A SKETCH OF WAR: WHAT IT IS, AND WHAT IT DOES. Have It not FEW among us know much about the evils of war. you ever visited its camps and fleets, or witnessed its sieges and battles? Have you followed the march of its armies, or looked in upon the anguish of its hospitals? Have you seen its nameless vices, its savage barbarities, its countless hardships, dangers, and sufferings? Did you ever behold it firing villages, and sacking cities, and desolating province after province, and butchering men, women, and children, by thousands? If not, you know little of war; and we wish to furnish you with a brief sketch of its NATURE ANd effects. I. Mark, then, THE WASTE OF PROPERTY BY WAR. only demands for its support vast sums of money, but dries up the main sources of a nation's wealth. Its victims are mostly men in the vigor of life. It cripples almost every species of business. It cuts the sinews of enterprise in every department of gainful industry. Fields lie untilled; factories stand still; the shop and the counting-room are deserted; vessels rot at the wharves; every kind of trade is interrupted or deranged; immense masses of capital are withdrawn from use; the entire energies of a nation are turned into the channel of war, and its resources whelmed in this mighty vortex of ruin. Look at the loss occasioned in the single department of commerce. This main source of wealth war dries up, and exposes to capture an incalculable amount of property on the ocean. Our exports and imports now (1836) exceed two hundred millions of dollars every year; and one half of all this, besides a great variety of products interchanged along our coast, would be liable in war to be seized by the enemy. The imports in the single city of New York amounted, during one quarter of 1835, to thirty-six millions of dollars; and a war suddenly occurring would probably have found afloat on the ocean more than twice that amount destined to the same port, and one or two hundred millions belonging to the whole nation. The commissioners appointed to adjust the demands of British merchants for property destroyed by Denmark alone during the late wars of Europe, received claims to the amount of about twentyfive hundred millions of dollars! Such estimates as these would prove that the direct expenses of war, though immense, are a mere fraction, rarely more than a fourth part, of the sum total which it wastes. But look at the enormous expenditures of war. Those of our last war have been variously estimated; but they could not have been less than forty or fifty millions of dollars every year. Our revolutionary war cost England six hundred millions of dollars; and in the wars occasioned by the French revolution, she spent more than FIVE THOUSAND MILLIONS! The public debt of Great Britain, incurred solely by war, is even now about four thousand millions of dollars; and that of all Europe amounts to nearly eight thousand millions! The wars of Christendom during only twenty-two years cost merely for their support not much less than FIFTEEN THOUSAND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS! Quadruple these sums by the indirect and incidental losses of war, and we shall have an amount that would almost tempt us to suspect figures themselves of falsehood, and facts of deception a sum so vast that the bare interest upon it would be more than enough to defray the necessary expenses of governing every nation on earth, to furnish every family in the world with a Bible, to provide the means of common education for all its children, and to support one minister of the gospel for every thousand souls. Seldom do the people inquire or imagine how much our own Republic spends for the war-system even in a time of peace. In 1827, our expenditures for war were about nine times as much as for all other purposes. In 1832, we expended for civil offices $1,800,758; for intercourse with other nations, $325,181; for miscellaneous objects, $2,451,203; for the military establishment, 85,446,035; for the naval service, $3,956,320; for revolutionary pensions, $1,057,121; for various other pensions, $127,301; for the Indian department, $1,352,420; for the national debt, $17,840,309; more than thirty millions and a half, in one form or another, for war; seventeen times as much as for the whole civil list, and about ten times as much as for all the other purposes of our government. From 1791 to 1832, the aggregate of our expenditures, with less than three years of actual warfare, was $842,250,891; and merely 37,158,047, a twenty-third part of the whole, were for the civil list, almost the only department that would be necessary, if the war-system were entirely abolished The bat II. But reflect on the LOSS OF LIFE BY WAR. tle-field will by no means tell us the whole number of its victims. Cruel treatment, bad provisions, unhealthy encampments, forced marches, frequent exposures to extremes of heat and cold without shelter, and fatal diseases generated by such causes, destroy vastly more than the sword. Often has a single march cut off more than half of an army. The hardships of war shorten from ten to twenty years the life of those who escape the sword, and thus occasion an immense loss that is never reckoned in the usual estimates of its havoc. But how vast the multitude of its immediate victims! At Borodino there perished in one day 80,000; and in the siege of Mexico more than 100,000 in battle, and more than 50,000 from the infection of putrefying carcasses. The Moors of Spain lost in one engagement with Christians 70,000, and in another 180,000, besides 50,000 prisoners. In the battle of Chalons there fell 300,000 of Attila's army alone; in ancient times it was no very uncommon slaughter for one or two hundred thousand to be left dead on a single field; and the Old Testament records an instance where one side lost 500,000.* We shudder at the thought of Alexander's sacrificing three millions of lives; but his successors occasioned the destruction of twenty millions, the Saracens, sixty millions, and the crusades alone, forty millions of nominal CHRISTIANS !! III. Glance, now, at some of the PERSONAL SUFFERINGS incident to war. Think of the violence practised in procuring seamen and soldiers. Where the war-spirit is predominant, they are forced into the army and navy at the pleasure of their rulers, and doomed to all the hardships, perils, and sufferings of war, with little or no hope of release till death. Do you know how soldiers are generally treated? They are subjected to the most iron-hearted despotism on earth, to a bondage far worse than that of a Turkish peasant, or a domestic slave. They are at the mercy of every superior, from the commander-in-chief down to the pettiest officer. They have little or no protection against hourly abuse, insult, and violence, nor any adequate security for life itself against the lawless passions of officers seldom called to account in war for the worst treatment of soldiers. Their punishment is still more barbarous. 'Sailors are subject,' says a well-known writer, 'not only to a torrent of imprecations and curses, but to the boatswain's 2 Chron. xiii. 3—17. cat-o'-nine-tails. The least complaint brings them to the gangway; and sometimes a sailor is sentenced to receive five hundred, and even a thousand lashes, to be inflicted day after day, as he may be able to bear them. He is attended at each whipping by a surgeon, who determines how much can be inflicted at once without immediate danger to life! Often does the flagellation proceed till the victim faints; and then he is respited, to renew his sufferings another day. I have often shuddered at the recital of whippings through the fleet, the keel-hauling, the spread-eagle, the gagging, the hand-cuffing, and other punishments inflicted on sailors who have been trepanned or forced into a service from which death is the only release.' The punishment of soldiers is equally cruel and shocking with that of seamen; but we will not describe flogging, the gauntlope, the picket, the wooden-horse, and other forms of punishment, the very thought of which is enough to make one's blood boil with indignation, or curdle with horror. One instance, however, we will select from our own land. In 1814, a soldier was shot at Greenbush, New York, for going thirty or forty miles from the camp, without leave, to visit his wife and three small children. After the usual preliminaries in such cases, his coffin, a box of rough pine boards, was borne before him on the shoulders of two men to the place of execution. He wore, as a winding-sheet, a white cotton gown, having over the place of his heart the black image of a heart, as a mark for the executioners to aim at. His countenance was as pale as his winding-sheet, and his whole frame trembled with agony. His grave was dug, the coffin placed by its side, and the deserter, with a cap drawn over his eyes, required to kneel upon the lid. At this signal, the eight soldiers, drawn by lot for the bloody deed, stepped forward within two rods of their victim; and, at another signal from the officer, all fired at the same instant. The miserable man, with a horrid scream, leaped from the earth, and fell between his coffin and his grave. The sergeant, to insure immediate death, shot him through the head, holding his musket so near that the cap took fire; and there the body lay, with the head sending forth the mingled fumes of burning cotton and hair. The soldiers, after passing close by the corpse in a line to let every one see for himself the fate of a deserter, marched back to the merry notes of Yankee Doodle! and all the officers were immediately invited to the quarters of the commander, and treated with grog!! Imagine the sufferings incident to marches. Trace the French army in the Russian campaign. On halting at night, the soldiers threw themselves down on the first dirty straw they could find, and there perished in large numbers with hunger and fatigue. From such sufferings, and from the infection of the air by putrefied carcasses of men and horses that strewed the roads, there sprang two dreadful epidemics, the dysentery and typhus fever. So fatal were these combined causes, that of 22,000 Bavarians, only 11,000 reached the Duna, though they had been in no action; and the flower of both the French and the allied armies perished. A division of the Russian army, amounting, at the commencement of the pursuit of the French, to 120,000 men, could not, on the frontier of the Duchy of Warsaw, muster 35,000; and a re-enforcement of 10,000, that had marched from Wilna, arrived with only 1500, of whom one half were the next day in the hospitals. Some battalions retained less than fifty men, and many companies were utterly annihilated! Others, The march of the French both to and from Moscow, was horrible beyond description. 'Overwhelmed with whirlwinds of snow,' says Labaume, the soldiers could not distinguish the road from the ditches, and often fell into the latter, which served them for a tomb. eager to press forward, dragged themselves along. Badly clothed and shod, having nothing to eat or drink, groaning and shivering with the cold, they gave no assistance, and showed no signs of compassion to those who, sinking from weakness, expired around them. Many of these miserable creatures struggled hard in the agonies of death. Some, in the most affecting manner, bade adieu to their brethren in arms, and others with their last breath pronounced the name of their mother and their country. Stretched on the road, we could only see the heaps of snow that covered them, and formed undulations in our route like those in a grave-yard. Flocks of ravens flew over our heads croaking ominously; and troops of dogs, which had followed us all the way from Moscow, and lived solely on our bloody remains, howled around us, as if impatient for the moment when we should become their prey, and often contended with the soldiers for the dead horses which were left on the road.' 'Every day furnished scenes too painful to relate. The road was covered with soldiers who no longer retained the |