Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 10, 8 March 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD,

Times (or, rather, circumstances) change. looting But, despite the well-known Latin saw, we in don't all of us keep pace with the change. war. Some lag a little, some a long way, behind,

like footsore infantry or jaded cavalry on a forced march. In war the pace of 'advanced' sentiment has, ever since the days when Christianity first left its impress on public life, been generally too furious for those whose leaden heels were trammelled by the chain and ball of older and rougher custom. Mrs. Grundy is still a power to be counted with, even by dashing general officers. Her code of propriety and respectability is the social echo — sometimes, indeed, a feeble and badly refracted echo — of the Christian sentiment which it has taken 18 centuries to create. And she will have nothing of looting and private plunder, much less of citysacking, unless, indeed, it be done sub rosa and the war correspodents don't make a blowing-horn of it. For war is a business affair nowadays, with its ledgers and its assessment of material and moral damages. But it is, or rather is supposed to be, an eminently respectable and ' proper ' line of business — for proclamations of 'no quarter ' went out (on paper) in 18 1 8, and the days of the plundering mercenary are as dead as the times of the Barmecides. We have neither leisure nor inclination to pound each others' brains out to the accompaniment of the flowing courtesies of the knights of chivalry. But from the serene heights of international codes we look down with complacent contempt on the bad old times of long ago, when the vanquished enemy's dead and wounded-were stripped upon the field, when every city taken by assault was given over to plunder, and when some of them were razed to the ground as well, ploughed up, and salt sprinkled upon their sites. Nowadays private property of the enemy is, indeed, liable to seizure. But it is (nominally at least) the official seizure known as a requisition. Official receipts are supposed to be given to the owners, who are supposed to be recouped out of the indemnity payable by the losing party at the close of the struggle. The unauthorised seizure of the private property of the enemy for the private benefit of the soldier is against the spirit and the letter of modern wars, and a soldier caught in the act of plundering the dead or wounded is (on paper) supposed to have his anatomy riddled with bullets by a firing party, and that, too, without the formality of a trial. Such rules represent the ' advanced ' sentiment regarding the rights of private property in war. But they denote an ideal to be attained by the modern warrior rather than actual achievements in the line of military conduct. As in many other matters, so here, Thomas Atkins, Esq., lags sadly behind the framers of the international code and the sentiments of the high-placed officers who are supposed to see to its observance.

During the course of the last Greco-Turkish war, the Porte was within an inch of seizing upon the property of all Greek merchants residing within the Sultan's dominions. Therein appeared the mind of the barbarian. Almost five centuries agone provision was made in the Magna Charta for the protection of the property of all foreign merchants whose countries might be at any time at war with England. Unfortunately the old traditions of plunder have not, thus far, disappeared from the armies of any of the fighting* nations. Thus — not to go too far back — the wholesale plunder carried out by the French troops in the Peninsula War had two conspicuous offsets in the sacking of Badajos and San Sebastian by the British soldiers. The story seems well authenticated that when Blucher visited London he looked out over the great wilderness of brick and stone from the dome of St. Paul's and exclaimed : ' Great heavens, what a city to sack ! ' The unchangeable East was, however, the place of all others where the phrase, ' the fortunes of war,' came to have a reality of meaning experienced, perhaps, in no part of the earth since the days of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. The Indian Mutiny

originated many a military fortune— and especially the sack of Delhi after its fall on September 21, 1857. Some two years later the victorious French and British troops entered Pekin and set themselves to the best of their abilities to stripping the city of its valuables. The French had the first innings at looting and did their work remarkably well. But of the pickings they left, enough remained to add considerable wealth to the pockets of hundreds of British fighting men of all ranks. Looting was tolerably frequent during the American Civil War— the Irish regiments being, however, with some others, conspicuous and honourable exceptions in this matter. Thus, a Protestant Episcopalian clergyman tells the following stcry of Sherman's visit to Mecklenburg county. The mansion of this clergyman's brother was looted from attic to cellar, with the exception of the room in which the owner's wife lay ill.

She was (this clergyman writes) confined to her chamber, when it was suddenly threatened by an excited group of soldiers maddened with liquor. In vain did the physician who was in attendance remonstrate with the ruffians, who insisted on forcing 1 the door in search of plunder. At this moment an Irish soldier came to the rescue, took his place as sentinel at the door, hurled back the crowd, and remained there for several hours the faithful guardian of that sick chamber, until the house waß freed from its invaders. Every nook and corner was searched, everything plundered that could be taken away, every apartment rifled save that sheltered under the aegis of the brave-hearted Irish soldier.

All this recalls the story told by Maguire regarding a soldier of the Ninth Connecticut (Irish) Regiment who was placed as sentinel before a mansion in New Orleans which had been intended for the headquarters of General Butler. The family had apparently been driven out of the house at short notice and, probably, with the scant ceremony that is supposed to be appropriate to times of war. The sentry's monotonous pacing to and fro in front of the mansion was soon interrupted by the appearance of a smartly-dressed young lady who came out by the front door of the house and (says Maguire) ' with an air half timid und half coaxing said : " Sir, I suppose you will permit me to take these few toys in my apron ? Surely General Butler has no children who require such things as these'" 1 "Young woman," replied the sentry, in a sternly abrupt tone, that quite awed his petitioner, " my orders are peremptory — not a toy or thing of any kind can pass this door while lam here. But, Miss," added the inflexible guardian in quite a different tone, " if there is such a thing as another door, or a back window, you may take away as many toys as you can find, or whatever else you wish. I have no orders against it. And the more you take the better I'll be pleased, God knows." 'The palpable hint,' Maguire adds, 'was adopted, and it is to be hoped that something more than the toys was saved to the owners of the mansion.'

* * a Readers of the history of the great Franco-German struggle of 1870- 1 will readily recall the remorseless exactions of the Germans on the French population, and the free and easy but business-like completeness of the looting done by the invaders from beyond the Rhine. In his Diary of a Besieged Resident. Mr. Labouchere, M.P., thus refers to the matter : —

The Prussian army may have many excellent qualities, but chivalry is not among 1 them. War with them is a business When a nation is conquered there 1a to be no sentimental pity for it, but as much is to be made out of it as possible. Like the elephant, which can crush a tree and pick up a needle, they conquer a province and pick a pocket. As soon aa a Prussian is quartered in a room, he sends for a box and some straw ; then he carefully and methodically packs up the clock on the mantelpiece and all the stray ornaments which he can lay his hands on, and then, with a tear glistening in his eye for his absent family, directs them either to his mother or his wife or his lady-love. In vain the proprietor protests : the philosophical Prussian utters the most noble sentiments respecting' the horrors of war ; ponderously explains that the French do not sufficiently appreciate the benefits of peace ; and that he is one of the humble instruments whose mission it ia to make these blessings clear to them. Then he rings the bell and in a mild, gentle voice, orders his box of loot to be carried off by his military servant.

Strangely enough, clocks and pianos, as well as the contents of the wine-cellar, formed the chief attraction for the soldier of the Fatherland when fighting for his country on the soil of France.

We have already dealt editorially with the scandalous and wholesale looting of churches, convents, and private houses in the Philippines by both the officers and men of a number of the American regiments that were on service in the islands. The Sudan campaigns of 1885 and 1898 did not offer a very promising field to Thomas Atkins when in search of booty. Nevertheless many of the soldiers returned home from both campaigns with tidy sums in their fobs. Two privates realised over £400 by loot taken during the military operations of 1885. From the letters published from time to time in the New Zealand dailies we learn that looting is by no means an unusual incident ot the present campaign in South Africa. A London weekly now before us is responsible for the statement that two British privates swelled their purses by more than £100 each by plunder taken by them after the battle of Elandslaagte. A letter from the seat of war published some time ago in the Otago Daily Times states that the writer witnessed a British regular rifling the pockets of a prisoner. In the columns of the same paper a member of the New Zealand Contingent details how he and certain others of his party entered a private house in British territory and 'annexed' therein a watch, a roll of music, and — a bundle of love letters! The story is told with a serene and amazing unconsciousness of guilt. For the life of us we cannot see how, in the moral order, all this differs from shop-lifting or pocket-picking. Military precept— as expressed in international law — is still manifestly leagues in advance of military practicej and we are evidently still far off from the verification of Leone Levi's statement that an armed conflict between nation and nation is merely ' a duel between the military and naval forces of the States at war. 1

CONCERNING BOMBARDMENTS

A cable message in Monday's daily papers reads as follows : ' Twelve thousand shells were thrown into Ladysmith. They did little damage, and killed only 35 persons and wounded 188.' A small result, in good truth, for such an amount of powder-blazing and shell-bursting and multitudinous and costly din ! But it is the usual story of practically all later sieges which did not end in assault and capture. For instance, the Germans, under General von Werder, drew an iron cordon round Strassburg in the middle of August, 1870. On August 24 they started the bombardment of the city, and kept up a hurricane of shells at close range almost without cessation till its surrender on September 28. During that period they dropped no fewer than 193,722 shells into the famous old cathedral city. A good third of the city was battered into heaps of rubbish or set on fire. Some 10,000 people were driven out ot the ruined or battered houses. But the accidents to life and limb were ridiculously out of proportion to the enormous expenditure of metal — the victims counting only some three hundred. Belfort was subjected to a searching bombardment from December 3, 1870, till, by direction of the French Government (then conducting the preliminaries of peace) its garrison surrendered with the honours of war on Fcbiuary 16, 1871. As many as 99,453 projectiles were dropped into the pleasant little town ; but they accounted for the death of only sixty persons all told. Verdun was bombarded three times by the Germans. The first two were with field-guns, and Dr. Russell said that the investing force ' might just as well have bombarded Verdun with cherry-stones.' The third was performed with siege guns. The shells displaced great quantities of stone and brick and mortar and dug up sundry cavities in the earth. But the loss of human life was insignificant, and the surrender of Verdun was brought about by reasons that had no reference whatever to any punishment that the garrison may have received.

Paris and its surrounding forts and fortified villages offer further evidence of the relative harmlessness of bombardments to human life. Six hundred shells thrown into Fort Nogent on January 2, 1871, did no damage beyond displacing a few hatfulls of eaith and barrow-loads of bricks and stones, and slightly ' barking ' the cuticle of an incautious French soldier. The incident reminds one of the fierce bombardment of Matan^as (Cuba) by the American warships : the net result of all the din and uproar and the expenditure of tons of ammunition and of tens of thousands of dollars was the docking of the tail of one Spanish army-mule! Between December 27, 1870, and New Year's Day, 1871, the Germans poured as many as 25,000 projectiles into Forts Noisy, Rosny, and Nogent. ' Yet even two days later,' says a well-known historian of the war, 'only thirty men had been killed and a hundred wounded, and the walls had not been seriously injured.' And yet we are told that the German's shell-fire 'was astonishingly good.' Casemates, 'dug-outs' (as in Ladysmith and Kimberley) and a sharp lookout for shells — the

soldier will add the unknown element called ' luck ' — account only in a small measure for the little loss of life that is caused by even the most terriffic bombardment. The war correspondent of the Times, after a visit to Fort Rosny, said : f The general opinion in the fort was that a bombardment, though it made a good deal of noise, and seemed very frightful to the uninitiated, did, in fact, but little harm. This, however, could only be true of buildings specially made to encounter such visitations. Bombs falling on the fragile roofs of ordinary houses, or exploding against windows, are enemies of a very terrific nature.' Only four persons were killed and ten wounded by 16,000 to 18,000 shells that fell in and about Fort Vanvres. Only 107 pc-iaons wue killed or wounded L\ sciViC 10,000 shells which the Germans threw into Paris during a bombardment which lasted 23 days. And as in Kimbeiley and Lidysmilh, the Parisians, in the first novelty of the siege, ' scrambled ' for the scattered fragments of the exploded shells. In a siege, hunger and disease are worse enemies than hurtling shells. Of this Ladysmuh, like Paris, has had an abundant experience.

BULLETS AND THEIR BILLET*.

It is evident from all thi-> that you are about as safe from the enemy's shells in a bombarded town a<=, in a thunderstorm, you would be from the electric fluid in a four-poster feather-bed. Perhaps it is the comparative bloodlessness of bombardments that has given rise to the legend that it takes a ton of metal to kill a man in war. In the siege of Paris — and we believe our estimate to be correct — it took about two hundred weight for every person hit ; at Fort Vanvres, about four and a quarter tons for every man killed. The bombardment of Samoan villages by the British and American warships probably furnished an equally absurd disparity between effort and achievement. We don't know how much weight of metal it took to sever the partnership between the soul and body of one of Mataafa's wan iors during those costal bombardments. But it took several broadsides from a British war-vessel and an expenditure of several thousand pounds sterling to kill a harmless Mataafa porker that was straying promiscuously about a deserted seaside village — it cost only £gooo worth of ammunition (5,681 projectile-)) to send Admiral Montojo's fleet to the bottom ot Manila li \y. It was confidently predicted that troops in the open would be pounded into mincemeat — a most magnificent and unexampled slaughter ! — alter the advent o\ quick-firing, long-range guns, high explosives, and M iuse r , Krag Jorgensen, Lebel, and Lee-Metford magazine niLs that sputter bullets with a pressure of nearly 18 tons to the =quare inch, and with an initial velocity of a mile a second. Here is one of those hotbrained estimates given by a ' military expert ' a few years ago, before the recently improved Maxims and lyddite were heard of :—: —

A regiment of 700 infantry armed with the Krag-Jorgensen rifle, a six-gun batter} of small breech-loading cannon, and a couple of Gatling gunc, open fire on an opposing force of 1500 men at a distance of 3000 yards. During the first minute's fire alone 36 shrapnel explode in the face of the enemy, hurling at them 10,S0(> messengers of death. The two Gatling guns fire 2000 shots, and 700 men discharge 14,000 bul etc. Thus, within 60 seconds, the advancing ranks are swept by a hail of over 26,000 missiles, which will scarcely fail to lay 1000 men in the dust. Another such minute of havoc, and all that is left of an army is a mere handful of flying men.

In other words, 26 shots are to disable a man. But this supposes an altogether unusuil coolness and accuracy of fire on the part of both gunners and iiHumen. It is very doubtful if the improvement in accuracy of shooting has been at all commensurate with the improvement in the weapons that have been placed in Mr. Atkins's hands. In the British army there are many capital individual marksmen. But the shooting average is and long has been admittedly low, as it was also in the days of the Snider and Martini-Henry. A military writer in the Pall Mall Gazette tells how, at the battle of Ulundi, the British troops blazed away solidly for twenty minutes at thousands of yelling Zulus that were attacking them in the open. When the crackling of the nfles was stilled it was found that only a few of the dark-skms had fallen, and that fourteen out of fifteen of the soldiers had been burning gunpowder for a thiid of an hour without doing any bodily damage to the enemy. When a ' bould soj r boy ' loses — or his not acquired — perfect steadiness he's a poor shot, and would as often miss as hit a haystack at ten yards off. In his Barracks, Bivouacs, and Battles the noted war correspondent, Archibald Forbes, has the following in point :—: —

I remember standing with a O*Ttnin general before Metz watching a skirmish. The German battalion engaged happened to consist chiefly of young soldiers, and they were not very steady. The old general shrugged his shoulders and observed : ' Dey vant to be a little shooted ; dey vill do better next time.'

' All young soldiers,' Forbes adds, ' need to be "a little shooted '" before they become steady enough to fire coolly and tolerably straight when bullets are zipping and shells crashing about them. The first Napoleon expressed the same idea in

characteristic fashion. 'Give me 100,000 men,' said he, 'and when one-third have been killed I shall have made soldiers of those who remain.' But this is not the least of the horrors of 1 war, that until soldiers have been ' blooded ' and acquiied an easy familiarity with wounds and death, they will shoot wildly, and may, on occasion, be almost as dangerous to friends as foes. This — together with resort to cover, and the adoption of the open skirmishing order and the ' loose attack ' — accounts in some degree for the fact that so many bullets never find their intended billets. For instance, in the Crimean War, the Russians fired about 9m shots for every man they «=lew ; the British, 700; the French, 590. In the Franco-German war, the victors fired at a rate of 400 shols foi t-veiy 'kill.' During the American Civil War the United States Ordinance Department served out 12,000 tons of gunpowder, 42,000 tons of lead, and 1022 million rounds of cartridge. How much of this remained unused at the close of the war we cannot say. But the vast bulk of powder and lead actually used accounted for the deaths of only 26,720 Southerners and the wounding of i0i,843> The Spanish- American war was a singularly bloodless one. So — considering the numbers engaged — has been the South African campaign thus far. We have waded through too much war literature and hobnobbed with 100 many soldiers of various nationalities that have passed through big campaigns — like, for instance, that of 1870 — to be much impressed by raw and gushing war correspondents' heated tales of 'hails of bullets,' 'storms of lead,' and the hourly miracles of skirmish or battle. Bloch's recent work, Modern Warfare, laid down the principle that the frontal attacks, so frequently resorted to by British officers in South Africa before Lord Roberts came upon the scene, would be impossible without immense loss and great numerical superiority on the part of the attacking force. It is quite true that the frontal attacks were, especially on the line of the Tugela, very generally repulsed. But by comparison with, say, Jena and Gravelotte and Leipzig and Sedan and Moscow and Wagram and Waterloo, the percentage of casualties was singularly inconsiderable. At the M odder river they were only j\ per cent. The Boer — with all his reputation as a marksman — is, in the mass, evidently given to high and wild firing, even when his human game is crossing the open veldt. Despite the long range, low trajectory, and rapid fire of repeating rifles, every bullet is happily far from having its billet ; and it is, on the whole, doubtful if the relative mortality from weapons of war is as great to-day in the combats of white men as it was in the days of the old Brown Bess, when soldiers set to work in close order, blazed away at the enemy at a hundied yards' range, and then * sailed in ' for a red and murderous melee with the bayonet. Bacteriologists have sheeted home to the rats ! mosquito the charge of spreading the malaria by inoculation. They have also convicted the rat, by evidence direct and circumstantial, of being the active agent in the propagation of the dread bubonic plague which now threatens New Zealand from Noumea and from several chief Australian ports. Our Government has waked up to a just conception of the dangers ot the microscopic germs that those rodents may at any moment discharge upon our shores from beneath the sleek surface of their well-licked fur; and at Auckland and elsewhere traps are set in all sorts of likely and unlikely places to prevent the landing of those undesired and undesirable immigrants from the infected ports beyond the water. The passage of hordes of migrant rats has time and again alarmed the hamlets and villages along their track. But this is, perhaps, the first time in history that the mus ratus has given a genuine shock of fright to the nations and originated an antirat crusade by the health authorities of all the Continents. Hitherto the rat was regarded chiefly in the light of an assiduous and expert thief — a sort of four-footed Artful Dodger — and his depredations were viewed with good-natured tolerance, or at worst, with a harmless peevishness that passed almost as quickly as it rose. Thus the rat-plague which arose in Birmingham early in 1898 on the closing of the old meat markets afforded a source of daily amusement to the inhabitants, who assembled to watch the fierce fighting of the starving rodents over such unconsidered trifles as a bit of orange-peel in the gutter. ' Some centuries ago the rats were summoned to appear before the court of Antun (France) to answer for the depredations which they were then committing in the grain-fields round about. Chassene was appointed their advocate, and the court went gaily through all the solemn tomfooleries of trying the absent nibblers. A conviction was not, however, secured, owing to the brilliant oratorical nonsense rattled off by Chassene. Even at Hamelin — in the tale of the Pied Piper — the poet makes merry over the varied and energetic mischief wrought by the rats : — They fought the dogs, and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, . Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, \ And even spoiled the women's chats, By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and fiats.

In China the rat is a culinary luxury. During the siege of Paris in 1870-71 he proved a real benefactor to the ironbound city. Pits were dug here and there and filled with a sweet glucose syrup which proved an irresistible tipple to the gourmet rodents. They were captured by the thousand in the midst of their feast, promptly turned into dead meat, and sold at a high price — sometimes under the euphemistic designation of ' young rabbit.' It is by no means clear that a rose by any other name is sweet, and we have it on the authority of a besieged resident that rat-pie with mushroom sauce is much more palatnb]>* when served iid as rabbit. The rat's discreditable association with such bad company as the germs of the bubonic plague will discount his value as a table dainty even in a protiacted siege. But our Governments will probably find it as 'sweaty work ' to suppress the rat as to suppress that other prolific rodent, the rabbit.

While upon this subject we cannot do better than quote the following bit of practical wisdom which ' The Flaneur ' ' gets off ' under the guise of a fable in a recent issue of the Sydney Freeman s Journal: — Concerning the bubonic plague, I have nothing scientific to say, but I have a short story with a very useful moral to relate. An Arab Sheik was riding along one day when he saw a poor old hag fainting- at the foot of a tree. And getting off hia horse he ministered to her wants, and taking her up behind him, pillion fashion, he carried her to the gates of Bagdad. There the hag alighted and said : ' I am the dread bubonic plague, but so great has been your kindness that I promise not to slay more than sixty persons in this city.' It so happened , however, that about 40,000 persons died, and the Sheik meeting the hag when the fearful trouble was over was about to split her in two with his sword when shp said : ' Don't blame me ! I kept my word. The plague killed no more than sixty people. Fear, blind unreasoning fear, killed all the rent /'

Should the Australian or New Caledonian rats succeed in giving- the bubonic plague a local habitation in New Zealand, our Public Health Department might do worse than post up this useful little fable in public places as a tag or appendix to such other regulations as it may promulgate for the protection of Maorilanders from the new microscopic king of terrors which threatens us.