A Terrible Toll.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 447, 10 November 1904, Page 5

A Terrible Toll.

I The magnitude of the struggle in which Japan and Russia are engaged is brought home to the public understanding by the number of casualties reported. At Fort Arthur, at the Yalu, at Liapyang, and at Shaho, the killed and wounded have run into appalling figures. Men have been mowed down in thousands and tens of thousands, extensive battlefields have been converted into veritable shambles, and ever small and comparatively unimportant engagements have produced records of slaughter that make Oolenao and Mageiifontein appear mere skirmishes. Last week's cables stated that after the battle of Shaho the victorious Japanese buried over 13,000 Ruasiaa dead, and previously it was announced that the Russian casualties in the battle had totalled 68,000. Ibis does not take into account the Japanese losses, but it is, nevertheless, a record of slaughter that eclipses those of some famous engagements of history. At Waterloo 40,000 men were killed or wounded, and at Borodino 80,000 paid the toll of war. Russia, at Yagni, lost 47,000, and Mars-la-Tour cost Germany 17,000 men. The South African campaign is altogether dwarfed by the fighting proceeding in Manchuria. Eleven hundred casualties at Oolenso was the record for a day's bloodshed in the Boer war, and at Magersfontein, Belmont, and Paardeburg the killed and wounded numbered well under a thousand. The first five engagements of the Japanese land campaign, at Yalu, Nanshan, Wafangkau, Motienling and Haioheng, produced more casualties than did the whole of the South African engagements, which were spread over three years. Eighteen thousand men were stated to have fallen in one of the early assaults on Port Arthur, and since then the cables have again and again, in a few pregnant words, told ghastly stories of soldiers dying in thousands under the merciless fire of a bitter enemy. The casualties at Port Arthur alone are likely to exceed in number those of many famous European campaigns, while the total for the war will probably go a long way towards the record of the American civil war, which reached some 600,000 men. It is small wonder that war is condemned as unworthy of civilisation by so many of the world's greatest thinkers. The soldiers killed and wounded represent only a small portion of the misery caused throughout the conflicting nations, and a,war such as is being waged in the Far East represents an amount of human suffering that is appalling to contemplate, and impossible to estimate.