200 
THE SANITARY CARE OE THE SOLDIER. 
French Revolution, and from then to Waterloo, that the army was of 
any great strength in England. But during all that time the number 
of barracks constructed was not very many, and large numbers of troops 
were encamped along 1 the south coast in temporary constructions. The 
moment that Waterloo was fought, and Napoleon was crushed, the 
English Government at home set to work to cut down the military 
expenditure, and I think that anyone who studies the history of the 
army between 1815 and 1854 will say that a darker period could 
not possibly exist than during that time. There was a very harsh 
discipline governing the army, the soldiers were shockingly badly 
lodged, they were very badly dressed and very badly fed during the 40 
years of that dark era of the service. 1 cannot see one glimmer of 
light through the whole of it, except one thing, and that was that you 
had here in Woolwich, in the Royal Military Academy, a military school 
which was keeping alive the light of military scientific proficiency. I 
think myself that the more an army drifts away from war experience 
the more it drifts away from the road to efficiency. The moment 
Napoleon was crushed an era of peace seemed to be quite fixed, and 
what did j'ou have ? You had the uniform of the army becoming an 
absolutely impossible one. It was the long peace that gave the bear¬ 
skin to the guardsman that he did not have at Waterloo; it was the 
long peace that gave the steel cuirass to the Life Guards that they did 
not have at Waterloo; it was the long peace that gave us the regi¬ 
mental contract system by which the soldier was robbed very often of 
his food and cheated in his clothing, and the whole of that time was a 
thoroughly bad time, and as the result of that wretchedly bad era there 
came in 1854 the tremendous crash and sufferings of the Crimean War. 
The whole of the modern efforts of sanitation in the army dates back 
to the break-up of that long peace system by the Crimean Campaign. 
In those barracks in the old days (and I myself have met men who 
remember them) the soldier did not sleep in the barrack-room as he 
does to-day in a bed by himself, he slept in bunks up along the wall, 
on shelves, two in a bed ; and you can quite imagine how a conservative 
officer in those old days might have thought that in giving the soldier 
a separate bed he was making a step towards molly-coddling—a word 
that is most wrongly used in regard to the soldier's life. I would pro¬ 
test at the very beginning against the use of that word. Whenever 
it is used by any officer of his men, or of the soldier generally, it is 
sure to be by one who knows little or nothing about these men. I saw 
the other day that an officer of the native army in India had been 
using the word molly-coddling " towards the English soldiers, and 
by so doing he showed that he knew nothing of the hardships and 
strain under which the soldier passes his life. So far from being 
molly-coddled, I think that just as a well-clotlied and well-housed and 
well-fed officer goes to war to beat the soldier in everything he does, 
so the more we develop the soldier's fitness in peace, so far from 
making him unready for war we make him more fit for war. During 
the whole of the long peace, when the army was doing the impossible 
old style of drills and was going about dressed in an impossible dress, 
and when every thing on the parade ground seemed so beautiful in 
