brilliant results, in the investigation of the cure of sleepingsickness in Uganda.

In addition to these and many other brilliant discoveries, there has been the steady improvement in the health of the soldier at home and abroad, the reduction of invaliding, and the increase in the percentage of men always fit for service. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Sanitary Institute in London, in November 1908, Surgeon - General Sir Alfred Keogh, the late Director-General of the Army Medical Service, in a simple and unostentatious manner placed before his audience certain facts which can only be regarded as astounding. Tuberculosis in the Army at home and abroad was responsible for 2.7 deaths per 1000 in 1860, in 1906 for 3 per 1000 only. Cholera, which quite recently in India was one of the most appalling of calamities, sometimes in one year sweeping away one-third of a regiment, has fallen during the last few years to a practically negligible quantity-less than 1 per 1000. Enteric fever similarly has been reduced to a death rate of less than 3 per 1000; while Malta fever in the Mediterranean has fallen from 643 cases in 1905 to 5 cases in 1908.

Whereas in 1888 there were constantly 72 men non-effective from sickness in India, and in 1897 101 were similarly noneffective, the number in 1907 was 46 per 1000. Similar remarkable figures could be quoted for home stations and for the colonies.

VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXVII.

It is impossible to estimate in any human arithmetic the amount of pain and suffering that has thus been saved. But we can apply a practical, if perhaps a lower and possibly a brutal, test of efficiency, when we reckon that every man constantly sick for a year costs the State in pay alone, apart from other charges, £14 per annum. In 1860 there were 5346 men constantly sick, in 1907 the figure was 2655. The difference represents to the State a saving of £37,674 in pay, without taking account of dieting, instruments and drugs, and other incidental hospital expenses.

The cost of dieting and transport charges at Malta have recently fallen by £15,000 a year since the cause and cure of Malta fever were discovered.

From these few instances it is evident that it pays to look after the health of the soldier. The death rate in the Army, which in the pre-Crimean days was only comparable to that of the dangerous trades in the United Kingdom, is to-day far below that of the civil population. During the siege of Sebastopol it was higher than that of London during the worst part of the Great Plague of 1665. Yet in China in the bitter winter of 1900-1 when the number of our troops was about the same as those employed in the Crimea, the sickness was less than it would have been if the troops had been in India, and compared most favourably with that of our allies, the Germans especially.

2 c

Our Army hospitals in the Crimean days were, as Queen Victoria truly described them, "more like prisons than hospitals." To-day there are well-built and equipped hospitals at central military stations, and the policy of centralising the treatment of the sick is gradually being carried out with excellent results.

racks are but a small fraction of the great town which has replaced the wooden huts of Crimean days. It is not only a training - ground for troops in martial exercises, but it is now a collection of various administrative training-schools for cookery, sanitation, veterinary knowledge, signalling, ballooning, and perhaps the most important of all, for supply and transport work. The judging of provisions, the knowledge of how to feed an Army, is the subject of one course of instruction; the methods of transport, both mechanically and by horsed waggons, are taught in another. We read in the Panmure

a

ever

If the R. A.M. College and modern military hospitals are monument to Mr Sidney Herbert, no less is modern Aldershot a monument to the Prince Consort. It was to his prescience that in the first instance, in February 1854, the land was purchased for the purpose of a permanent training-camp. At the conclusion of the Crimean War, huts having meantime been built for about 20,000 men, the camp was occupied by regulars, militia, and by the German legion. Then the Prince again showed his knowledge of our needs by pressing on the Government the need for some permanent buildings, which would, as it were, form a permanent anchorage, and prevent the place being sold to satisfy the craving for retrenchment. To-day those permanent bar

condition of a transport service dependent entirely on hired local labour, carts, and animals. We read also how the Prince Consort suggests that one company of the newly raised Army Transport Corps, subsequently called the Military Train, and now a regular combatant branch of the Army Service Corps, should be quartered at Aldershot, where it can be used to take baggage, &c., from place to place, and otherwise save the cost of hired carts. In reading this, with the consciousness of the usefulness of this branch of the service, one wonders how they managed at large camps, such as Aldershot and the Curragh, to get on without them. To-day the one company suggested by the Prince is represented by thirteen horse-transport and three mechanical transport companies.

1909.]

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This, however, has not always been Indian custom. Usually, in the earlier wars of the nineteenth century, the country in which operations took place was able to supply food and carriage. We read how the Duke of Wellington skilfully utilised the carrying traders of Central India in his campaigns, and the povindahs or Afghan traders of the North-West Frontier were utilised for war purposes in our operations in Afghanistan. But in the last war in that country the Transport question was weak and disorganised. Multitudes of camels died in the mountain-passes owing to overwork and injudicious treatment. The officers of the Transport Service were mostly volunteers from regiments not otherwise engaged, and in many cases, though keen and hardworking, they knew little about the animals they had to deal with, and often were very imperfectly acquainted with the language of the attendants. A regularly organised Transport Corps is quite a modern institution. Its units are stationed for the

Reverting once more to the question of supplies, although these are usually obtained by contract, yet in England officers of the Army Service Corps are encouraged to deal direct with local farmers and markets, and in India this is invariably the rule. The result is that the modern commissariat officer is as a rule a self-reliant, observant man, not regarding as a fetish Treasury sanction, or afraid of audit queries. More than this, the infantry officer nowadays is taught to do, what Mr Herbert in one of his letters says that no sane man would think of doing, purchase supplies for his men locally instead of getting them by contract. This is done annually when in the course of his company training an officer takes his men for a ten-days' tour in the country, making his own arrangements for everything and paying for his needs as he goes. This is the lesson of administration on a small scale, but one which is of exceeding value. A man learns thereby to rely upon himself and use his commonsense. The cost to the country in actual provisions is not greater than the feeding, housing, &c., of the men would be if contract supplies only were furnished.

The Army Ordnance Department is the great hardware shop of the Army, and issues anything from a 9-2-in. gun to a billiard cue for a soldiers' recreation-room. There is a depôt in nearly every station, and there are workshops where repairs are carried out in all the larger stations. All the soldiers' clothing in Home and Colonial stations is issued by this department; in India it is a duty of the commissariat to look after this. But the Indian Ordnance Department is not quite the same as the similar department in the home organisation. It concerns itself with the manufacture of ordnance and ammunition, and also with the maintenance of equipment and warlike stores at certain central arsenals, but it is not the great dry-goods store of the Army, and in so far as it is not, its utility is somewhat curtailed on active service.

The Works Department in the Crimea was perhaps as great a failure as any other administrative branch. An Army Works Corps, composed of artisans and navvies, was sent out at great expense, and was regarded with great disfavour by all the generals in command. This was not mere conservatism. Sir W. Codrington puts the case clearly when he points out that they (the workmen) are human beings, requiring food, shelter, protection, and that they need supervision and discipline.

Then

huts were sent out and arrived in vast quantities, but in utter confusion. When erected they were so leaky that men had to

wear greatcoats or waterproofs to protect themselves from the wet that poured through the roofs.

The

A good works organisation at home would doubtless have prevented these evils, but at that time works connected with the Army were either entirely carried out by contract administered from headquarters or by the few sappers and miners of the Army. latter, at Sebastopol, were all busily occupied with trenches and batteries, their officers had to be supplemented by infantry officers, and there was no supervision to spare for roads, water supplies, or other pioneer work in camps. And as regards works generally in the preCrimean days, the bare minimum necessary to necessary to keep in repair fortifications and barracks was all that was usually undertaken. The soldier's dwelling in those days was about as cheerless and unhealthy as it well could be. The Works branch of the Army to-day has inherited the legacy of many of these old buildings, some of which are structurally quite sound, though imperfectly planned. One of the most difficult administrative problems of the present is how to adapt these old buildings to modern use.

In comparing the Works organisation at home and in India, it must be remembered that the problem in the latter country is comparatively simple. The Indian Military Works Service, in constitution, rules, and methods, though not in government, is a branch of

the splendid Public Works Department which has covered the whole of India with monumental works of usefulness. The barracks in India are in few cases more than fifty years old, the fortified posts are few and not of first-class importance from an imperial point of view.

The Works branch of the War Office, on the other hand, has to administer works all over the world; in the last Army Estimates there was provision for barracks at places so far apart as Jamaica and Peking. The maintenance of old buildings that have been in constant use since the days of Marlborough is one of its most difficult tasks. In these days, too, of garden cities and Acts for rural housing, the standard of comfort for the working class is steadily rising, and we cannot allow the meagre accommodation of past years, when the soldier ate, worked, and slept with a number of others in his one barrack-room, to be admitted in any new construction. Married soldiers' quarters before the Crimean days consisted of a corner of the men's barrack divided off by a curtain from the rest. Mr Sidney Herbert introduced the innovation of each married man being allowed a room to himself. Nowadays it is evident that this is insufficient. Each married soldier is provided, wherever possible, with at least two rooms, plus a scullery, &c. The effect of these improvements is that the old-fashioned type of soldier's wife, of whom Dickens' Mrs

Bucket is a favourable specimen, is rapidly disappearing, and is being replaced by a much superior class of woman. An old soldier, somewhat scornfully but graphically, summed up the situation by saying to the writer, "A silk blouse and a picture 'at is about 'er form nowadays." The provision of dining-rooms for single men, of baths, of clean and good kitchens, of spacious and cheerful recreation-rooms, is also of modern introduction. How to do this at a reasonable cost, and yet avoid the cold, comfortless, and ultimately expensive hut, is a matter of no small difficulty.

There is considerable difference in procedure between the Works Departments in India and at home. In the former country the greatest care and scrutiny is taken before a project is sanctioned, but when once sanction is given the local officer has a fairly free hand in carrying out the work, according to his judgment. In England, projects are frequently, sometimes inevitably, brought before the Treasury or Parliament with only the approximate estimates furnished by local officers, but once they are sanctioned, the local officer has very little to say in the matter beyond superintending the work of a contractor chosen at headquarters. The Indian system may, and often does, cause vexatious delay in beginning work, but it results in very great economy (there is probably no country in the world where the public gets such value for its money as it does