Garibaldi was dazed by the shattering of his ideals. In his mind, an army fighting for freedom shouldn't have been like this.
Garibaldi hadn't lived through the War of the Sixth Coalition, and those who had experienced it had mixed opinions. But in this war, the French had unquestionably done nothing good.
As they retreated, they took everything they could carry and destroyed whatever they couldn't. To them, the oath that private property was sacred and inviolable was no more than a fart.
Radetzky's army, by contrast, was strictly disciplined. Along the way, any city that surrendered without a fight was generally left unharmed.
As for towns that resisted to the bitter end, Radetzky would simply use rockets to turn them into a sea of flames. The army wouldn't even stop there; after all, its primary objective was to take Genoa.
Although the vanguard advanced at a rapid pace, Benedek, the battlefield commander, moved very slowly.
Benedek was convinced the French Army would send powerful reinforcements. He had to be ready to retreat at any moment, so he set up defenses along the route and dispatched large numbers of scouts to provide early warning.
But the French Army not only sent no troops to aid Genoa, it kept transferring troops from Genoa to Piedmont.
The grueling battle Benedek had expected never came. There wasn't even a decent fight. His caution seemed utterly pointless, yet this was the very place Marshal Radetzky had called crucial.
Garibaldi didn't understand it either. As a low-ranking soldier who had made a mistake, he had few ways to get information. But he had clearly heard that the French Army had hundreds of thousands of men.
Wasn't the fighting in Genoa, the focal point of this war, far too uneventful?
Just like the fighting in Venetia,