THE CHILI-PERU WAR.

Temuka Leader, Issue 353, 12 February 1881, Page 3

THE CHILI-PERU WAR.

The American correspondent of the ;Otago Daily Times in speaking of the wai between Peru and Chili, says.; The details of the butcheries surpass credulity. An officer on board the United States warship Adams reports from actual observation what transpired at Arica after it was carried by assault. ' The Chilians turned the Peruvians’ flank, attached thew fortifications in the rear, and coolly pitched the garrison over the cliffs hundreds of feet high. He writes Then began a terrible scene ot rapine and carnage. I saw one spot in the garden of a well-to-do Peruvian .where nine pairs of human feet projected from the earth, their owners being buried there alive, bead downwards, by the Peruvians, some time previous to the attack. These men, with some 200 men who worked on the Peruvian defences, had formed the craw of a Chilian transport captured and brought into Arica. When the Chilians captured the city .these prisoners were released and pointed out the place of this inhuman crime, .which together with their recital of the cruelties and barbarous usage they them selves received, so worked upon the army that they burst from all control and shot and stabbed every Peruvian—man, woman, or child—or burned them alive in the buildings in which they took refuge. The details of this butchery are appalling, and would be held as impossible in a Christian country, yet the ’first and last sight of Arica shows its large cathedral, as in all towns in this country, leading one to think its presence would in a manner restrain these murBut the native population iknow no more of Christianity or its great truths than a savage of South Africa. The Chilians are here concentrating their forces preparatory to advancing on Lima, which is the Richmond of their war.