These few remarks upon the cremation of human bodies have as yet referred only to those which have succumbed to the ordinary evils of life; but I cannot forbear recording my conviction that it would be wise in the stricken field to have recourse to the practice. During the sittings of the recent International Sanitary Congress a paper was read by Professor Reclam of Leipzic, in which he most strongly urged the adoption of cremation after destructive battles. He described a new portable burning apparatus capable of reducing the carcase of a horse to ashes within two hours, and at a cost of four shillings' worth of fuel. He moreover declared that the dead, both men and horses, left on the battlefield of Gravelotte might have been by the aid of such machinery reduced to 'a harmless heap of white ashes in four days.' One thing is certain: science, which invented the mitrailleuse, could easily devise a proper apparatus.[35]
Combatants who have been slain, or who have perished through sickness, are buried as haste dictates, and often imperfectly. I saw, during the war, relics of the dead protrude from the Sebastopol trenches. The bodies at Metz were in many cases exhumed by the Germans and re-interred, because the superficial burial rendered them dangerous to adjoining tenements, and a source of contamination to watercourses. At Sedan the same thing occurred, only in this instance the dead bodies were consumed with pitch and straw.[36] Cremation is the only practice which seems commendable in times of warfare. Numerous dead Saracens were burnt by the King of Castile. During the wars between the English and the Burgundians and the French—the latter led by Joan of Arc—the dead were on one occasion piled up outside the city of Paris, and consumed in one huge pyre. After the late battle of Cuenca, the Carlists threw many of their dead into fires presumably lit for the purpose. Surely it would be well for sanitation's sake, that the slain were burnt, as in the olden times, upon days set apart by arrangement of neutrals. The Genevan and other Conventions could scarce find nobler work to inaugurate than this. It would be a wise repetition of history, should another great war unfortunately break out, if the combatants would adopt this salutary practice of 3,000 years ago. With the ancient Athenians, when soldiers fell in battle it was the custom to collect them into tents, where they lay for a few days, in order to ensure recognition. Each tribe then conveyed their dead in cypress shells to the Ceramicos or place of public burning; an empty hearse following behind in memory of the missing. It is not necessary, however, that the dead should be burned internationally. During the Trojan war—and since the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann we are almost at liberty to believe in it—men were sent out from each side to collect the dead, and the Trojans and allies burnt on separate pyres. There can be no doubt whatever that the dead were so treated. I have always considered that one or more of the huge earth tumuli on the plains of Troy, which I have frequently visited, would prove to cover ancient funeral pyres, and this point was put beyond all dispute by Mr. Frank Calvert in 1859. He opened up the Hanai-Tepeh tumulus there, and found an immensity of ashes, corresponding to what might have been expected after a great burning of the dead. He came to the conclusion that this was the site of the funeral pyre raised by the Trojans after the first truce.[37]
Were cremation practised now-a-days in times of warfare, and with our improved appliances, there would be no costly monuments to be kept up by the invaders, such as we now jealously maintain on the heights of Sebastopol[38]—nothing be left behind to recall a strife best forgotten. The ashes of our warrior dead could even be brought home to lie in the fatherland. When Nestor recommended the bodies of the slain Achæans to be burnt close to the ships, in order that the survivors might be able to carry home the bones, and raise over them a common tomb,[39] he proved himself much wiser than our generation.
The general adverse feeling to burning even the dead bodies of animals at the present day, has without doubt often brought about serious evils. During the Crimean war the putrefaction of numberless horses in and around the French camps became ultimately a serious matter,[40] and had they been destroyed by fire no evil effects could have followed. Why were they not destroyed by fire?—for fear of offending the prejudices of their allies? For one reads that in the battle of Paris, on March 30, 1814, 4,000 horses which were killed, were burnt twelve days afterwards. It is doubtful, too, whether or not the removal of diseased cattle from our midst by burial only, is sufficient to stamp out a very virulent plague. I find that during the great plague of 1865, in Great Britain alone 132,000 cattle were attacked; 17,368 of which were killed, and 81,368 of which died.[41] Had a few hecatombs been slain and burnt at the commencement of the visitation, or had the initial thousand of sickly ones been slain and consumed by fire in Russia, the steppe murrain would have been speedily stamped out.
In a similar manner should be treated the whole of the meat seized as unfit for food. In Gloucester, some years ago, and when the mayor had no power to fine the vendors of bad butchers' meat, the carcases were, it is said, destroyed by fire outside the city wall. Would that such jurisdiction existed now! In the metropolis alone, thousands of tons of animal food are yearly condemned, to say nothing of fruit and vegetables. The State should burn these up with even more alacrity than contraband of custom. And the purification by fire might be even extended to the humblest things. It has been said that the lower animals which perish in our midst must perforce send thousands of pounds of mephitic vapour daily into the air, if left unburnt.[42] It is not necessary to enumerate what else it would be desirable to destroy in this way. They can be seen in nearly every river, canal, and pond, in every ditch, gutter, and even street.
Medical men are the chief exponents of the good results which will follow the adoption of cremation, and with one exception the whole of the foreign writers upon the subject are professors of some branch of medical science. It is the same in our own country.[43]