It is singular that whilst our troops at home, for the last twenty years within the immediate influence of a growing sanitary science, have profited little by its teaching, the troops quartered abroad within the same time have experienced a marked decline in their annual rate of mortality. In the year 1835 Lord Howick caused a parliamentary inquiry to be made into the causes of the fearful mortality among the troops on some of the foreign stations, especially in the West Indian islands. The returns proved even worse than had been anticipated. The mortality in Jamaica was no less than 128 per thousand, or, in other words, every eighth man who stepped on board a transport for service in this beautiful island was doomed to leave his body for the land crabs. In the other islands the mortality was somewhat less, the deaths being 81 in the thousand. The reason of this decimation had long been known. More than fifty years ago Robert Jackson had pointed out the deadly nature of our military posts, situated for the most part at the embouchures of rivers and in low harbours, or placed in the immediate neighbourhood of pestiferous swamps. Salt pork and rum were called in to finish the work malaria had commenced. Five days a-week were our soldiers rationed upon this poisonous food; and, to make the injustice more glaring, the convicts upon the island were fed with fresh meat, and were consequently in good health. In 1843 Sir Charles Metcalfe determined that the troops should no longer perish. He altered their diet and removed them entirely from the marshy plains to Maroon Town, which stands at an elevation of not more than 2,500 feet on the Blue Mountains, but sufficient to lift European life above the level of the deadly fevers of the climate. The effect of these changes exactly corresponded with what had been foretold by Jackson; the mortality speedily fell from 128 to 60 per thousand, and is now reduced to 32. Thus for many generations the mortality of white troops in Jamaica was fourfold what it should have been, through ignorance and extravagance; for, strange to say, the difference between the cost of the poisonous salt pork and the healthy fresh meat caused a saving to the Government of 80,000l. a-year.
In other colonies the improvement in the health of the troops has been marked of late years. At Ceylon, where resort has been had to hill-stations, the mortality has decreased from 74 per thousand,—at which ratio it stood until 1836,—to 38 per thousand at the present time. During the same period, we find that at St. Helena the rate has fallen from 25 to 12, at Gibraltar from 22 to 12, at the Ionian islands from 27 to 17, and at Newfoundland from 37 to 11 per thousand. From this gratifying statement we must except the greatest dependency of all,—our Indian Empire. In Bengal the mortality of the British soldier, just before the mutiny, was even greater than it had been twenty years before. On the average of nineteen years previous to 1836, it had been 75 per thousand; on the average of the next period of eighteen years, it was 76 per thousand. In Bombay, the mortality has decreased 2 per thousand; but in Madras the improvement has been such that the deaths have fallen from 76 to 41 per thousand. Whilst India remained in the hands of the East India Company, and the British troops stationed there seldom exceeded 25,000, the high mortality of the presidency of Bengal might have escaped observation; but now that the European soldiers are more than doubled, the necessity for putting their sanitary condition upon a proper footing must be obvious. “Colonel Tulloch has informed me,” says Mr. Martin, in his admirable work on the Influence of Tropical Climates on the European Constitution, “that between 1815 and 1855 there died, of European soldiers belonging to her Majesty’s and the East India Company’s army in India, very nearly 100,000 men, the greater portion of whose lives might have been saved, had better localities been selected for military occupation in that country.” Estimating the value of each soldier in India at 100l., this would give a sum of 10,000,000l.
The barracks and cantonments of India, as regard vastness and solidity, are, perhaps, not to be equalled by any in the world. The military buildings of Burhampore, in Bengal, are said to have cost, during the seventy-seven years they were in existence, including capital and interest, 16,891,206l.; yet this costly station, like that of Secunderabad, in the Madras presidency, was planted in an absolutely pestiferous locality. All over India the localities of the barracks are bad, and their construction and arrangement extremely faulty. “Nearly the whole station of Cawnpore,” says Mr. Jeffreys, “running some miles along the river, was so cut up into small ‘compounds,’ by high mud walls, that a bird’s-eye view would have given it the appearance of a divided honey-comb. These walls, with the profusion of trees they enclosed, seemed as if designed to cut off every current of wind from the inhabitants of the ground-floor dwellings hidden within them.” In another case, as if to make stagnation doubly secure, he mentions that there is a square wall within a square wall, surrounding a cantonment. Hence we can easily account for the fearful mortality among European troops in India. As if to make patent to us the folly we commit in constructing these vast bakehouses, the native troops, who hut themselves outside our lines, and thus get plenty of air, present the unique example of a soldiery whose mortality is below that of the population from which it is recruited. In the Bengal presidency the mutiny has cleared away the difficulty; for it has swept the mass of these pestilential cantonments from the face of the earth. The question, how shall we profit by the loss? is answered by Mr. Martin in his “Suggestions for promoting the Health and Efficiency of the British Troops serving in the East Indies.” He insists that we must station our troops, in future, upon the hills, but not on such stations as we have on the Himalaya and Neilgherry mountains,—positions of 7,000 feet above the sea; for, although they are a security against the fevers of the country, they are apt to induce bowel complaints, which are almost as fatal. His opinion is, that elevations of from 2,800 to 6,000 feet would yield a climate most congenial for European troops,—such, in fact, as we have already found in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. He especially draws attention to the solitary hills,—“those islands of the plains,”—as capable of affording a refuge from the fevers that inundate the low-lying ground. Here the mass of the British army may be lodged until their services are needed. From these eyries, like the Romans of old, they may watch the champaign country, and be ready, at a moment’s notice, to move on any threatened position. There is no intention of recommending the abandonment of strategical points, or large cities which serve as arsenals, simply because they are not wholesome. There are dangers to be braved in peace as well as in war. Yet our experience of the heroic qualities of the British soldier justifies the assumption that small bodies of them, placed in strongly fortified positions, could hold out against all comers until succour should arrive from the hill-stations, especially now India is being traversed by railroads and telegraphs. But even these stations are not sufficient to restore patients suffering under chronic disease. These, if possible, should at once be sent home. The sick officer is invalided, and speedily recovers in the air of his native land; the common soldier, on the contrary, is forced to enter the hospital,—too often to die. The men, moreover, should be recruited for a shorter time. At present they practically serve seventeen years in India,—a period which breaks down the constitutions of the majority. It is the exposure to heat for a great length of time, and not its intensity for a short period, that destroys European life. If we entrap the ignorant labourer by the most unworthy artifices,[31] we should, at least, be merciful to him. Let the term of service be reduced to ten years, and then the stream of stalwart Britons, fresh from the mother-country, would enable us, in conjunction with hill-stations, to keep a powerful and resistless grasp upon the country.
It may well be imagined that, if the sanitary condition of our army is so bad in times of peace, its sufferings in war must be greatly exaggerated. The experience of the Peninsula, Walcheren, Burmah, and Sebastopol, has unfailingly proved this to be the case, and, in manifold instances, the evils were such as could have been avoided with ease.
“The barracks and the military hospital,” says Miss Nightingale, “exist at home and in the colonies as tests of our sanitary condition in peace; and the histories of the Peninsular war, of Walcheren, and of the late Crimean expedition, exist as tests of our sanitary condition in the state of war. We have much more information on the sanitary history of the Crimean campaign than we have of any other. It is a complete example—history does not afford its equal—of an army, after a great disaster arising from its neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale. In all other examples the last step has been wanting to complete the solution of the problem. We had in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent. per annum from disease alone—a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the great plague in the population of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks; that is to say, that there died out of the army of the Crimea an annual rate greater than ordinarily die in time of pestilence out of sick. We had during the last six months of the war a mortality among our sick not much more than among our healthy Guards at home, and a mortality among our troops in the last five months two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home.”
This splendid testimony to the value of sanitary science, exhibited on the largest scale, on an apparently hopeless field, is without appeal. The Commissioners propose a medical officer of health for the army,[32] second in rank to the principal medical officer, and attached to the quartermaster-general in the field. This officer, says the Report, should be the head of the sanitary police of the army, should be answerable for all the measures to be adopted for the prevention of disease, and should report to the quartermaster-general, and to the principal medical officer. In order to prevent any evasion of responsibility, they further recommend that the sanitary officer shall give his advice in writing, and that the disregard of it on strategical grounds shall be equally recorded by the officer in command. Having thus provided for the army in the field, the Commissioners propose that there shall be associated with the Medical Director-General of the Army a sanitary, statistical, and medical colleague. Each of these officers would be at the head of a distinct department—the sanitary officer taking cognizance of all questions of food, dress, diet, exercise, and lodging for the soldier; the statistical department gathering together those invaluable details relative to the health of the army, for the want of which the British troops have so long suffered a mortality out of all proportion to the civil community; while the medical department would serve as a connecting link between civil and military medicine, keeping the latter up to the last word of science, as spoken by the great medical authorities in all countries. Some of these suggestions will require deep consideration before they are adopted. Nothing, at any rate, must be permitted to fetter the absolute power of the commander in the field, who must have a real as well as a nominal freedom. But every precaution which can guard the health of the soldier without cramping the discretion of the general is demanded alike by humanity and policy. What was so powerfully said in the last century has remained in a great degree true in our own. “The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless and helpless; gasping and groaning unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits or heaved into the ocean, without notice or remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.”
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.
If a needle turning upon a pivot were fixed at York, and if, by a wire placed in close proximity to it, the needle could be made to move to the right or to the left through the agency of a power applied at the other end of the wire in London, and if it were agreed that one motion of the needle to the left should signify a, and one to the right b, &c.,[33] we should have just such a contrivance as the common needle telegraph now in use.