HORRORS OF WAR

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1732, 10 May 1905, Page 71 (Supplement)

HORRORS OF WAR

Some conception of the awful amount* of human suffering entailed by war may he obtained trom the brief cable message published _if this issue with regard to the Rus< sian sick and wounded at Harping. There are fifty thousand wounded and fifteen thousand sick men in the city towards which the Japanese are now marching; and to attend to these sixty-five thousand invalids there are hut sixty surgeons and a hundred and forty nurses. As long ago as August last the medical men of Harping made an appeal for more surgeons and hospital assistants; but the Russian authorities made no response. Dr Koslovski, in a paper read before the Harping Medical Association last month, stated that though the Red Cross and other private organisations were working day and night, the situation was far beyond their powers to cope with. Describing tlie position after the battle of the S'haho, he said the removal of wounded soldiers commenced on October 2nd, and lasted for a fortnight, during the whole of which time heavy snow was falling, and there were 20deg. of frost. Three thousand men were tranported in hospital waggons, and 30,000 in ordinary goods trucks, in which though tlie men were without warm clothing, no protection was provided against the intense cold. The sufferings of the poorly-clacl, starving, shivering, wounded soldiers were rendered more atrocious by the almost total lack of medical assistance. Some of the trains arrived at Harping with one doctor for 1300 wounded. Some arrived with no medioal man m attendance. All the occupants of one train arrived with their feet frozen, and yet they had to remain in the cold trucks at Harping for three days, as no one had time to attend to them, and two of these days they tasted nothing warm. It is truly terrible to think that the criminal ambition and greed of a few men should be the means of causing such suffering to thousands of their fellow-countrymen. Yet churchmen, philosophers, and philanthropists, who expend much labour and sympathy on saving the souls of men or preventing cruelty to animals, look with apparent, unconcern on the horrors of war, because they are most of tliqm slaves of the debasing superstition that battle and carnage are part of the Divine nlan, and are, therefore, inevitable. Even those gentle souls, the poets, are not quite free from this gross fatalistic view, for one has hazarded the theory that “He who sends the earthquake and the storm may send the battle too ” ; another had the temerity to say in an address to the Deity, “ Yea, Carnage is Thy daughter ” ; and Kipling’s anneal to the “ God of the long-drawn battle line ”is well known, it is surely time that more rational and humane ideas than these were obtaining currency among people calling themselves civilised.