Even a field of battle, with its unburied dead, speaks only of a small part of the miseries of a great war. Those who were at that time at Brescia, to which town the greater portion of the French wounded and all the worst cases were brought, still shudder as they recall the dreadful human suffering which no skill or devotion could do more than a very little to assuage. The noble Brescian ladies who had once nursed Bayard, turned, with one accord, into sisters of charity; every house, every church, became a hospital, all that gratitude and pity could do was done; but many were to leave their bones in Italy, and how many more to go home maimed for life, or bearing with them the seeds of death. Other reasons than those of sentiment in reality decided Napoleon's course. Though these can only be guessed at, the guess, at the present date, amounts to certainty. In the first place, the skin-deep rejoicings in Paris at the news of the victories did not hide the fact that French public opinion, never genuinely favourable to the war, was becoming more and more hostile to it. Then there was the military question. It is true that the Fifth Corps, estimated at 30,000 men, had, at last, emerged from its crepuscular doings in Tuscany, and was available for future operations. Moreover, Kossuth paid a visit to the Imperial headquarters, and held out hopes of a revolution in Hungary which would oblige the Austrian Emperor to remove part of his troops from the scene of the war. Nevertheless, Napoleon was by no means convinced that his army was sufficient to take the Quadrilateral. He realised the bad organisation and numerous shortcomings of the forces under him so vividly that it seems incredible that, in the eleven following years, he should have done nothing to remedy them. He attributed his success mainly to chance, though in a less degree to a certain lack of energy in the Austrians, joined with the exaggerated fear of responsibility felt by their leaders. He never could thoroughly understand why the Austrians had not won Solferino. Naturally, he did not express these opinions to his marshals, but there is ample proof that he held them; and if the fact stood alone, it ought not to be difficult to explain why he was not anxious for a continuance of the war. But it does not stand alone. Napoleon feared being defeated on the Rhine as well as in the Quadrilateral. Prussia had six army corps ready, and she was about to move them. That, after her long hesitations, she resolved to intervene was long doubted, but it cannot be so after the evidence which recent years have produced.