DISINFECTING A BATTLE-FIELD.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 38, 5 June 1876, Page 2

DISINFECTING A BATTLE-FIELD.

Here is a horrible description of how the stage has to be cleared away after the curtain lias fallen upon one of the acts of that vast tragedy called "War." It was a hideous and terrible drama, that disinfecting of the battle-field of Sedan, and one that might furnish the text of a chapter entitled "The Morrows of Glory." A Belgium physician, Dr. Guillery, has recounted the principal facts in a report published at Brussels. Historians never show anything but the radiance of the battle. The realism of these works display its hideousness amidst its corruption, You dream of glory I Look and behold a charnel house ! Seven months after the Ist September, 1370, the stench was so great around the battle-field that the public health was in danger. Belgium became alarmed. Prince Orloff wrote to M. Berardi that in the eighteenth century, in a war of the Turks against the Persians, swarms of insects, nourished on decaying flesh, brought a fearful epidemic into Russian provinces a hundred times further from the battle-fields than Brussels is from Sedan. It was necessary to hurry, for the peasants had buried many bodies both of men and horses in a summary fashion. The exhalations were horrible. People took in their hands a little red snow charged with bubbles of gas, and when it melted, it diffused an odour of corpses. Then in March, 1871, men dug and opened in the fields under the snow the tumuli of the dead. Feet still covered with huge boots, and half-decayed faces appeared here and there. Horrible things were discovered. A clog died at La Moncelle from having devoured a corpse. The miasma of the battle-field gave fevers to the poor. '' The dead avenged themselves," as Corneille says. After having disinterred the corpses, they were burned. Pitch, mingled with petroleum, was poured over these human remains, and then chloride of lime. Then all was fired. From time to time a detonation was heard in the tire. It was some cartouche-bo -1 ' attached to a corpse, and which exploded as though these enemies would fain continue the combat after death. And it was by thousands that these dead men, born to be happy and beloved, and to kiss rosy cheeks of their children, were buried there. Two hundred and seventy trenches disinfected by M. Trouet contained six thousand corpses. That was not all. M. Michel disinfected nine hundred and two trenches, and M. Creteur thirty-two hundred and thirteen. Calculate, therefore, how many corpses the tumuli contained !