JAPANESE "TOY-BULLETS."

Otago Witness, Issue 2650, 28 December 1904, Page 33

JAPANESE "TOY-BULLETS."

REMARKABLE RECOVERIES. The St. Petersburg correspondent of the Daily Telegraph sends the following: i The Japanese have merited well of their enemies for their humanity in dealing death on the battlefield. Their bullets, says the • Russian surgeons, are, if not precisely harm- ' less, at least the next best thing to that — they form the mildest kind of missile that , has ever yet been hurled from a rifle. One of the consequences is that a number of wounds which were formerly mortal are ■ now healed and forgotten in a few days. , Another is that the number of Russians i who quit the hospital for the battlefield is ' greater than was ever witnessed in any , war before. Blessings on the little Japs for their tiny little bullets, cay the Oossaeks • and Caucasians. ! '" In the sanitary train we have astounding cases of wounds healed," writes a i surgeon ; " the character of the hurts surprises us, and as for the rapidity with whicli the soldier recovers, -well, it is hard to ask | anyone- to believe it who has not actually seen it. Verily, their bullets are human." PATIENTS RECOVER EAPIDLT. "Wounds caused by bullets which enter the chest and go oxil through the bac-k are of freqiient occurrence. The patients recover ra-pidly. Take, for instance, Private Kurtcff, of the 3rd East Siberian Rifles. He was shot at Wa-fang-kau on June 15. The bullet entered his lungs. For less than 10 days blood was detected in his saliva, but soon all symptoms had gone, the wound 3 were cicatriced, and the brave warrior is I himself once more, and back on the field '• as active a 9 evei\ Private Kulessi had a j hole made in his liver, but he, too, has ; already begun to forget that he ever had a wound there. On the same battlefield a private of the 34th East Siberian Regiment named Bulgakoff received a mild Japanese bullet, whiqh passed through one of his lungs and liis diaphragm, injured his liver, and went- out at the spinal column. He was pidked up, cared for. and cured, and now he is on Ins way to Russia to take a rest. " Vilkoviteh is the name of a soldier of the 3d' East Siberian Regiment who has had a wonderful experience to look back upon. His bullet found its billet when he was lying behind the entrenchments at Wa-fans-kau on June 15. It cut its way through his shoulder between the collarbone and the shoulderblade, passed through his lungs, penetrated the diphragm and the abdomen, damaged the intestines, and' went out. The soldier was a fortnight under treatment, and is now on the warpath once more." Here is a SCB.VP OF A DIALOGUE between an officer and his soldiers, which gives an idea of the views taken by Russians of Jananeae. bullets ; —

] " Where were you wounded, Zemlakoff ?" I The private points to his shoulder. " Here, your honour, the bullet struck me and then passed out. Another hit me here (he touches his arm) and went through. On. my back I have two wounds, see, here they are; another bullet entered my leg, loot ." "Why, in heaven's name, how many bullets did you absorb, then?" " Nofc one stayed in me, your honour; they all swept right through." "A man can lee any number of Jap bullets go through him, your honour," the- soldier's neighbour chimed in; "you hardly even know it has struck you. A fly's sting is more painful. Our bits of lead don't go fooling about like that!" "Why not?" "Because they go to stay, unless a bonesetter can fish them out. 'And that is a black lookout. This is another dialogue which recently took place in one of the trains, between » surgeon and a soldier: — "In what battle were you wounded.' "At We-fang-kau, on the 15^ your honour." " Where were you hiu-t?" "In my head." "Did the bullet stay?" ?j jSo, your honour; it went right through. The doctor was astonished. He examined the skull. It was quite true. Two scarred orifice* were there, the one through which, the missile had entered was on the leffc side of the head, the other in the neck. " Ho-iv did it happen?" he inquired. "We were behind the earthworks, your honour, when the bullet struck me." "'Well, and then . . - you fell?" "Not at; al), your honour, I got up on my feet— for we were all lying down, — and then I crawled off backwards towards the ambulance tent. After that I felt a bad pain in my head, and the blood streamed down my face. When I had gone 10 paces or so I dropped senseless, but, perhaps, it was because both my legs were wounded, too." "Well, and then you came to, I suppose?" "No, your honour, I did not. I felt a racking pain when I first knew where I was, and lay a fortnight in hospital in high fever, raving." "And how are you feeling now?*' "All right, your honour, only when the weather is bad I have a slight heatlache." "Now a bullet in the head," remarks a Russian physician, who is collecting data on the surgical aspect of the present war, "a bullet in tho head which pierces the brain is certain death Beyond remedy. But here we have a case in which the missile - actually went through the medulla oblongata, and yet the man who had received this wound and a cracked skull was smiling and complaining of 'a slight headache' when the, weather was bad ! All tihe men in. hospital have tiny wounds, smaller than a threepenny-bit. A mere red stain, nothing more. The soldiers laugh and say — 'When, we go back to our villages they won't ever believe we have been wounded. They'll tell us we've been shamming.' " AN OFFICER "LOST IN WOXDEH." The medical investigator, leaving those cases to examine others, then called upon 1 a captain who had been in the thick of the fight and had lost all his younger officers^ non-commissioned officers, and 140 pri rates, betweeu 'May 31 and June 15, and asked him for information. " I am lost in wonder," he remarked to the captain, "at the miraculous way in which our fellows rise from the dead, as ifc were. They recover from wounds whicli are officially mortal. Now I want you to tell me, are these exceptional cases that X have been studying, or have you anything 1 like them?" "The Japs arc accurate," was the answer; "they often hit our men in the head, but when the bullets pass oleare through many of the men get well." " Curious. Well, and how do they fare when the bullet strikes them in the abdomen? You know a hurt in the peritoneum almost infallibly brings on peritonitis and death. And yet wg are transporting mart who were woundedin that very region and are now hale and hearty." "I suppose that means only that they were wounded while they had been long fasting. If a man gets a bullet in the peritoneum on a full stomach he will.probably not live to enjoy many more mealy. Anyhow, I can tell you that whoever gets one of our bullets either in the abdomen or the head won't worry much in this vale of tear 3." " How do you account for the difference in the results?" "I attribute ifc to their funny bullets, which have a different mantle from ours. Theirs is more compact. But if you take it and rub it 'ever so littla on a stone, then it's deadly. But, beside* the quality of the casting, there is the siiO of the bullet itself. Compared with ours, it is tiny, and its velocity is considerable greater. Our magazine rifle (1891 model) takes a bullet of three lines, and imparts to it an initial velocity of 620 metres; wh»r»»as the Jap rifles (model 1897) have a 2."5 line bullet with an initial velocity of T25- metre*. The Japanese bullet only PEXETBATES THE TISSUE, BX;T ECE3 NOT TEAB IT, just as a bullet fh-ed from a. rifle may mak© a hole in a window pane without sh&tteviag the glass. When passing through w abdomen it inflicts the minimum of dan}££e. its chief effect being to expand the mosciaA of the peritoneum, which quickly contrft'4. closing" the orifice, and thus saving fh» injured man from peritonitis and death." "Those three factors, then, explain the curious phenomena of recuperation which we witness in the present war. They are — the small calibre of the bullets, their velocity, and the compactness of the mantle. Thanks to these, skull wounds which wouldhave been considered mortal under other conditions are now successfully treated, 'provided always that the chief centres of the vital functions of the brain are nofr damaged. Those three factors give us the right." the medical investigator adds, "to term the Japanese bullet ' light.' " Bur,. alas ! the captain supplemented his information with this item of news : "At the outset of the war we knew that if a man was not killed on the spot he would recover. Bufc now many more are dying of their wounds. It is clear thai the Japs have changed their bullets.-'

— Since the beginning of last century no fewer than 52 volcanic islands have risen out of the sea. Nineteen have disappeared, and 10 are now inhabited. — Taxation enables many curious tables of statistics to be compiled. It would probably puzzle the best of English statisicians to guess even approximately at the number of billiard tables in use in England. There is no such difficulty in France, ■where iht billiard table is a taxed luxury, and its relative frequency in communes of all grades of population and wealth is made th© subject of calculations as elaborate as they are ingenious. In all France there are 89,676 billiard tables, divided among? 18,601 communes, and realising more tharj £4-0,000 in taxes.