Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1892 — American Sacrifices Lead the List. [ARTICLE]

American Sacrifices Lead the List.

Tho charge at Balaklava will live forever in song; but the feat shrinks almost to triviality when we consider the facts. According to Kinglake, the Light Brigade took 673 officers and men into that charge: they lost but 113 men killed and 134 wounded, the total being 247, or 36.7 per cent. The heaviest loss in the German army during the Franco-Hrussian war, occurred in the Sixteenth Infantry (Third Westphalian) at Mars La Tonr, where it lost, in killed, wounded and missing, 49.4 per cent. But Col. Fox enumerates no less than sixty-three union regiments which lost over 50 per cent, in single battles of our own civil war without including others where the statistics are incomplete. In some of these cases, the bulk of the loss occurred within an hour. The First Minnesota lost, at Gettysburg, in killed and wounded, 82 per cent, of the number that went in; Tho One-Hun-dred-First New York lost 73.8 per cent, at Manassas; the Twenty-fifth Massauchusetts lost 70 per cent at Cold Harbor. “Every little helps to lighted the burden, as the captain said when he threw his wife overboard.