It is not the moment to bewail idly or to follow a weak policy. I seek ferocious men! I want the fierce man who possesses energy—the energy to smash, the inexorable determination to punish and to strike without hesitation, and the higher the position of the culprit the better. (Loud applause from the assembly which understands the allusion.) You send the simple soldier, burdened with a family, full of cares, and whom you have never taught anything about the country, to court-martial because he has disobeyed some order. If you put this soldier with his back against the wall, I approve of what you do, because I am a believer in rigid discipline. But you must not have two kinds of law. If there is a general who infringes the Sacchi decree, strike him too. If there is a deputy who, after the experience of Caporetto, says again that war is a “useless massacre,” I tell you that he, too, ought to be arrested and punished! (Ovation.) Whoever has been to the front and lived in the trenches, knows what an effect the reading of certain speeches and Parliamentary reports had upon the minds of the soldiers. The poor man in the trenches asked himself: “Why must I suffer and die, if they are still discussing at Rome whether there ought to be war, if those who are at the head of affairs there do not know whether or not it is a good thing to be fighting?” That is deplorable and criminal talk, gentlemen! And now, even after Caporetto, after defeat, irresponsible people are allowed to make public anti-war demonstrations. (Loud applause.) _Ghosts!_ After Caporetto men showed themselves again whom we thought to have swept away for ever. But we have driven them back into their holes, because we are still on our legs. Yes! Many of our comrades have not come back from the Carso and from among the Alps. But we carry their sacred memory in our hearts. I think of the indescribable torture of mind of those men of the Third Armata, when they had to abandon the Carso. I think they must have cried out, “For what reason, as the result of what unexpected catastrophe, are we forced to abandon these rocks?” Because in the end one loves the tracks, the stones, the trenches and the dugouts among which men have lived and suffered. We love the Carso, this heap of stones dotted with little crosses which mark the graves of those fallen in the cause of the liberty of our country. (Applause.) We love the Carso, from which we can view the coveted coast-line, the riviera of our Trieste. We still carry, alive and splendid, the torch of the dead; the torch of those who fell in the face of the enemy. And we are not moved by motives of gain. We want clear and explicit recognition of the fact that we have done our duty. And we find ourselves still in the breach, that we may tell this people, in case they have forgotten, that there is no turning back. There is no possibility of choosing. Worry your brains as you will, there is nothing else to be done, nothing else can be thought of!