torm hastened the
end of the fight.

All the day another fight, separate from this, had been going on
between Benedek and the Sardinian army near the knoll of San Martino,
overlooking the lake of Garda. The battle, which began in the early
morning among the cypresses that crown the hillock, raged till seven
p.m. with a fury which cost the Piedmontese over 4,000 in dead and
wounded. It consisted largely in hand-to-hand fighting, which now gave
an advantage to the Austrians, now to the Italians; many of the
positions were lost and re-taken more than half-a-dozen times; the
issue seemed long doubtful, and when Benedek, who commanded his side
with unquestionable ability, received orders from the field of
Solferino to begin a retreat, each combatant was firmly convinced that
he was getting the best of it. Austrian writers allege that this order
saved the Sardinians from defeat, while in both Italian and French
narratives, the Piedmontese are represented as having been already
sure of success. The courage shown alike by Piedmontese and Austrians
could not be surpassed. Victor Emmanuel, as usual, set an example to
his men.

An incident in the battle brings into striking relief what it was this
bloody strife was meant to end. An Austrian corporal fell, mortally
wounded by a Bersagliere whom he conjured, in Italian, to listen to
what he had got to say. It was this: Forced into the Austrian army, he
had been obliged to serve through the war, but had never fired his
rifle on his fellow-countrymen; now he preferred to die rather than
defend himself. So he yielded up his breath with his hand clasped in
the hand which had slain him.

The Austrians lost, on the 24th of June, 13,000 men in killed and
wounded; the French, 10,000. It was said that the frightful scene of
carnage on the battlefield after Solferino influenced Napoleon III. in
his desire to stop the war. Had that scene vanished from his
recollection in June 1870?

Even a field of battle, with its unburied dead, speaks only of a small
part of the miseries of a great war. Those who were at that time at
Brescia, to which town the greater portion of the French wounded and
all the worst cases were brought, still shudder as they recall the
dreadful human suffering which no skill or devotion could do more than
a very little to assuage. The noble Brescian ladies who had once
nursed Bayard, turned, with one accord, into sisters of charity; every
house, every church, became a ho