"We haven't any."
"Have you any medicine for fever? Anything you can let me have, I'll take."
"We haven't any."
"I have a good many cases of rheumatism. Can you let me have any medicines?"
"We haven't any."
Thus, for diarrhœa, fever, and rheumatism there were no specifics. Dr. Smith could prove, no doubt, that there were granaries full of the finest and costliest drugs and medicines for fever, rheumatism, and diarrhœa at Scutari, but the knowledge that they were there little availed those dying for want of them at Balaklava.
EFFECTIVE STRENGTH OF OUR ARMY.
But with all this, the hand of the plague was not stayed.
Sickness clung to our troops, the soldiers who climbed the bloody steeps of the Alma in the splendour of manly strength, and who defended the heights over the Tchernaya exhausted, and "washed out" by constant fatigue, incessant wet, insufficient food, want of clothing and of cover from the weather, died away in their tents night after night. Doctors, and hospitals, and nurses, came too late, and they sank to rest unmurmuringly, and every week some freshly-formed lines of narrow mounds indicated the formation of a new burial-place.
It must not be inferred that the French escaped sickness and mortality. On the contrary, our allies suffered to a degree which would have been considered excessive, had it not been compared with our own unfortunate standard of disease and death, and to the diminution caused by illness, must be added that from the nightly sorties of the Russians and the heavy fire from the batteries.