10 HIPPOPHAGY. 



wounded, served as coppers for cooking this meat ; 

 and instead of salt, of which we were destitute, it was 

 seasoned with gunpowder. I only had the trouble of 

 pouring the soup from one breastplate into another 

 through a linen cloth, and of then allowing it to clarify 

 by rest. Marshal Massena, commander-in-chief of the 

 troops, was right glad to share in my repast, and was 

 very well pleased with it. Experience thus demon- 

 strates that horse-flesh is most proper nourishment for 

 man." 



Oh that this had been remembered in the Crimea ! 

 We should never have heard of the sufferings of the 

 wretched horses which crunched each other's tails ; 

 and many a sick and wounded man might have received 

 that nourishment for want of which he pined and died 

 on the bleak plateau around Sebastopol. In the debate 

 on the Crimean Commission, in the House of Commons, 

 General Peel, speaking of the want of forces for the 

 making of a road from Balaklava to Sebastopol, ob- 

 served that " it had originated from the impossibility 

 of finding forage for more than a certain number of 

 animals in the Crimea, and that number was already 

 exceeded by the horses of the cavalry, the artillery, and 

 others. The common-sense view would have been to 

 reduce the number of horses to the power of feeding 

 them. The proper course would have been to have re- 

 embarked a portion of them." Not a hoof of them, 

 say we. They should have been slaughtered and 

 eaten, instead of being permitted to die by inches, and 

 their carcasses to diffuse the odour of the most fetid 

 corruption in the vicinity of over- wrought, under-fed, 

 sick and wounded men. What was excellent food for 

 Frenchmen would have been equally good for British 

 troops ; and if Massena and Larrey thought horse-flesh 

 dainty fare when seasoned with gunpowder, we are 

 very decidedly of opinion that General Peel would 

 have no reason to complain were he doomed for a few 

 months to a dietary such as nerved the French defen- 



