The battle of Solferino is the only one during our century to be compared by the magnitude of its losses with the battles of Moscow, Leipzig and Waterloo.
As a consequence of the twenty-fourth of June, 1859, it has been calculated that there were in killed and wounded, in the Austrian and Franco-Sardinian Armies, three field-marshals, nine generals, fifteen hundred and sixty-six officers of all grades, of whom six hundred and thirty were Austrians and nine hundred and thirty-six allies, and about forty thousand soldiers and non-commissioned officers.
Besides that, from the fifteenth of June to the thirty-first of August, there were in the hospitals of Brescia, according to the official statistics, nineteen thousand six hundred and sixty-five patients with fever and other illnesses, of whom more than nineteen thousand belonged to the Franco-Sardinian Army.
On their side, the Austrians had at least twenty thousand sick soldiers in Venice, beside ten thousand wounded, who, after Solferino, were sent to Verona, where the overcrowded hospitals were finally attacked by gangrene and typhus fever.
Consequently, to the forty thousand killed and wounded on the twenty-fourth of June, must be added more than forty thousand sick with fever or dying from illness caused by the excessive fatigue experienced on the day of the battle or during the days which preceded and succeeded it or from the pernicious effects of the tropical temperature of the plains of Lombardy, or, finally, from the imprudence of these soldiers themselves.
If one does not consider the military point of view, the battle of Solferino was then, from the point of humanity a European catastrophe.
The transportation of the wounded from Brescia to Milan, which takes place during the night because of the torrid heat of the day, presents a dramatic sight with its trains loaded with crippled soldiers arriving at the station filled with crowds of people.
Lighted by the pale flare of the tar torches, the mass of men seems to hold its breath to listen to the groans and the stifled complaints which reach their ears.
The Austrians, in their retreat, having torn up several places on the railroad between Milan and Brescia—this road was restored for use by the first days of July, for the transportation of ammunition, of supplies and of food sent to the allied army—the evacuation of the hospitals in Brescia was in this way facilitated.