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Show LOSf Vi WARS Of Tilt LAST -GENIM Appalling Presentation of the fiorrors of f Armed Conflicts Between Civiiiz;fJ Nations, Na-tions, Compared With Totalities Through Accident. Fourteen million men were killed in "civil i"' warfare in those "years of mic Lord" 1 m to ll-eo. One hundred and Jir'tv billion ei.di.-w-. v.i :c - . '. ... quired by tlie enginery of war cm-ii u.ii- I i lions out of all semblance- io ihe Civa in c. -o j J image they h:id Ik en cunningly made. And considering flics.- lignres j-. Ii.s drawn them. Professor Charles Un-hof of I'aris i'..)k, io I the future of the twentieth century, seeing iu ir t, t promise of a diminishing death roll ami ti lighi- en ing of the burden.-- of militarism . f tin- next 1"" years. In Kichet's figures. 1-lo.lino men a year may be lookeel to in the next century as eiviliarii.n's tribute trib-ute to Mars. For the maintenance of standing armies, however, and for the conduct of the campaigns cam-paigns that shall kill and that shall devastate and lay waste, multiplied billions of money will be necessary, nec-essary, almost bevond the ineuuing of clustering numerals. For. as modern war has become "sanitary" "sani-tary" and "scientific." it alsn has become costly. But of the wars which Kichet numbers and whose costs and losses he computes, ir is said that ho merely touches their horrors. These wars were nt "sanitary" or especially "scientific." An English writer who was with Napole-on in the retreat from Moscow puts intc a paragraph of description more suggestion of horror than lies in Kichet's figure's of 10,OOO.OUO lives for the wars of this first Napoleon. Napoleon?s Reti-eat Brings Honors. Of this retreat the Englishman says: "The snow lay thick on the- frozen ground and the wounded on the march from Kars to Ezeroum, league after league, blazel the trail with their blood. The frozen flesh dropped from the hands and feet of the men an el the bones were black from decomposition. Two thousand men started en this raare'h and ol7 reached Ezeroum, 1U miles away." Another picture of later date is that of Lieutenant Lieu-tenant Herbert of the British army, who was among the prisoners taken by tlie llussians at Plevna and marched away to KbarkorF. There were oM.O'lO ,f v these Turks in the beginning of the march and !,0i of them dropped by the wayside. Herbert says of the scenes: "The route lay through snow-clad country in severe frost, with snowstorms and bitter winds. ... I saw at least 40 men drop down, taken as little notice of as if they were sei much offal, to die of starvation anel exposure', or to be elevoured by tin: wolves, which prowled around ottr column always. Over each man who fell a hideeus cloud of e-rows, ravens and vultures hovered until he was sufficiently sufficient-ly exhausted to be attacked with impunity." These are snow pictures. There are the pictures that might be drawn of death by the desert heat, or of death by the raging fever: death by drowning: death by slow starvation; death by the gangrenom wounds of bullet, shell and canister. And of the H.WO.OOO deaths that have been figured by Biehet, hundreds of thousands have come by these torturing tortur-ing means. Little Corsicari's Glory Cost 10.000,000 Lives. Biehet accredits the wars of the first Napoleon with 10.000,000 lives; the Crimea with ,'500.000; the American civil Avar, 500.000; Prussia, with 800,000 between 1SC0 and 171 : the Busso-Turkish war with , 400.000; in South American battlefield, .".OO.OOO;; and among the colonizing nations of Europe all over the world a loss of ".OoO.OOO men. To this vast total, too. he adds an unnumbered myriad who through the influences of war have gone down to : death through its direct influence. "Vet the twentieth century is promising no diminution of these victims as compared with tho-e of the last 100 years." is Biehet. 's conclusion. This observation is based upon the war footings of the great nations of the world. These total footings foot-ings for war in the great nations of Europe are? numbered as follows: Germany. .".I'.OO.Ooo men; France. r,i()0,000 men: Italy, J.iiOO.OOO men; Russia. ."),200.000 men; Great Britain, 700,000 men, and Turkey. Tur-key. 750.000 men. And as to the prospects for tfu future. Von Medtko has written in his memoirs; "We admit that the thirty years' war 'and thr seven years' war will never be rehearsed again. Yet when millions of men array themselves opposite ot.o another in a desperate struggle for national existence-, it is difficult to assume that the question will be settled by a few victories." To destroy these M.oOO.OOu men of a dozen nationalities na-tionalities and in the fighting characteristic of war by land and by ,se-a. the authority r.aking the table 'has figured that it cost $ l."0.j:;.",000.000. War. as it has developed, has grown more costly, not onK- in general totals but doubly so in the fact that thousands thou-sands of men are not sacrificed How in a single bat-' bat-' tie as they have' been sacrificed when men fought with cruder weapons. Sanitation and the Red Cross work have made the camp less a death heNjp than it one-o was, until it-has been advanced that one day if war eloes become obsolete, it will be because be-cause the nations no longer will be able to stand the financial strain of war's long drawn imlecisive-ness. imlecisive-ness. I Where Price Was Paid. I . Some of the great battlefields of the pa-st arc named here in their order of dates since the begin- I ning of the nineteenth century: I With the first Napoleon 'the fields of Marengo, f Trafalgar, Austerlitz. Jena, Fricdland. Leipsic, I Ligny and Waterloo are inseparably assoeiatcel. In'the war of the United States with Mexico are i the battles of Buena Vista, Ccrro Gordo and the. I City of Mexico. ' 1 The Crimea has given to history the fields of f Alma, Balaklava, Inkennan and MalakhotF. f The civil war in the United States left upon thy , -- . I (.t-'ontinucd on Page ) I 1 fourteen Million Lost in W3rs of Last Century (Continued from Page 1.) map some of. the bloodiest battlefields of all history. There are Shiloh, the Seven Days' battles, the second sec-ond Bull Run, Antietam, Murfreesboro, Chancel-lorsville, Chancel-lorsville, Yicksburg, . Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the Virginia, and the Atlanta campaigns. France and Prussia made memorable the fighting fight-ing at Worth, Gravelotte, Sedan, Metz and Paris. The Russians and the Turks had Plevna, Shipka Pass and Kars. . Majuba Hill long ago, and Spion Kop three years ago, made havoc for the English in South Africa. .; Port Arthur, Weihaiwei and Xingchang are memorable to the Chinese and Japanese who fought there ten years ago. Manila, San Juan Hill and Santiago have thrilled the American nation as they have brought mourning to the Spaniards. And the war in the far east is raging to the glory, or to the savagery, of the new twentieth cen- I tury. War, to the music of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," always has been another thing to the war of which Sherman spoke so bluntly. One battle may be a hundred Iroquois theatres and another hundred "General Slocum" tragedies, and yet still be only the expected results of the day. And after, the shock and heat and dead and dying of the day, there are "taps" in the silent camps the long, melancholy mel-ancholy notes of the bugles that are tam, up, one by one, all round the white tented field a sound that brings to many a hardened soldier of the day the homesick tears of the silent night. Reveille in the morning from the same bugle may bring him to his feet in the gray dawn, swearing at his broken rest ; but "taps," under the white stars, when night has settled down and thoughts of home are easy and insistent, bring the soldier some of the bitterest bitter-est tears of his life. Smokeless Power Increases War's Terrors. Within the" last twenty years the horrors of war, a3 seen on the field of battle, have been multiplied by the introduction of smokeless powder. The time waswhen the field of a great battle., so far as a bird's-eye view might be concerned, was smoke of guns and rolling clouds of dust. Xot only does the smokeless nowder leavn the. finld clear as to the effect of the enemy's fire, but on tho part of those fighting the deadly bullet comes whining whin-ing upon its mission of death with nothing to mark the position of the man behind the gun. Some of the hardest service seen by American troops, both in the Cuban campaign and in the Philippines, came from the sharpshooting of Spaniards and Filipinos, using the Mauser rifle with smokeless powder. Death by lightning out of a clear sky could not have beeri more disconcerting. General Kuropat--kin, now at the head of the Russian army in the present war with Japan, wrote nearly twenty years ago of the disposition of the soldier under fire. "Troops do not give way so much to an inferiority inferior-ity of numbers which forbids them" holding on. They. might resist even after losing 75 per cent of their own numbers. They do not give way so much because of the losses they have sustained. But it is in fear of the further hopeless losses which they ' may expert if they remain where they are or continue con-tinue the attack." Whether on the offensive or defensive in battle, the soldier sees more of the effect of his own and tho enemy's missiles than ever before, even if the fighting ranges have increased. Jean de Bloch, writing of the war in the Transvaal, touched upon the manner in which smokeless powder virtually has made the drill ground obsolete. He says: "Our officers recognized, even before they had fired a shot, that what they had practiced in peace was utterly unsuitcd to the Mauser-swept field On hardly a single occasion was the usage of the maneuver ground. adhered to." Plevna was one of the great object lessons in war in the latter part of tho last century. Osraan Pasha' there iutrenched himself against' the Russians, Rus-sians, whd hed taken the field without having as much as a spade with which to throw up a protection protec-tion for a man. In the first assault of the Russians, Rus-sians, 3G per cent of the attacking force was shot down; in the second assault 2(5 per cent of the assaulting as-saulting Russians were killed or wounded. For four months the Turk held out against four times his own forces simply through his intrencliments. Soldiers and Laborers' Chances Ccmpared. In the tables of life's prospects it has been shown thathe British soldier iu barracks" will die at the rate of fifteen to the 1,000 cvcry.yea.r. In th field," it has been remarked in all nations that di. ease takes few men when they are on the march - in active. fighting; it is when they go into r-;iM., 1 that fevers and intestinal disorders reap their hj:-- 7 vests. West Africa long has been known as "white man's grave." India has proved as im;.-;, to the British soldiery. From the death rolls in the Transvaal an English authority has .dra ;; some comparative figures between industrial . ci ties and the casualties of mtvlern w.-. For tl;. year between Sept. 1, 1SU!. to Aug. 1, l'-'OO. Kit. i. : prepared tho following table of deaths to the l.oi.i Miners Factory Railway and quar- opera- Aw - Armv. cmploves. rymen. Sailors, tivs. ;i Deaths ... 36.9 1.20 1.21 T.S! 0.20.", o -. . Wounded 67.4 00.06 6.31 ltOT 17 K ; ; Totals ...104.3 32.16 , 7.52 AS.S 17.27.', 1. ., These figures show that while of 1,000 w-u at the comparatively dangerous employments railroading, mining, sailing and working in tli. machinery of factories escape death and wound-, the British soldiers in the Transvaal lost 104 n,ru to every 1,000 in the field. |
