The Prussian army, with an average of 150,582 men, lost by death, during the ten years 1829 to 1838, 1,975 in each year, which is at the rate of 13 per 1,000 living.[8]
The mortality of the Piedmontese army, from 1834 to 1843 inclusive, was 158 in 10,000, while that of the males at home was 92 in the same number living.
From 1775 to 1791, seventeen years, the mortality among the cavalry was 181, and among the infantry 349, out of 10,000 living; but in the ten years from 1834 to 1843 these rates were only 108 and 215.[9]
Colored troops are employed by the British Government in all their colonies and possessions in tropical climates. The mortality of these soldiers is known, and also that of the colored male civilians in the East Indies and in the West-India Islands and South-American Provinces. In four of these, the rate of mortality is higher among the male slaves than among the colored soldiers; but in all the others, this rate is higher in the army. In all the West-Indian and South-American possessions of Great Britain, the average rate of deaths is 25 per cent, greater among the black troops than among the black males of all ages on the plantations and in the towns. The soldiers are of the healthier ages, 20 to 40, but the civilians include both the young and the old: if these could be excluded, and the comparison made between soldiers and laborers of the same ages, the difference in favor of civil pursuits would appear much greater.
Throughout the world, where the armies of Great Britain are stationed or serve, the death-rate is greater among the troops than among civilians of the same races and ages, except among the colored troops in Tobago, Montserrat, Antigua, and Granada in America, and among the Sepoys in the East Indies.[10]
In the army of the United States, during the period from 1840 to 1854, not including the two years of the Mexican War, there was an average of 9,278 men, or an aggregate of 120,622 years of service, equal to so many men serving one year. Among these and during this period, there were 342,107 cases of sickness reported by the surgeons, and 3,416 deaths from disease, showing a rate of mortality of 2.83 per cent., or two and a half times as great as that among the males of Massachusetts of the army-ages, and three times as great as that in England and Wales. The attacks of sickness average almost three for each man in each year. This is manifestly more than that which falls upon men of these ages at home.[11]
SICKNESS AND MORTALITY OF THE ARMY IN WAR.
Thus far the sickness and mortality of the army in time of peace only has been considered. The experience of war tells a more painful story of the dangers of the men engaged in it. Sir John Pringle states, that, in the British armies that were sent to the Low Countries and Germany, in the years 1743 to 1747, a great amount of sickness and mortality prevailed. He says, that, besides those who were suffering from wounds, "at some periods more than one-fifth of the army were in the hospitals." "One regiment had over one-half of its men sick." "In July and August, 1743, one-half of the army had the dysentery." "In 1747, four battalions," of 715 men each, "at South Beveland and Walcheren, both in field and in quarters, were so very sickly, that, at the height of the epidemic, some of these corps had but one hundred men fit for duty; six-sevenths of their numbers were sick."[12] "At the end of the campaign the Royal Battalion had but four men who had not been ill." And "when these corps went into winter-quarters, their sick, in proportion to their men fit for duty, were nearly as four to one."[13] In 1748, dysentery prevailed. "In one regiment of 500 men, 150 were sick at the end of five weeks; 200 were sick after two months; and at the end of the campaign, they had in all but thirty who had never been ill." "In Johnson's regiment sometimes one-half were sick; and in the Scotch Fusileers 300 were ill at one time."[14]
The British army in Egypt, in 1801, had from 103 to 261 and an average of 182 sick in each thousand; and the French army had an average of 125 in 1,000, or one-eighth of the whole, on the sick-list.[15]
In July, 1809, the British Government sent another army, of 39,219 men, to the Netherlands. They were stationed at Walcheren, which was the principal seat of the sickness and suffering of their predecessors, sixty or seventy years before. Fever and dysentery attacked this second army as they had the first, and with a similar virulence and destructiveness. In two months after landing,