218 
THE SANITARY CARE OP THE SOLDIER. 
“ Certainly, I would much sooner lie on the ground in the field than 
on the guard-bed in barracks.” What is gained by this guard-bed ? 
Remember that yon do not harden your men. No officer ever yet 
hardened his men. Why, the officers beat the men in everything, and 
we go out to war off very good beds. If we want to be hardened let 
us all go on the guard-beds together. If you give the soldier a 
proper bed for a guard-bed he will do his guard better ; it is not the 
sentry-work alone that knocks him up, it is the guard-bed; they are 
terrible contrivances, the remains of the bad old system. We want 
now to give the soldier a bedstead with a mattress of coir or hair, so 
that in the intervals of his sentry-go he shall get some chance of sleep. 
About the question of clothing. I will not now deal with the ques¬ 
tion of tunics and those things, but as regards the question of the 
flannel shirt. The old army wore always a calico shirt, but General 
Herbert, who was Quartermaster-General 15 years ago, devised at 
Pimlico a grey flannel shirt which contained 47 per cent, of wool; it 
is not a woollen shirt altogether, but it is a great improvement upon 
the old one. Now we find great difficulty in getting the men to wear 
them, there is a laxity about it in some way ; there is a want of the 
old parade system. I remember years ago how the soldier tucked up 
his sleeve and showed his clean shirt at the wrist. While you are 
sending men up to the hospital with bronchitis you must remember 
that every man whom you send up throws more work upon the men 
behind. If you want to know why the men get bronchitis it is 
because they do not wear the flannel shirt. It is of importance 
that he should also have some under-vest and not go out in this 
poor thing he is now wearing. Then he wears this shirt night 
and day, and it is very dirty. There must be a reinvigoration 
of the check of the “No. 1,” or whoever it is in the artillery, or 
the Colour-Sergeant in the infantry, or the officer himself must do 
it. That is to say in this short service unstable army, in this raft 
that sinks in mid-ocean under our feet, there is only one stable 
element—not the non-commissioned officers, not the men, but the 
officers. So far as I can see, as the old system gives way and the new 
system comes on, it is more and more essential for the officer to be able 
to answer for everything about his men. I think that, as in the 
mounted corps you give every man drawers, you should give a pair of 
drawers to every soldier in the army; the men would be healthier 
and better, and there would not be so much coughs and colds. And I 
would myself like to give the men some suit to sleep in. I said to a 
man sometime ago, “ What do you sleep in ; do you wear a night¬ 
shirt in barracks ?” “ Oh, sir, they would tear it off my back in the 
barrack-room if I wore it.” But many of those men have been accus¬ 
tomed to better things. You would be surprised when a man comes 
before you as a recruit looking grimy and dirty, and to find that, although 
uncared for, this man has been in his own home well-cared for. I ask 
him, “ Did you have sheets in your mother's house.” “ Yes.” Then 
I ask, “ Did you have night-shirts,” and they always say they had. In 
the army they are sleeping in their day shirts often for more than a 
week, and that produces the most frightfully sickening odour in the 
