GOING TO BATTLE DAILY.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 169, 4 May 1871, Page 3

GOING TO BATTLE DAILY.

There is something awful, says the correspondent of the " Times," in getting up every morning and going to a battle as regularly and calmly as if one was going out partridge-shooting. Yet for the last three days I have been driving to the scene of slaughter and back again to the same quarters iv the evening until the plain has been invested in my eyes with a frightful familiarity, and my landmarks are the same stiffened corpses, which have not yet been removed, and which are scattered for miles over the fields. Day after day to pass the same ditch and see the same contorted features and glassy eyes which thrilled one with horror the first time still staring at one ; to try new roads in order to avoid the ghastly sights of the old ones, only to obtain fresh evidences of tho great area over which the fight has been extended ; and after pi ssing across Lhe battle-fields of three succesive days, to fiud on the fourth a new battle gom-j: on at the point where the last one left off; all this is calculated to produce a sense of distress difficult to describe. In no places do the dead lie very thick together ; here and there 20 or 30 may be counted in a group, but as a general rule they are sparsely and widely dotted over the plains. Now and then, where a shell has burst in the middle of a battery of artilery, may be seen men and horses together, but the French h're had not been sufficiently good to render such sights common.