The Jeffersonian. [volume] (Stroudsburg, Pa.) 1853-1911, 1866-10-11
TWO GREAT BATTLE-FIELDS.

New York World the following descrip-
tion of the battle fields Of Sadowa and
Austerlitz
visited, on consecutive days, two re-
nowned battle fields, Sadowa and Auster-
litz. They were equally common place
when the struggles to which they gave
name occurred, but Austerlitz, by reason
OF It's commemoration, is now tourists
town of two thousand five hundred in
habitants, while Sadowa is hamlet mere
ly, utterly depopulated. The cholera has
killed two hundred of The little farmers,
wood cutters, ect., in and near by, since
the battle day, for among the putrefying
carcasses the old hyena whets his appetite,
and then picks up the living neighbors.
Sadowa was more sanguinary slaugh-
ter than Austerlitz; at least three hund-
red thousand men were there opposed,
and possibly half million as the bulle-
tins say. We all know how armies are
magnified on both sides till after defeat,
and in this war the military braggart has
been as eminently elastic as in our own.
The least truthful of all contemporary
historians is the soldier himself. Had
he to write our descriptions he might
make his own reputation, but would GER
tainly ruin ours. At Austerlitz, Bona
parte opposed seventy thousand men to
the allies ninety thousand. Sadowa was
fought in the margin of July, and Aus
terltz past the meridian of November
The former was the most terrible butch
cry, the latter the most artful embattling
One finds in the Sadowa battle only the
Prussian Crown Princes swift and per-
severing march to applaud; but Auster-
litz was a piece of daring adrotiness,
fought eight hundred miles from Paris,
with great and incensed capital to guard
behind, and not, as at Sadowa, the Italian
army of Austria compelled to face the Po,
but marching vigorously, eighty thousand
strong, upon the Frenchman's rear, while
Prussia, secretly inimical to him, was
edging up through Bohemia to- join the
allies at the first note of their success
The great inveigler, pleading false de-
sires for peace, first flushed the allies till
they were oyer-certain, assisted them to
| advance VIGOROUSLY, till by their every
success they had become outfanked, then
drove them pellmell upon his bayonets on
the one hand and on the frozen lakes on
the other. They were drowned by acres
when the ice crashed under the French
artillery. Both battles were equally sig
nal defeats to Austria. Sadowa was a
more piqaunt misery because inflicted on
her in the sight of Germany, and by a
lesser State.
My ride over the field of Sadowa was
scarcely pleasurable, because the cholera
had left there only the collapsed aud aged,
| and the peasents hereabouts have the rep
utation of veritable ghouls and glaours,
whose atrocities to the dead pass human
belief They have behaved worse than
any class of savages would do in America,
cutting purses and jewellery from the
wounded, stripping the dead of garments;
in word revenging themselves upon his
tory, which has done nothing for them
these three centuries. Sadowa itself is an
European Culpepper for example, little
stony faced town, with bulbously shaped
church steeple in it, two beer shops, and
the usual per centage of Austrian civil
officers.
An old woman in black stockings stood
alone in the open place of the hamlet,
! looking at the hospital wagons that passed
across the horizon. She did not know
anything, except that two of Hasmer
Somebody's boys, near by, had gone of
with the soldiers a week ago to get back
their horses impressed after action. Had
That was all she knew about the fight
Everything in the place is more or less
shot to pieces The battle field is Sc
ries of hills, half corn-patch, half scrub
timber, inclined to be mountainous, and
to some extent resembling the lands al
the foot of the Blue Ridge-Cedar Noun
tain, for example. At places on it there
are vistas of far white plains, prairie like
but of the deadly spots themselves moth
ing remains save the uneven trenches
where the dead, dumped in as they lay
remain to testify against the monstrous
enigma of ambition, submission and ignor
ance in which they pershcd at that fal
dim time when God shall make it plair
why our kind are thus causelessly anC
perpetually slaughtered. At this spo
the two Prussian armies capped the doubl.
lines of victory: Sechnow. Munchen
gratz, Gitschin on the one hand, Nachod
Skalitz, Trautenau on the other. 1t woulC
be absured for me to waste time in describ
ing series of bare slope stretches ant
curving hills about which none Of your
readers had particle of curiosity. Suf
fee it to say that all the view of Sadow'
is repetition of the Virginia misserie.
of our own rebellion; notany better coun
try, though it has the spruceness and tidi
ness Of age over it all better cleared up
better contented, inhabited by hewers O.
wood and drawers of water, who forge
that Christ ever came, in the better re
collection that they may some day g
hence to Him.
The graves of the dead are marked witt