THE SANITARY CARE OP THE SOLDIER. 
221 
breakfast. At 12 o’clock he has his early dinner; I come down at 
12 o’clock and have a quantity of cheese, sardines, and beer. At half¬ 
past 4 o’clock he has his afternoon tea or coffee, and I have mine in 
the Saloon. But there the comparison between the soldier and myself 
ends entirely. When I went out to India I found that the last meal 
given to the soldier was at a quarter-past 3 o’clock in the evening. I 
wrote to the officer in command of the ship pointing out the long 
interval that he went with no food, till half-past 6 o’clock next morning, 
there were swarms of undergrown boys going out, and those boys were 
getting no food all that time. He said he was awfully sorry, but he 
could make no change ; he would refer the matter home. But when I 
came home the other day the same thing was going on. And, remember, 
I was going down at 6 o’clock to a remarkably fine dinner; dinner on 
a troop-ship is a great restorative after the fatigues of the day, but 
the soldier had no dinner at all, he was without it. And what would 
our lives be in India, or all over the world, if it was not for the 
messes, which have made our lives happy and pleasant ? Let us remem¬ 
ber, then, the soldier by comparison with the officer is short of one meal. 
On the troop-ship you can see it in a microcosm ; I am getting a good 
dinner and he is not. And who are these men ? There are swarms of 
young soldiers going out to fight against typhoid who want food 
awfully, and there are swarms of them coming home tired and worn 
out by the Indian climate to a warfare which is far more bitter than 
any Indian campaign, the warfare in East London, leaving them far 
more dangerous to the public. I see them here in Woolwich. The 
other day I saw a man who was knocked to pieces with ague. I 
said, ec I remember your face well.” “ Yes, sir, I met you out in 
India; I am knocked to pieces by ague,” and the Indian Govern¬ 
ment, which is using these men for seven years, sends them home, 
and they are turned adrift at home on the same pay that a man 
may get by serving his whole time at Woolwich. If India uses 
those men I say that those men on coming home should receive a 
surplus reserve pay for the first year to carry them over the bad year 
when they are recouping from the wear and tear of Indian life. This 
question is of great importance—India exists by those men ; the private 
soldier made India for us and he gets nothing at all out of it. We 
want to make him the same as the Indian officer who comes home on 
furlough. Let us give him a certain special retaining fee for the first 
year when he comes home so that he may fight his battle, a terribly 
bitter battle, for work in England. 
On the question of the soldier’s food we are pursued by the stock- 
pot and the dripping-pan. Now the stock-pot is not used in the great 
mass of garrisons, and it is not popular; the men have an idea that 
the stock-pot is recruited from the bones that every class of man has 
nibbled at the dinner table, which is not the case, of course. The 
removal of the bones by unhandy men knocks the meat very much 
about. As a result it is not much used. So far as the Government 
ration and the 3Jd. or 4d. stopped for groceries go, the soldier is 
still, to my mind, underfed. When you compare the feeding of dif¬ 
ferent foreign armies—we do not want to compare ourselves very 
