Radetsky had with him 45,000 men;
Charles Albert's forces were reduced to 25,000. He had lost 5000 since
he recrossed the Mincio. He begged for a truce, and, defeated and
undone, he entered the city which he had vowed should only receive him
victorious.

To suppose that anything could have been gained by subjecting Milan to
the horrors of a siege seems at this date the veriest madness;
whatever Charles Albert's sins were, the capitulation of Milan was not
among them. The members of a wild faction, however, demanded
resistance to the death, or the death of the King if he refused. It is
their severest censure to say that their pitiless fury is not excused
even by the tragic fate of a population which, having gained freedom
unaided less than six months before, saw itself given back to its
ancestral foe by the man in whom it had hoped as a saviour. They saw
crimes where there were only blunders, which had brought the King to a
pass only one degree less wretched than their own. Crushed,
humiliated, his army half destroyed, his personal ambition--to rate no
higher the motive of his actions--trodden in the dust; and now the
name of traitor was hissed in his ears by those for whom he had made
these sacrifices.

Stung to the heart, the King instructed General Bava to tell the
Milanese that if they were ready to bury themselves under the ruins of
the city, he and his sons were ready to do the same. But the
Municipality, convinced of the desperateness of the situation, had
already entered into negotiations with Radetsky, by which the
capitulation was ratified. On this becoming known, the Palazzo Greppi,
where Charles Albert lodged, was the object of a new display of rage;
an attempt was even made to set it on fire. During the night, the King
succeeded in leaving the palace on foot, guarded by a company of
Bersaglieri and accompanied by his son, the Duke of Genoa, who, on
hearing of his father's critical position, disobeyed the order to stay
with his regiment, and came into the city to share his danger.

The next day, the 6th of August, the Austrians reentered Milan. They
themselves said that the Milanese seemed distraught. The Municipality
was to blame for having concealed from the people the real state of
things, by publishing reports of imaginary victories. Had the
unthinking fury of the mob ended, as it so nearly ended, in an
irreparable crime, the authors of these falsehoods would have been,
more than anyone else, responsi