FIFTY THOUSAND KILLED AND WOUNDED.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume V, Issue 290, 9 December 1870, Page 4

FIFTY THOUSAND KILLED AND WOUNDED.

o {From the London Echo.) Two or three years ago the newspaper placards about London announced a "Fearful Railway Accident at Abergele." Twelve, fourteen, sixteen people, it was successively asserted, were killed, burnt to death, or suffocated by the ignition of ■the fatal cargo of inflammable oil. All England was horrified at the news, arid cneu's faces grew pale as they narrated it to ODe another, and strove to prove tbat the death of the sufferers must have been Instantaneous. The scene of the funeral, •when the poor charred relics of what had once been men and women were shown lyiDg on the cotton-wool in their coffins, called tears from the eyes of many more than the witnesses of the tragedy, or the personal friends of the dead ; and for months 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 vee hurry alo_g tbe streets, the same ■newspaper placards, with the nnnounce_oeut — this time not in the largest type, •as if it were so great a matter — " 50,000 •killed aod wounded." And we read it at a glance as we pass by, aud remark to our neighbor, "Is it not shocking ?" or per_iaps ejaculate in our hearts, '* God help the families ! " and go on to plunge into -speculations about marches and sieges, capitulations and abdications, changes of __*ontier and indemnities of war, as if we were watching a steeple-chase, and they •were ouly so many stalks of wheat, and •aot 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 sufiocated passengers in the railway train, but a battle field is too big for our small hearts' symfpathy. They would burst with grief -could we really understand it ; and so -none but -God can know all that it means. Men who have 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 of whom liis father wrote so proudly that he was •ancaoved at the bullets of Saarbruck, that •{poor boy has now seen enough to shake Jus 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 battlefield of the world, speak of special inci--dents of horror; and fail to give any con«ef)tion of the main fact itself — that ou those sweet, familiar plains of the blue Moselle, have been this week lying five

hundred times an hundred human forms, either maimed or dead. A soldier actually killed in battle does not meet with a very painful death. Iv the fierce excitement of war, the sense of pain is for a moment lo9t, and men, like the gallant Sir Thomas Trowbridge, canuotbe made to understand why they must retire when both their feet bave been shot off. It is tbose who linger for hours after the mortal wound, in agony and thirst unspeakable, helpless as so many trampled worms, — it is for these that tbe soldiei's fate is terrible. And for every dead man in an army must we not reckon at least, one life darkened and left desolate at home ? In a country where conscription prevails, it would probably be nearer the truth to say that every life lost in the field means a household left without support — old age sentenced to poveity and dppcndence on strangers, and childhood deprived of a father's aid and guidance At this day, in America, there are thousands of poor fellows lingering in their mutilated frames, using, at best they may, the false arms and leg!*, 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 we 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 uo use in wriuging 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 ifc is, between our smiling corn-fields 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 j 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 Dot creatures of another planet, but people with whom we have had, and still have, endless sympathies — a cultured, keen-feeling, chivalrous race, susceptible alike in mind and bodily frame of all tbe bitterest pains to which humanity is exposed. No pity we can give them will equal their sufferiogs under such losses aud such humiliation. But it is only by putting ourselves as best we may in the ; r 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.