During the fight a pennant planted on a slight elevation marked the position of the dressing stations for wounded and the field hospitals of the regiments in action. But, unfortunately, the troops seldom knew their own hospital pennants nor those of the enemy, with the result that shells rained down, sparing neither doctors, attendants, wounded nor the wagons conveying supplies of food and lint. The heights extending from Castiglione to Volta were dotted with the twinkling lights of thousands of fires fed with the debris of the Austrian gun carriages, supplemented with the branches of trees broken off by the cannon balls or during the storm. Round these fires the soldiers made an effort to dry their soaking garments, then tired out they stretched themselves on the stony ground to sleep. There were whole battalions without a particle of food. Water, too, was lacking and their thirst was so intense that soldiers and even officers were content to drink from the muddy rain-pools, oft-times stained with blood. Everywhere wounded men were crying piteously for “Water!” In the silence of the night could be heard the groans, the stifled cries of anguish, the despairing appeals for help. What pen can describe the agonies of that horrible night! The sun of June 25th, 1859, rose on one of the most frightful spectacles that the most vivid imagination can conceive. The battlefield was strewn with the bodies of men and horses, and with the battered forms of men in whom the spark of life still remained, they filled up the roads, they choked the trenches and the ravines, they lay piled in heaps in the bushes and the fields, everywhere for miles around the village of Solferino. The crops were utterly destroyed, the corn was trodden under foot, hedges were piled up, orchards ravaged. Here and there were pools of blood, formerly prosperous villages, now deserted, bore the marks of shot and shell; apparently deserted houses, whose walls were riddled with bullets, stood shattered, gashed and ruined. Their inhabitants, who for the most part had passed the twenty-four hours during which the conflict raged in their cellars without food or light, now began to issue forth from their hiding places, the vacant expression and blank countenances of these poor peasants witnessing eloquently to the reality of the fright they had endured.