FOREIGN NEWS

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Publishing Committee · Rochester, N. Y. · Feb 20, 1855

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 6, No. 23.

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FOREIGN NEWS.

The London Times of Jan. 20th, in a leading article declares, that in the face of the increasing mismanagement in the Crimea, and the helplessness of the Government at home, it would be criminal to hide any longer the full truth from the British public. And then it startles John Bull with the information that of the 50,000 or 60,000 men who went to the East, not more than 14,000 infantry, and perhaps 1,500 artillery and sappers and miners are fit for duty, the remainder being dead, sick or wounded, while the cavalry, as a force, is broken up, the horses having been turned over to the ordnance to convey guns and provisions to the trenches. And even of these 15,000 men the great majority are only by courtesy fit for duty; they are weak and exhausted, harboring the germs of disease; they are disabled by sickness at the rate of a thousand a week, and the deaths number from 300 to 400 a week; there is no chance of this mortality decreasing for the work to be done by a force which becomes weaker and weaker every day, remains the same, and over-working is as great a cause of disease among those soldiers as any; and of the less than two thousand men who are reported to have been actually in good health on the 1st January, very many must have been reduced to helpless fever and dysentery by this time. Another article from the same journal on Jan. 25th, again sums up the dreadful facts of the case by saying, that at the existing rate of diminution, lord Raglan and his staff would, by the middle of March, be the only survivors of the expedition; and lord John Russell, in his speech in Parliament in explanation of his resignation, stated that the accounts from Sevastopol were "not only painful, but heart-rending." The number of deaths in the camp, lord John also states at from 90 to 100 daily. It is therefore impossible to suppose that the allegations of the London journals on the subject are mere partisan exaggerations, as has been pretended in some quarters.