Thanks to these shells this war is a war of frightful wounds. I have, not so far met with any real Dum-dum wounds or with any doc-"for who has seen such wounds; but when the ordinary bullet is nearly spent it—_sometimes enters the body _sidoways, making a hole which is sometimes mistaken for that made by a dum-dum. The shrapnel wounds re worse than those made by any dum-dum bullets, while the gaps made in the bodies of soldiers by chunks of the heavy shells are not to be described. Sometimes they knock off the head or lay bare the heart and the whole interior anatomy. But they do the most harm to a man when they just graze his head without breaking the skin at all. The damage done in this way called & contusion, and it a rule terrible and irreparable damage for the whole nervous system is upset in some mysterious way by the close passage of the gigantic missile.
One officer assured me that the strong vibration of the molecules of the shell communicates itself in some inexplicable way to the mole-criles composing the brain with the result that the latter is temporarily or permanently injured. Why ordinary bullets do not produce the same effect my friend did not attempt to explain; but perhaps the missile must be of considerable size in order to produce any effect.
Examples of Contusion, I saw cases of contusive.n Russo-Japanese war, but the first I saw in this war was that of a private soldier, whom I found sitting in a house near the front at Sokoloff. The house evidently belonged to some well-to-do Polish landowner, but it was now abandoned by its cand great Russian howitzers roared every few minutes in the garden outside, illuminating the interior of the house like a flash of lightning and shaking the furniture and the -piotures on the walls with the force sot the explosion.
In the great hall " number of soldiers were dimly discernible by the light of candle; and, owing to his attitude, one of these soldiers instantly attracted the attention of everyone who entered the room. Ho was a young peasant of enormous size and he sat as still as if he had been @ statue. But his whole pose was one of complete and tragic melancholly, combined with an entire unconsciousness of what was taking place around him. He did not even rise to salute officers when they passed; and, far from resenting this neglect, the officers only gazed at the unfortunate man with Pity. His head hung forward; his eyes were fixed on the ground; and his hands were suspended listlessly
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.