"Ah, sir, if you would write to my father, that he might console my poor mother!" said to me, with tears in his eyes, a corporal named Mazuet, scarcely twenty years old. I noted down the address of his parents and a few minutes later he had ceased to live. The parents, who dwelt on rue d'Alger, in Lyons, and of whom this young man, enlisted as a volunteer, was the only son, received no other information about their child than that which I sent to them. He very probably, like so many others, has been enscribed, "disappeared." An old sergeant, decorated with many chevrons, repeated with profound melancholy and an air of conviction full of bitterness: "If someone had cared for me sooner, I should have lived, whereas, this evening I will die." That evening he died. "I do not want to die! I do not want to die!" cries, with savage energy, a grenadier of the guard, full of strength and health three days before, but who, mortally wounded, and feeling sure that his minutes are irrevocably numbered, fights against this dark certainty. I talk to him, he listens to me, and this man, calmed, soothed, consoled, finally resigns himself to die with the simplicity of a child. In the back of the church, on the steps of an altar, a Chasseur d'Afrique lies on straw. Three balls have struck him, one on the right side, one on the left shoulder, the third remained in the right leg. It is Sunday, and he asserts that he has eaten nothing since Friday. He is covered with dried mud flecked with blood, his clothing is torn; his shirt is in tatters. After I had washed his wounds, given him a little bouillon and wrapped him in covers, he put my hand to his lips with an expression of unspeakable gratitude. Later we were able to send him to a better hospital. At the entrance of the church is a Hungarian who cries unceasingly, calling in heartrending tones for a physician. His back and his shoulders, ploughed with grapeshot, appear as if torn by iron hooks and are one mass of quivering, raw flesh. The rest of his body is swollen, green and black--horrible. He can neither lie down nor sit up. I dip some packages of lint in cool water and try to make a cushion for him, but gangrene soon carries him off. A little further on lies a dying Zouave who is weeping bitter tears, and we console him as if he were a little child. The preceding fatigue, the lack of food and repose, the intensity of the pain, the fear of dying without help, excites even in these brave soldiers a nervous sensibility which betrays itself by sobs. One of their chief thoughts, when they are not suffering too cruelly, is the memory of their mother, and the fear of the grief she will experience on learning of their fate. On the corpse of a soldier we found, hanging from his neck, a medallion containing the portrait of an aged woman, without doubt his mother, which with his left hand he was pressing on his heart.