Before me lie the returns
of six months of those twelve, showing the fate of the troops for that
time; and it furnishes the key to the whole story.
In those six months, the admissions into hospital in the Crimea
(exclusive of the Santari Hospital) were 52,548. The number shows that
many must have entered the hospitals more than once, as well as that the
place of the dead was supplied by new comers from England. Of these,
nearly fifty thousand were absolutely untouched by the Russians. Only
3,806 of the whole number were wounded. Even this is not the most
striking circumstance. It is more impressive that three-fourths of the
sick suffered unnecessarily. Seventy-five per cent. of them suffered
from preventable diseases. That is, the naturally sick were 12,563;
while the needlessly sick were 36,179. When we look at the deaths from
this number, the case appears still more striking. The deaths were
5,359; and of these scarcely more than the odd hundreds were from
wounds,--that is, 373. Of the remainder, little more than one-tenth were
unavoidable deaths. The natural deaths, as we may call them, were only
521; while the preventable deaths were 4,465. Very different would have
been the spirit of the parting in England, if the soldiers' friends had
imagined that so small a number would fall by Russian gun or bayonet, or
by natural sickness, while the mortality from mismanagement would at one
season of the next year exceed that of London in the worst days of the
Great Plague.
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