The Sun.
London, England, 1864-03-07 00:00:00

THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR.

(from the Times Special Corresponknt with the Daniah
Army.)

DANISH HEADQT.TkitTERS, SONDERBORG,
FEB. 26.

The game we are looking on at here is not a very
exciting or edifying one, but neither is it altogether
destitute of a certain amount of grim and painful in-
tercet. It is not real regular war, but it connot be
said to be anything like a bonafide armistice. We
are placed between the Prussians who are afraid,
and the Danes who are unable, to fight—the latter
reduced to numbers too insignificant to venture far
from their own line of fortifications; the former too
prone to listen to that discretion which is said to be
the best part of valour to make a brave dash at a
position which, however strong, is open to the onset
of a storming party, and makes no pretensions to be
impregnable. But, although we have nothing like
a general deliberate action to record, or, perhaps,
even to expect, although time, and the better coun-
sels it never fails to bring, lack of proper mettle on
the one side, and iron necessity on the other, must
sooner or later lead to a suspension of hostilities,
and bring the quarrel upon that field of diplomatic
intrigue and chicane from which both parties still
shrink with Teutonic and Scandinavian obstinacy,
still there is enough of the horrors of war about us
to keep our humane susceptibilities on a perpetual
stretch; there are outpost skirmishes, firing upon
each other's pickets, and filching, as it were, each
other's precious lives, not quite in obedience to the
rules of what modern warfare ought to be, where
not a drop of blood should be sacrificed, not an
ounce of gunpowder should be burnt, without
a well-laid pleas, a plausible purpose, and a
tangible result. I hope I do not over-state the
number of dead and wounded on the Danish side,
since the retreating army was concentrated upon
its safe shelter of Alsen and Dybbol, nineteen days
ago, if I set them down at about 300 or 400. Only
a few of these lie in the various hospitals which
have been hastily got ready for them at Sonderborg,
Augustenborg, and other places, where I frequently
visit them. By far the greatest part of those who
can bear removal are sent to quieter quarters in
Fanen, in Zealand, or as far as Copenhagen itself.
It would be impossible to deny the Danish sanitary
department of the army the praise and great skill
and carein the treatment of the sick and wounded.
Almoat all the poor sufferers I have seen give proofs
of that calm and silent endurance which is charac-
teristic of all Northern races. The wounded espe-
cially, are invariably cheerful and sanguine. They
sit up in their beds as strangers go past, enter wil-
lingly into particulars of the hurt that prostrated
them, solicit, if unable to hold a pen, the aid of
charitable persons to write to their friends at home,
and for the rest they are proud, and I may say, glad,
of having given their blood for their country, and
only long to be free to join the ranks to new risks
cf life and limb for what is to them, without con-
tradiction, the holiest of causes. They are on their
own soil ; they stand or fall for their hearths and
home. The blessings of heaven upon them ; their
blood on the head of those, whoever they may be,
who provoked an unjust or even an unnecessary
struggle !

These thoughts occurred to my mind yesterday, as
for the first time since we came here I found leisure
to attend the ceremony, which is here performed
regularly twice a week, Monday and Thursday, of
consigning the dead to the turf of Sonderborg
churchyard. The church of Sonderborg, a large
but unadorned and some what barn-like edifice, only
conspicuous for a tall slantingroom and tiny wooden
spire, after the common fashion of local ecclesiastical
architecture, rises on a culminating spot on the hill,
only overtopped by the various summits where
windmills are erected, and by a bastion or battery
called the Church battery, and destined to guard
the narrowest passage of the Sound, in the event
of the Dybbol position falling into the enemy's
hand is most extensive, charming even at this
bleak and gloomy time of the year. It commands a
long reach of the Sound towards the north ; to the
south-west and south the broad sheet of water called
the Vemraingbund, with the open sea as far as the
round he idland terminating the Broager peninsula,
and the strip of land enclosing the Ilorup Hay. In
front, looking westward, it is only bounded by the
waving eminences of the Dybbol position, crested
most of them with their batteries, and sweeping at
will a vast extent of the open country beneath. The
landscape was in the main yesterday white with
snow, but here and there the eye rested on dense
woods, the dark bare timber of which broke warm
and genial through the monotony of the desolate
-winter scene. The churchyard at Sonderborg must
be in the summer a lovely spot, a large tract of table
land, planted with thriving beech trees, tall and
tapering; rather indeed a parklike cemetery of
modern times than the narrow " God's acre" which
ancient niggardliness squeezed up between church
and parsonage and set apart for the city of the dead.
There were about a battalion of soldiers gathered
on the spot, a military band, bat vary lately sent
hither from Copenhagen to cheer the dulness of our
beleaguered existence, the officiating chaplain, a few
officers, and still fewer idle spectators. The soldiers
seem fain to pay the honours to their dead en famine.
It was by them that the grave was dug. Their
carpenters made the coffins, their own hands con•
veyed their beloved comrades to their last abode,
lowered them into it, threw the mould upon it, The
bodies to be interred were 22. The coffins were
taken cue by ore from the deadhouse where they
had lain for the last three days. Roogh, uncouth
boxes they were, smeared with coarse red paint; but
still they were coffins, and I could not help admiring
the piety and charity which in the midst of the toils
and cares of a disastrous warfare, in the midst of
incessant and exhausting labours at the trenches, at
the barracks, on the field, found leisure to provide
the nobly slain with six boards and a score of nails,
in obedience to the Northern notions of funeral
decency, and with a loathing (which I can respect,
even if I do not understand it) to give dust to dust
with nothing but s shroud between what was flesh
and the earth with which it must so soo❑ com-
mingle!

Well f. the coffins issued forth from the deadhouse
one by one, each borne by six stout men, whose
strength seemed barely equal to the exertion the
dead weight demnded of them; one by one they
wound round the avenue leading to the cemetery,
till the whcle sad convoy had pass, d under the gate
"ding to the mournful field where their burdens
were to land. As we walked in the rear of the
slowly 1n..;
ng Procession, with the harsh notes of
the bugles grating on our ears, we went past more ,
than one monument erected in commemoration of
the Danes who perished in the field during the war
of 1849-50;
men
who fought and suffered in this
same Schleswig-Holstein quarrel, which they flat-
tered themselves their blood had for ever settled,
and which now opens afresh, athirst for new
blood, and with no good prospect of a more satis-
factory or more permanent arrangement
A monument of that description, by the
way, was
raised soon after 1849, at Flensburg, and it bears
as a trophy in honour of the many dead that lie' under it, a colossal bronze lion of Denmark. The
report goes round the Holstein papers that the
Prussians have pulled down, or intend pulling
down, the harmless memorial ; but the Lanes here
have too good an opinion even of their enemies
deem them capable of such an act of wanton
andaliso.

While we were discussing such matters, in an
ander tone, awed by the simple solemnity, the
funeral convoy had reached the goal of its short
journey, the coffins were laid with reverent care,
one by one, in the spacious grave, not piled up
one upon another, as it is done with the poor
at Bethnal-green or Hackney, but all side by
side in several rows, like the calls in a beehive, till
everyone lay in its appointed place, according to
their numbers, the coffin of a Prussian among those
of his death-reconciled foes, and the last of the
coffin-bearers, helped by the hanis of his comrades,
emerged from the deep trench which was soon to
be levelled over the bodiee. The chaplain stood
now upon the brink of the grave, and his prayers
and eihartatio as sounded very solemn and imposing
and his blessings on the brave ones who die for the
sake of their Fa.d.reland and his 'well-timed allusions
to the One who died for the common Fatherland
of all mankind were listened to in deep silence
and with visible emotion by the assembled sol•