All the day another fight, separate from this, had been going on between Benedek and the Sardinian army near the knoll of San Martino, overlooking the lake of Garda.  The battle, which began in the early morning among the cypresses that crown the hillock, raged till seven p.m. with a fury which cost the Piedmontese over 4,000 in dead and wounded.  It consisted largely in hand-to-hand fighting, which now gave an advantage to the Austrians, now to the Italians; many of the positions were lost and re-taken more than half-a-dozen times; the issue seemed long doubtful, and when Benedek, who commanded his side with unquestionable ability, received orders from the field of Solferino to begin a retreat, each combatant was firmly convinced that he was getting the best of it.  Austrian writers allege that this order saved the Sardinians from defeat, while in both Italian and French narratives, the Piedmontese are represented as having been already sure of success.  The courage shown alike by Piedmontese and Austrians could not be surpassed.  Victor Emmanuel, as usual, set an example to his men.

An incident in the battle brings into striking relief what it was this bloody strife was meant to end.  An Austrian corporal fell, mortally wounded by a Bersagliere whom he conjured, in Italian, to listen to what he had got to say.  It was this:  Forced into the Austrian army, he had been obliged to serve through the war, but had never fired his rifle on his fellow-countrymen; now he preferred to die rather than defend himself.  So he yielded up his breath with his hand clasped in the hand which had slain him.

The Austrians lost, on the 24th of June, 13,000 men in killed and wounded; the French, 10,000.  It was said that the frightful scene of carnage on the battlefield after Solferino influenced Napoleon III. in his desire to stop the war.  Had that scene vanished from his recollection in June 1870?

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.