Hot meals were cooked at the doors of the dugouts for the fifty occupants on improved portable camp kitchens. Telephones connected every battalion headquarters with its regimental headquarters and so throughout the army, every unit with the next largest and all with the general headquarters at Liao-yang. Great fur overcoats, pure wool underclothing, heavy uniforms well adapted for comfort and warmth; in every detail the Japanese were splendidly equipped for the ordeal of cold. Thousands of slight cases of frost-bite reached the hospitals after occasional sorties demanded by fitful attacks of Russian scouting parties, but there was none of this in the normal life of the vast army of nearly 300,000 men.
The Japanese medical department during the winter made a wonderful fight against disease, that bane of armies, and continued under these unrecord of the actual campaign.
Wonderful Sanitary Record
Until now disease has always been much more destructive than shot and shell. During the brief conflict with Spain 268 Americans died of bullets and wounds, while mortality from disease reached the appalling number of 3,862, or about fourteen to one. In the Boer War 7,792 English were killed in action or died of wounds, while 13,250 fell victims to disease. Of the Turkish army operating in Thessaly seven years ago, 1,000 men were lost in battle, while 19,000 died at the front of disease. Twenty-two thousand others were invalided home, and of these 8,000 subsequently died. This was a ratio of twenty-seven men killed by disease to one by bullets. Even more frightful was the experience of the French expedition to Madagascar in 1894. Only 29 were killed in action, while over 7,000 perished from disease. Compare these frightful experiences with the record of the Japanese. During the last nine months of 1904, throughout a difficult campaign, in a country noted for lack of sanitation, only forty deaths from disease occurred in the immense army in Manchuria commanded by General Oku. It is a wonderful lesson in sanitation Japan has taught to the world.
While disease scored but forty victims in nine months among the soldiers of General Oku, no fewer than 5,127 officers and men were killed and 21,080 wounded. This shows that the period was one of great activity, of hard campaigning and severe fighting—which makes the low disease death rate all the more astonishing. Soldiers in the field cannot be looked after as carefully as those in camp; hygiene and sanitary surroundings are only temporary, and, therefore, more crude; dietetic regulations are more difficult to enforce. Of course, there were many cases of disease in Oku's army—24,642 in all—but the majority were of bronchial troubles, resulting from climatic conditions. Of beri beri, a malady peculiarly Oriental, 5,070 cases were reported. But the progressive Japanese seem to have gotten the mastery even of this, once notable, because of its mortality. It is, however, in battling with those most dreaded scourges of an army—typhoid fever and dysentery—that the Japanese have scored their greatest triumphs. Of typhoid fever they have had only 193 cases, and of dysentery only 342 cases.
Civil War Comparisons
During the first year of the American Civil War typhoid fever attacked 8 per cent. of the Federal troops, killing 35 per cent. of the white and 55 per cent. of the negro soldiers who contracted it. But here is an army in the wilds of Manchuria larger than that of McClellan before Richmond, which had only forty deaths in nine months. The great American conflict was one of the bloodiest in history. In the Federal ranks, 110,070 men were killed in battle or died of wounds, while 249,458 were sent to their graves of disease. Why is it the little brown islanders of the East were so successful in fighting the unseen foe?
"Every death from preventable disease is an insult to the intelligence of the age," says Major Louis L. Seaman, late surgeon in the United States Volunteers, who returned from Japan during the war.
"When it occurs in an army, where the units are compelled to submit to discipline, it becomes a governmental crime."
"Disease bacteria," asserts another writer, in discussing the medical aspects of the Boer War, "are even more dangerous than Mauser bullets shot off with smokeless powder. Both hit without giving a sign to the eye whence they come, and of the two, the Mausers hit less often and hit less hard." It was through prompt recognition of these propositions that the Japanese held down their death rate from disease. Major Seaman relates that, in conversation with a Japanese officer early in the conflict, the subject of Russia's overwhelming numbers was mentioned.