Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

THE SON OF THE REGIMENT. ?/
In a short time the camp was in order, the wagons were
taken to their places, the sentinels given their posts the
;
companies were re-arranged without arms, among their own
tents ;
and the sixteen orderly-sergeants began
call, each one standing in front of his company,
the roll
with the
officers on one side, and a soldier with a lantern on the
other to light up the record book. Meanwhile Carluccio,
led back to me by the commissary, had run to hide himself
between two tents, and stood there frightened and astonished,
contemplating the beautiful spectacle of the camp
lighted up by the moon. That multitude of tents gleaming
in long rows until they were lost to sight among the trees ;
those five hundred stacks of glistening bayonets;
all those
people ;
and the intense quiet, the monotonous voices of the
orderly-sergeants growing gradually fainter, from the company
near by to the one farthest away, where the lantern
hardly appeared as large as a fire-fly ;
and then the gradual
cessation of those voices, and the mysterious silence ; and,
at a stroke of the drum, the sudden breaking up of the
lines and the noisy scattering ;
and under the tents, in the
darkness, that confused shouting and hurried preparation of
the beds with cloaks, covers, and knapsacks, until little
by
little, throughout that immense camp quiet is re-established,
and an unseen bugle imposes silence with its
lamenting
blasts . . . it is a spectacle that moves one. And it would
have been much more impressive
if
any one could have seen
inside those tents. How many tapers were secretly lighted
between two knapsacks, beside a piece of
crushed letter-paper,
before a face in which appear from time to time the fatigue of
the long march and the fear of the officer of the guard