Visiting Modern War in Risorgimento Italy

VISITING MODERN WAR IN RISORGIMENTO ITALY

Copyright © Jonathan Marwil, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-10813-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For Tom and Leslie Tentler

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It is a glorious thing to talk of war, and conquests, and brilliant victories over an enemy, but it is a most horrible thing to put in practice. —William Edward Johnston, 1859

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue

1

1

Preparations for the Show

5

2

Preliminaries

31

3

Serious War

53

4

Picturing the Horrors

77

5

“The Second Greatest Battle of Modern Times”

97

6

Blasted Dreams, Hopeful Lessons

123

7

Setting the War in Memory

151

8

Honoring the Dead

189

Epilogue

225

Notes

229

Index

253

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Illustrations

1.1 2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3

French troops crossing Mont Cenis, Illustrated London News, May 28, 1859 Map of the Theatre of War from César de Bazancourt’s Campagne d’Italie de 1859 (1860) Piedmontese crossing the Sesia at Vercelli, Illustrated Times, June 4, 1859 Dead of Melegnano, Lamberto Vitali, Il Risorgimento nella fotografia (1979) Road to Solferino Cemetery, Illustrated London News, February 25, 1860 Battle of Magenta, Carlo Bossoli, The War in Italy (1859) A Convoy of the Wounded, François Tabar, Le Monde illustré, August 27, 1864 Sorting bones for the ossuary at Solferino, L’Illustration, April 2, 1870 Ossuary at San Martino, courtesy of the Brescia Civici Musei d’Arte e Storia 1909 Celebration at San Martino, L’Illustrazione Italiana, July 4, 1909

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12 38 59 86 118 164 180 195 198 219

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Acknowledgments

Researching the lives of many of the visitors in this book has been challenging. Aiding in the process were a number of individuals and institutions, notably the University of Michigan Library. Bryan Skib arranged for several purchases that facilitated my research, members of the reference staff often found Web sites and sources that were helpful, and Kate Riley guided me through the intricacies of genealogical research. My greatest debt, however, is to Sharon Johnson of the Interlibrary Loan office who was able to obtain most of the hundreds of books and articles I requested. In England, Nicholas Mays, the archivist at News International Limited, answered my many questions about the staffing and practices of the Times and made available the Manager’s Letter Books when I went to London. On that same trip, Dr. P. J. Thwaites, curator at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, arranged for me to see the records of the Woolwich Military Academy, and Rosalind Hardiman at the City Museum of Portsmouth showed me sketches and watercolors done by Frederick Miller. I was able to view more of these at Firepower—The Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich. I owe thanks as well to the staff of the Warwickshire County Record Office for sending me copies of letters and newspaper clippings pertaining to Miller’s death, and to the Hungarian State Archives for supplying me with copies of Ferdinand Eber’s correspondence. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Jeffrey Makala, Librarian for Special Collections at the Cooper Library, and the University of South Carolina, for providing the Frederick Miller sketch of Solferino used on the cover of this book. Once a draft of the manuscript was finished, three old friends and fellow historians, David Jordan, Richard Levy, and John Shy read all or part of it and offered many good suggestions. Later, Raymond Grew gave the manuscript a very careful reading. His criticisms and suggestions—as well as general advice—have made this a better book than it would have otherwise been. The same can be said for James Holoka’s subsequent pruning of the text. To all who helped, I am deeply grateful.

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Prologue

4

In the spring of 1859, French and Austrian armies numbering

together in the hundreds of thousands converged on northern Italy. Many traveled to this centuries-old battleground as their predecessors had, by ship, wagon, and their own feet. Many more came by train, the new mode of travel that was about to transform the art of war as it had transformed so much else. Waiting for them was the army of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, recently allied to France and hoping a war would break the power of Austria in the region. The war that ensued lasted ten weeks, surprising contemporaries by its brevity. In recent memory there had not been a short war between the great powers. The late war in the Crimea had lasted the better part of two years, the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s nearly a decade, and the wars of Napoleon a generation. To its contemporaries in Europe and America, especially to those of a liberal bent of mind, the conflict in Italy loomed larger than any since 1815. It did so because it involved the most stirring issue of the nineteenth century: a people’s struggle to become a nation. And not just any people. No other struggle for independence in the era seized the public imagination as did that of the Italians, who for centuries had been dominated by foreign powers. Their plight captured all the more attention because for almost two millennia their culture and landscape had fascinated people across Europe and beyond. The ruins of antiquity, the towns of the Middle Ages, the art of the Renaissance, the magnetic spirituality of Rome, and the physical beauty of the peninsula gave Italy a unique appeal. They also made the fate of Italy seem almost a moral obligation. Was not a people who had contributed so much to the progress of civilization deserving of independence? Today the 1859 war does not own a place in public memory except in Italy, where it is known as “la seconda guerra d’indipendenza.” Even there, however, it is dwarfed by the more sensational events that bracket it: Garibaldi’s defense of Rome (1848–49) and his descent on Sicily at the head of “the thousand” in 1860. Had he played a larger role in 1859, or had the war achieved its original goal of driving the

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Austrians completely out of northern Italy, it would figure larger in narratives of the period. As it is, the war, like many second acts, is a disappointment, a necessary but not memorable part of the drama of Italian independence. What is lost in ignoring the war is a realization of its murderousness. So bloody was the battle of Magenta (June 4) that it provided the name for a new variant of red dye while casualties at Solferino (June 24) exceeded 40,000, more than on any one day of the American Civil War. Such a figure may not shock readers today, familiar with the bloodbaths of World Wars I and II. People in 1859, however, were horrified by the killing. Their memories were stocked with stories of the Crimea, where disease, not bullets and bayonets, had been the primary cause of death. Of course they understood that war is always about killing the enemy, but Magenta, and especially Solferino, awakened a new dread. How long would it be, contemporaries began to worry, before the battlefield lost its identity as a field of honor and heroism and became merely a place of slaughter? They did not know the answer. We do. The evidence that the battles of 1859 aroused a new sense of war’s horror is considerable. The first photographs of the dead of war were taken during this war; the casualties of Solferino led directly to the founding of the International Red Cross; the transport of the wounded became a popular subject for artists; and a new form of war memorial, ossuaries displaying the bones of the dead, rose on all the war’s major battlefields within a generation. Also worth mentioning are the contemporary rumors that the war ended when it did because the emperor of France, Napoleon III, had been so distraught by what he saw at Solferino. Whether the rumors were true is not important; that contemporaries thought they might be attests to the more general sense of horror felt after the battle. With all that was anticipated about this war, all that ensued during the fighting, and all the practices subsequently inspired by the terrible casualties, it was inevitable that many visitors would be lured to its battlefields. During the war, travelers changed itineraries hoping to view a battle or possibly a siege; neutral powers dispatched military observers to report on the performance of the various armies; newspapers sent reporters to inform the public and increase their circulation; artists, following a very old tradition, set out to paint what they saw and what they did not; and various good Samaritans arrived eager to help the wounded and console the dying. Even a few knights errant showed up, men enamored of a cause or simply of war itself. Perhaps the most unusual visitor was a businessman seeking to conclude a deal

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Prologue

3

with Napoleon III. He wound up instead assisting the wounded of not just this war but virtually every war that has followed. In the months following the war, the flow of visitors continued. Many were tourists, on their way to someplace else but curious to see sites of death and glory and take away relics they could find or purchase. A few came with cameras. Artists also kept appearing, some to refresh their memory and others to see the battlefields for the first time. And occasionally military analysts showed up seeking to understand better what had happened and why. As the months turned into years and subsequent events deflated the significance of 1859, the number of visitors declined. While duly recorded in the national narrative as an important step in the process of unification, it seemed to be a faltering step because the war had been stopped short of its proclaimed purpose. But at specific times and places, sizable groups gathered to witness the unveiling of a memorial or celebrate an anniversary. On the fiftieth (1909), great crowds gathered at Solferino, including veterans from all the corps that had been in the battle, men with real memories of what the war had been like. On the hundredth (1959), the veterans were all dead, but President Charles de Gaulle of France together with President Giovanni Gronchi of Italy went to Solferino to remember them. They also hoped to solidify their partnership by linking it to the earlier alliance. Old soldiers both, the two men were presumably moved by walking over ground where thousands had perished. Whether their respective publics, particularly the French, were stirred on learning of their meeting is less likely. The 1859 war was an important fact, but with so many subsequent wars to remember and so many recent war memories to sort through, how was one to feel anything about a distant war that even historians paid little attention to? This question persists because we routinely measure a war’s significance by its political consequences. In the case of the 1859 war, those consequences were immediately deemed disappointing by the war’s anticipated beneficiaries, the Italians, not to mention the war’s losers, the Austrians. And many in France, despite the cheers that greeted the army returning to Paris, thought the enterprise a waste of blood and treasure. But if we look at a different set of consequences, the war takes on a different aspect. For in turning our gaze away from the political, other consequences—social, cultural, and aesthetic— become more noticeable. We can see, in fact, that this brief conflict jolted consciousness as did no other European war between 1815 and 1914 and in some of the same ways World War I would, despite their differences in scale and duration.

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This book looks at the war closely through the experiences of its visitors: who they were, why they came, and how their coming mattered. It is they who are largely responsible for why the war should be viewed as a significant moment in the imagining, valuing, representing, and remembrance of war and its participants. Their role sets them apart from visitors to earlier wars, whose presence seldom had significance beyond their personal lives. In telling the stories of the visitors to the battlefields of 1859, I have created a thickly peopled narrative. Each chapter will introduce a number of individuals. Some the reader will come to know well, others hardly at all. Their actions and testimonies matter most. The themes and arguments the book offers are embedded in the experiences and thoughts of the characters, much as in a work of fiction. Except that the people in this book and the things they say and do were as real as the battlefields they visited, either during or after the war. Although the form of this book will sometimes appear to be novelistic, there is nothing make believe in it. Attitudes about war cannot be understood in evolutionary terms. Every possible response seems to have already been enunciated in antiquity in a single text, the Iliad. There, the prevailing view is the heroic, which imagines the battlefield as a field of honor where a man may win fame and glory for himself and his state or people. This view has lived on, suggesting that the urge to valorize war, however much shaped by particular cultural values, comes from deep within us. In the mid-nineteenth century, the heroic view was very much a presence in the minds of the soldiers who went to war, the visitors who followed them, and the public who watched the proceedings from afar. Certainly this was true in Italy in 1859 What happened there over the course of ten weeks, however, inspired a challenge to that view, a challenge the likes of which had not been seen for centuries. Because the story of that challenge is so bound up with the responses and initiatives of individuals, some of whom displayed considerable physical and moral courage, it is a story that even Homer might have thought worth telling.

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Chapter 1

4

Preparations for the Show

The War of 1859 was conceived during a secret visit to a spa. Early

in the evening of July 20, 1858, the prime minister of PiedmontSardinia, traveling on a false passport, arrived by train at Plombières, a spa in eastern France. With him was a junior official of the ministry of foreign affairs. Finding no vacancies in the town’s hotels, the two men spent the night in a modest pension. At 11 o’clock the next morning, the prime minister met privately with the emperor of France. Scarcely anyone knew of this meeting. The emperor had not told his government, nor did anyone in Turin besides the king and his minister of war know of it. There was good reason for keeping it hidden. Secret diplomacy has its uses, especially in contexts where principles and passions have been fused. Such was the context of this meeting. For over forty years the peace of Europe had rested on agreements reached at Vienna in 1815, following the final defeat of Napoleon. Among those agreements, which were determined by the four principal powers of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain, was the decision to restore Lombardy and Venetia to Austria. This decision, along with a number of other territorial arrangements, was intended to restore order and a rough balance of power in the wake of twenty years of revolution and war. From the point of view of rulers seeking stability and hoping to guarantee their own ascendancy, the granting of Lombardy and Venetia to Austria made good sense. But the legitimacy of Austrian rule was contested by many who once again had to live under it. To assess their number is impossible. Common to most, despite their often sharp political differences, is thought to have been a belief in a growing cultural nationhood (“italianità”) that was assumed to

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inhere within the people dwelling from the Alps to Sicily. Though only a small minority in the peninsula might speak Italian on a daily basis, embedded within the consciousness of all were presumed to be values and practices distinctly Italian. Thus, to create Italy as a unitary state was merely to give political form to an already existing community.1 Sharing in the dream of an Italy free and united under the rule of Italians were many people across Europe and in America. Some had been to Italy, while others knew it only by books and pictures. Virtually all assumed that an Italy free of foreign rule was simply a matter of natural justice. For a key principle of liberalism in postNapoleonic Europe was the right of discrete peoples to have their own polity, hence the widespread support for Greek independence. Italians deserved no less. Over the next three decades, there were sporadic episodes of political unrest up and down the peninsula in cities where Austria did not actually rule but had influence over those who did. Risings in Naples in 1820 and Modena and Parma in 1831, though easily put down, were taken to be symptoms of a widespread desire for independence. So too was the founding in 1831 of a new revolutionary society, “Young Italy,” by Giuseppe Mazzini, whose incessant plotting made him a bogeyman to governments and ruling elites across Europe. The fact that Mazzini’s plots were conceived in London, where he lived safe from the reach of his enemies for much of his life, made him seem all the more sinister. With the inauguration in 1846 of a pope (Pius IX) ostensibly committed to more liberal practices than any of his predecessors in living memory, hopes for a new Italy rose. But the occupation of Ferrara by Austrian troops in July 1847, an occupation supposedly sanctioned by the Treaty of Vienna, reminded Italians that the great powers would deal with Italy as it served their interests. Finally, in the spring of 1848, it seemed foreign rule over Italy might come to an end. Revolution broke out in Palermo in January, and soon after in cities from Naples to Vienna. In Milan, after five days of fighting in late March, the Austrian garrison was forced to leave the city and retreat to the Quadrilateral, the four fortified cities that stood between Lombardy and Venetia. The success of the Milanese emboldened King Charles Albert of Piedmont to declare war on Austria. Volunteers rushed to the aid of the Piedmontese army, which on May 30 defeated the Austrian army at Goito. But the king did not follow up his victory, giving the Austrians, under General Radetzky, time to regroup and enlarge their forces. On July 24, they defeated the Piedmontese at Custoza and forced them out of Lombardy. An uneasy

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Preparations for the Show

7

armistice ensued and was finally broken in the spring of 1849, when Charles Albert was once more persuaded to take the field. Defeat at Novara on March 23 ended the king’s ambition and his reign. He abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emanuel II, hoping thereby to forestall an Austrian invasion of Piedmont. He then left Piedmont for Portugal, where he died in a monastery three months later. After a tumultuous year, the status quo ante had been nearly restored. Only the republics established at Rome and Venice remained and both had collapsed by the end of July. Venice had surrendered to the Austrians, Rome to an army sent by France, whose president was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon, who had made northern Italy the cornerstone of his empire despite describing his campaigns in the peninsula as wars of liberation. In restoring papal government to Rome, Louis Napoleon appeared as a man of order as well as a defender of the Church. But his coup d’etat in December 1851 and subsequent re-establishment of his uncle’s empire in November 1852 left people across Europe wary of his ambitions, including what he might have in mind with regard to the “Italian Question.” As a young man, he and his brother had been involved in a failed uprising in the Romagna. Now, as Emperor of France, he might not only dream but, if circumstances allowed, do as he wished. And for a Bonaparte, doing usually involved war. In March 1854, France and England declared war on Russia. In forging an alliance, the two powers reversed a centuries-long pattern of hostility. While each had its own motives for declaring war, together they appeared as a liberal alliance opposed to the most reactionary regime on the continent. Ten months later, in January 1855, Piedmont joined the alliance, hoping to benefit politically by its timely intervention in a war that had gotten bogged down. A fifteen-thousand-man force under General Alfonso La Marmora was dispatched to the Crimea, and in August performed well at Tchernaya, the only battle it took part in. Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, had been the principal figure urging Victor Emanuel to go to war. Cavour reasoned that by joining the alliance and providing a much needed infusion of troops, he could all but ensure that the affairs of Italy, or at least the interests of Piedmont, would gain a serious hearing—possibly some form of action—at the peace conference to be held following the war. What he got instead, when the powers met in Paris in the spring of 1856, were expressions of sympathy from Napoleon. More than soothing words, however, were needed if Italy was to be helped. Despite everything written and said about Italy achieving

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independence “by itself,” the events of 1848–49, not to mention the jealousies and suspicions between the various states, had left many Italians looking for a deus ex machina. Who better to perform the role than the man whose personal and family history declared him a friend of Italy? This reputation was tested in January of 1858 when Napoleon was the target of an assassination attempt by an Italian revolutionary, Felice Orsini. While subsequently waiting trial for his crime, Orsini wrote a letter to the emperor pleading not for his life but for “my country.” He urged Napoleon “to give Italy the independence which her children lost in 1849 through the fault of the French themselves.”2 But neither a bad conscience nor the fear of another attempt on his life— vaguely hinted at in the letter—was needed to persuade Napoleon to take up the role of liberator. It was one that greatly appealed to his sense of himself as a political leader while offering very real rewards. A victory over Austria promised to justify the name he bore, enlarge his influence in European affairs, and inspire greater enthusiasm at home for his dynasty. Hence the meeting at Plombières with Cavour, who understood how well aligned the ambitions of the rulers of France and Piedmont had become. The conference lasted the better part of the day. Napoleon began the proceedings by declaring that “he had decided to support Sardinia with all his power in a war against Austria.” From there the discussion went to the “main problem” of finding “grounds for war” that would position Austria as the aggressor in public opinion. Ideally, an uprising against Austria would present itself in the not too distant future. If not, protests might be deliberately stirred up in Massa and Carrara, towns in the Duchy of Modena. Whatever the occasion, the protesters would be prompted to appeal to Piedmont for support, possibly even annexation. Victor Emanuel would decline the appeal but send a “naughty and menacing note” to the Duke of Modena. He could then be expected to reply in an “impertinent manner” because of his confidence in Austrian backing, and the war would begin. Given the general sympathy for Italian liberation, the war, however manufactured, would win widespread support, allowing Cavour and Napoleon to view themselves as acting on the side of history as well serving their own interests. Once the allies were victorious—an outcome taken for granted— Italy would be divided into four parts: the kingdoms of North Italy, Central Italy, Naples, and a small rump state comprising Rome and its environs. Titular head of this confederation would be the pope, but as “sovereign in law over the richest and most powerful part of Italy,” Victor Emanuel “would be sovereign in fact over the whole peninsula.”3

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For its help, France would receive Savoy and Nice, not to mention the gratitude of a newly powerful neighbor. To seal the alliance, a marriage was proposed between Napoleon’s thirty-six-year-old nephew, Prince Jerome, known familiarly as “Plon-Plon,” and Victor Emanuel’s pious fifteen-year-old daughter, Clotilde. This part of the negotiations was discussed at some length during the afternoon carriage ride the two men took, with the emperor at the reins. Neither man thought very much about the future happiness of the couple; the stakes were too high for such concerns. And the difference in age between the couple might not have mattered had the prince been less a libertine and the princess less a model of piety. Dynastic unions are seldom pretty or happy, and this one between a family with a short pedigree and the oldest ruling house in Europe was to be no exception. Before long, Clotilde was viewed as a sacrifice to realpolitik, “the Iphigenia of Italy.”4 The discussions that summer day at Plombières did not remain a secret for long. Cavour had been spotted and his purpose readily surmised. It became more apparent in the autumn when articles critical of Austrian rule in Italy began appearing regularly in the French press. Some were commissioned by the government, others merely encouraged. Obviously, the emperor was trying to rouse support for a war he knew many would believe unnecessary. Conservative Catholics would strongly object, while Liberals would be reluctant to cheer Napoleon even in the role of liberator. This press campaign, though it achieved little in France, was widely noted. By the end of the year, the possibility of war was being discussed openly in Europe and America. On New Year’s Day 1859 the possibility became a probability. At a reception for the diplomatic corps, Napoleon found a moment to lament to the Austrian ambassador that the relations between their two countries should be “so poor.” The comment, though immediately softened with a profession of enduring friendship for Kaiser Franz Joseph personally, sent stock markets plummeting. Nine days later the markets received another jolt. In an opening speech to parliament in Turin, Victor Emanuel spoke of conditions in Italy, and noted that “the cry of anguish . . . comes to us from many points.” These signals were not misread. “The King of Sardinia,” concluded Lord Malmesbury, the English foreign secretary, “can only mean war.”5 The Austrians also understood their meaning and responded with the dispatch of additional troops to the Lombardy-Piedmont border. They would have sent even more had they known that at the end of January, Napoleon and Victor Emanuel had signed a secret treaty confirming the negotiations at Plombières. By its terms, France

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agreed to supply two hundred thousand men and Piedmont one hundred thousand to the army that was to expel the Austrians from Italy. In the following weeks a sense of crisis developed as the two sides girded themselves for war. Besides dispatching more troops to Lombardy, the Austrians constructed three new forts at Venice, a potential target for the French navy as well as a destination for its army. For their part, the Piedmontese stocked their frontier fortresses with additional supplies and ordered sixty thousand rifles from France to replace outdated smoothbore muskets. Volunteers were also coming to Piedmont, drawn by the hope that the liberating of Italy might be at hand. Meanwhile, the neutral powers tried to head off a conflict that promised to not only undo the settlement of 1815 but expand into a general and potentially disastrous European war. The specter of such a conflagration prompted a frenzy of diplomacy. Telegraph wires between the capitals of Europe hummed with proposals for preventing war. So heavy was the traffic in messages that Malmesbury, hardly slow of mind at fifty-two, confessed that it was “very trying to the memory.”6 The flurry of telegrams was in response to Cavour’s announcement on March 6 that Piedmont would mobilize its reserve forces, followed by Russia’s proposal twelve days later that a congress should be summoned to try to resolve the crisis. Ironically, this proposal soon provided the occasion for war. Austria viewed such a conference as bound to weaken its position in northern Italy, especially if only Piedmont among the Italian states was to have a role in it. Moreover, with thousands of volunteers now streaming into Piedmont, it seemed to Vienna that Cavour and Victor Emanuel intended war. On April 12, therefore, the Austrians insisted that the Piedmontese disarm before the congress could meet. A week later, under pressure from not only England but France—Napoleon was growing fearful of possible Prussian intervention and the lack of support for war among his own people—the Piedmontese agreed to disarm. Peace did not follow. On the same day (April 19), a meeting of the Ministerial Council in Vienna, presided over by the emperor, decided to send an ultimatum to Turin, calling for unconditional disarmament and demanding a reply within seventy-two hours. Franz Joseph’s government almost certainly had not yet heard of the Piedmontese decision to disarm, but it hardly mattered. The Austrian strategy now was to humiliate Piedmont and the ultimatum, formally presented to Cavour on the twenty-third, was the chosen weapon. If Piedmont capitulated then the status quo in northern Italy would remain; if not, the kingdom risked facing Austria alone, given Napoleon’s growing anxieties. But Austria did not anticipate that the ultimatum would

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dissolve those anxieties. In a classic instance of overreach—which would be repeated a half century later—the Austrians had positioned themselves as the aggressor. Cavour and Napoleon now had a pretext for war. They also had reason to believe Prussia would stand aside, since Austria could no longer claim to be the aggrieved party. Finally, the ultimatum turned French public opinion toward war. Napoleon was relieved, his ally jubilant. “I leave the last sitting of the Piedmont Parliament,” Cavour remarked after informing the members of Parliament of the Austrian demands, “the next I attend will be of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy.” On April 26, with the formal rejection of the ultimatum in hand, the Austrian envoys left Turin. Accompanying them to the frontier was thirty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Govone, a man of quick intelligence, surpassing charm, and a “sweet, almost feminine” voice that had served him well in a series of diplomatic postings starting in 1850, when he had been sent to Prussia. He was also brave to a fault, as witnessed in his joining the famous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava during the Crimean War, despite his status as an observer. Over time, Govone had become a favorite of both General Alfonso La Marmora, the Piedmontese minister of war, and, more importantly, Cavour, who admired his “calm and skeptical mind.”7 Thus, when tensions mounted in late February of 1859, Govone was the natural choice to go to Milan and prepare a report on Austrian preparations for war. Six weeks later, he was the natural choice again to serve as escort for the Austrian envoys. On May 1, Govone himself left Turin for San Salvatore, the headquarters of the king. A war was about to be fought, a war requiring the support of what many considered the finest army in Europe. And that army was coming. The French, however, were less prepared for war than a year’s plotting might have suggested. Grumbling about deficiencies in arms and supplies was widespread. Shoes, shirts, and horses were lacking, so was artillery, which was more worrisome. Two weeks into the campaign, the French had only ninety cannons in Italy. When General Randon replaced General Vaillant as minister of war on May 4, he remarked that “everything was lacking except courage.”8 He might have added speed of deployment. The vanguard of the French army had already begun arriving on Piedmont soil as the king and Cavour were considering the ultimatum. Some units came by foot over Mont Cenis or Mont Genèvre, and others came by boat from Marseilles, Toulon, or, in the case of the African troops, from various Algerian ports. Units that came by sea from France first traveled by rail from

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Figure 1.1 French troops crossing Mont Cenis. Source: Illustrated London News, May 28, 1859

their encampments to their embarkation points; those crossing the Alps to Susa and from there going to Turin or Alessandria rode by train before and after. The main body of the army followed once the ultimatum had been rejected. Whatever the route, the speed of arrival owed much to the excellent railroad systems of the allies. In late February, less than two months before his death, Alexis de Tocqueville had told a friend that the railway line from Marseilles to Toulon was “being pushed forward at an unheard of rate,” so that the completion time had been pushed forward from mid-summer to March. Had he lived a few weeks longer, de Tocqueville would have realized what “great object” had inspired “such efforts.”9 The Austrians, not much better prepared, were also on the move. On April 27 Vienna ordered Count Franz von Gyulai, the Commander of Austrian forces in northern Italy, to take his three corps across the Ticino, the river boundary between Lombardy and Piedmont. Additional units were also alerted, as was the Austrian railroad. For the army of Franz Joseph also depended on trains to move men and supplies, despite already having a large quantity of both in Lombardy and Venetia. Rail passage from Vienna to Lombardy could take two weeks, often slowed by congestion or accidents. But that was still

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six times faster than an army on foot and horseback had made the journey sixty years before. Prior to 1859, railroads had played a small logistical role in war. Now, with armies of many tens of thousands of men in the field and on the move for weeks, possibly months, at a time, trains had become a critical instrument of war. And in this war, they would play a tactical role in battle for the first time. Another precedent was set when the leaders of the armies in 1859 also went to war by train. Victor Emanuel left Turin for his headquarters on April 29, Napoleon set off from Paris on May 10, and Franz Joseph departed for the front on May 29. Of the three, Napoleon, ever conscious of the value of showing himself to advertise his purposes, made the most of the opportunity. His departure from Paris was celebrated as if he were already victorious. From the Tuileries to the railway station surged a “dense mass of human beings,” everyone crying “Vive l’Empereur.” Shoving aside the military escort, people rushed up to the emperor’s coach “shouting like madmen,” wrote the correspondent for the New York Times who was in the thick of the crowd that day.10 Finally reaching the station, the emperor and Prince Napoleon boarded their train accompanied by their wives, who went as far as Montereau, where they dined in the station with the subprefect and local authorities. Afterward, everyone accompanying Napoleon to Italy received three photographs taken by Disdéri, one of the emperor standing, a second of him seated, and the third with the empress and their son, the Prince Imperial. Handed out as well was a small gold medal of the Virgin, inscribed, “Mary, pray for us.”11 Hearing of this gesture, Catholics might be less concerned about the emperor’s intentions. At several subsequent stops, the emperor and his entourage were greeted by crowds shouting “Vive l’Empereur” and “Vive l’Italie.” In Dijon, at one in the morning, at least half the citizens were said to be waiting to greet the imperial train. Some of this enthusiasm was surely spontaneous, tied to the natural desire to see the emperor in person. But too much was at stake in this expedition to leave such matters to chance. If a tiring, all-night train ride was to be seen as a “triumphal march through the country,”12 there needed to be preparations. Care was also taken at Marseilles to treat the local bishop, Eugene de Mazenod, with warmth and respect. Well aware that many in ecclesiastical circles, including Mazenod, did not approve of the war, Napoleon did what he could to show that he was still an ardent supporter of the Church. After dining with the emperor, Mazenod confided in his journal that “everyone noticed that Napoleon several times had spoken to him and touched his

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hand.”13 Whatever the emperor did, of course, was important. But that he be seen doing it was often more important. Neither of the two other war leaders chose to turn his journey to the war into a public spectacle. The king had no opportunity, since his trip was too short; Franz Joseph had no time, coming as late as he did to the war. All three leaders, however, were eager to go, and two had some experience of war. Franz Joseph, the youngest of the three, had been enamored of war since childhood. At the age of five, he had declared, “What is military is what I like best,”14 a preference confirmed by his lifelong love of military dress. He saw his first battle at the age of eighteen, largely as an observer at Santa Lucia (1848). Even more passionate about soldiering was Victor Emanuel. Like his opponent, he also had received a military education, but in his first campaign in 1848, he had commanded a division and been wounded at Goito—facts that the thirty-nine-year-old King reminded his army of in a proclamation issued before he left Turin. “We have made each other’s acquaintance before this . . . in the heat of battle.”15 Disappointed in 1855 that the political situation in Piedmont had precluded him from leading his soldiers to the Crimea, the King now had a chance to prove his mettle in front of his people. His ally, Napoleon, had never been in a battle, unless one counts his youthful involvement in two failed coup attempts against the government of Louis Philippe. The emperor’s military education was similarly slight, having taken only a short artillery course with the Swiss army in 1830. But at the age of fifty-one, and carrying a name of which much was expected and even more remembered, he was determined to go to war. And there was nobody to dissuade him, as the British had done in 1855 when he had planned to go out to the Crimea. Napoleon did not suppose that he had inherited his uncle’s military genius. He did presume, however, that he could imitate his success in Italy. In the order of the day issued on landing in Genoa on the morning of May 12, he bid the soldiers of the armée d’Italie to be worthy of “her elder sister.”16 For they would soon discover that “every step” they took would remind them of an earlier Napoleonic victory. The Piedmontese were no less mindful of the past and hopeful for the future. When the imperial yacht sailed into the harbor that morning—a splendidly timed sight—huge crowds gathered and cheered as if the emperor had already saved Italy. Two weeks before, they had greeted the landing of the first French troops in the same manner. But the arrival of the man carrying the magic name sent the crowds into paroxysms of excitement. And that evening, when he appeared

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at the Teatro Carlo Felice an hour into the performance of the scheduled opera, he was greeted by a standing ovation and cries of “Viva l’Imperatúre!” “Viva l’Italia!” “Viva l’Alleanza!”17 The willingness of these three monarchs to expose themselves to the risks of war will seem both quaint and foolish. Kings and presidents today review armies on parade grounds and sometimes pay hasty visits to war zones. They do not lead their soldiers into battle or believe they should. In 1859, attitudes were different. The public still expected its leaders to go to war if they had any capacity for doing so, and leaders themselves felt bound to do so. “I am going,” Victor Emanuel said before departing Turin, “to send some thousands of men to death, and how could I ask them to die for Italy if I was not prepared to show them by my own example that the cause was one worth dying for?”18 Even queens were not immune to such feelings. At the beginning of the Crimean War, Queen Victoria had been filled with a longing to be at the head of her army “in these stirring times.”19 Such desires testify to a tradition stretching back to antiquity. Emperors and kings were, before anything else, war leaders, and the battlefield was the pre-eminent site for winning honor and displaying courage. Of course, the leaders in 1859 acknowledged in their more reflective moments that war was, as Franz Joseph said, “the scourge of mankind.” But humanitarian pieties were not uttered when the cause was deemed just or necessary. And certainly not in 1859. Franz Joseph would fight to defend his rights, Victor Emanuel to save Piedmont and win freedom for Italians. To the French as well, sons and grandsons of men who had found gloire in Italy, the war seemed just. It also seemed, as is often the case in the lead-up to war, as if it would be a pleasant, brief excursion to a storied landscape far different from the Crimea and the obstinate enemy they had met there four years before. Scrawled on the coaches of the trains leaving the gare de Lyon in April was the phrase, “trains du plaisir.”20 Irony aside, the phrase should remind us that armies going abroad are more than a body of soldiers bent on doing damage. They are also curious tourists, visitors to lands where often they must engage a climate, a people, a language, and a variety of customs unlike their own—as well as a host of men waiting to kill them. And before the logistical capacities of twentieth-century states enabled armies to be largely self-sufficient, soldiers—notably officers—were apt to behave very much like tourists, eating in restaurants, staying in inns and hotels, and patronizing shops and cafes. Inevitably, they complained about being overcharged. The Genoese, despite their “hurrahs,” complained a Zouave captain, “exploit us daily without shame.”21

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Some soldiers kept diaries of their travels, others made sketches of picturesque vistas, and a few took photographs or at least wanted to. Captain Émile Vanson often regretted that he did not have his camera with him during the campaign.22 Perhaps the perfect example of the soldier as tourist was Corporal Jean-Marie Déguignet, who purchased a French-Italian grammar en route to Italy and later, in Florence, bought “a map of the theatre of war . . . to learn . . . just what our situation was.”23 As a body of visitors, the French were traversing ground honored in national memory. From the moment they crossed Mont Cenis on a road improved by the first Napoleon a half century earlier, they were in a land redolent of his victories. One in particular was Marengo, where in 1800 Napoleon had handed the Austrians a crushing defeat. Now a new French army had come to Italy imagining similar feats and envisioning a journey to Vienna “by the road which led past Marengo.”24 But a sense of history may not be useful to an army. The armée d’Italie gradually learned that the climate of northern Italy could be almost as brutal as that of the Crimea, and that Austrian soldiers were a match for themselves in fighting qualities and a willingness to die. One other leader went to war by train. He was neither an emperor nor a king, and despite being recently made a major-general in the Piedmontese army, he was not a regular soldier. Yet Giuseppe Garibaldi commanded more respect among the general public and inspired more enthusiasm among the men who followed him than any of the other leaders in the war. Garibaldi had first become known to the public for his military exploits in South America, particularly during the campaign for Uruguayan independence (1842–46). Returning to Italy he added to his fame in the brief guerrilla campaign he had waged against Austria in 1848 and in defending (unsuccessfully) the Roman Republic against France in 1849. Following defeat, he had led his volunteer force in a dramatic retreat across central Italy, during which his beloved wife Anita had died. By virtue of these efforts, he embodied the romance of war like no other figure of his age. A warm, simple man, seemingly without pretense or deceit, he led by the magnetism of his character and was held in awe not only by those who served with him but by the millions across the globe who read or heard stories of his exploits. Those who wrote about his deeds and character, notably Giuseppe Mazzini and his followers, had made him a celebrity, someone whom people knew about, wanted to know more about, and expected much from. Once hostilities broke out, Garibaldi made his availability

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known. Several private individuals as well as journalists interviewed him during the war and then wrote up their experience. Such a figure, the “bravest of the Italian patriots,” as one American newspaper called him, raised the odds of success of any campaign he joined, while elevating it into something nobler than it had been.25 He was, however, a difficult figure for the political leaders of his day to deal with. His allegiance was to an Italy he was striving to create, not to the House of Savoy and certainly not to an emperor whose army had brought down the Roman Republic ten years before, and who he knew distrusted him. But Cavour believed that Garibaldi would join with allies he did not love in order to fight an enemy he wanted more than anything else to defeat. He also believed that the distrust and disdain regular soldiers had for Garibaldi and his volunteers could be overcome. Thus in December, the two men met privately in Turin. Cavour outlined the plan devised at Plombières and asked Garibaldi to raise a body of volunteers whose first mission would be to incite the insurrection in Modena that would lead to war. Garibaldi agreed, realizing the opportunity at hand. “This time we shall do it!”26 he told a friend not long after. At a second meeting in Turin in late February, Cavour told Garibaldi to begin enlisting and training volunteers. He also arranged an audience with the king while taking steps to avoid offending the amour-propre of the Piedmontese army. Garibaldi’s commission as a major general would be signed not by the king, which was the usual form, but by Cavour as acting minister of war. Moreover, the volunteers were to be trained at Susa, forty miles from Turin, out of view of the public and the army. Once the Austrian ultimatum cancelled the need for the insurrection, Garibaldi’s role was rewritten. He was to march his three thousand five hundred man force, the cacciatori della Alpi, into Lombardy, to the area around Lago Maggiore. There, on ground familiar to him from the summer of 1848, he was to serve as a diversion to the Austrians, mounting attacks that would draw off units from their main force. He would also by his mere presence win support for the king. Garibaldi’s “name” was “the key to every heart,” as one observer put it. Having him in the field, whatever the objections to his politics or to his military methods, would make victory more valuable as well as more certain. Leaving Turin on May 25, the hero who was already becoming a legend drew a cheering crowd who cried “Guerra, guerra!” as the train pulled out of the station.27 The volunteers who rushed to serve with Garibaldi came mostly from Italy. Among them were two painters, Gerolamo Induno and Eleuterio Pagliano, ardent patriots who had seen battle. Induno had

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served with the Piedmont forces in the Crimea, and earlier during the defense of the Roman Republic in 1849. Pagliano had taken part in the uprising against the Austrians in Milan in March before 1848, known as the “Five Days,” and then, like Induno, had fought in Rome. Each man viewed war as a test of his patriotism and an opportunity for his art. They would be in battles that could later be transformed into heroic images to inspire the citizens of a new Italy. Nineteen-year-old Giulio Adamoli, who was studying mathematics at Pavia, was one of many students eager to serve with Garibaldi. A patriot to the core, he joined other students at the university in protests against the Austrian authorities in the autumn of 1858. In the process, he had become good friends with the five Cairoli brothers, four of whom in the years ahead would give their lives for the cause of Italian independence. In mid-January of 1859, Adamoli and his mother crossed the Ticino into Piedmont, settling first in Genoa and then moving on to Turin, where in March Giulio joined a distinguished grenadier regiment. A photograph taken when he enlisted shows the young soldier looking resplendent in his new uniform, a rifle at his side, and right hand at the brim of his shako as if to salute. Sporting a moustache and goatee, he looks older and more worldly than his years. Had you met him at the time, you would have been impressed with how tall he was—facilitating his enrollment in a grenadier regiment—and how smart.28 Included in the sprinkling of volunteers who came from other countries, men drawn sometimes as much by the leader as the cause, was John Whitehead Peard, a forty-seven-year-old Cornishman who might have stepped out of a medieval epic. He had arrived in Turin early in the morning of April 28. By mid-day, the minister of war had rejected his offer to serve as a volunteer on the grounds that he was “too old.” Undeterred, Peard managed to get an interview with Cavour to plead his case. “I have just arrived; I have left everything, country, friends, family. . . . I am a captain in England; the only favor I ask is permission to follow Garibaldi as a simple soldier. I have my own weapons; I want no pay, and I will take care of my own expenses. I ask only to be allowed to fight by the side of the general.” Cavour was impressed and gave the Englishman permission to join Garibaldi.29 Peard was something of a soldier manqué. He had been educated at Oxford and subsequently trained as a barrister, but a life at the law had not appealed to him. He wanted adventure, and so spent much of his time traveling—his eldest daughter was born in Rome—often on a 55-ton yacht he had built himself. He also served in the Duke of Cornwall’s militia, rising to the captaincy mentioned to Cavour.

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The outbreak of war in the Crimea in 1854 had finally seemed to give Peard a chance for the kind of adventure he had long sought. But when he tried to raise a crew of volunteers to sail his yacht to the East, he was stymied by the government’s impressment policy, which had cleared the docks of able seaman. Five years later, circumstances were more favorable. No policy or person could stop Peard from going to Italy. As for being “too old,” those who knew him would have laughed. Tall, unusually strong, and possessing a rugged constitution, Peard was as ready for the rigors of a campaign as men half his age. He was also a crack shot, able to hit targets at five hundred yards or more. And being a militia captain, he knew more about soldiering than many of his new companions. Knights errant also joined Napoleon’s army. If John Peard is out of an epic, Philip Kearny is pure romance. Born in New York City in 1814, Kearny was a soldier by trade. In 1839, two years after receiving his commission, he had been sent to France to study cavalry tactics and wound up fighting in Algeria with the Chasseurs d’Afrique under General Louis-Michel Morris. For his services he was rewarded the Legion of Honor. Later, he served in the Mexican War, where he lost his left arm. Recruiting work for the army followed, but Kearny returned to the field to fight against Indians in California, using his teeth to hold the reins of his horse. In 1857 marriage troubles prompted Kearny to leave America and move to Paris, where he was living when the war in Italy broke out. Kearny had traveled in Piedmont and Lombardy in his youth, but his eagerness to rejoin his old commander, now in charge of the Imperial Guard, had little to do with politics. Italy was simply another opportunity to fight. Using his reputation and connections, he was quickly appointed “as a volunteer” to Morris’s staff and before long was hosting a dinner for old comrades and friends at French headquarters in Alessandria. Volunteers like Peard and Kearny were scarcely a new phenomenon. Wars have always drawn men eager to do battle in other men’s conflicts. They may, like Peard, be devoted to a cause, or be lured, as Kearny was, by the excitement of battle itself. War is a stimulant to some men, offering moments of excitement and clarity that erase the confusions and compromises of everyday life. Were this not so, there might be fewer volunteers, perhaps even fewer wars. There might also be fewer curious visitors like Charles Furne, a 64-year-old Parisian who left for Italy on May 1. A publisher by trade and passionate admirer of the French army since his youth— his memory was said to be stocked with the histories of several

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regiments—Furne was an ardent traveler, who on an earlier visit to Italy had retraced the route of the first Napoleon’s army. It was to Spain, however, that Furne most frequently went, and in 1843 he anonymously published a brief account of his most recent trip, Voyage en Espagne, 1842. But the real testament of Furne’s love for Spain was the translation of Don Quixote he undertook after giving up the daily management of his publishing business. He spent ten years on the book he admired beyond all others, ten years in the company of a romantic gentleman not unlike himself. His friends sensed that he “identified” himself with the Don, and it is not difficult to see why. Furne was always dreaming of adventures, and his many journeys—to Algeria, England, and Switzerland, as well as to Italy and Spain (four times)—were lived as such. He relished the challenges of travel and never complained of its hardships, not even when brigands outside Malaga in 1834 stripped him and his companion of everything except the clothes they were wearing. That, as Furne loved to tell friends, had been an adventure! Italy now promised to be the same, and at last he would see a war.30 Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov thought he would as well. A prize graduate of the Nicholas Military Academy in St. Petersburg, the 29-year-old captain had already spent time observing the French and British armies but had not yet seen a battle. Nevertheless, he had novel ideas about how soldiers should be trained for maximum effectiveness on the battlefield. Now in the spring of 1859, he was dispatched to Piedmontese headquarters to serve as an official observer. His specific instructions were to report on the progress of the war, the qualities of the armies, and the effectiveness of the new rifled weapons. Included in his orders was a caution to avoid offending the “dignity” of his hosts when writing his reports.31 Omitted were funds to purchase a horse so that he might accompany the army in the field. When Dragomirov arrived in Turin, he had to borrow money from the chief of the Russian mission. Dragomirov was one of many officers from neutral countries sent to observe the war. Attached to one of the headquarters, they were expected to provide their governments with much the same kind of information Dragomirov was. One of the observers, Captain Ferdinand Lecomte of the Swiss army, had already established a reputation as a military intellectual. In 1856 he had founded the Revue Militaire Suisse, and in the following year had published a book on the great Swiss strategist, Baron Alexandre Jomini. The sending of observers to the seat of war was a recent and not altogether welcome practice. While it was anticipated that they would

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behave as friendly witnesses, their hosts often doubted their intentions and treated them as a nuisance or worse. In 1849 a Prussian general, Wilhelm von Wilessen, had watched the fighting first from the Piedmontese and then the Austrian lines, leading Cavour to see him as a virtual spy. Six years later, the French army in the Crimea refused access to a three-man American commission unless they pledged not to visit the Russian lines as well. In war, there is no useless information and, in the eyes of belligerents, no innocent gatherers of it. The British, who had tried so hard to prevent the war, dispatched three commissioners to Italy, one to each of the armies. In each case, the officer was known to be friendly to the host army, thereby making his task easier. Captain Edmund Mildmay could scarcely be expected to cause suspicion among the Austrians since he had served with them for 17 years before returning to England and becoming equerry to the Duke of Cambridge. Mildmay was not the government’s first choice, but he was deemed a safe one. So, it was believed, were the appointees to the other armies. Colonel George Cadogan would be replaying his earlier role with the Piedmontese army during the Crimean War. “A good linguist” with an “able pen,” Cadogan, like Giuseppe Govone, whom he had known in the Crimea, was another soldier recognized for his diplomatic talents.32 Less likely to succeed as an observer was Colonel Edward Claremont, who had served as British military attaché in Paris for many years and so seemed the logical choice for posting to the French army. But Claremont, though a rabid Francophile, had gained less respect during his years in Paris than he or his superiors imagined. The “poor fellow” would be easily managed once he arrived at French headquarters, thought General Fleury, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp.33 He had been delayed at Genoa when the Piedmontese ambassador to France informed Cavour that the colonel was no friend of Italy and “even less of Piedmont.”34 A larger group of observers preparing to descend on northern Italy knew they would be even less warmly welcomed than their military counterparts. By 1859 armies could not expect to wage war without journalists in attendance. Their stories, composed from what they saw, what they were told, and what they imagined, would be read soon after they were written, given the proximity of the seat of war to the major capitals and the presence of the telegraph wire. Those watching a war from afar were now kept abreast of events almost while they were happening. News of the first Napoleon’s victories in Italy had taken days to reach Paris; reports of his nephew’s expected triumphs would arrive in hours. A day after a major battle in early June, a French

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lieutenant would write his uncle assuming that he already knew more about the battle than did the nephew who had fought in it.35 Governments, however, wanted control over what was reported of their wars, lest the enemy—or the home public—learn what they should not. So it was that the Piedmontese and the Austrians immediately forbid correspondents to follow their armies, leaving news to come in the form of official pronouncements. Napoleon adopted another strategy. He took with him three trusted journalists to report favorably and discreetly. One wrote for the Moniteur, the official organ of the regime, another for the Constitutionnel, which was very friendly to the emperor. The third, hired by the Morning Chronicle of London, was Henry A. Delille, a 28-year-old American journalist and would-be playwright. He was also the husband of the actress and writer, Olive Logan. The couple had been living in Paris for almost two years, and had become very friendly with the emperor’s private secretary, Jean Mocquard, himself a writer of plays and novels. This connection doubtless helped Delille obtain his position with the proimperial Chronicle. To add to his control of information, the emperor also took with him a mobile press to publish orders and bulletins. The danger of not managing the flow of information from the seat of war had become dramatically clear in the Crimea. William Howard Russell’s dispatches to the Times criticizing British army administration had led to the fall of the Aberdeen government in January 1855. Never before had the influence of the press during war been so pointedly demonstrated. In a meeting with Lord Clarendon two months later, Napoleon, while acknowledging that a “free press” was a necessity in England, told the Foreign Secretary that the Times and other papers had done “incalculable damage” not only to England but to the alliance.36 Later that year, the Saturday Review, in its inaugural issue, declared that “this country is ruled by The Times.”37 The Times editor, John Thaddeus Delane, would have smiled at the hyperbole, but knew full well that Russell had shown how a “powerful writer” might move people at home. In the field, Russell and his peers were looked at by commanders, such as Marshal Canrobert, as disastrous (“funeste”).38 They might not be actual spies, but what they wrote, in the words of Lord Raglan, the British commander-in-chief, served the same purpose. “I am very doubtful, now that the communications are so rapid, whether a British army can long be maintained in the presence of a powerful enemy, that enemy having at his command, through the English Press and from London to his Headquarters by telegraph, every detail that can be required of the numbers, condition, and equipment of his opponent’s force.”39

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Such concerns were not forgotten after the war. Nor was Russell himself. He had become a very public symbol in service of conflicting interests, admired by some and despised by others. In the spring of 1859, rumor had it—and Delane of the Times wished—that he would go to Piedmont. Whether he would or not, having just returned from a grueling assignment covering the Indian mutiny, his peers had him in mind as they made plans to cover the war. He had become their model. One of those was the 28-year-old Frank Vizetelly, a talented draughtsman who had been working in Paris for Le Monde illustré, a popular illustrated weekly. But it was the Illustrated Times of London, owned by his brother Henry, which engaged Frank to go to Italy as a “special,” a reporter who drew what he saw as well as wrote about it. This new breed of correspondents had made a reputation for themselves during the Crimean War, when they had given people back home a more immediate sense of what was happening in a place scarcely less alien than the far side of the moon. If their sketches did not quite provide the illusion of “being there,” they at least had made the Crimea seem more real. Without an image of Sebastopol in mind, would readers have become so caught up in the siege? Soldiers in the Crimea were themselves struck by how “very like and correct” the pictures of their surroundings were. They were less happy with the images of battle. As one veteran told the American reporter, Richard McCormick, “these painters seem to think all our horses are fit for brewers, and that gunpowder makes no smoke.”40 Still, the home audience had been satisfied. Subscriptions to the Illustrated London News rose by a third during the war, while in Paris L’Illustration almost doubled its sales.41 And the Illustrated Times of London began publishing in June 1855, when “the War,” as the editor later stated, “was the great fact of the day.”42 It might not have been, argued those opposed to the war, without the illustrated papers. Early on, the Illustrated London News was criticized for whipping up war fever, and in late 1855, Edmund Fry of the Peace Party savagely attacked the paper. “[It] fattens more on the war than any other paper, and proportionally reckless are its endeavors to prolong the war.” The News answered these charges in a front page editorial, arguing that the war “has not been a source of profit” but “entailed very large expenses upon it.”43 Still, the paper did not deny that its circulation had risen during the war. Nor could it have denied that the speedy transmission of war news, complete with pictures, beguiled the public. Wars were becoming serial stories, like the novels routinely published in many newspapers. Each morning

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or afternoon—except for Sunday—readers could anticipate a new installment, often containing dramatic or sentimental moments that wars, like novels, inevitably provide. But the stories of war were real, and as the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray had told an audience during the Crimean War, “reality [is] more interesting than novels.”44 Even more, one might add, when accompanied by pictures. Italy, a land thick with history and memories, not to mention picturesque vistas, promised wonderful reading. Vizetelly left Paris on April 24, and in his first set of “Notes” described his train journey to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and his subsequent passage of Mont Cenis. So cold and so slow was the crossing that Vizetelly and two companions got down at one point and had a snowball fight to warm themselves. He finally reached Turin early on April 29, the day of the Austrian invasion, and the next day he witnessed the first French troops arrive in the city to the cheers of “almost the entire population.” Vizetelly’s own progress, however, was stalled. Though “unwearying” in his efforts, he could not get a pass to Piedmontese headquarters at San Salvatore.45 Even the intervention of the English ambassador to Turin, Sir James Hudson, was to no avail. On May 8, therefore, Vizetelly decided “to take my chance” and left Turin for Alessandria, the headquarters of the French army.46 Almost immediately he found himself in another kind of trouble. While walking on the ramparts of the fortress-city with his sketchbook in hand, the tall, red-bearded Vizetelly was arrested on suspicion of being a spy. It had not mattered that he was English and therefore officially a neutral, for it was widely known that the Conservative government of Lord Derby sympathized with Austria. In a letter to the English ambassador in Paris a few months before, Malmesbury had given vent to his dislike for France—”a curse to Europe”—and even more heatedly to his distaste for the “mischievous” Piedmont. “That Europe should be deluged with blood for the personal ambition of an Italian attorney and a tambour major, like Cavour and his master, is intolerable.”47 Such unbuttoned comments were reserved for private letters, but even in public, Malmesbury could not conceal his sympathies for Austria. Luckily, Vizetelly had as yet made no drawings of “military works” and so was released—but with a warning to make none. Picture making was not an innocent art in wartime; artists and photographers wandering about on their own were suspect. And who could be certain that jittery soldiers might not take it upon themselves to administer the standard punishment for spies, death? A few days before, a man from Pavia had been shot for spying for Austria, and two other Italians

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had been arrested just that morning. Vizetelly had drawn a sketch of the men being led away for interrogation. He did not yet know their fate, but he now understood their fear. “I have to be exceedingly cautious in everything I do.”48 More at liberty to roam about were two French painters, though one, Théodore Gudin, would have seemed out of place. Not only was he getting on in years—he was 56 but looked to Canrobert to be nearly 80—but he had made his reputation painting scenes from French naval history. In the 1840s Louis-Phillippe had asked him to do 97 such paintings, a commission that must have taxed the ingenuity even of Gudin. What Napoleon presumably had in mind when deciding to enlist the painter was that the campaign would eventually involve naval engagements on Lake Garda and very likely a blockade around Venice. These would be apt subjects for a marine painter, as would occasions of majesty such as the imperial entry into Genoa and a triumphal departure from Venice at the end of the war. Edouard Armand-Dumaresq had only begun trying his hand at battle pictures in the last few years after beginning his career as a painter of religious scenes. He probably would not have wound up in Italy if his rendition of the battle of Moscow had not been seen in the salon of 1857 by Marshal Vaillant, the minister of war. Vaillant then commissioned the 31-year-old artist to do a series of watercolors of the uniforms of the Imperial Guard. Two years later, when Vaillant was removed from the ministry and given a command in the armée d’Italie, he asked Armand-Dumaresq to accompany him. It was an offer an ambitious painter could not refuse and an opportunity to paint events he actually saw. The practice of artists accompanying armies to war had been nowhere more prevalent than in France, “whose history,” the art critic Charles Blanc later wrote, “is a battle history.”49 The Salon of 1859, which opened on April 15, was ample proof. “Never,” thought one critic, had there been an exhibition with so many war pictures. He asked, “Is this a sign of war?” Battle pictures, many of the Crimean War, scaled the walls, including one by Armand-Dumaresq. Scarcely any, however, pleased the poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire. He had little use for a genre that exuded “either falseness or nullity,” and no respect for the doyen of battle pictures, Horace Vernet, the “absolute antithesis of the artist.” Believing that “a real battle is not a picture,” Baudelaire was not the fairest judge of such art, though he was not alone in disparaging the often huge, bombastic battle scenes routinely exhibited in the salons.50 On the other hand, the one painting of war that Baudelaire did admire in the 1859 salon, François Tabar’s

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“Guerre de Crimée, fourrageurs,” a quiet scene of soldiers moving across a grassy landscape, might not have been deemed a military painting by Marshal Vaillant. Nor might the marshal have altogether appreciated the large somber picture by Ferdinand Wachsmuth, “Le lendemain de la prise du Mamelon-Vert. Episode du siège de Sebastopol.” Wachsmuth was an experienced painter of battle scenes, having accompanied the army to Algeria in 1830. But in depicting the interment of the dead on the day after a battle, this “frightful painting,” as Théophile Gautier termed it, was unlike anything he had done before.51 It was also unlike what the public or the critics—who largely ignored the canvas—were used to seeing. French artists had more or less dominated military painting in the decades after Waterloo. The twenty years of the first Napoleon’s wars, the long campaign in Algeria, and the war in the Crimea had provided subjects aplenty to tempt painters, especially since successive governments had been so generous in their commissions and purchases. But the first family of military painters resided in Munich, not Paris. Albrecht Adam, the father, had first gone on campaign in 1809 with the forces of Napoleon and his native Bavaria in their war against Austria. Fifty years later and widely acclaimed for his renderings of battles he had seen and many he had not, the 73-year-old artist left Munich to follow once more in the train of the French army. Two of his sons, Eugen and Franz, went with the Austrians, as they had in 1848. On this occasion, Eugen contracted with the Stuttgart illustrated weekly, Über Land und Meer, to send back sketches. One of his earliest, showing a squad of Tyrolean sharpshooters relaxing in a church in Locarno, dates the artist’s movements. Inscribed on the stone floor are the words, “In Locarno 25 May 1859.” Three weeks later, a London newspaper reported that a “Mr. Adam,” presumably Eugen, had been arrested by the Piedmontese. They had caught him “making sketches” while dressed in the “costume of a Tyrolese chasseur.” It seems that Eugen donned the uniform as a disguise so that he might become “a close observer.”52 He was soon released by the Piedmontese, presumably with a warning to dress henceforth in mufti. Artists of a different kind were already hard at work before Napoleon left for Italy. Early in May, the Paris mapmakers, Monroq Frères, began running ads for a colored, bird’s-eye-view map “so that people might follow the operations.”53 In London well known firms like Stanford and Wyld prepared new editions of old maps of northern Italy and readied themselves to create new maps that would trace the progress of the war. On May 2, Day & Son, a firm noted for its illustrated books, published a “bird’s eye view” of the Kingdom of Piedmont by

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Carlo Bossoli, whose work was widely admired in England. Before long, he was in the field with his sketchpad and a commission to do a set of illustrations. The illustrated weeklies also quickly got into the game. Le Monde illustré printed a map of the war zone in the supplement to its issue of April 30. This particular flurry of activity made good business sense, given the public’s general fascination with war and with wars of liberation in particular. Italy was not the terra incognita that the Crimea had been, but the public still needed visual guides. Maps could define space and distance as well as mark towns and rivers; the latter was expected to be an important feature of this war. To have a map of the seat of war was not only to have a seat at the war, but to be able, like the generals, to grasp the possibilities and constraints of the terrain. Soon, bookstores were having trouble meeting customer demand for maps. As the Daily News of London editorialized at the end of May, “wars and rumor of war . . . afford a great stimulus to the popular study of geographical and historical lore.”54 One American newspaper even published an article (“Pronouncing the Names of Places at the Seat of War”) that assumed the war to be a topic of general conversation.55 With the armies on the move, the press in attendance, and the public waiting expectantly, the show was about to begin. It was certain to be popular and bound to inspire stage representations while it was being fought as well as afterward. Theaters in London and Paris had done very well with the Crimean War, and the recent mutiny in India had already been dramatized at Astley’s Amphitheatre in London. War and theater have long shared a common vocabulary and a common fascination. Combatants and noncombatants alike have routinely gathered to watch real battles as if they were theater, and mock battles staged for political or commercial purposes have drawn audiences since antiquity. The practice, however, of translating war into public entertainments had become especially common in recent decades when so many wars were legitimized as essential, expressive acts of nations, both extant and emerging.56 Such wars mattered to more people than the dynastic conflicts of earlier eras; they also produced heroes whom the public was very ready, or easily persuaded, to admire and even love. Nelson, Wellington, Ypsilanti, and Garibaldi gave war a glamor that today, living as we do on the backside of the slaughters of the twentieth century and amid the terror strategies of the twenty-first, is hard to grasp. The exploits of those nineteenth century heroes overshadowed the grisly face and consequences of war. Such heroes owed something of their sparkle to Napoleon. He had redefined the practice of war,

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embellished its reputation, and left behind an intensified public interest in it. For fifty years after his death, no war could be fought without newspapers summoning his ghost. Such was the hold of the man and his wars on the imagination even of his enemies. So it was that on her visit to Paris in 1855, Queen Victoria had told the young Prince of Wales to kneel before the tomb of Napoleon. In doing so the queen perfectly registered the standing of Napoleon in the consciousness of her contemporaries. Bonaparte had been the mortal enemy of England, but also an exceptional man. Another kind of theatrical representation could also be expected. Since the late eighteenth century, artists had been producing panoramas, huge paintings that often required the entire wall space of structures built solely for their display. Battle scenes—on sea as well as land—were naturally suited to such scale, and often the artist sought to create a narrative sense of the battle by depicting its stages. These film-like exhibitions, often kept on display for months, even years, overwhelmed audiences. The sheer scale of the images prompted the illusion of being an eyewitness to the event itself. One could not simply look at a panorama, one was virtually swallowed into it. Was there a better medium to instill in the public the effect and meaning of great deeds? Napoleon may not have thought so. In 1810, after viewing the newly installed panorama of Wagram, the emperor is said to have ordered the creation of eight rotondas on the Champs-Élysées, each displaying a panorama of one of the greatest battles of the revolution or empire. The Russian campaign canceled the plan. Whether true or not, the story reveals that such representations were assumed to enhance fame and glory. No one doubted that the coming battles in Italy would be bloody. Certainly not the wives and mothers who watched their men go off to war. The potential results of those battles, however, seemed to outweigh the costs to many people. Many of the soldiers shared that view. Marching away in splendid uniforms that looked as if they had come from costume shops, the French and Piedmontese were in an ebullient mood. Rather less so were the Austrians. Their task was to defend the interests of an empire not liberate a people, and many who marched in the kaiser’s army neither loved him nor even understood the language he spoke. Still, several battalions of volunteers from Vienna did go off to war in high spirits, having had balls and concerts given for their benefit and a new march written in their honor by Johan Strauss the younger. Equally excited were some who simply read of their departure. Writing from Nohant to her friend, Théophile Gautier, on May 12,

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George Sand confessed she could not calm her “hussard blood.”57 Within days, she had composed a stirring pamphlet, “La Guerre,” extolling the “holy war” that France would fight for “dear Italy, sister of France.” No less passionate was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had long been devoted to the idea of a united Italy. She followed the war, first from Rome and then from Florence, trusting all the time in Napoleon’s declaration to free Italy “from the Alps to the Adriatic.” News of the war, however, was complicating the life of the literaryminded Cesira Pozzolini. In the spring of 1859 the twenty-year-old Florentine was dealing with her first suitor, the distinguished botanist and naturalist, Filippo Parlatore. Several times a week he came to her mother’s drawing room where he regaled the company with stories of his travels and meetings with important people. Gradually, it had become clear that the “professore,” though old enough to be her father, was being drawn to the Pozzolini home as much by Cesira as by the prospect of intelligent conversation. While flattered by Parlatore’s attentions—she regularly recorded his observations in her diary—Cesira was absorbed in what she saw happening around her in Florence. In her diary for April 27, she described “the most dignified and miraculous revolution” that had occurred that morning when Leopold II, the grand duke of Tuscany, had abdicated and left the city with his family for Vienna. Meanwhile, her beloved brother Eugenio had gone off to volunteer to fight against the Austrians. Soon the evening conversations in the casa Pozzolini would be absorbed with the war.58 An English poet who happened to be in France inspecting schools took a more restrained view of events. Matthew Arnold had crossed the Channel in mid-March and had been watching the build-up to war from both Paris and the French countryside. He also had the benefit of long conversations with François Guizot, the statesman and historian, and Lord Cowley, the English Ambassador, at whose home he had dined with colonel Claremont a few days before hostilities broke out. But Arnold saw something with his own eyes that was perhaps as valuable as anything he learned in conversation. While sharing a coach to Rennes with “a chef de bataillon of the 7th Infantry” in the early morning hours of May 7, he was struck by seeing nearly all the peasants they passed taking off their hats to the officer. “They feel that the army is the proud point of the nation, and that it is made out of themselves.”59 For the next two months, as his duties took him through several regions of France, Arnold would closely observe the reaction to the war as well as read about it. There was never a chance that he would make a detour to Italy, but following the progress of

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the war from France soon gave him an idea that promised to affect his future as a writer. Others even further from the war but with a far greater stake in it reacted accordingly. In London the ardent nationalist Francesco Crispi was so enraptured by the coming of the war and what it might mean for his homeland that he “did not have the strength to hold a pen.”60 His fellow London exile, Giuseppe Mazzini, was only a few degrees less excited, despite his disdain for Napoleon and distrust of Cavour. Eager to follow hostilities, he pinned a “vast topographical map” of northern Italy to a wall in his tiny bed-sitting room and peered at it daily as he read accounts of what was happening.61 And in New York, news of the opening of the “mighty struggle” led the small, fractious community of Italian émigrés to put aside their differences and seek ways to help in the fight.62 But wars, even those carefully scripted, seldom satisfy expectations. This was only one lesson the 18-year-old Willi Gladstone was learning as he and his father, a long-time critic of Austria’s dealings in Italy, read Thucydides together while the armies were gathering.63

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Chapter 2

4

Preliminar ies

O

n Saturday morning, February 26, 1859, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the sixth annual exhibition of the Photographic Society. Their visit was not merely a gesture of royal courtesy. The couple were collectors of this new art and had been patrons of the society since its founding in 1853. Nor was this the first visit by the prince to the current exhibition. An avid photographer himself, he had earlier “made a minute . . . inspection” of the pictures, and would have been thinking of making a purchase.1 The royal fascination with photography was widely shared. There were numerous photographic societies in Britain, stretching from Glasgow to the Isle of Wight, and in London alone, there were dozens of photographic studios, testifying to the growing popularity of this new mode of recording not only what the eye could see but what it could not. Photography was even more popular across the channel in France, where the announcement of the daguerreotype had been made to the world twenty years before. Studios abounded in Paris, photographic societies had sprung up across the land, and La Lumière had become the pre-eminent photographic journal in Europe. Another sign of the new art’s stature was the decision in the spring of 1859 to give it “a distinct space,” with its own entrance, at the annual salon. And as in England, photography was appreciated in high places, though for different reasons. While the Empress Eugénie collected portraits, Napoleon was obsessed by the many ways photography could recommend his regime and his person. The passing out of photographs of himself and the empress to his entourage at Montereau was only the latest example of his eagerness to exploit the new art. It was rumored, moreover, that he had already ordered the training of certain army

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personnel in photography, so that he could eventually possess “pictures of those fields of action in which he so confidently expects to be victorious.”2 Presumably, he had in mind the kind of pictures that he had commissioned Gustave Le Gray to take at the inauguration of the new army camp at Chalons-sur-Marne in 1857. Those photographs of the cavalry maneuvers were breathtaking in their geometric beauty and evocation of invincibility. Spread out in a seamless line across a field of limitless expanse, the troopers looked as if they could ride over any opposition. The seat of war, notably the Lombard plain, seemed an ideal space for more such stirring tableaux. Rather different scenes were envisioned by an Englishman already in Italy as he sat down in early May and wrote a letter to the editor of the Photographic News of London. Casastrosso May 8 [1859] Sir,—Having frequently seen, when in England, letters published in your paper written by photographers in foreign countries, it has occurred to me that you would be glad to receive a letter from a photographer at the seat of war, and I therefore avail myself of this day of rest to write you an account of what I have seen, and a little of what I have done, since I left England.

The writer, who signed himself J. L., went on to say he had been touring Switzerland and taking photographs when the war had broken out. Immediately, the “exciting prospect” of getting “plates of battlefields, sieges, and other incidental scenes” induced him to change his plans. “Mere curiosity,” however, was not what prompted the change: “I should like people to have an illustration before their eyes of what a battle-field [sic] is really like, when the excitement of the conflict is past; they might not then perhaps talk so flippantly of war; and endeavor to use their reason in such matters instead of being swayed by their feelings.”3 J. L. believed that the public never saw war as it really was. He was very nearly right. Artists, their patrons, and the public at large had long been satisfied with a decorous pictorialism that favored the heroic and the picturesque over the real. In its brief life, photography had added little to the public understanding of what a battlefield “is really like.” Pictures of soldiers, weaponry, camp and battle sites, and war-damaged buildings—without bodies—were plentiful. Missing were shots of a battle in progress or of the wounded and dead in situ. Slow exposure times precluded images of action, though some photographers had tried. During the Crimean War, the Hungarian

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Carol Popp de Szathmari took a picture he captioned, “The bombardment of Silestria,” but the blurry image scarcely justifies the title. Three years later, in 1858, another contributor to the Photographic News (identified only as “C. A.”) claimed to have made two plates of a skirmish between Arab and French troops in Algeria. The editor of the News, William Crookes, evidently thought that the plates had been successful. For while mentioning in May 1859 that French army photographers were on their way to Italy, he expressed the hope that they, “on a more extended scale,” might accomplish what “our correspondent in Algeria had done on a lesser, and give to the world representations of a field of battle as it actually appears during an action.”4 Shortly after writing those words, Crookes received J. L.’s letter. But were photographers willing to capture, and the public ready to view, images of the wounded and dead as they “actually” looked in war? Did they want to see men with bloated chests, severed limbs and heads, gaping abdominal wounds with viscera spilling out, and blood pooling and slicking the ground around them? There was no squeamishness about photographing the dead lying in their beds at home; in fact, deathbed photographs of the famous and obscure, including children, were common. Nor were there qualms about photographing wounded soldiers—once they were tended to, fully dressed, and in no apparent discomfort. But showing the dead and wounded on the battlefield, revealing what bullet and shell, saber and bayonet, can do to flesh had been avoided. In 1855 Roger Fenton had decided not to photograph the halfburied remains of troopers killed in the famous charge of the Light Brigade. Two years later, though, Le Monde illustré published a lithograph of the 1857 Cawnpore massacre during the Indian mutiny that showed a baby held aloft on the point of a Sepoy bayonet as well as some severed hands and arms. Even without signs of blood, the image obviously crossed the line between inspiring pity and provoking horror and disgust. Well aware of this, the journal’s editor had offered a vigorous defense: the picture’s “repulsive details say more than all the reports of the time.”5 However true, the rationale did not persuade any other illustrated paper in France or England to publish the image or ones like it. Caution had also prevailed in the 1859 Photographic Society exhibition. Among the many pictures were 26 scenes from Lucknow, taken in the aftermath of the mutiny. The photographs were of the “Heroes” of the war and the “public buildings and localities” in Lucknow that would “forever” be connected with their “chivalry.”6 Missing from the collection—deemed to be “necessary to our understanding of

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the war now, and . . . indispensable to its future historians”—was one taken by Felice Beato showing skeletal remains of mutineers in the interior of the Sikandarbagh. The battle there had taken place on November 16, 1857. When Beato arrived the following March, there were no remains of the fighting to be seen. Wanting something besides pockmarked walls to show a battle had taken place, Beato had the bones of some of the dead dug up and strewn around the area. He then positioned several Indians and a horse as background props. The contrived image was left out of the exhibition presumably because it was considered too strong for the tastes of the audience, not least the royal couple. The making of it, however, argues that Beato was prepared to break with convention, and would have done so far more dramatically and honestly had he been in Lucknow five months earlier. J. L. was luckier. Already at the seat of war, he could reasonably expect to find a battle in progress or have one find him.7 So who was this Englishman eager to show the world what a battle was “really like”? Crookes presumably knew his name, but probably not much more than what can be gleaned from the letter itself, published in the June 24 issue of the News. J. L. was evidently young, possibly in his twenties, since he planned to make his “photographic pilgrimage” on foot. That he had the leisure to do so suggests a comfortable income, despite protestations that he was “anything but rich.” The phrase “when in England” points to long periods spent abroad, which would explain why he spoke French, Italian, and “a little” German. His occasional waspish comments about women may indicate that he was a bachelor and happily so. The only clue as to where he was born and raised is his familiarity with the Yorkshire vale. Several literary allusions, together with his prose, reveal a man with at least a grammar school education. Less guesswork is needed to discover his opinions. Like many of his English contemporaries, he disliked the French, particularly for their “assumption of superiority.” The Austrians, with their “quiet. . . . though sometimes stern” manner, were more to his taste. In one respect, however, he saw the two armies about to “butcher each other” as equals. “Nineteen-twentieths” of the soldiers were “profoundly ignorant” of what they were fighting for. The French at least had the “stimulant” of fighting for the “honor and glory of France.” The multinational Austrian army fought largely out of a sense of duty or fear of punishment, a situation, thought J. L., sadly rich in irony. “What a satire it is on human nature that the very men who, ten years ago, were in arms to obtain self-government for themselves, are now slaughtering others with the view of forcing upon them the very

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government which they then fought against.” As for the Italian cause, J. L. was indifferent. What prompted him to abandon his rambles in Switzerland was the “exciting prospect” of taking photographs in this war, not taking sides let alone taking part.8 He began his journey near the end of April when he went to Martigny, near the Saint Bernard Pass. There he spent a few days purchasing supplies to last for several months. He also bought a mule to carry his baggage, and had special straps made to balance the load and allow him to ride if he tired of walking. It was a wise precaution since he could not know how far his “pilgrimage” would take him. Once on his way, he crossed the Saint Bernard Pass and took the road to the ancient town of Aosta. There he met two travelers, a German and an American, and the three men went on together to Ivrea. As of yet, there were no signs of the “brutalities” the Austrians were rumored to be committing after they crossed the Ticino into Piedmont. Instead, people were going about their daily tasks and gossiping nightly at the local wine shops. To be sure, the Austrians, lacking sufficient supplies, had requisitioned wheat, corn, and tobacco and given receipts in exchange. But this was a common practice of war. J. L. stayed in Ivrea several days, pondering in which direction to go next. He wanted to avoid the Austrians, whom he knew to be close by, even though he believed that being “an Englishman and a photographer” ought to be “sufficient protection in any civilized country.” But this was wartime, when codes of civility can quickly drop away and armies become suspicious of wandering neutrals, especially those taking notes or pictures. J. L. used his time in Ivrea to take photographs. Of what he does not say, probably because his main purpose was to test exposure times with the photographic process he primarily used, the collodion wet plate. Obtaining good results with this process was not easy. One had to get the right balance of chemicals in the various stages as well as make a careful estimate of the available light. To his surprise, J. L. discovered that in the bright Italian sun his plates were underexposed, even after 12 seconds. He could not explain this “curious circumstance,” which other photographers would also note, but he tucked it away in his mind, aware that battles, unlike glaciers, would not offer “a second attempt.” Evidently, he did not test the dry collodion plates he had with him, presumably because he had never been able to get “as good results” with them. All of which suggests that the Englishman’s skills as a photographer were not yet a match for his ambition.9 Leaving Ivrea, once more alone, J. L. moved in a southeasterly direction. A day or two later he stopped at Casalrosso, the village

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from which he wrote Crookes but which was mistranscribed as “Casastrosso” when the letter was published. There he took lodgings with an elderly peasant couple who were nearly destitute. The Austrians, who were only a few miles away in Vercelli, had taken their crops. But it was the recent conscription of their two sons into the Piedmontese army that had made the couple’s life so difficult. Together with their 13-year-old daughter (“a child of their old age”) they were living on roots and cow’s milk. What their boarder could pay would provide only temporary relief from the “injustice and cruelty” of a system that J. L., as an Englishman, had been raised to think an affront to liberty but which he now saw as also deeply inhumane. In six months time, a “happy and content” couple had gone from “modest poverty to a condition of absolute starvation.” Here was a face of war the young Englishman had not expected.10 At the end of his letter J. L. said he would write again when he had decided on his future course of travel. Five days later (May 13) he was still at Casalrosso. Troops of both sides were on patrol nearby, and as he began writing a second letter to Crookes, a detachment of French cavalry rode into the hamlet. Spotting J. L., and assuming from his “appearance”—presumably his clothing—that he was not Piedmontese and might be Austrian, they immediately began questioning him “rather roughly” until he produced his passport and visas. The interrogation only confirmed his dislike of the French and was in marked contrast to an encounter he had had with their enemies two days before. While strolling in the fields around the village, he noticed a party of Austrians lying in the shade under some trees. He tried to avoid them by walking in another direction only to be summoned by loud shouts. One of the Austrians, an officer, addressed him in German. J. L., thinking it not “advisable” to disclose any knowledge of the language, answered in English. To his surprise the officer understood him “perfectly.” Several questions followed, including the inevitable one concerning his “intentions” in coming to Piedmont. This allowed J. L. to express his great desire to see a battle, to which the no doubt amused officer replied that he would be “soonest gratified” if he stayed where he was. Throughout the conversation there was no mention of photography. In fact, that morning, knowing Austrian detachments were in the area, J. L. had hidden his equipment in the back of an outhouse. Had the officer learned of its existence, the two men would not have parted “very good friends.”11 This second letter ends with an ellipsis after the phrase, “the Austrians are hurrying toward Vercelli from different points.” Crookes probably did not delete much, but when he printed the letter in the

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July 1 issue, he and his readers knew the Austrians were far from Vercelli and reeling from a succession of defeats. Still, the war was far from over if Napoleon’s declaration to see Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic was to be trusted. And J. L.’s letters, though far behind events, did offer an intimate view of conditions that the journalists, focused on the movements of armies and the course of battles, seldom wrote about. There was also the hope that J. L. might yet get the sort of pictures he had come to Italy to take. Such considerations probably explain why Crookes attached a byline to J. L.’s recent letter, “From our own Correspondent.”12 As the days passed, the young Englishman tired of his “idle life.” He liked the old couple and had become friends with the local priest, whose stable now housed his photographic equipment as well as his mule. But J. L. was beginning to despair of seeing a battle if he “remained,” as the Austrian officer had advised, where he was. The dilemma ended when the priest suggested they visit his brother at Torrione, a village several miles east of Vercelli. Should a battle break out while they were there, reasoned the priest, they would hardly be “farther away” from Vercelli than if they had stayed in Casalrosso. Needing little convincing, J. L. collected his camera and mule—testy itself from the “long rest”—and left Casalrosso with his new friend, probably on May 18 or 19, just as the Austrians were withdrawing from Vercelli, and the war was about to begin in earnest.13 *** Tentativeness had marked the behavior of both sides in the opening weeks of the war. Contrary to expectations, after crossing the Ticino the Austrian army had not driven toward Turin, nor sought out battle, raising suspicions about Gyulai’s abilities and mood. Was a general who had never commanded a force larger than a corps prepared for heading an army of one hundred fifty thousand men? Did his reported reluctance even to accept the command suggest a lack of self-confidence? Meanwhile, the allies were understandably hesitant to engage. The French were busy assembling their forces, and the Piedmontese were no match for the Austrians by themselves. Thus for almost three weeks, only minor skirmishes occurred. “Nothing new from the theatre of war,” wrote Cavour to the Piedmontese ambassador to Paris on May 17.14 Nassau Senior, the English political economist, likened the wait for real battle to being “in the pit. The spectators always think the delay before the curtain rises intolerable.”15 Serious combat finally flared on the afternoon of May 20, when an Austrian reconnaissance in force met up with a French division and a

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Figure 2.1 Map of the Theatre of War from César de Bazancourt’s Campagne d’Italie de 1859 (1860).

squadron of Piedmontese cavalry five miles northeast of Voghera, at the village of Montebello. The “mount of war” had earned its name in antiquity, when it was the site of several battles, notably a clash in 218 BCE between Hannibal’s cavalry and the advance guard of a Roman army. But the only battle at Montebello the armies in 1859 would have had in mind was the first Napoleon’s thrashing of an Austrian corps in June 1800. This new battle was far less decisive. After several hours of fighting that had begun around Casteggio and then moved to Montebello, the French claimed victory because they had forced the Austrians to withdraw from the village. The Austrians, interpreting the French failure to pursue as a sign of an army badly mauled, decided the day belonged to them. Casualty statistics favored the French claim: in all categories— killed, wounded, missing—they suffered appreciably less. The statistics also supported the view of many that the battle had really only been a “minor action,” or in the words of the American minister at Turin, John Moncure Daniel, of “no further significance” than a “bloody tournament would have had in the wars of the 12th century.”16 For participants, however, there was nothing “minor” about the actual fighting, especially around the village cemetery. Its thick walls had made it an ideal defensive position for the Austrians, and routing

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them out had been a savage business. “We entered black with powder,” one wounded French soldier said afterwards, “we left red with blood.”17 The French reliance on the bayonet had made the fighting especially terrible. All armies had come to depend on it in close quarter fighting, but its appeal to the French was almost mystical. No other weapon quite embodied the élan of the individual soldier. The emperor himself had extolled its role in his address to his soldiers at Genoa. “The new precision weapons,” he told them, were “only dangerous from afar.” The bayonet was still “l’arme terrible” of the French infantry.18 Underlying such an opinion was an heroic view of war still very much alive in European society; represented in myriad paintings, books, and monuments; and relished by many who had been in a battle as well as many more who had not. Brave words and brave acts sustained its appeal: “Come on men,” cried the French division commander, General Élie Forey, as the assault on Montebello began. “Follow your general.” They did and the village was soon theirs. The words of another French general, Georges Beuret, were even braver: “Soldiers, this is the village of Montebello; our fathers gained a victory here! Be worthy of them. Forward! And the day is ours!”19 Those words were also Beuret’s last. He was instantly killed by a bullet as his men advanced on the Austrians. Jean-Adolphe Beaucé, a wellknown special artist, sketched the moment for L’Illustration.20 The artist solved the compositional problem of honoring a death while celebrating a victory by placing the general at the left of the image and his troops at the right. Between them is a large triangular open space, with the base at Beuret and the whole pointing at the charging French troops. Victory, the viewer is asked to imagine, flowed from the general’s words—or as the Illustrated Times supposed, the “state of frenzy” his death unleashed in the soldiers.21 Either explanation suits the image, the moment, and an era given to theatrical gestures and language. Heroes in life, as in plays, seldom left the stage silently, and certainly not when there was something important to be said. “I am covered with glory and wounds,” the stricken Piedmontese colonel Tommaso Morelli is reported to have written to his wife that day. “I have, I feel, only a few moments to live but I wish that my last thoughts should be for you and for my country.”22 For Lieutenant Francesco Govone, one of Giuseppe’s brothers, there had been no time for words. Struck in the abdomen by a bullet during a charge at Montebello, he had died quickly. Giuseppe had had high expectations for this younger brother, but now the “pauvre enfant,” as he referred to him in a letter of May 25, was gone. Two

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days before, on first learning of his death, Giuseppe had spoken of Francesco as “mon pauvre frère.” The subsequent shift in reference suggests a grief-inspired awareness that Francesco, 13 years his junior, had been almost a son as well as a brother. Henceforth the deaths in this war would weigh heavily on Giuseppe.23 At midnight on May 20, General Forey sent his official report of “this glorious baptism” to his corps commander, Marshal Achille Baraguey d’Hilliers. Twice Forey praised the “impetuosity of our troops,” who cried “Vive L’Empereur” as they drove the Austrians out of the churchyard.24 The marshal then forwarded the dispatch to the emperor, who had been far from Montebello that day. After a morning conference and inspection tour with Victor Emanuel, he and the king had ridden to Marengo. Both men sought to salute a memory, but for the emperor, it was an effort to embrace, and be embraced by, a legend. Already a number of his soldiers had managed a visit to the hallowed ground; one regiment had even breakfasted there. If the spirit of the great Napoleon resided anywhere, it was at the site of one of his most glorious victories. The Marengo the two leaders saw that day was not the same as the battlefield of 1800. Like Waterloo and Borodino, it had become a tourist destination. Once ignored and left to nature and the needs of local people, battlefields were now sprouting monuments and museums, showing up in guidebooks and travel itineraries, and inspiring tourists to write about their visits. Napoleon and his battles had been largely responsible for this new cultural practice. Not only had they infused war with a romance seldom felt since the days of Bayard and the Black Prince, but they had bequeathed the belief that the glory and honor due to the valiant were best appreciated in the places where they had fought. Napoleon had signaled this himself by returning to Marengo in 1805 and ordering a monument to be built “to the memory of the brave dead on that day.”25 Much else had been added to Marengo since then. By 1859 there was a “colossal” statue celebrating Napoleon, a mortuary chapel honoring the sacrifice of his soldiers, a museum containing relics of the battle, and a handsome garden in which to reflect on the great victory. All of this was the work of an Italian, Jean Antoine Delavo, who had grown up admiring Napoleon and in the early 1840s had purchased the land around Marengo. Delavo’s creation did not draw the hordes of visitors who flocked to Waterloo, but being so near to the French headquarters at Alessandria, it naturally attracted many soldiers in the early weeks of the war when so little was happening.26

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For the emperor, paying homage to his uncle’s victory was both an obligation and a shrewd piece of political theater. Visiting Marengo highlighted the connection between his purpose in driving the Austrians out of northern Italy and that of his forebear. The link was appreciated by those he had come to help. On May 14 his reception on entering Alessandria rivaled the one he had received in Genoa two days before. When he rode into the main square and saw a bust of his uncle placed on a pedestal, he immediately saluted it by doffing his cap, a graceful, instinctive gesture by a man who had no peers, not even his uncle, when it came to winning the approval of the crowd. His almost preternatural sensitivity to the public mood had been fundamental to his hold on power and would be essential to his success as a liberator. But the rough work of liberation demanded other talents as well. Napoleon knew he lacked both the knowledge and the experience to command an army. Before leaving for Italy, he had sought advice from both Adolphe Thiers, from whose histories he had studied his uncle’s campaigns, and the well-known, former Swiss general and military thinker, Baron Antoine Henri Jomini. Once in Italy, he began to feel the burden of winning a war while living up to a legend—and paying attention to what was happening in Paris—despite the cheering crowds wherever he went. At Marengo he seemed to Marshal Canrobert to be “very tired” and “gloomy.”27 His spirits understandably rose when he learned later in the day that as he was walking around the sacred ground his “brave battalions” were winning a victory at Montebello. The stunning coincidence may well have seemed an omen. Perhaps war was not so difficult a business after all. Confronting the price of victory was another matter. Early the next morning (May 21) Napoleon and his staff took a train from Alessandria to Voghera. From there they went on horseback to Montebello, where in the company of Baraguey d’Hilliers, the emperor surveyed the battlefield, still littered with wounded and dead. Afterward, the party walked to a nearby barn where surgeons were busily amputating on borrowed kitchen tables. In one corner lay a pile of hands and feet. The sight and sounds of men being sawn was familiar to the old marshal, who pointed to his own empty left sleeve, a result of Leipzig (1813), as he encouraged those about to go under the knife. “Come my lads, I have been there!”28 For Napoleon, gagging at the stench of blood, bodies, and human wastes, the scene was a shock. Never before had he encountered such sights, certainly not in his carefully managed visits to the sick in hospitals and not even during his well publicized visit to the Loire valley in

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June of 1856 to see the damage done by floods. The sick and the dead were a familiar sight to the emperor, as they were to virtually everyone in that era. But being whole and usually clothed, they had not prepared him for the butchered, blood-spattered flesh at Montebello. Later in the day he went to a hospital in Voghera where the wounded of both sides were being cared for. Some lay on mattresses, others on piles of straw. All had been treated so that visitors were spared the worst sights. Walking among the men, the emperor, fluent in both German and Italian, spoke to French and Austrian alike. Among the latter was a young colonel he had met a few months before at a diplomatic reception in the Tuileries. Now he lay dying, waiting for a priest to give him the last rites. The “foreign oppressor” demonized in speech and proclamation was a familiar face, young enough to be a son. Nothing could be done for the colonel, but on returning to Alessandria, Napoleon ordered money to be distributed among the Austrian prisoners taken to Marseilles.29 This visit to the wounded was soon recorded in the illustrated press. A sketch in Le Monde illustré shows the emperor shaking the hand of a bedridden soldier while others gaze up at him.30 Napoleon, the gracious, consoling leader, is the focus of the image. The wounded, seemingly in no pain, serve as props in a scene intended to demonstrate the emperor’s sympathy. The commissioned painting of his 1856 visit to the Loire valley foreshadowed this sketch, as does Baron Gros’s famous painting of the first Napoleon’s visit to the soldiers in the Jaffa pest house. In 1863, a painting of the emperor’s visit to the wounded of Montebello by Jules Rigo would be shown at the Salon and quickly purchased by the government for display at Versailles. In centuries gone by, the imagery of war leaders had seldom included attendance upon the wounded. Such humanitarian gestures were not expected of them. This conception was beginning to change. Queen Victoria had paid a number of well-publicized visits to the Crimean wounded once they were back in England. One group had even been invited to Buckingham Palace, and came dressed in “the very clothes they wore in battle.”31 Sketches of these various occasions appeared in the illustrated weeklies, and paintings of them were also done. One, by Jerry Barrett, was engraved, leading the Art Journal to observe that “a more desirable contribution to English homes cannot well be devised.”32 Napoleon would have known of the queen’s gestures and their favorable reception. Did this knowledge inform his decision in December of 1855 to have the wounded march at the head of the returning Crimean veterans during the welcoming home

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parade through Paris? No contemporary seems to have assumed so, but we may. We may assume with more confidence that the wounded had not replaced the heroes of war in public admiration. The appeal of the heroic runs deep in human nature and thus has a place in the values of virtually all cultures. Nevertheless, so extensively had the suffering soldier been written about, drawn, and occasionally photographed during the Crimean War that the public and its leaders began to see him in a new light. Such concern befits a queen so attached to her soldiers. It also befits an emperor, whose capacity for empathy was doubted only by the cynical, and whose own health problems by this time caused him chronic pain. Aware of how the public was being encouraged to feel pity for the wounded and sick, the two sovereigns realized they now had a duty to publicly display their sympathy and respect for those defending their nations and their thrones. The Crimean wounded who led the parade through the streets of Paris stirred pride as well as pity. As they came into view, reported one of the eyewitness, the clapping of the crowd “increased.”33 Frank Vizetelly, whom we last saw being arrested on the ramparts of Alessandria and then set free, came upon the wounded of Montebello when they were being transported to hospitals in Alessandria. For the young, inexperienced reporter, they were a “painful” sight. Some of the men could walk on their own or with the help of a comrade, others lay on stretchers, several of whom were unconscious. In his sketch for the Illustrated Times, however, Vizetelly muted any signs of suffering. A Zouave, for example, whose foot had been “positively smashed by a cannon shot” is shown with the extremity wrapped as if he were suffering from the gout.34 A few days later the artist went to Montebello and was struck by the damage done by the French artillery. Worse than any sight, however, was the “stench” rising from the shallowly dug graves, only “scantily covered with earth.” So overpowering was the smell that Vizetelly was forced to “retreat.” He made no sketches of what he had seen at Montebello. Odors cannot be visually rendered, while graves and battered houses have little drama. And perhaps Vizetelly had no time to draw. As he had stood by the graves, word arrived that an advance party of Austrians had just reached Casteggio, “a stone’s throw of where I stood.”35 Believing that if the Austrians saw him with drawing materials they would treat him as a spy “whose object was to take plans of their lines,” Vizetelly quickly left the village. Montebello, although a “minor action,” inaugurated the hard fighting in the war. Everyone expected much harder to follow: at

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least one or two great battles and perhaps one or more long sieges at the Quadrilateral—should the allies get that far. Sebastopol was fresh in the minds of the French and well known to the Austrians, who had foreseen the likelihood of a siege in northern Italy. Few in May doubted that the war would go on for the rest of the summer and expand to the other side of the Alps should the Prussians decide to cross the Rhine. Gyulai and his generals might have frittered away their advantages, but their soldiers had shown at Montebello that they at least were a match for the French. That the Austrians had fought “most brilliantly” at Montebello had not surprised Captain Edmund Mildmay. The British commissioner had reached Austrian headquarters at Garlasco on the nineteenth and on the morning of the twentieth had gone with several officers to the top of the highest church steeple in the town. Although the view was “boundless,” Mildmay neither saw nor heard any traces of the battle some 15 miles away. His estimate of the Austrian performance derived instead from subsequent conversations with officers at headquarters. Their comments confirmed his happy impressions of the army at Garlasco. “It would be difficult to see an army in more perfect condition. . . . Count Guilay [sic] is beloved by his soldiers, in whose welfare he takes the greatest interest. . . . They are well fed and well dressed; they look the picture of health and strength; they are in excellent spirits.”36 Soon thereafter Mildmay was altering his assessment of the battle. The fighting had been “much more severe” than he had originally been led to believe. He also realized that Gyulai and his staff “do not, it seems, feel inclined to say much about the movements of the army.” A few days later Mildmay revised his account of Montebello again, reducing both the number of soldiers involved and the casualties suffered. He also informed Malmesbury that he hoped in the future such revisions would not be necessary. Gyulai’s Adjutant-General “has promised to give me, from time to time, a précis of the bulletins sent in from the different corps, whenever anything of importance takes place, and thus I hope in future not to be led into making erroneous statements.”37 In his report of May 30 Mildmay also described a visit to a hospital in Pavia where he found the Austrian wounded, among them fourteen amputees, in “very good spirits, and high in their praise of how they were being treated.” This rosy report, together with his other comments about the Austrian army, suggests why his host did not mind his presence. Or why Mildmay began wearing “my uniform” after it was suggested to him that it would be “inconvenient for me to be in

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plain clothes in the midst of so many soldiers.” This sartorial decision, which contradicted his own government’s wishes, almost cost him his life. Twice, at least, in the coming weeks he would be shot at by Austrian pickets who mistook him for a French officer.38 No English commissioner had been dispatched to the cacciatori delle alpi. They were regarded as an irregular force with a marginal role. John Peard, though, behaved like an observer even while being a combatant. He was under nobody’s orders and followed the army at his own “leisurely” pace, “en grand seigneur.” As a result, he arrived late for at least one battle. For their part, his companions regarded him as not quite one of themselves. In Peard’s diary of the campaign, which he may have planned to publish one day, he used “we” and “us” in referring to the cacciatori; they, however, saw him as the “inglese,” a foreigner who was welcome but not entirely one of them. Age also distanced him from his companions, most of whom were young enough to be his sons. An incident early in the campaign (May 12) is telling. To cross a stream the men had to walk on the trunk of a tree. Several fell from the slippery bridge, much to the mirth of the others. “My mettle was up,” Peard wrote, “by hearing them call attention to the inglese, so I held up my head, and marched across as if on parade, though I expected every instant to slip off.”39 Peard was being tested and he knew it. He also probably recognized that even in passing the test he remained an outsider, a “touriste militaire,” as one of his later companions referred to him, who could leave the war at any time.40 That war was about to begin in earnest. Garibaldi’s mission to harass the Austrian right flank had led him across the Sesia and headed for where the Ticino emptied out of Lago Maggiore. Early in the evening of May 22, the leading company of the cacciatori passed the crest of a hill and saw the lake just ahead. “A cheer arose,” for the lake signaled that they had reached the border of Lombardy, the first of the Austrian provinces they had come to liberate. Once across the border, the real work of liberating Italy would begin. In a ruse typical of his fertile tactical mind, Garibaldi arranged for a crossing that fooled not only the Austrians but his own men. Unbeknownst to the cacciatori, Garibaldi had arranged for barges to be collected at Castelletto, on the Piedmontese side of the Ticino just below the lake. He then marched his forces north to Arona as if to cross the lake from there. But after reaching Arona, he immediately turned the cacciatori around and marched them back to Castelletto where shortly after midnight they began crossing the Ticino in silence toward Sesto Calende. The plan worked. The Austrians were “captured in their beds without a shot being fired,” and by daybreak the

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people of Sesto Calende, who had, in Peard’s words, “gone to bed slaves,” had “awoke free.”41 It was a moment of high symbolic value for liberators and liberated alike. The crossing of the Ticino may not have equaled in martial significance the crossing of the Delaware, but it had symbolic importance far surpassing the emperor’s arrivals in Genoa and Alessandria. Those arrivals had drawn their energy from hope; Garibaldi’s landing at Sesto Calende had set Lombards free. And whatever color and choreography the event lacked did not discourage Eleuterio Pagliano from sketching the scene. He had been making pencil drawings since joining the cacciatori, but until the morning of May 23, they had mostly been of camp and marching scenes. Now he had a moment worthy of a grand canvas. Once Garibaldi crossed into Lombardy, he issued a proclamation summoning the people “to arms.” He did not seek more volunteers, instead he hoped to raise spirits and gain acceptance for his mission. The cries of “Viva Garibaldi” and “Viva l’Italia” that greeted the cacciatori on their way to Varese seemed, at least to Peard, to justify such hopes. They also stirred something deep within the Englishman. His description of the liberators’ entry into Varese as a storm came up evinces an almost mystical synergy between leader, people, and the forces of nature. As we wound round the head of the lake I shall never forget the fire flies. The meadows were filled with them. They pitched on our clothes and merry was the laugh at seeing the bright spots checked in the bushy beard of some soldier. However, laughing was nearly at an end, for as the column ascended the hill to Varese the rain began to fall in torrents. The lightning too was blinding. At one instant as dark as pitch, at the next, the whole scene was lighted as if by a full moon. I never recollect to have been out in such a terrific storm. It was eleven o’clock ere we entered Varese. There, though the rain was coming down in torrents and the thunder and lightning so terrific, the whole of the population seemed to be in the streets to welcome us, with bands of music and torches. The cheering rivalled the noise of the thunder; weary and drenched with rain every feeling of discomfort was lost in the excitement of the moment. Seeing a lady with her children under one of the Porticoes I ran over and asked to be directed to some inn. She at once sent her servant with me, and I was most thankful to get an excellent bed at the Leon d’Oro.

Who would not be swept up, or forever remember, such an evening? And the selection of “a lady” to approach about accommodations

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provides the perfect coda. For all his attachment to the cause and his comrades, John Peard, the son of one of Nelson’s admirals and a graduate of Oxford, remained very much the English gentleman. The “lady” evidently perceived this, for the inn she sent him to was recommended by Baedeker’s Italian Handbook.42 The cacciatori entered Varese on May 23. Three days later the Austrians tried to retake the town. Garibaldi, however, had set up defensive positions so that when the Austrians came down the road from Como his forces were ready. Adding to their tactical advantage was a decided superiority in numbers: 3200 to about 2000 Austrians. The ensuing fight, which ended with the cacciatori leaving their positions and attacking the Austrians in the fields around the town, resulted in even fewer casualties than Montebello: 19 Austrians killed, 200 injured, and 18 taken prisoner. Cacciatori losses were similarly slight: 18 killed and 63 wounded.43 A modest success became, in the telling of it, a grand and significant victory. Supposedly greatly outnumbered volunteers had defeated regular soldiers. The Austrians, Cavour announced, had suffered “grave losses.”44 The exaggeration was useful. This war was not a war between rulers lusting after land or wealth but a war to make a nation. It asked people to think of themselves as proud members of a community far larger than their little everyday world. Without the French, building such a community was impossible; without Italians seeing other Italians defeating Austrians, the community that was built would be without bonds. Varese, like Montebello, provided the bond of pride, even as it enhanced the fame of Garibaldi. Left unmentioned was that the Austrian army in Italy included thousands of Italians. John Peard’s fame was also made that day. At a distance of six hundred meters, he had brought down an Austrian cavalry officer. “The first shot missed, but the second dropped him.”45 Peard was proud of his shooting skills; indeed, without them, joining Garibaldi would have made little sense. But killing men from afar, as if they were merely targets, troubled some in an age that so admired individual valor on the battlefield. To such critics, the sniper was merely an executioner. He did not need the courage of a soldier wielding a bayonet. In the flush of his first kill, Peard probably had no idea of how such martial values would eventually call into question the legitimacy of what he was doing. From their success at Varese, Garibaldi and his men moved on toward Como. Several times they skirmished with the Austrians in what would be collectively termed the battle of San Fermo. Though casualties were slight, the fighting was sometimes fierce as the cacciatori attacked with

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the bayonet, “a favorite arm with our men.” Officers were to be found in the thick of the fighting, and Garibaldi, astride his horse, directed it by “his gestures.” Writing to his wife afterwards, one of the cacciatori exclaimed, “I am living in a world of poetry.”46 Peard’s comments were more matter of fact. But the quickening pace of his description of what happened when he and his companions approached Como the next day still vividly conveys the drama of the moment: As we descended the wide road, darkness began to close in. Every one expected some hot work before we should be in Como, for they had seen the formidable column that occupied the Piazza d’Armi. As we got nearer what was naturally supposed would be the scene of a hand to hand struggle, the halts, though of only a few minutes duration, became frequent. The men were careful in arranging the position of their canteens and anything that might make a noise. They seemed to step lighter than usual, for not a footfall was to be heard. The silence became almost painful. In this way the first of the houses of the suburb were reached. The inhabitants instantly, as the column advanced, showed lights at their windows. They began to cry “Viva Garibaldi,” but some one would run over immediately and beg them to remain silent. We were rapidly passing the suburb. Where were the Austrians whom we had seen in such strength an hour or two before in occupation of the place? The suburb is passed. At the entrance of the city [Como] is a dense mass of figures with torches. Lights rapidly appearing in all the windows, and instead of a storm of Austrian bullets the troops were met with a deafening Shout, “Viva Italia!” “Viva Garibaldi!”47

The momentary shift from past to present as they enter Como is pure Thomas Carlyle. Having taken Como on May 28, Garibaldi’s brigade became the celebrities of the war. No other force had so outfought and outsmarted the Austrians. None of their battles had been on a par even with Montebello, but accounts of several thousand volunteers putting to flight a much larger enemy force captured public attention. They drew all the more attention because of Garibaldi himself. There were reports that the Austrians were in terror of him; as they entered towns and villages they would ask, “Is Garibaldi here? Or near here”?48 True or not, by the end of his first month in the war, Garibaldi’s efforts outshone anything the allied armies had accomplished. He and the cacciatore were supplying romance to an otherwise sluggish campaign. Some in Paris, where one pamphlet telling of his exploits sold two hundred thousand copies by the end of June, were even wondering if Garibaldi might not be the “true Bonaparte” of the war.49

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The thought was a slight directed at the emperor. No one would have supposed that Prince Jerome, who had accompanied the emperor to Genoa and been given command of the Fifth Corps, possessed martial genius. Plon-Plon’s mission was to go to Florence, where a provisional government had been established after the Austrian archduke had fled at the outbreak of the war. Once there, it was hoped that he and his corps would stabilize the political situation in Tuscany, rally Tuscans to join the fight against the Austrians, and serve as a threat to the left wing of Gyulai’s army. On taking command, the prince issued a proclamation to his soldiers reminding them that “many of you are my old comrades of Alma and Inkerman.”50 Some of those “comrades” doubtless smirked at Plon-Plon’s reference to the Crimea. At the Alma the main force of his division had failed to cross the river and never engaged the Russians. And in November, having come down with dysentery, the prince had decided to leave the field and go to Constantinople to recuperate. Two months later, and against the emperor’s express wishes, he gave up soldiering altogether and returned to Paris. Within days of his return, he was being labeled a coward. “If ever a bullet is found inside Prince Napoleon, it will be one that he has swallowed.”51 A fairer, if hardly less damning, estimate of his conduct was offered by Marshal Canrobert, who wrote that it was not “fear of cannon balls or bullets” that had prompted the prince to leave the army but the prospect of a winter in the Crimea, with “the rain, the dirt, the vermin, the lice, etc.”52 Such criticisms did not bother Plon-Plon, who cared little about what others thought of him and even less about offending them. He had a less cavalier attitude toward the emperor, though their relationship was sometimes stormy. The war in Italy promised a period of calm between the two men since they shared the goal of forcing the Austrians out of the peninsula. By giving the prince a command, Napoleon hoped to exploit his cousin’s reputation as a friend of Italy and his talents as an administrator, which had been demonstrated while organizing the 1855 Exposition in Paris. What he did not have in mind for Plon-Plon was a serious role in the fighting. Already playing such a role in Italy was a third Bonaparte, a true soldier. Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson was the grandson of the first Napoleon’s brother Jerome, who had married an American, Elizabeth Patterson. Their son, also named Jerome, married an American as well, and out of this union Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson the younger was born in Baltimore in 1830. He was raised in America and attended West Point, graduating with distinction in 1852. He then served for two years on the Texas frontier before resigning his

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commission in the summer of 1854 and going to Paris. There he received a commission in the Imperial Dragoons and subsequently fought in the Crimea, earning the Legion of Honor together with British and Turkish decorations. After the war he served for a time in Algeria. When hostilities broke out in 1859, Jerome, now a captain in the chasseurs d’Afrique, went to Italy where he met up with an old comrade, Philip Kearny. Being a Bonaparte (despite his fair complexion and blond hair), Jerome was soon noticed in press reports, especially by papers and journalists supportive of the regime. Henry Delille, the American reporting the war for the Morning Chronicle, noted that “the gallant officer” had “distinguished himself” at Montebello while escaping unhurt.”53 All of this would matter little were it not that Jerome’s accomplishments as a soldier made him stand out. To some in France, he might have seemed the more logical heir to the Bonaparte legacy should the emperor’s young son not survive his father. Would the French rally to Plon-Plon, a man neither loved nor respected and thought to be a coward? Jerome might not look like a Bonaparte, but he had the Bonaparte quality that mattered most: courage. The prince was very conscious of the threat his cousin posed to his ambition, especially before the Prince Imperial had been born in 1856. The year before, Plon-Plon had moved to forbid Jerome and Jerome’s father from using the name Bonaparte by taking the issue to the imperial family council, a body that served as a court of law in family affairs. The prince did not get the decision he wanted; the court decided that the Bonaparte-Pattersons could continue using the famous name but without any of the advantages enjoyed by the imperial family. The emperor added that he did not accept the American Bonapartes as part of the civil family. Sensing the uncertain effect of such legal solutions, he also offered Jerome a title and one hundred thousand francs yearly to give up the family name. Jerome declined.54 Was his rejection simply a matter of pride? Or was ambition involved? Jerome well knew that he was effectively third in line to the imperial throne, close enough to dream of one day, somehow, succeeding Napoleon. His uncle’s long, tortuous ascent to power would have encouraged such thoughts; so too his own growing reputation as a soldier. Certainly in the spring of 1859, Jerome knew he was more than just another captain in the French army and that a war in Italy offered a unique opportunity to show that he might be the “true Bonaparte.” With three Bonapartes in Italy, each seeking to make his name as a soldier, and a fourth looming as a ghostly presence, the war had

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become a family matter. The fate of Italy was of genuine concern to all of them, but the fate of their dynasty mattered more. The emperor had many political enemies, the prince even more. Captain Bonaparte seemingly had none, except for certain members of the clan. In going to war, each man was at some political as well as personal risk. Each, however, also appreciated the opportunities those risks offered. Because war is the continuation of politics by other means, it inevitably becomes a context in which political fortunes are made and lost. That was another lesson Willi Gladstone was learning from Thucydides, with the help of his father.

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Chapter 3

4

Ser ious War

A visitor to Paris in late May would have seen a city gripped in a “war

mania.” Portraits of the war leaders, including Franz Joseph, were displayed in the windows of printshops, while maps of the theater of war, in all sizes and prices, hung “by the thousands” in book and picture stalls. Guns, drums, and toy swords had become the “only” gift for young boys, and the city’s “minor theatres” were mounting spectacles of the war, none as appealing as those showing Austrian soldiers “running away.”1 First victories, even very small ones, ignite enthusiasm. They also prompt expectations of future success. This was evidently in the mind of Joseph Méry when it was announced on May 28 that each week he would write and publish a “chant” on the “great military epic unfolding in Italy.” Reminding readers of Méry’s earlier poem, Napoleon en Egypte (1828), this new work was to be titled, Napoléon en Italie.2 Outside Paris, particularly in eastern and southern France, excitement over the war also ran high. Bookstores in Besançon were having trouble meeting “the demand for maps and charts,” newspapers around Toulouse saw their circulation double, and everywhere the war dispatches posted on bulletin boards drew large crowds and set off illuminations like the one at Nîmes seen by Matthew Arnold. Even in some of the most rural areas, the war was on people’s minds. Communes without newspaper were now ordering them, and letters from the front were shared with strangers. As the procureur général of Bordeaux noted in his report to Paris on June 4, “the people are all in Italy in mind and spirit.”3 Their thoughts, however, were not necessarily with the Italians. Had a referendum on the war been held at this time, a majority might

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have voted against it. What did France have to gain from helping the Italians besides gratitude? How would a more powerful Piedmontese kingdom on its border strengthen the security of France? Could defeating the Austrians be counted on to shift the balance of power on the continent in France’s favor? Would papal authority be weakened— a matter of great concern to many French Catholics—by a war fought under the banner of nationalism? The emperor might dream of being the liberator of Italy, but the majority of the French people did not very much care what happened to the Italians. On the other hand, pride in the army was widespread, all the more so after the recent success in the Crimea. Hence, the excitement over the campaign, especially now after the first victory. Tales of heroism were already being told and noble deaths recorded. In the nation’s long “battle history,” a new chapter was being inscribed, one in which the deeds of soldiers, not the dreams of political leaders, would be emphasized. Three thousand miles away in America, the dream of a free and united Italy was shared by many, from recently arrived immigrants to long established New England families. As rumors of war increased after the first of the year, it seemed the dream might solidify into reality. Young and not so young men wanted to join the fight, and funds were raised to support them until Cavour had announced in mid-February that such “military assistance” was not needed. This did not stop one “distinguished Italian” in Boston from proposing the formation of a company of one hundred immigrant fighters once the war broke out. Nor did it stop a number of American doctors from volunteering their services. Their offer too was politely rejected by the Piedmontese government. Offers of money, however, to support the “families of indigent soldiers fighting for their country’s deliverance” were welcomed. This form of aid could be controlled by Turin and did not imply that Italians by themselves could not win their freedom.4 One man who wanted to go to Italy could not be stopped, nor would Cavour have wanted him to be. Henry Jarvis Raymond was a passionate advocate of Italian independence, and as the editor and cofounder of the New York Times in 1851, he could promote the cause as few others in America could. Raymond is not a familiar name today, even within the corridors of the Times. In the late 1850s, however, he wielded considerable influence as both a politician and journalist. He had sat in the New York State Assembly, served a term as lieutenant governor, and recently played a role in the creation of the Republican Party. Whether politics or journalism would govern his future—he was not yet forty in 1859—no one, including Raymond, could say for sure. Whatever the

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choice, a series of on-site reports from a war that many in New York and across America were watching would enhance his reputation. William Howard Russell’s achievements in the Crimea also suggested that reporting the war in Italy would serve the interests of Raymond’s paper. The Times had never sent a reporter to a war. Nor, for that matter, had any American paper yet covered a war that did not involve Americans. Coincidentally, Raymond’s wife and children had recently settled in Paris after a long stay in Switzerland. Going to the war, therefore, could include a visit with his family. They were not, however, the primary incentive for his journey.5 Raymond traveled with an old college friend, James Forsyth, of Troy New York. His motives for traveling to the seat of war are unclear. They might well have included a desire to see the new railroad lines in France and Piedmont. The 42-year-old lawyer, whose photograph shows a striking resemblance to Mark Twain, had often represented the railroads. Forsyth was said to have “writing abilities,”6 opening the possibility that he too might report on the war. Also on the steamship “Arago” when it left New York on May 28 was the father of Captain Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson, hoping no doubt to see his son and worrying that he might not. Did he meet Raymond during the long voyage? Several mentions of Captain Jerome in the Times in the weeks ahead suggest he did. While Raymond was heading for the seat of war, a man he greatly admired and had once employed was seeking to use the war to realize his own nationalist dreams. Louis Kossuth, the hero of the 1848–49 revolution in Hungary, was now very much in the news as he made a series of speeches in England calling for British neutrality in the war. When he visited New York in December of 1851, Raymond had toasted him as “the most illustrious statesman of our age.” The following February, Raymond penned an introduction to a book about Kossuth in which he called upon Americans to realize how their “example has stirred all Europe with strange longings for a freedom accounted a dream before.” A year later, meeting Kossuth in London, Raymond asked him to write a series of articles on European politics for the Times. It was an offer difficult to refuse. Journalism was a way for Kossuth to earn a living, spread his ideas, and keep alive the hope of Hungarian independence. For years he had lived an exile’s life, moving between countries while dreaming of liberating his own. That dream suddenly loomed as a real possibility once the war broke out in Italy.7 Cavour thought so too. Ever since Plombières he had imagined a double war of liberation, one in Italy, the other in Hungary. Soon

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after the July meeting, he had contacted General Gyorgy Klapka, another hero of the 1848 Hungarian revolution currently in exile. The two men had met before; now they began regularly corresponding with the purpose of developing a plan for liberating Hungary. In January Cavour had introduced Klapka to Napoleon and his cousin, Prince Jerome, both of whom—especially the prince—were sympathetic to the idea of igniting a revolution in Hungary while the Austrian army was engaged in Italy. Klapka’s role was to raise a legion of Hungarian soldiers in Italy made up of prisoners and deserters from the Austrian army. Transported to Hungary, the legion, with the help of French forces, would then lead an insurrection to victory. Klapka’s recent book, The War in the East (1855), an onsite account of the war in the Crimea until July 1855, indicated that he was a man “whose ideas of war” were based on experience, not books.8 Kossuth’s role in this scheme was envisioned as a supporting one. Too popular to ignore but too radical to trust—Cavour called him “le Tribun”9— Kossuth could be useful, even necessary, in rousing popular support. But Cavour placed his trust in Klapka, an avowed monarchist as well as an experienced soldier. “With you only,” he told the general in January, “do I intend to put into effect the great plan to restore the life of our two countries.”10 Days after the war broke out, Kossuth met with Napoleon and received his blessing to foment an uprising in Hungary. From Paris he went on to England, where in the last week of May he gave the speeches urging the English not to stray from “impartial neutrality.” The queen’s government had already announced its position, but Kossuth—and Napoleon, who had urged Kossuth’s effort—worried that Malmesbury’s Austrian sympathies might lead him to try to bring England into the war on the side of the “oppressor.” Meanwhile, shortly before the Emperor left for Italy (May 12), Klapka met with him to discuss the raising of the legion. Not long after, Klapka himself entrained for Italy, stopping first in Florence to go over plans with Prince Jerome and then traveling to Genoa to set up formally the Hungarian National Committee and await the arrival of Kossuth. As with Plombières the year before, there was no way to conceal the plotting that was afoot. The movements of Klapka and especially Kossuth were frequently noted in the newspapers. And readers everywhere, not just in Vienna, knew that those movements threatened the integrity of the Austrian empire. Such a prospect pleased Ferdinand Eber, another Hungarian recently arrived in Italy. As a young man, he had fought the Austrians in 1848–49 and like Klapka and Kossuth had afterwards taken refuge

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in Turkey. Eber subsequently went to England, and in January 1852 settled in Kendal in Westmorland, where he boarded with a widower, John Whitwell, a local manufacturer of rugs and carpets. A month later, Eber began teaching German to young ladies in the area, one of whom was Matthew Arnold’s 19-year-old sister Frances (Fan). The instruction must have gone well, for a decade later Arnold assumed that Fan would be able to translate for their mother a letter in German “unless all that money paid to Eber was quite thrown away.”11 Eber’s early letters in England, despite occasional grammatical lapses, reveal that he had learned English well while studying to become a diplomat before the 1848 revolution. In January 1853 he published the first of several articles he would write for the Edinburgh Review. The following year, he began writing for the Times, reporting from Greece in the early phases of the Crimean War and then from the trenches around Sebastopol, where he joined Russell for a time. Russell found the mercurial Hungarian a somewhat difficult companion. Nevertheless, he was “brave as a lion” and loved battle beyond reason. Returning to camp after the “awful day” of Inkerman, Russell was astonished by Eber’s reaction to the battle. “‘Awful?’ said Eber; ‘No! a most bewdiful day; fine baddle as ever vos. No men ever fide bedder.’”12 After the war Eber spent much of the next three years writing for the Times from Constantinople, all the while dreaming that one day Hungarians would have the opportunity to fight again for their freedom. “Liberty never comes as a free gift,” he wrote in his first article for the Review, “. . . it must be bought with the heart’s blood of the people.”13 Eber’s fervid patriotism had long been a matter of concern to the Times. “I have always known,” wrote the manager of the paper, Mowbray Morris, “and respected, while I deplored, your aspirations after national independence. I can only hope that an opportunity may not soon arise for attempting the execution of your wishes, since it would deprive us of your services, and might lead to your ruin.”14 Morris had written that caution to Eber in March of 1859, not long after asking him to leave Constantinople and consider going to Italy “in the event of a European War.” Eber had agreed to the idea, but was very slow to reach the seat of war once hostilities broke out. On May 17 an obviously perturbed Morris told the Times correspondent in Paris that Eber had arrived in Genoa, but that after “nine days” he had submitted nothing. “I have sent another man from here who will succeed if anyone can.”15 What Morris did not know was that Eber had contacted Klapka and offered to help the Hungarian National Committee while still writing for the Times.

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On May 19 the general wrote to a confidant of Napoleon asking for a pass that would allow Eber to go wherever he needed to in order to interview Hungarian prisoners of war. 12 days later, Eber sent his first letter to London. Morris had hoped for a “retrospective sketch”16 of what had happened thus far, but Eber, dismissing the “dullness” of the last month, devoted the first half of his letter to the recent movements of the French army and praise for the emperor and his soldiers. “Never, perhaps,” had there been “an army in finer marching condition than the French army here.”17 In the second half of the letter, Eber turned to the pair of battles just fought on successive days that had given the war a dramatic turn. One of those battles had also given J. L. the opportunity to satisfy his photographic quest. Thus far, the English photographer had little sense of what was happening in the war beyond the area around Casalrosso. In deciding to leave the village and go to Torrione with the priest, he hoped to learn more as well as increase his chances of seeing and photographing a battle. The easy way to Torrione would have been by way of Vercelli. But unsure whether the Austrians had left the town, the two men chose a more “circuitous route.” Traveling across the countryside, J. L. was once more struck by the contradiction between what he had been hearing in the wine shops or reading in the Turin newspapers—the “most unprincipled” of any state, he complained—and what he saw with his own eyes. Crops were “flourishing . . . and everything appeared as quiet and orderly as in a Yorkshire vale.” When the two men, now accompanied by the priest’s brother, subsequently visited Vercelli, they found scant evidence of plundering or abuse. There was some “litter” in the streets and “a good many” shattered windows but nothing to show that the Austrians’ had misbehaved themselves when they left the town. As the trio rode along the main street, they attracted “great curiosity,” and several bystanders called out asking “who” J. L. was. “I imagine they took me for one of the enemy.”18 The Vercellians, like the French soldiers earlier, were presumably reacting to the style of his clothes. The visitors got a friendlier greeting from the landlord of the inn where they stopped for refreshments. J. L. picked up a Turin paper and was surprised to learn that an English journal had a correspondent with the Austrians. Until then, he had thought no reporters were allowed to travel in Piedmont, hence his interest in sending Crookes his informative if “not very photographic” reports. Readers of the News, he had imagined, would “thank me for writing and you for publishing my letters.”19 J. L. would have been even more surprised

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to learn that another English correspondent, Frank Vizetelly, was in Vercelli that day. He had arrived on the twentieth from Turin with a safe conduct pass from the Provost Marshal of the French army permitting him to accompany the troops and sketch “openly everything of interest that takes place.” Vizetelly did not have long to wait. The next day he watched a party of Bersaglieri ford the Sesia, the river on the western edge of Vercelli, and attack a small force of Austrians that had lingered in the area. It was the artist’s first action, and at one point he supposed himself a “target” of the Austrian fire. Quickly, he “laid down perfectly flat only keeping my head sufficiently up to see what was going on.” Afterward, he drew a sketch of the skirmish showing the Piedmontese crossing the river under the command of an officer holding his sword outstretched toward the opposite bank in the standard pose of commanders, real or imagined, over the centuries. Kneeling in the foreground of the image is a group of Bersaglieri laying down covering fire at the Austrians, who are not visible.20 The noise from this fight should have been heard in Vercelli, but J. L.’s letter does not mention it. Or at least not in what Crookes published of it. The last installment of J. L.’s story is by far the longest and the most obviously edited. It begins without a date or a salutatory “Sir,”

Figure 3.1 Piedmontese crossing the Sesia at Vercelli. Source: Illustrated Times, June 4, 1859

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omissions explained in a footnote in which the editor says the text is “continued” from the previous letter. Ellipses, moreover, signal large gaps in time and narrative material. Finally, the letter ends abruptly, as if to confirm that “it must,” as Crookes speculated in a concluding editorial note, “have been sent to Turin by some unexpected opportunity.”21 Nothing more from J. L. was printed in the News; perhaps no more arrived. If it had, Crookes would have had reason not to publish it. On the very day (July 8) of this last installment, the armistice ending the fighting was signed at Villafranca. To continue publishing reports from the “seat” of a war that had ended would have made little sense to the editor of a photographic journal. But Crookes was delighted to publish this report. “Our own Correspondent” had finally succeeded in getting photographs of “what a battlefield is really like.” J. L. and his companions stayed in Vercelli only a day or so before returning to Torrione. They walked around the town and the Englishman took photographs of what he termed the “memorials of a town which had just been abandoned by the enemy.” Unfortunately, the negatives did not turn out well, which meant that the prints would be “indifferent” at best. J. L. attributed the failure to the rapid journey he and the priest had made from Casalrosso to Torrione. Jostling around on the back of the mule, the various chemicals used in preparing and fixing the plates had been damaged. “I am sorry that I did not use the dry plates on this occasion.”22 At this point, the narrative is interrupted by an ellipsis, followed by a dramatic announcement: “Vinzuglio [sic]: I have just returned with my camera and three negatives from Palestro.”23 At least a week had passed, at the end of which the two battles (May 30 and 31) that Ferdinand Eber had reported in his first letter had taken place in and around Palestro, a town of 1500 people on the road from Vercelli to Bobbio. On May 30 a Piedmontese division forced an Austrian detachment of some 1200 men to withdraw from Palestro and the neighboring village of Vinzaglio. Casualties that day were light. The Austrians lost about three hundred dead and wounded; the Piedmontese evidently less, but no precise figures are available. These estimates, together with the mismatch in the size of the opposing forces, led one contemporary to downgrade the “affair” of May 30 from a battle to a skirmish. “The Piedmontese army merely drove in the outposts of the enemy.”24 To the Piedmontese and their king, who was on the field that day, May 30 had been their fight and their victory, the “Piedmontese Montebello,” as Edmond Texier of Le Siècle termed it.25 Victor Emanuel was rapturous when he issued his victory proclamation. On

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the anniversary of Goito, his soldiers had once again beaten an Austrian army. Was this not an omen equal to the French success at Montebello on the day Napoleon had visited Marengo? When news of the victory reached Turin, Cavour telegraphed all Piedmonteses legations: “After a sharp and brilliant fight His Majesty, at the head of his troops, has taken possession of Palestro . . . and of many prisoners.”26 The war would produce other victories but perhaps none so sweet as the one unshared with the mighty ally. While the battle was still going on, Napoleon arrived at Vercelli by train from Alessandria. A “considerable crowd,” according to Ferdinand Eber, met the emperor at the railway station and followed him as he went to the bishop’s palace, where he was to stay the night. One French correspondent was amused that the emperor would “probably be occupying the same room, eating on the same table, and sleeping in the same bed” as Count Gyulai had during his stay in Vercelli.27 Delicious ironies! Before he could enjoy any of them, however, Napoleon rode out to inspect the newly constructed bridges over the Sesia. Later, he walked around the town, “brightly illuminated” for the occasion, and was warmly welcomed by the inhabitants. But the welcome by his own soldiers, who thronged to catch sight of the emperor and cheered “as if they had never seen him,” most impressed Eber. Their reception “showed how popular he must be among them.”28 He was, and always worked to be, since his regime depended so much on the army. The cheers that night at Vercelli, however, arose from something more. From its creation, the emperor’s army had been prompted to imagine itself as the incarnation of the first Napoleon’s army of Italy. Cues were everywhere: the route it took, the places it passed, the proclamations it heard, the battlegrounds on which it fought, and the sites its officers (and leader) visited. The army’s very mission, to liberate Italy, recalled that of its predecessor, and its leader bore the same magical name. For the soldiers of 1859 to acclaim their Napoleon—who had yet to be tested in battle—as if he were the phenomenon of 1800, made a certain sense. They knew he was not the original Napoleon, but everything about the context encouraged the illusion that he and they were actors in a revival of a famous drama. The emperor was quite conscious of his role, the army much less certain of theirs. It was enough that they were in a place of so much memory and glory. For J. L., the first engagement at Palestro was “the most exciting time I ever spent in my life.” In his first letter to Crookes, he had spoken of going to Italy as an “exciting prospect.” Now, after weeks of tedium and an occasional scare, he had come face to face with what

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he wanted to see. He reveled in the experience. “My heart beat at a tremendous rate, not from fear, for there was really nothing to fear beyond the exceedingly improbable event of a shell bursting among us, but there was something terrible in the spectacle of bodies of men preparing to kill each other.” The balance in that sentence between “exciting” and “terrible” is perfectly struck. No contradiction exists in the mind of a man otherwise sensitive to suffering. The battle is pure spectacle; the aesthetic value of the participants dominates the mind of the spectator in the act of watching. Heard in his words is the lust of the eye to see what the imagination and ambition have decided is worth the risk. And what the presence of the priest and his brother has signaled to be completely human. The evening before, nearly everybody in Torrione gathered in the streets expecting to hear gunfire. With the French and Piedmontese now in Vercelli and Austrian units still in the “immediate neighborhood,” a battle seemed imminent. As the hours passed and no sounds were heard, the townspeople went home to bed. Few got much sleep, including J. L. who was up before dawn, anxious to go out and see what was happening. Stuffing some bread in a pocket and gathering his equipment, he joined his two companions and several other men eager to watch a fight. They left Torrione and headed southeast toward Palestro, some four or five miles away. They walked in the fields to avoid possible encounters with soldiers from either side. Before long, they spotted a force of Piedmontese marching on a nearby road. Their “resolute” bearing and the “tramp, tramp” sound of their marching “sent a thrill” through the young Englishman. His skepticism of the Piedmontese cause and of war generally had, at least for the moment, dissolved. As the party neared Palestro, J. L. could see through his “glass” the Austrians readying themselves for the rapidly approaching Piedmontese. He and his companions quickly made their way to a stand of trees, and climbed one for a better view. Perched on branches “like so many rooks” they waited for the show to begin. They did not wait long. An Austrian battery began firing on the advancing Piedmontese and the battle began. J. L. soon discovered that despite being up in a tree and having a telescope, he could not see much. The fighting was so spread out and his attention “so engrossed” in particular scenes that grasping the whole was impossible. He also found himself torn between a “longing” to be in the fight and a horror—“my blood ran cold”—at seeing the savagery with which men killed other men. This ambivalence was unexpected, disturbing, and brief, for fighting developed nearby, at one point

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coming so close to the trees that J. L. could not distinguish between the cries and oaths of the two sides. One of his companions, a peasant “whose patriotism exceeded his discretion,” then decided to take a shot at the Austrians with a gun he had brought along. Sensing the danger that would put all of them in, the priest’s brother, who was sitting on a branch above the witless man, gave him a kick in the head as he brought the gun to his shoulder, sending him “tumbling from branch to branch to the ground.” After this close call, the men stayed in the trees until the fighting ended. They then climbed down to the ground and the priest proposed that they try to assist the wounded lying about. All agreed to a task none had probably ever undertaken and for which they had no supplies except some water. The field around them was nightmarish. Blood slicked the grass and in places formed pools that the would-be caregivers, sickened by what they saw and smelled, splashed through as if they were puddles of water. Time also had to be spent just disentangling the wounded from the dead and then hauling the latter around so that they lay side by side. Eventually, patrols appeared seeking those who might be saved. Those who could were placed in carts and taken away, their chances of survival likely lowered by the rough journey they would make. Those determined to be past help were left to die and be buried with those already dead. One of the mortally wounded caught J. L.’s attention. Though dressed in a Piedmontese uniform, he had “all the appearance” of an Englishman. J. L. moistened his face with water and tried to get him to drink, but the man was unable to swallow. Hoping still to save him, J. L. had the man carried to a nearby tent where a surgeon was working. But the effort was useless; a bullet had severed an artery in the soldier’s leg and he had bled to death: “I did all I could to make his last moments easy by wetting his face with water . . . He had five Napoleons and a few francs in his pocket, and round his neck there hung a portrait of an extremely pretty English girl, on the back of which was written, in a female hand, the initials E. R., and the date December 14, ’58.” The girl in the picture almost certainly never read this account of her man’s death. Had she, it might have provided some solace. A stranger had made an effort to save her beloved because he supposed (“I believe”) the soldier was English, a fellow countryman, and so not entirely a stranger. But was the soldier English? For that matter, was the girl? We cannot know. But we can understand how in the “sickening” circumstances of that blood-soaked field another Englishman might have needed to imagine familiar faces.

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After doing what he could for the wounded, J. L. began photographing. During the fighting it had been “impossible” to get near enough to set up a camera, and so pictures “quite like what I hoped to send you” could not be taken. There would be no images of “bodies of men in actual conflict.” Instead, there were the bodies of the dead. J. L. took five photographs of them, some “scattered” about, others lying side by side ready to be thrown into the pits that would soon be dug for their burial. Two of the plates were later damaged when a “stupid” Piedmontese soldier, perhaps thinking to have his picture taken, “barged” into J. L.’s photo tent and knocked them over as they were drying. The soldier then completed “their destruction” by picking them up “with his clumsy paws and rubbing away half the film” as he tried to clean them. J. L. said nothing more about the photographs, except that he would send proofs as soon as he had “an opportunity of printing some.” The description of how he photographed the dead comes at the beginning of the last installment of J. L.’s letters and is followed by the much lengthier account of his journey to Palestro and what he saw there. The mention of the dying “English” soldier ends the installment, at which point Crookes appended an editorial note. “From the abrupt manner in which this letter concludes, we may imagine it must have been sent to Turin by some unexpected opportunity.”29 So what happened to the remaining three plates? Were proofs successfully struck and sent to Crookes? Or did something happen to them, or to J. L. himself, before he had a chance to make prints? Glass plates are fragile and human bodies are hardly less so in a war zone notorious for its summer heat and fevers. In July a French photographer, Leon Méhédin, would almost die of a fever. Possibly the plates were confiscated by some authority and never returned. After all, J. L. had photographed at Palestro in full public view of the Piedmontese army and had only “just returned” to Vinzaglio—and not yet made the proofs—when he wrote Crookes. Knowledge of what the Englishman had been doing would have traveled as quickly as he did, leaving open the possibility that a second, less innocent, interruption by Piedmontese soldiers might have cost him the remaining photographs. Crookes is no help in this matter. He printed no more from J. L., presumably because there was no more to print. He also never mentioned the photos or their maker again in the News. Had he received prints, even of poor quality, he presumably would have said something. Evidently something unfortunate happened. If prints had been successfully made and gotten to England, by post or in J. L.’s possession, they would have been seen and publicly discussed, even if

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Crookes himself was no longer interested. For in his first letter to the editor, J. L. had indicated that he might exhibit his pictures “at home.”30 Yet no evidence that he did so—announcements, reviews, sketches in journals—exists. Like their maker, the fate of the photographs remains a mystery. But they were made, and therein lies their significance. J. L. had done what no photographer before him had. Felice Beato almost certainly would have in India if he had arrived in Lucknow earlier. Yet the seeming equivalence of intention between the two men masks a notable difference. Beato took pictures to exhibit and sell; he and another photographer were in business together. J. L., while expressing an interest in showing his work, was driven by a moral concern. If the English public were ever to see what war was “really like,” and not talk about it “so flippantly,” they would have to be exposed to images of its true nature and consequences. J. L.’s scorn for his countrymen’s ignorance of war may have arisen from their reaction to the Crimean conflict and the Indian Mutiny. Neither campaign is alluded to in his letters to Crookes, but J. L. would have been aware of the rampant jingoism engendered by the war in the Crimea and the boundless rage that had fueled the revenge taken on the Sepoys. England’s virtue, valor, and pride had been trumpeted in the mid-1850s, not least by the press, which never spared hyperbole. The Times, for all its criticism of the management of the Crimean campaign, had never questioned its justice. Nor had Russell ever doubted the courage of “the thin red line.” And we may assume that the two dozen plays dealing with the war that were performed in London in 1854–55, not to mention the many that were staged in the provinces, seldom departed from the same patriotic script. “At Astley’s [a favorite playhouse],” Punch sniffed, “the ammunition is always up in time, the bivouac is always comfortable and complete, the commander-in-chief is always prancing about making pretty speeches to the men, while the Russians . . . know their place so well that they invariably give way on the advance of the British.”31 Fed a diet of such “counterfeit” representations, how could those “at home have . . . a thorough conception of the horrors of warfare”? *** The second engagement at Palestro was by any measure a real battle. Early in the morning of May 31, the Austrians attempted to retake the villages lost the day before. They met strong resistance from the allies. Victor Emanuel became a hero in this battle, acting “like a man at arms of the olden times.”32 He had charged into the very center of

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the battle at the head of his escort, hewing his way through the Austrians without a care for his person. He had once told Queen Victoria that he much preferred fighting to “the business of being a king.”33 Palestro left no doubt of that. Cavour’s message to the legations at the end of the day once more noted the king’s role. It also mentioned the efforts of “a regiment of Zouaves.” The third regiment of Zouaves had indeed played a critical role in the victory. They had carried the fight at a bridge over a canal, forcing the Austrians to retreat and creating “terrible havoc” among them. But the Zouaves also recognized the king’s bravery in the battle by making him an honorary corporal in their regiment. Their own losses that day, 46 dead and 223 wounded, were proof of their efforts and courage. They also represented almost half the casualties the allies suffered. In defeat, the Austrians paid dearly: 2118 killed, wounded, or missing.34 Worse than the losses, perhaps, was the consequent weakening of the nerve of Count Gyulai, who proceeded to abandon Piedmont and make plans to evacuate Lombardy. In the span of a week, Garibaldi’s victory by the lakes and the allies’ success at Palestro had put the invading army on the defensive On the afternoon of the thirty-first, Napoleon went to see the battlefield with the king and Marshal Canrobert. Once again the sight of smashed bodies overwhelmed the emperor. He could not speak and seemed to withdraw into himself, ignoring the cheers he heard from his victorious troops as he rode by them. One corpse in particular, that of the Adjutant-Major of the third Zouaves, a man known to him personally, drew the emperor’s attention. A saber slice to the head of Captain Barthélemy Marie Drut had sheered off the top and left an empty cranium, the brains missing, “as if scooped out with a spoon.”35 The next day Napoleon sent an urgent message to his minister of war, asking Randon to send more chaplains to the army “as soon as possible.” On June 1 as well, Giuseppe Govone wrote his by now almost daily letter to his fiancée to give her the news of the campaign. Thus far, aside from his brother’s death, things had been going well. “We march from victory to victory,” he had exulted the day before, proudly describing how another of his brothers had “greatly distinguished” himself in both Palestro battles. But on June 1, after accompanying the king on a long inspection of the army’s positions, Govone was more tempered. As much as the victory had been glorious, Piedmontese losses had been “rather considerable.” The “spectacle” of the dead and the moving of the wounded to houses and churches for treatment had been “heart-rending.”36 Although Govone was no stranger to the

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casualties of battle, Palestro was a new experience. In Italy the dead were his own, no more so than in the case of his brother. The Crimean campaign had been a foreign war, one with little or no meaning for the Piedmontese soldiers, however important it was for Cavour and the generals. Moreover, with one brother dead and another a hero in the space of little more than week, Govone was experiencing a tumult of emotions. On a balance sheet, his feelings might cancel each other out. In the mind of a sensitive man they did not. Palestro had been worse than Montebello, worse than anything in a generation except for Inkerman said some Zouaves. They did not exaggerate, and to their commander-in-chief it would not have mattered if they had. Napoleon would never get used to seeing the slaughterous sights his ambition and heritage led him to. Had he gone to war in his youth, as had Victor Emanuel and Franz Joseph, he might have developed more of a stomach for it. Now it was too late. *** A few days after the battle, Frank Vizetelly went to Palestro with a young lawyer from Novara. Inside the village he found “a scene of desolation.” Cottages were riddled with bullet holes and many no longer had their roofs. More unnerving still were the “marks of bayonet stabs and dark red stains of blood” to be found on the interior walls of many of the homes, “showing where more than one poor fellow had met his death.” Most of the fighting, however, had taken place in the fields around the village itself, where strewn about were Austrian knapsacks, shakos, pouches, and waist-belts, signs of “panicstricken soldiery in their flight.” The wounded had been removed and the dead buried by the time Vizetelly went to Palestro, but bodies were still being recovered from the canal—two “while I was present.” The artist drew no sketches of them or anything else he saw that day. Instead, he sent back to the Illustrated Times a sketch obtained from a local amateur artist that showed the king “charging” into the fray.37 So dynamic a scene, Vizetelly thought, would be of greater interest than empty houses, discarded paraphernalia, and water-soaked corpses. Words would do for them. The victories at Palestro were duly celebrated in Turin and Paris. Coming ten days after Montebello, they confirmed the belief that the Austrians were no match for the allies and had lost their best chance to win the war when they failed to advance on Turin in April. The only thing that seemed inevitable in Vienna, however, was the removal of Gyulai from command. The army had fought bravely in both Palestro battles; only better leadership was needed to translate valor into

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victory. In London opinions about the meaning of Palestro varied. But the Times took a tack that had little to do with its disapproval of the war or its longstanding suspicions of Napoleon’s ambitions. On June 2 its lead editorial offered a scathing indictment of war generally—“a horrible and revolting thing”—and of how it “seems to have become more hideous for its close contact with the greatest triumphs of our modern civilization.” How could one speak of human progress while reading that the “butchery of Casteggio was fed by a succession of railway trains, which disgorged their cargoes close to the human shambles, just as they carry the cattle, the sheep, and the calves which feed the daily hunger of London?” Or how could people take pleasure in learning that “news of every particular of the butchery is carried by the delicate and beautiful machinery of the electric telegraph?” Science, one had to conclude, was “being degraded into an instrument for the destruction of that race by whose intellects science itself had been created.”38 Such a paradox might have been noted five years before, except that in the Crimea there had been no trains to deliver “their cargoes” into the maw of battle, and the telegraph installations had been too primitive to relay all the particulars of battle. Nor had there been rifled cannon, which in a matter of weeks would cut down Austrian infantry “like wheat before a scythe.”39 Industrial war was arriving in fits and starts as circumstances allowed. Meanwhile, monarchs sought to inspire their armies by their presence in battle, the bayonet was depended on to clear the enemy from the field, and personal bravery was deemed the soldier’s greatest virtue. Even more disturbing to the Times than the new technologies was the “wanton and prodigal waste of life” in Italy. There appeared to be little “strategical object” in the fighting thus far, as if war were simply a matter of destroying the other side. Indeed, if the “art of war” was only to “attack your enemy wherever you can find him, and do and suffer all the mischief in your power,” it was no art at all. “Butchery in vain”—a phrase that would become a cliché in assessments of some World War I battles—was also the theme of an editorial in the Illustrated London News. Montebello and Palestro were condemned as battles without “necessity or . . . result.” The ground on which they had been fought might be “macadamized with what is called glory,” but glory for what? Heroic actions were noted, official versions of battles broadcast, and the wounded and dead counted and attended to. But no advantage had been gained by either side; neither king, kaiser, nor emperor had yet achieved anything that “would justify the impartial journalist in declaring him to be a General.”40

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Garibaldi had. The cacciatori had been moving with a purpose, as even the Times acknowledged, and defeating Austrian forces whenever they met them. Their campaign was becoming the most fascinating story of the war, a narrative of skill and boldness on a scale small enough to be comprehended and featuring a hero familiar and without airs. His exploits around the scenic lakes of Lombardy, while not strategically critical, had transformed him from a bit player to leading man. Journalists began showing up at his headquarters, with or without permission from Turin, hoping to interview the man who now seemed the “true Bonaparte of this campaign.”41 Léonce Dupont, a correspondent for Le Pays, traveled to Como at the beginning of June. There he met not the “personage of legend”— saber in hand, pistols in belt, and a “ferocious countenance”—but a mild-mannered man with a “very kind” voice who spoke excellent French, whose myopia forced him to use a pince-nez, and whose manner was considerate to a fault. Was this the man whose name alone terrified Austrian soldiers? Garibaldi offered Dupont a safe-conduct pass to accompany “my column” and see a bit of actual fighting. The reporter, if he wished, could even “exchange shots with the Austrians, and write to your journal the bulletin of our deeds and your own.”42 That jab had several targets besides Dupont. It also revealed how well Garibaldi understood the role of journalists in the making of fame. Tourists in the area were also drawn to the great man. A party of travelers, English and Scots by birth but now colonists in Australia, decided to pay their “respects” when a change in plans brought them near Lake Como. They reached the town on the morning of June 3 and took rooms in the same hotel that Garibaldi’s headquarters were in. After lunch they sent in their cards hoping for an interview with the man “who amid all the blunders and disasters of ’48 showed that only time and opportunity were wanting to develope [sic] in the Italians a single-minded heroism and constancy worthy of ancient Rome.” Their request was quickly granted and the meeting set for after the leader’s afternoon nap. During the “long interview,” the visitors—like Dupont—were most struck by how different the hero was from their idea of him. Instead of a tall chieftain with “long black hair and beard,” Garibaldi turned out to be “a quiet, unaffected, gentlemanly man” of middling height who spoke without “southern gesticulation.” He might, in fact, have been mistaken for one of them. “He has a healthy English complexion. . . the calm manner and appearance of the English gentleman . . . a Saxon-like calmness . . . etc.” Seeing the hero as virtually English obviously improved him in the eyes of those who actually

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were. Before the meeting he had been imagined as “little more than a dashing popular military leader.” Afterward his greatness was seen to lie in his “mental caliber,” what he could do for “the political regeneration and government of his country.” Similarly transformed were the cacciatori. No longer “brigands” or “bad characters,” they were, for the most part, decent and “tidily” dressed gentlemen whose “quiet and orderly” behavior, like that of their leader, could have been found “in a London drawing room.”43 Despite imagining Garibaldi as English—a not uncommon invention of the time—the writer of the account (Gideon Scott Lang) did not liken him or his men to specific figures from English history. Probably because there were no obvious parallels between those who had led the fight for English liberties, men of law and property and society like John Hampden, and the rough and ready fighters for Italian freedom. Napoleon and Victor Emanuel did not give “long” interviews to ordinary travelers. Garibaldi made himself available because he did not stand on his dignity and, like Napoleon, understood the value to his cause of publicizing his efforts and himself. This was especially true in England, which he warmly remembered as “the only safe refuge of the exile—friend of the oppressed.” A two month visit in 1854, when for the first time he was photographed, had concluded in Newcastle, where he was presented with a sword, telescope, and formal welcome address written on parchment by the “Friends of European Freedom,” a society made up largely of working men. Not everyone in England, beginning with the queen, admired Garibaldi, but he seems to have sensed that the English were the most natural supporters of his cause.44 Such interviews were possible, despite the growing industrialization of war, because chivalric standards and behavior still had resonance in 1859. Writing in July, George Sand would pronounce Garibaldi a “knight of bygone days,” who was engaged in a “crusade in the name of liberty.” The hero himself had similar imaginings. Five years before, he had promised “to unsheathe in England’s defense” the sword he had received if “England at any time in a just cause needs my arm.”45 Such attitudes were nurtured not only by lingering romantic views of war, but by the contemporary fascination with the Middle Ages. In art and architecture, poetry and prose, dress and furnishings, the styles of the medieval became the standard for the modern. So too in sport and war. A passion for destruction or obsessive hatred of the enemy did not typify mid-nineteenth-century European warfare. Napoleon’s response to the Austrian casualties and prisoners reflected a widely

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shared code, one that extended to civilians. While certainly wary of approaching armies and sometimes abused by them, they did not feel threatened as they would two generations later. *** Franz Joseph did not give interviews either, nor would he have been inclined to in the aftermath of Palestro. He now realized that a punitive expedition against an insolent kingdom was about to become a defense of his own realm. On the morning of June 1, the young emperor issued a proclamation to his “faithful subjects” of the Tyrol and Voralberg. “I call you to arms . . . Take into your practiced hands the old arms of your country—form yourselves into corps of riflemen and march to the frontier to meet the enemy.”46 That enemy was on the move. On the same day, Napoleon left Vercelli bound for Novara and ultimately the Ticino bridges. On the night of June 2, he ordered French units to cross the river. The crossings continued the following day, as the Austrians botched the blowing up of the bridges at San Martino and Buffalora. Writing from Novara on the third, Colonel Claremont, having finally arrived at French Headquarters, was full of optimism. “The road to Milan is quite open.” Claremont was relying on what “I am told.”47 Bound to headquarters, he, like the journalists following the allies, was out of sight or sound of the swiftly changing situation. By the morning of the fourth, it had become clear that the Austrians were not going to let the allies promenade down the road to Milan. Some sixty thousand of Franz Joseph’s troops had gathered just east of the river, the greater part of them near the village of Magenta. The murderous battle that ensued in and around the village eclipsed Palestro in scale, deadliness, and sheer confusion. Not until late in the afternoon, when General MacMahon’s corps finally arrived, did the outcome become clear. The general would later receive a marshal’s baton and a dukedom for an effort that some compared to Desaix’s arrival at Marengo that had won the day in 1800. Certainly MacMahon’s appearance saved the day for Napoleon III, who for the first time saw war up close. Reports vary as to his actual involvement. Was he primarily an onlooker, sitting on his horse behind the front lines, chain-smoking cigarettes? Or was he giving orders, acting as well as looking like a commander? Whatever his precise role, there is no argument that what he witnessed that day was a grande bataille. The fighting within Magenta was particularly deadly. “Every house,” reported Eber, became “a castle held by a desperate garrison.” The Austrian soldiers had been told that the allies killed “all” their prisoners and

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enemy wounded. With “this imaginary halter round their necks,” the Austrians were unwilling to surrender, so that one by one the houses in Magenta had to be attacked and cleared.48 Killed during one of these fights was General Espinasse, a favorite of the imperial couple and a hero of the Crimean War. Furious at the effectiveness of the Austrian fire and deliberately ignoring the risks to himself of behaving “like a second lieutenant,”49 as General Fleury would write in his journal the next day, Espinasse rode up to a window of one of the houses, beat on it with the pommel of his sword, and cried out to the men around him, “Enter, enter through here!” Immediately a fusillade of Austrian gunfire cut him down.50 Espinasse was not the only French general killed that day. Another hero of the Crimea, General Cler, also fell, and two other generals were wounded. Overall, more than two thousand men from both sides perished and some eight thousand were wounded, a toll that explains why a red alkaline dye created shortly after the battle was named magenta. Many of the wounded subsequently died due to lack of care or infected wounds. Linen for bandages and chloroform for amputations were in short supply on the day of the battle, leaving some doctors with little to do except offer water. A few soldiers, aware of what awaited them (or did not) at the dressing stations turned fatalistic. Rolling a cigarette and contemplating his options, one Zouave decided not to seek medical care, “I am going to die here without bothering.”51 Not all the dead succumbed to wounds. After the fighting, French soldiers began looking for food and alcohol. Casks of wine found in cellars were opened and the drinking began. The next day a few survivors of the battle were found floating face down in pools of wine, drowned. Austrian losses included an estimated 4500 missing, almost ten times the number reported by the allies. Most had been captured, a large percentage, particularly among the Hungarians, willingly. Days after the battle, Eber spoke to some of the Hungarian prisoners and found a number willing to join the legion made up of their countrymen. This was what Klapka and Kossuth had hoped for. Eber, able to move about more or less freely, was in a unique position to find volunteers. On June 15 Mowbray Morris congratulated Eber on his “remarkably good” correspondence thus far, never suspecting that Klapka and Kossuth were equally pleased with his work as a recruiter.52 Magenta seen from the ground was a confusing melee. Seen from above, however, the tumult took on a different character. In the middle of the afternoon, Captain Mildmay, the commissioner

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to the Austrian army, arrived at Robbeca, about ten miles south of the heaviest fighting. There he climbed into the belfry of the local church to get a “general view.” He was not disappointed: “The coup d’oeil was magnificent. With the exception of a heavy shower of rain which lasted for twenty minutes, the close of the day was clear and bright. Far away was seen Buffalora in flames, and, between that place and Magenta the French hurrying along the railway embankment towards the battlefield; whilst the whole line between Magenta and the extreme left of our position towards the Ticino, was marked by the line of fire from guns, muskets, shells, and rockets.” The captain spent only a “short time” in the belfry that afternoon, but it was long enough to be impressed with the majesty and beauty and even the form (“marked by the line”) of the battle. His reaction was the common one of onlookers from afar, whose perspective encourages them to speak in aesthetic terms as they try to describe the shapes, colors, and motion before their eyes.53 Charles Furne, the elderly Paris publisher and translator of Cervantes, was also at Magenta. From Genoa, Furne had gone to Turin and then on to Novara, looking for the war that seemed so slow to start. Impatient though he was for the smoke and sounds of battle, Furne had taken great pleasure in living among French soldiers, sharing meals and nights under canvas with “his paladins,” and whiling away the slow hours chatting and smoking.54 His companions took a liking to this unusual camp follower, “père Furne,” as one officer referred to him.55 The elderly man was harmless, asked for nothing more than what was available, and had his own stories—doubtless some from books as well as life—to tell around the campfire. He was also wondrously alive, full of energy and enthusiasm, and intoxicated by the sights, sounds, and smells of an army in the field. Finally on June 4, he got his chance to see what armies are intended to do. What he saw from his belfry perch he instinctively compared to a painting. He had seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of battle pictures, many in the books he had published. Such pictures were his natural frame of reference, especially when what he saw that day looked so much like them. In this instance the painting Magenta brought to mind was “The Defeat of the Cimbri,” by Alexandre Decamps. Shown at the 1834 salon, the painting depicts the Roman general Marius’s crushing victory over the Cimbri in 102 BC.56 Decamps places the viewer at a considerable distance from the battle, which takes up only the foreground of the image. That Furne should have been reminded of this specific work, therefore, makes sense. In his belfry he saw the

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fighting at Magenta in the same way: at a distance, spread out upon but not filling a rolling landscape. When Furne visited a hospital after the battle he did not compare what he saw to a painting. There were none to compare the sights with. He was in the midst of things he did not know, things traditionally left unpainted. But Furne’s humanity enabled him to form a lasting image of his visit. He went up and down the rows of wounded, talking with some, consoling others, and laughing at stories that asked for laughter. And all the time he was impressed by the bravery and cheerfulness—“entirely French” he thought—that sustained the men. Tears frequently came to his eyes, and we may suppose that he often told lies of hope to those who seemed to want them.57 The carnage of Magenta also profoundly moved another group of visitors. On the day after the battle a contingent of correspondents— dubbed the “Nine Zouaves” by one of them—hired two carriages and drove from Novara to the battlefield. Some of the wounded had not yet been removed, while the dead, piled in “sickening heaps,” still awaited burial.58 Words to describe what they saw did not come easily to the reporters. “I am writing,” said one, “under the effect of the greatest emotion I ever felt in my life.” Another, Delille of the Morning Chronicle, found the wounded so “sickening” a sight that he “regretted having followed the army.”59 Edmond Texier was equally distressed but managed to write a detailed description of what he saw only to have it suppressed by the editors at Le Siècle. The decision was said to be an act of kindness to readers, so “affecting” (“touchant”) was Texier’s dispatch. In fact, the government, worried about the high casualties and how the public might react to seeing—in the words of J. L.—“what a battle-field [sic] is really like, when the excitement of the conflict is past,” had ordered the Paris papers not to give “details” about Magenta.60 The order naturally extended to pictures. Thus, L’Illustration did not publish a drawing of “this scene of desolation” by Vincenzo Giacomelli lest it undermine the effect of the “glorious bulletin” of the battle. Readers were given instead a sketch of the artist seated on a stool, drawing the battlefield while two welldressed gentlemen, presumably correspondents, stand nearby. Were it not for the few bodies seen lying about, we might be looking merely at an artist sketching a landscape. News of Magenta was officially proclaimed in Paris on June 5. Large posters were stuck up all over the city announcing the “great victory” and exaggerating its costs to the enemy: “5000 prisoners; 15,000 . . . killed.” There followed the traditional outpourings of joy. Church bells were rung, flags raised on public and private buildings,

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cannons at the Invalides fired, and in the evening fireworks set off around the city. The next day a great Te Deum Mass was held at Notre-Dame attended by the empress and the court. As they made their way to the cathedral they heard the great guns of the Invalides sound again, seconded by the crash of a thunderstorm that broke out over the city. To an American observer, the explosion of the “earthly artillery” alternating with “those of the heavens,” accompanied by torrents of rain, seemed to reproduce the noise and terror of the battle. The sense of nature affirming human action was felt once more when the empress left the cathedral. From behind the clouds, the sun suddenly reappeared, shining brightly on Eugénie and her party, as if in acknowledgement of the thanks given for the great victory.61 For the Piedmontese ambassador to Paris, Salvatore Villamarina, the service was more amusing than triumphant. Unwilling to share the victory with its unpopular ally, the French government had “secretly” invited Villamarina and then assigned him a place far from the rest of the diplomatic corps where he would not be noticed.62 The American who observed the joyous scene was William Edward Johnston. A physician by training, Johnston had been building a practice in Paris since 1853 while simultaneously working for the New York Times. In November of 1855 his letters from Paris, signed “Malakoff,” began appearing almost weekly. Why Johnston adopted for his nom de plume the name of a famous bastion at Sebastopol is unclear. It might have been no more than a whim inspired by the great excitement that had followed the French capture of the city in September. Or it might have somehow evolved out of his friendship with the sister and brother-in-law of General Pélissier. Their son had served as Pélissier’s aide-de-camp at Sebastopol, and his letters home had provided Johnston with “important facts” about the siege.63 In any case, by 1859 Johnston had come to know people in high places, including the army, and was a respected figure in the large American community in the city. Major Kearny was a friend, and so evidently was the young Captain Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson. At 35, as yet unmarried and financially comfortable as a result of his medical practice and his salary from the Times, Johnston was enjoying everything about a life he had never imagined having while growing up in Sydney, Ohio.64 With the outbreak of the war in Italy, Johnston’s letters increasingly talked about its effect on Paris. Everyone he met was in favor of it, though the enthusiasm, at least by American standards, seemed tempered. After Magenta there was none of the “drunkenness and extravagance of joy” that would have been “manifested on Broadway if American arms on some part of the frontier were to gain a great battle.”

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Johnston himself, it seems, began feeling the excitement of the war, admitting that “it was difficult to remain in Paris when ‘all the world’ had gone to the war.” How could one go “promenading on the boulevards in the company of old men, women and children, sweet-scented dandies and other types of the genus non-combatants?”65 How indeed, if one had never been to a war and was but a long train ride away from seeing one? While turning the matter in his mind, Johnston grew increasingly impatient with what he read about the war in the Times of London, the main source for war news back in the United States. Aware of the Times longstanding hostility toward the emperor, Johnston was not surprised that the paper “pursued a course of injurious and totally groundless attacks” on his “motives and intentions.” But as the weeks went by, he became incensed by the “glaring falsehoods that appear in the London Times daily against France.” Every article the paper published on the war contained “one or more injurious and mischievous falsehoods against France and the glorious cause in which she is engaged.” The latest example was the assertion, based on events at Montebello, that the French artillery was “completely surpassed” by the Austrian. A week later Johnston charged that the Times was relying on the government and the “news manufacturers” in Vienna to get its information and ignoring Turin and Paris.66 Johnston was a Francophile, but he was neither naïve nor a tool of the French government. This can be seen in the opening paragraph of his May 31 letter, where he examined the changing numbers of soldiers said to have been involved on both sides at Montebello, an amusing lesson in “how contemporary history is written.” This kind of reporting pleased the “governor,” as Johnston was wont to refer to Henry Raymond. And the “governor” had probably already decided when he left New York to ask Johnston to accompany him to Italy. A second pair of eyes had advantages, as would Johnston’s fluent French and contacts in the French army. Useful as well might be his skills as a physician. Only Raymond might not have anticipated that a doctor would react to battles and their aftermath differently from a journalist. Johnston also might not have, as the “smell of blood came . . . from across the Alps” and he felt himself “drawn towards scenes of carnage.”67

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Chapter 4

4

Pictur ing the Horrors

As Paris celebrated the victory of Magenta, the artist Adolph Yvon

was preparing to go to Italy. He had been told that once a significant victory had been announced, he would be summoned to join the army. Magenta was that victory. Montebello had been a minor affair, while Palestro had been shared with the Piedmontese and their king. Magenta, though, was entirely a French success, and a painter’s dream. MacMahon’s timely arrival on the battlefield, together with the deaths of Cler and Espinasse, provided riveting scenes of heroic behavior. As inspiring as a picture of armies colliding could be, it was dull fare compared to images of individual drama. Such scenes could also be useful in shaping the memory of the campaign for the people of France. Rendered as paintings, moments of gloire secured themselves in the mind. The emperor understood this at least as well as any of the artists attending him. He might also have hoped that heroic, uplifting paintings would ultimately soften the memory of high casualty counts. Yvon made a name for himself and caught the attention of the emperor when he won the Medal of Honor for his “Capture of the Malakoff” in the Salon of 1857. He submitted two more huge canvases dealing with the great victory, “The Curtain of the Malakoff” and “The Gorge of the Malakoff,” to the Salon of 1859. Johnston of the New York Times judged the latter as “beyond doubt the best battle scene that has been painted for many years in France” and “destined” to win the grand prize again.1 Not all the critics agreed, but that did not matter to the emperor. He wanted Yvon to paint his battles in Italy and thereby instill their meanings in the public mind for generations to come. Yvon was eager to embrace this new role. His Crimean

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paintings were based on a visit to the Crimea during the Paris peace negotiations that ended the conflict in the spring of 1856—many months after the significant battle. This time he would be working much closer to events, and depending on how the war went, he might even get to sketch a battle in progress. Another French painter was on his way to Italy because he owed the government a picture. In 1849 Ernest Meissonier had been given a commission for a genre painting, his specialty. The fee was to be six thousand francs. Years passed, and though the fee was paid, the painting was not delivered. In 1856, following the artist’s complaints that the agreed upon fee was too small for so important a commission, the stipend was raised to twenty-thousand francs. Three years later, the painting having still not been produced, the commission was renegotiated again, evidently at Meissonier’s request. Now he was expected “to take himself to Italy in order to make on location the studies necessary for the execution of two pictures depicting episodes from the present campaign.” In return, he would receive twenty-five thousand francs per picture and ten thousand francs for expenses.2 Meissonier knew his worth, but at age 46, he knew little about painting war. As an eyewitness to the fighting in Paris in 1848, he had painted corpses lying in the rue de Mortellerie (The Barricade), but the nearest thing to a battle in his work was “The Brawl” (1855), a typically small scene of two men fighting. Nevertheless, shortly after Magenta, he set off to Italy, confident of his powers and position. He adorned his hat and tunic with gold stripes, thinking it made him look like an officer, and told those he met along the way that he was journeying to see the emperor. He wanted to be seen as he saw himself: an “important personage.”3 Accompanied by a servant, Meissonier traveled by rail and horse and regularly wrote letters to his family describing the journey. In addition to the commissioned paintings, he hoped to provide illustrations for a book on the war to be developed out of articles written by Edmond Texier for Le Siècle. Meissonier had done illustrations for many books, including five for Charles Furne’s edition of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. The collaboration with Texier, however, was something new. An illustrated book depicting a war would be a work of history, the subject, next to painting, that most interested Meissonier. “Had he not been a painter,” he often insisted, “he would have been an historian.” Now he would be both and well paid for his efforts4 One French painter who was not on his way to Italy was the one everyone expected to be there. Horace Vernet was the best-known battle painter of his time. Baudelaire might dismiss him, but the

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public and the emperor were enamored by the dash and spirit of his paintings, and engravings of them were “omnipresent.” Age likely explains why Vernet did not go to Italy. When the war broke out, he was almost seventy and watchful of his health. Already in the Crimea, he had worried continually about cholera. The well-known heat and fevers of an Italian summer no doubt seemed hardly less dangerous. Moreover, his visit to the Crimea in 1854 had gone badly. Snubbed by the French commander, he left early, angrily telling people that he “knew more of war than the field marshal.”5 Nevertheless, rumors persisted that he would paint this new war. After Montebello, according to one reporter, uniforms and arms were collected from the field and sent to the artist, “who will be charged with painting for the galleries of Versailles the second battle of Montebello.”6 Long before Yvon or Meissonier reached the seat of war, Carlo Bossoli, the 44-year-old artist whom we have already met, had been sketching scenes of the conflict. He had been commissioned in April by Prince Eugenio di Savoia-Carignano, Victor Emanuel’s cousin, to serve as a “pittore-reporter” in the Piedmontese army. It was a different kind of commission than the artist was familiar with, but one that appealed to his patriotic sentiments. Expelled from Milan by the Austrians in 1853, Bossoli had then settled in Turin but traveled widely, looking for scenes that lent themselves to the panoramic style. He had developed a talent for creating the illusion of depth and space under the guidance of a theatre designer in Odessa, where the Bossoli family had gone to live in 1820 when Bossoli was five. Russia also inspired the set of 24 lithographs that had made Bossoli’s fame. Views of the Crimea, published in Odessa in 1842, drew on watercolors Bossoli had painted years earlier. Republished in London in 1855 in the midst of a war fought in an unfamiliar landscape, they had drawn much attention. People wanted to visually grasp the “places most interesting to us at this moment.” Certainly the queen did, which is why her foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, brought Bossoli’s work to her attention. Victoria bought a copy of the book and is said to have “studied” the views during the war.7 England gradually became a second home to Bossoli. He had first visited in 1850, returned in 1855, and then spent almost a year there in 1856, when he met the queen while she was vacationing at Balmoral. He liked England, and the English liked him and his work. Even before the Crimean album, Day & Son had published a set of lithographs derived from his watercolors. Views on the Railway between Turin and Genoa (1853) was commissioned by Brassey, the English company that had recently built the railroad. A copy of the album

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was sent to Cavour, whose government had sponsored the project. Bossoli’s records also indicate numerous sales to English customers, and twice his work was displayed at the Royal Academy. The artist visited England for a fourth time in 1858, staying first in London and then traveling in Scotland before returning to Turin in September. The outbreak of the war and Prince Eugenio’s commission gave the artist a new opportunity for his talent. His earlier panoramic landscapes, with their “almost photographic power of minute realization,” promised that he would succeed in making the war beautiful.8 It was also to be expected that Day & Son would be interested in such pictures. What could not have been predicted was that those pictures, later joined with the letters Ferdinand Eber wrote for the Times of London, would compose one of the more beautiful war books of the nineteenth century. *** Magenta was immediately recognized as a turning point. The allies were now on the soil of the invaders, who appeared to be in full retreat, and the road to Milan was open. There the “liberators” would find a thunderous welcome. The celebrations began on the night of June 6, which some witnesses dubbed the real beginning of “the carnival of 1859.” Soldiers and citizens paraded the Corso, led by bands and the National Guard. Early the next morning, a French corps of fifteen thousand men entered the city to the cheers of delirious crowds behaving “more like fanatics or madmen than reasonable human beings.” The soldiers quickly realized that everything was free that morning. Shopkeepers offered wine, lemonade, and orange water, and young girls rushed the men crying, “Cari fratelli, cari liberatori.”9 The “frenzy of enthusiasm” continued the following day when Napoleon and Victor Emanuel entered the city with their staffs. They had hoped to make a quiet entrance, but crowds soon gathered and the procession took “the form of a perfect ovation.” Napoleon, riding to the right of the king, seemed to Colonel Cadogan to “monopolize public attention almost to the exclusion of the King.” The Milanese intended no disrespect. When Victor Emanuel later took leave of the emperor and rode to his headquarters, he was loudly cheered and “more directly political cries were heard.”10 But the initial response of the Milanese rose from their knowing who was primarily responsible for expelling the Austrians. It was Napoleon’s army that had crossed the mountains and the sea to meet the Austrians and his army that had defeated them at Magenta, a battle in which the Piedmontese had

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failed to appear. As the leader of that army, the emperor deserved to be treated as conquering leaders always had been. If his name magnified the enthusiasm of their greeting, that only showed that the Milanese, like his own soldiers, had good memories. Later that day the emperor issued a proclamation defining his role in the war. He had not come to Italy out of “personal ambition, or to expand the territory of France.” Instead, the “honor and interests” of France had made it his “duty,” and by contributing to the emancipation of Italy, he saw himself as being on the right side of history: “If there are men who do not understand their epoch, I am not of their number.”11 A bold claim easily challenged, yet true to a point. Napoleon understood the powerful appeal of nationalism and wished to be seen as one of its most willing agents. He also believed that the nationalistic yearnings of other peoples might serve the interests of France and himself. An independent Italy beholden to its liberator would be a far better neighbor than an Austrian-controlled Italy beset by unrest and revolutionaries. The emperor also issued a proclamation to his army that day, telling them how much they had accomplished in little more than a month. In early May they had been unready and faced a difficult passage over the Alps. “The danger was great; the energy of the nation and your courage supplied all.” And so it was that in the last two weeks they (and their ally) had defeated the enemy four times. Though there would be “more struggles to support and obstacles to overcome,” he remained confident. Some heard in this proclamation echoes of the one his uncle had delivered to his army of Italy. But even those who did not hear this realized the purpose and value of the emperor’s closing salute. “Courage . . . brave soldiers of the Army of Italy! Your forefathers from above contemplate you with pride.”12 The following day, June 9, the celebration of Magenta climaxed with a great Te Deum Mass at noon in the Duomo. As they rode to the church, the two monarchs were once more greeted by cheering crowds. Like political leaders of any era, the two men were energized by the response to their presence; one observer thought the emperor had never looked “so well and so pleased.” While riding along, he bowed right and left, acknowledging the cheers and tossed flowers with “a touch of the cap or a wave of the hand.” Inside the Duomo, the cheering did not stop, and loud bursts of “Viva l’Imperator” and “Vive il Re” exploded through the cavernous building. After the mass, when the two men were leaving, many in the crowd outside rushed up the steps of the church to kiss their hands.13

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No such greeting met Garibaldi when he came to Milan that day. Arriving “incognito,” he was received by the king, who awarded him a gold medal for military valor and made him a grand officer of the Military Order of Savoy.14 These symbols of honor and respect were sincerely granted. At the same time Garibaldi and the cacciatori were reined in, their freedom of movement restricted. Instead of being free to roam and strike as opportunities offered, they were assigned a position on the left flank of the allied army, subject to orders. This revised assignment was probably not the king’s idea. Cavour and General La Marmora—never an admirer of Garibaldi—had also come to Milan to celebrate the victory. They wanted even more to confer with the king and Napoleon. The liberation of Lombardy and the apparent retreat of the Austrians to the Quadrilateral put the usefulness of the cacciatori in question. The war had reached a stage where either another large battle or a prolonged siege was likely to come next. Neither possibility suited a guerrilla force. It is easy to see how the four men came to this conclusion and why they wanted Garibaldi to slip in and out of Milan without being noticed, though Delille of the Morning Chronicle, a favorite of the imperial court, “was presented” to him.15 Had Garibaldi been seen, the Milanese would likely have treated him with even more enthusiasm than they had shown the king and the emperor. This would not do. The two victorious leaders must not be upstaged. Garibaldi’s role, vital in May, was now cut. The wounded, too, arrived in Milan in the days after Magenta. They were brought by train, the most seriously injured lying on straw and hay in open goods wagons. Though the ride was only an hour, for some it was an eternity of pain and thirst. When the trains pulled into Milan, volunteer nurses were waiting with glasses of lemonade. Coaches belonging to the “noblest and wealthiest families” stood by to carry the wounded from the station to the hospitals. How many were brought to the city in this period is difficult to estimate. A London Times correspondent, writing on June 23, said there were 25 military hospitals in Milan, many of which had sprung up in the wake of Magenta, and of the ten thousand patients, “a very large proportion” were the wounded of the battle. Their care was good by the standards of the day. By and large, the hospitals were clean, and some had access to chloroform. The doctors, mostly civilians who had volunteered or been “invited” to help, included a sprinkling of Austrian surgeons, either captured or simply left behind by their retreating units. Helping out in the hospitals were a number of women volunteers. A watercolor by Alessandro Reati shows a wounded Zouave being wheeled on a litter into one of the hospitals. Walking next to him is a fashionably

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clad lady holding a parasol over his face to shield him from the sun. Some of the volunteers were less willing to extend “attention” to the Austrian wounded.16 On their visits to the hospitals in Milan, Napoleon and Victor Emanuel spoke graciously to all the wounded. Honor and compassion required no less. So, in the eyes of some, did the humanitarian impulse of the age. “It would be hard indeed if in the nineteenth century, a wounded enemy did not receive in Europe every kindness and attention on the part of his captor.”17 It no doubt helped that the enemy was Christian. In Marseilles, Bishop Mazenod, still fuming over the “evil” and “unjust” war, visited the wounded that had been brought there, including some Austrians, whose “piety” touched him deeply. They eagerly kissed his hand, and he “willingly” kissed them on the face.18 A more ancient code, however, inspired the honor given the fallen General Espinasse. As his coffin was carried aboard the ship taking it to France, a group of Austrian prisoners on deck were ordered by their officers to form a line “and by their attitude, in the absence of arms, rendered military honors to the mortal remains.”19 If generals can die in battle, so can kings and emperors—if they choose to be on or even near the battlefield. Newspaper reports that bullets had whistled by Napoleon’s head at Magenta finally made his death seem a real possibility to the government in Paris. On June 6, the Interior Ministry issued a “very confidential” memorandum stipulating that in the event of the “sudden death of the Emperor,” news of the fact “should be kept secret until the civil and military authorities had time to swear an oath of allegiance to his heir.” Also, “if necessary, martial law should be declared and suspects arrested.”20 Rifled weapons had greatly extended the killing zone in war. If one could see a battlefield well enough to give orders, one was close enough to be shot. This was a sufficient reason to keep political leaders off the battlefield after 1859 unless, as was thought of Napoleon at Sedan in 1870, they were seeking death. *** The retreat of the Austrian army after Magenta was orderly; three great columns each moved toward the fortresses of the Quadrilateral. Covering forces were positioned at several places along the withdrawal routes. One was Melegnano, ten miles southeast of Milan on the road to Lodi and the site of a great French victory over the Swiss in 1515. Then the town had been known as Marignan, but by either name it remained a nondescript little community of 1500 people. Except to

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see one or two paintings in the parish church, tourists did not pause in Melegnano. And except for the presence of an Austrian brigade there in the days after Magenta, the French force under Marshal Baraguey d’Hilliers had no reason to go there. Why the Austrians had stopped in the town was for the marshal to determine. Was it simply part of the covering strategy, or was it to acquire a base for a future attack to regain Milan? In either case, the Marshal’s orders did not explicitly state that he chase the enemy out of Melegnano. But the Marshal, who relished combat, was “eager to have his day.”21 He was also, as the soldier about to have his arm amputated after Montebello learned, not greatly troubled by the pain and suffering of war. Impulsive, even brutal, Baraguey d’Hilliers believed in striking the enemy wherever he found him, even if his own forces were at a tactical disadvantage. They certainly were in the late afternoon of June 8 when the Marshal arrived at Melegnano. The Austrians had had two days to fortify the town, especially the six-foot-high walls around the churchyard. Instead of waiting for all of his forces to arrive so as to encircle the town and improve the chances of a decisive victory, Baraguey d’Hilliers decided to attack immediately. The result was a victory, but the close-quarter combat left the houses and streets and even the groves behind the village gorged with corpses. As the First regiment of Zouaves saw their companions and officers cut down, they changed from liberators to avengers. “I wish you could have seen,” wrote one Zouave, “how we bayonet them—it was really delightful to see.”22 French losses, particularly in officers, exceeded Austrian—nine hundred killed and wounded to less than four hundred. Under the cover of a torrential thunderstorm the Austrians withdrew. The next morning, before attending the Te Deum Mass, Napoleon rode out from Milan to see the battleground. The “appalling spectacle” of the dead and wounded in the muddy streets produced in him a “profound” anger: so much death in a battle that need not have been fought. Doctor Larrey, the chief physician for the army and a personal friend of the emperor, had never seen him so angry.23 A rumor spread that Napoleon was thinking of having Baraguey d’Hilliers shot. Even Colonel Claremont, always reluctant to find fault in the army he admired, criticized the “mismanagement” of the battle and consequent “great cost of life.”24 That evening Napoleon and Victor Emanuel, together with a number of officers, including Giuseppe Govone, went to La Scala Theater. The two leaders were greeted with “frenzied applause” that lasted nearly a half-hour, and between each

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of the ten musical pieces performed, the house rose and saluted them again.25 They, not the musicians and singers, were the show that night. Several reporters also went to Melegnano. Arriving in the afternoon of June 9, they saw the same sights Napoleon had that morning. One of them, Delille, acknowledged his “morbid curiosity.” What he saw would more than sate it. The wounded were still being separated from the dead, and the bodies of officers embalmed for later shipment home. Meanwhile, peasants were digging the many burial ditches that would be needed. Adding to these “horrors” was an event almost more “revolting” because it was so unexpected—at least by someone unfamiliar with war. A party of Zouaves decided to store in a house some firearms they had found in the streets. The woman who lived in the house, asked if any Austrians were hiding in the town, assured the soldiers that she knew nothing of the Austrians. She then began taking the guns upstairs, “saying they would be safer there,” and the soldiers left. A few minutes later a shot was heard, and the sergeant in charge of the party of Zouaves fell dead. Spotting an Austrian about to leave the house, the soldiers ran into it and dragged the man outside, where he was immediately bayoneted to death. The woman was then hustled into the street, summarily tried, and shot. “This double execution was so horrible, and all around me so terrific in its reality, that I left Malegnano [sic] at once, determined for the future to keep away from the battle-fields [sic] until the wounded had been attended to, and the dead buried.”26 Delille was not an especially precise writer, but in separating the “horrible” from the “terrific in its reality” and then “at once” leaving Melegnano, his words should give us pause. What was he trying to escape? Was it the “horrors” he had seen, or was it also a set of assumptions about war and human behavior that he and his contemporaries shared? Do his words—especially the phrase “terrific in its reality”—suggest a cracking in the belief that men’s behavior in war does not veer much from their behavior in peace? The wars of the past century, driven as they have often been by ruthless ideologies, have mocked such notions. But in 1859, they still had life. Delille could scarcely articulate what he had witnessed at Melegnano: a murderous anger resulting in the execution of a woman. Reading his account today, we cannot feel what he did when he wrote it. Inured to such death, we think differently about the human capacity for killing. Perhaps the path from Delille’s assumptions to our own begins in a photograph taken that same day in the Melegnano cemetery (see Figure 4.1).

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Figure 4.1 Dead of Melegnano. Source: Lamberto Vitali, Il Risorgimento nella fotografia (1979)

Filling the foreground of the image are piles of corpses. Behind them, aware of the camera, stand two men, one with his hands on his hips. “Flung together like sacks of grain,” the dead have neither dignity nor identity.27 They are the refuse of battle, soon to be hidden under the ground. The photographer was not some passerby with an ordinary camera. The image is a stereograph, a recent technical development requiring a specially designed camera with two lenses a few inches apart, equal more or less to the distance between the pupils of the eyes. The resulting two images, pasted on cardboard and viewed through a stereoscope, created the illusion of three dimensionality. As evocations of how we actually perceive the world, stereoscopic pictures quickly became popular. And the spatial depth they offered seemed to promise that objects and activities in landscapes or seascapes were their natural subjects.

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Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in June of 1859, the American doctor and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes predicted that “the next European war will send us stereographs of battles.”28 He would not have to wait, and what he saw undoubtedly exceeded what he had imagined; the comparison of the bodies in the Melegnano photograph to “sacks of grain” is his, appearing in an article published in the Atlantic in July 1861. He had seen the picture in a friend’s collection of photographs. He was so shocked that he warned that young ladies and children should not see such images. “What war leaves after it” was not fit to be seen by the innocent.29 Holmes’s friend was Dr. Henry Jacob Bigelow, a colleague at the Harvard Medical School. How or when Bigelow had come to possess the photograph is not known. It was probably purchased in Italy. Photographic journals in the 1850s and early 1860s were full of ads for stereographs, and many shops in the cities of Italy were selling them. But who took the photograph? Was it Giuseppe Allegri of Brescia, or the better known Luigi Sacchi, whose picture of the damaged bridge at Magenta after the Austrians had failed to blow it up was one of the few to survive the war? Whoever it was probably took the photograph on June 9, either early in the morning or toward evening. These are the likely times because there is no mention of a photographer being present and taking pictures of the dead—something that would have been noticed—in the reports of Napoleon’s visit to Melegnano in the morning or those of the reporters in the afternoon. None of these mysteries, however, rises to the importance of the simple fact of the photograph being taken. A second person, almost certainly unaware of J. L., had decided to photograph the dead of battle. Like the Englishman, the photographer at Melegnano supposed the public would be willing to look at his pictures. Of course some people would not want to see them, and others, as Holmes suggested, would be prevented from seeing them. But Holmes’s strictures were almost an afterthought. It mattered far more to him that war be understood for what it was, and photography could do just that. In the midst of the American Civil War, the Bostonian wrote yet another essay on photography for the Atlantic, emphasizing the need for “truth” as the “deliniator” [sic] of war, not the “fanciful” canvases of “some Baron Gros or Horace Vernet.” And to make his point, he described again the stereograph of the “bodies of the slain heaped up for burial after the Battle of Malignano” [sic].30 Of J. L.’s picture taking, all we have are his comments about his purpose and efforts. Of the Melegnano photographer, we have only a single image from which to surmise his purpose. It is tempting to

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merge the two men into one, sharing, it seems, a common purpose. But did they? J. L. set out to photograph a battle in progress and wound up only photographing the dead. He was not disappointed with his pictures since they too could correct the public’s illusions about war. Palestro did not inspire his effort; it was just the occasion for doing what he had planned to do when he left Switzerland. On the other hand, the Melegnano photographer evidently went to the battlefield on June 9 to photograph the destruction of battle—including the dead. What else could he have expected to see and shoot at that point? Looking for good subjects, he found one that he probably did not anticipate, one more horrifyingly dramatic—“terrific in its reality” as Delille might have said—than the scattered bodies J. L. photographed. Was he revolted by the piles of the dead? Fascinated? Probably a little of both, but most of all he was gripped by the pictorial possibilities of the scene. It was not “picturesque” in the contemporary sense. It was profoundly disturbing but had at least the beauty of truth. Reckoning that others would be similarly affected, the man slid plates into his camera, uncovered his lenses, asked the two men to look at him, and snapped a picture. After twenty years, the reluctance to photograph the dead of war had been overcome twice within ten days. Hitherto, photographers had registered the fact of such deaths with pictures of graveyards and individual tombs. In 1859 they caught death itself in their lens, willingly, even eagerly, and evidently without fear of official censure or public rebuke. Quite the opposite. Aware of the public’s fascination with war and insatiable appetite for reports and representations of battles, they supposed their pictures would have an audience. Luck, of course, played a role in the making of the pictures. Had J. L. not been in Switzerland, he would not have gone to the war, and had he not been in Torrione, he would have missed the battle at Palestro. The same is true with the Melegnano photographer, who was nearby, probably in Milan, and so reached the village before the dead were buried. Still, photographers in 1859 were not as a group rushing about to find dead bodies for subjects. There are no pictures of the dead of Magenta. There is, however, a stereograph by an unknown photographer of a site where many of the dead had been entombed near the railroad station. It was an unusual but fitting location, given the new role of the railroad in this war. Nor would any pictures of the dead of Solferino be taken, despite the several days needed to bury them. All of this suggests that the taboo against showing the real

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face of war had been breached but not overthrown. It soon crumbled altogether in the war that Holmes himself saw. *** As the dead of Melegnano were being buried, a very old man was dying in Vienna. Count Clement Wenceslas Metternich had dominated European politics for the better part of two generations. Now, in his eighty-seventh year and in failing health, he watched the world he had made coming apart. The political map of Italy had largely resulted from his diplomacy and so had the “system” by which the sovereigns and ruling orders of Europe tried to preserve their power in the decades after 1815. A man of the eighteenth century, who shared with his rival, Talleyrand, memories of the “sweet” times before the cataclysm of revolution, Metternich had watched the revolutions of 1848 all but destroy his life’s work. In their aftermath, kings, queens, and emperors still ruled, and still ruled through their aristocracies. But they could no longer rule simply by fiat and fist. The growing wealth of the middle classes now mattered and so did their opinions. The laboring classes, increasingly crammed into the cities of Europe, had the power of the mob. In 1859, Metternich wielded what influence he still had with the young kaiser to delay, if not forestall, the war. Having seen many wars, he was acutely aware of how unpredictable they could be. He also knew that the Austrian army was even more unpredictable, especially without the redoubtable Radetzky to lead it. The Napoleon of 1859 was no military genius, but he had an army, an ally, and ambition enough to destroy Habsburg rule in northern Italy and damage it elsewhere. When the war finally came, the old count followed it intently, hoping for the best. On hearing of Magenta, he collapsed and rapidly declined until his death in the afternoon of June 11. Newspapers were quick to seize on the obvious irony: his death had come “at the very time” when the treaty of Vienna, his great achievement, was being threatened by the “sword of a Bonaparte.”31 The irony would have been particularly relished by the Hungarian leaders trusting their cause to the emperor. General Klapka, who had been in Genoa for several weeks, issued a manifesto on May 20 urging the Hungarian soldiers in Italy to desert and join the newly formed legion. “Already the Italians, our brethren in misfortune, brandish arms to conquer independence. And you, Magyar warriors, how should you remain in the enemy’s ranks? How could you fight against those who have risen to shake off the yoke of servitude”?32 Initially, few heeded the summons. By June 6 there were only 120,

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but a week later the number had risen to 300. More promising was the news that a single company of Piedmontese had routed a battalion of Hungarians on June 9 at Seriate. If not quite ready to desert, the kaiser’s Hungarian troops seemed less than eager to die for him.33 Whether they would fight against him, however, was another matter altogether, one that Kossuth’s presence might affect. Soon thereafter the “Tribun” left London. He arrived in Paris on June 16, pleased with the “greatest politeness” shown to him by French officials at Boulogne. The Inspector of Police himself had taken Kossuth’s passport to be stamped, and on the train to Paris he enjoyed a separate compartment and permission to smoke. “My name,” Kossuth wrote his wife, “was a free pass everywhere.”34 What Kossuth viewed as marks of honor were actually measures of quarantine, lest he become the object of excessive attention. This became clearer when, after two days in Paris, he went on to Marseilles. At the railway station, police agents asked him where he planned to stay and then set two plain-clothes police as “mounted guard” before the doors of the hotel to watch the “movements of the Hungarians and note who called upon them.” This deterred many of the Kossuth’s admirers in Marseilles from “calling to pay their respects.” The other Hungarian alluded to was Philip Figyelmesy, whom Kossuth called his assistant but whose passport read, “aide-de-camp to M. Kossuth.” It was Figyelmesy who, during the evening of June 20, the day of Kossuth’s arrival in Marseilles, went out to the prisoner of war camps at Menpemti to see the Hungarian prisoners and tell them of the plan to “liberate Hungary.” He also said that Kossuth would soon meet with Napoleon and Victor Emanuel, and that he hoped to win their release “as early as possible.” As a down payment on that hope, Figyelmesy distributed money to the Hungarians before leaving the camp.35 The two Hungarians spent only a night in Marseilles, a sleepless one for Kossuth. “I ought to lie down, but my room looks as if myriads of bugs were waiting to feed on me through the night.” The boat trip to Genoa the next day was even worse. Kossuth hated the sea. The very smell of it disgusted him, and travel by boat made him “continually ill.” The short journey from Marseilles was no exception, and a very relieved Kossuth stepped on the quay at Genoa on June 22. The following day he proceeded by train to Turin. At stations along the way, crowds gathered to cheer him, knowing his name if not always recognizing his face. At Asti the military commander took on the role of “fugleman” to the crowd, while at Alessandria, Kossuth spoke in

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Italian to the hundreds of people who had come out to get a glimpse of him.36 During the previous decade the Hungarian patriot had become a celebrity. His movements and his speeches were routinely reported by the press, and though his message was inevitably about the liberation of Hungary, his listeners could hear references to their own political struggles in his speeches. They also had no difficulty understanding him because he was fluent in all the major European languages. Indeed, much like Garibaldi, Kossuth had become a supranational figure. Virtually wherever they went, the two men drew large crowds of ordinary people eager, at the very least, to catch sight of them. Emperors, kings, and prime ministers, on the other hand, distrusted their presence, useful as it might be to their plans. Garibaldi’s role in the war had been recently revised by its directors. They could also alter Kossuth’s whenever it suited them. *** Henry Jarvis Raymond arrived in Paris on June 10. The trip across the Atlantic had been uneventful except for the death of a fellow passenger, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, the well-known editor of the abolitionist weekly, National Era. Thus, “my first letter,” as Raymond described his dispatch from Southampton on June 9, was devoted to Bailey. His next, from Paris on June 19, announced that the New York Times “will speedily be very efficiently represented at the war.”37 That “efficiency” lay in “Malakoff’s” willingness to accompany Raymond to Italy. Making the decision easy was Raymond’s offer to pay his expenses and thirty dollars a week while they were in Italy— enough to make up for what Johnston would be losing from his medical practice. In writing about the offer to his sister back in Ohio, Johnston confided that he would have paid to go to Italy rather than not go at all. “But the Times people think a great deal of me, and I have only to let them have their own way to be myself satisfied.”38 The two men, together with Raymond’s friend, James Forsyth, left Paris on June 17. They traveled overland by the Mont Cenis route. Along the way they were struck by the “enormous quantity” of provisions being transported by rail and draft animals for the French army. “This thing of going to war by steam,” Johnston wrote, “of moving whole armies by steam, broke in seriously upon our souvenirs of Homer and Ovid and Cicero.”39 On Sunday, June 19, the three men arrived in Turin. Excitement over the string of victories was everywhere, as were soldiers. Some were bound for the front, while others were just back and convalescing from what Raymond described as

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largely “trifling wounds.” Zouaves, heady with their recent exploits at Magenta and Melegnano, swung “through the streets with the same gay, rollicking, reckless air which marks them on the boulevards of Paris.”40 Famous for their bravery and esprit, the Zouaves regarded war as a life-enhancing sport in which wounds and death were part of the game. Captain Jules Colette, the future father of the writer, would speak of losing his leg at Melegnano as if it were “but a scratch.”41 Early the next morning the Americans traveled by train to Novara by way of Alessandria—the direct line from Turin was impassable— and then hired a carriage to take them to Magenta. They wanted to “explore” the battlefield, to make better sense of what had happened. The outcome was clear: the French had won a decisive victory. An “accurate and connected narrative of the transaction,” however, had yet to be written.42 When they reached Magenta, they found “many” other sightseers, as well as relic sellers. The place had already become a tourist site, though its appeal was compromised by strong odors rising from the shallow graves of the ill-interred dead and flies swarming around the area. For visitors anxious to sense what a battle was really like, these signs of Magenta’s dead offered particularly telling testimony. Of course Raymond and Johnston did not consider themselves ordinary tourists. They also knew they were not the first reporters to visit Magenta. But they did suppose that they were the first American correspondents to survey the ground of “one of the most sanguinary battles of the age.” They imagined, therefore, that what they wrote would be eagerly read by their audience back in America. Together with Forsyth, they spent several hours walking around the areas of Magenta where the battle had been fought. Johnston had little to say about the site itself and nothing at all about the experience of being there; he attempted to work out “the alternations of the struggle” and the number of casualties.43 Raymond tried as well to piece together an account of the battle and conversed with a half dozen French officers, “scarcely any two” of whom even agreed on the movements of the regiments involved. He was happier and more successful composing a “personal narrative” of the journey to and around Magenta. By summoning readers to his side—”there may be something of interest in accompanying me from point to point”— Raymond sought to command their attention. The result was a chatty letter highlighted by sad notices of the dead, glimpses of life being restored—a common trope of such writing—and several nods to the fickleness of Mars. Adjacent to a house riddled with cannon balls was a handsome flower garden untouched by the “breath of war.”

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Raymond’s strategy as a reporter was clear: to dissolve authorial distance and enable readers to see in their minds what was not before their eyes. Thus he described the men going to join Garibaldi as having their pantaloons “tucked into their boot tops after the manner of our New York firemen.”44 This first dispatch from the seat of war did not challenge William Howard Russell’s eminence. In fact, it was never printed, perhaps never even sent to New York. Reading it over the next day, Raymond recognized its “hasty,” “rambling” character.45 He may have also sensed that his description of an unseen battle lacked the drama and emotion that had made Russell’s eyewitness reporting so compelling to contemporaries. If Raymond was to rivet his readers’ attention, he needed a battle he could see. Forsyth also wrote a letter describing the afternoon at Magenta, one of two he wrote while in Italy. Both were published in the Albany Evening Journal. In this first letter Forsyth reveals how troubled he was—far more than his companions—by what his imagination, working on his knowledge, told him. “It is now fifteen days since this field was reeking with the warm blood of men, and the air heavy with the shock of warring hosts and the groans of the dying.” Forsyth had been so troubled that he instinctively turned to the familiar language of the law to compose his thoughts. “It may be doubted whether retributive justice towards Francis Joseph has any punishment adequate to the great crime of causing such a slaughter as this. It may also be doubted whether all the blessings which Italian independence can bring this people are not dear at such a cost. All the nationalities of Southern Europe are represented here; and if their liberties shall strike deeper and rise higher from this fertilization of the “field of Magenta,” it is not for an American to say that this expenditure of human life is not well made.”46 Forsyth’s readers might not have been comfortable with such a cost versus benefit approach. Their forefathers had spilled much blood in winning their independence, why shouldn’t others? Was liberty not worth any price? As “an American,” Forsyth might nod his head to the question. As a visitor to a battlefield whose noxious fumes testified to its being bloodier than any of the Revolutionary War, he clearly had his doubts. Leaving Magenta, the three men boarded another train for the 12-mile trip to Milan, where they found the Milanese “still rejoicing” at their deliverance. The streets were crowded with convalescing wounded, small boys and middle-aged National Guardsmen playing soldier, and tales of purported outrages by both armies, but especially

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the Austrians. Despite many reports to the contrary, stories about the misbehavior of Franz Joseph’s army continued to circulate widely— thanks in part to the Piedmontese government, which broadcast any rumors of Austrian misdoings that came to its attention. While still in Paris (May 12), Johnston had charged that plundering by the Austrians would have “disgraced the barbarous ages of warfare,” and that even if the war ended immediately, Piedmont would “require a generation to recover from its prostration.”47 Such claims were easily made in Paris, where Johnston had relied primarily on official French and Piedmontese reports. But once he and Raymond reached Italy, they found no “evidences” of deliberate, let alone “barbarous,” depredations.48 War, they began to realize, cannot be judged from afar. Soon they would understand that even when seen up close, it is difficult to comprehend or describe. *** John Moncure Daniel, the American resident minister in Turin, was not a model diplomat. The former editor of the Richmond Examiner had once written a letter making fun of court life that appeared in newspapers across Italy. Nor did Daniel rigorously attend to his duties. Often he was away from Turin traveling around the continent. But in the spring of 1859, he was at his post and writing weekly dispatches to the secretary of state, Lewis Cass. On June 8, he reported the facts of Magenta and prophesied that “Austrian domination in Italy is doomed.” Daniel also had to deal with Americans who showed up at the legation and “importuned me” to intercede with the Piedmontese government so that they might “follow the operations of the army.” The minister routinely refused such requests on the grounds that both the government and the army had made it clear that “strangers and non-combatants” were not welcome at the seat of war and that “such applications on the part of a neutral power might possibly be misinterpreted.”49 Daniel made an exception, however, in the case of Lieutenant George Watson Carr. The Virginian had asked in May for a leave of absence from his regiment and then went to Italy with a letter of recommendation from secretary of war, John Buchanan Floyd. “In this case I thought myself authorized to do something in his behalf, and I asked of Count Cavour a safe-conduct for him to go to headquarters and accompany the Piedmontese army. This request was most promptly granted. The Minister not only gave him a safe-conduct, but also letters to General La Marmora and others, requesting them to give him all facilities of observation in their power, and stating that

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he would be happy to do the same for any other officer of the United States Army whose application should be similarly supported.”50 Carr’s personal history—he was a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson—likely influenced Daniel’s decision. Born in 1823, Carr had received a law degree from the University of Virginia and then practiced for a while. But eager for a more active life, he joined the army and fought “with bravery and distinction” in the Mexican War.51 He later went to Europe during the Crimean War, and is said to have witnessed the siege of Sebastopol. At what point he returned to America is not clear, but when he did, he had not lost his enthusiasm for battle. “Rather too fond of gunpowder,” a later associate said of Carr, which probably explains why in the spring of 1859 he asked for leave to go to Italy.52 Several other American officers also arrived hoping to observe the war. None was acting officially like the commission under Captain George McClellan that had visited the Crimea in 1855. If the war in Italy had gone on through the summer and into the fall, perhaps Secretary Floyd or others in the American government would have dispatched an official party. But as matters stood after Magenta and Melegnano, a long war did not seem likely, despite Franz Joseph’s decision to take personal command of his army. The casualties of the late battles, together with the growing threat of Prussian intervention, clearly worried Napoleon. Still, one more great battle or a hard siege at one of the Quadrilateral fortresses was widely anticipated. And Lieutenant Carr hoped to see one or the other—possibly both—when he left Turin for Piedmontese headquarters. Somewhat less eager for a longer war was Carlo Bossoli. The pressure of fulfilling his commission as a “pittore reporter,” together with the discomforts and dangers of war, were affecting the health of a man who was no longer young, had never followed an army at war, and whose self-portrait suggests a less than robust constitution. A painting Bossoli did of Prince Eugenio’s visit to a military hospital in Turin on June 20 is possibly a clue to the artist’s state of mind. Surrounded by members of his staff, the Prince is being introduced by an officer to a wounded soldier sitting up in bed. Other wounded men are visible but too small to be seen clearly. Bossoli has produced a stage set: we acknowledge the wounded but we are not among them. And except for the bandages swaddling their heads, we have no sense of their injuries or suffering. What is most striking, however, is the whiteness of the scene, from the ceiling and walls—their whiteness magnified by the sun-filled windows—to the bedding, bandages, and caps and aprons of the nurses. Together, they evoke a feeling of calm

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and quiet. Though we note that words are being spoken, the image has the effect of muffling all sound. Bossoli was likely not at the hospital on the day of the Prince’s visit. The Piedmontese army was a long way from Turin on June 20. Thus, the artist would have had to depend on what he heard of the visit and what he imagined. He intended to show the Prince as a caring figure in a caring context. But was Bossoli’s own longing for a haven, a place of quiet and caring, also being expressed in this unusual picture? There is no way of knowing. He was not, however, the only visitor to the war whose health was compromised by the experience. Nor was he alone in finding himself eager to escape it.

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Chapter 5

4

“ The Second Greatest Bat tle of Moder n Times”

Late in the morning of June 14, Franz Joseph visited the great mili-

tary hospital in Verona. He paid his respects to the wounded, speaking to several “in their national languages,” and examined the wards and kitchen. In the latter he tasted the soup and meat prepared for the soldiers’ noonday meal. Two days later the kaiser reviewed the seventh and eighth army corps at Lonato, and on June 18 he sacked Count Gyulai, by now the subject of intense criticism. There was even talk of a court martial for “wantonly and unnecessarily” sacrificing “his brave troops.”1 Replacing him was Count Franz Schlick, a veteran of many campaigns, during one of which he had lost an eye. But Schlick was to command only the Second Army. The emperor, intent on continuing “the struggle which Austria was obliged to begin in defense of her honor and rights,” was taking supreme command of his forces.2 “Struggle,” indeed. Lombardy was all but lost, Venetia on the verge of being attacked. Venice itself had been under a miniblockade since early June, and on the twelfth a large French fleet had left Toulon for the Adriatic. Plots, moreover, were afoot to stir revolt in Hungary. Meanwhile, most members of the German Confederation—Prussia a notable exception—regarded the war as an unpleasantness to be avoided, leaving Austria without a single ally even as it was losing battles and territory. And all of this was happening because a few thousand men had volunteered to fight for Piedmont. No wonder the grumbling in the coffeehouses of Vienna was loud enough to cause the police to make arrests. Or that in the city’s churches familiar scapegoats were being lashed once more. On the Sunday after Magenta, the very popular Jesuit preacher, Father Joseph Klinkowstrom, whose brother Max was serving with the army in

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Italy as a chaplain, had told his audience that “things will never go well in Austria until the Jews were turned out of the country.”3 Taking charge of an army is not, however, the same as knowing what to do with it. As midsummer approached, the kaiser faced a decision that was likely to shape the outcome of the war. Should his army retire to the fortresses of the Quadrilateral and face the French on the defensive, or should it stand and meet the armée d’Italie in open battle on a field of his choosing? The former option seemed prudent since the French had not yet brought up their siege guns, and Napoleon might hesitate at the prospect of another Sebastopol. Alternatively, forcing a grand battle somewhere between the Chiese and Mincio, while risky, had appealing advantages. A victory on the offense would vindicate the honor of Austria, revitalize its standing in the confederation, earn glory for the kaiser, and quiet criticism of the regime. This option was all the more tempting because Franz Joseph knew his soldiers had fought well in each defeat, so well that it might seem as if victory had been stolen from them. After all, had MacMahon not arrived when he did, Magenta would have been an Austrian victory. And was not Melegnano, given the French losses, a victory of sorts? In the next battle, he would be in the field, directing his soldiers and by his mere presence inspiring them to an even greater effort. Franz Joseph was not the only leader in 1859 to think his presence on the battlefield was vital to success. Victor Emanuel was still savoring his role in the Piedmontese victory at Palestro. Nor was the kaiser the first leader to suppose that near victory foretells actual victory the next time. Franz Joseph’s confidence in his army was shared by British commissioner Edmund Mildmay. As he saw matters, the Austrian withdrawal toward the Quadrilateral had not been a “retreat.” How could it be, he wrote on June 15, “for there had been no pursuing army for three days.” Besides, the “excellent” spirit of the Austrian soldiers was not that of a defeated army.4 On the same day Gyulai was replaced, Napoleon and Victor Emanuel entered Brescia. Once more the two men were greeted as conquering heroes. Flowers and flags lined the streets, and the townspeople, whose memories of Austrian oppression were particularly sharp, clapped and cheered wildly. After the receptions the emperor had received in Genoa, Alessandria, and Milan, we might imagine the welcome to Brescia was a trifle tedious for him. But we would be wrong. We are not political actors whose authority and ego rest on public acclamation. Nor are we self-defined liberators, whose belief in their projects is corroborated by the enthusiasm of the people they would free. For the political leader, like the stage actor, every performance of a role, however often played, is a new happening. And entrances, as any actor or politician knows, are critical to winning the audience.

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If the emperor was a performer in spectacles of his own making, so were his soldiers. Several days after the battle of Montebello, members of the Third Zouaves in Tortona staged a set of pieces mocking the Austrian claim of victory. The climax of the show was a ballet executed by “the most handsome men” in the battalion.5 This was not the first war in which the Zouaves had spent their off-hours in theatricals. Their performances in the Crimea, admiringly described by General Cler in his posthumously published memoir, had been celebrated for their broad humor. Italy offered a new venue, a new enemy to ridicule, and in the weeks leading up to Montebello, plenty of free time. A few days before the battle the Zouaves staged a production in a barn between Genoa and Alessandria. As with the later show, the performance ended with a ballet involving a dozen Zouaves that made one man in the audience laugh until “tears” were in his eyes.6 The Zouaves were indulging in pure fun. What they did would seem to have little if anything in common with the emperor’s theatrical efforts. But in the nineteenth-century theater of war, distinguishing between the behavior of a general leading an attack, a colonel uttering grandiloquent dying words, an emperor entering a liberated city, or soldiers performing “une pièce de circumstance” is less easy than it may seem. Acting in a world where their performance would always be scrutinized—not least by themselves—they gave a special resonance to the phrase “theater of war.” If the performances of the Zouaves seem to be different because they were the product of planning and perhaps rehearsal, then consider the entrances of Napoleon. They too were scripted, and their iteration amounted to a kind of rehearsal. Many similar examples could of course be drawn from almost any war in any century. But “similar” is not strong enough to vitiate the point. In an era when many people could remember Napoleon I, soldiers dressed up in expensive finery to go out and kill each other, and a journalist could write that nothing made a man seem more like a general than an empty sleeve, war had acquired a distinctly theatrical quality. Would the public have enjoyed their role as spectators quite so much had they not sensed that some of the players shared their view of what war was? Or had journalists, like the recently arrived Joseph Archer Crowe, not been so willing to dramatize it for them? The 33-year-old Englishman had been sent by Mowbray Morris to take over the Times correspondence from the Austrian side. The man he replaced, an artillery captain in the British army, had been too proAustrian. Crowe had only recently come back to England from a twoyear stay in India where he had done a little writing for the Times. What made him seem a good choice in the present instance were his earlier reports and sketches from the Crimea for the London Illustrated Times.

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Crowe’s first love might be art—he had hoped to be a painter and eventually wound up writing books on art—but following in the footsteps of his father, he had already made a name for himself as a journalist.7 Crowe left England on June 1, going first to Vienna and then to Italy. He finally arrived at Austrian headquarters in Verona on June 15, having “had opportunities of noting, during my rapid journey through Austria to this place, with what activity and order, with what regularity and efficiency, the military organization of this empire is administered.”8 Morris, ever a close watcher of his correspondents, was not impressed by what he sardonically termed the “rapidity” of Crowe’s journey to the front. Nor was he mollified by his excuses. “The Times can’t afford to care for obstacles and are obliged to look only at results.”9 The manager became exasperated when Crowe subsequently asked whether he should remain with the kaiser’s headquarters or move to General Schlick’s. “Your place is wherever there is anything to see or to hear. No one can tell you what that place is at this distance of time and space.”10 As he wrote those words Morris must have had one or two second thoughts about hiring Crowe. At least Eber, for all his political obsessions, did not need to be told where to report a war from. Meanwhile, Raymond and Johnston of the New York Times were in the process of learning how. Back in Milan, after their visit to Magenta, each wrote a dispatch on June 21. Raymond’s, reflecting his impatience at having “no intelligence from the seat of war,” focused on what he saw about him. Little in the city pleased him. The newspapers had no real news, the new National Guard seemed more concerned with their uniforms than with their training, and many “not overly clean females” were hovering around the soldiers. On the other hand, Raymond was amused by the “mimic fights” he saw put on by a puppeteer near the Duomo and a “crowd” of boys marching with “shoulder sticks.” Here, within the sound of the guns, were two forms of play war, one relatively new and the other as old as civilization. Raymond’s eyes betrayed him, however, on one occasion. He thought he had glimpsed Garibaldi in a coach—”there is nothing very marked in his appearance”—when in fact the leader of the cacciatori was far from Milan.11 Johnston used his letter to describe what he had seen at Magenta. Only at the end did he mention Milan, and with little more liking than Raymond. The “bravado” of the Milanese seemed out of place, given their “docility” when the Austrians were still in control. And the new National Guard, sporting “gold watches and chains and seal rings,” looked “more like gentlemen than soldiers.” Both he and Raymond, therefore, were happy to leave Milan for Brescia early the next morning (June 22). The war was ahead of them—somewhere. Whether they would reach it before the next battle was a real question since travel by

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rail had become impossible. The army now “entirely monopolized” the trains, leaving the two men to go on by “horse conveyance.” If they were late for the expected great battle, they could at least hope to be witnesses to a siege.12 For it was reported that on the railroad cars no longer carrying civilians were elements of the great French siege train. Another reporter forced to rely on coach and horse to get to the front was Frank Vizetelly. He left Milan for Brescia on June 21, hoping to find a particular officer at Piedmontese headquarters who would grant him permission to attach himself to the headquarters, “a favor almost unobtainable by others.” He traveled from Milan in a “crazy old diligence, drawn by more crazy horses.” Under “favorable conditions,” the 55-mile trip took about ten hours. This one took twenty. And instead of a snowball fight to ease the monotony and discomfort, Vizetelly suffered “six perspiring” coachmates in heat that “cracked the paint on the panels of the coach” and “clouds of dust” that blew through the windows whenever there was a breeze.13 By the time the coach reached Brescia, Victor Emanuel had moved his headquarters forward to Lonato. And so Vizetelly, his patience withered, had to make another uncomfortable trip in a “wretched” coach. His fellow passengers this time were a group of half-drunk Piedmontese soldiers. The reporter’s perseverance was finally rewarded in Lonato when he gained the desired permission to accompany the king’s headquarters. Finding an old barn to lodge in, Vizetelly went to sleep on the night of June 23 thinking that the next day he would see the “great battle” that people were expecting. During the night, however, he found himself fighting his own battle with the tiny “foes” (bed bugs) that anyone who had had “to rough it in Italy” would understand.”14 As the reporters were trying to catch up with the war, a frustrated Ernest Meissonier was settling in at French headquarters. He had hoped to go to a division to be nearer common soldiers, but his request had been denied. He was also feeling unappreciated by the staff officers at the headquarters. At one point he even thought of packing up his materials and going home. “At my age and in my position,” he complained, it was intolerable “to be treated like someone who didn’t need attention paid to him.” Meissonier was also having problems in his work. Doing finished sketches of soldiers in motion was more difficult than he had anticipated. They were not models, ready to hold or repeat a gesture. “I don’t yet know how to do them,” he confessed in a letter on June 22, “I must make an apprenticeship of the thing, it won’t take long.” An artist unsure of himself is in trouble and likely to fall back on what he knows how to do. Eager to capture “campaigning soldiers,” a feat he thought not done before, Meissonier was reflexively gravitating toward painting the kind of small,

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genre picture that he was famous for. But would such a painting satisfy the purpose of the imperial commission or the emperor himself?15 On the same day Meissonier was worrying about his sketches, a very different sort of man had a very different set of worries that also involved the emperor. Jean-Henri Dunant was a 31-year-old Swiss businessman who headed an enterprise proposing to grow wheat in Algeria. His ambition was eventually to turn Algeria into a “breadbasket for Europe.” But things were not going well, thanks to a sustained drought and diminishing capital. Thus the young entrepreneur decided to ask Napoleon to become a sponsor of the flagging enterprise. Knowing that the emperor had an interest in the commercial development of North Africa, it seemed a very good strategy. And so armed with letters of recommendation from several senior army officers and a copy of a book he had just written that he intended to present to the emperor, Dunant set off for imperial headquarters. He had no particular interest in the war and no desire to be a spectator. Dressed in a splendid white suit, side whiskers and mustache carefully trimmed, and watch chain curled on his breast, the handsome Swiss looked exactly the part he wanted to play, that of a man bent on making a deal.16 Except that Dunant was more than a simple businessman. He was a devout Christian who was active in a number of evangelical organizations, an opponent of slavery who had met Harriet Beecher Stowe in Geneva in July 1853, and a writer, as his intended gift to Napoleon indicated. His most recent effort was The Empire of Charlemagne Restored, which imagined Napoleon as the heir not only to Charlemagne but to more ancient figures like Cyrus and Romulus. Indeed, someone meeting Dunant as he traveled to see the emperor might, after a short conversation, have been more impressed with his humanitarian concerns than his commercial interests. Those concerns had emerged early on. At age four he had exploded “into sobs” when his mother read him the La Fontaine fable of the fox and the lamb, and cried out, “I do not want the lamb to be eaten.”17 This sympathy for the innocent and the vulnerable prompted the charitable work he did as a youth in Geneva, principally as a member of the Société d’Aumones. It was also evidenced in his admiration for the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and subsequently the work of Florence Nightingale.18 In June 1859, Dunant did not succeed in meeting the emperor, who even declined his book. But he would write another based on what he saw and did in Italy, and that book would be read around the world. *** Wars in the nineteenth century fit a pattern: long periods of waiting, preparing, and marching interrupted by spasms of intense battle that

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usually lasted a few hours. Death by disease was a constant risk, and routinely accounted for the majority of fatalities in wars of long duration. In the American Civil War, twice as many soldiers would die of disease as of battle wounds. One might have to wait weeks, even months to find a quick, noble death in battle. Brief though it was, the war of 1859 followed this pattern—almost. The first three weeks had been quiet; then came the clash at Montebello, a small affair magnified in the contemporary telling. For the next ten days, aside from Garibaldi’s dramatic but not decisive forays around the lakes, quiet again prevailed. Then in rapid succession came Palestro, Magenta, and Melegnano, battles that did not decide wars but showed that war was finally about killing the enemy in significant numbers to gain victory. The Austrians, losers thus far in all their contests with the allies, needed time to regroup. Their retreat across Lombardy, during which they destroyed railway track and bridges to slow the French advance, gave them the opportunity. The retreat also served the allies, especially the French. Only now, in June, were some French units coming to full strength. They had arrived in Italy undermanned due to a system that allowed veteran soldiers to go on renewable furloughs until their military obligation had been met. By mid June, the regiments were filling up with men, Ferdinand Eber told his readers, who “are not recruits but seasoned soldiers, most of them dating from the Crimean campaign.” If a great battle was to be fought around the Quadrilateral, and all the world including Eber thought it would, the French would have their best in the field. Meanwhile, flushed with the confidence gained from its successes, the emperor’s army marched across the “beautiful Lombard plain,” as if on an “agreeable promenade in the park.”19 On June 23 Franz Joseph finally decided for battle. He ordered his forces to leave their positions around the Quadrilateral, cross the Mincio, and prepare to attack the allies, who were thought to be crossing the Chiese. What better moment to catch an army? But the kaiser’s intelligence was faulty: the allies were already across the Chiese on the twenty-third. In turn, allied intelligence was also flawed. From balloon observations made the same day, Napoleon knew that columns of Austrians were west of the Mincio, but thought they were only a reconnaissance in force, not an entire army seeking battle. Thus each side believed that only a part of the enemy was before them, and a part, given its size, vulnerable to attack by a much larger force. And so at five in the morning of Friday, June 24, the feast day of John the Baptist, the two armies, each numbering around one hundred and fifty thousand men, slammed into each other. Each met a force many times larger than expected.

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What followed along a 15-mile line, stretching from San Martino near Lake Garda, where Victor Emanuel and his forces were concentrated, down through Solferino and extending to Guidizzolo, was the “greatest battle the modern world has seen.”20 If by “modern” Henry Raymond meant his own lifetime, he did not exaggerate. No battle since Leipzig (1813) had involved armies the size of those that met that day, while few battles lasting a single day had matched it in intensity and duration. Under a broiling sun, the fighting churned on for almost sixteen hours, the heat eventually becoming so unbearable that water became the first priority. French and Austrians sometimes filled their water bottles together at the same source, even passing them along to each other.21 Late in the afternoon, a violent thunderstorm interrupted the fighting for the better part of an hour. Soldiers cringed before the crashes of thunder and lightning and then ran to escape being “buried beneath” the avalanches of water.22 Once the skies cleared, combat resumed, as well as the heat. Only at nightfall did the fighting stop, by which time the Austrians were retreating, the allies claiming another victory, and the casualties had exceeded forty thousand, equaling Waterloo. They would not be matched on European soil until 1914. Solferino was the name given to the battle when it was announced to the world in Paris. For Victor Emanuel and his army, however, the ground around San Martino mattered most. There they had fought and bested the “finest troops of the Austrian army,” as Cavour reported the battle to his ambassador in Paris on June 28.23 Finally, the Piedmontese army had a victory worthy of the world’s notice, and they were not going to allow the name their ally chose to overshadow it. The two battles had not been altogether separate, but that was a point of no concern for the Piedmontese, eager to have a victory that justified their dominance in a polity still being formed. As important as Palestro had been, San Martino, as a battle and a memory to celebrate, promised to be much more. For the average soldier that day, however, the naming of the battle mattered far less than having survived it. Writing to his uncle the next day, a French lieutenant happily announced another “grand victory.” He then added, more happily, that he had come out of the battle “still intact!”24 So had Giulio Adamoli. In the early days of the war, life for the young recruit consisted of marching, bivouacking, and inspections by important officials such as General La Marmora. The “monotony” eased when he and his comrades entered Milan on June 9 and experienced the extraordinary outpouring of celebration. It was, he later recalled, “like a dream.” From Milan, the Piedmontese continued their “triumphal march” across Lombardy, receiving another tumultuous

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welcome in Brescia. They then marched to Lonato, where on the morning of June 24 they were awakened by the beating of drums.25 In the ensuing battle Adamoli, like soldiers in every era, lived in a maelstrom of particular moments. “My memory of the battle is of a series of detached episodes; of the general course of the battle I understood nothing.” At one point in the fighting he turned to a lieutenant and asked, “Have we won or lost?” That night, when the outcome was clear, there were few expressions of joy. “Un sentimento religioso” pervaded the camp. The men spoke little, and then usually to ask after the fate of some companion. The next morning they saw spread around them the “dreadful” carnage of war: the dead thick on the plain, their bodies already swollen and turning black from the intense heat; equipment of every kind, from carriages to boots, scattered everywhere; and an “incredible number” of letters lying about, tossed away by the “plunderers” who had already rifled the packs of the dead. Of all the material detritus of battle Adamoli saw that day, the letters were the most disturbing. How many hearts, he wondered, did they leave “broken forever?”26 Raymond and his two companions had left Brescia by carriage early on the twenty-fourth, unaware that a battle was in progress. As they moved toward French headquarters at Montechiaro, they occasionally came upon carts carrying the wounded, but supposed them to be the victims of nothing more than a skirmish. On reaching Montechiaro they learned otherwise: a “great Battle [sic],” they were told, was being fought in the plain before Castiglione, some five miles away. Quickly the trio clambered to the top of some old fortifications and, peering through the “glasses” they had with them, saw smoke rising from the distant engagement. They then pushed on to Castiglione, and by noon had taken up a position on a hill that Napoleon had occupied earlier that morning.27 Viewing the battle, however, was unexpectedly difficult. The hill was too far off for the men to observe “with any accuracy the successive stages of the action.” They could make out masses of troops moving “toward the front,” but once there they were “speedily enveloped” in smoke, a common obstacle for observers—and directors—of nineteenth-century battles. Nevertheless, Raymond stayed on the hill all day, descending only briefly during the thunderstorm to find cover. He thought of leaving his vantage point and going “closer” but worried about finding “any eminence upon the plain” that would offer “so sweeping and complete a view.” As a result, he scarcely saw the fighting itself, and his description of its progress was sketchy, “a very general outline.”28

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Far more specific and vivid were his descriptions of the wounded, the few seen on the road in the morning and the multitudes in the aftermath of the battle. Raymond watched the latter go by in “sad procession” as he stood for over an hour in a crowd of onlookers. Some walked along, their faces completely covered with blood from saber cuts upon their heads. Many had their arms shattered, hundreds had their hands tied up, and some carried most ghastly wounds upon their faces. Some had tied up their wounds, and others had stripped away the clothing, which chafed and made them worse. I saw one man walking along with a firm step and a resolute air, naked to his waist, and having a bullet wound upon his side, an ugly gash along his cheek, and a deep bayonet-thrust, received from behind, in his shoulder.29

Raymond has tried to make his readers see what he did, and to a point succeeds. Few would have been unmoved by what they read. Yet he mutes the horror of the scene: blood is mentioned only once in that passage, and “ghastly” is left unexplained. Longstanding conventions forbade the graphic detail found in descriptions of war today. Raymond was no more willing than Russell to show just what battle can do to the body. And because he was not, and because other reporters and artists were not, the romanticization of war would continue. Johnston (together with Forsyth) saw more of the battle once he left Raymond and sought out other positions. As a result, he constructed a more coherent account of how “Francis Joseph has commanded and lost today his first battle.” This opening jab of his dispatch reveals the ironic flair that marks his writing. And like many of his contemporaries habituated to an extravagant aesthetic of nature, Johnston often extolled the “picturesque.” At one point in the battle, he was enthralled by the sight of artillery firing against the backdrop of the rays of the setting sun “illuminating the snow-clad tops of the mountains” while simultaneously throwing a shadow on Lake Garda. On both sides, artillery batteries were being shifted from one hillock to another, “and as soon as placed in position a regular rolling discharge could be heard and a line of fire seen like a conflagration. The scene was picturesque and terrible.” That last word, “terrible,” saves Johnston from sounding naïve. So would his descriptions of the wounded. To his eye, they were more than a parade of damaged, stoic men.30 During the storm Johnston took refuge in Castiglione and “assisted” in treating the wounded. Later that evening, after the battle, he went around to the hospital and churches where the wounded were being attended to. He noticed the majority had wounds to the

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arms and legs; “those of the chest and abdomen generally remain on the field”—presumably to die. But the “most horrible” wounds he saw that day were to the face. Two Zouaves . . . had the whole under jaw carried away, and yet these brave fellows walked behind the carts of their comrades more dangerously wounded than themselves. Some had their eyes closed from blows with the butts of the muskets, others had their cheeks or mouth hanging in lambeaux from sword cuts, others the cheeks swollen to enormous dimensions from balls that had pierced their faces through and through.31

Johnston’s medical training obliged him to help in the afternoon. In the evening it required that he be precise—up to a point—in describing what he had seen. The substitution of lambeaux for “shreds” softened the impact of his description even for those who knew French. The word choice must have surprised readers who had supposed that the “Malakoff” they had been reading for the last several years was little more than a boulevardier. Raymond and Johnston composed their stories about Solferino late at night on the twenty-fourth. Raymond wanted his report to be the first sustained account to reach the United States, which meant beating the London Times, whose own correspondent(s)—Raymond apparently thought there was only one on the field that day—were presumably writing through the night as well. “If I can only beat ‘the Thunderer’ into New York with this news, the Times is made.” So, a decade later, Forsyth remembered Raymond exclaiming “several times” that night. Those may not have been Raymond’s exact words, but Forsyth would have remembered accurately how eager his friend was to match the success of Russell, and how near to doing it he would have felt that long summer night.32 Neither Eber nor Crowe, let alone Morris and Delane back in London, viewed their American namesake as a competitor. The Times’ rivals were the other London newspapers, none of which, except for the illustrated weeklies, approached the Times in circulation. Still, Eber and Crowe were under pressure, as witnessed by the admonishment Morris had given the latter. Now that the paper had become an authoritative political voice, it could not tolerate delinquent or illinformed reporters, and certainly not in matters of war, the subject that had so enhanced its reputation and circulation. Moreover, too much was at stake for the nation. Given Prussia’s threats of intervention, an insurrection possibly brewing in Hungary, and Napoleon

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III emerging as a military threat, the political stability of the continent, and hence British policy and public feeling, seemed likely to be affected by the course of the war. Thus it was up to Eber and Crowe to report the war as accurately and swiftly as they could. They did not disappoint at Solferino. Morris told Crowe that his long dispatch of June 25 was “very satisfactory,” and reading it today one can understand why.33 Crowe was in the field “during the whole action,” much of the time within a few feet of the kaiser and his staff on a hill above Cavriana. Hence “I” and “We” become steady reference points for readers, who instinctively trust the eyewitness. In addition to his eyes, Crowe had “competent authorities” to inform him of the disposition and movements of the Austrian troops he could not see.34 Who those authorities were he does not say, but we may assume they were members of the kaiser’s staff, with whom he had carefully established good relations. Eber’s report, praised by Morris as “admirably” done, took another tack.35 The Hungarian was also on the battlefield most of the day, but he saw events through the eyes of an experienced soldier. Thus the first half of his letter analyzes the topography of the battleground and the strategy and tactics—such as they were—of the battle. Even when writing of what he saw, Eber speaks in the voice of a student of war, not an untrained observer. Crowe had watched battles, Eber had fought in them. After the taking of Solferino the engagement assumed really the shape of a battle, where tactics came into play. The taking of the village was more due to bravery than science. Battles have often been compared to a game of chess; well, I was never so struck by the truth of this comparison as yesterday during the advance from Solferino to Cavriana,—how one body after another was moved forward, and the enemy forced back by degrees.36

The difference between the two men is nicely represented in their respective opening sentences. First Crowe: A great battle was fought yesterday, as I expected, on the plain of Medole and the heights of Solferino and Cavriana. Another name has been added to the number of those places in this little hilly triangle which have been illustrated in the military history of Italy by a battle.

The difference in how Mowbray Morris valued the two men is clear from a comment in his letter to Crowe on July 11. While complimenting him again upon his description of Solferino (“clear and

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well written”), he adds a stinger at the end. “More details would be acceptable—such as we receive from your colleague or rather rival in the allied camp.”37 Famed for his “ruthlessness” in handling his foreign correspondents, Morris was not being witty.38 Frank Vizetelly was also on the field that day, in the company of the Piedmontese around the village of San Martino. As a special artist, he was looking for scenes that “struck me as being worth an illustration.” One of them indicates why the circulation of the illustrated papers would steadily rise while that of the Times would “stagnate” within a decade. It is best to listen to how the young journalist described what he saw. His majesty had dismounted, and comfortably seated himself upon the grass, with a pail of water by his side, from which he would occasionally help himself, using an iron ladle as a drinking-cup. The various members of his staff also slaked their thirst at the kingly tap, sans façon, and glad enough would I have been to have imitated their example.39

The resultant image conforms to Vizetelly’s description. Victor Emanuel is seated on the grass, spyglass up to his right eye; behind him stand a group of officers looking at the battle, none with a glass. One officer has taken a moment to dip a ladle into the pail of water to bring it to his lips. All the news accounts of the battle noted the terrific heat of the day. Vizetelly’s drawing gives it presence while suggesting how human, how ordinary, the king and his staff were. The artist also did sketches of the final assault on San Martino by the Piedmontese and a panorama image of the battlefield. Useful as such images were for understanding the battle, they were not likely to delight the mind like the water scene or linger long in it. A more sentimental example of this pictorial strategy is to be found in a tale of a dog and a man. At Magenta, according to the Daily Telegraph of June 14, a mortally wounded French officer was approached by his dog as he lay dying. After licking his wounds, the dog lay down “upon his master’s breast” and the two died “together.” The scene was too good to be left to words. Jean-Adolph Beaucé, the special artist who had sketched the death of general Beuret at Montebello, quickly made a drawing of the faithful dog that the editor of the Illustrated London News decided to publish on the front page. The News also identified the officer as a lieutenant in the Foreign Legion. Several weeks later the story appeared again, somewhat embellished. Now, according to the description that accompanied a different sketch in Le Monde illustré, the event took place at Solferino and the dog, previously unnamed, became “Fidèle.”40

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On June 24, for the first time in the war, the three British commissioners were all in the field. Like the correspondents, however, each saw only a part of the battle, and so at first underestimated just how large an affair it had been. “Excepting the position of Solferino,” Cadogan wrote on the night of the twenty-fourth, “and those on the left of the Sardinian line, the scene of action did not give the idea of a very bloody engagement.” Accordingly, casualties too were underestimated. Mildmay thought them “together less than at the battle of Magenta.” What was clear at the end of the day, however, was that the Austrians had been beaten. Mildmay accepted the unhappy fact that the army he admired, and which had fought “bravely and obstinately,” now had “to retreat” back across the Mincio.41 As the kaiser and his staff, having come under French shelling, vacated the heights of Cavriana, Colonel Claremont was also leaving the field. He had become so “sick from the effects of the sun,” that he could hardly sit on his horse. All around it was a bad day for Claremont. Early in the morning he had ridden to Lonato to view the left of the French line, and so could not “catch the Emperor” once the fighting broke out. He never did reach Napoleon’s entourage, and, in leaving the battlefield early, missed seeing the victory unfold.42 The artist Meissonier also missed his chance that day. He at least was with the emperor, but somehow had left behind his sketch materials. “I barely let the Emperor out of my sight, trying to compose my picture, and more than once I could have seized a good occasion. But baneful luck, not the least scrap paper or pencil” was handy.43 Meissonier was not alone in cursing his luck in the aftermath of the battle. Writing to his wife two days after the defeat, the leader who had “commanded and lost . . . his first battle” lamented that luck had not “smiled on us.”44 She certainly had on Philip Kearny, however. The night before Solferino, while scouting beyond French lines, he had “miraculously” escaped being captured by a party of Austrian cavalry. The day of the battle he did not suffer a scratch, despite being “scarcely off my horse” from six in the morning until eleven at night. He did, though, get a case of “sun-stroke.”45 Kearny also came away from the battle with an even greater respect for the élan of the French army after witnessing their attack and capture of the “Spia d’Italie,” the medieval tower that stood on a hill at Solferino. For a war lover like Kearny, escaping capture, then riding and fighting all day among men of “extraordinary bravery,” was what life ought to be about: battle, risk, glory.46 The last was formally recognized six months later when the emperor

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awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor, making Kearny the first American to receive the award for military service. When the Civil War broke out, Kearny hurriedly returned to the United States and received a commission in the Union army as a brigadier general. Soon he was in command of a division. Then his luck ran out. On September 1, 1862, in an incident reminiscent of his near capture before Solferino—impatient with a regiment’s slow advance at Chantilly, he rode ahead of his lines into a Confederate unit—Kearny was killed instantly in a hail of bullets. It was a soldier’s death, absent the glory. Henri Dunant was in Castiglione during the battle. Standing on one of the hills around the village, miles from Solferino, he was unable “to see accurately what was the plan of the battle,” but he could make out the movements of the armies. He later learned a great deal more: for example, how Colonel Louis-Charles Maleville, finding his regiment outnumbered and its ammunition spent, seized the regimental flag and rushed toward the Austrians crying, “Every man who loves his flag follow me!” He also heard about the faithful dog, but in a version that had the animal wounded so that it had “to drag itself back to die beside its master.” Then there were the grimmer details, of men fighting with stones and fists when they ran out of ammunition and their weapons were broken, and of soldiers on both sides killing the wounded. A story about Franz Joseph especially touched Dunant. As his army retreated before the French onslaught in the afternoon, the angry and frustrated kaiser had allegedly called his soldiers “cowards,” and then, calming down, had begun his own retreat to Vallegio “with great tears streaming down his cheeks.”47 None of this was known to Dunant on the night of June 24, and none of it mattered. What did was the crisis developing around him at Castiglione. In a matter of hours, the town of a few thousand was “transformed into a vast improvised hospital” as the wounded of both sides streamed in by the thousands on foot or horse or by cart. Virtually every building that could be converted into a hospital was, including the local police barracks and all the churches. Private houses were soon taken over as well, their occupants facing a calamity they could never have anticipated. “Some ran wildly through the streets, looking for a doctor for their guests. Others went to and fro distraught, begging to have the dead taken from their houses, for they did not know how to get rid of them.”48 Dunant himself went about helping however he could, giving water to the thirsty and comfort to those near death. Men who had been “a picture of health and strength” days before, now lay in their own filth,

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flies covering their faces and wounds. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,” protested one of the Grenadier Guards, struggling against what he knew was soon to come. Dunant spoke to him, and his words had a calming effect. “He allowed himself to be soothed, comforted, and consoled, to die at last with the straightforward simplicity of a child.”49 In moving about, Dunant may well have met up with Johnston of the New York Times doing what he could to help the wounded. If so, their contact was fleeting and likely forgotten by both men. Meanwhile, the majority of the wounded still lay on the battlefield, waiting for help and wild with thirst. If they were lucky that night, one of the parties of soldiers out looking for friends and comrades found them and brought them to Castiglione or one of the field hospitals (“ambulances”) set up around the battlefield. Even so, their luck would have to hold if they were to have a chance to survive. There were far too few surgeons to do all the cutting and splinting, and gangrene—as every soldier knew—might still await those who were treated as well as those who were not. Dunant would never forget the “agonies” of that fearful night, and doubted that his or anybody else’s literary efforts could “ever” describe them.50 During that anguishing night of June 24, the young Swiss businessman began thinking that “somehow or other a volunteer service had to be organized” if the wounded were to receive even minimal care. And so the next morning he set about trying to enlist residents of Castiglione as “improvised nurses,” not an easy task amid such chaos. It did not help that the same day a rumor about the Austrians returning set off a panic in the town. But by Sunday morning Dunant had managed to find some women willing to help. Their work was of the most basic sort: food, “and above all drink,” had to be dispensed; wounds had to be dressed; and bodies—”bleeding, muddy, and verminous”— had to be washed. All this in a hell of misery, smells, and cries that taxed the most saintly. Inevitably the inexperienced women “went first to those who cried the loudest—not always the worst cases.” Dunant did what he could “to organize” their efforts to be more efficient but he was more successful in persuading them to treat all the wounded the same, whatever their nationality. “Tutti fratelli” the women repeated feelingly. Meanwhile, young boys helped by carrying water from the town’s fountains to the makeshift hospitals in any receptacles they could find. Playing soldier was left to another time, perhaps given up forever.51 Dunant’s efforts at organizing relief quickly extended to getting supplies. “Resources” were very limited in Castiglione, especially since the Austrians had passed through the town not long before. On Monday, therefore, Dunant sent his coachman to Brescia for provisions. A

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few hours later the man came back, the carriage “loaded” with shirts, sponges, linens, bandages, tobacco, and, not least, sugar and lemons to make lemonade, “for which the men had been pining.” Dunant also sent a letter to the Journal de Genève describing his efforts and asking for donations, monetary or material. Meanwhile volunteers showed up to help, most of them strangers to Castiglione. They included an Italian priest, some French officers, a group of English tourists, a Paris journalist who stayed to manage one of the hospitals, and a handful of “casual travelers and onlookers.” All were welcomed, though most did not stay long. One by one they “withdrew,” unable “to look upon suffering which they could do so little to relieve.” Even the soldier volunteers found the “spectacle” in the hospitals unnerving. And finally so did Dunant. Worn out with fatigue, and unable to sleep a wink, I called for my carriage on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, and set off, at about 6 o’clock, to breathe the fresh evening air in the open, and get a little rest by staying away for a time from the gloomy scenes which surrounded one on every side at Castiglione.52

His sense of relief is even more palpable in the original French. “Je pars vers six heures pour respirer en plein air la fraicheur du soir.”53 Overcome by pity and Christian obligation, Dunant had done all he could in the few days he spent at Castiglione. It was not much, at least when compared to what Florence Nightingale and her volunteers did at Scutari in the winter of 1854–55. But to compare the two efforts—except to note Dunant’s urge “to organize”—would be unfair. The “lady with the lamp” was a trained nurse sent out by the British government to correct a deplorable situation. She and her staff did what was expected of them. Nothing had been expected of a “mere tourist,” and neither he nor his volunteers had any training.54 They did what they could for as long they could and then quit. All except Dunant. He left Castiglione but he had not quit. *** While the wounded were attended to on the night of the twentyfourth the correspondents for the various newspapers were composing their accounts of the day’s fighting. Raymond, with the help of Johnston and Forsyth, worked late into the night trying to compose a clear and vivid description of a battle he supposed would have the fame of Waterloo. And as an eyewitness, he would contribute to making “the 24th of June a day long remembered in the history of the

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world.” Newspapers could not only change policies, drive political leaders from office, and make correspondents famous, but also determine public memory. At least in the short run, for newspaper stories about Solferino in the coming days and weeks shaped what people thought about the battle. On the morning of the twenty-fifth Parisians saw on their newsstands and kiosks the front page of an “Édition extraordinaire” of the Moniteur Universel. Appearing in huge bold type was the telegram “L’Empereur a L’Imperatrice” announcing “Grand bataille et grande victoire.” In less than 24 hours, the French memory of the battle was being formed. That same morning Johnston was sent to Brescia with Raymond’s account. In the packet as well was Johnston’s own version, also dated “Castiglione. Friday June 24,” which he had somehow found time to write. Getting to Brescia, however, proved a slow and irksome process. The road “was a cloud of dust” clogged with carts and wagons bearing the wounded, who suffered all the more from the springless vehicles they rode in and the overpowering heat, measured at 97 degrees in the shade. Several times along the way Johnston was stopped by French officials wanting to requisition his carriage. Luckily his papers were in order. “Sealing wax,” he later wrote, “exerts a wonderful influence in Europe.”55 Easing his passage as well may have been his near-perfect French. Johnston put his connections within the French army to good use at Brescia. He managed to have the packet containing his and Raymond’s letters included with the army dispatches going by train to Paris. Mrs. Raymond received it three days later. Inside were instructions to place the letters on the “first and fastest steamer leaving either France or England for New York, at any expense of energy and money.” Realizing how much was at stake, Mrs. Raymond immediately took a coach to Le Havre, where she placed the precious papers aboard the first ship bound for New York.56 By chance it was the Arago, the same ship that brought her husband to Europe less than three weeks before. While Johnston was making his way to Brescia, Raymond, hoping to learn more about the battle, revisited Solferino along with Forsyth. They had hardly arrived, however, before their “cowardly” driver, seeing the “evidences of the slaughter,” insisted on going back to Castiglione. Unable to hire another conveyance, the two men sat down outside a café and soon fell asleep, overcome by the heat and lack of rest the night before. Before long, they were awakened by a loud commotion. Soldiers and townspeople were running down the street, caught up in the same panic that interfered with Dunant’s attempts to find volunteers. Seeing the “whole mobile population” of Castiglione

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streaming by, the two Americans joined the flight. When an hour or so later it became clear there were no Austrians about except for the wounded and captured, fear turned into embarrassment.57 The panic also reached Brescia, where the more phlegmatic Johnston, trusting that his passport and occupation would protect him (and probably the fact that the town was walled and guarded), decided not to flee. Later, when the three men rendezvoused at Montechiaro, they laughed over the “race.” But the episode, farcical in retrospect, enabled Raymond and Forsyth to feel the bowel-churning fear that had struck combatants at Solferino the day before. For a brief time they too had been wrenched out of the role of spectator and become actors in the war. Once back together, the three men went out to Solferino to again try to survey the ground. Here they saw, as they had not at Magenta, a battlefield on which many of the dead still lay where they had fallen. The process of burial was slow. One Austrian, his legs crushed “into a shapeless mass of flesh” by a cannon ball, lay on his back, both arms raised “as if in supplication.” Another had his face “completely shot away.” After a while the stench from the dead—including the horses— became so noxious that the trio left. But not before Raymond and Forsyth collected some evidences of the battle, in Raymond’s case a cannon ball and a bayonet, “which I hope may in due time reach the Times office and serve as memorials of the day.”58 These, unlike the letters taken at Magenta, were true war relics. Still, Raymond was being slightly disingenuous when he said the items would signify the battle. He surely realized their display in the Times office would more obviously testify to the paper’s achievement. Throughout the weekend and into the following week, Raymond and his companions were increasingly haunted by the omnipresence of the wounded. Some were still on the battlefield waiting to be found, others slumped along the roads begging for medical attention. By far the greatest number lay on the floors of makeshift hospitals, hoping that what little could be done for them would be enough. The walking wounded expected to live, however much their appearance belied the possibility. The magnitude of the suffering was so great that Raymond despaired of describing it “in writing.” Yet writing was his trade and purpose, and so he asked his readers to “imagine” the area in front of the city hall of New York filled with carts, each containing five or ten blood-soaked soldiers “groaning and writhing in pain,” and then to “conceive Broadway, as far as the eye can see, filled with an unbroken procession of just such carts laden in the same sad style.”59 Raymond was asking a lot. Few of his readers had ever seen a cart of “bloodsoaked soldiers.” Imagining hundreds of them, even within

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a familiar space, did not solve the problem of enabling readers to see what they had never seen. There was no way to transmit the “horrid” scenes, at least not as they “met the eye of the spectator.” On Friday Raymond had scarcely seen the battle; by Monday he doubted he could convey what he saw of its victims. Language seemed fatally insufficient to describe horrors on the scale of Solferino. Johnston tried to solve the problem by narrowing his focus to individuals, perhaps sensing that coaxing the imagination to see the personal would be easier. Forsyth opted for the eloquence of silence. “I refrain from any attempt at a description of the appearance of the field after the battle.”60 The limits of modern war journalism were apparent even in its infancy. The dead of June 24, despite their number, seemed to have posed fewer difficulties for journalists. Like their readers, they were practiced in responding to death and presenting it to others. Early the next morning, Frank Vizetelly started out for San Martino, anxious to see up close the battlefield he had only glimpsed from afar. While searching for a “pathway” through a “labyrinth of vineyards and wooded knolls,” he saw a reclining soldier apparently “waving off the flies” buzzing around his head. Moving closer, Vizetelly realized that the extended arm was motionless; the man was dead. “This was my first interview with a dead Austrian.” It was not his last. “They lay as thick as fallen leaves round the farmhouse of San Martino, and in all the eccentricities of attitude which the last spasmodic struggle had imparted to them.”61 Homer’s simile still had power. There is no disgust, no pity, and no fear in Vizetelly’s rendering. The dead do not even smell. Often that morning the artist met up with soldiers “digging graves and collecting the dead for burial.” One of the settings he thought worthy of a sketch. In the foreground are heaped together, ready to be cast into the pit preparing to receive them, the bodies of men who but the day before were full of life and health, with mothers and wives to love them. Now, what were they? Beyond this scene of desolation is a lovely prairie, bathed by the waters of a charming lake, that sparkles in the sunlight like a sheet of gold; still further rise the grand and majestic Alps, losing their summits in the drifting clouds. Is not this a contrast?

Of course it is, but does it matter? For Vizetelly’s tone, not to mention the picturesque setting (“lovely prairie,” “charming lake,” “majestic Alps”) drains the corpses of any real meaning or effect. This sketch, like the earlier one of the water pail, is intended to please, not

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startle. The pointed irony (“Is not this a contrast”?) is boilerplate; it lacks bite or insight.62 The wounded, however, defied the conventional pieties. Overwhelming in their numbers, they were not familiar. Worse yet, they were not silent. It took many days to bury the dead of Solferino. Most of their graves were dug by local peasants, many of whom seized what they could from the bodies before tossing them in. Clothing was especially fancied. One “clown,” wrote Carlo Arrivabene, who covered the war for the Daily News, “was clad in an Austrian Lancer’s green vest,” another wore the “picturesque Zouave jacket of the Imperial Guard.” The children who congregated to watch the burial work were partial to the white tunics of the Bohemian soldiers. Seen together, the dead looked to Arrivabene “like so many Nuremberg dolls, which had been knocked about in a dirty nursery.”63 The looting, as intimated by Adamoli, began during the battle. Regiments that dropped their knapsacks before entering the fighting often found them empty when they returned. Boots, much prized, were sometimes stripped from the helpless wounded as well as the dead. Worse yet, according to Dunant, “more than one living man was buried with the dead,” so eager were the peasants to be done with their job.64 In control of the field, the French tried to identify their dead before burying them. The Austrian remains were simply dumped by the hundreds into common graves. For weeks afterwards, additional bodies were discovered and buried. For even longer, the smell of death lingered, though not strongly enough to prevent tourists and veterans of the battle from visiting the battlefield or residents of the area from hawking articles of clothing or equipment. This trade troubled some soldiers. A group of Bersaglieri meeting up with a man wearing a Hungarian cape accused him of stealing it. “You are one of those villains who go about with the inhuman purpose of stripping the poor dead.” Even after the man’s companions confirmed that he had bought the cape from a boy at Solferino, he was forced to give it up. “The law,” announced one of the Bersaglieri, “is strict on this point, nobody is allowed to sell or buy military accoutrements.”65 But a sense of honor, not respect for the law, seems to have inspired the officer’s demand. A sense of honor that in 1859 still extended to the enemy. If anyone thought to take a photograph of the battlefield of Solferino in the days after the fighting when the field was littered with debris and corpses, it has not survived. But photographs of the cemetery of Solferino and the landscape around were taken, though dating them is difficult. One is particularly striking. Dominating the

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Figure 5.1 Road to Solferino Cemetery. Source: Illustrated London News, February 25, 1860

image is not the shell-pocked cemetery itself, seen at the top of a ridge, but the road—skeletal white against the dark ground on either side of it—that runs from the bottom right up through the middle of the picture. The picture recalls Roger Fenton’s photograph (“Valley of the Shadow of Death”), already well known at the time, of a shell-strewn road at Balaklava taken in 1855. Though bereft of human figures, both images evoke the role of war in the age-old notion of life as a journey ending in death. In neither battle were roads of any tactical significance. In the photographs, they are potent symbols. In February 1860 the Illustrated London News printed a lengthy letter by Dr. George Bennett, a highly respected physician and naturalist of his day. He and a party of friends had visited Solferino the preceding November. Accompanying the letter was an engraving captioned, “Solferino, November 1859—from a photograph by L. Sacchi, Milan.” In the picture the cemetery is a more imposing presence, the road no longer contrasts sharply with the ground around it, and, most significantly, a man stands in the road, squarely in the middle of the photograph. He is facing the camera, posing, while further up the

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road stands a group of two or three other people.66 They are—we are meant to assume—sightseers, some of the many visitors, like Bennett and his party, who have come to look at the famous field. Why Sacchi was named in the caption—modern scholarship attributes to him no such picture—is a mystery. What is not is the difference in feeling between the two images. The one without people offers a bleak reminder of the human condition, aggravated by man’s propensity for war. The other displays a ruin in a pleasant landscape welcoming visitors to come and see. The former was subsequently mounted with two others to create a panorama view of the whole area of Solferino.67 In the days after Solferino, the emperor summoned one man in particular to come and see. During the war, Napoleon, like his ally and his enemy, had tried to manage press coverage to ensure that the nation’s first impression of what was happening agree with what was supposed to be. Following such a “grande victoire,” and with the end of the war possibly near, it was now time to plan how to record the war for history. The man the emperor knew he could trust to create a proper history was Baron César de Bazancourt. Four years before, Bazancourt had been dispatched to the Crimea to witness the siege of Sebastopol and write a history of the war. During his time in the East, he wrote a series of letters to the minister of the interior that were published soon after he returned to Paris under the title, Cinq mois au camp devant Sebastopol. The first edition was bought up in six weeks by a public hungry for eyewitness accounts of what the writer claimed was a siege “without precedent” in the annals of history. Superlatives flowed easily from the pen of Bazancourt, particularly regarding the nation. “France gives its young arms of iron and hearts of bronze.”68 In January of 1856, L’Expédition de Crimée jusqu’a la prise de Sebastopol appeared. This book also sold very well, going through four editions by the end of the year. But it raised a storm across the Channel, where reviewers claimed Bazancourt had downplayed and at times ignored the English contribution to the war. The storm was not confined to reviews. In May the English ambassador to Paris, Lord Cowley, wrote to the French foreign minister Walewski describing the negative impact of the book in England. Moreover, since it had been dedicated to the emperor, the slap in the face to English pride was thought to have his sanction. To appease their former ally and recent peace partner, the French government planted a note in the Moniteur of May 29 declaring that Bazancourt “alone” was responsible for the facts and opinions in L’Expédition.69 Two weeks later the English translator of the book,

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Robert Howe Gould, offered a formal defense of its author in a long letter to the Times. But it too did little to mollify the critics. Bazancourt was forever labeled, “French, Imperial, and oblivious.”70 “French” and “Imperial” he certainly was, as befitted the son of a Napoleonic general. But Bazancourt, born around 1810, never served in the army himself, perhaps because of throat problems that seem to have run in the family. Nor was he by instinct or ambition a historian, despite having published a history of Sicily under the Normans. Instead, he spent most of his adult life writing novels that were little noticed then or since. The famously sour diarist Horace de Viel Castel judged him a “bad novelist of the tenth order.”71 Still, with a fluid style, access to the proper materials and important officials, and a seemingly inexhaustible “pride” in the French army, Bazancourt could be counted on to compose the kind of narrative that would please Napoleon as well as the public. Such a book would defend the cause for which France fought, honor the men who did the fighting, and celebrate the emperor who had led and inspired them. Already in the chronicle of the Crimea, the emperor was a Zeus-like presence. Reports that he might be coming out to the Crimea, Bazancourt insisted, had “made all hearts throb;—for every one, from the chiefs to the soldiers, was conscious of his efforts, of his devotedness, and of his self-abnegation; every one was proud of those laborious works, accomplished without rest, in the midst of the snows and of the tempests of heaven and of earth.”72 And Bazancourt’s friendship with Prince Napoleon and General Fleury—to whom he had dedicated Cinq mois—made his task in 1859 all the easier. Though Bazancourt lacked the title, he had become the de facto court historian for Napoleon’s early wars. In terms of literary talent, he was no Racine or Boileau, both of whom had held the post, but he would do for the task at hand. Voltaire had judged such a task to be “very difficult.” How could a writer avoid being a “liar,” since his primary purpose was to please the monarch who had appointed him? Bazancourt tried to finesse this predicament by thinking of himself as a “chronicler” of the war whose role was to “write for the living.” He would leave the more “difficult task” of criticizing the performance of the army or its leaders to the “historians of the future.” They—“much later”—would have “to judge the dead.”73 Meanwhile, he would go to the seat of war, too late to witness a battle but in time to talk to some of the combatants and see the landscape with his own eyes. Another man who arrived late to battle was Prince Jerome. On June 10 he received orders to leave Florence and move his forces to link up with the main army. His stay in the city had not been very

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satisfying. Rumors were rife that his real purpose in coming to Tuscany was to become the ruler of the province. His attempt, moreover, to raise thirty thousand volunteers had been met by the Tuscans with yawns and smiles. They were ready to entertain the French in their homes and listen raptly to stories of the Crimea, but they were not eager to take up arms. Plon-Plon had also annoyed the Emperor by inviting his mistress to leave Paris and join him in Florence. Napoleon had quashed this ill-advised plan lest it make his policy, not just his cousin, look ridiculous. The Prince’s stay in Tuscany, however, would be forgotten if he reached the seat of war in time to play a role in the fighting. Forgotten as well, he probably hoped, would be his dismal performance in the Crimea. Fittingly, he began his journey as the other leaders had by taking a train to Lucca. Thereafter he traveled by horse and coach. On arriving at Massa on June 18, he was greeted by a “bevy of the 12 prettiest damsels of the burgher class” who escorted him into the town where he was greeted by “applause loud enough to shake down the dilapidated fortress still crowning the hill above the town.” The entrance festivities ended with Plon-Plon planting kisses on the cheeks of two of the “damsels.” It was a gesture his cousin avoided during his entrances. From Massa the Fifth Corps went by a “circuitous” route to Parma, where the Prince conferred with Kossuth, and then on to Pindena and finally Goito, which he reached on July 4.74 There he immediately filed a three-page report on the political and military aspects of the “mission of the Fifth Corps.” In describing the 16-day march to Goito, he noted that the weather had “presented certain difficulties.” But even taking into account the “high temperatures” and “violent storms,” some at French headquarters snickered at the “touriste” progress of the prince.75 His pace had not been of the kind associated with the name Bonaparte, suggesting that he might be less than eager to see battle, despite his complaints about being left out. Traveling with the prince had been Anthony Gallenga, whom Mowbray Morris had recently hired to cover the war in central Italy. Nearly 49, Gallenga, christened Antonio Carlo Napoleone, was the oldest journalist covering the war, and arguably the one with the most colorful history. In his youth, he had been a fiery patriot and follower of Mazzini. Having left Italy in his early twenties, he lived for periods of time in North Africa and the United States before settling, more or less, in England in 1839, where he earned a living by teaching and writing. In 1848, Gallenga returned to Italy, and spent the next decade traveling back and forth between Turin and London, writing articles that eventually became books, teaching at University College London,

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and for a time sitting in the Piedmontese Parliament as a supporter of Cavour. Over the years Gallenga became more conservative, and in 1855 announced in a book that he and Mazzini had long ago plotted to assassinate Victor Emanuel’s father, Charles Albert. The charge cost Gallenga respect and friends in liberal circles, but not his value in the eyes of Morris, who admired his writing and saw the advantage to hiring someone who boasted that “Cavour is my friend.”76 Gallenga anticipated that he would be the “historiograph” of an important phase of the campaign. Unfortunately, the march of the prince to Goito involved no memorable deeds. On the day of Solferino, “loitering” in the Apennines sixty miles from the battlefield, they could hear the boom of the cannons. Knowing he did not have “the pen of Xenophon or Count Segur,” Gallenga realized he could not make literature out of so “slow and tedious” an expedition. How could one dramatize the slovenly marching of the Tuscan contingent in the Fifth corps or the egregious “plundering” by the locals in their commerce with the soldiers? But when he arrived at Goito and penned his first dispatch on July 4, his view seems suddenly to have changed. He was hearing of daily “skirmishes” between outposts; saw, while writing his dispatch, the body of a French soldier dragged out of the Mincio; and learned of a French attack across the river planned for the next day.77 Perhaps the war had not run its course and there might yet be opportunity to make a name as its historian. In the meantime, the public was being entertained. The day theaters in Milan were on a “war footing.” July, with its heat, was normally not a time when the Milanese went to the theatre. But day theatres, with their pits open to the sky and their performances beginning at five or six, could be quite pleasant, especially in a season of victories. Large crowds gathered to see The Victory of Solferino, which had just opened. Having profitable runs as well were Garibaldi at Varese and a pantomime, The Great Battle of Melegnano. More ambitious productions opened in Paris. In early July, audiences at the Porte-Saint-Martin were enjoying La Voie sacrée, a five act “military drama” with songs depicting the French army’s passage from Paris to Milan. The author of the spectacle, Eugene Woèstyn, was an admirer of Napoleon, and three years before had published an account of the Crimean War. Staging the dramatic moments of a successful campaign made good financial and political sense. Why should the public not enjoy the illusion of seeing the nation’s victories performed before their eyes? Presumably no one supposed that stage battles were like real battles, so what was the harm? Only that such representations inevitably encouraged visions of war utterly contradicted by the late battles.

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Chapter 6

4

Bl asted Dreams, Hopeful Lessons “

W

hen the war broke out in Italy I wished to see again the land where my ancestors had fought and where I had made my first campaigns under the excellent prince Eugene.”1 One might suppose that the writer of those words intended, like his countryman Charles Furne, to be a spectator. But the Marquis de Bryas had another purpose in mind. For many years he had devoted himself to agronomy, specializing in matters of drainage. Gradually he had come to see a “natural” link between the science of improving the soil and “ideas of progress and philanthropy.”2 Now in June 1859, the war in Italy offered Bryas an opportunity to help his fellow man. The wounded needed attention, and the French army medical services were overwhelmed. The Marquis had no medical training or experience, but, as a former mayor of Bordeaux and deputy in the Assembly, his worldly experiences encouraged the belief that he could be of use. Bryas though was 75 years old, almost ten years older than “père Furne;” indeed, he was old enough to be the father of the emperor. This was a fact of no importance for the marquis. If anything, his awareness of his age pushed him to Italy, where he might end his “active” life with an “act of charity.”3 Two years before, he had summarized his work as an agronomist in his magnum opus, Études pratiques sur l’art de dessécher, and in December 1858 he had buried his beloved son Eugene, an agronomist like his father. What was left for the old man to do or be concerned with? Was death simply to be waited for? Not by the Marquis de Bryas. When he arrived in Milan on June 22 after a difficult journey, Bryas offered his services to the Evangelical Mission in Italy, a French protestant organization working in the hospitals. Two days

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after Solferino he was advised that Bergamo or Brescia would be better places than Milan for his services. He chose Brescia, which by the end of June, in the words of Henri Dunant, had been turned into “an immense hospital.” Its citizens, hating the Austrians as no other community in northern Italy did, were only too eager to help with the allied wounded. Daily they saw around them the damage done in 1848 when Marshal Julius Jacob Haynau had put down an insurrection in the city with a brutality that earned him the nickname “Haynau the hyena.” Now the people of Brescia had turned their lovely churches and public buildings into hospitals, some thirtythree in all. Many had opened their homes as well, and several young women were said to have vowed to marry only “wounded soldiers of the army of Italian independence.”4 Dunant, after briefly returning to Castiglione, had gone on to Brescia. On a flying visit back to Milan he met Bryas, as the latter was about to leave for Brescia, and helped the “venerable old gentleman” board the train amid the confusion at Ponta Tosa railway station.5 Bryas and Dunant were not the only good Samaritans. In the previous six weeks a number of doctors and many lay people had left what they were doing and traveled to Lombardy to help. One of the doctors, Louis Appia of Geneva, took with him about 4,500 pounds of lint and linen collected in the city. He also had with him copies of a treatise on treating war wounds based on what he had read about the Crimean War. He hoped to enrich his text by observing practices in the hospitals of Italy. Completing his medical baggage was an apparatus he had designed for treating fractures. Though Appia had not gone out to the Crimea, that war had inspired in him a passionate interest in military medicine and an even more passionate sense of duty to treat the “victims” of war. “Abandoning everything,” his biographer writes, the forty-year-old Appia started off to Italy as if on a “great and magnificent adventure.” He arrived in Turin in early July, and shortly afterward went on to Milan, and then Brescia, where the almost unimaginable number of wounded—estimated at eleven thousand by mid-July— made the streets seem like “branch offices” of the hospitals.6 When possible, Appia helped out, sometimes assisting at amputations. But mostly he observed, every few days writing a long letter to his colleague and close friend in Geneva, Dr. Theodore Maunoir. The letters formed an appendix to his treatise when it was published later in the year. One of the letters Appia wrote from Brescia was dated July 10. On the same day, Johnston of the Times also composed a letter from the city, one he would not have imagined writing two weeks before. The physician and journalist was appalled at the “totally insufficient”

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means available to help the thousands of wounded. French army surgeons might be the best in the world, “but the wounded of Solferino were not well treated in any sense—neither in the mode of conveyance, nor the nursing, nor the surgical treatment.” The Italian “civil surgeons and doctors” were only of limited use. Most had “never practiced military surgery, and, perhaps, not much surgery of any kind.” Only the women volunteers of Brescia, “ladies in silk dresses and hoops—real ministering angels,” were giving help to the patients.7 Johnston was with another (unnamed) American, whom he had met before coming to Brescia. Together they lent a hand that day, primarily by talking to “hundreds” of wounded. Johnston became angry and depressed by the stories he heard: of wounded soldiers lying on the battlefield for over a week, of surgeons ignoring their duties, and of unmade beds with unwashed men lying in them. Johnston’s friend, who was fluent in German, acted as an interpreter for the Austrian wounded who had been unable to make their simplest “wants” known. At one point, Johnston was allowed to talk with some prisoners, one of whom, a Hungarian, said that he and his comrades were very satisfied with the “treatment” they were receiving as prisoners, living as they did “in common with the French soldiers.” When this comment was translated to some French soldiers standing nearby, one of them exclaimed, “Why not? They are human beings like ourselves, and go to war because they are ordered to. Why shouldn’t we treat them as brothers?” Johnston—or possibly an editor back in New York—set this comment as a separate paragraph in the story.8 On the same day (July 6) that the Marquis de Bryas began helping to “organize and regularize” the services of the hospitals at Brescia, Napoleon sent his trusted aide-de-camp, General Fleury, to Verona to propose to Franz Joseph that the fighting be suspended. The emperor had been thinking about an endgame strategy for some time. The battlefield of Solferino had left so “distressing” an impression on him, the writer Prosper Mérimée told a friend, that the “idea of prolonging the war appeared as a kind of crime.”9 It also loomed as a potentially disastrous mistake. Prussia’s intentions, while still unknown, had to be regarded as ominous. On July 4 Prince Regent William had ordered five army corps to move to the Rhine. Were they to cross, they would meet only a skeletal French force lacking in equipment. Hardly less worrisome was the dwindling popularity of the war at home. After Magenta, the procureurs had already noted a widespread desire to “negotiate” an end to the war now that Austria had been forced out of Piedmont and glory had been won.10 In the days after the victory at Solferino, the calls for peace grew apace. So

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much so that procureur reports from seven different regions of France were rushed to the emperor at Valeggio. Rushing as well to French headquarters was a stream of “wives and daughters seeking news of fallen relatives,”11 visitors no commander could ignore. Franz Joseph also had good reason to welcome an end to hostilities. The eight thousand missing after Solferino, most of them deserters, meant trouble for the imperial army. The criticisms voiced in Vienna about the war, the generals, and the censorship of the press suggested that the empire itself might be in trouble. Meanwhile, the French were giving every indication they meant to continue the war. They did not pursue the Austrians after the battle, but they dug in around the Quadrilateral and had recently brought up gunboats—delivered in “pieces” from Toulon and then assembled on the shores of Lake Garda—to assist the Piedmontese in their investment of Peschiera. “These new tourists on the blue lake of Garda,” wrote Eber of the Times of London, were forcing the Austrians to “throw up works and batteries on the sea side” of the city.12 There was also the matter of Venice to be considered. French warships were now in a position to blockade the city and deliver troops on the Adriatic coast. With Lombardy all but lost, Venetia threatened, and supply lines to his army potentially open to attack, Franz Joseph could not refuse to read the letter that Fleury brought to his headquarters. After sleeping on this “very grave matter,” the kaiser, his own honor intact, consented to the armistice, which was signed the next day, July 8.13 Three days later, the emperor and the kaiser—without the king— met to discuss peace terms. At seven in the morning Napoleon left Vallegio for Villafranca accompanied by a large entourage that included Marshal Vaillant, General Fleury, the Cent Gardes, and a squadron of guides. He reached Villafranca at eight, and seeing no sign of the kaiser rode out to the road to Verona to await him. When he saw Franz Joseph and his equally large entourage approach, Napoleon rode forward at a gallop and stretched out his hand as he came up to him. César Bazancourt would turn this meeting of the two men into an epochal moment. “Across the mountains, across the seas, all of Europe, nervous and anxious, was contemplating them attentively.”14 Certainly the moment had visual drama, and artists for the illustrated papers made the most of the tableau that Napoleon, with his matchless instinct for the theatrical, had created for them. The scene outbid in significance any of the town entrances, including Milan, the emperor had made earlier. The gesture of extending the hand of peace announced not only that hostilities had concluded but that there should be no antagonism between the two leaders. Europe could rest easy. Peace was still what the empire was about.

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Returning to Villafranca, the two men retired to a private home for their meeting. The house was carefully chosen, for it allowed Napoleon and Franz Joseph to be easily seen—but not heard—through a large window. The room where the sovereigns met was also carefully prepared. The only decoration was a bouquet of violets in a wineglass that stood on a table. Pens and paper were not in evidence nor were any maps. The carefully laid set encouraged the vision of two leaders having a friendly conversation, not of two enemies engaging in a negotiation. At moments, Franz Joseph “seemed much moved,” but Eber, who witnessed the proceedings from the street, dismissed reports that he had wept at any time.15 When the emperors had finished conversing, they came out of the house and “presented to each other their cortege.” By eleven o’clock the two sovereigns were returning to their headquarters. A war sketched out in a clandestine meeting almost a year before had now been concluded, in principle, with a very public show. The absence of Victor Emanuel from the scene was understandable. Neither his ally nor his enemy wanted him there, nor did he himself want to be there. The king could not be seen so publicly consenting to what the Italian public would interpret as a sell-out. Once back in Valeggio, Napoleon composed from memory a summary of what had been discussed. Later that day he gave a copy to Prince Napoleon and sent him to Verona to establish in writing the understandings that had been reached. Two hours of difficult negotiations followed, with the prince, more comfortable wielding words than a sword, at one point declaring that if the conditions were not agreed to, the war would begin again on August 16, when the truce period ran out. Finally, agreement was reached on the principal items. Lombardy was to be handed over to France, which in turn would cede it to Piedmont; an Italian confederation, including Venetia, was to be formed under the “honorary” presidency of the Pope; and a full amnesty would apply to both sides, extending to the Hungarian soldiers who had deserted. The prince traveled back and forth to Verona in a coach, accompanied only by his aide-de-camp and a courier. The meeting with Franz Joseph was in private. No sketches of the event were published. The hard bargaining of diplomacy did not need to be seen. Italy, in the words of one Paris daily, had ceased to be a “geographical expression” and was becoming instead “an expression of law, of civilization, and of nationality.”16 On July 14 Henry Raymond was back in Paris and defending Napoleon against charges that he had broken his promise to free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. “No one can deny that he has substantially freed Italy from Austrian domination.”17 The Italians in Paris did

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not think so, nor did most of their countrymen back home, beginning with Cavour. Upon being told the terms of the armistice by the king on the evening of July 11, he became enraged and resigned. (The king accepted the end of the war with the grace of an ally who knows he cannot challenge his stronger partner.) The citizens of Turin expressed their anger five days later when the emperor and the king arrived back in the city. Though many people came out to see the two monarchs, cheers rose up only for Victor Emanuel. It was as if Napoleon was not present. “It is my firm belief,” John Moncure Daniel reported, “that if he [Napoleon] had been alone no hat would have been raised.”18 Popular scorn found other ways to express itself. Stuck on windows across the city were portraits of Orsini, who had tried to assassinate the emperor the year before. If Napoleon somehow missed seeing the pictures, he could not have been deaf to the insult offered that night at the opera. A ballerina with the same name as his would-be assassin was given a special ovation.19 Ardent supporters of Italian independence were also outraged. Elizabeth Barrett Browning became “nearly as ill as I could be” and took to her bed for weeks. She forbade her young son to wear his Napoleonic medal. The thrill of being in Italy during the war, “the rapture, the ecstatic union, the gratitude and love,” had been blasted by Villafranca.20 Soon Browning would distill in Poems Before Congress her frustration with “this low world, where great deeds die.” The volume is not one of her better collections. Rebuke may be, as one critic acknowledged, “one of the forms of love,” but hardly an inspiring one.21 Villafranca, which he compared to the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797), by which the first Napoleon enraged Italians by granting Venice to Austria, had a very different effect on Francesco Crispi. Even before the peace was announced, he and Mazzini had discussed the need for an insurrection in Sicily. They realized that whatever the outcome of the war, Sicilians would gain nothing by it. Only by rising against the Bourbons could they gain their independence. And so on July 16, armed with a false passport identifying him as Manuel Pareda, an Argentinian businessman, Crispi, his mustache and sideburns shaved off and wearing blue-tinted glasses to ‘complete the transformation,” left London by express train for Dover. Under his arm he carried a French tourist guide to his homeland.22 Villafranca also blasted the hopes of Louis Kossuth. At a meeting on July 3 the emperor had told him he had “firmly decided . . . to make Hungary independent, unless something so unexpected intervenes that even you would be obliged to acknowledge that it is

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impossible.” Kossuth heard in those words only what he wanted to hear. The next day he wrote to his wife boasting of his good health (“I am still sound as a bell.”) and telling her he had summoned the committee to meet to talk about the organization of the Legion, which had grown to four thousand. They would have to be made ready since it seemed only a matter of days before a French army would march into Hungary. News of the armistice, therefore, struck Kossuth like “a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” For a day or two he did not want to believe that it really meant the end of the war and of his best chance yet of fulfilling his dream. But he realized “all was over” when shown a letter in which Napoleon asked that Kossuth be told that “I am extremely sorry that the liberation of his country must now be left alone. I cannot do otherwise.”23 Klapka too was dumbfounded, and in his rage decided the evil genius behind the betrayal was Prince Napoleon, who had for so long urged the Hungarian enterprise. It was he, Klapka deduced, who had “insisted upon the peace . . . complained of everybody, of the Italians, of the Hungarians,” and then done the hard negotiating with Franz Joseph.24 No doubt the general believed in his interpretation of events, just as Ferdinand Eber thought the French army, aside from “some of the superior officers,” was unhappy with the “shortness of the campaign” because in “two short months” it had come to believe in its role as an army of liberation. The army had “entirely taken the tinge of the mind which commanded it.”25 Up to a point, Eber may have been right. While French soldiers had no particular love for Italians, a string of victories over a traditional enemy on behalf of a principle their fathers and grandfathers had fought for induced in the armée d’Italie a growing belief in their mission. The emperor, though, realized that he must not become a prisoner of his rhetoric lest he lose far more than could be gained by a war of liberation. Continuing the war after Solferino carried many risks and promised to become a logistical nightmare. Moreover, the “slaughter” the war had already caused had shocked peoples and governments across Europe, not just himself. What would another Solferino bring—or even a prolonged siege—and how might either upset the existing political balance in Europe? None of the great powers wanted the war to expand, nor did they want to have to deal with the fragmentation of the Austrian empire. To his neighbors, the third Napoleon might seem as ambitious as the first. But absent from the latter day liberator were signs of the megalomania seen in his predecessor. Louis Napoleon’s ambitions, as one might expect of a leader finely attuned to public opinion, were usually tempered by his reading

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of the constraints of a given situation. And as he told Kossuth, he also respected the demands of the “unexpected.”26 In early July the unexpected had not yet happened, but the emperor clearly sensed it might. Those yearning to continue the war in the name of national liberation had little to lose. Napoleon, well read in ancient and modern history, would not leave to the vagaries of future battle what had taken him decades to achieve. *** On July 6 Georgio Pozzolini walked over the ground of Solferino, still covered with pieces of equipment and clothing, though, thankfully, no bodies. But as he later told his sister Cesira, the earth seemed to have “turned black,” so saturated was it with blood.27 That image would stay with the young woman and many years later inform her own response to seeing the battlefield. Georgio Pozzolini was hardly the first tourist to visit Solferino. Travelers had been making their way there almost since the guns went silent. A number of journalists, as we have seen, returned to the field the very next day. Joseph Crowe waited until mid-July and then left Verona accompanied by G. P. R. James, the English novelist serving as consul-general at Venice. Neither man went to Solferino in his official capacity. As Crowe acknowledged in the opening line of his chatty letter to the Times the next day, he made the trip because “I had some curiosity.”28 So did James, a soldier in his youth whose literary works included lives of Charlemagne and the Black Prince. There would, however, be no mention of this excursion in his next report to Lord John Russell, the new foreign secretary. James simply wrote that he had gone to Verona. The meeting up with Crowe, the day at Solferino, and the impact of the visit on the ailing 58-year-old writer who had just missed being at Waterloo were not the stuff of diplomatic pouches. Curiosity about Solferino was understandable. The battlefield might lack the political significance of Waterloo, but its scale, picturesque landscape, and nearness to other popular tourist destinations gave it allure. British tourists in particular, with their “insatiable thirst for novelty and indefatigable activity in visiting historical spots,” were expected “to swarm over” Solferino.29 Coincidentally, mapmakers in London had been preparing updated maps of the area. At the beginning of July, before any hint of an armistice, Stanford published the third in its series on the war, showing the fortresses of the Quadrilateral and the “now celebrated battlefield of Solferino.” Wyld also published a new “wonderfully full and minute” map, but it did not

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“extend eastward so far as Mr. Stanford’s.”30 Intended for armchair followers of the war, these new maps now could serve curious travelers in situ. Travelers also had the benefit of a plethora of guides. For a time, the house of Murray had monopolized the field. But as traveling on the continent grew more popular, other firms got into the game; by 1859, one needed a “guide” to the available guidebooks. Chief among Murray’s competitors was Bradshaw’s Continental Guide, a volume “conducted on the smartest American principles.” Thus, travelers should expect little on “artistic or historical” matters, and more about hotels and train schedules. Longman’s series of Practical Guides were leaner still. “Written for a race of tourists who neither eat nor sleep, nor read the newspapers,” they made travel a task to be finished in the shortest amount of time.31 Those acid comments on the guidebook market appeared in a Saturday Review article inspired by the sudden opportunities for travel. “One class of persons at least,” the writer noted, took “unfeigned satisfaction” in the unexpected conclusion of the war.32 The article was not specifically concerned with travel to Italy, but readers planning a trip to the continent usually included it on their itinerary. Now, in addition to soaking up the aesthetic wonders of the ancient and medieval worlds, travelers could walk into the experiences of the modern. Or at least ride by them. Anyone taking a train along the much-traveled corridor between Milan and Venice could not escape seeing the graves of Magenta or the house near the station “riddled with shot.” They might even catch a glimpse of a dog said to have belonged to General Espinasse “who still lurks about the spot where his master shed his blood.”33 They would also see the thousands of French and Piedmontese soldiers whose encampments, stretching across Lombardy and into Venetia, would remain until the final peace was signed at Zurich in November. Of course, battlefields were not to all tastes, but the evidence suggests Solferino quickly drew many visitors. The “English tourists” said to be “pouring” into Brescia by the end of July did not need a guidebook or map to find a battlefield. Anyone could tell them how to get to Solferino, or for that matter Magenta, and hiring a carriage to go there was not a problem. Once they arrived, they had the services of any number of self-appointed guides—often convalescing soldiers—ready to explain what had happened and where. Following in the footsteps of the early visitors to Waterloo, some who came to Solferino became guides themselves by describing their visits in letters to newspapers and articles for magazines. The urge to

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testify to having been at so momentous a site could be as compelling as the original urge to visit. A few visitors even wrote books. Among these were A Merchant’s Holiday; or a Rapid Journey over the Alps and Apennines to the Battlefields of Italy and the Cities of Rome and Naples, and Notes on North Italy and the Seat of War in 1859. Neither of these books was a simple vade mecum to the war’s battlefields. Their focus was broader, as their titles suggest. Each recorded a journey prompted by the war and taken soon after. The author of Notes, the Reverend George Tooker Hoare of Tandridge, Surrey, was an experienced traveler, and not easily impressed. He found Martigny, where J. L. had started from in May, to be “hot and close . . . and plagued with flies” in early August. Nor was he taken with the “dreary and unpicturesque” Great St. Bernard Pass. But if nature disappointed, life did not. Approaching the summit, he saw “poor Kossuth” and his family. The clergyman thought Kossuth was returning from his “fruitless mission to Hungary,” when in fact he was traveling from Turin to Vevey in Switzerland.34 That Hoare recognized the Hungarian indicates how the illustrated papers were making important people identifiable on sight, which they often had not been before. That Hoare chose not to speak to Kossuth—and so learn where Kossuth had actually been—suggests that for clergymen at least, the boundaries of propriety and privacy still persisted. Or perhaps Hoare had just been taken aback by meeting up with history. In the course of his journey in Italy, Hoare twice visited Magenta, “by far the most interesting battle of the campaign.” By early August, he saw so “few traces of the deadly fight” that he concluded an “indifferent traveler” might pass over the site of the battle “without remark.” He did not suppose himself to be such a traveler, and on his first visit to Magenta acknowledged that one “incident affected me.” The driver of his carriage pointed out a little wooden cross in a ditch by the roadside. The cross bore the name of a French officer killed “by a stroke of the bayonet.” The words made the 40 year old clergymen think of the “fond mother” who might still be anticipating the return of her “gallant son.” The burial mounds near the railroad track containing “thousands” had not moved Hoare. Those interned there were a nameless abstraction. Jean François Bouisson was not.35 Later, while sightseeing in the Duomo at Milan, Hoare came across a wounded French soldier lying on his back on a seat in the center of the church. Though “fast asleep,” the man was throwing his arms around as if he were “fighting imaginary foes in dreamland.” The clergyman assumed “Magenta and Solferino had left their impression upon his brain, as well as marked his maimed body.”36 Hoare was

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guessing as to where the man had been wounded. But his diagnosis of how battle had damaged the man’s mind rings true to us—truer, perhaps, than it did to his original readers. Hoare had a very different reaction to the mass for the military dead he had seen a few days before in the cathedral at Genoa. The nave had been “filled” with soldiers and a number of officers in “gorgeous uniforms,” while in the side aisles stood crowds of people eager to see the “dignitaries.” White smoke from censers swirled around the altar and drifted off to the pillars festooned with funeral banners naming the “great actions” in which those being remembered had fallen. The music too was decidedly martial. What was missing, lamented Hoare, was what was supposed to be the “object of the assembly”: prayer. “Every one who was not listening to the music, or crushing forward to get a glimpse of the performers, was talking to his neighbours. All looked upon it in its true light—as a fine spectacle, intended to cherish ideas of earthly splendour and military glory; certainly of nothing heavenly or divine.” It is easy to dismiss such comments as the complaints of a fussy vicar unfamiliar with a different religious culture. Hoare’s judgment becomes something more, however, when we recall his reaction to particular victims of the war. When death and suffering are individualized, pity more readily follows. A great show (“spectacle”) of mourning devoted to the many is apt to produce only awe. We cannot determine from his text how Hoare came to this sense of things. Was it from what he saw in August? Alternatively, had living through the Crimean War in some way shaped his attitude? Or was it simply the fact of being a rural vicar who regularly dealt with death as it came to individuals? Whatever the explanation, Hoare’s disgust for the “spectacle” arose more from something deep within the man than from some obligatory understanding of propriety. Before he stepped into the church he was disturbed by the sign outside announcing the mass. In calling it “the program of the entertainment,” Hoare simultaneously acknowledged and mocked the public acceptance of war as a show.37 Another visitor to the battlefield was disturbed by a very different practice. Walking about Magenta in the autumn of 1859, John Ormsby, a young Irishman who had recently come to Italy with a friend after climbing in the Alps, was struck that everyone in the village except the “street boys” seemed to be selling relics of the battle or convincing counterfeits. “The manufacture of relics” in a matter of a few months had “arrived at a height of perfection which even Waterloo, with the vast hardware trade of Belgium at its back, has never

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reached.” Ormsby found the same “mercantile spirit at Solferino.” In the courtyard of a church, “a museum of relics” had been set up, though not intended as a memorial to the battle or the fallen. Everything in this museum was for sale, from buckles to bullets, and at “tolerably stiff prices.” What drew Ormsby’s attention in the piles of stuff was a packet of letters that had been found in a French knapsack.38 They had been written by a girl in Paris whom Ormsby, sensitive to her privacy, decided to name “Constance.” She wrote often to her “Jacques,” expressing concern for his welfare and how she regularly dreamed about him. A couple letters alluded to a tiff the two were having over Jacques’ jealousy of a “Mr. Thomas,” a boarder in the same house as Constance. While chastising him for his suspicions, Constance assured Jacques that she would move to a “quieter and more decorous house,” and that she was still his “petite femme.” Ormsby was fascinated by what he read and with good reason. “To look through these letters, full of queer spelling, tattered, and thumbed, and conned over again and again, no doubt with infinite comfort, after many a march, is to look at the war through a new medium.”39 Soldiers’ letters describing what they were doing and seeing were regularly printed in newspapers by editors who knew their readers’ hunger for first-hand testimony. But letters that revealed how a loved one back home waited and worried and, yes, argued with her lover, who in turn accused her of being unfaithful yet read her letters to tatters—not for the words, long since embedded in memory, but for the person they conjured in his mind—were, indeed, something “new.” Not only did newspapers neglect such documents, historians did not use them and libraries did not collect them. In 1859, war was still about armies and battles and soldiers acting as soldiers. Their departures and their returns were matters of interest. But how their mothers, wives, and lovers, or fathers and brothers, or even their children, interacted with them in their absence was not seen as something the public had either an interest in or a right to know. A poem heard in Florence several months after the war by the American orator Edward Everett Hale captures the boundaries of concern. Cacciatore delle Alpi My love I left behind me; I left my cottage-door; And nights and mornings find me An Alpine Cacciator

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My poor old mother took me, And led me from the door; And, when she bade me leave her, She kissed her son once more. My love I left behind me; I left my cottage door; And nights and mornings find me An Alpine Cacciator. She said to me, “My darling, Forget me nevermore; But while you live and breathe, child, Return not to my door.” My love I left behind me, &c.40

In the world of the poem, the son, on becoming a soldier, is only that. Curiosity about the personal lives of soldiers and those they left behind was not yet a matter of common interest and study, or a common subject for artists. Signs of this development, however, were emerging. The Crimean War inspired a number of drawings and paintings of family members and soldiers reading letters from each other. Good examples are Frederick Goodall’s “A Letter from Papa” (1855) and John Everett Millais’ “News from Home” (1857). The latter was mocked at the time by John Ruskin for lacking in realism because the soldier is dressed as if on parade. More important, however, is Millais’ decision to paint the soldier reading the letter, a decision likely prompted by the new empathy for soldiers that the war had stirred. For all its sentimentality, the painting reflects an enlarged sense of the soldier’s predicament. We cannot, of course, read the letter in the painting. But we can guess that the soldier is imagining himself at home when he reads it. Millais signals this psychological fact by having the soldier standing virtually alone in a trench, with two comrades only partially visible at the edge of the picture. Luck was involved in why John Ormsby realized the significance of a woman’s letters to her soldier. Had there been only one or two letters, they would probably have made no more impression than those Henry Raymond picked up earlier at Magenta. The packet Ormsby leafed through, however, contained many letters—the seller was charging a franc a piece, “with a reduction on taking a quantity”— enough to be read in sequence as a narrative.41 A casual tourist would not have paused to read through all of them, and having done so appreciated their value.

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In the fall of 1859 the thirty-year-old Ormsby was beginning a literary career after deciding not to practice law. His series of articles, “Hints for Vagabonds,” that had begun appearing in Fraser’s Magazine the year before revealed his love of travel, a passion that led him to Spain in the 1860s and ultimately a second career as a distinguished translator of Don Quixote. The historian James Anthony Froude, in an exhaustive 35-page review in 1886, called Ormsby’s rendition “the best which has yet been produced in English.”42 But in his earlier years, Ormsby was deeply engaged in the literature of the eighteenth century. “He knew Defoe and Fielding and all the Johnsonian circle by heart,” wrote Leslie Stephen, the English writer and editor who first met Ormsby at Zermatt while both were climbing in the Alps in the summer of 1859.43 Thus it is not too much to imagine the letters of “Constance” to “Jacques” summoning thoughts of one or more of the eighteenth century epistolary novels that Ormsby knew so well. The couple themselves seemed like characters in a story—except that “Jacques” was really dead, and “Constance” actually mourning. Their story was not an entertainment but a “new” source for understanding history, and eventually a new subject for history writing. To the young Henry Adams, Ormsby’s find would have meant practically nothing. In the summer of 1859 Adams was studying in Dresden, along with a number of other Americans. Their attention, though, was relentlessly drawn to the war. “Every night when a fresh battle’s won,” Adams wrote his brother on June 7, he and a friend had “regular old hallelujerums [sic].” Bets were placed on when Milan would be taken. Living among a people sympathetic to Austria, Adams tried to remain neutral, “but it was no go.”44 Raised in a culture that prized liberty above all political values, the Americans naturally sided with those fighting for it. How, moreover, could any American who had heard of Haynau or Metternich remain neutral? Years later, in The Education of Henry Adams, Adams recalled that “like all good Americans” he had been “hotly Italian” in 1859. He also remembered how his sister, once hostilities had ended, dragged him off to the “seat of war.” They did not stop at any battlefield, but at various inns they dined with young officers happy to “talk all evening of their battles,” especially with a “charming patriot who sparkled with interest and flattery.” The Adams who wrote the Education was fascinated by the power women had over men. Further proof of what the “eternal woman” could accomplish when she is “young, pretty, and engaging” came when the party decided to cross into Austria at the Stelvio Pass, where in June the cacciatori had stopped an Austrian advance. Now, despite the ending of the war, it was not

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clear whether the pass was open to travelers. Once more, though, the charm of Adams’s sister prevailed. The barricade “offered no resistance” and in a matter of minutes the carriage containing the young travelers was “rolling down” to Mals and on to Innsbruck. Slight as his contact with the war had been, it had “given zest” to the young man’s life. Less than a year later he would go to Sicily “to see Garibaldi and a fight.”45 A far more famous American was also in Europe that summer. He had gone to improve his “health” and to “study the institutions and people of the Old World.”46 He had also gone to burnish his credentials as the likely Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1860. William Henry Seward, one time governor and for the last decade Senator from New York, assumed he would be the standard bearer of his party in the coming election. The send-off he got from New Yorkers in early May, as he began his seven-month sojourn, only encouraged that belief, as did the reception he got in the various countries he visited. In England, he was presented to the queen. Later, while visiting Vienna in September, he met Franz Joseph, whom he congratulated on “the establishment of peace.”47 During his stay in London, Seward renewed his acquaintance with Louis Kossuth: “The most serene, dignified, and graceful person in address and conversation whom I have ever met.” The two had met when Kossuth came to America in December of 1851 looking for support for the cause of Hungarian freedom. Though Seward remained sympathetic to the cause, he did not believe “in the auspices which have revived his hopes.” After two months in England, the Senator went on to Paris, where the omnipresence of the army reinforced his sense of a “despotically ruled” nation. “It gives freedom to Italy, and it wishes for emancipation to all nations; but it makes the Army, not the Press, the minister of Liberty.” A day at the Louvre, where he passed by “battle scenes, which I have no love for,” offered a respite from uniforms and talk of war. Later, in Vienna, he felt besieged by men in uniform: “all is martial everywhere,” right up to the “youthful Emperor,” who “has never been seen in the costume of a civilian.” And yet, for all his distaste of things military, Seward, within days of his innocuous interview with Franz Joseph, rode out in a carriage with two other men to see the “world’s latest battle-ground.”48 At the village of Solferino the three men left the carriage and walked up the hill to the cemetery. Gazing out over the plain, Seward saw what others before him had in the past few months: scattered equipment, grave sites where the earth had “not yet settled,” a “few rude monuments to the dead” put up by their “comrades,” and virtually

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every peasant “clothed in the garments of the Austrian soldiers.” What distinguishes Seward’s description of this visit is what he made of it. How hard, said I to myself, is the progress of the human race to its better destiny! Here were a people of five or six millions, seeking a higher freedom, and a better social condition. The effort to obtain it brought on a conflict, on this spot, and I stand among the graves of fifty thousand of my fellow-men, who fell in that fearful combat. It was really a combat for freedom, but of those who engaged in it, even of those who perished in it, perhaps not one of one thousand knew or cared about the question involved in it. Nearly all were mercenaries; and more than half were opposed to the cause of freedom itself. Nevertheless, even these anomalies show how irrepressible the principle of liberty is, since it will force even despots to wage wars, out of which it may gain only consequential advantages.49

In that paragraph Seward expresses the dilemma of his own politics. What price was to be paid for freedom? Was a war that killed thousands in a single battle—and there were certain to be many such battles—too high a price? And of those doing the fighting and dying, how many would know or care about the cause? Seward could testify to those “anomalies” because they lay before his eyes. His readiness to speak of them, however, arose out of anxieties for his own nation’s future. Only weeks before Seward visited Solferino, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry reminded his countrymen of the real possibility of there one day being a “combat for freedom” among themselves. Seward knew of the raid when he visited the battlefield. Indeed, given his distaste for even representations of battle, perhaps the knowledge had nudged him to make the visit and see with his own eyes just what a “civil war” might cost. For that is what Seward, while still in England, had termed the war in northern Italy. “Looking with American eyes on what I see, the war in Europe seems to me less a war between nations, than a civil war; for the European states, though not politically united, like the American states, are nevertheless in fact one great commonwealth.” Looking now over the killing ground at Solferino, Seward’s dread of a civil war in America would have become all the stronger. It would have become stronger still a day or two later when he “stopped” at Magenta. The site was “as calm, as beautiful as if no conflict had ever taken place.” Except that one had, as the “rows of tumuli” not yet covered by grass made clear. “On each is a rude cross, and when I asked the meaning, I was answered: ‘Two thousand of the fallen of Magenta are buried here.’”50

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There was no delight and very little curiosity in Seward’s visits to Solferino and Magenta. He might have had trouble explaining why a man who loathed war and everything military would make such visits. Would he have acknowledged a feared future as a motive? Possibly. Did the visits energize his efforts to stave off war over the next eighteen months, first as a Senator and then as Secretary of State? Almost certainly. Seward made one more visit to a battlefield before returning home. His account of Waterloo sounds very much like that of any curious traveler. He hired a guide who spoke “tolerable English” and “unconscious of any fatigue” walked for several hours around the battlefield. “I studied the attack and the defense of Hougomont, . . . I stood where Wellington stood, while managing his defense.” At Waterloo Seward was also visiting his own past. He was reminded of the day “forty-four years ago” when he heard of Napoleon’s defeat during a school recess. The news was devastating. “I had been educated to sympathize with him. I believed him utterly invincible.” Since then Seward’s view of Napoleon had changed: he had lost his “puerile pity for him.” But the feelings “came back . . . for a brief space” at Waterloo as he mused not only on the battle but on Napoleon’s career from the escape from Elba to his “lonely death” on St. Helena. With the benefit of hindsight, Seward concluded that if Napoleon had not “lived and reigned,” despotism would have been “a thousand fold stronger. Though not a devotee of liberty, liberty has had the chief benefit of his championship.” The visits to Solferino and Magenta served Seward as an omen of what might be. Waterloo merely reminded him of what had been.51 *** After sending their letters on to Paris, Raymond and Forsyth followed the French army for a time while Johnston struck out on his own. He went to Milan, Valeggio, and Desenzano on Lake Garda and spent the better part of a very hot day at Peschiera, watching from a distance the somewhat ragged investment of the town. Still lacking the proper siege guns, the Piedmontese could not hope to break into the town, yet had to deal with Austrian counter shelling. At one point, Johnston advanced to within a mile of the fortifications, thinking that “a journalist must walk up to the cannon’s mouth, if but for a single paragraph.” So stifling was the heat that he eventually shucked his clothes and went swimming in the Mincio.52 On July 10 he was in Brescia visiting the hospitals. By this time he had become enraged at the insufficiencies of the French army medical

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system. But he did not dwell on the problems in his letters as Russell had in the Crimea. Johnston knew that however interested his American readers were in the conflict, its casualties were not their flesh and blood. In truth, the war was only a serial story to most of the readers thousands of miles away. Its scandals and foul-ups—inevitable in every war—were of little concern to audiences invested only in the drama and denouement of the conflict. The day after Villafranca, July 12, New Yorkers at last read the Solferino dispatches of Raymond and Johnston. No other full account of the battle had yet reached America. The New York Times had won its race with the “Thunderer” and thereby gained new stature among American newspapers. Praise quickly followed, and the stories, particularly Raymond’s, were reprinted in part or whole in papers around the country. The Chicago Press & Tribune charged that Raymond and Johnston owed their “enviable” access to the war zone to a “special permit” from the French government, granted in return for the Times ardent support of the “Napoleonic scheme in Italy.”53 Raymond’s vigorous support of French actions in Italy encouraged such suspicions, as did his subsequent justification of Napoleon’s decision to cease hostilities. And had the editor of the Tribune been lucky enough to see the July 29 issue of the staunchly pro-government Le Constitutionnel, which included selections from the Times coverage of Solferino and commended the reporters for their “impartialité,” he would have felt his assertion proven beyond any doubts. Coincidentally, Raymond had addressed this assertion without knowing it. In his letter from Paris on August 2, he denied that newspapers were “shut entirely out of the French camp” as alleged by a “person who visited the field” for the English journal All the Year Round. In fact, Raymond countered, a number of Paris and London newspapers were represented, as was the New York Times, “and everyone was at perfect liberty to write what he pleased.” Moreover, the Paris papers had been “far more reliable” than most of the London press. The one exception was the Times, whose reports from both camps had been “exceedingly able and graphic.” Raymond singled out Eber’s letters as “terse,” “vigorous,” and less ornate than Russell’s Crimean dispatches. “Few native English could write the language with greater correctness or effect.”54 Raymond himself was soon being compared to Russell. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, for example, called him the “American Russell,” and predicted that “if he goes on as well as he has begun, he will surpass the original.” The same writer, however, had preferred Johnston’s Solferino story for its “clearness” and its “vivid picture”

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of the battle. “All things considered,” it was “as good as any of Russell’s,” and “better” then his employer’s.55 Russell’s boss presumably thought so as well. On September 7 the Times of London printed a long excerpt from Johnston’s Brescia dispatch, noting that its author had written “several graphic accounts of scenes during the war.” Not a line of Raymond’s war letters appeared in the “Thunderer.” By the end of July, all three Americans were back in Paris, with Raymond hobnobbing with English and French journalists before returning home. Johnston’s journey back to Paris had included a stop at Magenta. Walking the field again, now “more trampled over and beaten down by visitors than it was by the hasty passage of the soldiers the day of the battle,” he “stumbled” on the grave of a lieutenant “well known in Paris society.” For “two winters past” he and Johnston had often met and danced in the same quadrilles. Johnston did not know the man had been killed at Magenta and thought his burial site, next to a garden wall encircling a custom house, a very “lonesome and desolate spot.” This chance encounter with the grave of someone he knew and liked and supposed he would soon see again deeply upset Johnston. He used his reaction to conclude his first letter (August 11) after returning to Paris. It is common to talk lightly of the horrors of war, and to imagine at a distance that one can appreciate it in all its force; but he that would really comprehend the term must be brought thus face to face with the thing itself; he must lose near relatives and friends; he must stand thus over their lonely graves in a foreign land as over their mutilated bodies and ghastly faces, in order to feel what the horrors of war are. It is a glorious thing to talk of war, and conquests, and brilliant victories over an enemy, but it is a most horrible thing to put in practice.56

Four days later, Johnston filed a more uplifting story about the great parade held to honor the returning army and its victory. The spectacle, though marred by rain, surpassed any other of the war. On Sunday morning, August 14, a few minutes after nine o’clock, the emperor and the leading column of soldiers set forth from the Bastille, where a copy of the facade of the Milan Cathedral in the form of a sixty-foot arch, had been erected. Inscribed on the arch were the words, “To the Army of Italy, the city of Paris.” Below were listed the names of the war’s battles and the number of all the regiments who had fought in them. Sixty thousand soldiers marched that day, taking four hours to wind through the parade route. At the head of the Rue de la Paix the soldiers passed a statue of Peace atop a 17-foot-high

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pedestal. In one hand she held a sword pointed down, in the other a peace treaty. The “scene on the boulevards” seemed to Olive Logan, Henry Delille’s wife, like an “immense theater, the public being the spectators, and the victorious army the actors.” Enjoying it as much as anybody was the three-year-old Prince Imperial, who clapped his hands wildly while standing on a chair for a better view. Already known for his “pugilistic” temper, he looked to be a worthy bearer of the family name.57 Walking at the head of the army, some in “evident” pain, was a contingent of the wounded estimated at a thousand by Johnston. Their position differed from that of the wounded in the parade three years before. Then, they had marched at the head of their respective regiments. In having them walk at the head of the whole army in 1859, Napoleon meant to elevate their standing in public consciousness. One young officer, having lost both hands, smiled “as he saluted by a bend of the body,” and shouted “Vive l’Impératrice.” Sensing the significance of this positioning of the wounded, Jean-Adolphe Beaucé sketched the scene for the Illustrated London News.58 Several photographs of the triumphal parade survive. At the bottom of one we can see what looks to be a portion of the wounded. The phalanxes of marching soldiers moving too rapidly for the camera largely appear as a blur. It is the spectators, finally, who command attention. They jam the route from storefront to street, leaving barely enough space for the soldiers to pass by. Hundreds more, many of them women, stand on ledges and roofs, eager to see and applaud. The loudest cheers, according to Johnston and the several spotters he stationed along the parade route, arose in the “more fashionable quarters,” while the fewest were heard in working class districts. The climax of the event took place in the Place Vendome, now “converted into a sort of imitation of the Roman Colosseum.” Some twenty thousand people had gathered to pay their respects, creating a tableau that at least one photographer captured and the illustrated papers were quick to feature. Even the rain that came on around two o’clock could not ruin the drama of a display intended to celebrate so much: an army that had not lost a battle, an emperor who now seemed to merit the name he bore, and a victory by an imperial regime dedicated to liberty. To help the nation remember the day, the artist Louis Eugène Ginain was commissioned to do a painting of the gathering for the “galleries historiques” at Versailles. Among the spectators on August 14 were dozens of Americans waving their own flag in salute to the armée d’Italie. No British flag was to be seen, however, despite there being “five times” as many

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English as American residents in the city.59 This show of reserve was no surprise. The English still regarded Napoleon as a threat, even more so after his recent campaign. Was he now planning to lead his army across the channel as many in England believed? Such a plan, it is safe to assume, was very far from his mind that day, and probably any other day during his many years in power. Certainly on this day he was intent only on basking in the public appreciation he thought he and his army deserved. Sweet as the victory in the Crimea had been, that war had dragged on for a long time. Not so the war in Italy, whose brevity almost made it seem like a scripted drama, with a slow introduction of the players and their interests, a long middle marked by a series of confrontations that sharpened the essential struggle, and a thunderous climax that, while bloody, managed to achieve some resolution—at least from the French point of view. And the emperor had been there throughout. That evening Napoleon gave a grand banquet for his senior officers at the Louvre. In a toast, he announced that a medal commemorating the campaign would be given to all who participated. On it would be inscribed the “glorious names” of the battles they had fought. Physical tokens, though, could not match each soldier’s memories of his time in Italy, memories that he would “often” hark back to. For “memory,” the emperor told his guests, is “for all men of war . . . knowledge itself.” Surrounded for eight weeks by generals who talked incessantly of earlier campaigns, Napoleon had learned firsthand an old truth.60 *** Matthew Arnold had also learned a few things in those two months. One result of his education was a pamphlet, England and the Italian Question, published at the end of July. The work came as something of a surprise; up to this time Arnold was known only as a poet. Once before, in 1848, he had been “tempted to attempt some political writing,” but the urge had soon passed. Its re-emergence in 1859 was a direct result of his travels on the continent during the war. As he wrote to William Gladstone—who had recently become chancellor of the exchequer in the new Liberal government—when sending him a copy of the pamphlet, “in the last few months I have visited nearly every part of France and seen all classes of society. . . . Indeed, it was this alone which gave me any right to trouble the public on the Italian question.”61 And “trouble” the English public, notably the “aristocracy,” by which Arnold meant the ruling elites generally, he certainly did. His

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defense of Napoleon as a man who understood the “ideas” of his time, as “the champion of nationalities,” convinced few in English public life. Nor did his defense of the emperor’s decision to lead an army to Italy in order to make a nation. In Arnold’s mind, the “aristocracy” did not understand the world they were living in and so misconceived and unfairly condemned Napoleon’s role in it. And the “English in general,” imagining “Napoleon as a skillful despot who has mastered France and . . . deals with it for his own advantage,” could not understand that the “vast majority of the industrious classes in France regard him as a beneficent ruler on whom they have themselves conferred power, and who wields it for the advantage of the French nation.”62 Arnold tried his best to get a wide audience for his views. He personally dispatched copies of his pamphlet to numerous friends and people in high places, and instructed his publisher to be generous in sending out copies for review. This was not so much a sign of authorial ego as it was an attempt to discover if he had a political voice people might want to hear. The response was not encouraging. From family and friends he got approval, and from Gladstone, who read it shortly before he would give a lengthy speech in the House of Commons on “Italian affairs,” a “very warm note.”63 But the pamphlet was knocked about by several English critics, including Harriet Martineau, whom Arnold thought shared his views. And the Times did not even bother to review it. Though the first edition sold out, a second never appeared. Nor would there ever be a second political pamphlet, leaving England and the Italian Question a not very successful pièce d’occasion. Had the pamphlet won greater favor, Arnold, whose poetic fire was all but burnt out by 1859, might have engaged more with political affairs, and not only as a writer of pamphlets. For there are signs in his life of a man with a relish for politics. But the reception of the pamphlet, together with the fading of the war from public concern, left Arnold with no ambition to pursue a place in public life.64 Still, the excitement he had felt while in France and while working up the pamphlet did not entirely disappear. In the autumn he enlisted in a unit of the Volunteer Rifle Corps, which had been organized in the spring out of fear of a possible French invasion. Today, that fear seems foolish, even paranoid. Arnold was neither, and did not drill twice a week in fear of the French. Instead, an enthusiasm unlike almost any other had stirred in him, as it has stirred in countless others, a desire to participate as an actor not merely a spectator. Thus when we read what he wrote about the weekly drill, keeping in mind

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that he was writing to his mother, we may suspect he was gaining more than physical exercise. “I like the drilling very much—it braces one’s muscles, and does one a world of good.”65 Whether it did an army a world of good was a question Mikhail Dragomirov was wrestling with in Turin as he composed his report on the war some weeks after Villafranca. The young Russian captain, it will be recalled, arrived at the seat of war too late to observe any of the battles. That did not stop him, however, from offering some strongly worded opinions on the French and Austrian armies, opinions confirmed rather than inspired by events he had not witnessed. Having earlier attended lectures at the École Militaire at Saint-Cyr and watched the French army in training, Dragomirov admired the “initiative” and “moral autonomy” encouraged in French soldiers. There was no lack of discipline in the emperor’s army, but it was also understood that discipline should not be the highest “goal” of an effective fighting force. Proof lay in the Austrian army, which in Dragomirov’s mind was so obsessed with discipline and the appearance of it that its soldiers were lacking both will and spirit. How else to explain the army’s defeats at Palestro and Magenta, where they had the advantage but lost the battles. Or at Solferino, where they held superior ground, only, to be defeated by an adversary determined to displace them no matter the cost. Therein lay the crux of the matter. Treated as “subjects,” trained in drill to the point of being automatons, Austrian soldiers lacked an essential quality: “To defend a position until the end (“jusqu’à la mort”) is an idea foreign to Austrian troops.”66 It was a severe judgment, one that by Dragomirov’s own admission Solferino somewhat contradicted. There, inspired by Franz Joseph’s presence and the “lessons” learned at Palestro and Magenta, the Austrians had fought “more energetically.” Nevertheless, from soldiers lacking élan to generals, like Gyulai, who “understood brilliantly war on a map,” the kaiser’s army was not a fit instrument of policy. Nor, and this was Dragomirov’s ultimate concern, was the czar’s for some of the same reasons. A parade army, disciplined to the point of fear, would never develop the skills and attitude needed in battle, where the unforeseen is the norm and thus requires soldiers and leaders with the will to improvise. Readers of his essay, published in a Russian journal in 1861, would not have missed the relevance of the argument to their own army, though Dragomirov never explicitly makes the connection. In subsequent decades, as he rose in rank, reputation, and command, becoming head of the Nicholas Academy in 1878, he continued to promulgate his ideas in a series of articles and books. To say that his

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views were a direct outcome of his time in Italy would be to exaggerate. But what he had learned there in the weeks after the war, by studying the various battlefields and talking to veterans, had given him the kind of evidence that turned notions into fixed principles. *** Absent from the August celebrations in Paris of the great campaign was Charles Furne. The publisher had returned to Paris on June 15, sunburned and seemingly rejuvenated by his trip. Within days, however, his behavior began to worry family and friends. He easily grew impatient, complained excessively about the heat, and became very irritable when discussing the actions of the emperor. “He was not sick,” and yet there was obviously a “certain change in his character.”67 On the morning of July 14 he left the house around noon, and after making a few stops decided to go to a public bath. There, in a fit of violent coughing, he began to vomit blood, the sign of a pulmonary hemorrhage. When the vomiting eased, he managed to dress himself and with assistance walk home. Crossing his garden, Furne became ill again and had to be carried into his house. Shortly thereafter he died. The suddenness of his passing shocked his many friends. “Poor Furne,” wrote Charles Blanc in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, “in the morning he was laughing with us, in the evening he was dead.”68 The funeral at Saint-Sulpice two days later was very large, befitting a man with so many friends. Some in the “immense cortege” naturally wondered if the visit to the war had hastened his death. There was no way of knowing. But a man so enamored of soldiering as Furne might not have minded being a casualty of war. Sometime in the month between his arrival home and his death, Furne would have visited the Salon and noted the extraordinary number of battle paintings on display. “Never before in an exhibition,” thought one critic, had there been so many.69 Paintings inspired by the “recent and glorious Crimean campaign” were the most common, with Yvon’s two massive Malakoff canvases dominating the first room of the Salon.70 What Furne, now that he had witnessed a real battle, thought of these and the other battle tableaux is not known. We can be confident, however, that he lingered before two lithographs of the siege of Rome (1849) done by his close friend and one-time traveling companion, Auguste Raffet. As the critic for the Gazette des BeauxArts commented, “La est le sentiment, la est le caractère.”71 For thirty years, in a series of albums and books, Raffet had been publishing lithographs and engravings that celebrated the achievements of the French army under the Republic and the Empire. Born

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in 1804, he had not escaped the mesmerizing impact of Napoleon and his wars. As a student of Gros, Raffet aspired to be a “painter of battles and a singer of victories.”72 But five years spent studying with Nicolas Charlet turned his art to less grand modes of honoring the soldiers of France, men like his father and uncle. Raffet joined the National Guard, rising eventually to the rank of captain. While he never took part in a battle as a soldier, Raffet twice saw war as an artist. In 1832 he witnessed the French siege of Antwerp; and 17 years later, he was present at the siege of Rome and visited Novara after the Austrian defeat of the Piedmontese. Otherwise, Raffet depended on his imagination (and what he saw in other men’s pictures) to “divine” what he had not seen.73 He did so with great success. So accurate and powerful were his lithographs of the French conquest of Algeria—a land he never visited—that one writer titled him “the pictorial Homer of the Army of Africa.”74 It was an opinion doubtless shared by Charles Furne, who used Raffet’s work to illustrate a number of books he published. When the war broke out in Italy, Raffet was staying near Florence at the palace of San Donato, the home of his patron and friend, Prince Anatole Demidoff. Eager to finish his Rome series, he refused an editor’s request in early May to turn his attention to the “actual war” that had just begun. But Raffet’s exclusive focus on the past ended when the first units of Prince Napoleon’s Fifth Corps arrived at nearby Livorno. On May 20 he rushed to the port town to see the soldiers, only to be disappointed at how few there were. Returning two days later, he was again disappointed by their scant numbers. In the days following, however, the main body of the corps arrived and by the end of May had moved to Florence where they were encamped in the Cascine Gardens. Raffet reveled in the presence of “Mes Français” and went to see the soldiers daily, chatting and dining with friends and passing out cigars. He also had a meeting with Prince Jerome, who asked him if he wanted, like Meissonier, to “do something” with the “actual war.” Raffet declined, perhaps in part because he doubted the military capacities of the prince. For all that he might “resemble” the first Napoleon, Plon-Plon’s decision to enter Florence by carriage rather than on horseback had revealed that he did not understand his role “as a general” (One can imagine the emperor’s reaction when learning of his cousin’s mode of entry!). Nevertheless, Raffet asked the prince’s permission to sketch in the Cascine encampment. This was granted, and for the next several days the artist virtually lived among the soldiers75.

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News of the victories at Palestro and Magenta gave Raffet an idea. He would create an elaborate album of lithographs linking the current campaign with that of 1796. In each, a French army had crossed the mountains not to dominate or plunder but to liberate. A lithograph done at San Donato in July, “Les Drapeaux,” suggests the heroic view Raffet had of the two campaigns. Swirling in the wind, the flags bear the names of the chief battles of each. Topping one flag—and the highest point of the image—stands the imperial eagle, traditionally a symbol of power and conquest. Only in the contexts of 1796 and 1859, the eagle had become a symbol of a benevolent crusade. To “inspire” his imagination, as he told his friend Auguste Bry in August, Raffet planned to visit the war’s battlefields. He guessed that it would take him nine or ten days by train.76 As he thought about his trip the memory of Charles Furne was still very much in his mind. Word of his death had reached Raffet on July 18, in a letter from his wife. It was a terrible blow (“le plus grand peine”), yet one possibly softened by the knowledge that his friend had been able to go on campaign with his beloved French army.77 Only a man himself enamored of “les soldats” could appreciate what Furne’s last journey must have meant to him. In telling Bry of his plans Raffet expressed a hope to leave San Donato very soon. But work on the Rome lithographs kept delaying his journey. Meanwhile he queried Bry about the dress of the French in various battles of the late war and requested a “short report” of the festivities for the return of the army to Paris. In October he was still in San Donato, having two more “subjects” to do on the Rome series. Then on December 10, he announced that he had been “called” by Demidoff to Vienna, and that the journey would go past “all the French battlefields.”78 Eight days later Raffet left Florence by train. His journey took him through Pisa, Genoa, and Milan, where he heard retreat with “our soldiers.” Then it was on to Desenzano and Solferino, where he found the battlefield covered in snow, making it “impossible to get a sense of the terrain.” Nevertheless, he made some notes and sketches, and visited the grave of an army friend killed in the battle. In all, Raffet spent several days in the area before going on to Vienna, enough time to reflect on how much death as well as how much glory had resulted on the day of Solferino. He knew, moreover, that he would have to “return,” possibly after his stay in Vienna.79 Instead, he went to Paris to see his family and stayed until February 9, when he left for San Donato. He had changed his mind about quickly resuming his tour of

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the battlefields, perhaps thinking it would be better to wait for spring and more suitable weather. The day before Raffet left Paris, he went with Bry to Montparnasse cemetery. There he purchased three wreaths, placing them on the graves of his mother, of Charlet, and of a son who had died in 1844 at the age of three. As the two men left the cemetery, Raffet “abruptly stopped” and exclaimed, “I have forgotten Furne.” When Bry told him Furne was buried at Père Lachaise, Raffet became very agitated. Having missed his friend’s funeral he wanted very much to visit the grave. Now there would be no time. Bry tried to jolly the artist by telling him Furne would take into account his “good intentions,” naturally supposing there would be other occasions for Raffet to bid his friend goodbye.80 In returning to San Donato, Raffet crossed the Alps by Mont Cenis, the same route taken by the French army in the previous spring. Even then there had been enough snow on the ground for Frank Vizetelly and his coach companions to have their snowball fight. Now in February 1860, the snow was deeper and the temperature far colder. Nevertheless, Raffet, whose health was delicate, insisted on riding on top of the coach in order to chat with some officers. By the time he reached Genoa on February 11, the artist was feeling unwell and a doctor was summoned to his hotel. It was pneumonia, and five days later Raffet was dead. There would be no return visit to the battlefields, no set of lithographs celebrating the nation’s triumphs, not even a farewell to Furne. But there would be a haunting painting.

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Chapter 7

4

Set ting the War in Memory

By the autumn of 1859, travelers in northern Italy who visited the

late war’s battlefields usually did so out of curiosity. A few, though, arrived with a specific mission. One such traveler was Major Frederick Miller of the Royal Artillery. He and several other officers had been sent by the army to survey the various battlefields, “as well as the principal points of defense along the Po.”1 Out of this visit would come A Study of the Italian Campaign of 1859, a 74-page account written by Miller that was quite unlike the book that César Bazancourt wrote for the emperor. In selecting Miller to head the survey, the army had chosen one of its rising stars. At age 28, Frederick Miller had all the credentials suitable to an officer of his era. He came from an old Warwickshire family, his father had commanded a regiment of dragoons at Waterloo, and Frederick himself had won the Victoria Cross at Inkerman. In receiving his award on May 6, 1859, he became the last man to be so honored for service in the Crimea. In addition, the young major was quick of mind, fluent in several languages, and an able writer. This was clear from the long letter describing Inkerman written the night of the battle and published in the Times in late November of 1854. Miller had sent the letter to his family and somehow—the act of a proud, distinguished father?—it had wound up in Printing House Square. Miller was also a talented draughtsman, as his many sketches and watercolors from the Crimea and subsequent postings reveal. His assignment to northern Italy called upon several of Miller’s talents. The one readers of A Study would first notice was his skill as a draughtsman. Facing the title page is an elegant sketch. In the right foreground a peasant is pointing at a map held by a man flanked by

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two others, all intently engaged with the map. None is in military uniform. These presumably were the men who accompanied Miller. Just off to their left stands another figure, likely Miller himself, who is drawing the scene around them. Titled “Tower, Convent & Cemetery of Solferino. From the South West 7th Oct 1859,” the sketch, with its inclusion of the man actually drawing the scene, emphasizes the picturesque quality of the site, not its military significance. The image strikes one as more suited to a guide book than a report printed for the Royal Artillery Institution. So too were several passages in the book. “It is worth while for a tourist in this part of the country to stop at Desenzano for the sake of the beautiful scenery which the hills and lake afford. An excursion to Solferino (8 miles) will bring him to the highest point of ground on the south, and the name ‘Spia d’Italia,’ given to the old feudal tower above the village, does not exceed the reality, for a more extensive view there could hardly be. The surrounding district is well fitted for such a battle as took place in it,—a battle between 300,000, commanded by two emperors and a king.”2 Murray’s Handbook of Italy could hardly have said it better. Frederick Miller was no artist manqué. He was happy and successful in army life. Still, wherever he served, he had spent many hours sketching and painting. To judge from his surviving notebooks, scarcely a subject or a site in the Crimea escaped his brush or pencil. And on several occasions, as in the sketch done in northern Italy, he placed himself in the scene as an observing artist. Now, in the autumn of 1859, taking “notes” and making “rough sketches,” he was for the first time acting professionally as an observer, trying to sort out what had happened by viewing the landscape and talking to battlefield guides. But unlike the trio of observers sent out by the government at the beginning of the war, who were only responsible for reporting their impressions of what was happening at the moment, Miller was expected to write a full-length study explaining the whole course of the war. Such a report would be useful to the army, especially if it were to confront a French invasion of England in the near future, the worry of many of those drilling alongside Matthew Arnold. Such a possibility did not concern Ferdinand Eber. The correspondent for the Times returned to northern Italy in the autumn to cover postwar events. He also had another purpose, one that he would not have mentioned to his boss, J. T. Delane, when the two met in Turin. Shortly after Villafranca, Mowbray Morris suggested to the Hungarian that he and Crowe “condense” their war correspondence into a “connected narrative.” The resulting book would have the rare advantage of enabling readers to see the war from opposing sides.

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Four years before, Eber had considered compiling his dispatches from Greece into a book, but despite gaining Morris’s approval, he had eventually given up the idea. This time Morris was the initiator, and the publisher George Routledge, according to Crowe, was willing “to take the venture.”3 But Eber was not interested, leaving Crowe to publish a twenty-page account of the war, “based on his own correspondence,” in the October issue of the Edinburgh Review. Eber turned down the deal because he already had—or was in the process of negotiating—a more ambitious one with Day & Son. The publisher wanted him to revise his dispatches for a book featuring color lithographs based on the wartime sketches of Carlo Bossoli. Given the long history between artist and publisher, we can assume the idea for the book did not come from Eber. We can only surmise why Day & Son decided to undertake so ambitious a project, since the records of the company have not survived. Was it the success of Bossoli’s earlier books? Respect for the Times and its coverage of the war? The belief that the public’s interest in the war would endure—an assumption evidently shared by Mowbray Morris and George Routledge? Any of these might have persuaded William Day that a book about a war in which the British had not fought would sell. Taken together, they probably seemed compelling. To fulfill his part in the project, Eber had to visit the battlefields, especially those he had not been on during the fighting. His first stop was Turin, a city that in the “best of times” he thought was marked by “a general listlessness, I might say nothingness, which gives you the impression that you are walking about in a town of somnambulists by daylight.” From there he took the train east, expecting to see vivid evidence of the war as he went along. He was struck instead by how peaceful and bountiful the landscape appeared. “In vain,” he realized, would the traveler “look for all those formidable traces of the devastation which he had been accustomed to couple with the idea of war.” Even around the railroad station at Magenta, site of fierce fighting and now the graveyard for hundreds, the only signs of the battle were wooden crosses marking the graves and boys selling souvenirs. Solferino was no different. Carriages taking tourists to the battlefield left every morning from the hotels of Desenzano, but once on the field, tourists could see few traces of the “second greatest battle of modern times”—only holes in the “walls of the church. . . . and some loopholes in the walls of the graveyard.” The field and villages appeared as they had for centuries. If visitors to Solferino wished to grasp the events of that torrid, bloody day, they would have to use their imaginations.4

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Eber tried as best he could to give a “carefully drawn picture of the campaign.” Errors in his original reporting could be corrected and “new details” included.5 But he did not expect the text he provided for Day & Son to convey what he had seen on June 24th or any other day of the war. “Word painting” would satisfy only the blind. Bossoli’s pictures promised at least the illusion of seeing. Eber was not the first or only journalist to profit from the war twice. Amédée Achard, who covered the war until mid-June for the Journal des Débats, published his “letters” in book form as Montebello, Magenta, Marignan in early September. A couple of weeks later, Edmond Texier of Le Siècle published his dispatches “without any changes.” And in late October, only days before the death of its long-time editor JeanBaptiste Paulin, L’Illustration brought out a history of the war based on the filings of several of its reporters, including Paulin. These books were assembled in the expectation that public interest in the war would endure for some time, especially if it were continually nourished. French journalists and publishers knew of William Howard Russell’s success with the book publication of his Crimean reporting. A correspondent’s words did not have to be lost within days of publication; sewn together and placed within covers, they took on a second life as a memoir or diary. Russell titled several of his collections of war dispatches “My Diary of. . . .” For generations, firsthand accounts of war had usually been composed—often years afterwards—by those involved in the fighting. Now, with the increasing flow of journalists and special artists to the battlefield, a new kind of war book had come into being. And since such books routinely appeared before those of the generals, they not only sustained public attention on the war but gave journalists a strong claim to be its most authentic voice. It did not matter that Achard and Texier, unlike Eber, never saw a battle in progress. They had been to the seat of their war and had seen the wounded and dead. That was perhaps more than Homer could claim. Or César Bazancourt. “Called by order of the Emperor to the army of Italy,” he arrived after hostilities had concluded. Nevertheless, he had advantages over correspondents like Achard and Texier. He was favored by the emperor, trusted by important individuals who could help him, like General Fleury and Prince Napoleon, and well known to many officers from his time in the Crimea and his books about the war. Bazancourt could easily craft a fluent chronicle of “this immortal campaign.”6 And given his admiration for Napoleon and the army, together with his aversion to describing unpleasant scenes like a battlefield after the fighting has stopped, the Baron could be depended on to write what was expected of him.

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Bazancourt did not disappoint either his patron or his audience. La campagne d’Italie de 1859 is an unabashed paean to the French army and its leader, who are described as going to Italy “in the name of the most holy of causes.”7 While on crusade they did no wrong, and if, like many crusades, theirs did not fulfill the stated ambition, they did add several new pages to the triumphal history of French arms. La campagne appeared in two parts, the first, carrying the story through Magenta, in November 1859 and the second in March of the following year. Newspapers praised the work and the public bought up three editions in 1860. A fourth, prepared “especially for the army,” came out the same year. At the center of the narrative stands Napoleon, a war leader par excellence. Brave, decisive, indefatigable, beloved by his soldiers, and virtually “clairvoyant”8 in anticipating what would happen, the emperor is portrayed as the legitimate heir to his uncle. At Solferino, by an “inspiration worthy of the genius of the great captain whose name he carries,” Napoleon realized that everything depended on capturing the heights above the village. The French finally did, thanks to Napoleon’s wise and timely decisions. Leaders, though, only give orders. Armies do the fighting and win the victories. Thus the accomplishments of the French army fill most of the pages of the book. From the “brave regiments, disdainful of death,” who fought at Montebello to the chasseurs, “insatiable for danger,” who charged the Austrian lines at Solferino, the “intrepid [a favorite adjective] army” showed it had no equal.9 Lest the soldiers be seen only as a mass, an abstraction, Bazancourt inserts dozens of footnote biographies. And at the end of each volume, he lists the names and career steps of all of the French officers who fell at Magenta and Solferino. For the latter, the list goes on for 42 pages. Read through, the cumulative impact of the death entries compares to the experience of walking through a military cemetery and seeing the row upon row of headstones. Except that Bazancourt did not intend his readers to mourn, so much as respect the fallen. Seldom is there a passage in the book that either prompts or describes grief, pity, or horror. Battles are bloody, and the casualties duly enumerated, but neither the dead nor the wounded have a real presence or any voice. Nor do readers see the hundreds of wounded lying for days on the battlefield of Solferino. The reason: they did not exist. “The day after the bloody day of June 24 there remained not a single wounded soldier, French or Austrian, who had not been gathered up and given shelter.”10 Though quick to draw a veil over terrible scenes, Bazancourt could not conceal the statistics of the human cost of war. The count of the

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dead and wounded was what it was. Outweighing those numbers in Bazancourt’s mind, however, was the glory of the army, the glory of the campaign, and the glory of the emperor. Like many of his countrymen, the baron ardently believed those things mattered far more than the horrors of war. But his obsession with bravery and glory does not fully explain why La campagne seemed to be “a novel from end to end” to Horace Viel Castel.11 He was reacting more to an imagination than a rhetoric, an imagination that conceived of war as at once the grand drama and the greatest spectacle of life, combining beauty of act with profound significance. “The history of our wars is the history of the progress of civilization.”12 Napoleon uttered those words to the veterans of the Italian war on the tenth anniversary of Solferino. Bazancourt could easily have written them immediately after the battle, for they typify his unwillingness to dwell on the horrors of Solferino, even if he had seen them with his own eyes. While Bazancourt was at work, the emperor himself was thinking of writing a history. It was not to be of his own time and achievements nor of his uncle’s. Instead, the subject would be Julius Caesar, the “genius” whom both Bonapartes admired. The first Napoleon had written an Outline of the Wars of Caesar during his time on St. Helena. His nephew now planned a whole life. Before coming to power, Napoleon had written on a variety of subjects. Why in the autumn of 1859 he should have considered taking up his pen again has drawn a number of explanations: he was growing older and looking for more sedentary pursuits, he thought a well-written tome would gain him admission to the French Academy, he sought to justify his great man theory of history, etc. Left unconsidered is the timing of his decision. Having returned to France as the leader of a successful military campaign, Napoleon undoubtedly saw himself in a new light. For all his ambition, for all his power, for all the propaganda touting his imperial abilities, Napoleon—until the war in Italy—had not met the critical test of an emperor: leading an army to victory. Now, finally, he knew what command in battle entailed. He still would not have supposed himself the equal of his uncle or Julius Caesar, but he could now persuade himself that he understood their military feats far better than he had. Italy had given him the qualifications and confidence only experience can supply. Of course, he lacked many of the scholarly qualifications for such a project, beginning with a sound knowledge of Latin, but he could call upon any experts he might need. And he relished the legwork that would be involved. In June of 1861, in the company of the writer and historian, Prosper Mérimée, and under “the most terrible sun in the world,”

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the emperor visited the excavated site of Caesar’s siege at Alesia, near Dijon. Returning to his chateau at Fountainebleau, sunburned and dirty as a “chimney sweep,” Napoleon—if not his companion—was a happy man.13 Napoleon’s fascination with Caesar was widely known. No one supposed he believed his Italian campaign made him the equal of Caesar, but there could be no harm in suggesting the comparison. The painter Hippolyte Flandrin, in his famous full-length portrait of the emperor, exhibited in the Salon of 1863, placed on a table to the right of his subject both a bust of Caesar and a copy of his Commentaries. Dressed in the uniform of a general, his left hand clasping the hilt of his sword, his gaze resolute, almost fierce, Napoleon looks worthy of the comparison. Indeed, the portrait is not so much of a person as of a role, one the emperor would not successfully play again. *** In the months following the war, John Peard, Garibaldi’s “inglese,” began to see the consequences of fame. Not long after hostilities ended, a writer for a London newspaper alleged that Peard was actually “indifferent to the cause of Italian independence,” and that he had “shot down human beings for sport merely, as he would game.” Infuriated by the attack on his integrity, Peard sent a letter refuting the charges to a west country weekly, which appended its own testimonial. “We have the honor of Capt. Peard’s acquaintance, and, . . . are convinced that he is a fearless and devoted friend of the glorious cause to which he has dedicated his life.”14 Soon thereafter the two rejoinders were reprinted in several London dailies, including the Times. In October Peard was again in the public eye, this time as a thinly disguised stage character at Astley’s Amphitheatre, a venue famous for equestrian extravaganzas. Written by Tom Taylor, the journalist and playwright whose drama, “Our American Cousin,” was a transatlantic hit the year before, “Garibaldi” told the story of the hero in four acts, beginning with his years as a “free-lance commander” in South America. There he had met John Beard, an “adventurous Englishman,” and the two men became fast friends. In subsequent acts Garibaldi, together with Beard, defends Rome, flees the Austrians after the fall of the city, and, ten years later, leads the cacciatori in northern Italy, where Beard, as one reviewer described the scene, “commences ‘potting’ the Austrians after the manner which has gained himself so much world-wide celebrity.”15 Peard did not object to the preposterous rendering of his association with Garibaldi. The “hippodrama”—horses had appeared—was all in

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good fun and had not impugned the Cornishman’s honor. Besides, in spirit if not in the flesh, Peard had always been with Garibaldi, “devoted” as he was to the man and the cause. Certainly the audience did not mind Taylor’s fanciful portrayal. At the end of several of the acts, they called out the players for applause, and at the conclusion of the drama asked for Taylor himself, who was not in the house. Why, we need to ask, was there so much enthusiasm for the play? Was it just because it was well-written and well-performed? Not likely. Garibaldi had long been admired in England, and the recent war only enhanced his fame. For weeks the public read newspaper accounts of his adventures, including several interviews with him. Now in October, he had been brought to life on the stage, or as near to life as possible until the man himself appeared. The stage Garibaldi unleashed an enthusiasm the print Garibaldi never could. An actor can easily create the illusion of a living person—“Mr. Ennis made a robust Garibaldi.” Words in a newspaper cannot.16 A second question also needs to be asked. Why did Taylor write John Peard so extensively into the play? He had not been a part of the Garibaldi narrative before 1859 and was less than a major figure during the campaign in Lombardy. The immediate answer is that Taylor knew his audience would be largely made up of admirers of Garibaldi who were aware of Peard’s role with Garibaldi. But the audience’s reaction to the drama reveals another phenomenon at play, one Taylor may or may not have intended. Peard in life, and even more so on the stage, was at once a symbol and surrogate for themselves. They wanted to see themselves as Garibaldi’s companions in spirit, each in his or her own way also the hero’s “inglese.” In cheering the play and players, especially John Beard, the audience also cheered for themselves. On hearing of the French victories in June, Auguste Raffet felt a similar bond with the army he so admired. Even though he was not with them, he felt himself their comrade. And so it was that in making his preliminary sketches of the projected volume of lithographs, he was consumed by the pride and glory of French arms. But that was in the sun-filled days of July. In December, death was evidently more on his mind as he worked on a watercolor for Prince Demidoff. “Le lendemain de Solferino” is not about victories or glory or pride. It shows a small contingent of French cavalry riding through the ravaged battlefield. Strewn about are bodies of men and horses and smashed-up guns. Far in the background we see some damaged buildings with traces of fire and smoke rising from them. What most draws our attention though are several French and Austrian corpses

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sprawled together at the bottom of the scene. The white uniforms of the Austrians, together with the white trousers of the French and the white face of a drum nearby, are in marked contrast to the pervasive orange and ochre tones of the image. So much does the color of the painting suggest fire that we might think we were, like the French soldiers, making a reconnaissance of Hell. As if to mock our impression, a pair of seemingly disembodied bare feet rests on the legs of another soldier. Feet, bare or shod, are not a common interest of painters; they are apt to elicit mirth more than any other feeling. In Raffet’s picture, however, they are grotesque, and in their repulsiveness symbolize the ugliness, the horror, of what had taken place at Solferino the day before. The juxtaposition of the dead and the living in “Le lendemain de Solferino” is intended to disturb. Raffet means us to see the two not as separate but as interchangeable. The soldiers riding by, full of health and clad in their brilliant uniforms, might almost themselves be visitors to the battlefield. One or two look about, as if trying to catch an interesting sight. They do not imagine—anymore than would a civilian party of visitors—that in the next battle they may lie sprawled among the dead. In contrast to this seeming lack of concern is the reaction of one of the horses. The animal is shown beginning to rear back to avoid stepping on a body. This simple, instinctive movement places the horse as an actor within the scene of death, not merely as a figure passing by. Raffet did not see such a scene in December or envision it in the project he was planning in July. So how did he come to portray Solferino as he did? Gros’s “Eylau” might have been in his mind while he painted, but differences in composition and mood indicate that Raffet was not trying to match his mentor’s achievement. Was the watercolor then inspired by the memory of what he had seen at Novara in 1849, the half-buried dead on the battlefield, the amputees and grievously wounded in the hospitals? Or was he moved by what he had heard or read about Solferino, or what he saw in some illustrated paper or book? Could he have known of Ferdinand Wachsmuth’s recently exhibited “Le lendemain de la prise du Mamelon-Vert,” a painting close in mood to his own “lendemain”? Any explanation must include the time of his visit to the killing ground itself. Winter is without the teeming colors and sounds of the other seasons, a time when one might more readily muse on the butchery rather than the glory of battle and on the evanescence of life in a state of war. No one understands better than the soldier that he who laughs in the morning may very well be dead by nightfall.

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Such bleak thoughts were not in the mind of either Gerolamo Induno or Eleuterio Pagliano when they came to paint the war. As members of the cacciatori delle Alpi, they had not witnessed the death scenes of a Magenta or Solferino. Pagliano would paint the death of Narcisco Bronzetti at Tre-Ponti, a battle in which the artist himself, as well as his subject, had earned a gold medal for bravery. But the death of a much-loved hero like Bronzetti—“the bravest of the brave,” Garibaldi called him—only seemed to valorize war. Thus in October of 1859, when Victor Emanuel commissioned Pagliano to paint Solferino and Induno Palestro, he did not expect either man to dwell on death. As decisive victories, they were supposed to instill a sense of pride. In Pagliano’s “The Taking of the Cemetery at Solferino” (1866), death is present only symbolically. Our attention is focused on a group of Austrian soldiers fleeing through the cemetery. Two have stopped to shoot at a smaller group of French soldiers pursuing them. As the Austrians run, they pass by a number of wooden crosses marking freshly dug graves. How then are we to understand this painting? Was it intended to instill pride? Perhaps, but the pursuing soldiers are clearly French Zouaves, not Piedmontese, and can hardly be seen because they are so far from the Austrians. Are we to feel pity? Certainly not for the Austrians, and not likely, despite the crosses, for the dead. In the end, satisfaction may be closer to what Pagliano had in mind. To see the long-hated enemy running away in a battle that effectively ended both the war and their presence in Lombardy would inspire pleasure, almost gloating. When the painting was exhibited in Paris during the Universal Exposition in 1867, one French critic, Paul Mantz, described the scene as a “merry battle” (“bataille gaie”).17 We sense satisfaction as well in Induno’s “Battle of Solferino and San Martino” (1860). At the center of the very crowded canvas is a small group of Austrian prisoners, some of them wounded. Several of their unhappy faces are quite distinct, unlike those of their conquerors, who surround them on all sides. Looking at the picture today we may pity the Austrians, but Induno’s contemporaries certainly did not. Induno also painted a “Battle of Magenta” (1861?), and once more he placed a group of Austrians at the center of his composition. On this occasion they are about to surrender. The year before Pagliano finished his Solferino picture, he presented to the world his much better known “Landing of Garibaldi and the Cacciatori at Sesto Calende.” Here was an event Pagliano had seen and meant to document for posterity. Spreading across the 24-foot canvas are the figures of Garibaldi and the leading cacciatori,

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some 73 of them identifiable. Among them are three of the Cairoli brothers, including Ernesto, soon to be killed at Varese; Francesco Carrano, the author the following year of an important account of the cacciatori, and Giuseppe Guerzoni, the future biographer of their leader; and, finally, the painter himself, along with his fellow artist, Gerolamo Induno. Dead center, with the early morning sun shining on him as he stands in the bow of one of the boats that made the night crossing, is Garibaldi. The mammoth painting overwhelms the viewer, as Pagliano meant to do with a moment of such importance. He could have copied the strategy of Emanuel Leutze in his famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware and focused on the leader. But for all of Garibaldi’s significance, his companions deserved to be remembered for being present at this hugely symbolic moment. It was also a foreshadowing moment. In less than a year, Garibaldi left by boat for Sicily and the crowning achievement of his career, as well as the act that more than any other made possible the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in March of 1861. The scene of Garibaldi’s departure in 1860 would inspire many artists, including Induno. But for Pagliano, looking back from the years after 1860, Sesto Calende loomed even larger than it had in 1859. For the crossing into Lombardy by boat dramatically announced Garibaldi as the Liberator of Italy, the role that he, together with the “the thousand,” would replay to even greater effect, and far more publicly, in Sicily. As works of art, none of these paintings enjoys great critical acclaim. As exemplars of contemporary historical painting, especially Pagliano’s “Landing,” they remain powerful, affecting statements, designed to shape national memories and give Italians particular understandings and feelings about the 1859 war. Hanging in museums, along with many similar paintings, they were meant to impress their messages on young and old alike. Having been translated into lithographs, some reached larger audiences. Giuseppe De Nigris’s, “The Impressions of a Picture” (1863), well captures the hope that lay behind all these works. The “picture” in question is of Garibaldi being treated for the foot wound incurred at Aspromonte in August 1862 as he and an army of volunteers bent on seizing Rome (“Rome or death”), advanced toward the city. In De Nigris’s recreation, a little boy and his sister, together with several adults, stand in front of the picture. The boy is dressed in a Garibaldian red shirt, with a tiny sword hanging at his side. The little girl, her right arm draped over her brother’s shoulder, points with her left to something in the picture. The painting within the painting might just as well have been a scene from the 1859

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war, for De Nigris means his audience to see the artist’s importance in establishing the national memory. Victor Emanuel also understood that when he gave commissions to the two former cacciatore. A variation on the king’s understanding can be seen in his dealings with Henry Cook. Over the years the London-born artist had traveled through much of Italy and had done numerous sketches and watercolors of the landscape. In 1846 he published The Scenery of Central Italy, a volume of “twenty-six views in the neighbourhood of Rome, Nepi, Civita Castellana, etc.” Cook had spent the two previous years living in Rome, and would spend many more there and elsewhere in Italy before his death in 1890. His deep love for Italy is registered in his decision to have the text of Scenery, which was published in London, printed in Italian as well as English. This may have seemed odd to some English readers, including the queen and Prince Albert, each of whom owned a copy. They also bought copies of Cook’s next book, Recollections of a Tour of the Ionian Islands, Greece and Constantinople (1853). In the autumn of 1859 Cook visited northern Italy, “taking sketches,” including venues of the late war. When he saw them, Victor Emanuel was “so pleased” that he commissioned the artist to produce six pictures from the sketches. He also requested a picture of San Martino, which Cook had not drawn. Not long after, Napoleon asked Cook to paint some of the same scenes for him.18 The artist had no experience painting battles, and no inclination to do so. He sought out quiet, picturesque vistas for his watercolors. Ruins of ancient architecture set in a landscape are common in the book on central Italy. His pictures of the 1859 battlefields show that Cook did not adapt his art to his new subjects. Visitors who came to the exhibition of the pictures in Portland Place in late September of 1860 saw the battlefields of 1859 as Cook had several months after the armistice. By then the signs of war were few and Cook used them sparingly. Only an occasional battered building, a broken bridge, a shattered gate—certainly no graves—disturb his peaceful landscapes. These modern ruins, made in a day by shot and shell, are suffused with the same gentle melancholy found in his paintings of time-eroded Roman ruins. Critics thought them accurate and, in some instances, “remarkably picturesque,” but as a group lacking “any peculiarly high merits as works of art.”19 We may guess, however, why Napoleon and Victor Emanuel liked them so much. The titles of the pictures nudge viewers to recall the glorious moments of the war, while nothing in them points to its human costs. The two war leaders could remember while forgetting.

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One might say the same of The War in Italy, the Eber/Bossoli collaboration that appeared in London bookshops in December, just in time for the Christmas season. Soon labeled by the Art Journal as “one of the most instructive contributions to the art-literature of our age and country,” it is a remarkable volume.20 Accompanying Eber’s text is a series of beautiful pictures that begin with the Piedmont cavalry “proceeding” through Turin to their encampment and end with the “Interview” at Villafranca between Napoleon and Franz Joseph. This last image shows the two men first meeting on the road, not their subsequent parlay in the house in Villafranca itself. The choice makes perfect sense aesthetically: there was nothing picturesque about the latter scene, while the former obviously appealed to Bossoli’s talents as a landscape artist. Indeed, the two leaders are almost swallowed up in the scene because Bossoli has put them at a distance from the foreground of the image, where the viewer is situated behind the emperor’s escort. Off to the right, yet quite noticeable, stand two peasant women who have interrupted their hay raking to watch the meeting. As spectators, they remind us how important moments of political theater were to this war, specifically the several arrivals and entrances beginning with the landing of the French army at Genoa. Winning popular support for the cause and its champions was almost as important as the war’s battles. Another half dozen images show troops crossing rivers, scenes that also lend themselves to Bossoli’s special talents. The same cannot be said for all of the battle scenes, particularly Magenta and Melegnano, where most of the fighting occurred within the towns. What marks all the fighting scenes, however, is how faithful they are to the conventions of the day. The dead and wounded are present, though in small numbers even at Solferino, but the eye is never drawn to them. Instead, Bossoli usually focuses our attention on the attack, with lines of infantry or cavalry charging forward. The pictures swell with the energy and thrill of men in motion. We also admire his rendering of buildings, trees, and skies. They are the strength of his art and are almost too vivid and too pretty for Eber’s narrative. Nevertheless, in their panoramic sweep, Bossoli’s pictures capture, as one reviewer noted, “the disposition and movement of the masses, the crisis of the battle, the configuration of the ground, and character of the scenery.”21 Their accuracy, moreover, seemed to be of a very high order. Eber himself testified in several footnotes to the “excellent idea” that Bossoli had given of a particular situation.22 Whether or not his praise was voluntary, the Hungarian knew his own contribution was secondary. The images were the real matter of the book, as

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Figure 7.1 Battle of Magenta. Source: Carlo Bossoli, The War in Italy (1859)

the title made clear. The War in Italy from Drawings by Carlo Bossoli. With a Descriptive Narrative by the Author of “The Times” Letters from the Allied Camp. The artist’s name is in the largest type, and the significance of his contribution is indicated by what fills the rest of the cover—an image of the siege of Peschiera at night with artillery fire streaking across a sky filled with clouds and a quarter-moon. In the foreground of the picture a sentinel stands gazing at the night-time shelling. Whatever else war might be or become, it remained beautiful to watch. Not everyone was pleased by the dominance of Bossoli’s images, arresting though they were. The critic of the Daily Telegraph would have preferred the artist to be “the illustrator of the author,” rather than the other way around.23 But would the book then have had a market in England in late December of 1859? Perhaps not. For all the interest shown toward the war while it was going on, it still had not been a British fight. And once it was over, the war faded from public interest. No book-length study of it was published in England until 1907. Nor were any of the numerous French, Italian, or German accounts translated. On the other hand, The War in Italy was quickly translated into Italian by Gustavo Strafforello, and published in Paris the following year under the title, 1859; Guerra d’Italia; scritta dal

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corrispondente del Times al campo franco sardo. Con disegni dal vero di C. Bossoli. The changes in the title bear notice. Leading off with the year distinguished the 1859 war from Garibaldi’s descent on Sicily the following spring; reversing the order of priority of text and images suggests their relative value, a point made even clearer in the book’s preface. The editor of the volume, Charles Perrin, claimed that “by universal consensus,” Eber’s text was the “best” of all the “relations” published on the war.24 Such praise did not greet Frederick Miller’s A Study of the Italian Campaign, at least not among the general public, who were unlikely to see a book printed by the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich. But when it appeared in early 1860, Miller’s superiors would have found its argument something of a relief. The French army was not invincible. It had not won the war so much as the Austrians had lost it. In assessing the campaign, Miller treated the leadership of Franz Joseph and Marshal Gyulai with contempt and criticized only slightly less harshly the supporting elements of the Austrian army for failing to feed or supply the soldiers. The rank and file, though often brave, were outmatched by the more aggressive French. “They stood up to be shot at,” lamented one Austrian Commander. Miller, of course, did not witness such behavior, but as a postwar analyst, he concluded that many Austrian units lacked “the will” as well as the experience to be an effective fighting force. Miller also condemned the Austrian “excuses” for their poor performance. “The Austrians attributed much of their overthrow in the campaign to want of information, which, as the country was disaffected, if not hostile, is to a certain extent admissible; but the peasants were not very zealous in the Italian cause, and money will generally procure intelligence. That large bodies of troops should be so close as the French and Sardinians were on the morning of the 30th May, and no notice taken of them, reflects discredit on the army itself.”25 Miller’s report was not of the kind reviewed by newspapers or journals. But in military circles it was certainly noticed. Proof of his superiors’ pleasure came in May 1860, when Miller received a plum posting to the Topographical Department, a recently created office in the War Department that combined planning with intelligence. It was just the place for a man of Miller’s talents, and a place where a junior officer holding the Victoria Cross would be noticed. Miller’s particular duty was “the collection and keeping up of perfect detailed information respecting the equipment of an army of any strength about to take the field in any country.”26 This led to his writing a highly regarded survey, The Equipment of the Artillery, which extended his fame in

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the army. In addition, he began to be asked to give public lectures on military subjects, some of which were published. In 1861, for example, he revisited the Italian war in a lecture at the United Service Institution, which was published first in England and later in France. The following year he delivered another lecture at the Institution, this time on a war in progress in a place he had never visited. Miller thought his audience deserved a “better guide” to “the present war in America.” In one respect he was right; there were English soldiers who knew more about America than he did. But the lecture did not focus just on the first year of the war. Miller examined as well the journalistic coverage of the war, “the special correspondence of the leading journals and the ordinary intelligence of daily or weekly papers.” What he found in “collating these scattered accounts” was that the English public was being given ill-informed and often highly exaggerated stories, thanks in no small part to the naïve expectations of the journalists. By the end of May 1861, “the newspapers had already planned magnificent and immediate operations, such as would crush out in a few weeks what they called the rebellion.” And Miller reminded his audience of an obvious but perennially disregarded warning. You will do well to remember that all our intelligence is derived from Northern sources, and the accounts of one side only are never a safe authority. In any war we can only approach the truth by carefully weighing the statements of both parties, which, in this one, are beyond our reach. The case of the Southerners is that of the lions in the fable, who were always shown in pictures as being killed by man, because lions were never the painters.27

Miller had not suddenly discovered the weaknesses of war reporting. Already in the Study he had criticized specific newspaper stories, including some in the Times. The reporting of war, Miller believed, was too important to be left to “Our Special Correspondent.” Unless of course that correspondent had the experience and understanding of a Frederick Miller. A man of Miller’s self-confidence and independence of mind will eventually offend. In the spring of 1868, Miller, now said to be known “throughout the army as a careful student of the higher branches of the art of war,” gave a course of lectures at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He said some things that annoyed a “distinguished cadet.” Asked to “alter” his lectures, he refused and immediately resigned his appointment. What he said and the identity of the cadet

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are a mystery that the records of the academy do not solve. But what happened next was predictable: he was posted in 1869 to St. Helena and the Cape, where, undaunted, he found new vistas to sketch and paint. He also began work on a military history of the region. In January 1874 he fell ill and within a few weeks was dead at the age 43.28 *** On the evening of May 5, 1860, two steamers left the port of Quarto near Genoa for Sicily. Aboard was a force of volunteers, many of whom had served the year before in the cacciatori delle Alpi. Nearly half, one observer thought, were under the age of twenty, and the youngest was just eleven. At their head was Garibaldi, still pursuing his dream of a united Italy, and still, it seemed, willing to accept unification under the government of Victor Emanuel. The often-told story of Garibaldi and “the thousand” is one of the great romances of the modern era. Combining a noble purpose, a legendary leader, and impossible odds, the expedition was mythic from the outset. On “a magnificent lark” Henry Adams, who was traveling in Italy and sending letters to his brother that soon after were printed in the Boston Courier, made a “flying visit”29 to Palermo in early June “to see Garibaldi and a fight.”30 He had already missed several of the highpoints of the campaign, such as Garibaldi’s victory over the Neapolitan forces at Calatafimi and the taking of Palermo, but surely there would be another “fight.” In fact, Adams never did witness a battle but he did meet Garibaldi. Here I was at last, then, at the height of my ambition as a traveler, face to face with one of the great events of our day. It was all perfect. There was Palermo, the insurgent Sicilian city, with its barricades and its ruined streets with all the marks of war. There was that armed and howling mob in the square below, and the music of the national hymn, and the five revolutionary cannon. There were the guerrilla captains who had risked their lives and fortunes for something that the worst could not call selfish. And there was the Great Dictator, who, when your and my little hopes and ambitions shall have lain in our graves a few centuries with us, will still be honored as a hero, and perhaps half worshipped, who knows! for a God.31

The young American was not wrong in estimating Garibaldi’s lasting fame and thinking “the future Italy” would “only respect” the memory of Cavour.32 The politics and politicians of modern nation building are too readily seen as stained by deceit, compromise, and bad faith. On the other hand, the wars and warriors that have given birth

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to virtually every modern nation are routinely imagined as heroic, however murderous battles like Solferino may have been. Heroes are made from the powder and steel of battle, not the talk and papers of chancelleries. And if the memory of Napoleon kept the romance of war alive for a generation after his death, so for another generation did nation-founding and preserving battles like Solferino, Gettysburg, Königgrätz, and Sedan. Arriving in Sicily shortly after Adams was John Peard, who sailed from Genoa on June 9 with a second wave of volunteers. Given his continuing notoriety, Peard naturally became a popular subject in the English coverage of the “the thousand.” The Illustrated London News of July 7 carried a story about the recent volunteers and singled out “the famous Englishman” for particular comment. Included with the story was a sketch of some volunteers aboard a ship, with Peard among them. Several weeks later, portraits of the colonel appeared in both the News and the Illustrated Times. Accompanying the picture in the latter was a long story mentioning that Peard had sometimes been mistaken for Garibaldi, and that on one occasion the hero had gone along with the misidentification by applauding the “inglese” as if he were himself. There is a difference between English visitors seeing Garibaldi as an Englishman and Italians seeing John Peard as Garibaldi’s “double.” Nevertheless, taken together, the two misperceptions, with help from the press, sufficed for some to put an English face on the “glorious cause.” The most important action of the campaign had occurred two weeks before John Peard arrived in Sicily. Garibaldi, now bearing the title “Dictator of Sicily,” marched into Palermo, having taken the city largely by stealth, and was welcomed as a liberator in a manner that confirmed Henry Adams’s prophecy. In the afternoon Garibaldi made a tour of inspection around the town. I was there, but find it really impossible to give you even a faint idea of the manner in which he was received everywhere. It was one of those triumphs which seem to be almost too much for a man. The most wonderful thing I ever saw in this way was the reception of Napoleon and Victor Emanuel at Milan, just about a year ago, and I am almost inclined to think that the one yesterday was more extraordinary. The entry of the Sovereigns was something more formal, which prevented the full expression of popular enthusiasm. They were on horseback and surrounded by their guards, while the popular idol, Garibaldi, in his red flannel shirt, with a loose colored handkerchief round his neck, and his worn wideawake [a soft hat with a wide brim], was walking on foot among those cheering, laughing, crying, mad thousands; and all his few

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followers could do was to prevent him from being bodily carried off the ground. The people threw themselves forward to kiss his hands, or, at least, to touch the hem of his garment, as if it contained the panacea for all their past and perhaps coming sufferings. Children were brought up, and mothers asked on their knees for his blessing; and all this while the object of this idolatry was as calm and smiling as when in the deadliest fire, taking up the children and kissing them, trying to quiet the crowd, stopping at every moment to hear a long complaint of houses burnt and property sacked by the retreating soldiers, giving good advice, comforting, and promising that all damages should be paid for.33

This account of that astonishing scene was written by Ferdinand Eber, who had come to Sicily shortly before the May 27 assault on Palermo. In fact, the success of the assault owed much to information about the city’s defenses that Eber brought to Garibaldi’s headquarters at Misilmeri the day before. Officially, Eber was in Sicily as a neutral reporter for the Times, and his account of the seizure is considered superior to other contemporary descriptions. But as his passing of intelligence to Garibaldi makes clear, Eber was neither a neutral observer nor only a reporter. Scarcely had he arrived in Sicily then he told English friends that he hoped to find a position with Garibaldi. His opportunity came the following month when Colonel Turr, a fellow Hungarian who had been with the cacciatori in 1859 and now commanded a brigade, fell ill. Needing a replacement, Garibaldi chose Eber, who quickly proved himself a competent and well-liked commander. When Mowbray Morris heard what Eber was up to, he was in equal parts furious and offended. The best reply I can give to your letter of the 15th [July] is this—you were sent by the Times to Sicily to attend the military expedition to that island, to report its proceedings & to keep us informed upon all matters of public interest accurring [sic] there. To perform that duty efficiently & impartially it was obviously necessary that you should undertake no other, & that you should presevre [sic] a perfectly independent position. How far you have departed from that plain obligation your own confession sufficiently explains. But there is to my mind a very much worse feature in the case, & one which weighs with me more heavily than the offense itself. I allude to your endeavor to conceal it: I can’t help thinking that we have deserved better treatment at your hands.34

Eber did not resign, and so Morris asked Antonio Gallenga to take over his reporter duties.

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This blowup did not mark the end of Eber’s tenure with the Times, or even his dispatches from Sicily, which resumed in September. By then as well, Eber had probably consented to an Italian translation and publication of his dispatches between May 27 and June 13, the most significant period in the campaign and thus the one that supporters of Garibaldi would want to broadcast. The resulting volume, Garibaldi Palermo, ossia, bel tratto della rivoluzione siciliana narrata da un testimone oculare, was printed at Livorno before the end of the year and is said to have been widely read. Had Eber become a willing party to a propaganda campaign? It certainly looks that way, and we should not be surprised. Having committed himself to taking up arms for the cause, he would have done what he could to ensure its success, no matter the risk to his career, his reputation, or his life. Serious as Eber’s commitment to Italian independence was, Lombardy in 1859 and Sicily in 1860 were only stops in a journey that led to Hungary. In helping another people gain their freedom from Austrian rule, Eber could find hope for his own countrymen while making a name for himself as a journalist and soldier. Just how much Hungary meant to Eber, how passionately he anticipated returning to it, is revealed in a story told in Maxime du Camp’s book about the Sicilian campaign. One day he found the Hungarian, “an excellent musician,” improvising some “sad melodies” on a piano. When du Camp asked him to play the Rakocy March, the national song of Hungary, Eber’s normally pale face flushed. “No, not that,” he burst out. “In Hungary I will play it for you as much as you like; but it is impossible as long as the country is not ours.”35 John Peard could go home after Sicily and reminisce about his visits to Italy. Ferdinand Eber was left to go where the Times sent him. *** While Garibaldi was consolidating his hold on Sicily, Ernest Meissonier returned to northern Italy. Astride the horse he had ridden the year before, he returned to Solferino to make further sketches. In the past year he had worked steadily on the picture, scrupulously satisfying “my love of accuracy,” or what others deemed an obsession. He had visited the army encampment at Vincennes to draw soldiers and paid a visit to Fountainbleu to do a portrait sketch of the emperor. Now in June, he was coming back to Solferino to look again at the landscape and light, features that would have a significant place in the finished work. For Meissonier did not intend to paint a battle picture. His reaction to the news of Villafranca, “Thank God, . . . we shall see no more corpses in the furrows,”

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implied that the painting would focus on neither the conditions nor the consequences of the battle.36 The work was supposed to be ready for the 1861 Salon. The judges accepted it sight unseen, and listed it in the catalogue. But when the doors of the exhibition opened on May 1, the painting was nowhere to be seen. Rumors that it might be hung before the Salon closed proved unfounded. Notorious for being deliberate— Johnston of the New York Times called him, unfairly, the “laziest of geniuses”—Meissonier was simply working as he always had.37 Even in the absence of the much anticipated canvas, visitors to the Salon still enjoyed a virtual pictorial history of the war. “Solferinos, Magentas, Montebellos and Melegnanos abound” sighed Johnston in his review. One of the many dealing with Solferino—the catalogue lists five—had the emperor surveying the battlefield from the knoll between Castiglione and Solferino, “which you, Mr. Editor, will recollect as the point from which certain correspondents of the Times watched the last hours of the battle.” Two years had passed since Raymond and Johnston had seen their first battle. They had read accounts of it, and very possibly one or the other had written the long Times review of Bazancourt’s La campagne. But seeing the battlefield, the people, and the extraordinary tumult represented in a “large picture” evidently touched Johnston. Whimsy and sentimentality jostle each other in his salutation to Raymond. The two men shared a memory like no other.38 The Solferino painting in the 1861 Salon that drew the most attention was Adolphe Yvon’s “Battle of Solferino.” Much was expected of the artist who had won the gold medal in 1857 for his Crimean painting, “The Gorge of the Malakoff.” And considerable labor had obviously gone into the current gargantuan canvas (24' x 19'). Its immediate subject, as described in the guide to the exhibition, was the moment shortly before noon on June 24 when the emperor gave the order to General Camou to send his division of the Imperial Guard to support the attack on the heights of Solferino. It had been a critical moment in the battle. Had the Guard not advanced, the attack might well have failed, and the day, perhaps the war, ended differently. Yvon, therefore, made the emperor the pivotal figure at the pivotal moment in the pivotal battle of the war. In the center of the picture, Napoleon sits calmly on his horse, looking to his left at the Guard marching forward. With his right arm extended, he points to the heights of Solferino where swirling smoke indicates a furious battle is in progress. Around the emperor and looking at him and the Guard is an arc of officers. Off in the middle ground to the left is a battery

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of artillery firing on the heights. But the viewer’s eye is never meant to stray from Napoleon, the center and tallest figure in the picture, lit up by shafts of sunlight. On no other battlefield of the war had he displayed any sign of the tactical skills of his uncle, who might have thought the order obvious rather than a sign of genius. Nonetheless, Yvon portrayed the emperor as a worthy successor to the greatest battlefield tactician of the nineteenth or any other century. The artist’s decision to paint the battle as he did was almost foreordained. When he was summoned to the seat of war, Yvon knew that the emperor in battle would have to be the focus of a painting. If Napoleon’s ordering General Camou to attack was not quite as determinative as the painting suggests, it at least was evidence of imperial leadership. This point would have been made clear to Yvon by the French officers who had escorted him around the battlefield several days after the fighting. Having not been a witness himself, the painter would naturally have depended on those who had been. Moreover, after the war, Napoleon visited Yvon’s studio on several occasions to pose for him, and once invited him to a weekend party at Compiègne where he confided “some details on how the battle developed.”39 Like so many battle pictures already adorning the walls of museums and chateaux around France, “The Battle of Solferino” was not so much a fabrication as a reality-bound fiction. The critics who grumbled about the painting’s “color” or “balance” did not question its story.40 They either believed it or knew better than to say they did not. Adjacent to the Salon of 1861 was an exhibition mounted by the French Society of Photography, which included 19 photographs taken by Leon Méhédin in northern Italy in July 1859. Méhédin arrived at the emperor’s headquarters on July 11, two hours after Napoleon’s meeting with Franz Joseph at Villafranca. In the euphoria of the moment, the emperor, according to Méhédin, took time to talk to the young photographer about his work, which he knew from his photographs taken several years before in the Crimea. Napoleon also asked Méhédin to take a picture of the view from the window of his residence at Valeggio “for the Empress. It will be a souvenir of my last stop.”41 After Magenta, Eugénie had wished for the war to be over. Now that it was, a peaceful, bucolic picture of the “last stop,” the sort a tourist might take or purchase, would provide a suitable parting image. The same could be said for the rest of the pictures Méhédin took that were later assembled into an album, Campagne d’Italie, and given to Napoleon. Méhédin photographed the significant sites of the war but traces of actual battle are not easily discerned. Like the pictures of Henry Cook, the photographs in the album are little more than a

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pleasant reminder of where the armée d’Italie had been. A more accurate title would have been Voyage en Italie. The emperor, however, was evidently pleased with the album, and so perhaps was the empress. Since nothing in the pictures could disturb even Holmes’s “young maiden,” they could be enjoyed as a travelogue.42 When displayed in 1861 the photographs were greatly enlarged. As a reminder of the late war, the reviewer for La Lumiére wrote, they were of “interest.” Purely as photographs, however, there was “nothing remarkable about them.”43 What Colonel Jean-Charles Langlois and his wife Josephine thought of them is not known, though we can assume they saw them. They knew Méhédin very well since he had gone to the Crimea in the service of Langlois in late 1855. His task then was to take photographs for a panorama of the taking of Sebastopol. The relationship was not a happy one. Langlois grew impatient with Méhédin’s efforts and eventually took his own photographs. Now his skills were to be put to use again, for Langlois had recently been asked to create a panorama of Solferino “to perpetuate the memory of an event, equally glorious for civilization, for the army and for France.”44 Though 72 years old and aware that the commission would take several years to complete, Langlois could not refuse. He had the energy of a man half his age, strongly believed in the capacity of the panorama to educate, and had spent much of the last thirty years, beginning with the “Battle of Moscow” (1834), creating panoramas honoring the victories of the emperor and his uncle. Langlois also had an extraordinary helpmate, his wife. The two had married in 1826 and were seen by contemporaries to be unusually close. Josephine had even accompanied Langlois on all but one of his expeditions to gather materials for his panoramas. Seeing them together in Egypt in the spring of 1851, Maxime du Camp was impressed by their partnership. “He was very tall, vigorous in spite of his spare frame, active in spite of age, and very gentle despite his military bearing. His wife, who was a little younger than him, never left his side. She helped him in his work and took advantage of his chambers.”45 The one time Langlois traveled alone was when he went to the Crimea. During that period the couple corresponded regularly. The 56 letters that Langlois wrote between late October 1855 and the following May have been published. Though only snippets of Josephine’s side of the correspondence are in print, they reveal a loving, determined woman, immersed, even at a great distance, in her husband’s work and not afraid to speak her mind. “Permit me to tell you, dear friend, I believe that you are wrong. Your mission involves only what relates to the panorama. . . .”46

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The expeditions Langlois undertook arose from a desire to know all he could about the sites of his panoramas: the ground, the light, the climate, and whatever else would help him create an accurate rendering. Hence the unusual length of his visits: seven months in the Crimea, eight in Egypt, and an entire year in Russia while preparing two panoramas, “The Battle of Moscow” and “The Burning of Moscow.” His work, he once told a friend, had achieved fame because of his “long and serious studies.” Langlois also believed his visits “inflamed the imagination,” a process he deemed vital for the painter of history.47 Ultimately, the task of the panoramist was to “transport” audiences into the experience of the chosen battle, and to do this, the artist first had to immerse himself in the site. From this immersion came the imaginative insight to create a successful panorama. Langlois had revealed his abilities as a panoramist with his first creation, “The Battle of Navarino,” for which he had spent three months in Toulon studying ships of the French navy. It may have been here that the artist came up with the innovation that helped to make his fame. Normally, audiences entered a panorama along a bare hallway and then mounted a platform to gaze upon the painting that more or less encircled the interior wall of the building. The resulting illusion of being within the represented event or landscape could be quite powerful, depending on the lighting, the artist’s skill, and the viewer’s imagination. In his Navarino panorama, Langlois sought to intensify the viewer’s sense of contact with the subject by converting the observation platform into a ship’s deck using parts of a French ship that had seen action in 1827. He also contrived to have the passage to the platform take visitors on a virtual tour of a warship, with stops at a cabin “bristling with axes, pistols, musket, telescopes, etc.” and the captain’s quarters featuring “a dining room, gallery, sleeping quarters, and galley.” Audiences were dazzled: “What a sight it was,” exclaimed the writer Ludwig Borne, “I shall never forget it.”48 Certainly Maxime du Camp never did. Nearly two decades after seeing the Navarino panorama as a boy, he still marveled at its “magic.” The only thing missing was the “noise” of battle.49 When Langlois and his wife, along with a servant, left Paris in April 1862, they planned to spend six months in Italy, at least four of them at Solferino. A good deal of time would be spent photographing, and we can assume Josephine helped at least in preparing the chemicals used in the process, but all we know for certain is that she handled the couple’s correspondence. In the first weeks at Solferino the weather was lovely and they made good progress. Visitors to the battlefield “still poured in,” according

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to Langlois, but they did not interfere with his work.50 Standing on a little hill one day, Josephine marveled at the battlefield with its famous medieval tower, and in the distance Lake Garda and the Tyrolean Alps. “The view is vast and very beautiful,” she wrote to a friend, echoing many visitors to the site during and after the war.51 For sheer beauty of landscape, Solferino outmatched any other nineteenth-century battle. As spring turned into summer, however, Josephine’s mood changed. Neither she nor her husband had ever experienced such heat, either alone—Langlois in Algeria in 1830—or while the two were together in Egypt. So debilitating was the heat that the couple took to rising at 4 a.m. and working until mid-day, then resuming work at 5 or 6. Violent rainstorms like the one during the battle occasionally interrupted their labors as well. July was hotter than June, and for a time they were forced to suspend most of their work. Worse followed. In the middle of August Josephine came down with a fever, probably malarial, and in a matter of days she was dead. Evidently no letter survives to tell us how Langlois took the blow. None is really necessary. We do know he had his wife’s body sent back to France for burial at the priory of Saint Hymer in Normandy, a property the couple had bought in 1838 and often lived in. Langlois then went on with his work, staying in Italy until October. By then he had accumulated the photographs and sketches he needed and no doubt a deeply ambivalent sense of the place. He had also begun to imagine what life without Josephine would be like. Could he, by himself, accomplish all that remained to be done to create the panorama? Would he have the time? In February 1863 he wrote out a will which gave all his photographs of Solferino to the emperor. If the panorama were not finished at least Napoleon would have another kind of visual record of his great victory. *** When Henri Dunant returned to Geneva in the summer of 1859, he turned his attention to sorting out his business concerns. But he could not forget what he had seen at Solferino, Castiglione, and Brescia. In his mind he continually relived the awful scenes of June and July, and incessantly he talked about them to his friends. Finally, in 1861, his north African business venture having gone bust, Dunant began writing a book about Solferino. He wanted to make readers see and feel what he had, holding back none of the grisly details of bodies mangled in battle, and none of the agonies those bodies subsequently suffered. To that end, Dunant was willing to use any stylistic techniques necessary. So, in his description of the battle itself, which

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forms the first half of Un Souvenir de Solferino, he often shifts into the historical present to add a sense of immediacy. “Here is a hand-tohand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness; Austrians and Allies trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with saber and bayonet. No quarter is given; it is a sheer butchery; a struggle between savage beasts, maddened with blood and fury. Even the wounded fight to the last gasp. When they have no weapon left, they seize their enemies by the throat and tear them with their teeth.”52 That last sentence carries the terrible—and exaggerated?—insinuation that such behavior was common. In the second, much longer section of the book, Dunant dwells on what he saw and did beginning on the night of June 24. There was one poor man, completely disfigured, with a broken jaw and his swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was tossing and trying to get up. I moistened his dry lips and hardened tongue, took a handful of lint and dipped it into the bucket they were carrying behind me, and squeezed the water from this improvised sponge into the deformed opening that had been his mouth. Another wretched man had had a part of his face—nose, lips and chin—taken off by a saber cut. He could not speak, and lay, half-blind, making heart-rending signs with his hands and uttering guttural sounds to attract attention. I gave him a drink and poured a little fresh water on his bleeding face. A third, with his skull gaping wide open, was dying, spitting out his brains on the stone floor. His companions in suffering kicked him out of their way, as he blocked the passage. I was able to shelter him for the last moments of his life, and I laid a handkerchief over his poor head, which still just moved.53

Had Dunant not included all three men, the passage would not horrify as it does. Only his meager efforts to give relief make the passage bearable to read. The disparity between the suffering the soldiers endured and the little help volunteers could offer is heart rending. But Dunant meant to inspire more than pity in his readers. He wanted them to recognize that the scale and weaponry of a modern battle inevitably overwhelmed not only traditional military medical efforts but also voluntary, ad hoc efforts like the one he was involved in. How could fifty or a hundred ordinary people with no training care for thousands? And so in the last section of Un Souvenir, he proposes that in times of “peace and quiet,” there should be formed “relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers.” Such groups

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would become all the more necessary in the future since “battles will only become more and more murderous.”54 Dunant worked on the book throughout much of 1861. He was not simply writing up his memories, important as they were to the text. He read widely on the war and the experience of soldiers in general. Stories of the battle he heard even before he decided to write a book also found their way into his text. “In the course of the following year [1860] I had the satisfaction of meeting in Paris, particularly in the Rue de Rivoli, invalid soldiers, some of them with amputated limbs, who recognized me and stopped to thank me for my care of them in Castiglione. ‘We called you the White Gentleman,’ one of them said, ‘because you were dressed all in white—and indeed it was pretty hot.’”55 Early in 1862 Dunant put the manuscript aside for a while to attend to business matters. He went back to it in the summer and by October it was finished. He paid for the first edition of 1600 copies himself and did not put it on sale. He sent copies to friends and acquaintances, and after receiving their generally enthusiastic responses, he dispatched the remaining copies to publishers in Paris, Turin, St. Petersburg, and Leipzig, asking that they be distributed to veterans of Solferino whenever possible. Leftover copies were to be given to governments and military leaders. A second edition came out before the end of the year and a third in early 1863. By the summer of that year, the book was a phenomenon. No one had ever written about war quite like Dunant. Passages in other books—the Goncourt brothers suggested Ségur’s Memoir of 1812—were its equal in descriptive truth, but only Dunant had made his readers confront the miseries of war in so sustained a manner. That might have led the historian and philosopher Ernest Renan to call Un Souvenir de Solferino the “greatest work of the century.”56 Renan was surely thinking in moral as well as in literary terms. He understood that the author was challenging his readers, in fact the world generally, to acknowledge the terrible consequences of an activity they seemed eager to justify or have justified for them. Better perhaps than a glowing review was Charles Dickens’s decision to publish a six-page synopsis of the “startling work” in his journal, All the Year Around. In his preface he honored Dunant the man by saying that he had shown a “heroism far greater than that of the fiercest combatant” when he stayed on after the battle “tending and consoling, to the utmost of his strength.”57 Certain books have the power to shape the understanding of a generation and thereby influence the thought and behavior of subsequent generations. For Dunant, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such a book.

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When he read it and later met the author, he could not have imagined that someday he would write a similar book. Solferino gave him that opportunity. Had the battle been a lesser affair, Dunant would likely not have stayed to help; had he not been already committed to helping others, no battle would have persuaded him to stay. To suggest that Dunant was the right man in the right place, however, does not quite explain why Un Souvenir de Solferino had the impact it did. We must also consider the sensibilities of an audience increasingly ready to show compassion for the lowly and the unfortunate, be they soldiers, children, or the poor. The career of Charles Dickens is a measure of this new found sympathy. So was the reception to Dunant’s book. Several paintings done in the aftermath of the war also testify to this changing consciousness. Only one, “The Italian Camp after the Battle of Magenta,” by Giovanni Fattori, is well known. Born in Livorno in 1825, Fattori moved to Florence as a young man. In 1848 he wanted to join the army and fight against the Austrians, but his parents intervened. Though they may have saved their son’s life, they did not dampen his “enthusiasm for the redemption of Italy.”58 By the early 1850s, he was as well known in Florence for his anti-Austrian sympathies as for his skills as a painter who focused on landscapes and history. Like many in his generation, he loved historical novels, especially those of Ugo Foscolo and Sir Walter Scott. After the landing of the French Fifth Corps at Livorno in May of 1859, however, Fattori realized he could find far more romance in the present than in the distant past. Thus when the French moved to the Cascine Gardens in Florence, the artist began visiting their encampment. He did a number of sketches over several days, but there is no evidence that he ever met Raffet, whose work he admired. Nor was there any sign that Fattori was tempted to follow the French when they left Florence for the seat of war. In 1861, however, Fattori visited Magenta with his wife. He had won a competition set up in the autumn of 1859 by Bettino Ricasoli, the governor of Florence. Ricasoli wanted to commission a series of paintings dealing with more or less recent battles in which Italian arms had triumphed. Three, Palestro, Magenta, and San Martino, were from the late war; the fourth, Curtatone, had been fought in 1848. Fattori’s winning entry, one of two sketches he had offered, was “The Italian Camp.” Its subject was not what Ricasoli had in mind in setting up the competition. Battle scenes were what he expected and got for the most part; indeed, Fattori’s other entry was a view of the battle of Magenta. But his winning sketch was a far more imaginative work, one very much in keeping with Dunant’s vision of the war. Or for that matter, J. L.’s.

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In the center of the canvas is a partially covered ambulance drawn by a horse that has momentarily been stopped by the soldier leading it. Visible in the open front of the wagon is a wounded soldier, attended to by a nursing sister. The other wounded inside—if any— cannot be seen. Standing near the wounded soldier, another nurse is pointing at a body by the side of the road and apparently asking a soldier approaching on horseback to examine it. Off to the right, a group of officers gaze at the scene like spectators. The work of caring and healing is not their work. It is a work, however, that after Magenta and especially Solferino took on a new significance. Faced with thousands needing care, the public was now conscious of the wounded as seldom before. Fattori did not have to be at Magenta to know this. Newspaper reports of the time and stories subsequently read or heard surely informed his mind and stirred his imagination. Fattori was not the first or only artist of the 1859 war to seize upon ambulance wagons as a subject. The first was Hans von Marees, a young German painter who served in the Landwehr for several months in 1859. The following year he painted “Transport of the Wounded,” which features in the foreground a covered wagon carrying the wounded accompanied by several soldiers on foot. In the distance we see a long line of wagons. A single wagon, uncovered to reveal the wounded, was the focus of Adolphe Yvon’s “Convoy of the Wounded” (1863). Like von Marees, Yvon had seen the “lugubrious corteges under the burning sun,” their passengers the constant prey of flies.59 “Convoy” was not the sort of painting for which Yvon had been summoned, but the sight of those ubiquitous wagons had deeply troubled him. Another picture, “Convoy of the Wounded” by François Tabar, earlier praised by Baudelaire for his Crimean painting, was shown in the 1864 Salon. Once more a covered wagon containing the wounded occupies the center of the image, and once more we barely get a glimpse of the wounded themselves. Two years later, Edouard Armand-Dumaresq, the artist invited to Italy by Marshal Vaillant, entered his “Transport of the Wounded” in the Salon. Finally, there is an 1872 painting by Franz Adam, variously titled “Transport of the Wounded after the Battle of Solferino” and “Scene out of the AustroItalian War.” Adam, who with his brother Eugen had been within sight and earshot of Solferino, offers a more complex scene. Instead of a single covered wagon escorted by a few soldiers, several wagons, none covered, pause in a village. Off to one side a man, evidently an officer is speaking to a villager, while along the road a line of men and wagons stretches endlessly into the background.

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Figure 7.2 A Convoy of the Wounded. Source: François Tabar, Le Monde illustré, August 27, 1864

None of this clutch of paintings, with the notable exception of Fattori’s, has ever received much attention. Tabar’s was dismissed as “a trifle” by a critic of his day.60 Nevertheless, because of their common subject matter, they testify to how the number of casualties of Magenta and, more dramatically, Solferino jolted the contemporary mind. The newspapers were filled with stories of how day after day the roads were clogged with hundreds of carts and wagons hauling the wounded toward help. Nothing in the Crimea approached what happened at Solferino and during its aftermath. Nothing in Napoleon’s wars matched the “death trains” of Solferino. One did not have to see those pitiful wagons to form a picture of them in one’s mind. From such pictures, with the help of sketches in the illustrated papers, paintings were fashioned and symbols formed. Dunant wanted his readers to see and hear the wounded because he hoped his text would move people to act. Fattori and the other painters left the wounded to trouble the imagination by making an ordinary wagon into a symbol. The Parisian diarist Henri Dabot probably did not see Tabar’s painting when he visited the 1864 Salon. Even had he wanted to, the picture was placed so high up that it was difficult to get a proper view. Dabot likely stood in line and used his elbows to see the picture drawing everyone’s attention: Ernest Meissonier’s “The Emperor

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Napoleon at the Battle of Solferino.” Five years after it was commissioned, three years after being announced as finished, and less than a year after its exhibition in Brussels, the painting went on display in Paris. Once Dabot reached the head of the line, he would have needed to come very close to the canvas to have seen it well, and closer still to have seen the emperor. Yvon’s “Battle of Solferino” measured thirty feet across, while Meissonier’s picture was just thirty inches. The critics, accustomed to huge battle paintings, had much fun at Meissonier’s expense. One suggested using a telescope to see the picture, and another wondered if the French had gone to war against Lilliput. Dabot was more generous. While all the figures in the picture—and there were many, including the artist himself—were indeed little, they could be seen with “surprising clarity.”61 Had “The Emperor Napoleon at the Battle of Solferino” been several times larger, it still might not have pleased the critics. How could one like a battle painting in which the battle seems so distant, the principals allegedly managing it seem so detached, and the ambience of the scene seems so quiet? And how was one to decipher Meissonier’s decision to make the cloud-filled sky so looming a presence? The painting “does not tell any palpable story,” complained one critic. And indeed nothing happens or seems about to happen in the painting. Napoleon and his entourage are looking at something happening very far away. Moreover, no one in the entourage is using a telescope to see the battle. It seems almost as if the emperor and his staff, out for a ride, heard a battle being fought nearby and decided to go and have a look—from a safe distance. Yvon’s Napoleon was an actor in the drama of Solferino, Meissonier’s an accidental spectator. These two versions of the emperor represent starkly different views of his role in the battle. Neither is quite true, for each reflects a discrete artistic vision. Meissonier’s was shaped by his presence at the battle. He was with the emperor as he “advanced on the heights and followed constantly the attack on the different positions.”62 He sensed how vast the area of fighting was, how small and insignificant soldiers appeared when seen from a distance, and how no one controlled events. The emperor and his staff kept advancing, close enough at times to hear bullets whistling by. But they were not directing events. No one could have in so vast a battle involving so many combatants. Meissonier was criticized for “sanitizing” the war in this painting by keeping to the traditions of the battle picture genre.63 However true the charge is, the painting makes up for that fault. His Solferino is a place without sound and fury, with few signs of fighting at all and fewer still of leadership. Without perhaps intending to, Meissonier deglamorizes

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war not by showing us its ugliness and terrors, but by revealing how a battle looks in a vast, indifferent landscape. One critic of the painting complained about its “disagreeable color,” and another dismissed its landscape as “hard, dry, and lacking in warm tones.”64 Neither realized that Meissonier had good reason to paint the Lombard plain as he had seen it. With the gray clouds overhead and the green-grey land below, the image neutralizes any urge to see beauty. Only the red kepis and pants of Napoleon and his staff offer color. No record exists of what the emperor thought of the painting. Meissonier never received another commission, and though he was invited to Compiègne in 1864, he was not treated as a favorite. Size alone cannot explain why the painting did not please, for everyone knew how one of the most famous artists in France painted. But even Napoleon, who was no art connoisseur, could see that Meissonier had deprived him of a commanding role in what was the greatest action of his life. The emperor might have been displeased by another painting Meissonier exhibited in the Salon. Virtually side by side with the Solferino was “The Campaign of France,” which imagined a scene from Napoleon’s retreat across France in the winter of 1814. Though it was a scene of retreat, Meissonier portrayed the emperor as a forceful, still hopeful figure leading his army along a muddy road. “Doubt has come,” the artist wrote of this Napoleon. “He alone believes that all is not lost.”65 For Meissonier, whose idea for the scene seems to have been inspired by Adolphe Thiers’ history, the emperor was never more heroic than in this crisis. Critics at the Salon praised the picture as enthusiastically as they mocked its companion. None mused in print about how Napoleon III, normally quite receptive to comparisons with his uncle, would react to the juxtaposition of a picture implying he was a mere onlooker at his greatest victory with one portraying his uncle as a hero in the midst of disaster. *** A month before the Salon of 1864 opened, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at the Southampton docks in a steady rain. There he was greeted by a large crowd, who noted that he was still limping from the wound suffered two years before at Aspromonte while leading an army on Rome. Garibaldi anticipated a warm welcome in England, but he could not have imagined just how warm that welcome would be, or how, in William Gladstone’s words, it would form “an historical event.”66 In the five years since the war of 1859, Garibaldi had become the most widely admired man in Europe. Sovereigns like Queen Victoria

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feared him as a “revolutionist,” but the general public, including members of the queen’s family, idolized him.67 A half million people jammed the streets of the city when he arrived in London on April 11. They were eager to see, perhaps even touch, the man who had defended Rome, harried the Austrians in Lombardy, led “the thousand” to victory in Sicily, and fell wounded trying to win Rome for Italy. Which of these actions was uppermost in the minds of Londoners that day is impossible to know. They probably did not know themselves, for while Garibaldi was known “by his deeds,” as the Times commented, he had in fact transcended them by 1864.68 To the public, the man Giuseppe Garibaldi had become the mythic figure, ‘Garibaldi,’ a being whose qualities defied explanation or imitation. “I saw Garibaldi well,” Matthew Arnold told his mother, “and he satisfies the imagination perfectly.”69 Those who failed to glimpse the great man were soon able to purchase one of the several photographs taken of him at a sitting during his stay in London. These, together with the many paintings and lithographs, surely contributed more to his fame than the many interviews he gave. Possessed of a powerful head and a handsome, open countenance, the physiognomy of the hero was more eloquent than the man himself. With Garibaldi in London were two men who had been by his side before. Ferdinand Eber, identified in contemporary reporting of the visit as “General Eber” as a result of his role in Sicily, accompanied Garibaldi on many of his daily outings and was occasionally invited to the more formal evening parties, such as the banquet given at Stafford House on April 13 by the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. Six days later Eber rode to the Crystal Palace in the Sutherland’s “open barouche” just behind the carriage carrying Garibaldi. He was also among the small group of advisors who urged Garibaldi to end his stay in England when it seemed his visit might become an embarrassment to all concerned. John Peard was among that group as well. In personal terms, Peard was probably closer to Garibaldi. Besides being nearly the same age—Eber was 16 years younger—the men each shared a simplicity and directness of character that appealed to the other. They had also served as comrades in arms in the campaigns of 1859 and 1860. Evidence of a special bond can be seen as well in Garibaldi’s choosing to spend his last night in England at Peard’s home in Cornwall. During their tear-filled parting the next morning, was either man aware that it was April 27, the fifth anniversary of the Austrian declaration of war? We may only guess.

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The role of Eber and Peard in the story of Garibaldi was more than that of friend and comrade. They also, like many others, served as propagators of his fame. Eber’s letters to the Times from Sicily in 1860 had been instrumental in shaping English public opinion about the great venture. Later, they influenced historians like Trevelyan, who declared them the “best single authority on the taking of Palermo on May 27 and the following days.”70 Peard’s contribution, while indirect and almost unwitting, is nevertheless also worthy of notice. As “Garibaldi’s Englishman,” a title bestowed on no other English volunteer who served the cause, he convincingly linked the new Italian epic with English national imaginings. The public had no need of Peard or Eber to give its heart to Garibaldi, but each man, in his own way, provided a special connection to his saga. Gladstone slightly exaggerated when he called the reception of Garibaldi “an historical event.” The phrase better suits a private, unpublicized conference involving some three dozen participants held in Geneva four months later. Out of this conference came what Henri Dunant had proposed at the end of his memoir, what we know today as the International Red Cross. The story of how this organization was born need not be told here. Dunant was one of the five principal figures—another was Louis Appia—who worked to establish the Red Cross, though as one of them acknowledged, “We are simply your assistants.” Dunant’s Un Souvenir de Solferino was a critically inspiring text and its author a tireless advocate of the cause. Twenty-six delegates from 16 states, several among the great powers, attended the conference, which began on August 8. Over two weeks, they crafted one of the most significant documents in the history of war: a treaty that regulated how the wounded ought to be treated while declaring neutral status both for those aiding the wounded and for the places (ambulances, hospitals, etc.) where the wounded were helped. There was now, in effect, a third party to war, a party to be allowed on the battlefield, beholden to neither of the belligerents yet obligated to both. Eight years later, in 1872, Edouard Armand-Dumaresq produced a painting of the signing of the treaty. Seen today in the headquarters of the International Red Cross in Geneva or on many websites, it is hard to associate this work with the “painter of our glories.”71 Soldiers in colorful attire risking their lives were Armand-Dumaresq’s trade, not middle-aged men in somber suits standing about, waiting their turn to sign a piece of paper. People who knew him in 1859 would have been especially surprised. To them, the painter’s experience of war in Italy seemed a great adventure, possibly the greatest in his life. He

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reportedly went “everywhere, indifferent to danger,” and had been astonished at the “bravery” of the soldiers.72 Returning to Paris, he went on to paint a half dozen pictures of what he had seen, hoping thereby “to perpetuate the memory” of the soldiers. For his efforts, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1867. His final two paintings, however, the already mentioned “Transport of the Wounded” (1866) and “Le lendemain de Solferino,” an oil exhibited in 1869, indicate a shift in his imagination toward an awareness of the less glorious parts of war. Had he come to this awareness through a reading of Dunant? Perhaps, if we keep in mind that not long after “Le lendemain de Solferino” he painted the signing canvas. Ironically—fittingly, it might be argued—the latter picture is today the only one of Armand-Dumaresq’s the public is likely to know. But when he died in 1895, there was no mention in the obituaries of his more pacific pictures. He was eulogized instead as a painter who “excelled” at creating “picturesque” images of soldiers.73 Also missing from the obituaries was the painter’s American period. In April 1870 the French government sent him to the United States to investigate art education practices in various colleges and universities along the east coast. Out of this visit came not only a report, but a number of paintings of the American Revolutionary War. Several were inspired by John Trumbull’s great panels in the dome of the Capitol, which Armand-Dumaresq presumably saw during his stay in Washington. Having finished with one war of independence, he had found another for his art and no doubt his sympathies. However, after painting his versions of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the surrender at Yorktown, and the battle of Saratoga, Armand-Dumaresq eschewed the last of Trumbull’s great subjects: the resignation of Washington. We should not be surprised. A painter long supported and rewarded by the emperor could hardly have dealt with that particular subject after 1870. And most assuredly not a painter who a late photograph shows sporting an imperial mustache and beard. Solferino was an awful battle, but it ended a war and inspired a man to write a book. Five years later, the battle, the man, and the book inspired a treaty codifying the growing belief that the well-being of soldiers mattered. No one in 1864 supposed that the treaty would transform war itself. Nor was it foreseeable that the document would affect the public fascination with war. It did not take a cynic to realize that the growing concern for the welfare of soldiers could comfortably co-exist with a desire to be entertained by what they did.

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*** People strolling along the Champs-Elysées in the summer of 1865 saw that a new panorama had opened in the rotunda on the corner of the rue d’Antin. Empty since the closing of “The Capture of Sebastopol” the year before, the elegant structure now featured “The Battle of Solferino.” Overcoming age and profound loss, Charles Langlois had completed his work. He had also finished, or nearly so, a sixtypage pamphlet, Explication du panorama et relation de la bataille de Solferino. As well as being a gallant soldier and talented artist, Langlois was a shrewd entrepreneur. He had been the principal figure in the building of the three rotundas that housed his panoramas, the latest organized as a joint stock company. He had also written guides like the current Explication for each of his panoramas since “The Battle of Moscow.” These did not earn him much money, but when sold all over Paris they were an effective advertisement. Two days before the official opening of the new panorama, the colonel was on hand to lend assistance to the emperor and empress and various dignitaries during a private viewing. Press accounts noted that Napoleon “remained a long time,” and “on several occasions he congratulated the painter.”74 Well he might: Langlois had transformed his victory at Solferino, arguably the high point of his reign, into a stunning spectacle for the world to see. In the next four years, more than a half million people would view it. Attendance undoubtedly surged during the great 1867 Exposition Universelle when millions of visitors came to Paris, including many from Great Britain and America. To lure them to his show, Langlois had a translation of his pamphlet prepared. He also had help from a writer for a prestigious English journal, who advised “all visitors to Paris to include” the panorama “in their arrangements.”75 One of those visitors was Henry Raymond, on his first trip to Europe since 1859. While his own country had been mired in war, the Times editor had had no time to go abroad. Nor had he had much interest, given the opportunities the Civil War offered his newspaper and himself. Soon after the war began, the Times started publishing on Sundays, and before long Raymond went into the field, no doubt thinking to repeat his Solferino success. It was not to be. He saw the panic retreat after first Bull Run and was in the Peninsula during the Seven Days battle in June 1862. But he largely left the reporting of the war to others and never witnessed a major battle. He did, however, almost take part in a skirmish during the draft riots in New York in the summer of 1863. When a mob approached Printing House

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Square, he and another director of the Times manned Gatling guns to protect the building. The expected attack never came, possibly disappointing Raymond, for whom war had evidently become more than an event to report. The same could not be said for Johnston, who later turned down Raymond’s request that he cover the war between Austria and Prussia. Recently married, “Malakoff” was content to stay in Paris, practice medicine, and report on French politics and society. There is no record of either man going to see Langlois’ panorama. Raymond might not have had the time during his short visit in 1867. Why “Malakoff” never did, or at least never mentioned doing so in a column, is a mystery. Langlois’s spectacle remained on exhibition through the siege of Paris and the Commune but was damaged by shelling. It was subsequently replaced by a panorama of the siege and presumably destroyed.76 Nevertheless, we know what it looked like, thanks largely to a series of photographs the artist had made of the work in the summer of 1866. The battle they reveal is the one the emperor and the public wished to remember. The scene “singled out amidst the many, of which the great battle was the theatre,” was Napoleon’s fateful decision to order the Guard forward “to carry the almost impregnable heights of Solferino.”77 That decision had allegedly established the emperor as the true heir of his uncle’s genius. Yvon and Beaucé had already painted the scene, focusing on Napoleon. The emperor was also the key figure in Langlois’ work, but the panorama could take in much more. Audiences saw the French fight their way up the hill, forcing Franz Joseph and his army to retreat. The emperor’s decision made victory possible, but the élan of his soldiers made it happen. Even opponents of Napoleon could be thrilled by Langlois’ rendering of the battle. All the more so since they did not have to see its human costs. The wounded and dead are visible in the panorama, but their numbers and agonies do not concern the artist. Indeed, in Langlois’ view, the “glory” of the victory “was so much the greater, as it had been dearly bought.”78 No other artist of his time knew as well as Langlois what shot, shell, and saber did to flesh; nothing in Dunant would have surprised him. But for Langlois, the pity of war was a private matter. There could be no room in his work for sights that stomach or conscience might not tolerate. What the emperor expected to see, what the public wanted to see, and what the artist knew how to design were tableaux that aroused pride and wonder. The sense of wonder began with the experience of being in the rotunda, a darkened enclosed space where the eye was forced to focus

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on a scene that entirely surrounded it. There were no obvious boundaries to what one saw and no frame. That made it easier for the spectator to imagine being within the event itself. As Delacroix had said of Langlois’ panoramas, “no painting could create such an illusion.”79 For those who had been at Solferino, the illusion was apt to be all the more powerful. “Look,” said one veteran, “there is my battalion, there is the place where grapeshot shattered my right leg.”80 Accuracy alone does not account for his reaction. The man insists that he is seeing the actual people and place, not a representation of them. In his mind he is back at Solferino. Another visitor to the rotunda narrowed the gap between the imagined experience and the actual almost to the vanishing point when he wrote that “one is astonished not to hear the noise of the cannon.”81 Perhaps today it is useful to ponder the experience of watching a silent film. Is it not the case that some in the audience, as they read the intertitles on the screen, virtually hear the actors speaking? The imagination, especially when stimulated by the memory, is very willing to see or hear or believe. And while the illusion itself is temporary, the experience of the illusion may persist for a lifetime. Of all the representations of Solferino, and the war in general, Langlois’s panorama surely reached the most people in the decade following the war. Bazancourt’s chronicle sold very well, but none of the five printings could have been more than ten thousand copies. Only Dunant’s memoir did as well. The various paintings would have had limited exposure. After appearing in the salons, they tended to wind up in private collections or at Versailles. That more people encountered the war as a “spectacle,” the term the French press used in listing Langlois panorama, obviously foreshadows what would happen in the twentieth century, when film gradually became the most popular and defining mode of recreating past events, notably wars. In its time, each mode, panorama or film, asked only for attention and offered in return a deeply engaging experience. Yet public memory, what Napoleon had in mind when thinking about perpetuating the memory of Solferino, is vulnerable to the course of events.

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Chapter 8

4

Honor ing the Dead

O

n June 20, 1869, at least one Paris newspaper announced the death of Henry Jarvis Raymond.1 He had died in New York two days before at age 49. There would be no celebration with Forsyth this year on the anniversary of Solferino. The anniversary, though, was very much on the mind of Emperor Napoleon as he was preparing for his annual visit to the army encampment at Chalons. Usually, he made the trip in the last two weeks of August. This year, he was eager to view a series of exercises testing new battlefield tactics. He was also looking forward to a respite from the political turmoil that followed national elections in May. Those elections had embarrassed the government as opposition parties won 40% of the vote. Violent demonstrations in Paris in early June were more ominous yet, though no surprise to William Johnston, still writing for the Times. “I have told you over and over again . . . in months gone by that the storm was brewing.”2 Rising to the occasion, the emperor and empress had driven around Paris in an open carriage on the night of June 11 to show they had no fear. Five days later the emperor emphasized the point by announcing in a public letter that he would not bend to the pressures of the street. “It is always useless to meet popular movements by conceding principles or sacrificing persons: a self-respecting government cannot give way to pressure, inducement, or violence.”3 Seen in this light, the visit to Chalons was about more than military tactics. In meeting with his army, Napoleon would be firming relations with his strongest supporters, supporters he might have to summon to save his regime. With the emperor when he boarded the train for Chalons on June 21 was his son, the 13-year-old Prince Imperial, whom we last

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encountered as a “pugilistic” three-year-old clapping his hands at the fete celebrating the return of the army from Italy. The prince had first accompanied his father to the encampment at the age of four and by the age of eight had developed a passion for soldiering. Seen side by side, Napoleon could be mistaken for the boy’s grandfather. At sixtyone, he was old enough in years and increasingly older in appearance, certainly older than painters were representing him. On some days attacks of rheumatism and kidney stones left him unable to ride a horse or even walk. The emperor’s will to govern was still strong, but that will was being sapped by the miseries of aging. Three days after arriving at Chalons, Napoleon observed the anniversary of Solferino by speaking briefly to almost 1,400 veterans of the campaign. Soldiers!—I am rejoiced to see that you have not forgotten the grand cause for which we fought ten years ago. Keep always in your hearts the remembrance of the battles of your fathers, and those in which you have taken part, since the history of our wars is the history of the progress of civilization. Thus you will preserve the military spirit which is the triumph of noble over vulgar passions. Fidelity to the standard is devotion to one’s native country; continue as in the past, and you will always be worthy sons of the great nation.4

The very brevity of the speech added to its ambiguity. Was it a simple summons to remember? Or was it a quiet bid for support in turbulent times? Did the speech, as some in the press thought, imply that the emperor was contemplating a new war? No politician of his age could be more delphic than Napoleon, and this speech was no exception. Whatever he precisely intended, he did not mean stock prices to fall on the Bourse or the talk in cafes to be full of forebodings of war. Both happened. A Paris humor magazine, however, found the emperor’s connecting war to the “progress of civilization” an amusing contradiction to his famous assertion that the empire “means peace.”5 Apart from Napoleon’s speech, the tenth anniversary of Solferino seems to have passed without notice in France. There were no monuments unveiled and no speeches or great gatherings in Paris. The war was slipping from public interest as the regime of the man most responsible for it became threatened. Langlois’s panorama, though, still drew crowds in its fourth year. “It is the most natural thing of the kind I ever saw,” wrote a young American in his diary after viewing it. “It seemed as if the battle was really in progress.”6 But the near absence of paintings on the war in the Salon that year signaled

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flagging interest. One of the two paintings that did appear was by the indefatigable Armand-Dumaresq, the other by an artist, Jacques Alfred Barrault, who is unknown to the world of art today. Whether or not the “genre” of battle pictures was “without a future,” as one critic asserted, French painters no longer cared to memorialize the battles of the Italian war.7 In hindsight, this loss of interest appears inevitable. The war had not touched the French people in a way that encouraged them to remember it. They had followed it in the press and felt the joy of victory, but what the war achieved was ultimately of little importance to most of them. Of course, the war still mattered to the soldiers who fought in Italy, as it did to Napoleon, who had helped instigate the war, led the French army to victory, and decided when and how the war was to end. If it was not the greatest accomplishment of his rule, it might well have seemed so when his authority was under attack and his prestige was faltering. There is no sign that Franz Joseph, his army, or his people paid any attention to the tenth anniversary of Solferino. Nor would visitors to Vienna that June have found any monuments to the sacrifice of the kaiser’s army or any street named in memory of what had happened. Defeat does not inspire such physical tokens of remembrance unless the defeated see themselves as victims. The Austrians could scarcely claim that role because they had initiated the war. Had they not, Lombardy might still have been theirs. But the 1859 war was out of mind for another reason. In the summer of 1866 Austria suffered a far more humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia. The price of that defeat had been high: Austria had been forced to give up its place in the German Confederation, which left it without serious influence in German affairs. Franz Joseph’s power was further diminished six months later when he accepted the creation of the Dual Monarchy, thereby giving Hungary virtual autonomy. The defeat in 1859 had been an embarrassment easily ignored; 1866 was a disaster difficult to forget. Italians too had sour memories of 1866. Thinking to benefit from the impending conflict, Victor Emanuel had allied his kingdom with Prussia. But the strategy that worked so well in 1859—alliance with a stronger partner—failed in 1866. There was no second Palestro, much less a second San Martino. Instead, the king’s army and navy both lost battles where they outnumbered their Austrian opponents. Nevertheless, Italy gained Venetia, which the Austrians had been prepared to hand over before the war if the king and his government had

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opted to stay out of the conflict. Eager for more accolades as a warrior king, Victor Emanuel had been blind to the wisdom of that choice. The humbling defeats of 1866 very likely made the victories of 1859 seem all the brighter. It didn’t matter that the French had dominated the fighting and Napoleon the peace making. It didn’t even matter that Nice and Savoy had been surrendered in payment to their ally. It was enough that Garibaldi and the cacciatori had outfoxed and outfought General Urban and his forces, that the Piedmontese army had held its own and better against the Austrian army, and that Victor Emanuel had displayed a daring and personal courage that the vainglorious French could not claim for their emperor. Though the war of 1859 failed to make Italy, it enabled many Italians to sense their capacity to make a nation. That capacity had emerged on the various battlefields of the war, and they quickly became sites of remembrance. Long before 1866, Italians had been busy keeping the earlier war alive in public memory. Within days of Villafranca, for example, plans were afoot in Turin to erect monuments at Solferino and San Martino. Six weeks later the citizens of Como wrote to Garibaldi that they were going to build a monument commemorating the battle of San Fermo. The hero responded with his usual humility: “The engagements which took place in May last in your town and neighborhood are worthy of being recorded. Great, indeed, was the bravery of the riflemen of the Alps, most of whom belonged to your population. How can I express my gratitude towards you? For the little I have done you have held me up to the esteem of Italy, and even of the distant nations.”8 San Fermo had not been much of a battle. So long as blood had been shed, however, and the enemy forced to withdraw, it was worthy of remembrance. And even the most minor of skirmishes that involved Garibaldi gave luster to a community. The Tuscan government announced a more elaborate memorial at the end of September. Bronze statues of Victor Emanuel and Napoleon were to grace the Plaza dell’Indipendenza in Florence. To some, still irate over Villafranca, the prospect of a statue to Napoleon must have been hard to swallow. Others, possibly a majority, realized that if the emperor had not come to Italy the Austrians would still be in power and Archduke Leopold still in Florence rather than Vienna. After all, if Garibaldi could publicly acknowledge the “gratitude” owed to “Napoleon and to the heroic French nation,” then so could the people of Florence.9 On November 17, a week after the signing of the Treaty of Zurich formally ending the war, a special funeral mass took place in the chapel

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at San Martino. The officiating priest was from nearby Rivoltella. Also taking part were an infantry regiment and a battery of artillery. Following the priest’s blessing of the earth “where so many brave men were buried,” the battery fired a series of salvos. Then the soldiers paraded before General Filiberto Mollard, who had distinguished himself at San Martino. A “great number” of people were reported to have been present on the occasion, which like the memorial service seen by Reverend G. T. Hoare in August, smacked more of “military glory” than anything “heavenly or divine.” Emphasis on the martial was to be expected at a military mass. As important as the souls of the fallen were, their deeds demanded celebration. Napoleon himself saluted his ally’s prowess when he addressed his own troops the day after the battle. “The Sardinian army has fought with equal bravery against superior forces. It is well worthy to march by your side.”10 Still more eloquent, perhaps, were the casualties sustained by the Piedmontese: 691 killed, including 49 officers, and more than 3,500 wounded. Furthermore, the Piedmontese had fought against arguably the best Austrian general in the war, Benedek. No wonder an aura of military triumphalism prevailed in a mass for the dead, or that the Piedmontese, “jealous beyond measure of their military glory,”11 according to a French diplomat, ignored Solferino in favor of San Martino. In no other battle of the war did Victor Emanuel’s army, or, as popularly believed, the king himself, perform so well. If Italy was to be made by force of arms—and what alternative was there?—there now seemed to be an indigenous army capable of it. Memorials can be dreamed up in a moment; their realization often takes many years. Typical of the process was the monument at Varese to the cacciatori. In June of 1859, the community decided to erect “a column or pyramid” to honor the gallant fighters. Eight years later, on May 26, 1867, a bronze “Garibaldi” holding aloft a standard was unveiled in the newly named Piazza Cacciatori delle Alpi. Two memorials dedicated the following year featured a single figure as well, but not Garibaldi or any other known figure. Giovanni Bellora’s sculpture at Montebello was of a cavalryman holding a sword in his right hand—pointed down—and a standard in his left. On the pedestal of the monument was a poem praising the “Italian soldier,” whether “on foot or horseback,” who was deemed “second to none.” Similarly, the memorial at Palestro, dedicated to the Brigata Regina, featured an anonymous soldier. This effort to highlight the bravery of the common soldier made good sense. Aside from Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel, the war had not produced the kind of heroes that inspire memorials. No Italian

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general matched the deeds of General MacMahon or died a hero’s death like General Espinasse. And even if there had been figures worthy of celebration, the real heroes of a war for nationhood were supposed to be the common soldiers. No matter where in the peninsula they had come from or fought, they had fought for a united Italy. This was how the war was to be remembered, and the memorials were meant to shape and sustain that memory. But even as Napoleon was visiting his soldiers at Chalons, a very different kind of memorial to help in the making of Italians was being imagined. In the spring of 1869, Count Luigi Torelli, the Prefect of Venice, visited Solferino with his friend Ippolito Cavriana, a deputy for Mantua in the National Assembly. What they saw shocked them. Scattered over the landscape were the bones of the dead, washed up from their shallow graves by rain or dug up by animals. After a decade, the battlefield honored in countless pictures and speeches had become, quite literally, a boneyard, a “revolting spectacle. Something had to be done. People who knew the 59-year-old Torelli might have predicted he would be the person to do it. He was a fervid patriot, famed for planting the tricolor on top of the Duomo in Milan during the 1848 uprising; a skilled administrator respected for his work under the old Piedmontese government as well as the new Italian government; and perhaps most significant, a man—much like Henri Dunant and the Marquis Bryas—committed to improving the public welfare. Over the years this impulse had revealed itself in many ways. In 1836 he stayed in his hometown of Tirana in the Valtelline to help during a serious outbreak of cholera, a decision for which the Austrian government later awarded him a gold medal. Later, he was very active in the kindergarten movement and wrote several pamphlets on the subject. Add to these his writings on such topics as malaria, agricultural improvement, and the protection of animals, “birds in particular,” and one sees a humanitarian reformer of rather eclectic interests. The dead of Solferino became a new interest in the spring of 1869, one dear to him for the rest of his life.12 The solution to the problem of Solferino was soon determined. The bones of the dead would be interred in two ossuaries, one at Solferino, the other at San Martino. Ossuaries were a familiar sight in Italian cemeteries, churches and religious houses but not on battlefields, either in Italy or elsewhere in Europe. The one notable exception was Marengo, where a small chapel, intended to house the ashes of the dead, had over the years become the repository for bones ploughed up by farmers. Now the skeletal remains of over nine thousand soldiers

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of all three armies were to be exhumed and placed in crypts, comprising a war memorial unlike any to be found on a nineteenth-century battlefield. The dead of Solferino, like the wounded earlier, inspired a new mode of dealing with the horrors of war. The decision to exhume the dead, sort the arm and leg bones from the skulls, place them in newly created crypts, and honor friend and foe equally gave a new standing to the dead. They would now have a lasting presence at the place of their honor, a commanding if morbid visibility. The disinterring began in November and was largely completed by February, when a committee was formed to raise the funds necessary for the project. The Società di Solferino e San Martino was officially established in Milan on February 17, 1870, with Torelli as its first president. A general appeal for money brought in over one hundred seventy thousand lira, far more than was needed. Most of it came from Italy, but fifteen thousand arrived from France and five thousand from Austria. As the project went forward, it drew visitors. One of them, a 34-year-old artist and caricaturist, Luigi Borgomainerio, arrived by train from Milan early in March. What he saw and drew were scenes he had never witnessed before and could hardly have imagined. Spread out on long tables were piles of bones. The skulls, with their empty eye sockets seemingly staring at the visitor, were particularly

Figure 8.1 Sorting bones for the ossuary at Solferino. Source: L’Illustration, April 2, 1870

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“terrifying.” Whole skeletons destined for a special place in the ossuary lay on benches. Two of them had been found holding hands. This “handshake in the grave,” intimating that life still flickered in their bones, “moved” Borgomainerio more than any stage “drama” he had ever seen. The men doing the work were mainly peasants, possibly some of the same hired eleven years before to bury the dead. If so, none joked about having now to dig them up. A mood of “profound regret” hung over the “funereal labor.” Borgomainerio was overwhelmed by what he saw that day. His subsequent account of the “harrowing spectacle” in L’Illustration zigzags between many emotions. One moment he is angry, another terrified, and yet another despairing. He thought the sketches he included with his letter would “say more than my words.” They may have to his contemporary readers but not to eyes that have taken in the ghastly war images of the twentieth century. We are more likely to respond to the artist’s words, especially a sentence that foreshadows a well known twentieth century poem. But if each of those who claps his hands at the word victory could have accompanied me to San Martino and Solferino, if he could have gone through, as I have done, the two immense ossuaries of where the gravediggers are reuniting side by side French, Italians, and Austrians, if he, as I have, looked at the interminable ranges of skulls, tibias, femurs, and ribs of the skeletons that today represent the great day of June 24, 1859, I am convinced that I would not be alone in bowing my head in grief over the meaninglessness [“neant”] of life—and above all, the meaninglessness of glory.13

A half century later Wilfrid Owen, after seeing a gas attack on the Western front, echoed those words in “Dulce et decorum est.” He too conjured up for his readers war as it actually is, not as the rhetoric of patriotism would have it be. Borgomainerio’s reaction to the vestiges of war is bleaker. Having come upon those who died for their country in a condition rarely envisioned by patriotic poets or grieving loved ones, the artist’s sense of existence—not merely his view of war—had been shattered. Three months later a more positive mood marked the inauguration of the two ossuaries. Early in the morning of June 24, a crowd estimated at between thirty and forty thousand people, some of whom had arrived by special train, gathered at Pozzolengo. They had come from France and Austria as well as all over Italy. At half past eight,

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the crowd, led by Crown Prince Umberto, who had been at Solferino in 1859 as a 15-year-old boy, began walking in the direction of San Martino, a little over two miles away, where the bones of over two thousand Austrian and Piedmontese soldiers had been collected. Following behind the prince were representatives from France and Austria and a deputation from the Italian parliament. In honoring the dead together, the former enemies sought to bear witness to their current friendly relations. This purpose was emphasized in a speech at San Martino by the Italian Minister of War, Giuseppe Govone. This was the same Giuseppe Govone who in 1859 had escorted the Austrian envoy to the Piedmontese frontier after Vienna’s ultimatum had been rejected and then fought in the war and been at Solferino, where, as he told his fiancée, he had been “lucky” to escape injury. During the subsequent decade, Govone rose in rank and esteem as a diplomat and a soldier. In the spring of 1866 he went to Berlin to negotiate an alliance between Italy and Prussia, and in the subsequent war with Austria commanded a division at Custoza Although the battle was a humiliating defeat for Italy, Govone’s division fought well. After the war he was for a time the Commander of the Italian Staff Corps, and in 1868 he was elected to the chamber of deputies. A year later he became minister of war. The one stain on his record came in the summer of 1863 when he commanded a twenty-battalion force in Sicily tasked with enforcing conscription quotas for the new Italian army. His soldiers, under orders, used tactics harsh to the point of brutality and caused a national uproar. Criticism grew louder when Govone, defending his actions in parliament, seemed to suggest that there was an inherent “barbarity” in Sicilian society. Imprudent at best, the remark was not typical of a man known for his gentleness and tact, qualities apparent in his brief speech at San Martino. Govone was not an orator, as Luigi Torelli well knew, for it was Torelli who long ago had been struck by Govone’s “soft . . . almost feminine” voice. Nevertheless, straining to make himself heard, Govone urged the “valiant” former enemy not to “lament the lost battle.” Instead, the Austrians should see in their defeat “the hand of God and the spirit of the new times.” Doing so, Govone hoped, would make it easier for the two nations to take the common path of “civiltà e giustizia.”14 After the speeches, salvos of artillery were fired and the flags of the two countries raised together, another sign that an occasion for remembering was also to be one for forgetting. From San Martino the visitors moved on to Solferino for the consecration of the second ossuary, holding the bones of over 6,700 Austrian and French troops. Visitors wishing to see the contents of the

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Figure 8.2 Ossuary at San Martino. Source: Brescia Civici Musei d’Arte e Storia

ossuary at Solferino first entered a chapel, where they immediately encountered four skeletons standing on pedestals “like ushers to a coming ceremony.”15 Just beyond them, cases along the walls of the chancel held over 1,400 skulls, some bearing bullet holes. Descending into the crypt, visitors saw the bones of many more thousands of soldiers neatly organized by type. Whatever feelings such a sight inspired, pride was not among them. No photographs of the day’s festivities—if any were taken—have evidently survived. We do, though, have a sketch by Luigi Borgomainerio, who had returned to Solferino for the occasion. Composed inside the chapel, the drawing reveals a crowd of people, behind whom loom the walls of the chancel with their rows of skulls dimly outlined. The picture’s caption asks readers to focus on the presentation of the Legion of Honor to Torelli by the French representative at the proceedings, Lt. Colonel De La Haye. Off to one side stands his Austrian counterpart, Lt. Colonel Pollak, conspicuous in a white tunic, his hands cupped on the hilt of his sword and his head cocked in a quizzical manner as he gazes upon his former adversaries. Did Borgomainerio mean for his readers to think the colonel had some

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doubts about the occasion? Is the tilt of a head sufficient to warrant even asking the question? Perhaps it is, given the circumstances.16 An Austrian officer watching a French officer give the Legion of Honor to an Italian bureaucrat in late June of 1870 might well have been a little perplexing. Already there was talk of war between France and Prussia over the Hohenzollern candidacy to the Spanish throne, a war in which Austria might decide to support the French. It was public knowledge that Archduke Albrecht, the Inspector General of the Austrian-Hungarian army, had visited Paris in the spring and that General Lebrun had repaid the courtesy by going to Vienna. Did these negotiations create a role for Italy in the war, if it should come? Was this finally the moment to gain Rome, the one missing piece in the new nation? And if the “spirit of the new times” could explain the Austrian defeat in 1859—a judgment a professional soldier like Colonel Pollak might have scoffed at—what might that same zeitgeist accomplish in 1870 if Bismarck intended to go to war? The day’s festivities concluded with a banquet and the obligatory, hopeful toasts. The president of the Italian Senate began by proposing the health of the king. He was followed by Torelli saluting Napoleon, and the mayor of Milan, who raised his glass to Franz Joseph. Then Prince Umberto rose and, in a further gesture of reconciliation, toasted the “three armies.” In reply, Colonel Pollak acknowledged “the sympathy which unites Austria and Italy,” a sympathy forged on the battlefield, which the colonel hoped would endure.17 Whether it would was certainly a question that many besides the colonel were pondering that day at Solferino. On June 28 the Times of London gave its opinion in a remarkable editorial arguing that the recent “ceremonials” offered an alternative form of remembrance that would bring about a more peaceful Europe. “If Italy and Austria can agree, and violent enemies then be changed into sympathetic friends, why may not Austria and Prussia follow the example thus nobly set them?” Was it too much to hope that one day an ossuary might mark the decisive battlefield of the 1866 war (Königgrätz) “in which may be buried, along with the bones of the combatants, the enmity and rivalry of Austrian and Prussia at once and forever?” However naïve the writer’s hope, his words testified to the impact of this new form of remembrance. The ossuary, “in plain English, a ‘Bonehouse,’” put the lie to the conventional rhetoric of battle anniversaries. “Vainglorious speeches . . . exhorting the youth of a country to follow in their father’s footsteps and to imitate their glorious example” had no meaning in places where death was rendered permanently visible.

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The long journey to Italian nationhood had been filled with compromises, double dealings, battlefield disasters, and dependence on the efforts of other governments. Becoming a nation is more often than not a ragged, ugly process, and the making of Italy was no exception. The battlefields of Solferino and San Martino, however, stood out as bright shining moments in the process, moments, as James Forsyth had understood, made even brighter by their heavy costs. And with those costs now visible, the two battlefields became all the more useful as sites of remembrance. No Garibaldi victory, however glorious in expectation or however significant in the quest for nationhood, held such poignant evidence of its value. Nor had any made a piece of ground a sacred place. By creating the ossuaries, Torelli and the Società established Solferino and San Martino as moving birth sites for the new Italy. However “grewsome” [sic] the displays—the reaction of the well-known nineteenth-century American traveler, John Stoddard—they made visitors pause to consider the deaths that had given life to the new Italy.18 Eighteen months later, Italians were asked to ponder the costs of serving the new Italy. On January 25, 1872, Giuseppe Govone, worn out physically and mentally from the strains of political life, killed himself. He had left government the summer before and retired to his family home in Alba. He was 46 years old. *** Within a month of the inauguration of the ossuaries, France declared war on Prussia. Once more, as in 1859, the French army was ill-prepared, and once more the emperor, this time with the 15-year-old Prince Imperial, took the field. Once again, moreover, the empress was made regent. But in repeating itself, history on this occasion mixed tragedy with farce. In seven weeks, the French army and its leaders were overwhelmed, losing every major battle to a badly underestimated opponent. So ill that he could hardly ride a horse, Napoleon soon lost his nerve and ordered a general retreat to Chalons within ten days of arriving at the seat of war. Although the retreat was quickly redirected to the fortress town of Metz, the emperor obviously did not belong on the battlefield, let alone in command of his army. Turning command over to one of his generals did not improve the situation. Worse yet, the string of defeats roused the republican opponents of the regime and unsettled many of its supporters. War, famously, bankrupts treasuries and upends governments. What is remarkable about 1870 is how swiftly the Second Empire came apart. By the middle of August, Napoleon knew himself to be a shadow of the man who defeated the Austrian in Italy. During a

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meeting with his generals, he confessed, “I seem to have abdicated.”19 In his place, brimful with determination, was the empress. Seeing firsthand the growing public dissatisfaction with the war and the emperor, she insisted that Napoleon secure a major victory to save his reign. Absent a victory, he could not even return to Paris without fear of revolution. By this point, however, only the perversely optimistic could hope for a victory. On September 1, a badly outnumbered French army under General MacMahon, the hero of Magenta, was crushed by the Prussians at Sedan. French losses were seventeen thousand dead and wounded, many of the latter cared for by Red Cross volunteers who came from all over Europe in what would be seen as the defining test of “Dunant’s dream.” In the midst of the fighting, Napoleon, thinking to retrieve some shreds of honor, rode out into the battle expecting to be killed. It was not to be. Instead, he surrendered, and within days, despite the frantic efforts of the empress back in Paris to hold on to power, the Second Empire collapsed. With it went the emperor’s reputation as a military leader and the war in which he had gained it. Nine years later, the Prince Imperial, eager for a martial reputation, persuaded the British government to permit him to go as a “distinguished visitor” to South Africa to witness the campaign against the Zulus. He was killed accompanying a patrol, thereby becoming the only Bonaparte to die on a battlefield. After Sedan, the 1859 war, already a fading memory in French life except to the war’s veterans, seemed hardly to matter. Occasionally, a painting appeared in a Salon, though never again one by Armand Dumaresq. Nor evidently did any French novelist think it a worthy subject. The devastating 1870 defeat and the emperor’s tarnished reputation made it embarrassing to celebrate the earlier war and the emperor’s role in it. And after the imperial family decamped to England, there seemed little to celebrate in any of the emperor’s wars. The victory in the Crimea was a shared triumph and the campaign in Mexico a debacle in its own right. Thus those seeking consolation or inspiration in the nation’s military past had to go back to the first Napoleon, an authentic genius of war, thereby demonstrating that nations can forget their wars, even victorious ones. So it was with the French memory of 1859. The war had been about too little to earn much of a memory niche, and the summer of 1870 ensured it never would. In the making of memorials, as in other cultural forms, success breeds imitation. Following the creation of the ossuaries at Solferino and San Martino, other communities decided to build their own. The

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ossuary at Magenta (1872), situated close by the railway station where many of the dead had originally been buried, was dedicated to the French. They had done the fighting that day, so the names of their dead were inscribed in bronze inside the ossuary. Ten years later, it was the turn of Montebello. This time, the names of the dead of all three armies involved in the battle were inscribed, and representatives from Austria and France came to pay tribute. More, however, was at stake on this occasion than simply honoring the dead. On the very same day, a treaty was signed in Vienna forming an alliance between Germany, Austria, and Italy. Fittingly, the speeches given at Montebello were sprinkled with invocations “urging peace and concord among nations.”20 Where better to signal the closing of an “epoch of war and animosity” between Italy and Austria than where the bones of the dead of each nation resided together? The dedication of the ossuary at Palestro in 1893 followed the same script, but with a twist. Relations between France and Italy had cooled considerably since the latter’s alliance with Austria. In Paris the question being raised was whether Italy was now “against” the nation whose army had done so much to create the new Italy. Eager to prove otherwise, King Umberto, who had succeeded his father in 1878, invited General Adolphe Fabre, the French representative to the inauguration, to dine with him after the ceremony. For his part, the general also tried to ease tensions between the two countries. When he spoke at the inauguration, Fabre dwelled on the comradeship that existed between soldiers, and the “feelings of gratitude” that survived between the former allies. The occasion itself showed that Italy “could still be grateful” for the help France had given. Whether true or not, the general’s concluding salute, “Long live Italy and France!” drew loud cheers.21 The French government made a wise choice in sending Fabre to Palestro. As a young aide-de-camp to general Beuret in 1859, he was at the general’s side when he died at Montebello. A month later he himself was wounded at Solferino. Taken to Brescia to recuperate, he lived for some time with an Italian family, an experience that left him with a lasting affection for Italy and its people. Nevertheless, like most of his countrymen, he knew the 1859 war was now, in the words of a reporter for Le Temps, “far away from us.”22 Certainly in years, even more so in spirit. The crowd at Palestro that day was “enormous.” Milling about with the usual dignitaries and townspeople were deputations from more than seventy civilian and military associations. None of the attendees, however, mattered more than the veterans of the battle,

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now well into middle age. Sporting medals and remnants of their old uniforms, they told stories of their battle to any who would listen. Did any of their stories mention the Englishman who had helped with the wounded and then taken photographs of the dead? Not likely. Nor would J. L. have been included in any of the speeches. He had, after all, not been a soldier. But he deserved to be remembered, for a short, straight line led from his purpose to the ossuary. Was there a more apt “illustration” of what a battlefield is “really like” than an exhibition of the bones of those who had fallen on it? Luigi Borgomainerio had not thought so. By the time of the inaugural ceremony at Palestro, the ossuary as a form of remembrance had expanded beyond the 1859 war. Versions had sprung up at Custoza (1879), Monte Suello (1885), and Calatafimi (1891). Giuseppe Torelli’s desire to cleanse a particular battlefield and honor its victims had grown into a national commemorative mode. Italians, whatever their political or religious beliefs, whatever their provincial interests, could respond to a memorial that honored the dead by giving them presence. “Grewsome” though the heaps of bones might be—a reaction perhaps less common in a culture familiar with the charnel house—they possessed eloquence. How often they were visited is an open question. Probably not as frequently as their creators had hoped. Neither the guidebooks of the era nor the newspapers indicated that they were a tourist attraction or ought to be. Yet visitors did come, especially to Solferino and San Martino. One of these tourists was Cesira Pozzolini, whom we last saw as a twenty-year-old woman listening to her brother Giorgio describe his visit to Solferino twelve days after the battle. In subsequent years, Cesira became a teacher at the Woman’s Institute of Florence and in 1864 married the philosopher Pietro Siciliani. Three years later, the couple and their infant son moved to Bologna, where Pietro took up a chair at the university. Among their friends was the poet Giosuè Carducci, with whom Cesira corresponded for many years. In the late 1870s, Cesira Siciliani—to call her now by her married name—began publishing travel and historical sketches in various magazines, notably Nuova Antologia, and in 1880 her first book, Napoli e dintorni, appeared. A year later, Una visita agli ossari di San Martino e Solferino grew out of a visit she had made on the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of the ossuaries. Why she decided to make the trip just then is not explained. The auspicious anniversary or her apparent connection with Torelli, to whom she dedicated the book and who appears several times in the text, would have been reason enough. Whatever

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the reason, Siciliani and her companions were treated as special guests during their visit to the domicile of the dead. Una visita begins on an “oppressively hot” day in the railway station at Bologna. There, waiting for their tour leader (“caporione”), Siciliani meets her fellow travelers. All carry maps, as well as overnight bags, since their journey, with stops in Mantua and Verona, will last two days. None of her companions are named, not even the leader, who was the “promoter” of the excursion. Besides him, there is an army colonel, a professor of history, a young girl with “long blonde tresses,” and a pale “slightly myopic” society lady. Each plays a role in the text. The two women—the younger naïve, the older poorly informed—mostly ask questions. The men, including the tardy leader, provide information and insights based on their positions and experience. Thus the leader must explain to the society lady why, as they pass by Villafranca, a street is called the “street of peace.” She was evidently unaware of the meeting of the emperors that ended the war.23 Siciliani herself, however, occupies center stage. Alternately curious, awe-struck, melancholy, and tearful, her role is that of the sensitive traveler tirelessly absorbing what is happening around her and eager to muse about her reactions. She is surprised when tears fill her eyes while listening to a requiem mass at San Martino. “Why such emotions? Why so much sadness in this small modest church when one sees neither gravestones, tombs, or inscriptions?” Her answer is at once commonplace and moving. “This place, sanctified by the blood of heroes, speaks to the soul. One does not see the dead, but one feels them.”24 Over the course of the visit the party did more than confront the dead. They recall their battles, encounter a few of their graves, meet their loved ones, endlessly invoke their sacrifice, and gaze upon their bones, stacked like “books in a library.” For Siciliani, the sight was unnerving, surpassing “anything one can imagine.”25 The sheer quantity of bones undoubtedly had an effect. Siciliani had not blanched during an earlier visit to a small ossuary at Otranto. Confronting the skeletal remains of thousands, friend and foe, was a different matter. They were, as nothing else could be, the enduring symbol of what war was. Another sight at Solferino also moved Siciliani. Among the relics of the dead that lined one wall of the church were letters written to the soldiers: one from a wife “full of anxiety and an inexpressible dread” for her husband, another by a mother sending her son six francs without the knowledge of his father. These sad missives once more brought Siciliani to tears.26 They did not form a sustained narrative

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like those John Ormsby perused in the autumn of 1859 at Solferino. Still, each held a story whose final chapter at least was known and thereby inspired a pity that embraced the living as well as the dead. Death reigned in the two ossuaries and in the funeral masses Siciliani and her companions heard that day, but it did not entirely rule in the tower at Solferino. Built in the twelfth century and rising over ninety feet on a high hill, the “Spia d’Italie” was famous for the extraordinary view it offered. Now refurbished, thanks to the Societa, it had become a memorial to the battle, with two captured cannon on the ground floor and portraits of Victor Emanuel and Napoleon hanging in a large room at the summit. Trumping the paintings were two large albums that rested on a massive table. In one were the signatures of the two sovereigns and the officers of the two armies. In the other were autographs of those who fell in the battle. Their signatures came in the form of letters they had written, which their families donated to the Societa. Here finally were traces of the identity of the dead. The desire to establish identities and ensure remembrance reached its logical conclusion in the tower Siciliani saw being built at San Martino. Designed to honor Victor Emanuel, the tower would eventually rise to more than 240 feet, offering from its peak a panoramic view as glorious as that of the Solferino tower. San Martino was the natural site for a memorial to the warrior king. He had gained his greatest victory there, an achievement symbolized at his funeral by having the horse he had ridden that day walk, riderless, immediately behind his hearse. San Martino also made sense as a memorial site because of the ossuary. At least it did in the mind of Luigi Torelli, whose “very good Friend” (ottimo amico)27 Carlo Bossoli, the “pittore reporter” of the war, first came up with the idea of a tower. The “splendid plan” he gave Torelli was not adopted but evidently persuaded him and the other members of the Società—who had to have been aware of the rising monument to George Washington—that a lofty vertical form suited the “father of the nation.” When completed, however, the tower was more than a memorial to a king. To be sure, on the ground floor stood a large bronze statue of Victor Emanuel and circling the walls were four large paintings representing important moments in his life. But as one ascended to the top of the tower, the focus expanded to include the longer struggle for Italian independence. In a series of seven rooms, beginning with one dedicated to the battle of Goito in 1848, and ending with the attack on Rome in 1870, the battle history of the Risorgimento was dramatized in large paintings. Representing 1859 was a canvas depicting the assault on San Martino. Even more striking than the visual history are

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tablets containing the names of the legions of combatants in the long struggle that line the wall of the tower. Supplied by the various provinces, the names made the tower a unique work of public history and education, a site where pride, even joy, muzzled grief. Speaking at the inauguration of the tower in October 1893, Vincenzo Stefano Breda, the industrialist and senator who had succeeded to the presidency of the Società after the death of Torelli in 1887 and who had fought in the war, declared the structure to be the “military monument” to unification.28 In recognition of the battle’s significance, the village had earlier renamed itself “San Martino di battaglia.” With the increasing emphasis on the glorious battle and its place in the narrative of independence, the nearby ossuary began to fade from attention, the dead not forgotten but diminished by the tower’s sheer size and the living glory embodied within it. In the 1928 Baedeker, the ossuary survived as an afterthought. After recommending the “View from the tower,” it notes that “near the tower is a charnel house, surrounded by cypresses.” *** Ten days after the inauguration, Marshal MacMahon died at the age of 85. Of all the French generals who served in Italy in 1859, he enjoyed the greatest reputation. At Magenta, it will be recalled, he had brought his forces to bear on the battlefield at a critical moment, turning almost certain defeat into victory. A thankful emperor awarded him a marshal’s baton and also a title, Duke of Magenta, to immortalize his greatest moment. MacMahon’s later military and political career—he was President of France from 1873 to 1879—was less brilliant, but he remained always a modern Bayard, a “fearless and blameless knight.” Nowhere was this more true than at Magenta, where the battle was very much a living memory. Among its memorials was a column dedicated to “the valiant soldiers of France” at Ponte Vecchio, the site of particularly heavy fighting. One Sunday in the 1880s, the historian Pierre de la Gorce saw a group of women in Magenta, dressed in “their Lombard costume,” walking in procession several times around the column. On each tour they stopped at one point, knelt down, and recited the Ave Maria. After the last circuit they departed “silently.”29 Since 1872, the townspeople had gathered on the anniversary of the battle in front of the ossuary to remember the victory and the sacrifices. For some in Magenta, perhaps many, June 4, 1859 forever linked not only the townspeople but Italians in general to France.

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No one believed that more than Giuseppe Brocca, the mayor, and Don Cesare Tragella, the energetic local priest. Learning of MacMahon’s death, the two men decided to attend the funeral. Four months before, at that year’s celebration of the battle’s anniversary, Tragella had told Magentians that despite the cool, often testy political relations between the two countries—a recent tariff war had led to mutterings of a shooting war—the hearts of the Italian people “beat for the French.”30 What better way to show this natural “fraternity” than to honor a Frenchman who had done so much for Italy and its people. Tragella actually played a small role in the funeral arrangements, which suggests that he and probably Brocca were already known to the MacMahon family. The priest offered the last prayers over the body before it was taken from the family home at Montcresson to the nearby village for the family funeral. He also, together with the local curé and the Marshal’s son and son-in-law, accompanied the body to Paris for the state funeral and burial in the Invalides. At the funeral, Marshal Canrobert thanked Tragella for coming to “pay homage” to MacMahon and said that “before closing his eyes” he hoped to see “Italy and France marching hand in hand as formerly at Magenta and Solferino.”31 Tragella echoed the sentiment in a letter to the newspaper Figaro just before he and Brocca returned home. His immediate purpose was to thank the MacMahon family for their “very generous hospitality” and the various civilian and military authorities for their many “kindnesses.” But most of the letter addressed the “friendship” Tragella believed existed between the people of Italy and France. In making his point, he quoted at length from his speech of the previous June.32 Unmentioned in the letter was an idea Brocca and Tragella would soon be discussing that seems to have originated with a Dr. Ernesto Grassi. Why not build a monument to honor the French hero so important to Magenta? Such a memorial would also foster fraternity between the two peoples. The unusualness of the idea may itself have appealed to them. Memorials to foreign generals were scarce in nineteenth-century European cities. The English had erected no monument to the Prussian Blücher for ensuring Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. Nor had the Crimean war allies, France and England, memorialized each other’s generals. But the 1859 war encouraged such homage. For centuries, armies had crossed the Alps to conquer. This time, one had come with an “intention fraternelle.”33 Now that the man who had done so much to realize that intention had died, honor demanded that he be given the kind of recognition normally accorded triumphant generals.

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MacMahon had earned a statue. His remains might be in the Invalides and his soul in heaven, but embodied in bronze he would forever be in Magenta, a symbol not just of a victory but of the brotherhood of two peoples. Shortly after Brocca and Tragella returned from the funeral, a committee was formed with the mayor as chairman and the priest and Dr. Grassi included among the members. Support for the project was gained from the government in Rome, and calls for funding were published in various newspapers. A well-known sculptor, Luigi Secchi, was chosen by the committee to do the work, and the unveiling took place on June 4, 1895, the anniversary of the battle. It was a grand occasion, one of those all-day celebrations so favored in the nineteenth century. Several thousand people showed up, an estimate consistent with a drawing, based on a photograph, that appeared in L’Illustrazione Italiana. Swarmed around the statue, their parasols protecting them against the hot sun, the citizens of Magenta, along with visitors, were witnessing the biggest event in the town since the battle itself. Various civilian and military leaders from both countries attended, though not King Umberto or Crispi, the prime minister. The latter sent a telegram “expressing his regret that the exigencies of his duties” kept him away.34 It is also possible that his longstanding distrust of France made him reluctant to take part in a celebration promoting friendship between the two countries. The day’s events began at the train station in Milan with a breakfast for fifty of the important guests. Sipping champagne, they listened to a series of speeches. One was by General Henri Iung, who had fought in the war as a young captain and was now president of the Franco-Italian League, an organization based in Paris. Founded seven years before, the League sought to improve relations between the two countries. Honoring MacMahon was an ideal opportunity, and Iung, a witty and graceful speaker, the ideal person to argue the cause. During his remarks he claimed that Cavour had once praised him as one of the “thirteen Frenchmen who understood Italy.” What precisely this meant or Iung took it to mean did not matter to a crowd listening for the theme of the day. At the end of his short speech, given with “molto brio e spirito” thought the reporter for Corriere della Sera, Iung was given a huge ovation. Later that morning a special train brought the dignitaries to Magenta, where they went first to the ossuary to hear a funeral mass conducted by Tragella and then walked the few steps to the MacMahon monument. At a signal from Mayor Brocca, the cloth covering the statue dropped away, and, to the strains of the Marseillaise, the

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crowd burst into shouts of “Viva la Francia!” “Viva l’Italia!” “Viva MacMahon!”35 What the crowd responded to was a most unusual statue. “Heroic” is not the word used to describe the rendering of MacMahon. One Paris daily termed the statue “very expressive,” which seems about right.36 Standing on a pedestal taller than himself, the marshal is gazing off to his left, his right hand thrust into the pocket of his pantalons, his left crooked behind his back. The posture is of a man calmly deciding what to do, a posture that enacted the basis of MacMahon’s fame. It is also a posture that clashes with the traditions of military sculpture. Rarely do monuments of generals and heroes so deliberately represent their subject thinking. But in so fashioning the marshal, Secchi made him wonderfully human, almost ordinary. Without the uniform, the figure could be any man considering a problem. On the other hand, dressed in the uniform of a French general of the 1850s, MacMahon stands as a constant reminder of what the French had done for Italy. In breaking with tradition, Secchi created, in the words of one of the many dignitaries who spoke at the unveiling, a “modest monument” that people were less likely to ignore as they passed by. The common refrain of the speakers that day was “the brotherhood of the two peoples.” The most fervent advocate of this position was Cesare Tragella. The priest was a powerful orator, and with his talk of the “glorious Latinity” of France and Italy and his certainty that “God had made them brothers,” he brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience. One old peasant woman cried, “I saw them, the French soldiers, so brave, so good.” Following the speeches, a French general who had fought at Magenta went inside the ossuary. Numerous wreaths were then laid at the ossuary and the statue, after which Mayor Brocca invited the dignitaries to his villa for refreshments and to hear a chorus of one hundred children sing a hymn. Revived, the guests then visited the places in Magenta where the fighting had occurred before departing at 4:30 by special train back to Milan and a grand dinner with more speeches. All in all, said one general, it had been a “good” day for the “rapprochement of our two peoples.”37 The MacMahon memorial was always intended to serve a larger purpose than honoring the man. Whether one considers the genesis of the monument—the how, when, and by whom it was imagined and created—or reads accounts of the many speeches given on the day of the unveiling, or notes that General Iung and the vice president and secretary of the Franco-Italian League stayed that night in Magenta as guests of Mayor Brocca, the political concerns energizing the project are clear. While a chapter of the league had not yet opened in Italy,

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there were undoubtedly many people who favored better relations in both countries. A memorial honoring MacMahon, therefore, made good sense. No other French general, not even the brave Espinasse, to whom a column was erected at Magenta, had played as significant and as well-publicized role in the winning of the war. Had he not delivered Milan and thereby nearly all of Lombardy? So why didn’t Brocca, Tragella, and the Franco-Italian League just use the existing ossuary to rally support for their agenda? Why not call on the dead to inspire the living? The answer lies in the question itself. The dead, especially when encountered so visibly, tangibly in an ossuary, elicit sadness tinged with revulsion. The crowds who gathered at the inauguration of the various ossuaries did not spontaneously cry out, “Vive l’Italia.” The monument to MacMahon, on the other hand, exuded life, possibility, and success. Its subject seemed almost alive, forever in the act of making his fateful decision. The ossuaries asked visitors to cherish the sacrifices made for them. The memorial summoned people to live a dream. In less than a generation, glory had nudged pity aside in how the public would be encouraged to remember the war. *** In that same summer of 1895, 19-year-old George Macauley Trevelyan visited Italy for the first time. Like so many others, he fell in love with the country almost immediately. Two years later, during Christmas break from his studies at Cambridge, he visited Rome with his parents. One day his father, the historian George Otto Trevelyan, took him up the Janiculum hill and told him about Garibaldi’s defense of Rome “on that spot in 1849,” a story until then “quite unknown” to the younger Trevelyan.38 Told by a man with a gift for making “history vivid,”39 the story was riveting. All the more, we may asume, because of George Otto’s own history with Garibaldi. In his youth, the elder Trevelyan was so captivated by the romance of Garibaldi that in October 1867, on an “irresistible impulse,” he interrupted a trip to Paris to go to Italy to witness the campaign against Rome. Though he arrived after Garibaldi’s defeat at Mentana, he did interview the “noble and modest hero,” who “surpassed expectations.”40 The visit to the Janiculum, as the younger George Trevelyan recalled almost fifty years later, was life forming: “something new had been planted in my mind and heart.”41 But it would take several more visits to Italy and a wedding present in 1904 of an armful of books dealing with the Risorgimento, including Garibaldi’s Memoirs, for the seeds planted by his father to germinate and finally

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bloom. Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic was published in 1907, and was followed by Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909), and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911). In his research, Trevelyan, a famously avid walker who could knock off 30–40 miles in a day, went on foot or bicycle over the ground of Garibaldi’s campaigns from the Alps to Sicily. What he saw on these pilgrimages is sometimes visible in his texts. Thus in telling the story of 1859, he mentioned that a villa outside Varese “is easily to be distinguished today by a bust of Garibaldi on its outer wall.” Absent from his narrative is any indication that he visited Magenta or Solferino. They had not been part of the Garibaldi campaign. Despite their titles, the three volumes were not intended to form a biography of Garibaldi. Their concern is limited to “the two years 1849 and 1860 that gave him his title to enduring fame.” Hence, the 1859 war necessarily plays a small role in Trevelyan’s history, meriting only a single chapter, albeit the longest, in Garibaldi and the Thousand. While “a story dear to all true Italians,” the campaign was “perhaps of most importance” in providing training for the force with which Garibaldi “accomplished the work of the following year.” With that conclusion, Trevelyan did as much as any historian to bury the memory of the 1859 war, especially outside Italy. For the Garibaldi trilogy not only earned their author profit and fame, making him “quite a hero in Italy,”42 but became arguably the most read narratives of the Risorgimento in the twentieth century. Trevelyan sought a large audience, and he succeeded with a work that he later looked back on as his “best.” If so, he had his subject to thank. None of his other biographical books had the impact of his Garibaldi trilogy, presumably because none of his subjects (John Bright, Lord Grey, Daniel Manin, et al.) could match Garibaldi’s appeal. “Mind you get Trevelyan’s Garibaldi to read,” Winston Churchill’s mother wrote to her son in August 1907.43 Jennie Churchill remembered that her son’s own earlier fascination with the hero had led him in 1898 to think of writing a “Life of Garibaldi, of whose wonderful career no good account exists.”44 Nothing ever came of the ambition, perhaps because Churchill found writing about his own adventures a more congenial, and quite profitable, activity. Did Churchill take his mother’s advice and read Trevelyan’s first volume? One of his most famous lines suggests he did: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” sounds very like Garibaldi’s exhortation to his supporter on July 2, 1849, the day he left Rome. “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death.”45 The lines are quoted

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in Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic. In the subsequent volume, Trevelyan quoted a briefer version Garibaldi offered to the Lombard crowds during the campaign of 1859. “I do not promise you anything but toil and fatigue and fusillades; but we will conquer or die.”46 How conscious Churchill was of his ‘borrowing’ is impossible to say but probably not enough to put him in the dock for deliberate plagiarism. For a man of words such as Churchill, sorting out the remembered from the invented is tricky at best. The lives of Churchill and Trevelyan had intersected long before their engagement with Garibaldi. They met at Harrow, where Trevelyan, the younger by two years, admired the “driving force” of his schoolmate’s “character.”47 The two shared a background of privilege; an abiding sense that their class should rule; and an overweening belief in the traditions, values, and culture of England. They also shared a fascination with war, as mediated by historians and painters, its lethality and horrors concealed by an aura of excitement and vaunted nobility. As children, war had occupied their imaginations and their play, at the center of which were collections of toy soldiers. “Nearly fifteen hundred,” in the case of Churchill, whose growing “orientation” toward a military career was “entirely due to my collection.”48 Trevelyan’s life path led in another direction, but throughout his childhood and beyond toy soldiers formed the basis of an elaborate game (“Soldiers”) played with his two older brothers and father. Not until they were “grown men” did the three brothers give up the game. Weak eyesight spoiled Trevelyan’s chance to fight in World War I, but anxious to serve in some capacity, he led the first British Red Cross ambulance unit sent to Italy and subsequently wrote a book about his experiences, Scenes from Italy’s War, his only pass at the kind of book that had established Churchill’s early fame. Though not widely known, the book’s chapter on Caporetto was later put to good use by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway seems to have repaid the loan. The “tall,” English Red Cross officer with “steel rimmed glasses” and “perfect Italian” who helps the wounded Lieutenant Henry is the very image of Trevelyan. Garibaldi was a man of war and something of a genius in his leadership of men. Being so, he reinvigorated the aura of romance about war that Napoleon’s career had done so much to inspire. We may sense this in Trevelyan himself when he says he was “attracted” to Garibaldi “because his life seemed to me the most poetical of all true stories.” We also sense how the child’s play shaped the work of the man. The “delightful hours” spent playing “Soldiers” was, he thought, one reason why he enjoyed “studying and describing the campaigns and

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battles” of Garibaldi. Something deeper yet prompted in Trevelyan “a liking for those bits of history that had clear cut happy endings,” stories “cheerful to contemplate.”49 This fondness goes far in explaining why the Garibaldi trilogy stops in 1860. A brief epilogue furnishes only glances at the failures and frustrations of the later years. What Churchill might have done with Garibaldi is anyone’s guess. What Trevelyan did was give the man and his campaigns a wonder and nobility that were part truth and part poetry. The books made for wonderful reading, but as preparation for those who would soon go off to war, they left something to be desired. Garibaldi and the Thousand went on sale in October 1909. Four months earlier, cities across northern Italy celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the war. Festivities also took place in Rome and Paris, signaling that the governments of both countries had forgone the distrust of the Crispi years. “Times have changed,” noted Figaro; no longer was France the “natural enemy of Italy.”50 Quite the contrary, according to the Franco-Italian League, which was very involved in the state visit of King Victor Emanuel III and Queen Elena to Paris in October 1903 and now saw the auspicious anniversary as another opportunity to stress the natural bonds between the two countries. A photograph of a banquet in Asti, a town midway between Turin and Alessandria, is suggestive of what this anniversary meant to ordinary Italians. Taken from one end of a very long, flag-festooned room, it shows hundreds of men seated at three lines of tables, some old enough to be veterans, others too young to have any memories of the war. All are looking up at the photographer, knowing that their picture is about to be taken. Who they were, including the woman whose white dress sets her off from her dark-suited companions, is not decipherable. But it doesn’t matter. Their presence in such numbers, together with the numerous bottles of presumably Asti Spumante, the sparkling wine for which the town was famous, attests to the importance of the occasion. However “remote” the war had become to many people, perhaps even to some at this banquet, a fiftieth anniversary restored it to consciousness, at least for a while.51 Festivities at Magenta began early on a hot humid morning with salvos of artillery and chords of martial music. The streets were soon packed with people, many from surrounding farms and villages. At 11 a.m. a group of special guests gathered at the steps of the ossuary, among them the Duke of Genoa, the cousin Victor Emanuel had delegated to represent him at many of the celebrations. School children sang the Italian hymn and the Marseillaise, and a mass was

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celebrated. Following a formal greeting from Mayor Brocca, still in office, the crowd listened to the principal speaker of the day, Lt. Colonel Henri Jullian, who was representing the French ambassador. Jullian’s remarks recalled the many speeches given fourteen years before at the inauguration of the MacMahon statue. “Here on the plains of Italy the soul of Italy and the soul of France vibrated with the same ardency.” After several more speeches, Jullian and the Duke entered the ossuary, where they remained “a very short time.” It was a perfunctory visit. The dead were to be remembered—“Your blood was not wasted, Jullian had cried, “your glory not in vain”—but the focus this day was on the living and the future.52 The emotional forces that fostered the building of the ossuaries were fast fading. Few of the parents of the fallen still survived, wives had died or long ago remarried, and children were middle-aged and had their own memories. On a day given over to celebration, why encourage tears? The MacMahon statue better suited the spirit of the time, as did the Casa Giacobbe, its shell-pocked walls still not repaired. Gradually, the house itself had become a memorial and together with the statue and the ossuary, offered Magentians a variety of physical reminders of the battle in which so many Frenchmen had given their lives for Italy. Florence might be the city in Italy with the most vibrant French community, but France was most honored, most loved, in Magenta. One of the many reporters in Magenta to cover the celebrations was Gaston Routier. It was not his first visit. Fourteen years earlier, he was the reporter for Figaro so impressed with Don Tragella’s “magnificent” speech at the unveiling of the MacMahon statue.53 Writing now for Le Petit Journal, he had come the 15 miles from Milan by automobile through blinding dust blown up by the procession of cars ahead of him. Earlier, he had been at Palestro, and after the celebrations at Magenta he would return to Milan and from there go on to the other battle sites of the war, finally ending at Peschiera on July 8. At 41, Routier had made a name for himself. Born and educated in Marseilles, he had had “a certain success” with two newspapers there before coming to Paris in 1888. Over the years, he worked for several Paris dailies and, by 1909, published nearly twenty books, including a half dozen dealing with Spain. One, Espagne en 1897, went through five editions. Several of his other books, two on Macedonia, and one each on Madagascar and Germany, where he had also spent time, dealt with contemporary political issues. Then there were the novels, plays, and poetry and in 1898 a lengthy “cri d’alarme d’un patriote,” Grandeur et décadence des Français.54

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The range of Routier’s writings suggests a dilettante, as one reviewer of Les Droits de la France en Madagascar (1895) had observed. “His book is merely a compilation, and shows no special knowledge of the subject.”55 Though Routier made a number of visits to Italy between 1888 and 1894, he had never published a book about it. Nor did he show any special interest in matters military; just seven of the 379 pages of Grandeur et décadence are devoted to the army and the navy. And yet in 1909, he became “our special envoy” for Le Petit Journal to the anniversary celebrations and reviewed “step by step” not only the festivities but the campaign itself. Though he regarded his journey as a “pious pilgrimage,” readers soon realized that it was something more.56 On returning from the celebrations in Italy, Routier began putting together a book, 1859–1909 La Résurrection de l’Italie, which was published in December. A friend, the writer and politician Gustave Rivet, provided a flattering preface. “Like me you have felt your heart beat with the hearts of the Italians.” However true that was, Routier did not intend his book, any more than his original reporting, to be a sentimental tribute. In fact, it was a motley volume. The first third of it contains nearly verbatim his summer dispatches. The next section (“Opinions of Yesterday and Today”) examines more intensively the military and political mistakes made during and after the war. Included in this part were reprints of articles, several of them interviews with Italian politicians, which Routier originally published in various newspapers between 1889 and 1895. The last third of the book consists of other journalists’ reports of the recent festivities. Whether their inclusion was Routier’s idea or, more likely, his publisher’s, is left unsaid. What is clear is that Routier had always intended to use the anniversary celebrations to talk about much more. Notable among these were French military failures during and after the war, failures that culminated in the disaster of 1870. Routier saw the 1859 campaign as “the most generous expression of the Second Empire,” but he had come to have a critical view of French leadership during the war. He dismissed the official history of the campaign published in 1862 as “un dithyrambe,”, preferring instead Helmut von Moltke’s 1861 analysis, “which had underlined all our mistakes,” and especially the recent “fine study” by General Félix Silvestre, Étude sur la campagne 1859 en Italie, which he had seen before going to Italy. (No mention is made of Bazancourt’s Campagne d’Italie.) Chief among the army’s errors was a lack of audacity after Magenta and most disastrously after Solferino, when Napoleon decided to halt the war. The problem appeared again in 1870 when the army went on the defensive when it should have been attacking. The breakdown

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in leadership had been total, with even Marshal MacMahon “losing his head.” He “forgot that he was an army commander and instead behaved as a courtier.”57 At the end of his preface, Gustave Rivet praised Routier as a “talented” historian with the “heart of a patriot.” Not all readers would have agreed. At times, the criticism of the political and military leadership in 1859 and 1870 was harsh, almost sneering, as the comment about MacMahon indicates. It almost seemed as if Routier was less interested in celebrating what the 1859 war had achieved for Italy than in damning French policies and their makers. This may explain why Éditions de “l’époque moderne,” which published several of his earlier books, added cheery reports of the anniversary celebrations from other newspapers to the volume. Their presence left a sweeter impression, just as Rivet’s mention of his friend’s patriotism softened the sting of his criticism. Oddly proportioned though the book is, there is logic to what Routier himself contributed to it. As a Frenchman, he cared about what the anniversary should mean to France and what the French people should remember. If they wanted, they could bathe, along with the Italians, in the oratory of honor and success, forgetting that the mistakes of 1859 had led to the ‘crimes’ of 1870, that “terrible year.”58 But as he had demonstrated in Grandeur et décadence, Routier would no more let his countrymen forget the dark chapters of their history than let them ignore the unseemly aspects of their everyday lives. Here is the beginning of the dedication to an historical novel, Le Roman de l’Espagne heroïque, that he published in 1905: “To all those indignant at the weakness of our corrupt and soulless society, who are revolted by the shameless cult of the Golden calf and the ignoble tyranny of the financial class, I dedicate these pages.” Such comments made Routier seem to be a “socialist with extreme tendencies.”59 Whatever his politics—another charge was that he was a “true admirer of the old regime”60—the war that broke out in 1914 upset him. He admired Germany while loving France, and so in 1917, while living in neutral Spain, he tried to launch a biweekly, bilingual journal in Madrid, Journal de la Paix (Heraldo de la Paz). It never appeared, thanks to the opposition of the French ambassador, the French community, and charges that the journal was backed by German money. A short time later, Routier became ill and spent several months recuperating in the monastery of Euclés outside of Madrid. He does not say what exactly ailed him, only that he endured “months of illness, physical suffering, and moral tortures.”61 By autumn, he had

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evidently recovered, for according to a newspaper report of October 1917, he was planning to return to France and “enlist in the army.” How serious he was—assuming the newspaper report was accurate— can be questioned. His age (49) and stout physique, together with his recent illness, would almost certainly have made him unfit for military service. As it was, he did not return to France, perhaps knowing that detectives were waiting at the frontier to arrest him for his alleged German connections. Routier did, however, publish a book in the spring of 1918, La Guerre se meurt . . . La Paix s’impose! which told how the planned bilingual journal “died before it was born.” Routier also took the opportunity to air his disgust and sadness over the war, “a hecatomb without equal in history.”62 Was Routier a pacifist in principle? He hadn’t been in 1909 and may not have been in 1914 or even 1918. What can be said is that he was deeply skeptical of the rich and powerful in France and that his reading about the 1859 war, as well as his travels to its various battlefields, sensitized him to the stupidities of war and their awful consequences. Given his activities during the war, it is not surprising that Routier drew the ire of not only right wing newspapers like Action Française but the French government. In the spring of 1919, a French military court tried him for treason in absentia and condemned him to death.63 The verdict was announced just as the provisions of the Versailles Treaty were made public. Since he remained under a sentence of death, it is very unlikely that Routier ever returned to France. He also apparently did little further writing. Except for a Spanish-language pamphlet on banking printed in Madrid in 1919, there is no record of any publications by a once prolific writer. He died in a Catholic hospital in Madrid in 1920, one of the many late casualties of what he called that “infernal war.”64 Of all the celebrations in 1909, those held on June 24 at San Martino and Solferino were the grandest. The king and queen were to appear, along with the Italian minister of war, the French ambassador together with a French military delegation, and the Austrian consul at Venice. The expected presence of such a low ranking Austrian official indicates the deterioration in relations between the two nations in the previous decade. Earlier at Milan, the Austrian consulate had to be guarded by the police during the celebrations, and precautions were also taken at Venice to protect the Austrian ambassador. The dead of Solferino and San Martino still lay together, but in Lombardy the living no longer believed—if they ever did—that that fact should have any bearing on their attitudes. It did not matter that the sacrifice of

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the Austrian dead had been “glorious,” as Govone had insisted in 1870, or that an alliance between the two countries had been in place since 1882. The Austrians were still the “nemici.” Ultimately, in an instance of comic serendipity, the Austrian counsel had car trouble and failed to appear. Festivities began with the arrival by train at San Martino of Victor Emanuel and his wife Elena. Though dressed in an army uniform complete with sword, the forty-year-old monarch had always lacked the soldiery inclinations of his father or grandfather. An English writer described him on his accession in 1900 as having the “the tastes of an old man or a bookworm.”65 He had, however, acquired many of the skills needed by royalty. As a courtesy to the French, the royal party went first to Solferino, a trip by automobile that, reminiscent of Routier’s to Magenta, left the king and everyone else in the fifty-car procession powdered white. Arriving at 7:30, the party walked to the ossuary where a short mass was held. Afterward, the king and queen and several dignitaries entered the ossuary. They did not stay long, and the king conversed with the French ambassador most of the time, as if to avoid a close inspection of the skeletal remains. “What a horror” was the response of the reporter for Figaro, and very possibly Victor Emanuel as well.66 The reaction of Gaston Routier was even stronger. He came away not so much shocked—he had visited the Magenta ossuary twice before—as angered. He had come to the conclusion that displaying the dead was a “bizarre idea,” a “profanation” of what they had been and done. “I find this exhibition uncalled for and disrespectful.”67 What had once seemed appropriate and moving was now met with skepticism, even disdain. Some visitors in 1870 had probably been uncomfortable as well, but their reactions, if they voiced them, did not prevent the creation and public acceptance of the other ossuaries. Sensibilities, though, change over time. What one generation regards as respectful and tasteful another may find irrelevant or grotesque. In 1870, the bones of the dead were prized as symbols of their glory and sacrifice and the terrible cost of both. Forty years later, the carnage of Solferino was only a story, its heroes only bones. And yet before long, attitudes would change again: the largest and most somber ossuary in all of Europe would rise at Verdun commemorating a far more deadly battle. From the ossuary the royal party went to the tower at Solferino. There the king ascended to the top and, like visitors before and after, marveled at the view. “It is like a living map (carte vivant).”68 The soldiers fifty years before had also admired the beauty of their

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Figure 8.3 1909 Celebration at San Martino. Source: L’Illustrazione Italiana, July 4, 1909

surroundings as they went about the job of killing each other. Victor Emanuel could not imagine the battle, nor is there evidence that he tried. He did, though, spend far more time in the tower than he had in the ossuary. Returning to San Martino, the king and queen walked to the ossuary and again heard a mass before entering. Because it was the resting place of the Italian dead, and over the years was reportedly “much

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visited,”69 they spent more time inside than at Solferino. One relic, a skull noticeably smaller than the others, caught the queen’s eye. What also made the skull unusual was that it was accompanied by an identifying card: “Spazetti Fortunata, killed by a bullet at the moment when she was helping the wounded.” Together, skull and card were enough to draw an expression of sympathy from Elena: “La povera.” Coming up behind her the king, in a loud voice, also reacted: “Horrible!” One wonders if it was only Fortunata’s fate that prompted Victor Emanuel’s response.70 A more dramatic scene unfolded when the king left the ossuary and approached the tower built in honor of his grandfather. “White bearded” veterans, their hands “trembling,” approached Victor Emanuel. One, “contrary to protocol,” stretched out his hand to the king’s. Instead of refusing, the king “immediately took it into his own,” and with “tears in his eyes” shook it “vigorously,”71 So reported Le Temps. The reporter for Illustrazione Italiana, which carried several fine photographs of the day’s events, including one showing the old soldiers lining the path to the tower, disagreed. The king’s act was a calculated gesture and performed without tears, a version altogether in character for a famously unemotional sovereign. Whatever the truth, by all accounts the day as a whole proved highly emotional, as “little by little” an official occasion was “transformed” into an unforgettable explosion of popular feeling.72 For Italians, who made up most of the “enormous crowd,” it was a day to remember the single greatest military victory they had won during the wars of independence. It was also surely the last day when so many veterans, not only of San Martino but of Garibaldi’s campaign as well, would come together. One of those veterans was Giulio Adamoli, white-haired himself but still quite vigorous. San Martino had not been his last battle. He had served with Garibaldi in Sicily, where he had come to know and admire Ferdinand Eber, and was with Garibaldi at Aspromonte in 1862. Four years later he fought with the Italian army during the Austro-Prussian War. In December 1866 he left Italy to visit the United States, carrying letters of introduction from Garibaldi and Mazzini. During nearly four months in America, Adamoli managed to see a great deal and even made a side trip to Cuba. One day while riding a train in the South, he saw a Civil War battlefield, the ground still littered with pieces of equipment and the skeletons of horses.73 Back in Italy, he answered the call of Garibaldi in 1867 for volunteers and fought, for the last time, at Mentana in November. Subsequently, he made a career out of travel, becoming something of an expert on

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Central Asia. For several decades he was a member of the Italian geographical Society, serving as vice president from 1887 to 1895. He also served in the Crispi government between 1893 and 1896, and in the latter year was nominated to the Senate. For all his later accomplishments, however, Adamoli, like so many who have gone to war in their youth, always savored his fighting days. In 1892 he published Da San Martino a Mentana, a vivid memoir that contained a photograph of Eber and a touching notice of his old companion’s “morte dolorosomente tragica.” Not yet sixty, but “grown prematurely old,” Eber became light-headed while walking up the stairs to his apartment in Budapest and fell to his death. It was not a soldier’s death, but the funeral was all that Eber might have desired. The political leaders of Hungary were all in attendance: the cortège of carriages was very “picturesque, the coachmen and servants being all in black Hussar uniforms,” and among the flowers placed on the coffin was a wreath of magnolias sent by the Times.74 Adamoli himself, now nearly seventy and living in Cairo where he served as the Italian representative on the International Commission for the Egyptian public debt, seldom visited his homeland. But he had come back for the anniversary of San Martino and was not disappointed. Walking over the battlefield, he and his surviving comrades could ignore their “old age” and live again their “youthful adventure.”75 It is a common refrain of elderly soldiers who visit the battlefields of their youth. What seems to be uppermost in their minds is recapturing their youthful selves in the face of fast approaching oblivion. The exaggerations in their war stories are often less expressions of pride than a yearning for their youth. For the French, the celebrations in northern Italy were an opportunity to recall “glorious military memories.” Solferino, seen from 1909, had been the last great victory of French arms. Mexico had turned into a disaster, and 1870 was worse. The reputation of the army suffered another kind of disaster with the Dreyfus case, which dragged on for nearly 12 years, ending finally in 1906 with the reinstatement of the captain. To bask for a day or two, therefore, in flattering oratory and shouts of “Vive la France” was to regain pride. And for a group of French officers to be carried on the shoulders of crowds in Verona was to regain a sense of triumph. So wound up was the crowd that hearing an Italian reporter speaking French, a group of young men surrounded him and cried out “Vive la France”! “Vivent les Français”! “Vive la presse française.” Informed of their mistake, they responded, “So what, Vive la France all the same.” What the French army had done in 1859, exclaimed the French consul during

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the celebrations in Genoa, they would happily do again, “without a second thought, for glory, liberty, progress and civilization.”76 Largely missing from the celebrations were references to the man who had led the French army to Italy. Only in Milan, where thousands of schoolchildren marched on June 8 to the monuments to honor the “grandi fattori della Patria,” was the emperor publicly recognized. Stopping by the bronze equestrian statue done of him thirty years before, but a subject of political controversy ever since, they laid wreaths and listened as one student spoke of what Napoleon had done for Italy.77 Otherwise, the emperor had no place in the version of the war being remembered in either Italy or France. Having not been at San Martino and having “betrayed” Italy at Villafranca, why should Italians honor his memory? By 1909, he seemed irrelevant to most people. A few, however, thought the emperor’s absence bizarre. “To deny Napoleon III when talking about 1859 is like withholding the name of Beethoven when speaking of the nine symphonies.”78 Officials of the Third Republic, like any successor regime, were happy to airbrush the emperor out of the story. Too happy thought his widow, now living in England. “The Second Empire is officially deleted from the history of France, and so the dates of June 4 and 24, 1859, no longer kindle a memory in the hearts of Frenchmen . . . What a shame! What ingratitude! Was it to witness this that God has made me live so long”?79 What Eugenie failed to understand was that in the politics of remembrance, as in the politics of war, justice seldom rules. The same day (June 27) the empress expressed her displeasure, a commemorative ceremony took place in Paris in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne. The main speaker, the historian Ernest Lavisse, had supported the imperial cause long after 1870, even corresponding with the Prince Imperial until the latter’s death. But now he championed the Third Republic, so that while alluding several times in his address to the emperor, only once did he utter his name. The driving force behind the Paris celebration was the FrancoItalian League, now under the leadership of the 75-year-old Charles Beauquier, a well-known writer and politician. To improve relations between the two countries, the League had arranged for a group of Italian veterans of the war to come to Paris. The day after the Sorbonne celebration, they laid wreaths at the monuments to Dante, Victor Hugo, and the recently (1907) inaugurated memorial to Garibaldi in the garden of the place Cambronne. They also posed for a group photograph in front of the Hotel de Ville. Most were in top hats and frock coats, suggesting the class the veterans were

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chosen from. Joining them for the festivities, which included an elegant lunch in the Hotel de Ville, were “delegations” from each of the 87 French regiments that had fought at Solferino. The Italian ambassador gave a gold medal to all of them. While the theme of the day was Franco-Italian unity, memories of deeds done and emotions felt would have been uppermost in the minds and talk of French and Italian veterans alike. Even Ernest Lavisse reminisced about how, as a 16-year-old at the Lycée de Charlemagne, he had played hooky and gone to see the emperor pass through the streets of Paris to the gare de Lyon. Such was the tumult of that day that the houses along the route, bedecked with waving flags, their windows shaking due to the commotion in the streets, had seemed to him “to be following the movement of the street. Everything was leaving for Italy.”80 General Marie-Georges Picquart had no such vivid recollections to relate when it was his turn to speak at the Sorbonne memorial. Born in Strasbourg in 1854, the nightmare of 1870 was his formative memory of war. Now minister of war, Picquart had invited the representatives of the Solferino regiments to take part in the festivities. Not all of them, we can be sure, were grateful. Many in the army and the nation generally saw Picquart as a blackguard or worse. In 1896 he had challenged the integrity of the infamous bordereau, the key piece of evidence used to convict Dreyfus and thus made possible his eventual acquittal and reinstatement. Had Picquart destroyed the reputation of the army in doing so, or saved it? The question was still being debated in 1909. Picquart avoided heating up the controversy in his “brief” remarks by sticking to the theme of the day. In a “clear and rousing” voice he paid tribute to “the arms of Italy and France” and to the “glorious campaign” that “unified the two countries.”81 He also avoided any mention of Napoleon. Memorial celebrations like those for the fiftieth anniversary of Solferino and San Martino reveal how the meanings and values ascribed to events shift over time. The concerns of the present ever shape the pasts we value. Such celebrations can also seem to be exercises in overindulgence: too many speeches, too many toasts, too many vivats. How did contemporaries endure it? Easily is the answer, familiar as they were with sermons and speeches that might last for hours and novels that took days to read. But something quite unusual happened on the night of June 24 at Solferino and San Martino. After the dignitaries and most of the crowd had left, people in “vehicles of all sorts,” especially bicycles and automobiles, rode out to the two battlefields carrying lanterns garnished with the colors of France and Italy. Set off against the two towers, which had also been lit up, this

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“immense moving illumination”82 created a new kind of spectacle, one that owed its existence to new modes of self-transport. Had he been alive, even Charles Langlois might have been impressed with the show. But new technologies inevitably render past events more distant and quaint. Viewed from today, that flow of light and color across the Lombard plain offered not only a lovely spectacle but a shining farewell to the war itself.

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4

orld War I weakened the hold of the 1859 war on Italian memory. Garibaldi’s exploits around Lake Como still appealed, but the major battles had shrunk in significance and in symbolic value. Measured against the long campaign on the Isonzo that climaxed with Caporetto in October 1917, Magenta and Solferino belonged to another age. So increasingly did the veterans. By the 1930s, few were still alive; one, Anton Neubauer, who made it to his hundredth birthday in June 1936, was thought to be the “last survivor” of Solferino.1 Four years earlier, a fellow Austrian, the writer Joseph Roth, published a novel that also reminded people of that once famous day. Radetzky March tells of how a young lieutenant willingly takes a bullet for kaiser Franz Joseph at Solferino and how that brave act shapes his and his descendants’ lives. The book was well received by critics and public alike, but it did not revive interest in the war. Too much had happened since 1859 to restore its memory to honor, except as a brief, aborted chapter in the saga of unification. Schoolchildren learned about it, towns like Palestro and Magenta put on anniversary celebrations, and old people told their memories of it, but the war had lost resonance for the Italian public in general. One battle, however, had gained a new relevance. In addition to being a battlefield and then a memorial to the dead, Solferino was now visited as a site of inspiration, thanks to Henri Dunant, who had tended the wounded, then written a book, and finally helped found the International Red Cross. Birthplaces, whether for individuals, states, or organizations, hold special meaning. Solferino had become such a place and in the person of Henri Dunant had given another life to the memory of the war. Dunant would have relished his growing fame, especially because he long believed himself cheated of it by his very collaborators in creating the Red Cross. On the other hand, they, notably Gustave Moynier, thought Dunant guilty of shabby, probably criminal business practices and in 1865 had forced him not only to resign as secretary of the organization but to withdraw as a member. Thereafter,

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Dunant refused to visit Geneva. “No power on earth will make me go there.”2 For many years before his death in 1910, he lived a wandering life, depending for money on the kindness of relatives and friends and nursing a grievance bordering on paranoia. A virtual nonperson, he disappeared from public consciousness and was not even mentioned in the history of the Red Cross published in 1888 to coincide with the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Nor was he invited to the gala evening in October of that year to celebrate the anniversary. Napoleon III became unmentionable primarily after his death. Dunant suffered this fate while still very much alive. His life began to improve in 1895 when he was found living in the village of Heiden in Switzerland. Newspaper stories about him appeared, and curious strangers made their way to the small hospital where he stayed. In 1901 he shared in the first Nobel Peace Prize. Some objected that Dunant had never expressed pacifist principles. Nonetheless, the prize was a kind of vindication, and he spent his remaining years basking in the special glow of long-delayed praise. His last act was reportedly to send a book on the origins of the Red Cross to Queen Elena of Italy. World War I transformed the Red Cross from a relatively “little known” body into an “internationally respected” organization.3 Dunant’s fame increased accordingly. Evidence of this was displayed during the first annual convention of the American Red Cross in Columbus Ohio in October 1921. The “culminating feature” of the five-day gathering was an extravagant pageant involving some 2000 people, a chorus of 1000 voices, and a tableau vivant with Dunant standing in the midst of a battlefield. Seven years later, on the anniversary of his birth, Dunant’s contribution was honored in Geneva at a special meeting of Red Cross societies from around the world. In a preface to a new edition of the Souvenir, the president of the organization, Gustave Ador, acknowledged that the book was the “foundation stone” of the organization, while sidestepping the issue of Dunant’s importance. Geneva itself paid tribute by having addresses read in all the city’s schools praising his “work for humanity.”4 Red Cross activities during and after World War II were even more extensive than in the earlier war. Besides their traditional mission of helping the wounded, the organization made great efforts to ensure the welfare of prisoners of war and after 1945 to resettle millions of displaced persons. Public esteem for the organization rose accordingly and in 1948 inspired a motion picture, D’Homme a Hommes, starring the well-known French actor Jean Louis Barrault as Dunant. The movie never achieved fame, but it expanded Dunant’s and suggested

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that saving lives on a battlefield was as heroic as taking them, a point made again when Anna Neagle played Florence Nightingale in Lady with a Lamp (1951). D’Homme a Homme also underlined the new rationale for remembering Solferino. Once notorious for its horror and then for its sadness, the battlefield could now be celebrated as the birthplace of a noble idea. Soon enough, a memorial arose offering a tangible presence for visitors to honor. Centenaries are favorite anniversaries, usually inspiring a great deal of noisy self-congratulation. This was not to be with the 1859 war. As in 1909, there were celebrations at all the battle sites and once more the festivities at San Martino and Solferino received the most attention. Yet newspaper reports of the one hundredth anniversary reveal no spontaneous acts like the night drive across the battlefields in 1909. Nor did the centenerary events seem to draw the huge crowds seen fifty years before. Having suffered much in two world wars and gained little in return, Italians could be forgiven for their lack of excitement about long ago battles. One event in 1959 does stand out, however: the visit of the president of France. Making his first state visit abroad since becoming president, Charles de Gaulle hoped to use the occasion to bind Italy in a western Mediterranean security pact. While sharing a desire for closer relations with France, President Giovanni Gronchi of Italy believed that his country had more to gain from a partnership with the United States. Differences aside, both men understood the symbolic value of visiting the battlefields, and as veterans themselves, they could imagine what had once taken place on them. The two men met in Milan on June 23 and drove to Magenta where they stopped at the MacMahon statue and then “rapidly visited” the ossuary, evidently not going inside.5 Returning to Milan, they witnessed a grand parade led by men carrying banners and standards of French and Italian regiments that had fought in 1859. That evening the two presidents were the guests of honor at a dinner given by the mayor. For the occasion, Phillipe de Rothschild made a gift of two bottles of 1859 Mouton Rothschild. The next day the leaders went to San Martino and Solferino and again did not enter the ossuaries. At Solferino, surrounded by aides, dignitaries, and eager photographers, they walked over the battlefield. They also took part in an unusual reenactment by lunching at the villa where their predecessors in 1859 had dined after the battle on a meal prepared for Franz Joseph. At San Martino, De Gaulle gave a short speech praising the efforts of the Piedmontese army in the battle, even naming the division commanders. The climax of the speech dwelled on the “harvest”

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(moisson) of the victory: “the unity of Italy, the admirable work of the Red Cross that had been inspired in Henry Dunant by the distress of the wounded, and, finally, the ultimate testimony of Latin brotherhood.”6 At least those were the three points written into the speech and to be found in De Gaulle’s published works. In his actual delivery, he alluded to neither Dunant nor the Red Cross. Did someone at the last moment inform DeGaulle that Dunant had not been at San Martino, thus saving him from a minor but embarrassing gaffe? Or did the general, as he was giving his speech, sense that Dunant, a Swiss, did not belong at a decidedly Italian occasion and that a ‘double’ harvest was quite enough for his listeners to absorb. Whatever the explanation, the original inclusion of Dunant in the speech indicates his growing importance in the story of the war. Three days later that importance was signified in the unveiling of a monument to him at Solferino put up by the Red Cross. Whatever his sins, Henri Dunant had become the accepted progenitor of the organization. A parade of speakers honored his work, but the featured guest for the occasion, the wife of President Gronchi, did not speak. Her presence, however, confirmed what De Gaulle had earlier implied: Dunant was a figure who belonged to the world, not just the Red Cross. An editorial in the Times of June 24 put his contribution in another light. Commenting on the commemoration to take place that day, it had suggested that what was worthy of remembrance about Solferino were not the “names” of the leaders—“their thrones are fallen”—or stories of “martial glory.” Instead, the “agony” of the wounded and dying should be recalled, and the “redeeming idea that was born out of all that travail.” Henri Dunant’s emergence as the hero of the war would have surprised most of the visitors we have met in this book. Some went to their deaths having barely heard of him; others, familiar with his name, would not have judged him worthy of so much notice. But a few— J. L., the Marquis de Bryas, Luigi Torelli, perhaps—might have thought history had finally gotten it right: an “obscure, slightly ridiculous, Swiss bourgeois” had given the war its lasting significance.7 It had taken a long time. In 1909 Dunant, still alive, his reputation resuscitated, had not mattered. Fifty years later he was almost all that did.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. Instrumental in shaping this view of the Risorgimento has been Alberto Mario Banti. For a recent discussion of his work see the summer 2009 issue of Nations and Nationalism. 2. Favre, Jules. Discours du battonat; Défense de Felix Orsini. Paris: J. Hetzel, 1866. 167. 3. The quotation comes from Cavour’s long letter to the king on July 24. Plombières: Secret Diplomacy and the Rebirth of Italy. Ed. Mack Walker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. 27–29. 4. Morning Chronicle February 5, 1859. 5. Earl of Malmesbury. Memoirs of an Ex-Minister. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Company. 1884. 2.148. 6. Malmesbury, Memoirs 2. 165. 7. Cavour, Camillo, Epistolario. 19 vols. Ed. Carlo Pischedda and Rosanna Roccia. Bologna, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1962–2008. 16. 231. The standard source on Govone is Govone, Uberto, Il generale Govone: frammenti di memorie. 1911. Turin: F. Cassanova, 1902. I have used the second edition (1911). For the description of his voice, see page 17. For his actions at Balaclava, see Armstrong, William, E. L. Godkin: A Biography. 2 vols. Albany: SUNY Press, 1978. 2. 107. 8. Broglie, Gabriel de. MacMahon. Paris: Perrin, 2000. 88. 9. Tocqueville to Henry Reeve, February 25, 1859. Laughton, John Knox. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1898. 2. 8. 10. New York Times, May 23, 1859. 11. Morning Chronicle, May 14, 1859. 12. Morning Chronicle, May 14, 1859. 13. Mazenod, Saint Eugene de. Journal 1849–1860. Rome: Archives générales O.M.I., 175. 14. Corti, Egon. Vom Kind zu Kaiser, quoted in Beller, Stephen. Francis Joseph. London: Longman, 1996. 33. 15. The Times, May 2, 1859. 16. Daily News, May 14, 1859. 17. The Times, May 18, 1859; see also L’Illustration, May 21, 1859.

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18. Dicey, Edward. Victor Emmanuel. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1882. 190. 19. Longford, Elizabeth. Victoria R. I. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. 241. For more on the queen’s “military mania” see 244, 255–56. 20. Thompson, J. M. Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 189. 21. Luguez, F. Crimée-Italie 1854–1859. Nancy France: G. Crepin-Leblond, 1895. 87–88. 22. Vanson, Émile. Crimée Italie Mexique: lettres de campagnes 1854– 1867. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1905. 215. 23. Deguignet, Jean-Marie. Memoirs of a Breton Peasant. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Seven Stones Press, 2004. 184. Some soldiers even sought out guide books to Italy. 24. Marguerittes, Julie de. Italy and the War of 1859. Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1859. 319. 25. Chicago Press & Tribune, June 10, 1859. On the role of Mazzini and other journalists in fashioning Garibaldi’s image before 1859 see Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 47–58. 26. Ridley, Jasper. Garibaldi. New York: Viking, 1974. 399. 27. Ridley, Garibaldi 404. 28. Adamoli, Giulio. Da San Martino a Mentana. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. Chapter 1. 29. Varenne, Louis de la. Les chasseurs des Alpes et des Apennins. Florence: Imprimerie le Monnier, 1860. 317–18. 30. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Eugene. Notice sur Charles Furne. Paris: J. Claye, 1860. 31. Persson, Gudrun. “Russian Military Attachés and the Wars of the 1860s.” Reforming the Tsar’s Army, Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution. Ed. David Schimmelpenninck Van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003. 157, note 26. 32. Blakiston, Noel. “Carteggio Hudson-Russell (Gennaio-Marzo 1861).” Archivio storico Italiano 1961. 373 33. Fleury, Emile Felix. Souvenirs de Général Cte. Fleury. 2 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie., 1897–1898. 2. 20. 34. Cavour, Epistolario 16. 777. 35. Brion, M. J. “Lettres du sous-lieutenant Brion.” Carnet de la sabertache 8 (1900): 589. 36. Mabell Ogilvy, Countess of Airlie With the Guards We Shall Go. A Guardsman’s Letters in the Crimea 1854–1855. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933. 265. 37. Saturday Review, November 3, 1855.

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38. Bapst, Germaine. Le Maréchal Canrobert: souvenirs d’un siècle. 5th ed. 6 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie., 1909. 2. 221. 39. Lord Raglan to the Duke of Newcastle, January 4, 1855, quoted in Kinglake, Alexander. The Invasion of the Crimea. 4th ed. 6 vols. Edinburgh & London: W. Blackwood and sons, 1863–1887. 6. 244. 40. McCormick, Richard C. Jr. A Visit to the Camp before Sevastopol. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855. 191. 41. Lalumia, Matthew Paul. Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. 247, note 37. 42. The comment was made when the paper published a volume containing the issues of the first six months. 43. Illustrated London News, January 12, 1856. Emphasis in the original. 44. Sutherland, J. A. “’Westward Ho!’ A Popularly Successful Book.” Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Ed. J. A. Sutherland. London: Athlone Press, 1976. 117. 45. Illustrated London News, May 14, 1859. 46. Illustrated London News, May 28, 1859. 47. Wellesely, Henry. Secrets of the Second Empire. Private Letters from the Paris Embassy. Ed. F. A. Wellesley. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. 175. 48. Illustrated London News, May 28, 1859. 49. Blanc, Charles. Les trois Vernet. Paris: Librairie Renouard H. Laurens, 1898. 141. 50. The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. Jonathan Mayne. New York: Phaidon, 1956. 259. 51. Gautier, Théophile. Exposition de 1859. Ed. Wolfgang Drost and Ulrike Henninges. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitats Verlag, 1992. 92. 52. Daily Telegraph, June 17, 1859. 53. Le Siècle, May 8, 1859. 54. Daily News, May 31, 1859. 55. Albany Evening Journal, June 2, 1859. 56. For a stimulating treatment of war and theater in an earlier era, see Russell, Gillian. The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1773–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 57. Sand, George. Correspondance. 26 vols. Ed. Georges Lubin. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964–1995. 15. 415. 58. Signorini, Maria Adele. “Il Salotto di Gesualdo e Cesira Pozzolini nella Firenze del 1859.” Salotti e ruolo femminile in Italia. Ed. Maria Luisi Petri & Elena Brambilla. Venice: Marsilio, 2004. 393. 59. Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold. 6 vols. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001. 1. 444–45.

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60. Duggan, Christopher. Francesco Crispi 1818–1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 151. 61. Saffi, Aurelio. Giuseppe, Mazzini compendio biografico. Pisa: NistriLischi, 1972. 136. 62. New York Herald, May 15, 1859; see also Marraro, Howard R. American Opinion on the Unification of Italy 1846–1861. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932 238–47. 63. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, eds. The Gladstone Diaries. 14 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–1994. 5. 390.

C hapter 2 1. The Photographic Journal, February 22, 1859. When Prince Albert died he was remembered by the photographic community as a “skillful operator, a clever critic, and kind patron.” British Journal of Photography, January 1, 1862. 2. The Photographic News, May 20, 1859. 3. The Photographic News, June 24, 1859. 4. The Photographic News, May 20, 1859. 5. Le Monde illustré, November 14, 1857. 6. The Photographic Journal, February 22, 1859. 7. Fraser, John. “Beato’s Photographs of the Interior of the Sikandarbagh at Lucknow.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 64 (1981): 51–55. 8. The Photographic News, June 24, 1859. 9. The Photographic News, June 24, 1859. 10. The Photographic News, June 24, 1859. 11. The Photographic News, July 1, 1859. 12. The Photographic News, July 1, 1859. 13. The Photographic News, July 8, 1859. 14. Cavour, Camillo. Epistolario. 19 vols. Ed. Carlo Pischedda & Rosanna Roccia. Bologna, Florence: 1962–2008. 16. 788. 15. Senior, Nassau William. Conversations with M. Thiers, M. Guizot, and other Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire. 2 vols. Ed. M. C. M. Simpson. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1878. 2. 248. 16. Glover, Michael. Warfare from Waterloo to Mons. London: Cassell, 1980. 96; Marraro, Howard R. “Documenti Americani sul conflitti Italo-Austraco del 1859.” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 47 (1959) 3–44. For the casualties see Wylly, H. C. The Campaign of Magenta and Solferino 1859. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1907. 55; and Bourgerie, Raymond. Magenta et Solferino (1859). Paris: Economica, 1993. 52. 17. Achard, Amadée. Montebello, Magenta, Marignan, lettres d’Italie. Paris: Hachette, 1859. 109. 18. Daily News, May 14, 1859. For the original text, see Oeuvres de Napoléon III. 5 vols. Paris: Amyot, 1856–1869. 5. 81–82.

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19. Illustrated Times, June 18, 1859. 20. L’Illustration, June 11, 1859. Beaucé was attached to General Joseph Vinoy’s division and so could move about with greater liberty than other journalists. 21. Illustrated Times, June 18, 1859. 22. Daily News, May 27, 1859. 23. Govone, Général. Mémoires (1848–1870): Mis en ordre et publiés par son fils le chevalier U. Govone. Trans. M. H. Weil. Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1905. 110–11. I have used the French translation of the memoirs on this occasion since Govone wrote to his fiancée in French. The exact age of Francesco is uncertain. The Italian edition has him born in 1836, the French in 1838. 24. The Times, May 25, 1859. 25. The decree ordering the monument was signed at Alessandria on May 5, 1805, and is to be found in Correspondance de Napoléon I. 33 vols. Paris: H. Plon, J. Dumaine, 1858–1870. 2. 378. 26. L’Illustration, June 17, 1854. For more on Delavo and Marengo, see Marengo et ses monuments. Paris, 1854. 27. Bapst, Germaine. Le maréchal Canrobert: souvenirs d’un siècle. 5th ed. 6 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie. 1909. 3. 213–14, 217–18, 288. 28. Molenes, Paul. Les commentaries d’un soldat. Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1866. 276. 29. Daily News, May 26, 1859. 30. Le Monde illustré, June 4, 1859. 31. Illustrated London News, March 10, 1855. 32. Art Journal, July 1856. 33. Baroche, Mme. Jules. Second Empire. Notes et souvenirs. Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès et cie, 1921. 23–24. 34. Illustrated Times, June 11, 1859. 35. Illustrated Times, June 11, 1859. 36. “Reports from Military Commissioners at Austrian and Allied Headquarters.” Ed. John F. V. Keiger, 145, 147. In British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Part I, series F, vol. 23. Italy 1855–1873. Ed. John F. V. Keiger. Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1991. 37. “Reports,” 146, 147. 38. Liverpool Mercury, July 13, 1859. 39. Trevelyan, G. M. “The War Journals of ‘Garibaldi’s Englishman.’” Cornhill Magazine n.s. 24 (1908): 98. 40. Caraguel, Clément. Souvenirs et aventures d’un volontaire garibaldien. Paris: A. Bourdilliat, 1861. 21. Caraguel, writing of their association in Sicily in 1860, described Peard as “having invented for his own personal use the profession of military tourist.” 41. Trevelyan, “War Journals” 100. 42. Trevelyan, “War Journals” 101.

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234 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

Notes Ridley, Jasper, Garibaldi. New York: Vikings, 1974. 406. Cavour, Epistolario, 16, 848. Trevelyan, “War Journals” 103. Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Thousand. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1909. 99. Trevelyan, “War Journals” 108. Le Monde illustré, June 4, 1859. Daily News, May 31, 1859; Illustrated London News, July 2, 1859. The Times, May 18, 1859. Holt, Edgar. Plon-Plon: The Life of Prince Napoleon. London: Joseph, 1973. 93. The comment was made by the Comte de Morny, the emperor’s illegitimate half-brother. Holt, Plon-Plon 93. Morning Chronicle, May 25, 1859. Holt, Plon-Plon 105–6.

C hapter 3 1. Daily Telegraph, May 27, 1859. 2. Le Constitutionnel, May, 28, 1859. 3. Case, Lynn M. French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954. 76–77. 4. New York Times, May 20, 1859; Detroit Free Press, May 28, 1859; New York Herald, June 2, 1859. 5. For Raymond, see the biography by Brown, Francis. Raymond of the Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 1951. 6. Troy Daily Whig, July 20, 1859. 7. New York Times, December 12, 1851; De Puy, Henry W. Kossuth and his Generals. Buffalo: Phinney, 1852. xix; for the commission, Brown, Raymond 123–24. 8. Klapka, General George. The War in the East. London: Chapman & Hall, 1855. 71. 9. Cavour, Camillo. Epistolario. 19 vols. Ed. Carlo Pischedda and Rosanna Roccia. Bologna, Florence: 1962–2008. 16, 36. 10. Cavour, Epistolario 16, 109. 11. Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold. 6 vols. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001. 2. 238. The Arnold family home at Fox How was about 15 miles from Kendal. 12. Russell, William Howard. The Great War with Russia: The Invasion of the Crimea. London, New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1895. 178, 208. 13. Eber, Ferdinand. “Hungarian Revolution.” Edinburgh Review 97 (1853): 119–51. Eber deserves a biography. For more on him see

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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the entry in the Dizionario del risorgimento nazionale. 4 vols. Ed. Michele Rosi and Vittorio Gigli. Milan: Casa editrice dottor Francesco Vallardi, 1930–1937. Print; and two articles by Jaszy, Magda. “Un Cronista ungherese della gesta Garibaldine: Ferdinando Eber.” Risorgimento in Sicilia n.s. 3 (1967): 322–53. Print; and Jaszy, Magda. “Giornalisme e azione: Ferdinando Eber corrispondente del Times nel 1859–1860.” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 60 (1973): 214–40. The Hungarian State Archives in Budapest holds an extensive collection of Eber papers. The Times. The History of the Times: The Established Tradition 1841– 1884. London: The Times, 1939. 284, note 1. Mowbray Morris to J. B. O’Meagher, May 17, 1859, “Manager’s Letter Books of The Times.” Mowbray Morris to Ferdinand Eber, June 2,1859, “Letter Books.” The Times, June 6, 1859. Photographic News, July 8, 1859. Photographic News, July 1, 1859. Illustrated Times, June 4, 1859. Photographic News, July 8, 1859. Photographic News, July 8, 1859. Photographic News, July 8, 1859. Crowe, Joseph Archer. Rev. of Der italienische Krieg 1859 and L’Italie Confédéré, Edinburgh Review. July–October 1859: 110, 237. Texier, Edmond. Chronique de la guerre d’Italie. Paris: Hachette, 1859. 160. This book contains the dispatches Texier wrote for Le Siècle, 160. Cavour, Epistolario 16, 874. Achard, Amadée. Montebello, Magenta, Marignan, lettres d’Italie. Paris: Hachette, 1859. 179. The Times, June 6, 1859. All of J. L.’s description of the battle and the aftermath are in the letter published in the Photographic News, July 8. Photographic News, June 24, 1859. Punch, 1855. Liverpool Mercury, June 7, 1859. Longford, Elizabeth. Victoria R. I. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. 256. Wylly, H. C. The Campaign of Magenta and Solferino 1859. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1907. 62. Bapst, Germaine. Le maréchal Canrobert: souvenirs d’un siècle. 5th ed. 6 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie. 1909. 3. 322–23. Govone, Uberto. Il Generale Giuseppe Govone. 2nd ed. Turin: F. Casanova, 1911. 122–23. Illustrated Times, June 25, 1859. The Times, June 2, 1859. New York Times, July 22, 1859.

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40. Illustrated London News, June 4, 1859. 41. Daily News, May 31, 1859. 42. The Illustrated Life and Career of Garibaldi. London: Ward and Lock, 1860. 84, 86. 43. The Times, June 20, 1859. 44. Ridley, Jasper. Garibaldi. New York: Viking, 1974. 385. For more on Garibaldi’s use of the press, see Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 45. Sand, George. “Garibaldi.” Questions politiques et sociales. Paris: C. Levy, 1879. 336. Print; Ridley, Garibaldi 385. 46. Morning Chronicle, June 11, 1859. 47. Keiger, John F. V. “Reports from Military Commissioners at Austrian and Allied Headquarters.” Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1991. 155. Vol. 23 of British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Pt. I, series F, Italy 1855-1873. Ed. John F. V. Keiger. 48. The Times, June 14, 1859. 49. Fleury, Emile Felix. Souvenirs de Général Cte. Fleury. 2 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie., 1897–1898. 2, 33. 50. Bazancourt, César de. La campagne d’Italie. Army edition. Paris: Amyot, 1860. 1. 321. 51. M. Kamienski. La mort d’un soldat. Paris, 1860. Quoted in Porch, Douglas. The French Foreign Legion. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. 130. 52. Morris to Eber, “Letter Books.” 53. “Reports” 167. 54. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Eugene. Notice sur Charles Furne. Paris: J. Claye, 1860. 28. 55. Le Monde illustré, July 16, 1859. 56. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Notice, 28. 57. Rosseuw Saint-Hilaire, Notice, 28. 58. Daily Telegraph, June 13, 1859. 59. Morning Chronicle, June 13, 1859. 60. Le Siècle, June 4, 1859. Most of the June 7 dispatch was deleted from the paper. Texier put the deleted parts back into his book (Chronique, 224–33). 61. New York Times, June 23, 1859. 62. Cavour, Epistolario 16. 956–57. About 1000 Piedmontese fought at Magenta. 63. New York Times, August 29, 1859. 64. Johnston, W. E., ed. Memoirs of Malakoff. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson, 1907. 1. Chapter 1. This chapter provides basic information about Johnston’s early life. 65. New York Times, June 23, July 12, 1859. 66. New York Times, June 6, 18, 23, 1859. 67. New York Times, July 12, 1859.

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C hapter 4 1. New York Times, May 14, 1859. 2. Dax, Pierre. “Chronique.” L’Artiste, June 12, 1859, 111. 3. The comment is from a letter quoted in Hungerford, Constance Cain. Ernest Meissonier: Master in his Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 115. 4. Gréard, Octave. Meissonier, His Life and his Art. Trans. Mary Loyd & Florence Simmonds. London: Heinemann, 1897. 51. 5. Lalumia, Matthew Paul. Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. 107. 6. Adam, Charles. La Guerre d’Italie histoire complete des operations militaries dans la peninsula. Paris: N-J Philippart, 1859. 2. 272. The quote is from the correspondent Charles Dreolle. 7. Millar, Delia. Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. 2 vols. London: Philip Wilson, 1995. 2.12. For Bossoli generally, see the thorough work of Peyrot, Ada. Carlo Bossoli: luoghi, personaggi, costumi, avventimenti, nell’Europa dell’Ottocento, visti dal pittore ticinese. 2 vols. Turin: Tip. Torinese editrice, 1974. 8. Illustrated Times, November 17, 1855. 9. Daily News, June 15, 1859. 10. Keiger, John F. V. “Reports from Military Commissioners at Austrian and Allied Headquarters.” Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1991. 163. Vol. 23 of British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Pt. I, series F, Italy 1855-1873. Ed. John F. V. Keiger. 11. The Times, June 13, 1859. 12. The Times, June 13, 1859. 13. Morning Chronicle, June 15, 1859. 14. Achard, Amédée. Montebello, Magenta, Marignan. Lettres d’Italie. Paris: Hachette, 1859. 297. 15. Morning Chronicle, June 15, 1859. 16. The Times, June 29, 1859. 17. Daily Telegraph, June 11, 1859. 18. Mazenod, Saint Eugene de. Journal 1849–1860. Rome: Archives générales O.M.I. 177. 19. Illustrated London News, June 18, 1859. 20. Price, Roger. The French Second Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 48. 21. Bapst, Germaine. Le Maréchal Canrobert: Souvenirs d’un siecle. 5th ed. 6 vols. Paris: E. Plon. 3. 440. 22. Morning Chronicle, June 24, 1859. 23. Bapst, Marechal Canrobert 3. 443. 24. “Reports” 160.

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25. Govone, Uberto. Il Generale Giuseppe Govone, frammenti di memorie. 2nd ed. Turin: F. Cassanova, 1911. 129. 26. Morning Chronicle, June 15, 1859. 27. Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic.” Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861): 27. 28. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859): 748. 29. Holmes “Sun-Painting” 27. 30. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Doings of the Sunbeam.” Atlantic Monthly 12 (1863): 1–12. 31. The Times, June 13, 1859. 32. The Times, June 17, 1859. 33. On Hungarian desertion, see Deak, Istvan. “Defeat At Solferino: The Nationality Question and the Habsburg Army in the War of 1859.” War and Society in East Central Europe 14 (1984): 508. 34. Kossuth to his wife, Paris, June 16, 1859. Kossuth, Louis. Memories of My Exile. Trans. Ferencz Jausz. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Company, 1880. 353. 35. The Times June 24, 1859. 36. From a letter to an unnamed person, June 23, 1859. Kossuth, Memories 357, 364–65. 37. The Times, June 23, July 1, 1859. 38. W. E. Johnston to his sister Margaret, July–August 1859. I am grateful to Jane Hummel for allowing me to see this and the other Johnston letters in her possession. 39. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 40. Henry J. Raymond, unpublished letter in Turin to the New York Times, June 19, 1859, New York Public Library. 41. Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. New York: Knopf, 1999. 15. Colette wrote a story about her father in 1915 titled, “Un Zouave.” 42. Raymond, unpublished letter, Magenta, June 20, 1859, New York Public Library. 43. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 44. Raymond, unpublished letter, Magenta, June 20, 1859. New York Public Library. 45. Raymond, unpublished letter to the New York Times, Milan, June 21, 1859, New York Public Library. 46. Albany Evening Standard, July 13, 1859. 47. New York Times, May 23, 1859. 48. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 49. Marraro, Howard. “Documenti Americani sul confitti Italo-Austraco del 1859.” Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento. 47: 24–25. 50. Marraro, “Documenti” 25. 51. Roanoke Times, April 20, 1899.

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52. Krick, Robert E. L. Staff Officers in Gray: A Biographical Register of the Staff Officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 91.

C hapter 5 1. Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Charles Frederick. St. Petersburg and London in the Years1852–1864. Reminiscence of Count Charles Frederick Vitzthum von Eckstaedt. Trans. Edward Fairfax Taylor. Ed. Henry Reeve. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1887. 1. 354. 2. The Times, June 28, 1859. 3. The Times, June 14, 1859. 4. Keiger, John F. V. “Reports from Military Commissioners at Austrian and Allied Headquarters.” Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1991. 175. Vol. 23 of British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Pt. I, series F, Italy 1855-1873. Ed. John F. V. Keiger. 5. Adam, Charles. La Guerre d’Italie histoire complète opérations militaries dans la peninsula. 2 vols. Paris: N-J Philippart, 1859. 2. 256–57. 6. Daily News, May 25, 1859. 7. On Crowe see Crowe, Joseph Archer. Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of my Life. London: John Murray, 1895. 8. The Times, June 27, 1859. 9. Morris to Crowe, June 15, 1859, “Manager’s Letter Books of The Times.” 10. Morris to Crowe, June 21, 1859, “Letter Books.” 11. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 12. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 13. Illustrated Times, July 9, 1859. 14. Illustrated Times, July 9, 1859. 15. Hungerford, Constance Cain. Ernest Meissonier: Master in his Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 252, note 14. 16. Moorehead, Caroline. Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross. London: Harper Collins, 1998. 6–7. 17. Dunant, Henri. Mémoires. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’homme, 1971. 28. 18. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream 12. 19. The Times, June 21, 1859. 20. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 21. Bapst, Germaine. Le maréchal Canrobert: souvenirs d’un siècle. 5th ed. 6 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie. 1909. 3. 485. 22. Deguignet, Jean-Marie. Memoirs of a Breton Peasant. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Seven Stones Press, 2004. 188. 23. Cavour, Camillo. Epistolario. 19 vols. Ed. Carlo Pischedda and Rosanna Roccia. Bologna, Florence: 1962–2008. 16. 1047.

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24. Brion, M. J. “Lettres du sous-lieutenant Brion.” Carnet de la sabertache 8 (1900): 592. 25. Adamoli, Giulio. Da San Martino a Mentana. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. 35, 40. 26. Adamoli, Da San Martino 46, 50–52. 27. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 28. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 29. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 30. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 31. New York Times, July 12, 1859. 32. Troy Daily Whig, July 17, 1859. 33. Morris to Crowe, July 1, 1859 “Letter Books.” 34. The Times, July 2, 1859. 35. Morris to Frederick Hardman, July 11, 1859, “Letter Books.” 36. The Times, July 4, 1859. 37. Morris to Crowe, July 11, 1859, “Letter Books.” 38. “Mobray Morris.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, UK: Oxford, 2000. 39. Illustrated Times, July 16, 1859. 40. Daily Telegraph, June 14, 1859; Illustrated London News, July 30, 1859; Le Monde illustré, August 13, 1859. 41. “Reports” 187, 192–93. 42. “Reports” 181. 43. Hungerford, Meissonier 116. Meissonier acknowledged this to his wife in a letter of June 26. 44. Briefe Kaiser Franz Josephs an Kaiserin Elisabeth 1859–1898. 2 vols. Ed. Georg Nostitz-Rieneck. Vienna, Munich: Verlag Herold, 1966. 1. 28. 45. New York Times, August 4, 1859. 46. DePeyster, John Watts. Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, 2nd ed. New York: Rice and Gage; Newark, New Jersey: Bliss & Company. 167–68, 182. 47; Dunant, J. Henry. A Memory of Solferino. Washington, DC: American National Red Cross, 1939. 22, 24, 28, 31. In the original French edition of 1862 Dunant put his name as “Henry,” not Henri. This translation honors that choice. Why Dunant chose to change the spelling of his name is not known. To prevent confusion, I always refer to him as Henri. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 127–28. 48. Dunant, Memory 44–45. 49. Dunant, Memory 51–52. 50. Dunant, Memory 35. 51. Dunant, Memory 45–46, 49, 54. 52. Dunant, Memory 49–50, 59.

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53. Dunant, J. Henry. Un Souvenir de Solferino. Genève: Institut HenryDunant, Slatkine Reprints, 1980. 65. This is a reproduction of the 1862 text. 54. Dunant, Memory 17. 55. New York Times, July 22, 1859. 56. Troy Daily Whig, July 17, 1869. 57. New York Times, July 22, 1859. 58. New York Times, July 22, 1859. 59. New York Times, July 22, 1859. 60. Albany Evening Journal, July 22, 1859. 61. Illustrated Times, July 9, 1859. 62. Illustrated Times July 9, 1859. 63. Arrivabene, Carlo. Italy under Victor Emmanuel. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862. 1. 40–41. 64. Dunant, Memory 40–41. 65. Arrivabene, Italy. 1. 226. 66. Illustrated London News, February 25, 1860. 67. The panorama is reproduced in Napoleone III a Brescia e à Solferino. La Vittoria celebrata 1859–2009. Elena Lucchesi, Maurizio Mondini, Francesca Morandini, eds. Milan, 2009. For a brief discussion of the panorama, see 124. 68. Bazancourt, César de. Cinq mois au camp devant Sébastopol. 2nd ed. Paris: Amyot, 1855. x–xi. The comment about “arms of iron,” and so on appears in the dedication to Colonel Fleury. 69. The Times, June 13, 1856. 70. The actual comment was made in a review of La Campagne d’Italie published in The Athenaeum, March 3, 1860. 71. Mémoires du Comte Horace du Viel Castel. 6 vols. Paris: Chez tous les libraires, 1883–1884. 3. 210. 72. Bazancourt, César de. The Crimean Expedition. Trans. Robert Howe Gould. London: S. Low Son & Co., 1856. 2. 216. 73. Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie 2. 381. 74. Gallenga, Antonio. Italy Revisited. 2 vols. London: S. Tinsley, 1876. 1. 343–44. 75. “Rapporto del Principe Napoleone all’Imperatore Napoleone III.” In Alfredo Comandini. Il Principe Napoleone nel risorgimento italiano. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1922. 175–77. The comment “touriste” is reported in Crowe, Reminiscences, 297. 76. Gallenga, Antonio. Episodes of my Second Life. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1884. 1. 293. For more on Gallenga see Cerruti, Toni. Antonio Gallenga. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. 77. Gallenga, Italy Revisited 1. 330, 348.

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C hapter 6 1. Bryas, Charles. État des services militaires et civils. Paris: Ledoyen, 1860. 6. I am indebted to my colleague, David Bien, for transcribing portions of this text for me while he was in Paris. 2. Bryas, Charles. “Mon Excursion en Italie.” Études pratiques sur l’art de dessécher. 2 vols. Paris: Ledoyen, 1859. 2, 248. 3. “Mon Excursion,” 256. 4. Illustrated Times, July 16, 1859. 5. Dunant, J. Henry. A Memory of Solferino. Washington, DC: American National Red Cross, 1939. 83. 6. Boppe, Roger. L’homme et la guerre: le docteur Louis Appia et les débuts de la croix-rouge. Geneva-Paris: J. Muhlethaler, 1959. 29. 7. New York Times, August 16, 1859. Emphasis in the original text. 8. New York Times, August 16, 1859. 9. Prosper Mérimée to Antonio Panizzi, July 15, 1859. Mérimée, Prosper. Correspondance générale de Prosper Mérimée. 17 vols. Eds. Maurice Praturier, Pierre Josserand, and Jean Mallion. Paris: Le Divan, 1941–1964. 2, 168. 10. Case, Lynn M. French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954. 80. 11. This was reported in an undated letter to the Empress. Memoirs of the Empress Eugénie. 2 vols. Ed. Comte Fleury. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1920. 2. 33. 12. The Times, July 14, 1859. 13. Fleury, Emile Felix. Souvenirs de Général Cte. Fleury. 2 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nouritt & cie., 1897–1898. 2, 117. 14. Bazancourt, César de. La campagne d’Italie. 2 vols. Army ed. Paris: Amyot, 1860. 2, 349. 15. The Times, July 19, 1859 16. The prince’s account of his mission, “Les Preliminaries de la paix juillet 1859. Journal de la mission a Verone auprès de L’Empereur d’auteur,” is printed in Revue des deux mondes, 52 (August 1, 1909). 17. New York Times, July 29, 1859. 18. Marraro, Howard R. “Documenti Americani sul conflitti Italo-Austraco del 1859.” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 47 (1959): 38. 19. Daily Telegraph, July 22, 1859. 20. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy. Ed. Peter Heydon and Philip Kelley. New York, 1973. 143–44. This letter is dated October 31[?], 1859. 21. Daily News, March 29, 1860. 22. Crispi, Francesco. Scritti e discorsi politici di Francesco Crispi. Rome: Unione Cooperativa Editrice, 1890. 229–30. 23. Kossuth, Memories of My Exile. Trans. Ferencz Jausz. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Company, 1880. 383, 386, 410, 414.

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24. Kossuth, Memories 415. 25. The Times, July 15, 1859. 26. Kossuth, Memories 383. The comment is contained in a memorandum Kossuth wrote on July 3, 1859. 27. Signorini, Marie Adele. “Il Salotto di Gesualdo e Cesira Pozzolini nella Firenze del 1859.” Salotti e ruolo femminile in Italia. Ed. Maria Luisi Petri and Elena Brambilla. Venice: Marsilio, 2004. 397. 28. The Times, July 23, 1859. 29. The Times, July 11, 1859. 30. Daily News, July 1, 1859. 31. Saturday Review, July 30, 1859. 32. Saturday Review, July 30, 1859. 33. Daily News October 17, 1859. 34. Hoare, G. T. Notes on North Italy and the Seat of War. London: Aylott & Son, 1860. 10, 13. 35. Hoare, Notes 33–34. 36. Hoare, Notes 40. 37. Hoare, Notes 27–28. 38. Ormsby, John. “The Battlefields of 1859.” Frasers Magazine 61 (1860): 172, 174. There is an entry for Ormsby in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 39. Ormsby, “Battlefields” 174–75. 40. Hale, Edward Everett. Ninety Day’s Worth of Europe. Boston: Walker, Wise, 1861. 100. 41. Ormsby, “Battlefields” 175. 42. Froude, James Anthony. “Mr. Ormsby’s Don Quixote.” Quarterly Review 162 (1886): 46. 43. Stephen, Leslie. “John Ormsby.” The Alpine Journal 28 (1896): 34. 44. The Letters of Henry Adams. 6 vols. Ed. J. C. Levenson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1982–1988. 1. 46. 45. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930. 85–87. 46. New York Times, May 9, 1859. 47. Seward, Frederick. William H. Steward: an autobiography from 1801 to 1834. With a memoir of his life, and selections of his letters. 3 vols. New York: Derby and Miller, 1891. 2. 424. 48. Seward, Steward 2. 368, 390–92, 425. 49. Seward, Steward 2. 426. 50. Seward, Steward 2. 382–83, 426. 51. Seward, Steward 2. 432. 52. New York Times, July 30, 1859. 53. Chicago Press & Tribune, July 15, 1859. 54. New York Times August 15, 1859. 55. Comments reprinted in New York Times, July 14, 1859. 56. New York Times, August 29, 1859.

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57. Logan’s comments come from a collection of her newspaper articles that she published in 1861 under the nom de plume, “Chroniqueuse.” Logan, Olive (“Chroniqueuse”), Photographs of Paris Life. Paris: William Tinsley, 1861. 85–86, 88, 148–49. Curiously absent from the festivities were Plon-Plon and Clotilde. Baroche, Mme Jules, Le Second Empire. Notes et souvenirs, 1855–1871. Paris: Crès, 1921. 130. 58. Photographs of Paris Life, 85; Illustrated London News, August 26, 1859. 59. New York Times, September 1, 1859. 60. Oeuvres de Napoléon III. 5 vols. Paris: Amyot, 1856–1869. 5.93. 61. Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Arnold. 6 vols. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001. 1. 483 62. Arnold, Matthew. On the Classical Tradition. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.76, 86. 63. Arnold, Letters of Arnold 1. 485. Comment contained in a letter to his good friend, Arthur Hugh Clough. 64. For more on this matter see the introduction to Matthew Arnold’s England and the Italian Question. Ed. Merle M. Bevington. Durham: Duke University Press, 1953. 65. Arnold, Letters of Arnold, 1. 507. 66. Dragomirov, Mikhail. “Les causes des revers Autrichiens en 1859.” Revue de Paris 53 (1902): 459, 464. This is a French translation of the essay. 67. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Eugene. Notice sur Charles Furne. Paris: J. Claye, 1860. 29. 68. Gazette des Beaux Arts, August 15, 1859. 69. Le Monde illustré, April 23, 1859. 70. Gautier, Théophile. Exposition de 1859. Ed. Wolfgang Drost & Ulrike Henninges. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitats Verlag, 1992. 82. 71. Gazette des Beaux Arts, May 1, 1859 72. Mantz, Paul. “Raffet.” Gazette des Beaux Arts 7 (1860): 12. 73. Mantz, “Raffet,” 18. 74. d’Ivoi, Paul. Figaro, March 1, 1886. Quoted in Michèle Lefrançois. “Raffet et la conquête de l’Algérie.” Raffet 1804–1860. Paris: Éditions Herscher, 1999. 60 note 1. 75. Notes et croquis de Raffet. Ed. Auguste Raffet. Paris: Amand-Durand, 1878. 133, 135–38. 76. Bry, Auguste. Raffet: sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris: J. Bauer, 1874. 95. 77. Notes et croquis 139. 78. Bry, Raffet 99. 79. Bry, Raffet 100. 80. Ladoué, Pierre. Un peinter de l’épopée française: Raffet. Paris: A. Michel, 1946. 112–13.

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Chapter 7 1. Miller, Frederick. A Study of the Italian Campaign of 1859. Woolwich, England: Royal Artillery Institution, 1860. Preface. 2. Miller, A Study, 53–54. 3. Crowe, Joseph Archer. Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of My Life. London: John Murray, 1895. 369. 4. The Times, October 3, 11, 1859. 5. The War in Italy. London: Day & Son, 1859. Preface. 6. Bazancourt, César de. La campagne d’Italie, 2 vols. Army edition. Paris: Amyot, 1860. 1. 64. 7. Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie 1. 64 8. Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie 1. 211. 9. Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie 1. 135; 2. 267. 10. Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie 2. 291. 11. Viel Castel, Horace du. Memoirs du Comte Horace du Viel Castel, 6 vols. Paris: Chez tous les librairies, 1883–1884. 6. 41. At one point in his assessment of the war, Moltke chided Bazancourt for his ability to know the emperor’s mind before the emperor could possibly have. Moltke’s Kriegsgeschichtliche Arbeiten. Der Italienische Feldzug des Jahres 1859. Berlin, 1904. 157. 12. The Times, June 25, 1869. 13. Correspondance générale de Prosper Mérimée. 17 vols. Ed. Maurice Praturier, Pierre Josserand, and Jean Mallion. Paris: Le Divan, 1941– 1964. 4. 310–11. 14. The Times, September 16, 1859. 15. Daily News, October 19, 1859. 16. Daily News, October 19, 1859. The play ran for two months, closing in mid-December. Mazzini, who likely did not see a performance, was “disgusted” by Taylor’s having exploited Garibaldi in a stage spectacle. Mazzini, Giuseppe. Scritti editi ed inediti, 106 vols. Imola: Cooperativa Tipografica-Editrice P. Galeati, 1906–1990. 39. 111. 17. Gazette des Beaux Arts, September 1, 1867. 18. The Times, November 19, 1859. 19. The Times, September 28, 1860. For a detailed description of the paintings, see the review in The Athenaeum, October 6, 1860. 20. Art Journal, April 1860. 21. Daily News, December 27, 1859. 22. War in Italy, 17, 22, 63, 66. 23. Daily Telegraph, December 23, 1859. 24. Guerra d’Italia. Paris: C. Perrin, 1860. “Prefazione.” 25. Miller, A Study 71. 26. War Office, 30/125. National Archives. 27. Miller, Frederick. “Military Sketch of the Present War in America.” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 6 (London, 1863): 242, 245, 253, 262.

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28. The Standard, February 1, 1868. The records that exist concerning his lectureship are now held in the library at Sandhurst. The Warwickshire County Record Office holds newspaper cuttings announcing Miller’s death and several letters written to his family by his physician and a fellow officer during his last illness. 29. Letter to his brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr, June 9, 1860. The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols. Ed. J. C. Levenson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1982–1988. 1. 162, 164. 30. Letter to Elizabeth Giganti April 25, 1899. Adams, Letters, 4. 714. 31. Adams, Letters 1. 168. 32. Adams, Letters 1. 169. 33. The Times, June 13, 1860. 34. Morris to Eber, August 27, 1860. Hungarian National Archives. 35. Camp, Maxime du. Expédition des Deux Sicilies: souvenirs personnels. Paris: Librarie Nouvelle, 1861. 301. 36. Gréard, Octave. Meissonier, His Life and his Art. Trans. Mary Loyd and Florence Simmonds. London: Heinemann, 1897. 41–42. 37. New York Times, June 28, 1861. 38. New York Times, June 28, 1861. The review of Bazancourt appeared April 17, 1860. 39. Yvon, Adolphe. “Souvenirs d’un peinter militaire,” Revue des deux mondes, October 15, 1933. 871. 40. L’Illustration, May 16, 1861. 41. http: exposition. bnf.fr/napol/grand/108.htm. Accessed July 2, 2007. 42. Méhédin has been credited with the three photos, discussed earlier, that made up the panoramic view of Solferino. If he was responsible for them, the decision to leave out of the album the picture of the road leading up to the cemetery was in keeping with what the emperor wanted the album to be. Why bring death into a summer excursion? 43. La Lumière, May 15, 1861. 44. Langlois, Colonel. Explanation of the Panorama of the Battle of Solferino. Paris: Ch. Lahure, 1867. 11. 45. Camp, Maxime du. Souvenirs littéraires de Maxime du Camp. Ed. Henri Lemaitre. Paris: Hachette, 1962. 143. 46. Robichon François and André Rouillé. Jean-Charles Langlois: le photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédité de Crimée (1855–1856). Nimes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1992. 265. 47. Jean-Charles Langlois: photographe normand et le Panorama de la bataille de Solferino. Caen: Archives départementales du Calvados et l’ARDI, 2000. 57. 48. Oetterman, Stephan. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. New York: Zone Books, 1997. 159–60.

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Notes 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

247

Du Camp, Souvenirs 143–44. Langlois,Explication 11. Langlois, Photographe normand 104. Dunant, J. Henry. A Memory of Solferino. Washington, DC: American National Red Cross, 1939. 19–20. Dunant, Memory 48. Dunant, Memory 85, 95. Dunant, Memory 53 note. Emphasis in the text. Moorehead, Caroline. Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross. London: Harper Collins, 1998. 8. All the Year Around. May 16, 1863, 283. Fattori, Giovanni. Scritti autobiografici editi ed inediti. Ed. Francesco Errico. Rome: De Luca, 1980. 27. Jouin, Henry. “Adolphe Yvon.” Paris: “L’Artiste,” 1893. 25. This comment is not included in the portion of the “Souvenirs d’un peintre militaire published in the Revue des deux monde in October 1933. Le Monde illustré, August 27, 1864. Dabot, Henri. Souvenirs et impressions d’un bourgeois du quartier latin. Peronne: Impr. E. Quentin, 1899. 148. Hungerford, Constance Cain. Earnest Meissonier: Master in His Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 116. This from a letter the artist wrote two days after the battle. Hungerford, Meissonier 117. Journal des Débats; The Judgment August 15, 1864; Les Beaux Arts July 15, 1864. Quoted in King, Ross. The Judgement of Paris. New York: Walker & Co., 2006. 126. Gréard, Octave. Meissonier, His Life and his Art. Trans. Mary Loyd and Florence Simmonds. London: Heinemann, 1897. 243. The comment was made in the House of Commons April 21, 1864. Hansard, 3rd series, 174. 1424. Blakiston, Noel. “Garibaldi’s Visit to London in 1864.” unpublished lecture, 2. Indicative of this appeal are the opening lines of a letter to Garibaldi written February 2, 1860 by W. M. Thackeray as editor of the Cornhill Magazine: “We have 500,000 readers. How many more should we have for an article by ?” Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 182. The Times, April 12, 1864. Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 6 vols. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001. 2. 301. Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Thousand. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1909. 370. Le Temps, March 8, 1895.

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Notes

72. Montrosier, Eugene. Les Artistes Modernes. Paris: H. Launette, 1884. 7. 73. L’Artiste, March 1895. 74. Robichon and Rouillé. Jean-Charles Langlois. 75. Art Journal, September 1867. 76. My thanks to Professor François Robichon for this information. 77. Langlois, Explanation, 12. 78. Langlois, Explanation, 50. 79. Journal of Eugène Delacroix. 3 vols. Ed. André Joubin. Paris: E. Plon, 1932. 3. 186. 80. Oettermann, Panorama, 164. 81. L’Illustration, July 1, 1865.

C hapter 8 1. Le Constitutionnel, June 20, 1869. 2. New York Times, July 6, 1869. 3. Thompson, J. M. Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 282. 4. The Times, June 25, 1869. 5. Diable a Quatre [n.d.], quoted in Illustrated London News July 10, 1869. 6. Knapp, Henry. “Diary of Henry Knapp.” December 27, 1869. http:// e2proxy.uwstout.edu/ics.wpd/knapp_diaries/diary. Accessed July 17, 2008. 7. L’Artiste, July 1869. There were three paintings of the Crimean War. 8. Daily Telegraph, September 16, 1859. 9. Ridley, Jasper. Garibaldi. New York: Viking, 1974. 414. 10. Oeuvres de Napoléon III. 5 vols. Paris: Amyot, 1856–1869. 5. 86–87. 11. Henry d’Ideville. Journal d’un diplomate en Italie. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1872. 5. 12. Monti, Antonio. Il Conte Luigi Torelli. Milan: Presso Il R. Instituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, 1931. 498. 13. L’Illustration, April 2, 1870. 14. The speech is reprinted in Il Generale Govone 584–85. 15. Stoddard, John L. John L. Stoddard’s Lectures. Supplementary Volumes. Boston: Balch Brothers, 1901–1909. 3, 220. 16. The accompanying story was not written by the artist. The two men were military attachés serving in Florence for their respective governments. 17. The Times, June 27, 1870. 18. Stoddard, Lectures 220. 19. McMillan, James F. Napoleon III. London, New York: Longman, 1991. 163. 20. The Times, May 22, 1882.

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249

21. The Times, May 29, 1893. 22. Le Temps, May 29, 1893. 23. Siciliani, Cesira. Una visita agli ossari di San Martino e Solferino. Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1881. 17. 24. Siciliani, Una visita 45. 25. Siciliani, Una visita 47. 26. Siciliani, Una visita 78–79. 27. The phrase is found in the biographical sketch Torelli wrote about Bossoli, which is printed in Peyrot, Ada. Carlo Bossoli: luoghi, personaggi, costumi, avventimenti, nell’Europa dell’Ottocento, visti dal pittore ticinese. 2 vols. Turin: Tip. Torinese editrice, 1974. 1, 4–10. 28. The Times, October 16, 1893. 29. Gorce, Pierre de la. Histoire du second empire. 12th ed. 7 vols. Paris: Librairie Plon, Plon-Nourrit, 1911–1916. 3, 55. 30. Laforge, Leon. Histoire complète de MacMahon: Maréchal de France, duc de Magenta. 3 vols. Paris: Lamuelle et Poisson, 1898. 3, 67. This passage originally appeared in a letter Tragella had sent to Figaro. 31. Illustrated London News, October 28, 1898. 32. Quoted in Laforge, MacMahon 66–67. 33. Laforge, MacMahon 69. 34. Le Temps, June 5, 1895. 35. Laforge, MacMahon 79. 36. Le Temps, June 5, 1895. 37. Laforge, MacMahon 88–89. 38. Trevelyan, G. M. “Autobiography of an Historian.” An Autobiography and other Essays. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1907. 28. 39. Trevelyan, “Autobiography,” 12. 40. Trevelyan, G. M. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, A Memoir. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1932. 80, 82. 41. Trevelyan, “Autobiography,” 28. 42. Cannadine, David. G. M. Trevelyan, A Life in History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 69. 43. Churchill, Randolph, and Martin Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill, 8 vols. London: Heinemann, 1966–1988. 2. Companion, part I, 671. 44. Churchill to his mother, April 25, 1898. Churchill and Gilbert, Churchill. 1. 383. 45. Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 409 note 128. The speech is in Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic. London: Longman and Green Company, 1907. 231. 46. Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Thousand. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1909. 107. 47. Cannadine, Trevelyan 135.

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250

Notes

48. Churchill, Winston S. My Early Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. 19. 49. Trevelyan, “Autobiography,” 4, 13, 34. 50. Figaro, June 5, 1909. 51. Storia d’Italia. Annali 2: L’Immagine fotografica 1845–1945. 2 vols. Ed. Carlo Bentelli and Giulio Bollati. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Photograph No. 90. 52. Figaro, June 5, 1909. 53. Figaro, June 4, 1895. 54. Le Temps, July 13, 1898. 55. Saturday Review, April 27, 1895. 56. Routier, Gaston. 1859–1909: La Résurrection de l’Italie. Paris: Éditions de L’“Époque moderne.” v, 3. 57. Routier, 1859–1909 62, 112, 113, 143. 58. Routier, 1859–1909 138, 141. 59. New York Times, June 15, 1919. 60. Swart, Koenraad W. The Sense of decadence in Nineteenth Century France. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1964. 146–47. 61. Routier, Gaston. La Guerre se meurt . . . la paix s’impose! Madrid: Hernández, 1918. 15. 62. Routier, La Guerre 16, 217. 63. Le Temps, June 15, 1919. 64. Routier, La Guerre 222. 65. Bolton King, quoted in Mack Smith, Denis, Modern Italy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959, 1997. 191. 66. Figaro, June 25, 1909. 67. Routier, 1859–1909 92. 68. Figaro, June 25, 1909. 69. Poiré, Eugène. Magenta et Solferino, autrefois—aujourd’hui. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1907. 110. Poiré emphasized the point by saying that the visitors came “en tous temps.” His own visit was in 1903. 70. Figaro, June 25, 1909. 71. Le Temps, June 26, 1909. 72. L’Illustrazione Italiana, July 4, 1909. 73. The visit is recorded in Dionigi, Renzo. Sono in America! Le lettere di Giulio Adamoli al padre, Boston 1866–1867. Varese: Insubria University Press. 74. Adamoli, Giulio. De San Martino a Mentana. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. 171; The Times, March 2, 4, 1885. 75. Adamoli. Episodi vissuti. Ed. G. A. Essengrini. Varese: Instituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1929. 242–43. 76. Le Temps, June 26, 1909. 77. L’Illustrazione Italiana, June 13, 1909. The statue, done by Francesco Barzaghi, had been placed in a courtyard rather than a public square, thanks to a change in public feeling toward the Emperor

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Notes

78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

251

after his soldiers had fought against Garibaldi at Mentana. Tensions between the two countries later on had only complicated feelings about honoring the emperor. Only in 1927 would the monument be moved to a more public location, Sempione Park. For more on the statue, see Tobia, Bruno. Una patria per gli italiani. Spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell’Itali unita 1870–1900. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1991. Chapter 11. L’Illustrazione Italiana, July 4, 1909. Paleologue, Maurice. The Tragic Empress: a record of intimate talks with the Empress Eugénie, 1901–1919. Trans. Hamish Miles. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1928. 205. Lavisse’s speech is to be found in Lega Franco-Italiana. Nel cinquantesimo anniversario della guerra liberatrice. 1859–1909. Turin: S. Lattes, 1909. 22. Emphasis in the original. Figaro, June 28, 1909. Figaro, June 26, 1909. Emphasis added. Traditionally, public building and homes in cities and towns were lit up to celebrate military victories. As we have seen, Matthew Arnold viewed several such displays while he was in France in 1859.

E pilo gue 1. The Times, June 8, 1936. 2. Moorehead, Caroline. Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross. London: Harper Collins, 1998, 161. 3. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream 257. 4. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream 287; New York Times, October 8, 1921. 5. Le Monde, June 25, 1959. 6. DeGaulle, Charles. Discours et messages. 7 vols. Genève: Éditition Édito-service, 1970. 3. 100–101. 7. New York Times, June 24, 1959.

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Index

Achard, Amédée, 154 Adam, Albrecht, 26 Adam, Eugen, 26, 179 Adam, Franz, 26, 179 “Transport of the Wounded after the Battle of Solferino,” 179 Adamoli, Giulio, 18, 117, 220at battle of Solferino, 104 Da San Martino a Mentana, 221 and Ferdinand Eber, 220–21 and 1909 anniversary, 220, 221 Adams, Henry, 136–37 Education of Henry Adams, The, 136 on Garibaldi, 167 in Sicily 1860, 167–68 Ador, Gustave, 226 Albert, Prince, 31, 162, 232n1 Allegri, Giuseppe, 87 American Civil War, 2, 87, 103, 186 Anatole Demidoff, Prince, 147, 148, 158 Appia, Louis, 124, 184 Armand-Dumaresq, Edouard, 25, 179, 185, 191, 201 “Le lendemain de Solferino,” 185 and Marshal Vaillant, 25, 179“Transport of the Wounded,” 179 Arnold, Matthew, 29, 53, 57, 251n82 England and the Italian Question, 143–44

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and Garibaldi visit to England in 1864, 183 on Napoleon III, 144 and Volunteer Rifle Corps, 144–45, 152 Arrivabene, Carlo, 117 Austro-Prussia War (1866), 187, 199, 220 role of Italy, 191–92, 197 Bailey, Gamaliel, 91 Baraguey d’Hilliers, Achille, 40, 41 and battle of Melegnano, 84 Barrett, Jerry, 42battlefield tourists, 130–32, 151, 174, 225 Baudelaire, Charles, 78, 179 on battle paintings, 25 on François Tabar, 25–26 Bazancourt, César de, 119–20, 126, 151 Cinq mois du camp devant Sébastopol, 119 commissions, 119, 154 in Crimea, 119friendship with Fleury, 120 La campagne d’Italie de 1859, 155– 56, 171, 188, 215, 245n6 L’Expedition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol, 119 Beato, Felicè, 34, 65 Beaucé, Jean-Adolphe, 39, 109, 142, 187, 233n20 Beauquier, Charles, 222

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254

Index

Bellora, Giovanni, 193 Benedek, Ludwig von, 193 Bennett, George, 118–19 Beuret, Georges, 39, 109, 202 Bigelow, Henry Jacob, 87 Blanc, Charles, 25, 146 Bonaparte-Patterson, Jerome, 49–51, 55, 75 Borgomainerio, Luigi, 195–96, 198, 203 Borodino, battle of (1812), 40 Bossoli, Carlo, 27 commission, 79 and Luigi Torelli, 205, 249n27 Views of the Crimea, 79 Views on the Railway between Turin and Genoa, 79 War in Italy, The, 153, 154, 163–65 Breda, Vincenzo Stefano, 206 Brocca, Giuseppe, 210, 214 and MacMahon funeral, 207 and MacMahon memorial, 208–9 Bronzetti, Narcisco, 160 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 29 anger over Villafranca, 128 Poems before Congress, 128 Bry, Auguste, 148, 149 Bryas, Marquis de, 123–24, 125, 194, 228 Études pratiques sur l’art de dessécher, 123 meets Dunant, 124 Cadogan, George, 21, 80 at Solferino, 110 Camp, Maxime du, 170, 173, 174 Canrobert, François, 25, 41, 66 and journalists, 22 at MacMahon funeral, 207 Carducci, Giosuè, 203 Carlyle, Thomas, 48 Carr, George Watson, 94–95 Carrano, Francesco, 161

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Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 7, 10, 30, 37, 54, 167 and Crimean War, 7 eagerness for war, 11 and Garibaldi, 17, 18, 82 and Peard, 18 Plombières, 5, 9 reaction to Palestro, 61 and San Martino, 104 supports Hungarian uprising, 55–56 Cavriana, Ippolito, 194 Charles Albert, King, 6–7, 122 Charlet, Nicolas, 147, 149 Churchill, Jennie, 211 Churchill, Winston, 211–12, 213 and Garibaldi, 211 Claremont, Edward, 21, 29, 71, 84 at battle of Solferino, 110–11 Clarendon, George Villiers, 22, 79 Cler, Jean Joseph, 72, 77 Clotilde, Princess, 9, 244n57 Colette, Jules, 92 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 92, 238n41 Cook, Henry, 162, 172 Recollections of a Tour of the Ionian Islands, Greece and Constantinople, The, 162 Scenery of Central Italy, The, 162 Cowley, Henry Wellesley, 29, 119 Crimean War, 1, 2, 7, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 26, 65, 66 Crispi, Francesco, 30, 213, 221 goes to Sicily, 128 and MacMahon memorial, 208 Crookes, William, 33, 34, 36, 37, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64–65 Crowe, Joseph Archer and battle of Solferino, 108 employed by The Times, 99 idea for narrative of the war, 152–53 postwar visit to Solferino, 130 relations with Morris, 100, 107, 108 Custoza, battles of, 6, 197 ossuary, 203

9/30/10 11:53 AM

Index Dabot, Henri, 180–81 Daniel, John Moncure, 38, 94–95, 128 Day & Son, 26, 79, 80, 153, 154 Day, William, 153 Decamps, Alexandre, 73 De Gaulle, Charles battlefield visits, 3, 227, 228 and Dunant, 228 Déguignet, Jean-Marie, 16 De La Haye, Colonel, 198, 248n16 Delane, John Thaddeus, 22, 23, 107 Delavo, Jean Antoine, 40 Delille, Henry A. and Garibaldi, 82 and Morning Chronicle, 22, 50 reaction to Melegnano, 85, 88 reaction to wounded, 74 De Nigris, Giuseppe “Impressions of a Picture, The,” 161–62 Desaix, Louis, 71 D’Homme a Hommes, 226, 227 Dickens, Charles, 177, 178 Disdéri, 13 Dragomirov, Mikhail, 20, 145–46 “Les causes des revers Autrichiens en 1859,” 145 Dreyfus case, 221, 223 and Picquart, 223 Drut, Barthélmy Marie, 66 Dunant, Henri (Henry), 2–3, 180, 185, 194 antipathy to Geneva, 226 background, 102 and Bryas, 124 and creation of Red Cross, 184, 225, 228 Empire of Charlemagne Restored, The, 102 letter to Journal de Genève, 113 monument to him, 227 Nobel Prize, 226

pal-marwil-11in.indd 255

255

Un Souvenir de Solferino, 175–78, 184, 188, 226, 240n47 and wounded at Castiglione, 111–14 Dupont, Léonce Garibaldi interview, 69 Eber, Ferdinand (Nandor), 60, 61, 80, 100, 103 background, 56–57 at battle of Solferino, 108 on Bossoli, 163 death, 221 and Garibaldi, 168–69, 183–84 Garibaldi Palermo, ossia, bel tratto della rivoluzione siciliana narrata da un testimone oculare, 170 Hungarian patriotism, 57, 170 Magenta visit, 71–72 and Mowbray Morris, 108, 10 postwar visits to battlefields, 152, 153 in Sicily (1860), 169 as Times correspondent, 80War in Italy, The, 153, 154, 163–65 Elena, Queen, 213, 217–20, 226 Espinasse, Charles, 72, 77, 83, 131, 194 memorial to, 210 Eugénie, Empress, 31, 172, 186, 200, 201, 222 Eugenio di Savoia-Carignano, Prince, 79, 80, 95, 96 Fabre, Adolphe, 202 Fattori, Giovanni, 178–80 “Italian Camp after the Battle of Magenta, The,” 178–79 postwar visit to Magenta, 178 Fenton, Roger, 33, 118 Figyelmesy, Philip, 90 Flandrin, Hippolyte, 157

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256

Index

Fleury, Émile Félix, 21, 72, 120 and Bazancourt, 154 meeting with Franz Joseph, 125, 126 Floyd, John Buchanan, 94, 95 Forey, Élie, 39, 40 Forsyth, James, 55, 91, 107, 114, 115, 139, 189, 200 at battle of Solferino, 107 difficulties of reporting, 116 postwar visits to Solferino, 114–15 visit to Magenta, 92–93 Franco-Italian League, 213, 222 founding, 208 and MacMahon memorial, 208–10 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), 200–201, 215 Franz Joseph, Kaiser, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 53, 67, 71, 145, 187, 191, 227 assumption of army command, 95, 97 decision for battle, 98, 103 military experience, 14 Villafranca, 126–27, 172 visit to army hospital, 97 Froude, James Anthony, 136 Fry, Edmund, 23 Furne, Charles, 19–20, 78, 123, 147 at battle of Magenta, 73–74 homecoming and death, 146 relations with soldiers, 73, 74 Gallenga, Anthony, 121–22 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 82, 160 and battle of Varese, 46–47 defense of Rome (1848–49), 1 Memoirs, 210 memorials to, 192, 193, 222 reputation, 16–17, 27, 70 and Sesto Calende, 45–46 subject of Taylor play, 157–58 and “the thousand,” 1, 165, 167

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as the “true Bonaparte” of the war, 48, 69 visit to England (1854), 70 visit to England (1864), 182–84 Gautier, Théophile, 26, 28 Gettysburg, battle of (1863), 168 Giacomelli, Vincenzo, 74 Ginain, Louis Eugéne, 142 Gladstone, William Ewart, 30, 51, 143, 144 and Garibaldi’s 1864 visit, 182, 184 Goito, battle of (1848), 6, 14, 61, 205 Goodall, Frederick “Letter from Papa, A,” 135 Gorce, Pierre de la visit to Magenta, 206 Gould, Robert Howe, 120 Govone, Francesco, 39–40 Govone, Giuseppe, 21, 84 background, 11 brother’s death, 39–40, 66 criticism of tactics, 197 death, 200 reactions to Palestro, 66–67 speech at Solferino ossuary, 197, 218 Grassi, Ernesto, 207–8 Greek War of Independence, 1 Gronchi, Giovanni visit to battlefields, 3, 227, 228 Gros, Baron, 42, 87, 147, 159 Gudin, Theodore, 25 Guerzoni, Giuseppe, 161 Guizot, François, 29 Gyulai, Franz von, 12, 37, 66 mistakes, 44 removed from command, 67, 97–98 Hale, Edward Everett, 134 Haynau, Julius Jacob, 124, 136 Hemingway, Ernest, 212

9/30/10 11:53 AM

Index Hoare, George Tooker, 132, 193 Notes on North Italy and the Seat of War in 1859, 132–33 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 87, 89, 173 Homer, 4, 91, 116, 147, 154 Iliad, 4 Hudson, James, 24 Imperial, Prince, 13, 50, 142 death, 201 in 1870, 200 and Ernest Lavisse, 222 passion for soldiering, 190 Indian Mutiny (1857), 33–34, 65 Induno, Gerolamo, 17, 18, 161“Battle of Magenta,” 160 “Battle of San Martino,” 160 commission, 160, 162 industrialization of war, 1, 12–13, 68, 91 Inkerman, battle of (1854), 57, 67 Miller description, 151 International Red Cross, 225–26, 228 and Franco-Prussian War, 201 and World War I, 226 Iung, Henri, 209 speaker at MacMahon unveiling, 208 James, G. P. R., 130 Jerome Bonaparte, Prince (“PlonPlon”), 9, 13, 244n57 and Bazancourt, 120, 154 and Fifth Corps, 49, 120–21, 147 military reputation, 49 and Villafranca, 127, 242n16 J. L., 58, 59, 178, 203, 228 at battle of Palestro, 60–63 identity, 34–35 motives as photographer, 32, 65 opinions, 34, 36 photographs of dead, 64–65, 87–88

pal-marwil-11in.indd 257

257

Johnston, William Edward (“Malakoff”), 75, 77, 100, 139, 228 account of battle of Solferino, 113, 114 background, 75 criticism of The Times, 76 criticism of treatment of the wounded, 124–25, 139–40 difficulties of reporting, 94, 116 eagerness to see war, 76, 91 and 1861 Salon help with wounded, 12, 125 on Meissonier, 171 praise for his reporting, 140 rejects offer to report AustroPrussian War, 187 visit to Magenta, 92–93, 141 visits to Solferino battlefield, 115 and wounded, 106 Jomini, Alexandre, 20, 41 Jullian, Henri, 214 Kearny, Philip, 19, 50, 75 at battle of Solferino, 110 Legion of Honor, 111 Klapka, Gyorgy, 56, 72 and Hungarian National Committee, 56, 57 manifesto to Hungarian soldiers, 89 reaction to Villafranca, 129 War in the East, The, 56 Klinkowstrom, Joseph, 97–98 Klinkowstrom, Max, 97 Königgrätz, battle of (1866), 168, 199 Kossuth, Louis, 55, 72 journey to Italy, 90–91 and Napoleon, Prince, 121 as public figure, 90–91 and Raymond, 55 reaction to Villafranca, 128–29

9/30/10 11:53 AM

258

Index

“Lady with a Lamp,” 227 La Marmora, Alfonso, 7, 11, 82, 94, 104 Lang, Gideon Scott, 69–70 Langlois, Jean-Charles, 224 “Battle of Moscow,” 173, 174, 186 “Battle of Navarino,” 174 “Battle of Solferino,” 186, 187–88, 190 “Burning of Moscow,” 174 in Crimea, 173 Delacroix on, 188 Explication du panorama et relation de la bataille de Solferino, 186 innovation in panoramas, 174 and Leon Méhédin, 173 and photography, 173, 175, 187 working habits, 174 Langlois, Josephine, 173–75 Larrey, François Xavier, 84 Lavisse, Ernest, 222–23 Lecomte, Ferdinand, 20 Le Gray, Gustave, 32 Leipzig, battle of (1813), 41, 104 Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 29, 192 Leutze, Emmanuel, 161 Logan, Olive, 22, 142, 243n57 Louis-Philippe, 25 MacMahon, Patrice, 194 at battle of Magenta, 71, 77, 98 death and funeral, 206–10 dedication of memorial at Magenta, 208–9 memorial at magenta, 207–9, 214 Maleville, Louis Charles, 111 Malmesbury, Lord, 9, 10, 24, 44, 56 Mantz, Paul, 160 Marees, Hans von, 179 “Transport of the Wounded,” 179

pal-marwil-11in.indd 258

Marengo, 61 battle of (1800), 16, 71 memorial at, 40 ossuary, 40 visitors, 40 Martineau, Harriet, 144 Maunoir, Theodore, 124 Mazenod, Eugene de, 13, 83 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 6, 16, 121, 122, 128 critical of Taylor play, 245n16 distrust of Cavour, 30 McClellan, George, 95 McCormick, Richard, 23 Méhédin, Leon, 64, 246n42 Campagne d’Italie, 172 in Crimea, 173 in Salon of 1861, 172–73 Meissonier, Ernest “Barricade, The,” 78 at battle of Solferino, 110 as book illustrator, 78 “Brawl, The” “Campaign of France, The,” 182 commission, 78 difficulties working, 101–2 “Emperor Napoleon at the Battle of Solferino, The,” 181–83 and Napoleon, 182 postwar visit to Solferino, 170 slowness as painter, 171 Mérimée, Prosper, 125, 156 Mèry, Joseph, 53 Metternich, Clement, 89, 136 Mildmay, Edmund, 21, 44, 98 at battle of Solferino, 110 and Magenta, 72–73 visit to wounded, 44 Millais, John Everett “News from Home,” 135 Miller, Frederick Crimean War, 151, 165 death, 167, 246n28 Equipment of the Artillery, The, 165

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Index paintings and sketches, 151–52, 167 Study of the Italian Campaign, A, 151–52, 165, 166 Topographical Office, 165 Woolwich lectures, 166–67 Mocquard, Jean, 22 Moltke, Helmuth von, 215, 245n11 Montebello, battle of (1859), 77, 103 casualties, 38, 47 ossuary, 202 Morelli, Tommaso, 39 Morris, Louis-Michel, 19 Morris, Mowbray, 57 and Eber, 57, 58, 72, 16 and Gallenga, 121–22 idea for war narrative, 152–53 Moynier, Gustave, 225 Napoleon I, 5, 7, 26, 201 influence, 27–28, 212 Italian campaign (1800), 16, 21, 38 monument at Marengo, 40, 233n25 and panoramas, 28, 173 Treaty of Campo Formio (1797), 128 Napoleon III, Emperor, 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 17, 30, 51, 61, 70, 175, 205 battle of Sedan (1870), 200–201 at battle of Solferino, 105, 110, 172 and Chalons, 189–90, 194 decision to end war, 2, 125–26, 129–30 entry into Brescia, 98 entry into Milan, 80 health, 191, 20 and his army, 61, 189–90 Histoire de Jules César, 156–57 and Marengo, 40–41, 61

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and Melegnano, 84, 87 on memory, 143, 188, 190 military experience, 89 and Palestro, 66 Plombières, 5, 9 and the press, 22, 70, 119 reaction to dead and wounded, 2, 41–42, 66, 67, 84, 129 statue in Milan, 222, 250–51n77 threat to England, 107, 143, 152 Villafranca, 126, 127, 172 visits to Milan hospitals, 83 visit to Montebello wounded, 41–42 Nelson, Horatio, 27 Neubauer, Anton, 225 Nightingale, Florence, 102, 113, 227 Ormsby, John, 133, 205, 243n38 and soldiers’ letters, 134–35, 136 translation of Don Quixote, 136 Orsini, Felice, 8, 128 ossuaries, 194–95, 203, 218. See also under individual battles Owen, Wilfrid, 196 Pagliano, Eleuterio, 17–18 commission, 160–62 “Landing of Garibaldi and the Cacciatori at Sesto Calende,” 160–61 “Taking of the Cemetery at Solferino, The,” 160 Palestro, battle of, 60–62, 103 casualties, 63, 66 ossuary, 202–3 reaction of The Times, 68 panoramas impact on audience, 28, 174, 187–88 political value, 28, 173, 187 popularity, 28, 186 Paris, Congress of (1856), 7, 78

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260

Index

Parlatore, Filippo, 29 Paulin, Jean-Baptiste, 154 Peard, John background, 18–19 criticism of, 47, 147 and Garibaldi, 18–19, 45, 168, 170, 183–84, 233n40 as stage character, 157–58 Perrin, Charles, 165 photography images of the dead, 2, 33, 85–87 and Napoleon III, 13, 31 and panoramas, 173, 174, 175, 187 in Salon of 1861, 172 Picquart, Marie Georges, 223 and Dreyfus case, 223 Pius IX (pope), 5 Plombières (1858), 5, 8–9, 127 Pollak, Lt. Colonel, 198, 199, 248n16 Popp de Szathmari, Carol, 33 Pozzolini, Eugenio, 29 Pozzolini, Georgio, 130, 203 Radetzky, Joseph, 6, 89 Raffet, Auguste, 178 and Demidoff, Prince, 147, 148, 158 focus of work, 146–47 and Furne illness and death, 149 “Le lendemain de Solferino,” 158–59 “Les Drapeaux,” 148 and Napoleon, Prince, 147 Raglan, Lord, 22 Randon, Jacques Louis, 11, 66 Raymond, Henry Jarvis, 54, 76, 100, 139 account of Solferino, 113, 114 and American Civil War, 186–87 at battle of Solferino, 104, 105 battle souvenirs, 115

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competition with The Times, 107, 140 death, 189 defense of Napoleon III, 127, 140 difficulties of reporting, 93, 94, 116 political career, 54 visit to Magenta, 92–93 visit to Solferino, 115 and wounded, 106 Reati, Alessandro, 82 Renan, Ernest, 177 Ricasoli, Bettino, 178 Rigo, Jules, 42 Rivet, Gustave, 215, 216 Roth, Joseph Radetzky March, 225 Routier, Gaston, 216, 218 background, 214 condemned to death, 217 criticism of French army, 216 death, 217 1859–1909 La Résurrection de l’Italie, 215 Espagne en 1897, 214 Grandeur et décadence des Français, 214, 216 La Guerre se meurt . . . La Paix s’impose!, 217 Le Roman de l’Espagne heroïque, 216 Les Droits de la France en Madagascar, 215 and Magenta 1909, 214 and ossuaries, 218 political views, 216, 217 visits to Italy, 215 and World War I, 216–17 Routledge, George, 153 Ruskin, John, 135 Russell, William Howard, 55, 65, 93, 107, 140–41 controversy over, 22, 23 influence, 22 postwar books, 154

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Index Sacchi, Luigi, 87, 118–19 Sand, George, 29, 70 on Garibaldi, 70 “La Guerre,” 29 San Martino, battle of funeral mass, 193 naming of, 104 1959 celebration, 227–28 1909 celebration, 217 ossuary, 194–99, 200, 203, 206 Schlick, Franz Joseph von, 97, 100 Sebastopol, siege of (1854–55), 23, 57, 98 Secchi, Luigi, 208, 209 Sedan, battle of (1870), 168, 201 casualties, 210 Senior, Nassau, 37 Seward, William on European civil war, 138 and Franz Joseph, 137 and Kossuth, 137 on Napoleon I, 139 postwar visit to Magenta, 138, 139 postwar visit to Solferino, 137–38, 139 visit to Waterloo, 139 Siciliani, Cesira Pozzolino, 29, 130 Napoli e dintorni, 2 postwar visit to San Martino and Solferino, 203–5 Una visita agli ossari de San Martino e Solferino, 203–5 Siciliani, Pietro, 203 Silvestre, Félix, 215 Societa di Solferino e San Martino, 195, 200, 205, 206 soldiers’ letters, 105, 134–35, 204–5 Solferino, battle of, 88, 104, 168 casualties, 2, 104, 116, 117–18, 180 1909 celebration, 3, 217–24 1959 celebration, 3, 227–28 ossuary, 194–99, 200, 203 stage plays and theatricals of war, 27, 99, 100, 122, 188

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Stephen, Leslie, 136 Stoddard, John, 200 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 102, 178 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 102, 177 Strafforello, Gustavo, 164 Tabar, François Tabar, 25, 179–80 “Convoy of the Wounded,” 179–80 Taylor, Tom, 157–58, 245n16 “Garibaldi,” 157 “Our American Cousin,” 157 Texier, Edmond, 68, 78, 154 article censored, 74, 236n60 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 24, 247n67 Thiers, Adolphe, 41, 182 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 Tommaso, Duke of Genoa, 213, 214 Torelli, Luigi, 197, 199, 200, 203 background, 194 and Bossoli, 205, 249n27 Legion of Honor, 198–99 and ossuaries, 194–95 Tragella, Cesare, 210, 249n30 MacMahon funeral, 207 MacMahon memorial, 208–9, 214 Trevelyan, George Macauley, 210, 212 and Churchill, 212 on Eber, 184 fascination with war, 212 Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, 211 Garibaldi and the Thousand, 211, 212, 213 Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic, 211, 212 and Garibaldi’s fame, 211 Trevelyan, George Otto, 210 Umberto I, King, 197, 199, 202, 208

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262 Vaillant, Jean Baptiste, 11, 25, 26, 126 Vanson, Émile, 16 Varese, battle of, 46–47, 161 casualties, 47 Vernet, Horace, 25, 78–79, 87 Victor Emanuel II, King, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 67, 70, 84, 127, 167 at battle of Palestro at battle of San Martino, 104, 193 commissions for artists, 160, 162 and 1866 war, 191–92 entry into Milan, 80 memorials to, 192, 205 passion for war, 66, 192 visits to Milan hospitals, 83 Victor Emanuel III, King, 213, 217–20 and veterans, 220 Victoria, Queen, 28, 162 and Bossoli, 79 concern for soldiers, 42 dislike for Garibaldi, 183 interest in military matters, 15 interest in photography, 31 Viel Castel, Horace de, 120, 156 Villafranca, 60, 126–27 anger at armistice, 128–29, 192 Bossoli picture, 163 and Meissonier, 170 Villamarina, Salvatore, 75 Vizetelly, Frank, 23, 24, 101 at battle of San Martino, 109 journey to seat of war, 24, 149

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Index at Vercelli, 59 visit to Palestro battlefield, 67 visit to San Martino battlefield, 116–17 war sketches, 25, 43, 59, 67, 109, 116 and wounded of Montebello, 43 Wachsmuth, Ferdinand, 26, 159 War in Italy, The (1859), 163–65 translation, 164–65 Washington, George, 205 Waterloo, battle of, 26, 113, 130 casualties, 104 postwar visitors to battlefield, 40, 139 Wellington, Duke of, 27 Wilessen, Wilhelm von, 21 William, Prince Regent, 21, 125 Woestyn, Eugene, 122 World War I, 2, 3, 68, 212, 216, 225, 226 Wyld, James, 26, 130 Ypsilanti, Alexander, 27 Yvon, Adolph “Battle of Solferino,” 171–72, 181, 187 “Capture of the Malakoff,” 77 commission, 77, 146 “Convoy of the Wounded,” 179 “Curtain of the Malakoff,” 77, 146 “Gorge of the Malakoff,” 77, 146, 171 Zurich, Treaty of (1859), 131, 192

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