to those
who venture into it. The habits of those Bourbon
soldiers, as they lived in their casemates, were not
those of civilised or even of savage human beings.
There remains in my mind no doubt whatever
that the explosion of those powder magazines was
simply owing to the deadly effect with which the
Piedmontese projectiles fell among them : or it
may be to accidents arising from carelessness, but
scarcely from treachery among the defenders,
Nothing in the world can equal the accuracy of
aim or the violence of the effect of the rifled pieces
which for so many days thundered against the place.
I have hitherto only visited the town and sea bat-
teries, besides the outward bastions, through which
a breach was so nearly opened, and I can bear
witness that there is scarcely an embrasure that has
not been hit, hardly a cannon that has not been
either wholly dismounted or at least shaken out of
its line by the iron hail that has been pelting against
the most exposed lines. Had even walls and bul-
warks had the power to stand the storm any longer
the Neapolitan gunners must have been more than
heroes to stand to their pieces; but there is ample
evidence that the uncovered batteries were forsaken
for some time, and even the casemates were visibly
not built to stand the brunt of the war engines
modern contrivance has brought to bear against
them. I have seen dire splits and rents and gaps
in the vaults ; the masonry even of the casemates
seemed to be not of the best, that of the upper bat-
teries decidedly inferior.
After all, it is difficult to see in what manner