The Sun.
London, England, 1864-04-19 00:00:00

THE WAR IN DENMARK.

(From the Times Special Correspondent at the Parrish
Head-quarters.)

ULKEBOL, April. 11.

The fire was tremendous yesterday from 11 in the
morning till nightfall, and there was no great abate-
ment in its intensity after dark. No less than 17,
and even 20, shots in the minute were counted, and
5,000 shells are calculated to have fallen in 24 hours.
The Danes had between 70 dead and wounded on
Friday, no less than 17 on Saturday morning, when
the fire ceased at 9 a.m. The Danish army numbers
its sick and wounded in the hospitals at the rate of
25 per 100, and in the event of some great action
strewing the field with the dead and dying, it is
feared that no accommodation will be found for the
wounded, either in the hospitals of this island, or
even in those of Funen and Zealand, or of Copen-
hagen itself, so crowded are already all charitable
institutions of that nature.

The Prussians have profited by the lessons of ex-
perience, and understand now that the efficiency of
their fire must depend on its exteesion all along the
line, and no less on its continuance throughout the
21 hours. The Danes ou the bastions are harassed
to death, and those who are sent to replace them are
hardly less worn out than their comrades. Two or
three foggy days we have had in succession have
enabled the besiegers to advance their parallels
within a dangerous distance. The crack of the rifle
begins to b heard occasionally among the incessant
reports of the artillery. The hostile batteries are on
certain points within reach of the fire of small arms,
and a rush over 500 or 600 yards of dry ground can
at any moment refer the contest to the arbitrament
of the bayonet.
We thought that the moment for this supreme
trial of strength had come this very morning. We
were awakened at 5 by the trumpets sounding the
alarm, and by the tidings brought to our bedside by
a friendly officer that the Rolf Brake was leaving
her anchorage. We were up in a minute, and
rushed across the fields to the sea shore, where, sure
enough, we saw the ironclad in motion; but we
had hardly turned our glasses in that quarter when
the sound of rattling chains assured us that the
steamer had cast anchor. The affair at Dybbol was
already over, and the co-operation of the sea forces
with the land army was no longer required.
We walked to headquarters at Ulkebol, and soon
learnt the particulars of the encounter. The Prus-
sians flattered themselves that the bastions, espe-
cially Nos. 3 and 4, had been dismantled and their
cannon silenced, and, massing a few large columns
in front of those posts, sent forward their skir-
mishers with directions to possess themselves of the
Danish rifle pits. The Danes at outposts, however,
stood their ground, and the batteries from the forts
rang out in clear notes that there was life in the old
Danish lion yet; whereupon the assailants came to
a pause, and upon seeing the ironclad ready to come
to the rescu,_—the ironclad which so powerfully
contributed to their defeat on the 2Sth of last month
—they fell back again.
It was the feeblest possible attempt at an attack,
and it must have given ample evidence to the Prus-
sians that Dybbol is not to be taken by the cannon
alone. Why, with the noise their guns have kept
up for the last fortnight, it seems as if the very hill
of that name, to say nothing of its bastions and of
their defenders, ought by this time to have been
swept away before them. But the position is not
yet materially shaken, and the little army which
has it in charge, however sorely worn out and
efflicted, will not surrender an inch of ground un-
disputed.

Truly, the ordeal to which the Danish troops are
exposed would overcome the most heroic endurance.
All along their way from Sonderborg and its bridges,
up the ascent of Dybbol hill, and on the way to its

forts, they are exposed to a raking fire. Not one
of their tents or barracks, not one of the hollows

in which they ha re their bivouacs, and where they
cook and sleep, and live altogether for 24 hours at a
time, is safe from the übiquitous shells. I was to-
day at Sonderborg, and saw several corpses brought
in, and laid in the dead-house for interment. I saw
a good number of wounded men borne along by the
ambulance men on stretchers, two of them hideously
black in the face, iaegrimed with the powder of the
shell that had burst between them as they lay on
the ground in their sleep.
Under such circumstances, can Dybbol hold out
muctflonger Will the day come in which the de-
fenders, shrinking from the horrible death that en-
compasses them on all sides, will refuse to go forth
across the bridges, or will the commanding officers,
anticipating such a mood among their troops, be-
come aware of the unprofitableness of all that irre-
parable waste of life, and resolve upon the surrender

or simply the abandonment of the position ? That
llybbol may be given up to the Prussians seems to
me far more probable than that it may ever come
into their hands either by main force of arms or by

a coup de niaziz and surprise. The Prussians, we
learn from their own friends, are chary of the lives
of their soldiers ; they will not venture to win by
bloodshed what they hope they may get by merely
burning gunpowder.

APRIL 12.

We have ceased to venture across the bridges.
There is not much to be dreaded from all that cease-
less shower of shells if you happen to be born under
a particularly lucky star, for these blundering mis-
siles are not aimed at your person with the fell
intent and fiendish malice with which a rifia bullet
singles you out among a thousand, if your uncom-
mon height, or the epaulettes on your shoulders, or
the star on your breast, attracts the marksman's
at,',?ntion. Still, one must be very sure that he is
born to bb hanged if he thinks himself safe from
drowning in such deep waters. The ground be-
tween the bridges and the forts is literally all
ploughed up by the ruthless iron hail. The soldiers
pick up cartloada of fragments of shells, which they
sell to the owner of a foundry in Sonderborg.
One of our artille:v captains, quartered here at the
Ladegaard,went out on c.?..lilduY night with his field
battery complete; he came bae: minus two horses,
one gun, and four men. He had hare. iv sat down
to supper when his lieutenant stood before hie: with
the intelligence that another gun was lost. Another
captain who had gone out to relieve our friend was
brought back severely wounded. He had been
struck on his way to outposts. All these lasses are
promptly and cheerfully repaired ; but there are
limits to the resources of the Danish stores, and men
arc more difficult to replace than either horses or
guns. It is not too much to say that the losses
of the army must be proportionate to the damage
done to these batteries. These field batteries, be it
remembered, are scarcely placed in the front line ;
they are merely parcelled out all round at the vari-
ous gaps between the bastions, and are intended to
act as a reserve should the heavy artillery in posi-
tion be silenced.

For the rest, if the Prussians are still only feeling
their way, and are at a loss how to act with consis-
tency and resolution, the same cannot be said of the
Danes, who have fully made up their minds, and
are actually working up to the very letter of their
programme. Their plan is to stand to their guns
and bide their time. The enemy will scarcely ever
know when their batteries may be silenced, for they
are almost constantly and systematically silent. It
is a steady heroism, of which few troops in the
world could be capable. There they stand, and sit,
and lie down, day and night, seeking shelter where-
ever any is to be found, letting the angry shells
whir and rattle over their heads and burst among
them, only shaking from their coats the dust with
which their fragments cover them, and starting up
from time to time when there is a shattered breast-
work to be repaired, a fallen gabion to be replaced,
a dismounted cannon to be removed, or a killed or
wounded comrade to be sent to the rear. They are
not sullen under circumstances, nor are they
cast down, though they are not as much in the
humour fcr singing as they used to be. They go to
work earnestly, silently, with that impassive steadi-
ness which characterises them either in success
or defeat. They have made up their minds to the
worst, and the worst is to be knocked on the head
and put out of trouble. Truly, it would be plea-
santer to give and take, and all theirsufferings would
be more than fully compensated if they had a chance
of a hand-to-hand fight with their foe. Buy even
this is too much to ask, far too much—more than
1 they have reason to expect; they are quite content,

that the cannon should be utterly idle on their own
side, suffer no loss,end have the game all their own
way. The Danes are aware that their artillery is
no match for the enormous array of batteries which
encompass them on all sides, and which from Broa-
gerland to the woods of Sandbjerg, darken, as it
were, the very sun in the heavens with their cross-
fire, and thread on either side that narrow gorge of
th© Alssund which is their only highway to the
battle-field. Their task is to stand up and be shot
at, and all that with the certain conviction that their
devotion will be of no avail in the end. The Danes
do not only fight, " hoping against hope"—they die
without hope.
The forts 4,6, and 8 were almost utterly dis-
mantled last night. Great efforts have been made
to set them in tolerable repair in the morning, but
the Prussian fire has acquired a deadly effect from
long practice, and beiore six o'clock the bastions
were again a mass of ruins. A kind of sullen mu-
tinous spirit begins to break out among the ambu-
lance men—those fellows, " merry as undertakers,"
who, were always singing the loudest. The wounded
are in no danger of neglect on the part of their com•
rades, but the dead are not unfrequently left stiff
and stark on the spot where they have fallen. The
Danes have an average of 100 men hors de combat
daily. How long will it take at this rate before
their small army is utterly wasted and used up ?
A council of war was held last Sunday at Ulke-
bol, where the assembled officers:determined that the
position shall be defended to the last drop of blood.
It is a wholesale slaughter with no other result
than ultimate ruin; a sacrifice made to a point of
honour which it is impossible not to respect, even
for those who may be at a loss how to understand
it. In some of the partial insurrections in the south
of Europe, when a parcel of young students and
other volunteers were put down by the disciplined
armies of despots, all the consolation the conquerors
received at the hands of European opinion was
" that they were a pack of cravens," and that no
nation is entitled to the enjoyment of independent
existence unless it is ready to fight for that greatest
of blessings • " who would be free themselves
should strike the blow." This taunt can hardly be
flung into the teeth of agonising Denmark. Their
soldiers are not only fighting like men—they fight
as hardly any men fought before. Yet is there a
hand in all Europe that will be raised to avert their
fate or to avenge it ? .

ArniL 13.

When we read or hear the particulars of some
great battle in which the dead and 'wounded are
strewing the ground by hundreds and thousands we
are apt to think that we have become acquainted
with war in its most appalling charactEr, and that
minor details are matters of commonplace interest.
Wespeak indifferently of Bonaparte's second Italian
war as the "campaign of Marengo," of the subju-
gation of Austria by the First Napoleon as the
" campaign of Austerlitz." General engagements,
however, are merely the gala-days, the great shows
and pageants of a war. Its real horrors must be
sought in those obscure skirmishes, in those weary
marches, in those unwholesome bivouacs, in all that
complication and aggravation of silent suffering
of which history scarcely takes any note, and
which, however, if set out in proper' relief, would
go further towards curing mankind of tht.'ir com-
bative and destructive propensities than any mot; nt
of carnage heaped up together in fair fight and in
hot blood.

Here, for instance, we have this war in Denmark
going on for the last two months and a half with
scarcely any actual fighting. It will require no
trifling flourish of trumpets to dignify such partial
encounters as those of Bustrup or 0 verso, or the
attacks on Dybbol of the 17th and 28th into serious
warlike events. There is no instance, as far as we
have learnt, of more than two or three regiments
being engaged on either side, and such affairs as we
had to record are rather the results of the fortui-
tous falling in of the van of one army with the rear
of the other, rather the inevitable brush between
the outposts watching each other than the delibe-
rate deed of one party marching out to meet the
other with full intent that one of the two should be
driven, routed and annihilated, from the field.
Yet what amount of killing and wounding have
the Danes and the Germans contrived, or are even
now contriving, to go through without actual fight-
ing ! Our friendly officers come back from the
bastions after their dreary nightwork, and what a
terrible tale of miserably wasted lives have they not
to tell ! Here an officer of artillery, on his way to out-
posts, is struck down from his horse, and has to be
carried back severely wounded ; there another sits
down at our table with his head bandaged in con-
sequence of some hard knock which has fractured
his skull. A major of infantry is crushed by a shell
in his tent, where he sat writing in the midst of
his encamped battalion. Another shell falls among
a group of sleeping men, killing six and wounding
one. These have become for us common place
occurrences, and matter of daily experience. It is
thus, in driblets, without lifting a hand in its de-
fence, that the Danish army is sinking, melting, as
it were, before the fire of an invisible foe. The
whole of yesterday we were stunned; the whole of
last night we were kept awake by the incessant
Prussian cannonade. One of their shells fell so
very close to the great barn of the Sonderborg Lade-
gaard, my night quarter, that every pane of glass
in our windows rattled, and the whole house shook.
About half a score more have kept up the game in
the course of this forenoon. It is not every cannon
ball, nor every shell that kills, thank Heaven ! and
all teat terrible nohie, which would seem to usher
in the crack of doom, is found to have done much
less harm than we anxious spectators had been led
to apprehend. Still the fire of the Prussians has
gained tenfold in intensity. The cannonade is five
times as brisk ; it is kept up with five times as great
a constancy and assiduty. The result is, of course,
proportionate to the increased exertion. The time
was when the Prussians fired about 500 shot daily,
when the average loss to the Danes was four or five
dead ,or wounded. Wo even remember the day
when the shells that fell were 1,000, and we had no
casualty to deplore. Now the Prussians have en-
circled the Dybbol bastions with a line of fire, from
which no less than 6,000 or 7,oooshells are showered
• Danes within the 24 hours; no wonder due-
on alb
ing that same
to Sonderborb,
- period if from 90 to 100 men are con-
veyed- to be consigned to the cares of
either surgeon or undertaa-er• On Monday the dead
and wounded were 78; yesterna.,v' 138. At the rate
of 100 per day the returns of the Dy ,:bol siege will
soon swell to the proportions of one of the" world's
decisive battles; and it must not be forgotten that
the armies by which gigantic battles were lost or
won mustered their combatants by hundreds of
thousands; while the army from which hundreds
are subtracted daily hardly consisted of 18,000
men at the beginning of the siege, and has not
been kept up to that mark, in spite of the rein-
forcements constantly sent up to it. Denmark is a
small State, and all its war establishment was on
a somewhat diminutive scale. There is no lack of
humanity towards the wounded, as far as the means
of the medical department extend, but these means
are, unfortunately, inadequate to the exigencies of
the occasion. The sick and wounded are brought
home in numbers for which the Government este.
blishments were not prepared. The bombardment
of Sonderborg has twice compelled the evacuation of
the Castle Lazaret, of the Caroline Amelia School,
and other improvised asylums of that nature. All
the space that public or private charity provided for
military sufferers at Augustenburg, Horup, Tond-
slet, and in every village in the island, has been long
since exhausted, and as I rode up to Horup Hay
this morning I fell in with a long, a very long train
of country carts—a sad convoy of sick and wounded
men, for whom no accommodation or attendance
could be procured in any part of Alsen, and who
must needs embark for Funen or Zealand, although
it is doubtful whether many, or indeed any of them
are in a fit state for the voyage, or likely to reach
their destination alive; although some of them
evinced by their haggard countenances and writhing
features the agony which the jolting of those clumsy
conveyances inflicted, and others bore it with that
apathy which is often only the result of suspended
animation; although it is more than doubtful
whether the hospitals of the two larger islands and
of Copenhagen itself will have any room to spare
these poor wanderers, as all houses set apart for such
purposes are already crowded to suffocation. No