“Toward three o’clock a second advance is ordered ... nearly 15,000 men close in ... now they are through [the wire fence] ... half naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchments they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast.... Officers are picked off by sharp-shooters, as flies are flecked from a molasses jug.... So up they go, for the tenth time.... Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage.... Thus hand to hand they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of culture sloughed as a snake his cast-off skin; they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.... The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in four trenches. The others paid seven times that price—killed and wounded—to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan.... A hospital ship left every day for Japan carrying from 200 to 1,000.... I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers huddle against the barbed-wire, under the machine guns ... only to melt away like chaff before a wind.... The ‘pioneers’ met with the death-sprinkle of the Maxim [guns] ... a machine rattled and the shale beyond spattered. I was carried back [in memory] to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is most deadly.... The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving one-half its number on the slope.... Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, two-thirds of its men killed or wounded ... for out of that [another] brigade of 6,000 men there are ... uninjured but 640.... Moreover in throwing up their trenches ... corpses had to be used to improvise the walls.... The dead were being used to more quickly fill the embankments.... Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair.... Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he nearly two-thirds of the command was mowed down at once.... Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had heard up to that time, and though I had never before heard bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof-beat of mud in the face.... The parapets of four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with glycerine gases of the motor shells, and the wind blowing ... held huge quantities of dust.... ‘No, the truth about war can not be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark in the center—is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell them the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror.... Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed—how, God knows—on that field out there without help for twelve days, while shells and bullets rained about them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance, his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, enginery of scientific trenches, machine-guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of over 2,000—these things have helped to make war more terrible than ever before in history. Red Cross societies and scientific text-books—they sell well and look pretty, but as for “humane warfare”—was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!’”
Read all of Mr. Barry’s thrilling book and thus learn why the haughty “very best people,” who despise the workingmen, socially, don’t go themselves, up close, to the foul and bloody hell called war.
In the Russian-Japanese war 275 officers and 1,349 men were treated in a single hospital for insanity. Says Dr. Awtokratow:
“As might be anticipated, in the acute insanities, particularly in neurasthenic and confusional cases, the influence of the war gave a characteristic color to the mental symptoms, phases of panic terror, with hallucinations of bursting shells, pursuing enemies, putrefying corpses, and so forth, being especially frequent.”[[86]]
A special despatch in the New York Times of December 11, 1909, reads:
“A carload of insane soldiers from the Philippines passed through Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] today in charge of Major J. M. Kennedy, who was taking them to Washington from the Pacific Coast.”[[87]]
The soldiers of the American Civil War did not use—had not even heard of—the terrible explosives of our day. Melinite, dynamite, cordite, indurite, motorite, ecrasite, peroxilene and other explosive compounds vastly increase the effectiveness of modern arms and in other ways also multiply the dangers of the modern battlefield.
Mr. Charles Morris describes a dynamite gun as follows:[[88]]
“The dynamite gun, compressed air usually being employed, while forty feet long, has a barrel of three-eighth inch iron, with one-eighth inch brass tubing. The projectile is of brass, forty inches long, rotation being given it by spiral vanes fixed to its base. It has a conical cast-iron point, twelve inches long. At a trial in 1895 shells were thrown as far as two thousand five hundred yards, and one containing one hundred pounds of dynamite was thrown a distance of two miles. Great accuracy of aim was attained. This dangerous weapon is an object of dread by naval officers.”
Writing of modern explosives, M. Bloch says, in substance: Such enormous energy is developed in firing cannon using some of these explosives that gun, gunners and horses have been dragged a considerable distance. In the case of a shell exploding by slight accident due to excitement the body of the gun was broken into twenty pieces, the carriage and wheels were reduced to a pile of shapeless steel and wooden splinters; single fragments of the destroyed gun “weighed 363 pounds and were hurled 99 yards forward and backward from the place where the gun was fired, and nearly 108 yards on either side.” He calls special attention to the dangers due to having such explosives on the field of battle. He says:[[89]]