THE RUSSIAN BAYONET.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 237, 16 November 1877, Page 9

THE RUSSIAN BAYONET.

The following extract from a letter printed by the Times from its correspondent at Loftcha deserves general attention. It should be borne in mind that its writer admits to being under groat obligations to Prince Meretinsky, and is ob\ionsly Russian in his sympathies. He is therefore the better witness to the facts which he record* :

" Leaving the redoubt, I rode along the ridge where the Turks had retreated. The ground was strewn with Turk«, with here and there a dead Russian. I saw several Moslem bodies bared on the breast, in which were three or four bayonet stabs. They had been shot first and then bayoneted. Sonic of them had their brains blown out. Consequently the bayonet wounds were entirely superfluous. I had expected this all along the western line, where the Russian soldiers knew of the inhuman treatment of their wounded comrades in front of Plevna."

We have here unassailable testimony to the Russian treatment of the wounded and captured. What this correspondent savr was simply the result of a massacre of disabled nnd overpowered Turkish soldiers. We wonder whether, when the next of these •' breaches of the Geneva Convention " occurs on the other side, the Turks will also find some thoughtful advocate to say that it is " what he expected," as the Turkish soldiers "knew of the inhuman treatment of their wounded comrades "at Loftcha. But in the Russian case, at any rate, the excuse is superfluous. The Russian troops are only doing in Bulgaria what we kno^y they did in the Crimea ; and what provocation had they there ? what inhuman conduct on the part of their enemy to avenge ? Surely it is time for their sympathisers to admit what is so abundantly evident — that this is the ordinary Russian mode of fighting, the mode natural to a barbarous race, such as, under their veneer of civilization, the Russians still are.— -Pall Mall Gazette.