CIVILISED WARFARE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 33, 14 December 1883, Page 7

CIVILISED WARFARE.

(London Correspondent of the Dublin Freeman.) The French papers contain the most horrible reports from the correspondents with the expeditionary force operating in Tonquin of the manner in which the Annamite soldiers were butchered wholesale in the recent attacks upon the forts and citadels on the Red River. It appears that a new weapon of destruction has come into play in the shape of a "Kropatchek Magazine rifle," which has been largely adopted in the Austrian and Hungarian armies, and has also been issued to the French Marine Infantry. The Kropatchek can be employed as an ordinary breechloader, but it contains within its stock an arrangement by which a dozen cartridges, by an easy mechanism, can be directed in instantaneous buccession into the breech, and thus fired off in a constant stream. The Annamites are described as men of fine physique and surprising pluck, but were only armed with miserable matchlocks or bamboo lances. Notwithstanding these disadvantages they bore the brunt of the French ordinary fire with the greatest coolness, and only broke and fled on being exposed at close quarters to the rain of bullets from the Kropatchek rifles. It is not, however, the slaughter committed under these circumstances that causes a feeling of horror on reading the last reports from the seat of war. At the end of the second day's operations it was discovered that a large portion of the garrison of one of the principal forts had taken refuge in some villages on a point of land, the Leek of which was occupied by a fort captured by the French. Thereupon the French fleet was directed to bombard the villages, which were quickly Bet in flames, and then the sailors and marine infantry garrisoning the fort were able to see how the miserable refugees, diiven from the burning dwellings were preparing to run the tenible gauntlet of flight along the shore under the walls of the fort, with a faint hope of escaping to the mainland. Every preparation was made to receive tne fugitives. The magazines of the Kropatchek rifles were charged, and with a sense of grim amusement the French troops saw the unfortunate natives going past the fort at a rush, vainly endeavouring to afford themselves some protection from the leaden hail by bear.ng on their shoulders planks of timber, earthenware vessels, and even wickerwork baskets rescued from the burning villages. The French bullets, of coarse, made short work of these frail defences, and the nativee fell dead in hundreds, heaped one upon the other within a few paces of the French rifles,

This was bad enough,| but worse was to follow. Maddened by the lust of destruction, and drunk with the sight of blood flowing around them, the French soldiers rushed from the fort and despatched the wounded with their bayonets. This is related, it should be nnderstood, by French correspondents. Their officers endeavoured to check this wholesale murder, but were met with the reply—" They are only savages." A peculiarly disgusting feature in the butchery was the fact that the French soldiers were assisted by the Annamese followeis, who, to keep in the good graces of their masters, " pointed " the places where the wounded lay, so that the Frenchmen had only the exertions of bayoneting them. This horrible incident is only another illustration of the brutalising effects which warfare waged against inferior opponents, especially if they can be accused of savagery or semi-civilisation, has upon European troops. In the Sikh war similar scenes were witnessed, and still more recently at Tel-el-Kebir, where a wholesale massacre of wounded and dying Egyptians was described by German correspondents. Powerful influence was used to have the matter hushed up, but in Vanity Fair letters were published from English officers who confessed that in order to prevent their men from being fired at from behind they had ordered all the Egyptians wounded to be bayonetted as the British lines advanced.