GLORIES OF WAR

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3409, 13 August 1913, Page 8

GLORIES OF WAR

BULGARIA’S WASTE OF LIFE. ' ‘ 1 A standing example of “how not to make war” is afforded by Bulgaria, says a military critic, who signs himself “Chasseur,” in “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.” He is referring to the loss of life revealed in the official returns recently issued at Sofia showing that 330 officers and 29,711 men were killeu; 950 officers and 52,550 men were wounded; 3193 officers and- men are missing. Of Bulgaria’s population of 2,200,000, one malo in every twenty-five must be dead, wounded, or missing. The same percentage of males, in the United Kingdom Would be about 920,000; in the United States ft would amount to 2,000,000. Speaking of Bulgaria’s reckless valor and incautious exposure of her battalions, he cites the fate of two Sofia regiments:

“These two units had comprised, during the original mobilisation, almost the entire literati of the capital. The very architect responsible for the most modern of the buildings had marched away with a rifle on his shoulder. Judges, magistrates, lawyers, actorsj shopkeepers, seized in the great entaeles of universal conscription, had been spirited away to the field of battle. What had been their fortune? There is a cruel fate in war, which may spare one unit and proscribe another. The Sofia regiments found the latter fate. Extermination was their role in their country’s victories. In the early battles of the war they marched with the ‘valor of ignorance’ upon the enemy, and paid the price. * They were recruited again to sendee strength. The boys from the lyceum and the apprentices from the works were hastened a year before their time, into the bar-rack-square, and after three months’ training were drafted to the front. Again a cruel fate lay in store for them. The lions from behind Tchat aldja crept out under cover of the night-mists, and for a second time tlie literati of Sofia were practically annihilated.”

An editorial in the “Evening Standard” (London) contains the startling statement that waste of life in the Bulgar. lines made the mortality of this war, considering its duration, unprecedented in the world’s annals, and we read:

“It is not surprising to learn that the Bulgarians have lost 30,000 men killed in the war. It was obvious from the first that their reckless gallantry would result in heavy losses. The Turks ‘fought like lions’ before Adrianople, and, shockingly as they were led at Kirk-Kilisseh, on October 23, and a week later at Lule Burgas, they still managed to inflict heavy losses on their dauntless foe, who advanced in serried ranks against the fire of shrapnel. The attacking side always suffers most severely, as the Japanese found to their cost, and to the 16.000 men put hors de combat in the finai assault on Adrianople must be added the terrible struggle for the possession of that Spion Kop in the Tchataldja lines on March 23 and 29, when the Bulgarians were finally driven off through the rain .and mist, leaving 1000 dead behind them. Our own losses in the Boer War were nothing like so heavy as those of King Ferdinand’s troops in this campaign, and the total will indeed be appalling when to these figures are added the terrible mortality among the Montenegrins in the attacks on Alount Tarabosli, and the Servian losses, which in the taking of Pristina alone, were officially declared to be “extraordinarily large.’ The Russians in the whole of the Alanchurian campaign scarcely lost more men killed.”