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

Y. 1.1 IE SCIT.LE,

TIN WAR.

(11.0 m the lvmes Special Corr dent with the Danish
Army.)
DANISH HEADQUARTERS, SON DERBORG,
FEB. 26.
Th. 9 game we are looking on at here is not a very
exciting or edifying one, bat neither is it altogether
destitute of a certain amount of grim and painful in-
terest. :It is not real regular war, but it connot be
said to b'3 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
general deliberate action to record, or, perhaps,
even to expect, although time, and the bettez cone-
mils it never fails to bring, lack of proper mettle on
She one side, and iron necessity on the other, must
sooner or later lead to a suspension of hostilities,
an d bring the quarrel upon that field of diplomatic
jet rigue and chicane from which both parties still
sht ink 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 plan, a plausible purpose, and a
tangible result. I hope Ido 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
of 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
lout unadorned and somewhat barn-like edifice, only
conspicuous for a tall slanting room 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-wes' and south the broad sheet of water called
the Vemmingbund, with the open sea as far as the
round headland terminating the Broager peninsula,
and the strip of land enclosing the Horup 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 wes 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, but very 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 enfamills.
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 one by ore from the deadhouse where they
bad lain for the last three days. Bough, 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 de not understand it) to give dust to dust
with nothing but a shroud between what was flesh
and the earth with which it must so soon COM-
mingle !
Well! 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 demanded of them; one by one they
wound round the avenue leading to the cemetery,
till the whole sad convoy had passed under the gate
leading to the mournful field where their burdens
were to land. As we walked in the rear of the
slowly moving 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-nolstein
quarrel, which they
flat-
tered themselves their eie blood had for ever settled,
and which now °pew, afresh •
athirst for new
blood, and with no good prospect
a of a more satis-
factory or more permanent
A monument of that description
raised soon after 1849, at Flensba;br the
way, was
as a trophy in honour of the man-,,, and it bears,
under it, a colossal bronze lion of flegead that lie
report goes round the Holstein
pentea'rk. The
Prussians have pulled down, or papers that the
down, the harmless memorial ; but the TID
pulling
have too good an opinion even of
theiranenes here
e
to deem them capable of such an act f
0
vandalism. wanton
While we were discussing such matters, in an
under 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 cells in a beehive, till
everyone lay in its appointed place, according to
their numbers, the coffia of a Prussian among those
of his death-reconciled foes, and the last of the
coffin-bearers, helped by the hanis of his cowl...des,
emerged from the deep trench which was soon to
be levelled over the bodies. The chaplain stood
now upon the brink of the grave, and his prayers
and exhlrtations sounded very solemn and imposing
and his blessings on the brave ones who die tor the
sake of their Fadreland and his well-timed allusions
to the ()ne who died for the common Fitherlann
of all mankind were listened to in deep silence
and with visible emotion by the
assembled sot.