SEDAN AFTER THE BATTLE.

Westport Times, Volume IV, Issue 734, 8 November 1870, Page 3

SEDAN AFTER THE BATTLE.

The " Times" correspondent thus describes his visit to the battlefield : I think the British public must have had enough of battlefield horrors and hospital scenes. There will be plenty of letters describing Kranken-tragers, burial parties, wounded men, heaps of dead, the hideous reverse of the medal, on the other side of which are the bright emblazonments of glory and victory. I will not dwell on the topic, but ask your readers to be content with the assurance that no human eye ever rested on such revolting objects as were presented by the battlefields around Sedan. Let them fancy masses of colored rags glued together with blood and brains, and pinned into strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men's bodies without heads, legs without bodies, heaps of human entraita attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes, with skulls shattered, /aces blown off", hips smashed, bones, flesh, and gay clothing pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours, and then they cannot, with the most vivid imagination, come up to the sickening reality of that butchery. No nightmare could be so frightful. Several times I came on spots where there were two horses lying dead together in harness killed by the same fragment. Several times I saw four, five, and six men, four, five, and six horses, all killed by the explosion of one projectile, and in one place there lay no less than eight French soldiers who must have been struck down by the bursting of a shell over a company, for they lay all round in a circle with their feet inwards, each shattered in the head or chest by a piece of shell, and no other dead being within a hundred yards of them. A curious, and to me unaccountable, phenomenon was the blackness of most of the faces of the dead. Decomposition had not set in, for they were killed only the day before. Another circumstance which struck me was the expression of agony on many faces. Death by the bayonet is agonising, and those who die by steel, open-eyed and openmouthed, have an expression of pain on the features, with protruding tongue. A musket ball, which is at once vital, does not seem to cause much pain, and the features are composed and quiet, sometimes with a sweet smile on the lips. But the prevailing expression on this field of the faces which were not mutilated was one of terror and of agony unutterable. There must have been a hell of torture raging within that semicircle in which the earth was torn asunder from all aides with a real tempest of iron hissing, and screeching, and bursting into the heavy masses at the hands of an unseen enemy. I cannot imagine anything so trying to the bravest man as to meet death almost ingloriously in such a scene as that—nothing so maddening to soldiers as to be annihilated without a chance of vengeance—nothing so awful to the fugitive as to see his comrades blown to fragments all around him. It is well that wives and mothers and fond sisters were spared the sight of their beloved ones, and it is well that in France it is only mothers and sisters who will have to deplore the slain. "Whether the Prussians buried their dead early—the night of the battle itself—or not I cannot tell, but their losses were almost nothing if they were to be estimated by the number of bodies on the field.