Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

352 MlLITAR V LIFE.
army enter Chivasso at evening, fifteen days
after the battle of
Novara. Many wagons, horses, a cannon, two officers, and
several soldiers were missing from the battery. The captain
and one lieutenant accompanied it. The people witnessed
their entrance in silence and sadness, as they would have done
the passage of a funeral cortege.
They stopped in the first square. The captain ordered his
officer to park the battery, and, dismounting from his horse, he
looked about as if in search of some one in the crowd.
A moment later, two young men (one might have been
twenty-five, the other eighteen) approached him, took off their
" "
hats, and asked timidly
: Are you Captain
?
The captain did not allow them to finish, shook hands with
"
both, calling them kindly by name, and said : I took the liberty
of writing direct to you, without having
the honor of
knowing you, because I knew of no one else in this city to
whom I could turn ;
I should have written earlier if I had been
able to learn any thing about your family.
. . . But not
even his friends," he added in a sad tone,
" could tell me any
thing ;
and he had many dear ones, the poor, poor fellow."
Then he put out his hand again to the two young men, who
pressed it affectionately.
" Did you say any thing about my letter to your father "
?
They replied that they had said nothing, save that the captain
of the battery to which their poor brother had belonged
would come within a few days to pay him a visit ; they could
not tell him any thing more because he was ill,
afraid of exciting him too much ; yet
and they were
some details of his son's
death had reached him two days after the battle, and he had
been perfectly inconsolable.