The route of the flying enemy was thickly tracked through the straggling course of the shallow Amato and up the heights beyond by slaughtered bodies of the 1st Regiment of French Light Infantry, which had ventured to charge ours with the bayonet. All lay in one direction, in the attitude of headlong desperate flight.
I forget the number of this regiment buried on the field, but a skeleton of it only could have escaped.
Amid all the disfigurements of wounds and scenes of human agony, nothing so powerfully inclined my heart to pity and compassion as the letters which lay near each unburied soldier, representing the last remains of the affections and softer feelings, as the body represented his warlike powers. Many of these, in female characters, were expressed with all the tender beauties of the French tongue, and, with an absence of reserve taught by the Revolution, showed by their intenseness of feeling how bitterly living hearts were to be grieved with the tidings of the scene before me.
No one can tell from description how wretched is the feeling, when standing over the body of a youthful soldier, to read in a fair female hand such expressions as these:—
“Oh, preserve thy life! Venture not too much for the sake of thy poor Adèle, who has never ceased to deplore thy absence, but who will think the first moment of thy return an ample compensation for all her sufferings.”
Return! shall that prostrate blood-stained figure ever return to the poor Adèle? The beauty of youth indeed has not yet left him, but by to-morrow the form even of humanity will be gone! Many of the letters were from all degrees of kindred—mother, wife, sister, daughter. It was impossible to read unmoved.
Poor Harry Paulet was dreadfully wounded in the thigh, and our Commandant had a beautiful horse killed under him.
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Having been unable to be actually present at the battle of Maida, I write the following account from subsequent observation and inquiry, by which I satisfied my natural thirst to know all the events of this memorable day.