BATTLES THAT HAVE ENDED IN MASSACRE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 17061, 14 August 1917, Page 3

BATTLES THAT HAVE ENDED IN MASSACRE.

FORCES WHICH HAVE BEEN

WIPED OUT

All battles have something more or less gruesome in their composition, but there is a horrible fascination about th.3 fight which results in every one of the losing side being relentlessly slaughtered. Americans still recall with a thrill of horror the awful fate of General Custer and his division in the lass; stand of the Red Indian —the battle i> Big Little Horn*' in 1876. It was on n balmy June morning that Ouster's command, consisting of nearly three hundred mounted men, parted company with Major Reno's division, and passed over the hill into the valley where a horrible do-cm, awaited it, the gallant General himself gaily waving his adieus, i which mayhap he had a premonition were to be his last. Soon afterwards he was attacked by " Crazy Horse" ana his brave but merciless tribesmen, but not a single white man came out of that bloody hand-to-hand struggle alive. Next morning they were all found stark and stiff, every man scalped except the redoubtable Custer himself, who it is thought the Indians would fain have spared, but he died fighting fiercely hi a vain attempt to pierce an outlet through the ranks of his horribly painued foes.

THE ALAMO,

Exactly forty years earlier America saw another massacre of war, which, however, more closely concerned the Texans, who then were f*~hting for their independence against the brave but utterly implacable foes, the Mexicans. The glorious defence of the Alama, a building built for a convent, is a household word- in Texas to this very da^. But seventy odd years ago "Remember th c Alamo" was a battle cry arousing the Texans to a pit-ch oi fury which swept their foes like chaff before them. And little wonder: less than 200 gallant fellows held the convent for hours against 4,000 Mexicans. Desperately they fought, while the triumphant notes of Mexican bands of music outside mingled with the incessant rattle of musketry—fought tin every man, except five, was dead or mortally wounded. The five survivors were afterwards foully put to death. Unfortunately, our own modern history is not devoid of this unspeakably horrible side of war; rather does ; t bristle with gruesome incidents. What the Big Little Horn is to the Yankee, 1 Isandhlwana is to the Briton, and who I amongst us whose recollecton reverts to I fatal 1879 will forget the indescribable thrill of horror the news aroused. Not an unmounted man of the ill-fated 24th Regiment engaged in that fell struggle for existence ever saw home again, and when the Zulu impis had departed, their lust for blood satiated, 26 Imperial officers and over 6CO British soldiers were lying dead on the field, side by side with their gallant Colonial brothel's.

It was only a year Inter that a catastrophe of equal intensity happened at Maiwand, Afghanistan, where the 6th Regiment were absolutely wiped out at the hands of the treacherous and fanatica lGhazi. No less than 964 of our gallant men on that fatal day fell never to rise..

ONE SURVIVOR

But Afghan soil saw another massacre, so fiendish and gruesome as utterly to ecilpse anything that a century of strife can show. This was the total destruction not merely of a British battalion but a British army of over 12,000 strong, inclusive of camp followers. Civilised times have surely never shown a worse example of base treachery and ferocity. There was one survivor, however, Dr. Bryden, the subject of Lady Butler's famous picture "The Remnant of an Army." Though much less deadly than any of the preceding horrors, there is another British tragedy of the battlefield which appeals even mor j strongly to the reader's imagination, the fate of the Shanghai. Patrol in the last Matabele War. What exactly happened to brave Major1 Wilson nnd his 33 heroes will never Ye known, for not a man survived to tell the tale. But this we know, they fell fighting desperately to the last and not in vain, for so terrible was the mark left- on the enemy that the latter's contempt for the white man turned to profound resnect, and the sequel came in the speedy termination of the war.

TRAGEDIES OF THE SUDAN

But for the pitched hattles that resulted in the total annihilation of the losers, the Sudan throws any other part of the world into the shade. During the years 1883-1885, beginning with the awful roaster to Hicks Pasha's force, nnd ending with the fall of Khartum on that hlack day in January, there was an unparalleled succession of military massacres. The fate of valiant Hicks Pasha and his powerful force of men was a peculiarly horrihle one. Led by +vpfi"herv into ?fl ambuscade, •which promised from the nr<=t no escane, they fought death in the shape of a foe who never pave nor asked quarter, desperately for three days, the officers fisrhtiug "on foot, for their horses were soon shot down: hut the end extermination. Every man was billed. Mr. O' Donovan, the "Dni^v News" intrenirl correspondent, shared th» common fntp. T?,r> very la.-t, man to f»11 t.o the jn-owid rlvin^ ir- sin'd to h^ve h°en th*» vedonhto.hlo Hicks himsoif. onrl over hi<; cniw« n gru^som 0 Arib en^tom """; out. Tn tho nre«enee of fho M-ihdi, who lfe«d taken no part in the fight,

each Shiek thrust his sword into the body of the dead ieader.

It was about this time that the cruel slave-dealer, Osman Digna, came into prominence, and he lost no time in paying the Khedive out for the edict which threatened the slave trade with extinction. Falling upon stray forces of Egyptians an dtheir allies, he wiped them out, leaving not a survivor to tell the tale. At Tamai, for instance, 700 Nubian troops were slaughtered to a man, while 500 Egyptians, under Commander Moncreiffe, R.N., met a similar fate.

BAKER PASHA AND COLONEL BURNABY.

But on February 4th, 1884, came the most calamitous and at the same time the most amazing massacre of all —the nihilation for the latter, as their very ly equipped army of 4,000 Egyptian regulars, officers, and supported lw Krupp and machine guns; and when tlirea days after its arrival this respectable force was given battle to by 1,200 of the enemy it seemed very like annihilation for the latter,, as their very heroism promised to seal their doom. But, alas! tLe Egyptians turned out to be the most abject cowards imaginable, well deserving of the scathing epithst of "Hens," which General Gordon applied to them. For a time their terror was such that, they positively hadn't even the grit to fly; instead they pitched away their rifles and sought (shelter behind each other like sheep. All the frenzied efforts of gallant Baker Pasha and the threats of huge, deatnspurning Colonel Burnaby, utterly failed to get them to face the exultant enemy, and the utter hopelessness or the situation will best be gauged from the fact that those officers at length deliberately abandoned the cowed and doomed horde, which was no longer an army, and hewed a way through their I foes.

Four days later a sequel to the catastrophe came in the shape of the butchery at Sinkat, one of a very different stamp were the victims her*. Refusing to yield or capitulate on terms to their treacherous foes, the 400' brave defenders of Sinkat, confronied by starvation if they remained any 1« nger, strove desperately to cut a way out. It was an alternative forbiddingly hopeless, and the wonder is not that 394 of them were slain but that six men succeeded in escaping.