Morning journal and courier., 1882-10-23
ntaI Notions Of Honor on the Battle
 field.
[From the London Daily Nsws.l


 The late telsgrams report dreadful mutila-
 tions by the Egyptian soldiers on the wound
 ed at the last engagement which took place.
 The bodies of two Life Guardsmen were
 found in such disfgured condition that
 they were quite unrecognizable. "Their
 faces weie horribly gashed about. One body
 had one of the hands completely severed from the arm, while the other was nearly so One of the eyes had been scooped out of the socket" A wounded quardsman relates that
 after he fell with his thigh broken, and while
 lying on the battlefield he saw 8 soldier in
 Egyptian uniform riding by, and called on him for help, when the brute rode up, and with 8 cut of his sabre laid the troopers cheek open from the temple to the chin" Such are the details we have resulting from 8 comparatively small battlefield, and we can in. asipe what they might be If it was heavy
 struggle and more particularly if the ground of the battle had to be left in the occupation of the enemy. The Oriental soldier of the ! present day is not Saladin. He has no mo- tion of mercy to fallen foe. It matters not in what part of the East we seek examples, the battlefield witnesses the same brutalities. In Afghanistan, we had many experiences, whoever fell into the hands of the enemy I was orimpsd all over, like piece of pork ready for the spit, with the long charra which each Afghan carries in his kummerband men murdered on the road were they natives :, or Europeans, it mattered nothing--this was the condition in which their bodies were i found. The Abyssinians, who are in a very ! primitive condition, as we'll as their neigh bors, the Gallas, practice very rude kind of l matiletion, of which reference will be found l in the scripture, and it seems to have been a | common act on battlefelds at an early pe- riod in the East. When ws go back to the more savage conditions of civilization, the victorious warrior cuts off noses, ears and | fingers from bis fallen enemy and wears them on his person trophies of prowsss. is done trih If North America, with some of whom the scalp l is not the only evidence of victory carried off.
 In the account of the battle which took place between the Turkish troops under Mus- ! tapha Pasha and Napoleon at Aboukir, the Turks not only lost the day, but their whole army, and that too, after they had all but won the fight, from this most reprehensiblo practice When the French began to retreat tho Turkish soldiers rushed out of their en- trenchments to mutilate the wounded bodies left on the field, and from the disorder this produced in their ranks the French were able to renew the attack, and finally annihilated the Turkish army that occasion. The Russian army, which is supposed to be com- ! pletely European in it's organization and sen- timents, has shown at no far back date that it had still left some of the Oriental instincts so peculiar to it's origin. At the battle of Inkermann various accounts were current of barbarities committed on our wounded men, ana SuSSlan ma1or WhO was maOe prisoner was accused of some of these acts. A cor ! respondence was said to have taken place be- l tween Lord Raglan and the authorities in Sebastopol to his conduct, and the ma jor was understood to have made mar row escape from hanging, as shooting would have been too good for such crimes. Russian officers as body are no doubt | educated above this type, but their men at the time of the Crimean war were not free from the weakness. At the siege of
 Kars both Russians and Turks are said to | have been guilty of this on the field of bat | tie. Colonel Lake, in his account of the de- fense of Kars in 1855, in describing the l ground after one of the Russian attacks, says l that but few wounded remained, for, un-
 happily, little quarter was given on either
 side" In European battles there is 8 certain proportion of killed and wounded which is
 we'll understood, but in battles fought by | Oriental soldiers this proportion is never l found. The number of dead is enormously
 increased in comparison to that of European | battlefields.