In the hospital of Saint Clement, a lady of Brescia, Countess Bronna, occupies herself, with saintly self-abnegation, in nursing those who have had limbs amputated. The French soldiers speak of her with enthusiasm, the most repellant details do not stop her. "Sono madre!" she says to me with simplicity: "I am a mother!" These words well express her devotion as complete as motherly.
In the hospital San Gaetano, a Franciscan monk, distinguishes himself by his zeal and kindness to the sick. A convalescent Piedmontese, speaking French and Italian, translates the petitions of the French soldiers to the Lombardy physicians. They keep him as interpreter.
In a neighboring hospital chloroform is used. Some patients are chloroformed with difficulty, accidents result and sometimes it is in vain that they try to revive a man who a few minutes before was speaking.
I am stopped many times on the street by kind people who beg me to come to their homes, for a minute, to act as interpreter to the wounded French officers, lodged in their houses, surrounded by the best care, but whose language they do not understand. The invalids, excited and uneasy, are irritated at not being understood, to the great distress of the family whose sympathetic kindness is received with the bad humour that fever and suffering often call forth. One of them, whom an Italian physician desires to bleed, imagining that they wish to amputate him, resists with all his strength, overheating himself and doing himself much harm. A few words of explanation in their mother tongue, in the midst of this lamentable confusion, alone succeed in calming and tranquilizing these invalids of Solferino.
With what patience the inhabitants of Brescia devote themselves to these who have sacrificed themselves in order to deliver them from a foreign rule! They feel a real grief when their charge dies. These adopted families religiously follow to the cemetery, accompanying to its last resting place, the coffin of the French officer, their guest of a few days, for whom they weep as for a friend, a relative or a son, but whose name, perhaps, they do not know.
During the night the soldiers, who have died in the hospitals, are interred. Their names and numbers are noted down, which was rarely done in Castiglione. For example, the parents of Corporal Mazuet, aided by me in the Chiesa Maggiore and who lived in Lyons, 3 Rue d'Alger, never received other information about their son than that which I sent them.