ad means at least 70,
casualties all told, or 35,000 on a side if losses were equally
distributed. And this, figured on the basis of the 16,000 dead already
buried, without allowing for the numbers of the fallen that still lie
about in the woods. And yet here is a battle the name of which is hardly
more than known in America, yet the losses on both sides amount to more
than the entire army that General Meade commanded at the Battle of
Gettysburg.

"He who has the heart to walk about in this ghastly place can read the
last sad moments of almost every corpse. Here one sees a blue-coated
Austrian with leg shattered by a jagged bit of a shell. The trouser
perhaps has been ripped open and clumsy attempts been made to dress the
wound, while a great splotch of red shows where the fading strength was
exhausted before the flow of life's stream could be checked. Here again
is a body with a ghastly rip in the chest, made perhaps by bayonet or
shell fragment. Frantic hands now stiffened in death are seen trying to
hold together great wounds from which life must have flowed in a few
great spurts of blood. And here it is no fiction about the ground being
soaked with gore. One can see it,--coagulated like bits of raw liver,
while great chunks of sand and earth are in lumps, held together by this
human glue. Other bodies lie in absolute peace and serenity. Struck dead
with a rifle ball through the heart or some other instantly vital spot.
These lie like men asleep, and on their faces is the peace of absolute
rest and relaxation, but of these alas! there are few compared to the
ones upon whose pallid, blood-stained faces one reads the last frantic
agony of death.

"The soldiers themselves go on from battlefield to battlefield, from
one scene of carnage to another. They see their regiments dwindle to
nothing, their officers decimated, three-fourths of their comrades
dead or wounded, and yet each night they gather about their bivouacs
apparently undisturbed by it all. One sees them on the road the day
after one of these desperate fights marching cheerfully along, singing
songs and laughing and joking with one another. This is _morale_ and it
is of the stuff that victories are made. And of such is the fiber of the
Russian soldier, scattered over these hundreds of miles of front to-day.
He exists in millions and has abiding faith in his companions, in his
officers, and in his cause."

TERRIFIC FIGHTING IN MIDWINTER

Writing of the desp