Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 by Unknown
page 57 of 164 (34%)
page 57 of 164 (34%)
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The incidents of that short campaign are too full of horror to be related. Not only did the demon of war devour strong men, but found dainty morsels for its bloody maw in innocent women and children. Whole families, crazed by the belief that capture was worse than death, fought in the ranks with the soldiers. Women ambushed in coverts shot the Russians as they rummaged the captured trains for much-needed food. Little children, thrown into the snow by the flying parents, died of cold and starvation, or were trampled to death by passing cavalry. Such a useless waste of human life has not been recorded since the indiscriminate massacres of the Middle Ages. The sight of human suffering soon blunts the sensibilities of any one who lives with it, so that he is at last able to look upon it with no stronger feeling than that of helplessness. Resigned to the inevitable, he is no longer impressed by the woes of the individual. He looks upon the illness, wounds, and death of the soldier as a part of the lot of all combatants, and comes to consider him an insignificant unit of the great mass of men. At last only novelties in horrors will excite his feelings. I was riding back from the Stanimaka battle-field sufficiently elated at the prospect of a speedy termination of the war--now made certain by the breaking up of Suleiman's army--to forget where I was, and to imagine myself back in my comfortable apartments in Paris. I only awoke from my dream at the station where the highway from Stanimaka crosses the railway line about a mile south of Philippopolis. The great wooden barracks had been used as a hospital for wounded Turks, and as I drew up my horse at the door the last of the lot of four hundred, who had been starving there nearly a week, were being placed upon carts to be |
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