Better would it have been for you, poor martyr, if you had perished, struck dead on the field of butchery, in the midst of the splendid abomination which men call "Glory!" Your name, at least, would not have been forgotten, if you had fallen near your colonel defending the flag of your regiment. It would almost have been better for you had you been buried alive by the peasants commissioned for that purpose, when you, unconscious, were carried from the hill of the Cypresses, from the foot of the tower of Solferino or from the plains of Medole. Your agony would not have been long. Now, it is a succession of miseries that you must endure, it is no longer the field of honor that is presented to you, but cold death with all its terrors, and the word "disappeared" for a funeral oration. What has become of the love of glory which electrified this brave soldier at the commencement of the campaign and during that day at Solferino, when, risking his own life, he so courageously attempted to take the lives of his fellow-creatures, whose blood he ran, with such light feet, to shed? Where is the irresistible allurement? Where the contagious enthusiasm, increased by the odor of powder, by the flourish of trumpets and by the sound of military music, by the noise of cannon and the whistling of bullets which hide the view of danger, suffering and death. In these many hospitals of Lombardy may be seen at what price is bought that which men so proudly call "Glory," and how dearly this glory costs. 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.