, 1904-11-30
CURRENT
COMMENT
Bloody Battles OF Modern Times.

Bloody Battles OF Modern Times.
General Methuen's excited dispatch
from the field at Magersfontein, In
South Africa, that he had fought the
bloodiest battle of modern times" earn
ed for him no end of ridicule. Russian
and Japanese generals are at least
modest in their reports and show no
disposition to boast of record making
feats. 1t Is easy to e~xaggerate the
terrors of battle, for as a rule any
description, by participant or spectator,
can only refer to a portion of the field.
1t Is likewise natural that figures OF
losses may be exaggerated through
carelessness, haste or the zeal of under
officers and ven of enlisted men who
have responsibility In the work of
gathering and burying the dead. And
the exaggerations of generals in stat
Ing the number of the enemy's dead
are notorious. This Is not always due
to intention, but results In part from
luc IuSD CldllllS VI SuDOluildtCO WAOSC
figures cannot be verified. The first
formal statistics Of losses in the civil
war were given to the public twenty
years after AppomattoX, and by a curl
Gus error Grants losses In the Wilder
ness were Overstated by about 10000,
and only an expert could detect the
or.,.or II u,oo dt1n 10 N oicu1nfo Hon nf
the official figures compiled by the sur
gical bureau.
The subject of battle losses is a
grewsome one to consider, but only by
r%eiteration can the horrors Of war be
brought home to the public mind and
conscience. The little end of every
bloody battle is terrible. The cumula-
ton of horrors in pr~odigious combats
like those Of the Wilderness, Gettys-
burg, Antietam, Chickamauga, LAO
yang and Sha river, not to speak of the
countless fields of slaughter on Euro
pean soil within the century, cannot
do otherwise than "stagger humanity"
even when the point Of view is no more
than a summary of the losses. The
figures may mean n in every ten shot
down in an army Of 100000, and they
may mean one In every two shot down
In certain regiments, certain brigades
or certain divisions, as happened again
and again in the civil war. At Gettys-
burg the First Minnesota lost 215 kill
ed and wounded out of a total of 252
In line in the space of ten minutes, a
loss of about eight in every ten en-
gagged. On the same field the Twenty
seventh North Carolina In one days
battle lost 5SS killed and wounded out
of 800 in line.
At Antietam the First Texas regi-
ment lost 1856 out of 226 in a single
charge, n loss equal in percentage to
that of the First Minnesota. At Cold
Harbor the First Maine artillery went
into a charge with 832 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
engagement exceeded 80 per cent, or
n in every two, and the casualties
ranged as high as so per cent, or eight
in every ten actually present in the
fight. In the Federal armies there
were sixty-three regiments which lost
over so per cent In single battles. AT
Gettysburg the First corps, entire, lost
81 per cent in killed and wounded, and
Hancock's Second corps on the same
field lost over 40 per cent. 1t 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 GER
tain regiments have been wiped out
In the prolonged fighting at Liaoyang
and at the Sha river, both battles of