COUNTING THE SLAIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 50, 13 December 1900, Page 17

COUNTING THE SLAIN.

HP

HE day is past when a nation may enter upon a campaign as Emile Ollivier did upon the Franco-German war ' with a light heart.' For, as Block tells us in his Modern Weapons and Modern War, ' even a little war in the future f will take a serious form.' The South African campaign, with its many surprises and its dearly bought lessons, has furnished a singularly appropriate illustration of the truth of the Russian soldier-mathematician's forecasts. The seriousness of the Anglo-Boer struggle is not to be measured by the relatively insignificant numbers that have been killed, permanently disabled, or otherwise injured during its course by weapons of war. Its significance lies rather in the enormous and unexpected capacity for defence which modern weapons have placed in the hands of a small body of farmers and shop-boys ; in the indefinite prolongation of a struggle by even a decimated enemy when operating among a friendly population ; in the disproportion of the results obtained by an enormous expenditure of treasure, amounting in the present case to about £2,000,000 per week; and in the enduring legacy of racial hate between the fast-increasing Boer and the slow-increasing Briton, which promises to make the South Africa of the future as aching a problem to British rulers as the Black Belt of the United States is already beginning to be to statesmen on the other side of the Atlantic. • • • These are, however, the features of the campaign which appeal with least force to the leader-writers of the secular Press and to the war correspondent whose duty it is to perambulate tli3 land from Dan to Beersheba in search of attractive ' copy.' His letters are mainly descriptions of very unpleasant and awesome, but, happily, relatively harmless din and uproar and hullabaloo. The tortured atmosphere is a very marine-store of ' perfect hails of bullets,' ' hurricanes of lead,' ' ropes of bullets,' ' living death,' ' hell-fire,' and other distressing property. Even militarj men have caught the craze for perfervid description. General Metjiuex, for instance, described the relatively trilling losses on the M odder as among the greatest ill modern times ! The bad example was set to him and others by one so high-placed as General Hamley, who, after much shrieking verbiage about the ' triangles of fire,' 'storms of bullets,' and ' hurricanes of shells,' poured at him from the earthworks of Tel-el-Kebir, could only record some sixty casualties out of his command of 2800 men ! The anticlimax reminds one of the solitary ' accident ' that resulted from the hell-fire bombardment of Matanzas during the Spanish-American war : an indiscreet mule lost some vertebra? of its tail — only that and nothing more. * • • It is fortunate, for humanity's sake, that war-correspon-dents in South Africa have usually had to record iuch trifling losses at the close of the h'ery torrents of description which form the staple of their letters. Most campaigns are fought more with leg 3 than with arms. This is especially true of the xVnglo-Boer war. It is a war of ' positions ' — of rapid movement, forced marches, and strategy rather than of mere hard fighting. And of all recent struggles it has been the war oi tame surrenders and of small mortality from wounds. Von Eoon, Blocii, and some medical writers on military science will have it that nervousness has increased with the increase of culture and prosperity and that it must be counted upon as a weakening factor, especially in.

attack, in future wars. The British private has, however, probably lost none of his old grit or endurance. And circumstances have proved that a fighting machine of the highest order has been found in the colonial volunteer. Nevertheless Captain Gambier — a British officer — in an eye-opening article in the Fortnightly Review for October, declares that it is folly to blink the fact that 2,200 men, ' in broad daylight, only a few miles from their camp,' surrendered to an enemy ' not having made that enemy pay dearly for their temerity.' So far as the evidence goes, the blame of such surrenders lay, in practically every case, with the admitted ineptitude of officers rather than with any luck of pluck or endurance or determination among the men. w * * The total number of deaths on the British side from hostile lead up to the end of September was only 3,960 in a force of over 200,000 men — a wonderfully moderate butcher's bill after twelve months of powder-blazing. The losses in individual battles or skirmishes were usually counted by units or tens — in singular but happy contrast to the days of the muzzle-loading and single-fire breech-loading rifles when a single hour's short-range firing or brief bayonet-melee would pile more dead upon the field or in the deadly imminent breach than have been stretched out on the red veldt of South Africa after twelve months 1 uproar with the more destructive weapons of modern war. Of the 10,000 men whom Wellington flung at Badajos, 3,000 went down before the British flag was planted on the battered walls. At the Kedoubt d'Eu Ligonier lost at least 4,000 men in 900 paces out of his column of 14,000. The force that held Mount Inkermann in the Crimea numbered 7,464 officers and men. The dogged fellows still held their ground, victors, after 2,487 men — one-third of their whole number — had fallen. They understood fire - discipline in those shoulder-to-shoulder days and took their punishment like gluttons. In the one battle of Gettysburg the Confederates lost 18,000 men out of 68,000 engaged. But they were so full of fight that General Meade did not dare to interfere with their orderly retreat. * * • In the Franco-German War General von Alvensleben left 7000 of his lb,ooo infantry across the track of the French army on the heights of Mass-la-Tour. They stood their ground, and forty-eight hours later were up to the eyebrows in the sanguinary battle of Gravelotte. Krudener and Schahofskoy marched 28,000 men to the attack of Plevna on July 30-31,1877. They returned battered, but in good order, but not 'annihilated,' with only 21,000. One regiment under Scuahokskoy's command lost 75 percent of its whole number. 'In the September attack on Plevna,' says Archibald Forbes, in his Barracks, Bivouac, and Buttles, ' of 74,000 Russo- Roumanian infantry engaged, the losses reached 18,000. Skobelefk commanded 18,000 men, and at the end of two days' desperate fighting, not 10,000 of these were left standing. The survivors who had fought on the 11th and 12th September were ready at the word to go in again on the 13th ; and how they marched across the Balkans later is one of the marvels of modern military history.' • • • The charge of the Light Brigade at Baldklava is a familiar instance, out of many that might be given from British military history, of the capacity of even a small command for mischief after its ranks have been ploughed and cross-furrowed with artillery and rifle-fire. A still more signal instance — though it has as yet found no Tennyson — was Bredow's charge with the Seventh Cuirassiers and the Sixteenth Lancers at Mars-la-Tour. They wont into action 800 strong. They left upon the held 363 of their number. Sixteen officers were among the gallant men that fell. But nobody had blundered there. Bredow had a purpose. It was achieved, though at a mighty relative sacrifice. But that charge of cuirassier and lancer decided the fate of the war. It led to the fall of Metz and wrecked the fortunes and the hopes of France. It had one unintended counterpart — so far as mere slaughter weut — in the present campaign in South Africa. It was among the ranks of the naval brigade at Belmont and Graspan. Experienced and well-led troops advanced to the attack five paces apart. But owing to the blundering or ineptitude of their officers the men in blue marched up the kopjes almost shoulder to

shoulder — as in the days of the old ' Brown Bess.' Fifty per cent, of them were speedily down. But the rest, with magnificent bravery, still kept plodding along over the bullet-splashed rocks, with their faces to the foe. On the part of the officers it was about the most sublime blunder of the whole campaign. But none of them was courtmartialed or shot. On the part of the rank and file it was about the most gallant thing in the war. It was likewise, in the matter of casualties, the most exceptional. ♦ * * The worst thing about the South African skirmishes is the war correspondents' descriptions of them. It is the old story : sounding the loud timbrel over the noisy tubes that kill their thousands, but little or no word about the terrors of camp disease that slays its tens of thousands. There is something of the spirit of the old Coliseum audience among us still. Death has its attractions — when it is theatrical, as in the fall of soldier or gladiator in mortal combat. Little notice is taken of his flitting if his parting spirit gets its wings from typhoid or dysentery. Ten idle men will assemble to see a healthy ox drop under the pole-axe for the one that will pause on the roadside to see him die quietly of lock-jaw. The war correspondent knows his public.