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Updated: May 7, 2025
A good warning, one would think, against war, and more compact and less wasteful of space than a conventional graveyard. Thence we drove on to Solferino, a little remote village with a single street paved with cobble stones, seldom visited by foreign tourists. The plaster on the walls of the farmhouses hereabouts still bears many bullet marks.
Yet the France of the last crusades was within a century the France of Crecy, just as the France of Austerlitz was more speedily the France of Waterloo; and men who followed the tricolour at Solferino lived to see it furled in humiliation at Sedan.
We ourselves needed twenty-nine years from 1830, when the first steamship was brought into our fleet, to 1859, when the application of the principle of ram-fighting was affirmed by laying down the 'Solferino' and the 'Magenta' to work a revolution in the contrary direction; so true it is that truth is always slow in getting to the light.... This transformation was not sudden, not only because the new material required time to be built and armed, but above all, it is sad to say, because the necessary consequences of the new motive power escaped most minds."
The younger sister, who was by far the handsomer of the two, afterwards became the wife of Prince Gonzaga Solferino. The prince was a cultured man, and even a genius, but very poor. For all that he was a true son of Gonzaga, being a son of Leopold, who was also poor, and a girl of the Medini family, sister to the Medini who died in prison at London in the year 1787.
Politically, so far as we can judge, there was no cause or occasion for the throwing up of the cards by the French, after Solferino. Nor were the military reasons for the cessation of warlike operations of a nature to convince men of their irresistible weightiness.
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.
The campaign proved disastrous to the Austrians, whose half-drilled and badly-fed troops and obsolete artillery were commanded by an utterly incompetent general. They were defeated at Palestro on May 31st; at Magenta on June 4th; and again at Solferino on June 24th.
He then set forth the dangers of every kind which this resolution would cause to arise. The army had not yet repaired its losses; the wounds of Magenta and Solferino were still bleeding. The French would, once more, pass the Alps, and the revolution, far from being stifled, would be more threatening than ever.
The whole of the first, second, and third Italian corps d'armee are by this time concentrated within that comparatively narrow space which lies between the position of Castiglione, Delle Stiviere, Lorrato, and Desenzano, on the Lake of Garda, and Solferino on one side; Piubega, Gazzoldo, Sacca, Goito, and Castellucchio on the other.
When things are at their lowest ebb, and men's hearts are sinking with fear, quiet, grave John buckles on a soldier's haversack and marches away. The others have substitutes. Ah, what times they were! It is well that flowers can spring up on a battlefield. The little girl keeps track of her heroes. Kearny, who has seen Magenta and Solferino, meets his fate at Chantilly.
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