Many of the soldiers beg me to write to their relatives, some to their captains, who replace in their eyes their absent families.
In the hospital of Saint Clement, a lady of Brescia, Countess Bronna, occupies herself, with saintly self-abnegation, in nursing those who have had limbs amputated. The French soldiers speak of her with enthusiasm, the most repellant details do not stop her. "Sono madre!" she says to me with simplicity: "I am a mother!" These words well express her devotion as complete as motherly.
In the hospital San Gaetano, a Franciscan monk, distinguishes himself by his zeal and kindness to the sick. A convalescent Piedmontese, speaking French and Italian, translates the petitions of the French soldiers to the Lombardy physicians. They keep him as interpreter.
In a neighboring hospital chloroform is used. Some patients are chloroformed with difficulty, accidents result and sometimes it is in vain that they try to revive a man who a few minutes before was speaking.
I am stopped many times on the street by kind people who beg me to come to their homes, for a minute, to act as interpreter to the wounded French officers, lodged in their houses, surrounded by the best care, but whose language they do not understand. The invalids, excited and uneasy, are irritated at not being understood, to the great distress of the family whose sympathetic kindness is received with the bad humour that fever and suffering often call forth. One of them, whom an Italian physician desires to bleed, imagining that they wish to amputate him, resists with all his strength, overheating himself and doing himself much harm. A few words of explanation in their mother tongue, in the midst of this lamentable confusion, alone succeed in calming and tranquilizing these invalids of Solferino.
With what patience the inhabitants of Brescia devote themselves to these who have sacrificed themselves in order to deliver them from a foreign rule! They feel a real grief when their charge dies. These adopted families religiously follow to the cemetery, accompanying to its last resting place, the coffin of the French officer, their guest of a few days, for whom they weep as for a friend, a relative or a son, but whose name, perhaps, they do not know.
During the night the soldiers, who have died in the hospitals, are interred. Their names and numbers are noted down, which was rarely done in Castiglione. For example, the parents of Corporal Mazuet, aided by me in the Chiesa Maggiore and who lived in Lyons, 3 Rue d'Alger, never received other information about their son than that which I sent them.
All the cities of Lombardy considered it due to their honor to share in the distribution of the wounded.
In Bergamo and Cremona special commisions organized in haste are aided by auxiliary committees of devoted ladies. In one of the hospitals of Cremona an Italian physician having said: "We keep the good things for our friends of the allied army, but we give to our enemies only what is absolutely necessary, and if they die, so much the worse for them!" A lady, directing one of the hospitals of that city, hastened to disapprove of these barbarous words, saying that she always took the same care of Austrians, French and Sardinians, not wishing to make any difference between friends and enemies, "for," she said, "Our Lord Jesus Christ made no distinction between men when it was a question of doing them good."
In Cremona, as everywhere else, the French physicians regret their insufficient number. "I cannot, without profound sorrow," said Dr. Sonrier, "think of a small room of twenty-five beds assigned, in Cremona, to the most dangerously wounded Austrians. I see again their faces, emaciated and wan, with complexion pallid from exhaustion and blood poisoning, begging with heartrending gestures, accompanied by pitiful cries, for one last favor, the amputation of a limb (which they had hoped to save), to end an intolerable agony of which we are forced to remain powerless spectators."