Havoc of Life by War

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 18, 1861

Havoc of Life by War.

It is difficult to conceive what fearful havoc this custom has made of human life. Some of its incidental ravages seem to defy belief. It has at times entirely depopulated immense districts. In modern as well as ancient times, large tracts have been left so utterly desolate that one might pass from village to village, even from city to city, without finding a solitary inhabitant. The war of 1756, waged in the heart of Europe, left in one instance no less than twenty contiguous villages without a single man or beast. The thirty year's war, in the 17th century, reduced the population of Germany from 12,000,000 to 3,000,000—three-fourths; and that of Wurtemberg from 500,000 to 48,000—more than nine-tenths! Thirty thousand villages were destroyed; in many others the population entirely died out; and in districts once studded with towns and cities, there sprang up immense forests.

Look at the havoc of sieges—in that of Londonderry 12,000 soldiers, besides a vast number of inhabitants; in that of Paris in the 16th century, 30,000 victims of mere hunger; in that of Ismail, 40,000; of Vienna, 70,000; of Ostend, 120,000; of Mexico, 150,000; of Acre, 300,000; of Carthage, 700,000; of Jerusalem 1,000,000.

Mark the slaughter of single battles—at Lepanto, 25,000; at Austerlitz, 30,000; at Eylau, 60,000; at Waterloo and Quatre Bras, one engagement in fact, 100,000; at Borodino, 80,000; at Fontenoy, 100,000; at Arbela, 300,000; Chalons, 300,000 of Attila's army alone: 400,000, Usipetess slain by Julius Cæsar in one battle, 430,000 Germans in another.

Take only two cases more. The army of Xerxes, says Dr. Dick, must have amounted to 5,283,320, and if the attendants were one-third as great as common at the present time in Eastern countries, the sum total must have reached nearly 6,000,000. Yet in one year this vast multitude was reduced, though not entirely by death, to 300,000 fighting men, and of these only 3,000 escaped destruction. Jenghis-Khan, the terrible ravager of Asia, in the 13th century, shot 90,000 on the plains of Nesa, and massacred 200,000 at the storming of Charasm. In the district of Herot, he butchered 1,600,000, and in two cities, with their dependencies, 1,700,000. During his last twenty-seven years he is supposed by Chinese historians to have destroyed not less than 18,000,000—a sum total of 32,000,000 in forty-one years!

In any view, what a fell destroyer is war! Napoleon's wars sacrificed full six millions, and all the wars consequent on the French revolution, some nine or ten millions. The Spaniards are said to have destroyed in forty-two years more than twelve millions of American Indians. Grecian wars sacrificed 15,000,000; Jewish wars, 25,000,000; the wars of the Cæsars, 30,000,000; and in all the wars of the Romans before Julius Cæsar, 60,000,000; the wars of the Roman Empire, of the Saracens and the Turks, 60,000,000 each; those of the Tartars, 80,000,000; those of Africa, 100,000,000!

"If we take into consideration," says the learned Dr. Dick, "the number of not only those who have fallen in battle, but of those who have perished through the natural consequences of war, it will not perhaps be overrating the destruction of human life if I affirm that one-tenth of the human race has been destroyed by the ravagers of war; and, according to this estimate, more than fourteen thousand millions of human beings have been slaughtered in the wars since the beginning of the world." Edmund Burke went still further, and reckoned the sum total of its ravages, from the first, at no less than thirty-five thousand millions.