In childhood he rescued a drowning washerwoman; in youth he nursed men dying of cholera; as a veteran soldier he passed the night among the rocks of Caprera hunting for a lamb that was lost. No amount of habit could remove the repugnance he felt at uttering the word 'fire.' Yet this gentle warrior, when his career was closed and he lay chained to his bed of pain, endorsed his memoirs with the Spanish motto: 'La guerra es la verdadera vida del hombre.' War was the veritable life of Garibaldi; war, not conspiracy; war, not politics; war, not, alas! model farming, for which the old chief fancied in his later years that he had discovered in himself a vocation.
Riding the wild horses and chasing the wild cattle of the Pampas, his eyes covering the immense spaces untrodden by man, this corsair of five-and-twenty drank deep of the innocent pleasures of untamed nature, when not occupied in fighting by land or sea, with equal fortune; or rather, perhaps, with greater fortune and greater proof of inborn genius as commander of the naval campaign of the Paran[=a] than as defender of Monte Video. No adventures were wanting to him; he was even imprisoned and tortured. In South America he found the one woman worthy to bear his name, the lion-hearted Anita, whom he carried off, she consenting, from her father and the man to whom her father had betrothed her. Garibaldi in after years expressed such deep contrition for the act which bore Anita away from the quiet life in store for her, and plunged her into hardships which only ended when she died, that, misinterpreting his remorse, many supposed the man from whom he took her to have been already her husband. It was not so. Shortly before the Church of San Francisco at Monte Video was burnt down (some twenty years ago), the marriage register of Garibaldi and Anita was found in its archives, and a legal copy was made. In it she is described as 'Doña Ana Maria de Jesus, unmarried daughter of Don Benito Rivevio de Silva, of Laguna, in Brazil.' The bridegroom, who during all his American career had scarcely clothes to cover him, parted with his only possession, an old silver watch, to pay the priest's fees. Head of the Italian Legion, he only took the rations of a common soldier, and as candles were not included in the rations, he sat in the dark. Someone reported this to the Government, who sent him a present of £20, half of which he gave to a poor widow.