ble
sacrifice of a country's best and bravest sons, was a necessity, and
must still go on for ages to come. And while he thus communed with
himself he, too, held in his hands a weapon calculated to carry not only
death to a valiant foe, but also sorrow and anguish to that foeman's
wife and mother, and perhaps destitution to his family.

To the north of the fortress of Solferino rose a wooded height, since
known to the historians of that battle as Cypress Hill, and
distinguished as the point around which the conflict raged most
fiercely. Occupied alternately by each side, the opposing batteries
stormed it in succession, and the squadrons, now of one army, now of the
other, marched up to assault it. But though they marched up, Manasseh
saw none of them return. Austrians, French, and Italians, all seemed to
be swallowed up alike in that maelstrom of blood and fire.

At four o'clock in the afternoon the battle was at its height. In the
heat of the conflict one could see uniforms of all three armies mingled
in inextricable confusion. The Austrian forces were at last becoming
exhausted with toil and hunger. Whole regiments were there that had not
tasted meat for a week--where were those forty thousand cattle?--and the
bread dealt out to them was ill-baked, mouldy, gritty, and altogether
unfit to eat.

A final and concentrated effort was determined upon. Reserves to the
front! Cypress Hill was to be stormed once more. A battalion of yagers,
the pride of the Austrian army, charged up the fatal hill and succeeded
in taking it, after which the rattle of musketry beyond announced that
the fight was being continued on the farther side.

At this point Manasseh's battalion was ordered to hold the hill while
the yagers were pushed farther forward. The order was obeyed, and then
Manasseh learned what the cypress-crowned height really was: it was a
cemetery, the burial-ground of the surrounding district, and each
cypress marked a grave. But the dead under the sod lay not more closely
packed than the fallen soldiers with whose bodies the place was covered.
Cypress Hill was a double graveyard, heaped with dead and dying
Frenchmen, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, and Croatians, their
bodies disfigured and bleeding and heaped in chaotic confusion over the
mounds beneath which slept the regular occupants of the place.

In the soldier's march to glory each step is a human corpse. Manasseh
took care to step over and between the pr