The N. Z. Times (PUBLISHED DAILY). SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1901. HALF A MILLION MEN ENGAGED.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 5372, 3 September 1904, Page 4

The N. Z. Times

(PUBLISHED DAILY). SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1901. HALF A MILLION MEN ENGAGED.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE " WELLINGTON INDEPENDENT.'* ESTABLISHED 1845.

The hostile armies of Manchuria have now concentrated for the final struggle, which is proceeding on a scale unprecedented in modern war. Half a million of men arc engaged, a number which tho returns of no other battle of modern history has approached. At Leipsic, where the forces of united Europe met Napoleon in 1813, the numbers engaged on both sides wore 400,000, of whom 160,000 marched under the orders of the .French Emperor. This was tho largest battle of the Napoleonic wars, in which the united number of the combatants seldom reached a quarter of a million. The same thing may bo said of tile seven weeks’ war of 1860, between Austria and Prussia, of tile great American campaigns some time earlier, of tho Eusso-Turkish war of 1878, and the vast struggle of 1870-1 between Franco and the forces of Germany and Prussia. To parallel oven these figures we must go back to tho days of Tamerlane’s victory over the Turkish Sultan Bajazet, on which occasion the numbers engager! on both sides were probably less than the 400,000 of Leipsip (allowing for the inexactitude of the returns of tho time) and greater than the quarter million of the most sanguinary of all'tho battles of the Napoleonic era, Borodino. The campaigns of tho twentieth century seem destined to rival the great military displays of antiquity. The fact is not unexpected, for the vastness of tho armies maintained by the Continental conscriptions lias long been realised. What seemed doubtful was the capacity of military genius to handle such masses of men and the power of military organisation to keep them adequately supplied with food and munitions of war. To these doubts the concentration of tho Kussian and Japanese armies in the valley of the Liao appears to lie a decisive answer. Five hundred thousand men are fighting with desperate valour; not less than three thousand pieces of artillery are maintaining a fire rapid enough to enable them to exchange 100,000 projectiles a day; the infantry sweeps everything before it, with storms of fire representing millions of cartridges ; and the mind fails to grasp the enormous amount of food which must be moved in the day to keep these immense hosts in heart. In addition, there are tho numbers of railway waggons required; the carts, the transport and pack animals, the miles of telegraph wires, the hosts of assistants, the enormous army of camp followers, ,hucksters, labourers in the trendies and on tho roads about the fortifications —with all these the mind simply wanders aghast, among countless numbers and colossal quantities. There cannot be less than a million of human beings, with great hordes of animals and hundreds of thousands of tons of necessaries of all kinds, all under the control of two men, and all moving about their organised work in disciplined order. And yet this is not a great war, as history understands the term. Nevertheless, it reminds on© of the Seer of Armageddon, who cried out of the “Multitudes! Multitudes! In the Valley of Decision !”

As are the writers of history, so are tho correspondents of newspapers. They fasten upon the “pomp and circumstance’’ ; they revel in the “magnificence of the spectacle’’; they are enthusiastic over the “extraordinary vehemence of the battle”; they hear nothing but “the noise of the captains and the shouting.” One can scarcely blame them. The spectacle must be magnificent: a powerful army of something: less than 200,000 men bolding a great curve of fifteen miles assailed by a host of over 300,000 fiercely on the centre and both flanks: a huge duel of great ordnance broken by desperate bayonet charges; assaults of great columns of infantry repulsed by vivid rifle fire; troops forming for further effort under the boom of heavy pieces, the growling of the machine guns, I and the rattle of volleying musketry, while the hills around the curve of battle “vomit fire.” A century ago, however, tho spectacle of a great battle was even more impressive. The distances were less, all being within easy vision. For example, at Borodino the front of battle for the 240,000 men engaged was little over two miles, the battalions advanced to the attack in close order, one heard the “ordered tramp of men moving to mortal conflict,” marked their, splendid bearing.

and saw them fight. When the Cuirassiers, the showiest cavalry of the time, were hurled at the Russian redoubts, riding boot to boot, the thunder of the galloping hoofs dulling the roar of the cannon playing upon the stately mass of horsemen, they presented a spectacle such as no battle of our time can over hope to rival. There was such another at Worth in 1871, when MaoMahon sacrificed his cavalry, 6000 strong, to save his army. The horsemen paralysed the German advance by their splendid charge, and few came out of it, but the spectacle has never been forgotten by those who saw it.

This Vas exceptional, for before the date of that war the picturesque element had begun to depart. In most of fho battles of the American war the lines of fire were hidden in forests, and even the Ibearere who went in for the wounded seldom saw more than the smoke of the firing-line in their immediate front. The grim side, however, has by no means lessened. What it was at Borodino, Tolstoi tells us in his admirable “Peace and War,” in an awful picture of toiling surgeons—of men in every stage of agony, and of piled limbs and nameless horrors innumerable. Zola, who has no talent at all for the pomp and circumstance which his Russian rival" describes in masterly fashion, has also left on record a terrible picture of the hospital side of war, which is the most remarkable passage perhaps in that wonderful book, “La 'Debacle.” What it must bo in the centre of that tremendous conflict in Manchuria no one need doubt who has read the literature of the medical side of the Boer war. The special note there is in this campaign, next to the vastness of the scale, is that it is a duel between East and West, with the advantage chiefly, so far, on the side of the East. Botween them these two races have taught the world that the end of war is brought no nearer by modem improvement of deadly weapons. On the contrary, they teach that there is actually much less loss, in proportion to the number of men engaged—a result duo to the development of tactics, which is far greater than the prog-ess of mechanical invention. In one day’s battle at Leipsio, ninety-one years ago, the loss of both sides amounted to 80,000, being 30 per cent, of the men engaged. In one day’s battle at Liao there fell 3000 Russians, and not more than that number of Japanese; in all some 6000 out of half a million engaged—an average of 1.2 per cent. One lesson of modern war on a large scale is that war is decidedly less deadly than it was in the days of inferior weapons. Another is that it is far more rapid. The".third may he that the results are more decisive; hut these meantime lie hidden in the womb of futurity.