THE HORRORS OF WAR.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue XXXII, 9 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE HORRORS OF WAR.

A visitor to New Zealand, Mr Win. Jones, late Secretary to the Peace Society of Great Britain, has heen lecturing in Dunedin on the subject of international arbitration as an alternative for war. In the course of his lecture he 6aid :—War in reality is a very different thing from that which is so glowingly described in the pages of the historian or by the war correspondents. Iu 1870-71 it was bis duty, being in charge of the relief fund so liberally subscribed in England, to visit scenes of battles and seiges in the Franco-Prussian War. He saw the field of Gravelotte—the most tremendous battle of the war—where the sun rose on August 20 and shone ou 350,000 armed men, of whom at sunset 28,000 were corpses, while countless thousands were wounded, smashed, or disfigured out of all recognition. He visited Metz, the place of arms in the whole world. From its situation no cannonball could be tired into Met/.; it never surrendered to force but to famine. He was permitted to pass through the German lines into Metz, and he was thus able to see the actual condition of the besieged army. Fancy 170,000 fighting men shut in by a ring of steelshut iu so closely, that, ns a German officer said to him, "not even a mouse can eo in or out without permission. Inside the city he saw the flower of the French Army, the Imperial Guard, lying about iu the mud, their only food a few biscuits and horseflesh. A mass of human misery, fever-smitten, aud famine-strick-en. Dying away like rotten sheep, carried off by dysentery and confluent smallpox, h ever also increased— first it was typhoid, then typhus, aud then black or livid typhus, a form so dangerous that no cases were allowed to go into the hospital so the sufferers were pot into the railway cars in the streets and squares, where they could be seen writhing about in straw, with no friend at hand to soothe their last moments or whisper a word of consolation in their ears. Humau beings were abandoned to die a worse death than that of " the brute that perisheth." That was war in its reality.