Waterbury evening Democrat., 1904-11-15
WATERBURY RADIO -CHEMIC PHYSICIAN

ing the number of the enemy's dead are notorious. This is not always due to intention, but results in part from the rash claims of subordinates whose figures cannot be verified The first formal statistics of losses in the civil war were given to the public twenty
 years after Apponattox, and by curious error Grants losses in the
 Wilderness were overestimated by about 10000, and only an expert could detect the erroh It was due to mis,
 quotation of the official figures com piled bN the surgical bureau The sub
 ject of battle losses Is a grewsome one to consider, but only by reiteration can the horrors of war be brought home to the public mind and con
 science. The little end of every
 bloody battle is terrible. The cumula.
 ton of horrors in prodigious combats
 like those of the Wilderness, Gettys-
 burg, Antietam, Chickamauga, Liao
 yang and Sha river, not to speak of the countless fields of slaughter on Flu
 ropean soil within the century, cannot do otherwise than 'sstagger humanity even when the point of view is no more than 8 summary Of the losses. The figures may mean one in every ten shot down in an army of 100 900, and they may mean one in every two shot down in certain regiments, cen
 tain brigades or certain divisions, as happened again and again in the civii
 war. / At Gettysburg the First Minne- sota lost 215 killed and wounded out Of a total of 252 in line in the space Of ten minutes, a loss of about eight In every ten engaged. On the same field the Twenty seventh North Carolina in one days battle lost 5SS killed and
 wounded out of 800 in line, At An tietam the First Texas regiment lost
 1S6 out of 226 in a single charge,
 loss equal in percentage to that of the
 First Minnesota. At Cold Harbor the First Maine artillery went into a charge with S32 men and, while under fire but seven minutes, lost 632 killed
 and wounded. There were fifty three confederate regiments in which the
 loss for each in some particular en-
 gagement exceeded 5O per cent, or one in every two, and the casualties ranged
 as high as 90 per cent, or eight in
 every ten actually present in the fight
 Tn the federal armies there were sixty
 three regiments which lost oyer 50
 per cent in single battles. At Gettys burg the First corps, entire, lost 61
 per cent in killed and wounded, and
 Hancock's Second corps on the same field lost over 40 per cent It is plain that had the armies of the civil war equaled in numbers those fighting in Manchuria the losses would have been computed by the hundreds of thou sands instead of tens of thousands. Reports from the. east state that cer- tain regiments have been wiped out in the prolonged fighting at Liaoyang and the Sha river, both battles of many days duration. Ill every case cited above the regimenta1 losses given were sustained in one day, often in a single charge of a few minutes, ane the figures are official, verified by the
 war department records. The propor> tion of dead in battle casualties de- pends upon the intensity of the fight | ing. In isolated cases the number of
 killed outright and mortally wounded will equal the wounded who recover. l It has been assumed that the wound ed in the Manchuria battles should be estimated as five times as great as the dead. but that assumption is wrong if
 the fighting was phenomenally severe.
 The First Maine heavy artillery as Cold Harbor lost 21O killed and 422 wounded The First Minnesota at Gettysburg lost in the same proportion, l the casualties being 70 killed and 40
 wounded. As rule, every soldier on I the line of battle stands one chance in ten of being hit, which gives nine
 chances in his favor. But if he gets
 into a slaughter pen his chances O.