The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-08-02
BOW AND BATYLRAXE.
SLAUGHTER GREATER THAN
 WITH MODERN FTREARafS

|
 pears to Indicate That Gunpowder Is
 a Beneheence-The Great Distances
 at which Fighting is Now Carried
 On.
 The horror of war increases paTi pas gu with the advance of civilization. and the value set upon life has arisen approximately with our ability to sp- preciate its pleasures, its mutuality and associations. says the Pail Mall Gazette. Partly the sentImentalisn of lup-to-date Journalism, partly our own sensibility of nature, has disposed us to regard any battle losses over 1000 as terrible. But the strange truth is that we go back in history of war we shall notice an extraordinary increase in the proportion of losses to the num- bers engaged until we begin to realize that the longbow and clothyard shaft of our ancestors were much more dead l ly weapons than the modern magazine rifle, with it's small bullet and high ve- locity. 1..... ,s...-.
 Such facts would doubtless have con- founded M. Bloch, whose fayorite con- tention it was that, owing to the dead liness of modern weapons, war was rapidly becoming impossible. A closer study of history would have taught him that the discovery of gunpowder was in reality a beneficent invention which has enabled an armed struggle to be decided without the former necessity for prolonged close-quarter lighting land the deadly weapons of the melee,
 It cannot be charged that men are less courageous nowadays when they were called upon to face much more terrifying instruments of warfare. But the fact remains that the Lee-Enfleld the Mauser, quick-flring artillery and lhigh-explosiv shell are productive of nothing like such slaughter as the long bow, the battleax and the sword In the hands of our fighting ancestors.
 If we take battles like Colenso and Kinchau since the employment of mag azine rifles and quick-firing artillery, land compare them with engagements lsueh as Crecy, Poitiers or Agincourt, I've cannot fail to be impressed with the lastonishing discrepancy in the casualty lists. In Gen. Buffers attack on the Boers at the battle of Colenso, his men lpresented as fair a mark for the action Iof the modern firearm as our enemies
 could have desired. Yet, as a result of Iseveral hours hot fighting, during (which many brave deeds were done by lofficers and men, who recklessly ex- Il lpncoH fn O cfo fNf HiIiIat a and shell fire, our losses were not more lthan HOO men out of a force of 25,000 Ito SO,000 while those of the Boers were lprobably far less.
 \ Compare such a causalty list with the Islaughter at Agincourt in i415. a bat ltle which lasted for not much longer lthan three hours between an English force of 14,000 men under Henry v. and 5l50,0o0 French led by their Constable. It Twas the longbow and the clothyard ishaft which broke the French army,
 and was the most potent agent of des- truction on that great day in our mili- ltary annals Over 10000 French were lslain outright and two or three times ithat number were wounded.
 With the result of this three hours battle it Is interesting to contrast the Isixteen hours struggle in Kinchau be- tween the Russians and Japanese, where both sides were armed to the teeth with modern weapons and the lpostion was taken after successive as- saults in the face of an apparently lmurderous fire from heavy artillery and magazine rifles. At the end of this prolonged contest the losses of the Ivictors, compelled to advance through lthe fire swept zone in front of Nanshan, Iwere no more than 4000 men, of whom lonly 750 were killed, out of total of about 60,000.
 How infinitely more terrible again was the work of the bow and the bat ltleaxe at the battle of Crecy In 14a6,
 when our Edward III. and his son, the
 Black Prince, routed the great army of IPhilip of France. The English army numbered SO,oOO men, that of Philip l12O.OOO. Again the longbow proved it's I terrible effectiveness. The French lwere utterly unable to sustain the heavy fire of it's yaTd-long projectiles, against which amor was but sn indif- Iferent protection, and were routed with the loss of 1,2O0 knights, 1,400 esquires and S4,O00 men, of whom no less than
 10000 were killed outright The same icausality lists were noticeable at the
 battle of Poitiers, where l2,000 English ldefeated 60,000 French; and so terrible
 was the execution done by the English bowman that 11.000 of their enemy were
 slain outright. Both Hastings and Ban Inockburn bear additional testimony to l the formidable and deadly character of these old battles. At the former 30,-
 GOO men fell on both sides, while the latter resulted in total losses of 3s,000,
 in both cases a heavy percentage of the
 conbatants.
 K As we gradually approach our own time we shall find not only that the I. proportion of those actually slain in
 battle to the numbers of those who are wounded shows sensible decrease, but that the total causalty lists are almost invariably smaller, in proportion to the numbers engaged, in spite of the fact that the weapons of war are al-