Part 33

The most important object after the prevention of shipwreck is that of rescuing the crew when the catastrophe takes place. All along the coast--grouped thicker together where the fatal black dots indicate dangerous spots--we find rude marks indicative of the presence of life-boats. Thus, whenever the dangerous headland or the hidden shoal threatens destruction to the mariner, the means of preservation are close at hand. Of these boats, each manned by a fearless crew of twelve volunteers, there are 141 stationed along the coast; seventy being under the management of the National Life-Boat Institution, and seventy-one under the direction of various corporations and local authorities. To the princely conduct of the Duke of Northumberland, the President of the National Life-Boat Institution, we owe the present improved condition of the means of saving life in cases of shipwreck. As far back as the year 1790, two humble boatbuilders on the banks of the Tyne, Greathead and Wouldhave (who were encouraged and fostered by the then Duke of Northumberland), invented the broad, curved form of life-boat, with air-cases, which was chiefly in use around our coasts. This model was afterwards much departed from, and by degrees the most imperfect boats (provided they were lined with what were supposed to be air-tight cases) were dignified with the name of life-boats. The many casualties that happened to these craft, which were built by rule of thumb rather than upon any scientific system, brought them into much disrepute. Too often, indeed, their hardy crews, instead of fulfilling their mission, were drowned on the way. In some instances, owing to their defective build, they turned _end over end_ when struck by a heavy sea, and, from want of the power to right themselves when capsized, the unfortunate men were encaged beneath them. To prevent the recurrence of such disastrous accidents, the Duke of Northumberland offered a premium for the production of a model life-boat, and the result was the exhibition of several respectable contrivances. Not one of them, however, fulfilled all the prescribed conditions; nor was it until after several trials and many experiments that the present life-boat was completed. It appears to be the production of a committee and not of an individual; but the chief credit of it is due to Mr. Peake, of the Royal Dockyard, Woolwich; to Joseph Prowse, junior, foreman of the same yard; and to Messrs. Forrestt, the well-known boat-builders of Limehouse. It has been adopted by the Life-Boat Institution, and has stood the test of some years' experience without a single failure. In a trial lately made at Boulogne, the boat was twice purposely capsized by the help of a crane, and righted herself in two seconds, and in less than fifteen seconds the water with which she was filled disappeared through her self-acting valves. Of the entire number of 1668 seamen saved during the last year, 399 owed their lives to these boats, and we have no doubt that in future years they will prove still more effective, if only well handled and not rashly sailed by inexperienced men; for no life-boat can be devised that will not be liable to accidents if entrusted to careless or unskilful hands.

But there is another point almost equally important that seems to have been greatly overlooked, the worthlessness of the so-called life-boats that every emigrant ship, every transport, every passenger vessel, is by Act of Parliament required to carry. We have no hesitation in pronouncing them to be in most cases a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. It is not long since that we heard from the lips of one of the most extensive boat-builders on the banks of the Thames, that, when a boat was condemned as unseaworthy for any other purpose, it was a common practice to patch it up, add a certain amount of air-case, and dispose of it as a life-boat. We know not with whom it rests to see the Act enforced, whether with the Board of Trade or the Life-boat Association, but the fact of its evasion is notorious, and a heavy responsibility rests somewhere. Even when the crazy thing is embarked, it is often so stowed that it cannot be lowered in case of need without long delay, and is frequently deficient in sails, oars, thole-pins, plugs, and always without an efficient compass. Yet in this ill-equipped boat the lives of thirty, forty, perhaps fifty, of our too confiding countrymen are risked. It would be easy to see, before the vessel sailed, that the life-boat was efficient; that a certain supply of provisions and fresh water was placed in proper cases; that the mast, sails, oars, and thole-pins were secured into the boat, and that an efficient boat-compass was provided, instead of the ridiculous toy that goes by that name, the card of which spins round like a top at every stroke of the oars. The beautiful spirit or liquid boat-compass of Dent may be purchased for less than £5. A life-boat thus furnished would give confidence to the passengers, would serve them well in time of need, and would be no more than the legislature is entitled to require under the provisions of the Act. Anything less is a gross imposition upon the simple emigrants, who embark in confidence, believing that everything has been done for their safety.

In addition to the life-boat system we have located in most of the coast-guard stations rocket and mortar apparatus to enable a connection to be established with stranded vessels by firing a rope over them. This method was effectual in 243 cases during the last year, and is well worked under the auspices of the Board of Trade. The drawback to the use of the mortar apparatus is its weight, which prevents its being easily transported along the rocky shores where it is chiefly needed, but we understand that Mr. Brown, of the General Register and Record Office of Seamen, has invented a portable apparatus, which will in all probability greatly facilitate our means of communicating with stranded vessels, and tend in no small measure to still further lessen the dismal list of seamen who annually perish on our weather-beaten coast.

LODGING, FOOD, AND DRESS OF SOLDIERS.

If the question had been asked a short time since what body of men presented the most healthy lives in her Majesty's dominions, the reply might reasonably have been Her Majesty's Foot-Guards. Recruited, at the age of nineteen, principally from among the agricultural population, submitted to the critical examination of the inspecting surgeon, tried in wind and limb and tested at every point, the would-be soldier must be proved an athlete, or renounce for ever the hope of wearing her Majesty's uniform. Absorbed into the picked corps of the army; quartered either in metropolitan barracks or within a stone's-throw of the palace of the Sovereign; clothed, fed, housed, and tended in sickness by the State; and only in the face of great emergencies required to brave the dangers of foreign service; the weak and incapable instantly weeded out from the ranks,--his does indeed seem to be a select life, with which no other among the labouring classes would appear to be comparable. As we see him on parade in all the pomp and panoply of war, we view him with pride as worthy of that noble band that swept irresistibly before it the eagles of France, and, single-handed, at Inkermann, long kept the foe at bay, and saved two armies from destruction. Yet take the unhealthiest trades in England--the pallid tailor, as he sits at his board, or the miner who lives in the bowels of the earth--and it will be found that the percentage of deaths in their ranks is not nearly so great as in those of the magnificent Guards, pipeclayed and polished up to meet the eye of princes, but, alas! often little better than whited sepulchres. Such is the fact elicited by the labours of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the regulations affecting the sanitary condition of the army. If the "most favoured" regiments furnish these disastrous results, it may be imagined that the condition of the rank and file, who take their turn in all climates, must be much worse; but, strange to say, the contrary is the fact. This is shown in the following table, which gives the number per thousand who die every year among the army at home and among the male civilians of England and Wales at army ages:--

Household cavalry 11·0 Dragoon Guards and Dragoons 13·3 Foot Guards 20·4 Infantry of the line 18·7

Population of England and Wales, at army ages:--

Town and country population 9·2 Country alone 7·7

One of the unhealthiest towns at army ages:--

Manchester 12·4

According to Mr. Neison's calculation, the mortality of the Household Cavalry is 1-4/5, Dragoons, &c., 2-1/5, Line 2-9/10, and Guards 3-1/13 times as great as the mortality of the agricultural labourers who are members of friendly societies. Well may the Commissioners, contemplating these returns, remark--

"That in war men should die from exposure, from fatigue, from insufficient supplies, is intelligible; or that the occupation of a town of 30,000 inhabitants by an army of 30,000 men, without any sanitary precaution, suddenly doubling the population to the area, and thereby halving the proportion of every accommodation, supplies, water, drainage, sewerage, &c. &c., should engender disease, is readily understood; but the problem submitted to us is to find the causes of a mortality more than double that of civil life among 60,000 men, scattered, in numbers seldom exceeding a thousand in one place, among a population of 28,000,000, in time of profound peace, in a country which is not only the healthiest, but which possesses the greatest facility of communication and the greatest abundance of supply in Europe."

In endeavouring to solve this extraordinary problem, the first question naturally asked is, Why the foot soldiers suffer a rate of mortality so much higher than the cavalry? They are recruited pretty much from the same source, and breathe apparently pretty much the same atmosphere; yet we find that the Foot Guards perish at nearly double the rate of the Life Guards. The causes of this difference are mainly, overcrowding and the want of due exercise and employment. The chief diseases of the soldier are fever and consumption; the latter, or "the English Death," as it is but too aptly termed, being the chief destroyer. The deaths by pulmonary disease amount in the cavalry to 7·3 per thousand, in the infantry of the line to 10·2, and in the Guards to 13·8; whilst of the entire number of deaths from all causes in the army, diseases of the lungs constitute in the cavalry 53·9 per cent., in the infantry of the line 57·277 per cent., and in the Foot Guards 67·683 per cent. We are strongly inclined to believe that some portion of this extraordinary mortality from pulmonary disease may be owing to the atmosphere of pipeclay in which the Foot Guards, and indeed the Horse Guards in a minor degree, live. In 1853, the year in which the mortality tables were made up, the former pipe-clayed their white trousers and fatigue jackets as well as their belts. Thus the fine dust must have been for ever entering their lungs, and Mr. Simon, in his recent Report affecting the health of special occupations, expressly states that the workers in potteries are among the most unhealthy artisans, in consequence of the clay-dust they are constantly inhaling in the course of their daily work affecting their respiratory organs.

It would appear that overcrowding is the chief cause of the disparity of the death-rate between the two classes of Guards. If we compare the extremes, we find that, whilst the Foot Guards quartered in Portman-street barracks have only 331 cubic feet of air allotted to each man, the Horse Guards at the Hyde Park barracks have 572 cubic feet; and if we take the whole force of Foot and Horse Guards, we find that in London the latter have the advantage of between one-fourth and one-fifth more air in their barracks. But there is another and very important difference in favour of the Horse Guard: his exercise is on the whole more varied than that of the Foot Guard. In the infantry, the drill only exercises the lower limbs and fixes the chest in one position; the grooming of a horse brings nearly every muscle into play, which tends to open and expand the chest. The broadsword exercise has the like effect. This diversity in the daily duties and in the amount of air they have to breathe, explains, we believe, the great discrepancy between the deaths from consumption of the two classes of Guards.

The reason for the increased mortality of the Dragoon regiments over that of the Life Guards is not so easy to discover. As regards the Line regiments, being quartered mostly in country localities, they breathe on the whole a better atmosphere and have more exercise than the Foot Guards. That this is the reason of their lower rate of mortality would appear from the fact, that while the Guards were campaigning in Canada during the rebellion, enjoying the same pure air as the Line, and undergoing precisely the same fatigue and exposure, their relative rate of mortality was reversed, and the Foot Guards proved the more healthy of the two. The latter portion of the Crimean campaign showed the same result.

When the high rate of mortality was first made known in the "Times," military authorities imputed it chiefly to the destructive nature of the night duties. The evidence given before the Commissioners, however, entirely negatives this explanation.

There are three classes of men whose night duties are more severe than those of the Foot Guards--firemen, the police, and sailors; yet, strange to say, all three enjoy a high state of health. The London fireman undergoes, perhaps, more wear and tear than the rest. His duties call him sometimes to several fires in a night, and when not out he is waiting in readiness. Whilst on service he is liable to great varieties of temperature, and to a good deal of wet; one minute he is scorching in the midst of the fire, the next half-drowned by the water. Nevertheless, he suffers a mortality of only seven per thousand. The metropolitan police are on duty ten consecutive hours in all weather, yet their mortality is less than nine per thousand. The comparison between them and the Foot Guards is the closest that could be made, as the unmarried men all live in section-houses (or barracks), are clothed in a uniform, and fed in messes. Yet the mortality is just half that of the line regiments, and less than half the mortality of the Foot Guards! The sailor on the home station, who is worse lodged than either, and is subject to constant nightwork of a very exposed character, shows a still more favourable result. It is clear therefore that the nightwork will not account for the frightful inroads made by disease in the ranks of the soldier. Nor need we go much further than the barracks to know the main causes of all this suffering and death. In London, as we have said, no more than 331 cubic feet of air was meted out to her Majesty's Foot Guards, and in Dover Castle it was reduced to 147 feet per man, or less than the quantity which brought about the jail fever which Howard discovered to be raging in the Cambridge Town Bridewell in 1774. The highest average space allotted to each man before 1847 was 447 cubic feet. Even this amount of air is rendered less pure by defective arrangements. Add to which the beds are placed only one foot apart, in defiance of the fact that a man may be suffocated in a crowd notwithstanding that he has all the sky above him. The state of the morning atmosphere is thus summed up by Serjeant Brown, in answer to the questions from one of the Commissioners:--

"Have you often gone into the men's rooms in the morning before the windows were open?--Yes. In what state did you find the atmosphere?--In a very thick and nasty state, especially if I came in out of the air. If I went in out of my own room sometimes, I could not bear it till I had ordered the windows to be opened to make a draught. I have often retired to the passage and called to the orderly man to open the windows."

In some cases the troops are lodged in the basement of buildings below the natural level of the soil, or in places where the storekeepers object to put their stores, in consequence of the damage that would result to them from the damp. A notable instance is given in evidence by Dr. T. E. Balfour:--

"In 1845 the armoury was burnt down in the Tower, and a new barrack was erected on its site--certainly not before it was wanted, because the accommodation was very bad. The barrack was finished in the beginning of 1849; fever was then prevailing among the men, and cholera threatening. The surgeon applied to have the new barracks given over for the use of the men, and he got two rooms; he remonstrated through his commanding officer with the authorities, when he was informed that he could not have more given over to him, as they were full of stores--blankets, I believe. On suggesting that the stores might be put into the old barracks, he was told that they were a great deal too damp to put stores into, and it was only in consequence of an energetic remonstrance on the part of the commanding officer, which I believe reached the Duke of Wellington, that a Board of officers was ordered to assemble, who recommended that the troops should be immediately moved into the new barracks."

Now and then the crotchet of a Colonel does a vast deal of mischief. Not many years since, the cavalry at Knightsbridge were condemned to drink the water from the Serpentine,--a reservoir of filth, which is now pronounced to be pestilential to the neighbourhood. The men objected to use this diluted sewage; but the commanding-officer had perfect faith in filters. Nevertheless, the water persisted in smelling bad, notwithstanding it looked clear,--a mystery the Colonel's knowledge of chemistry could not fathom; nor would he give in until a Board had been called. The veterinary surgeon now began to complain that the coats of the horses were beginning to stare, and he wished that they should drink from the improved supply which was furnished to the men. The Colonel still had faith in his Serpentine water, and maintained that the horses would prefer it to the purer stream. A bucket of each was placed side by side in the barrack-yard, and a horse was brought in, which immediately settled the question by refusing the dirty water, and plunging its muzzle into the clean. It is not many years since the troops stationed at the Tower were, in like manner, forced to drink the Thames water, taken from the most convenient, which chanced to be the foulest, spot in the whole river. A coarse filter did not suffice to protect them from the disease such supplies were sure to engender.

They manage these things better now in civil life. In the year 1848, the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes opened their first model lodging-house. Their measure of the quantity of air necessary for the poor man was much greater than that settled three years later, by the military authorities, for the soldier. The mechanic and labourer were allowed 542 cubic feet; the soldier, under the most favourable conditions, breathed no more than from 400 to 500 cubic feet,--a measure which fines off, by degrees, to the Black Hole allowance at Dover Castle, where the soldier was reduced to 131 cubic inches. Nor is this the only point in favour of the model lodging-house, of which there are several situated in the foulest portions of the metropolis, and which accommodate sometimes seven hundred inmates, or the full strength of many a regiment. Besides containing pure air, which, with a proper system of ventilation, costs nothing, but is of incalculable value to human life, the lodging-house, instead of being confined to one room, used for all purposes, is divided into the ordinary apartments of an inn; every inmate has his own dormitory, and there is a good coffee-room stored with papers and books, and supplied with hot water. In the kitchen below, there are facilities for roasting, boiling, baking, and frying, and each man has his safe for provisions. Hot and cold baths are provided; and the whole building is heated by hot-water pipes, and well lighted by gas. If the soldier was treated like his brother of the chisel and the hammer, the mortality of the Guards would not be at the rate of 20·4, and that of the ordinary rank and file at the rate of 17·8 per thousand, whilst that of the mechanic is only 13·9 per thousand.

If we were to write volumes, we could not deepen the impression these figures are calculated to convey of the importance to health of sanitary science. It has been said that soldiers would not appreciate the benefits of a model lodging-house, and that, as the colonel asserted of the troop-horse, they prefer the dirty to the clean,--crowding in a common room, to separate apartments. If this were true, it would be no reason for not teaching them better. If bad habits are congenial to them, they do not suffer less when the mischief is done; and if they were callous to the last, the interest of the nation still requires that lives which cost so much should not be recklessly thrown away. But experience refutes the supposition that soldiers have different notions of comfort from civilians. The Guards, in the old part of the Wellington Barracks, had, on one occasion, the temporary use, as a day-room, of an apartment fifty feet by thirty, and, large as it was, it became inconveniently crowded. The Commissioners, in their report, recommend that a minimum space of 600 feet be allotted to each man in his barrack and guard-room, that an interval of at least three feet be maintained between each bed, and that a day-room should be provided. The barrack should at least be on a par with the workhouse.

The high rate of mortality in the army is not to be attributed to the bad arrangements of barracks alone; the important elements of exercise and food have to be considered, and in both the infantry are in an inferior position to the artisan.

"Perhaps," says Colonel Lindsay, "no living individual suffers more than the soldier from _ennui_. He has no employment save the drill and its duties; these are of a most monotonous and uninteresting description, so much so that you cannot increase their amount without wearying and disgusting him. All he has to do is under restraint; he is not like a working man or an artisan; a working man will dig, and his mind is his own; an artisan is interested in the work on which he is engaged: but a soldier has to give you all his attention, and he has nothing to show for the work done. He gets up at six; there is no drill before breakfast; he makes up his bed and cleans up his things: he gets his breakfast at seven; he turns out for drill at half-past seven or eight; his drill may last half an hour. If it be guard-day there is no drill except for defaulters. The men for duty are paraded at ten o'clock; that finishes his day-drill altogether. There is evening parade, which takes half an hour, and then his time is his own until tattoo, which is at nine in winter and ten in summer. That is the day of a soldier not on guard or not belonging to a company which is out for Minié practice."