Part 35

It is singular that whilst our troops at home, for the last twenty years within the immediate influence of a growing sanitary science, have profited little by its teaching, the troops quartered abroad within the same time have experienced a marked decline in their annual rate of mortality. In the year 1835 Lord Howick caused a parliamentary inquiry to be made into the causes of the fearful mortality among the troops on some of the foreign stations, especially in the West Indian islands. The returns proved even worse than had been anticipated. The mortality in Jamaica was no less than 128 per thousand, or, in other words, every eighth man who stepped on board a transport for service in this beautiful island was doomed to leave his body for the land crabs. In the other islands the mortality was somewhat less, the deaths being 81 in the thousand. The reason of this decimation had long been known. More than fifty years ago Robert Jackson had pointed out the deadly nature of our military posts, situated for the most part at the embouchures of rivers and in low harbours, or placed in the immediate neighbourhood of pestiferous swamps. Salt pork and rum were called in to finish the work malaria had commenced. Five days a-week were our soldiers rationed upon this poisonous food; and, to make the injustice more glaring, the convicts upon the island were fed with fresh meat, and were consequently in good health. In 1843 Sir Charles Metcalfe determined that the troops should no longer perish. He altered their diet and removed them entirely from the marshy plains to Maroon Town, which stands at an elevation of not more than 2,500 feet on the Blue Mountains, but sufficient to lift European life above the level of the deadly fevers of the climate. The effect of these changes exactly corresponded with what had been foretold by Jackson; the mortality speedily fell from 128 to 60 per thousand, and is now reduced to 32. Thus for many generations the mortality of white troops in Jamaica was fourfold what it should have been, through ignorance and extravagance; for, strange to say, the difference between the cost of the poisonous salt pork and the healthy fresh meat caused a saving to the Government of 80,000_l._ a-year.

In other colonies the improvement in the health of the troops has been marked of late years. At Ceylon, where resort has been had to hill-stations, the mortality has decreased from 74 per thousand,--at which ratio it stood until 1836,--to 38 per thousand at the present time. During the same period, we find that at St. Helena the rate has fallen from 25 to 12, at Gibraltar from 22 to 12, at the Ionian islands from 27 to 17, and at Newfoundland from 37 to 11 per thousand. From this gratifying statement we must except the greatest dependency of all,--our Indian Empire. In Bengal the mortality of the British soldier, just before the mutiny, was even greater than it had been twenty years before. On the average of nineteen years previous to 1836, it had been 75 per thousand; on the average of the next period of eighteen years, it was 76 per thousand. In Bombay, the mortality has decreased 2 per thousand; but in Madras the improvement has been such that the deaths have fallen from 76 to 41 per thousand. Whilst India remained in the hands of the East India Company, and the British troops stationed there seldom exceeded 25,000, the high mortality of the presidency of Bengal might have escaped observation; but now that the European soldiers are more than doubled, the necessity for putting their sanitary condition upon a proper footing must be obvious. "Colonel Tulloch has informed me," says Mr. Martin, in his admirable work on the Influence of Tropical Climates on the European Constitution, "that between 1815 and 1855 there died, of European soldiers belonging to her Majesty's and the East India Company's army in India, very nearly 100,000 men, the greater portion of whose lives might have been saved, had better localities been selected for military occupation in that country." Estimating the value of each soldier in India at 100_l._, this would give a sum of 10,000,000_l._

The barracks and cantonments of India, as regard vastness and solidity, are, perhaps, not to be equalled by any in the world. The military buildings of Burhampore, in Bengal, are said to have cost, during the seventy-seven years they were in existence, including capital and interest, 16,891,206_l._; yet this costly station, like that of Secunderabad, in the Madras presidency, was planted in an absolutely pestiferous locality. All over India the localities of the barracks are bad, and their construction and arrangement extremely faulty. "Nearly the whole station of Cawnpore," says Mr. Jeffreys, "running some miles along the river, was so cut up into small 'compounds,' by high mud walls, that a bird's-eye view would have given it the appearance of a divided honey-comb. These walls, with the profusion of trees they enclosed, seemed as if designed to cut off every current of wind from the inhabitants of the ground-floor dwellings hidden within them." In another case, as if to make stagnation doubly secure, he mentions that there is a square wall within a square wall, surrounding a cantonment. Hence we can easily account for the fearful mortality among European troops in India. As if to make patent to us the folly we commit in constructing these vast bakehouses, the native troops, who hut themselves outside our lines, and thus get plenty of air, present the unique example of a soldiery whose mortality is below that of the population from which it is recruited. In the Bengal presidency the mutiny has cleared away the difficulty; for it has swept the mass of these pestilential cantonments from the face of the earth. The question, how shall we profit by the loss? is answered by Mr. Martin in his "Suggestions for promoting the Health and Efficiency of the British Troops serving in the East Indies." He insists that we must station our troops, in future, upon the hills, but not on such stations as we have on the Himalaya and Neilgherry mountains,--positions of 7,000 feet above the sea; for, although they are a security against the fevers of the country, they are apt to induce bowel complaints, which are almost as fatal. His opinion is, that elevations of from 2,800 to 6,000 feet would yield a climate most congenial for European troops,--such, in fact, as we have already found in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. He especially draws attention to the solitary hills,--"those islands of the plains,"--as capable of affording a refuge from the fevers that inundate the low-lying ground. Here the mass of the British army may be lodged until their services are needed. From these eyries, like the Romans of old, they may watch the champaign country, and be ready, at a moment's notice, to move on any threatened position. There is no intention of recommending the abandonment of strategical points, or large cities which serve as arsenals, simply because they are not wholesome. There are dangers to be braved in peace as well as in war. Yet our experience of the heroic qualities of the British soldier justifies the assumption that small bodies of them, placed in strongly fortified positions, could hold out against all comers until succour should arrive from the hill-stations, especially now India is being traversed by railroads and telegraphs. But even these stations are not sufficient to restore patients suffering under chronic disease. These, if possible, should at once be sent home. The sick officer is invalided, and speedily recovers in the air of his native land; the common soldier, on the contrary, is forced to enter the hospital,--too often to die. The men, moreover, should be recruited for a shorter time. At present they practically serve seventeen years in India,--a period which breaks down the constitutions of the majority. It is the exposure to heat for a great length of time, and not its intensity for a short period, that destroys European life. If we entrap the ignorant labourer by the most unworthy artifices,[31] we should, at least, be merciful to him. Let the term of service be reduced to ten years, and then the stream of stalwart Britons, fresh from the mother-country, would enable us, in conjunction with hill-stations, to keep a powerful and resistless grasp upon the country.

It may well be imagined that, if the sanitary condition of our army is so bad in times of peace, its sufferings in war must be greatly exaggerated. The experience of the Peninsula, Walcheren, Burmah, and Sebastopol, has unfailingly proved this to be the case, and, in manifold instances, the evils were such as could have been avoided with ease.

"The barracks and the military hospital," says Miss Nightingale, "exist at home and in the colonies as tests of our sanitary condition in peace; and the histories of the Peninsular war, of Walcheren, and of the late Crimean expedition, exist as tests of our sanitary condition in the state of war. We have much more information on the sanitary history of the Crimean campaign than we have of any other. It is a complete example--history does not afford its equal--of an army, after a great disaster arising from its neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale. In all other examples the last step has been wanting to complete the solution of the problem. We had in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent. per annum from disease alone--a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the great plague in the population of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks; that is to say, that there died out of the army of the Crimea an annual rate greater than ordinarily die in time of pestilence out of sick. We had during the last six months of the war a mortality among our _sick_ not much more than among our _healthy_ Guards at home, and a mortality among our troops in the last five months _two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home_."

This splendid testimony to the value of sanitary science, exhibited on the largest scale, on an apparently hopeless field, is without appeal. The Commissioners propose a medical officer of health for the army,[32] second in rank to the principal medical officer, and attached to the quartermaster-general in the field. This officer, says the Report, should be the head of the sanitary police of the army, should be answerable for all the measures to be adopted for the prevention of disease, and should report to the quartermaster-general, and to the principal medical officer. In order to prevent any evasion of responsibility, they further recommend that the sanitary officer shall give his advice in writing, and that the disregard of it on strategical grounds shall be equally recorded by the officer in command. Having thus provided for the army in the field, the Commissioners propose that there shall be associated with the Medical Director-General of the Army a sanitary, statistical, and medical colleague. Each of these officers would be at the head of a distinct department--the sanitary officer taking cognizance of all questions of food, dress, diet, exercise, and lodging for the soldier; the statistical department gathering together those invaluable details relative to the health of the army, for the want of which the British troops have so long suffered a mortality out of all proportion to the civil community; while the medical department would serve as a connecting link between civil and military medicine, keeping the latter up to the last word of science, as spoken by the great medical authorities in all countries. Some of these suggestions will require deep consideration before they are adopted. Nothing, at any rate, must be permitted to fetter the absolute power of the commander in the field, who must have a real as well as a nominal freedom. But every precaution which can guard the health of the soldier without cramping the discretion of the general is demanded alike by humanity and policy. What was so powerfully said in the last century has remained in a great degree true in our own. "The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless and helpless; gasping and groaning unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits or heaved into the ocean, without notice or remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away."

THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.

If a needle turning upon a pivot were fixed at York, and if, by a wire placed in close proximity to it, the needle could be made to move to the right or to the left through the agency of a power applied at the other end of the wire in London, and if it were agreed that one motion of the needle to the left should signify _a_, and one to the right _b_, &c.,[33] we should have just such a contrivance as the common needle telegraph now in use.

Such is the dry statement of a problem the more detailed working of which we are about to explain to the reader.

When a schoolboy places a sixpence and a piece of zinc in juxta-position with each other in his mouth, he immediately perceives a singular taste, which as instantly disappears upon their separation; it is an experiment which most of us have performed, wondered at for a moment, and then forgotten. How little did we ever dream that in so doing we were calling into life one of the most subtle, active, and universal agents in nature--a spirit like Ariel to carry our thoughts with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth--a workman more delicate of hand than the Florentine Cellini, and more resistless in force than the Titans of old!

If now we place a piece of zinc, Z, and of copper, C, in a glass of acidulated water, instead of in the saliva of the mouth, and if we then attach to the piece of zinc the wire D K, and to the piece of copper the wire B A, and approximate the two ends, A K, until they touch, we shall have the philosophic expression of the contrivance of the boy--a decomposition of the water will immediately take place, and either as its cause or consequence--for scientific men have not yet decided which--an electric current will flow in a continued stream from the zinc plate or positive pole to the copper plate or negative pole of the battery, and this action, provided the plates are kept clean and the acidulated water is supplied, will go on as long as the materials last. If this little instrument, which generates a very small amount of electric force, is combined with others, as in figure 2,--the zinc plate of one cell being connected with the copper plate of the next by a piece of wire--we shall have the celebrated battery invented by Volta in 1800, in which the accumulated current, after flowing from one cell into another, by means of the little hoops of wire, is transmitted along the large hoop, D K A B, from the one pole of the battery to the other. Within the narrow chambers of some such battery (which may be made of any number of cells, according to the force required), the motive power is generated by which the electric telegraph is worked, and the large hoop by which its two poles are connected represents the telegraphic wire we see running beside the railroad, whose office is to form a conducting pipe for the conveyance of the electricity. Different substances possess this property in various degrees; some, such as dry paper, not permitting the passage of the electric fluid to any sensible extent; and others transmitting it with great freedom. Of all known bodies, the metals are the most perfect conductors, and copper is in this respect superior to iron; but the latter, being cheaper and more durable, is commonly employed in the construction of the telegraph. Thus we have two of the indispensable requisites--a constant force and a channel which conveys it from place to place.

There was yet a third thing necessary--some contrivance by which the force could be made instrumental in forming signs or characters at its destined goal; and this final condition was supplied by Oersted's discovery in 1819, that a _magnetic_ needle is deflected by the passage of a circuit of electricity through a wire parallel and in close neighbourhood to it. The following cut will explain our meaning:--When the fluid passes from the U pole of the battery in the direction of B A K L M Z, and enters V, its opposite pole, "a current," as it is called, is completed, running from left to right, the effect of which upon the needle, N, is to deflect it in the direction of the dotted line (seen in perspective) 2, 3, or to an angle of 90 degrees, with the wire, if the current is sufficiently strong. If, however, the current be reversed, and the electric fluid made to traverse the wire from right to left, in the direction of the letters V Z M L K A B to the U end of the battery, the needle will immediately reverse its position and place itself at 90 degrees in the opposite direction. This then is the whole principle and mystery of the needle telegraph, the one still most extensively used in this country. The break that occurs between the letters B U and Z V is intended to show the method in which the needle is made to work. "Whilst the wires are thus apart the circuit is broken," or the fluid no longer passes along the wire, but immediately they are approximated the circulation again commences, and the needle "answers the helm." By the opening and closing, then, of this small space, which is effected by a lever, the needle is made to oscillate at will.

The mere fact, however, of an electric current passing along a wire in proximity to a magnetic needle was not sufficient to enable any person to construct a telegraph. Would the needle be deflected by a wire, the battery of which was placed at any considerable distance? it would not; therefore, for all telegraphic purposes Oersted's discovery was worthless. Schweigger, however, soon after ascertained that by passing a great number of times round the needle a wire, thoroughly insulated by a "serving" of silk thread, as shown in figure 4, the deflecting powers of the currant were _multiplied_, and the sensibility of the instrument marvellously increased.

In the same year that Oersted made his brilliant discovery, M. Arago detected another law, which furnished a second method by which the electric current could be made to tell its tale. He announced to the French Academy the fact so pregnant in its consequences, that the fluid possessed the power of imparting magnetism to steel or iron; and shortly afterwards our own countryman, Sturgeon, invented the first electro-magnet, by coiling around a piece of soft iron a great length of fine insulated copper wire, the ends of which communicated with a battery. Figure 5 will give a rough idea of this instrument. The wire U B A, when it reaches the cylinder K L, is wound many times round it, and returns to the battery at V. As long as the current is passing, the soft iron becomes a magnet and attracts the iron armature P; but directly the circuit is broken its magnetic power ceases, and P, by the action of a spring, flies back. It will at once be seen that by alternately making and breaking the circuit, which can be done as fast as the hand can move the handle of a lever, an up and down movement of the armature P will take place, and this is the principle of action in Wheatstone's electro-magnetic dial instrument and Morse's recording telegraph, so extensively used in America. The general _modus operandi_ of the latter, which is a contrivance of singular merit and efficiency, can be easily understood. At the station at which the message is received, a poised iron lever has a metal pin on its upper surface at one end, and an armature on its under surface at the other end. When the magnet, which is placed beneath the armature, attracts and draws it down, the pin at the opposite extremity is raised, and presses against a strip of paper, which is moved between the metal point, and a roller supported above it, at a uniform rate by means of clock-work. The pin or style will then make a simple dot, or trace lines of variable length upon the paper, according as the electric current is kept up only for a single instant, or for a longer period. "The impressions on the paper," says Dr. Turnbull, "resemble the raised printing for the blind." Out of these dots and lines an alphabet is formed similar to that which we have given in a subsequent page, when speaking of the chemical telegraph at Bain. The instrument of Morse requires only a single wire to work it, and is, says the Abbé Moigno, "an excellent telegraph, very simple, very efficacious, and very rapid in its transmissions. A practised clerk can indent on an average seventeen words a minute, which is consequently as many as a skilful writer could transcribe with a pen. It is, moreover, a great advantage to have fixed on a band of paper the messages which the needle telegraphs merely figure in the air."

Since the year 1821 the principles of action of two of the working telegraphs of the present day were known to scientific men, and the question naturally arises, how was it that it still took so many years to make the telegraph a working fact? The answer is, that the combination of circumstances necessary to bring it to perfection had not arisen. What interest had practical men in carrying out the dreams of philosophers? No one imagined that it would ever become a necessary social engine, or that it would pay "seven per cent." to a public Company. The patronage of the Government could alone have been looked to by any of the proposers of the new method of telegraphy, and the sort of encouragement received from this quarter may be judged from the fact that when Mr. Ronalds attempted to draw the attention of some of the officials to the working of his instrument, they did not even deign to pay it a visit, but returned for answer, "That the telegraph was of no use in time of peace, and that the semaphore in time of war answered all the required purposes." The occasion that suddenly ripened the invention and brought it into practical operation was the introduction of railroads. Were it not for the universal spread of this new means of locomotion, the telegraph might still have remained in that limbo from which so many discoveries have never emerged. The vast advantage to a railroad of a method of conveying signals instantaneously throughout its entire length was at once seen, and the continuity of its property, together with the protection afforded by its servants, presented facilities for its introduction and maintenance which had never before occurred.