My Italian coachman is so frightened at the idea of being very near the Austrian lines that, more than once, I am obliged to take the reins from his hands and give them to the corporal seated beside him on the box. The poor man had run away from Mantua several days before to save himself from the Austrian service, taking refuge in Brescia, he hired out as a coachman. His fears grow greater on hearing the discharge of a distant gun, fired by someone who disappears in the underbrush. After the retreat of the Austrian army, many of the deserters hid themselves in the cellars of the houses of the villages, abandoned by their owners and partially plundered. In order not to be captured, they, at first, ate and drank in those underground retreats, then, being at the end of their resources and pressed by hunger, but well armed, they ventured out at night.
The unhappy and terrified Mantuan can no longer guide his horse. He constantly turns his head, he casts affrighted glances at all the thickets along the road, at all the hedges and hovels, fearing, any moment, to see emerge some hidden Austrians.
His fears increase at every turn of the road and he almost swoons, when, in the silence of the night we are surprised with a shot from a guard, whom we do not see on account of the darkness. His terror knows no limit when we almost collide with a large, wide open umbrella which we vaguely catch sight of at the side of the road near a path leading to Volta. That poor umbrella, riddled with bullets and balls was, probably, a part of the baggage of some canteen-woman who had lost it during the storm of the twenty-fourth.
We were retracing the road to reach Borghetto. It was after 11 o'clock. We were making the horse gallop and our modest vehicle rolled across the space, almost without noise, on to the Strato Cavallara, when cries of "Who goes there? Who goes there? Who goes there? or I fire," came like a bolt from the mouth of an invisible sentinel. "France," replies immediately a loud voice, which adds, in giving his rank: "Corporal in the First Engineer Corps, Company Seventh." "Go on," is the reply. Without this presence of mind of the corporal we would have received a shot almost in the face.
Finally, at a quarter before twelve we reach, without other adventure, the first houses of Borghetto.
All is dark and silent. However, a light shines on the ground floor of a house on the principal street, where are at work in a low room the accounting officers. Although embarrassed in their work and very much astonished at our appearance at such an hour, they treat us very kindly. A paymaster, Signor Outrey, gives me a cordial invitation to be his guest. His orderly brings a mattress on which I throw myself, completely dressed, to rest for several hours, after drinking some excellent bouillon, which seems to me the more delicious as I am hungry and for several days have eaten nothing even passable. I can sleep quietly, not being, as in Castiglione, suffocated with fetid exhalations and tormented with the flies, which though satiated with corpses, attack also the living.
The corporal and the driver settled themselves simply in the carriage, remaining in the street, but the unfortunate Mantuan, always in great terror, could not shut his eyes during the whole night and the next day he was more dead than alive.
Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, at six in the morning I was received most kindly by Marshal MacMahon. At ten o'clock I was on the way to Cavriana. Soon after I entered the modest house, since historic, for there was lodged the Emperor Napoleon.
At three o'clock in the afternoon I found myself once more in the midst of the wounded of Castiglione, who expressed their joy at seeing me again.
The thirtieth of June I was in Brescia.