Immediately all the houses are closed, the inhabitants barricading themselves in their homes, burning the tri-color flags which had adorned their windows, hiding themselves in the cellars or the attics. Some run into the fields with their wives and children carrying with them their most valuable possessions. Others, less frightened and more sagacious, remain at home, but take in the first Austrian wounded upon whom they lay their hands and overwhelm them with kindness and care.
In the streets, on the roads, blocked by wagonloads of wounded, by convoys of supplies, are rapid transport wagons, horses flying in all directions, amid cries of fear, of anger and of pain. Baggage wagons are overturned, bread and biscuits fall into the gutter. The drivers detach the horses, dashing away with hanging bridles on the road to Brescia, spreading the alarm as they go. They collide with carts of provisions and convoys of wounded. These latter, trodden under foot and frenzied with terror, beg to be taken with them. In the city some of them deaf to all orders tear away their bandages, go staggering out of the churches, into the streets where they are jostled and bruised and finally fall from exhaustion and pain.
What agonies! What suffering during the days of June twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh!
Wounds poisoned by heat, by dust and by lack of water and care, have become intensely painful.
Suffocating stenches pollute the air in spite of efforts to keep in good condition these local hospitals.
Every quarter of an hour the convoys sent to Castiglione are bringing new loads of wounded. The insufficiency in the number of assistants, of hospital orderlies, of servants is cruelly felt.
In spite of the activity of the Commissary Department, which is organizing transportation to Brescia by means of ox-carts; in spite of the spontaneous care of the inhabitants of Castiglione, who transport the sick, the departures are much less numerous than the arrivals, and the crowding grows unceasingly greater.
On the stone floors of the churches of Castiglione are placed, side by side, men of every nation. French, Germans, Slavs and Arabs are temporarily crowded to the most remote part of the chapels. Many have no longer the strength to move themselves and cannot move or stir in the narrow space where they are lying. Oaths, blasphemies and cries which can be interpreted by no expression, are sounding beneath the arches of the sanctuaries.
"Ah, sir, how I suffer!" say to me some of these poor fellows. "We are abandoned, left to die miserably, and yet we fought bravely!" They can get no rest, in spite of the nights they have passed in sleeplessness and long-endured fatigue. In their distress they beg for help which is not given. Some, in despair, roll in convulsions which will end in tetanus and death. Others, believing that the cold water poured on their festered wounds produce worms, which appear in great numbers, refuse to have the bandages moistened. Others still, whose wounds were dressed at the improvised hospitals on the battle-fields, are given no further attention during the halt they are obliged to make in Castiglione, and as these bandages are very tight, in view of the roughness of the transportation and have not been changed, they are suffering veritable tortures.