FIFTY THOUSAND KILLED AND WOUNDED.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 16, Issue 876, 25 November 1870, Page 2

FIFTY THOUSAND KILLED AND WOUNDED.

[rKOM THE LONDON ECHO-I Two or threp years ago the newspaper placards about London, announced a '* Fearful Railway Accident" at Aberr gele, Twelve, fourteen, sixteen people, it was successively asserted, were killed, burnt to cleath, or suffocated by the ignition of the fatal pargo of inflammable oil. AU England was horrified at the news, and men's faces grew pale a,s they narrated it to one another, and strove to prove that the death of the sufferers must have been instantaneous. The evidence of the woman who professe4 to have offered to take the child from the lady, and to have seen the passengers locked Up in their carriages after the collision, wa.s canvassed by a thousand critical, tongues, and rehearsed in every newspaper with anxious comments. The scene of the funeral, when the poor charred relics of what had once been men and women were shewn lying on the cotton-wool in, their coffins, called tears from the eyes of mauy more than the witnesses of the tragedy, or the personal friends of the dead ; and for mouths afterwards none, passed the blackened wall of the railway which marked the point of the catastrophe without, a shudder. That was the great horror of those peaceful years. And now we see, as we hurry along the streets, the same newspaper placards, with the announcement,—this time not in the largest type, as if it were so great a matter — i •' 50,000 killed and wounded." And we read it at a glance as we pass l>y, and remark to our neighbor, " Is it not shock-, ing ?" or perhaps ejaculate in our hearts, " God help the families! " and go on to plunge into speculations about marches, and sieges, capitulations and abdications, changes of frontier and indemnities of war %

as if we were watching a steeple-chase, &ni they were only so many stalks of wheat, and not gallant men, which had been trodden down into the mire. The simple truth is, that our minds refuse to realise what such a mass of misery can mean. We could imagine the few suffocated passengers in the railway train, but a battle field is too big for our small hearts' sympathy. They would burst with grief could we really understand it; and so none but God can know all that it means. The tortures of the mangled horses alone —-agonies which none can *top ; to assuage or end by merciful death ..,-*-would form a nightmare like a hundred Alforts in one. But theJiuman sufferings, as the mutilated forms lie writhing hour After hoar before help can reach them, can anyone count the pangs so multiplied ? Men who have had more powers of comprehension than their fellows have ere now gone mad at witnessing* half such carnage as that of the week past. The young Prince for whose sake, it may be, the war was undertaken, and for whom his father wrote so proudly that he was unmoved at the bullets of Saarbruck, that poor boy, we are told, has now seen enough to shake his young nerves, and cause him to shriek with terror in his sleep,. Well-worn soldiers and correspondents, whose business for years has been to watch every battle field of the world, speak of special incidents of horror; and fail to give any conception .of the main fact itself—that on those .sweet familiar plains of the blue Moselle bave been this week lying five hundred £iraes an hundred human forms, either maimed or dead. A soldier actually killed in battle does not meet with a very painful death. Jn the fierce excitement of war the sense of pain is for a moment lost, and men, like gallant Sir Thomas Trowbridge, cannot be made to understand why they must retire when both -their feet have been shot off. It is those who linger for hours after the mortal wound in agony and thirst unspeakable, help Less as so many trampled is for these that the soldier's fate is terrible. A»d for every dead man in an army, must we not reckon at least one Jife darkened and left desolate at home ? In a country where conscription prevails it would probably be nearer the truth to .sty that every life lost iu the field means a household left without support —old age sentenced to poverty and dependence on strangers, and childhood deprived of a father's aid and guidance. Worse than death itself, however, we must needs deem to the sufferer are often those fearful wounds and mutilations which form so large a part of the casualties of a battle. It is common for men to talk disdainfully of such injuries, and to speak as if fame and military honors were ample compensation for a lost leg or a shattered arm. They speak ignorantly. A man may be willing to become a cripple to save his Fatherland or to obey the calls of honor, or to do his duty, as he considers it, to his God. But it is mockery to talk as if any reward his fel-Jow-men can give him -r- pensions and medals and titles and ribbons could .compensate him for his sacrifice. Any one who has known what it is to live a few years deprived of the use of the free limbs and senses of nature, knows but too well that had the wealth of the world been his he would have poured it out like water to be restored to the state of the .healthy beggar in the street.

In the old war which ended at Waterloo it is recorded that an English officer lost both his arms and one of bis feet. On his return to England, he sent a friend to tell the beautiful girl whom he was engaged to marry that he released her from her promise, dreading that she could only loujc at him with terror and disgust. The lady heard the message, and then returned the fitting answer of a woman's heart,—" Tell him that if there be but enough of his body left to hold his soul, I will be his wife." Love can conquer woes worse than death, and we doubt not jtlje brave soldier found in it his sufficient comfort; but it is sheer folly to think he would have, done so in a few inches of ribbon. At this day in America there are thousands of poor fellows lingering in their mutilated frames, using, as best they may, the false arms and legs, whose manufacture, we are told, became so profitable a source of trade during the war. In France and Germany, alas! ere long we shall see similar martyrs in every town and village, and by what arithmetic are sre to count their sufferings and those of

the men wounded in the thousand ways which destroy health and enjoyment, while they fail to put a merciful close to existence ? . Perhaps it may be said that there is no use iu wringing our hearts here in England with efforts to picture sufferings which we have not caused and can but slightly alleviate. Rather let the distance, small as it is, between our smiling corn-fieids and hopgardens and those red plains of France save us as much as may be from the dreadful sight, and interpose that haze of aerial perspective which makes all things seem dim. But such stolidity is unworthy of Englishmen; nor is it well in the face of so tremendous a drama of history, that we should lose its sharpest lesson. These fifty thousand dead and wounded, and the more than a hundred thousand hearts which are grieving for them, are not creatures of another planet, but people with whom we have had, and still have, endless sympathies —a cultured, keen-feel-ing, chivalrous race, susceptible alike in mind and bodily frame of all the bitterest pain 3to which humanity is exposed. No pity we can give them will equal their sufferings under such losses and such humiliation. But it is only by putting ourselves as best we may in their place that we shall adequately measure the guilt involved in what, so far at least as 'they are concerned, is an unjust and unnecessary proclamation of war.