They said he could not die. The men who fought under him in Tripoli, the men who stood beside him in the bloody capture of Ala, looked on Antonio Cantore with almost superstitious awe. For he ought to have been killed a hundred times. A hundred times he came back, smiling quietly behind his spectacles, out of perils through which other men could not live. So the legend grew up among the Italian Alpini that their commander led a charmed life; they said he had the camicia della madonna and that bullets could not harm him. Death got him at last, but those boys of his--as he used to call his soldiers--will not believe it, even though they carved his tomb out of the rock and heaped the earth over his body. Gen. Cantore was not a bit like a hero, as one pictures heroes. One might have taken him for a schoolmaster, a clerk in the post office, a retired commercial traveller. He was not tall, nor was his bearing martial. His kind blue eyes looked mildly through his round spectacles. His mouth laughed under his white mustache. He wore a black mackintosh and walked with his head a little on one side and his hands in his pockets. But he was not afraid. Neither was he foolhardy. He neither feared nor courted death; he merely ignored it. He had the sublime courage of the man who knows the danger so well that he will let no one else face it, but will brave it all alone. The veterans of the Tripoli campaign talked in this wise to the young recruits of the Alpini: "Look at that old man, with his kind face and gentle soul. He is the father of the Alpini. He has seen them born and has brought them up, all of them. They are his sons, his boys. With a word he has moulded them according to his own heart of bronze; with a smile he has forged them a heart of steel. You don't know him? Then you were not in Libya! But go to him, say 'Good morning, General!' and tell him your name. Ten years from now he will remember the name. And some night when you are on outpost duty and the hail of bullets is most furious, and the miaowing of the shells is maddest, when the air seems a-quiver with death, and the darkness is shot through with arrows and flashes, and the silence is shattered with bangs and explosions and roars, if your heart trembles a moment as you think of your little ones at home and the bells of the far-away village church ringing the Angelus, you will see the old man, the General, Antonio Cantore, rise suddenly before you, place himself between you and the enemy, shield you with his body.