a  commissariat officer in Allahabad when
General Neill arrived there; and
fugitives from that town, conveyed down the
Ganges in government steamers, suffered from
hunger which in one case at least, ended in
death.

If it be said that the beginning of the
Indian Revolt, like the beginning of the siege
in the Crimea, took us by surprise; and, if we
be pooh-poohed for considering that a well-
organised system ought to know how to stand
the shock of a surprise, let us look simply at
the garrisons at home. Nothing seems to
have been learned from the great lesson
taught before Sebastopol. How well it was
taught we shall show presently: how little
has been learnt from it by government officials
we remark at once, with shame. Nothing
whatever has been done to amend the gross
defect of ventilation in the barracks of this
country. There is still only one way of cooking
soldiers' meat officially recognised: it is
invariably boiled. The private soldier has
but one tin vessel from which to drink his
tea, beer, physic, or whatever else it may
become his fate to drink. We must disgust
our readers, too, by adding that here, at home,
where every convenience is accessible at
small cost, in some instances his only washing
tub is used for such other unmentionable
purposes, that the economy exercised on
behalf of the nation, in this matter, causes
frequent inflammation of the eyes among its
victims. We read of barracks in one
English county town which have their
kitchen and their dead-house side by side
under one roof; the stench from the dead-
house passing through sloping shutters into
the kitchen, to perfume the dinners of the
men.

Now, let us con over again that Crimean
lesson, which we cannot have too perfectly
by heart. In England, the Sanitary
Commission, and in France, M. Baudens who
was sent out to the French army on special
mission as a Medical Inspector, made,
during the year eighteen hundred and fifty-
seven, their experience public. From other
sources, also, minute information is accessible.
More emphatic and instructive lesson
upon public health the nations never have
received.

When the allied armies landed on the
shores of the Crimea, it was the belief of the
English government that Sebastopol would
be taken by a coup-de-main. It has since
appeared that the fortress might have been
so taken, and that it was not the English
who, in that first critical time, held back. A
considerable part of the French army had
previous experience of the business of the
field. The Englishmen, having only
experience of English peace, were sent from quiet
barracks, by a government slow to admit
any new idea, and which required, at least, a
twelvemonth to consider what new sort of
provision might be necessary for the
maintenance of soldiers in their new position.
Routine was in bewilderment. Stores were
mis-sent, or stored improperly; roofs of huts
were forwarded to one quarter of the world
and walls to another; clothing sailed round
the world, and then came home again;
cooking became one of the lost arts,
wholesome food a curiosity.

Our generals magnanimously undertook
that every Englishman should do as much
as two Frenchmen: that being the necessity
imposed upon our soldiers by the proportion
held between extent of lines and the force
at disposal for trench duty. Hunger,
exposure, want of sleep, and that wild strain of
overwork which was the chief burden of the
soldier's complaint when he came into
hospital, produced horrible mortality in the
winter of eighteen hundred and fifty-four.
Survivors were compelled to add to their
own overwork, much of the duty of sick
comrades.

At first sight, it was natural — after breaking
vials of wrath on the heads that should
have taken thought concerning all these
matters, and did not—it was natural, when the
whole army seemed to be sickening and
dying, to attribute much blame to our army
medical system; and, as we heard nothing
of the sufferings of the allies, it was not less
natural to laud the French ambulance
system, the French hygiène, the French method
in everything. Time tries all. There is solid
reason for believing, that at no time was the
sickness and mortality in the French army,
for three successive months, below the rate
of sickness and death in the same months
among the English.

Discreditable statistics were suppressed
by the French government, when they
referred to France; but, when they referred to
England, they were proclaimed with just
wrath by the English people. The correction
of a fatal course was imperatively demanded.
The nation was absolute and had its will.
When peace was signed, the English army
was in perfect vigour and high spirits, its
hospitals were empty, its physicians out of
work. The French army was rotten to the
core. M. Baudens had to report to the Emperor,
through the Minister of War "the critical
situation in which the army of the
East was placed by the invasion of typhus."
An army scourged by typhus, means an.
army cursed with dirt, hunger, and foul air.
The French medical system broke down far
more hopelessly than ours did; because it
was, much more than ours, the slave of the
bureau. That may stand here for a moment
as assertion only. We shall bring it presently
to proof.

In the middle of February, eighteen
hundred and fifty-five, while the horrors of that
first Crimean winter were still filling our
newspapers, Dr. Sutherland, Dr. Gavin, and
Mr. Rawlinson, the civil engineer, were
appointed members of a Sanitary Commission,