The Kingdom of serbia : report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia

4 AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ATROCITIES

be amputated. A wound in the head or trunk of the body is almost inevitably fatal.

Ordinary bullets fired at a very close range may also cause a normal orifice where the bullet has entered and a very large orifice where it has left the body; but these wounds, of which I saw a fairly considerable number, do not possess an excavation channel as large as that produced by explosive bullets. We have, moreover, frequently found jagged fragments of the bullet in the interior of the wound. At the Russian hospital at Valievo, for instance, several such fragments were extracted from the leg of one of your soldiers (see Plate No. 4). There is therefore no doubt, but that Austrian explosive bullets were employed in firing on your soldiers.

Wounds caused by explosive bullets are even frequent in your army. Thus, in the 5th Reserve Hospital at Valievo, Dr. Major Ljubisha Vulovitch within nine days observed 117 cases of wounds caused by explosive bullets.

I wished to make personal observation of the effect of these bullets and therefore proceeded in the yard of the Artillery barracks at Valievo to experiment at the rifle-butts, firing the cartridges in question from an Austrian service rifle. When I fired at any hard object (a fairly hard wooden board, for instance), I observed that the orifice at the entry of the bullet was quite irregular. In fact, the explosion took place in front of the board and the jagged fragments of the bullet lacerated the wood. The photograph (see Plates 7 and 8) shows the normal entrance orifice of an ordinary

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