Jasper County Democrat, Volume 17, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1915 — OLD WARS WERE MORE BLOODY. [ARTICLE]

OLD WARS WERE MORE BLOODY.

Notwithstanding Modern Death-Deal-ing Machinery Slaughter in Ancient Conflicts Was Greater. Modern warfare seems a desperately cold-blooded business. It is not now' so much a question of the man. He is still, of course, a necessary uni£, but efficiency of equipment and scientific war machinery are the telling forces. Swopping war planes scatter tho death-dealing lyddite into the sleeping camp. The trenchs with their spitting rifles and the whirring of concealed machine guns- or the deeper times of the howitzers’ dirge, cast death at the unseen, or almost unseen, enemy. If a veteran of Waterloo could look upon our modern methods he would have difficulty in keeping the grim smile from lvis lips. (In his day the whole game was to get as near to your man as possible and show •what you thought of him at the point of the bayonet should your musket fail to make the desired impression) . But the old soldier would find that our modern warfare is, comparatively speaking, humane when one considers the enormous number of men engaged. So far from increasing the carnage of the battlefield, the tendency of scientific warfare is to diminish it.

In the early days of hand-to-hand struggles it followed that either of the combatants must killed or injured. In such conflicts the slaughter was terrific. The Roman .Jogionary, in the heat of battle, got within a few paces of ids enemy, hurled his deadly pilnm, and the discharge of that weapon was followed by the short sword at close quarters. The almost complete annihilation of the Goths at Naissus is a ghastly tribute to the effectiveness of Roman arms. The Roman knew nothing of lyddite or dum-dum bullets, yet it is stated that on that day upwards Of 100,000 Goths fell upon the field —tho unparalleled record of war. To Edward I. of England is assigned tho discovery of tho value of the longbow' archer in warfare. At Falkirk be raked the Scottish squares with tho new arm, and even the skill and valor of Wallace could not avert a defeat attended by the slaughter of nearly half his army. The English long how was a powerful factor in the victories of dressy, Poitiers, Agincourt and Flodden. At <Tessfy the carnago was fearful. On that day the French lost 1,200 knights and 30,000 footmen out of an army of 120,000.

The invention of firearms gradually ousted .the cloth-yard from the field of battle, and England thereby lost one of the most murderous instruments of warfare she ever possessed. The formation of troops on the modern battle field would, of course, render the effectiveness of the cloth-yard practically nil, but in the day of archery dense masses of men moved toward each other, doing battle almost without thought of taking cover, and the trained archer, with a range of 300 yards, saw to it that “every shaft found its billet. “The guards want powder, and, by God, they shall have it!” And they got their powder or Waterloo would never have been won. Yet had .those British squares been composed of archers, volleying their lightninglike showers of cloth-yards at such close quarters, there would have been less of the enemy to retreat. It is computed that one ton of lead was fired away for every man killed in the Napoleonic wars, while the English yeoman could boast that for every shaft in his quiver he carried a foeman’s life. it is certain that since the introduction of the breech-loader the proportion of lives lost in battle has considerably decreased. In the period of the French wars the slaughter wrought by the old musket was terrific. The formation of troops in line and column, with little or no attempt to take advantage of cover, gave the musket bullet a wide chance of finding even a random mark. . The fearful losses of opposing armies in the past can be better understood by a .few illustrations. During the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign the allied armies at the battle of Blenheim consisted of about 50,000 each. When the night fell the French and Bavarians left 12,000 dead on the field, besides 13,000 of their men ..prisoners, while tihe English knd Dutch counted their loss at 12,500. This means the appalling percentage of one man killed or wounded out of every four engaged. At Jena the Prussian loss was 21,000 out of 1.05,000, and the French 19,000 out of 90,000, a proportion of one in five. At Eylau the Russians lost 25,000 out of 73,000, the French 30,000 out of 85,000. One in three! At Aspern, the scene of Napoleon’s first defeat, the carnage was still greater.* Out of an army of 70,000 one-half were left upon the field. But even this butchery pales before that of Borodino in the Moscow campaign, for on that field the French left 50,000\ dead and wounded out of 132,000 engaged, and the Russians 4 5,000 out of the same

number. That bloody work was dona on a single September day, with the old flint-lock musket, and smoothbore cannon, aided by Saber and bayonet. The only battle in the latter half of the nineteenth century that can compare Borodino in slaughter is that of Sadowa in 1866, which ended the Austro-Prussian war. Out of 400,000 men engaged, 40,000 Austrians and 10,000 Prussians were killed or wounded. One in eight as compared with ono in three.

During tho American civil war, in the most sanguinary battle, 100,000 men fought. Twenty-six thousand and fivo hundred of their number were left on* the. field. Still later in tho century wo find timt the losses at Sedan were not so great. At this battle the combined forces of the French and Germans numbered 100,000 and the loss in killed and wounded was only 39,000. y Coming to th tv campaigns of our own times we find it difficult to arrive at figures of comparison. During the South African anil Russo-Japan-ese. wars there were sanguinary engagements and heavy losses. But these losses never approached in number anything like the .massacres of the old century’s battles. Shell fire does fearful work, and the long rifle range is effective in good hands But the modern soldier does not walk blindly to the muJSzle of the guns. He has been taught to know the value of cover, and that he can do far better work crawling on the ground than standing up before a grinning enemy to get shot for his country’s sake. Comparison shows the rifle of today an extremely humane instrument of warfare The old musket ball inflicted a " horrible would when it did not kill outright, while the rifle bullet kills if it must, hut when it maims, maims lightly. In fact, too lightly, in the opinion of some experts. But. we have other instruments and machines of warfare unknown in the days of the musket. Who shall say what, horrors will be experienced when the hawk-like war plane hovers over the exposed trenches, dropping the devastiiig lyddite where it will? - And yet the progress of the present war seems to prove the contention that the slaughter which will lake place is unlikely to furriish a parallel to former wars. Of course, the losses both on t?!e fTerman side and that of the allies are being kept secret for obvious purposes. But this secrecy cannot endure very long, and when the truth comes to light it will be found that the carnage, though appalling to peace-accustomed ears, is nothing to the carnage of the past. Though battles will be fought on an unprecedented scale, with millions instead of hundreds of thousands, the number of killed and wounded is likely to be fewer proportionately.—New York Tribune.