Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1896 — BRUTAL ABYSSINIANSL [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

BRUTAL ABYSSINIANSL

They Are u Cruel add Barbarous aa Anjr People in Africa. A great-deal of stuff has been published during the past few weeks about !Abyssinian civilisation, writes Frank O. Carpenter. The truth is - that the Abysalnlans are almost as barbarous and fully ai brutal as any people of Africa. They are more intelligent, perhaps, than some other nations, but they are the personification of cruelty and brutality. The first great fight which the Egyptians had with the Abysslnlans was with an army under Col.

Arendrup. This man was a Danish lieutenant. • He had come to Egypt Abd had been glyen charge of the army at Massowah, on tho Red Sea. From here he marched with 2,500 men against the Abyssinian capital. Ills men were armed with Remington rifles. They had two six-gun batteries. After a fpw days’ march from the sea they came to the mountains, and they got within ten hours of the King’s capital before they saw anything of their foes. At this point, however, tens of thousands of Abysalnlans sprang out of the hills. They rode their homes right up to the cannon and cut the Egyptians down almost to a man. Of tho 2,500 men 1,800 were massacred. Those who were wounded were brutally mutilated. Their bodies were not burled, and a French consul who visited the battlefield a few days afterward tells how he saw the bones of 1,000 men piled up together In one place, and In another jackals, wolves and hyenas eating at the corpses. Arendrup was killed. The horrors of an Abyssinian battlefield cannot be described. They mutilate thQ dead as well as the living, and their fighting is accompanied by all sorts of unnecessary cruelty. The

scalping done by the Indians Is a refined and gentle custom In comparison with that of the Abyssinlans in their wars. They cut up different parts of the body and carry away pieces as trophies. Gen. Dye says that In going through the battlefield he saw one mass of mangled human remains. The bodies looked as though they had been chewed up by wild beasts. There were hundreds of heads, which had been cut off, and hundreds of naked and bleeding bodies, the faces of which were distorted with pain and fear, and the eyes of which were protruding and glaring. Borne of the bodies were burned. Borne had been clubbed and hacked with fcwords, and all were mutilated In such a way as cannot be described.

AN ABYSSINIAN YOUTH.