These particular dangers are best obviated by
the appointment of sanitary officers, to attend the forces, and take
charge of the health of the army, as the physicians and surgeons take
charge of its sickness. If, besides, there is a separate department
between the commissariat and the soldiery, to see that the comforts
provided are actually brought within every man's grasp, the authorities
will have done their part.
The rest is the soldier's own concern. When cruelly pressed by hardship,
the soldiers in Turkey and the Crimea took to drinking; and what they
drank was poison. The vile raid with which they intoxicated themselves
carried hundreds to the grave as surely as arsenic would have done.
When, at last, they were well fed, warm, clean, and comfortable, and
well amused in the coffee-houses opened for them, there was an end, or
a vast diminution, of the evil of drunkenness. Good coffee and harmless
luxuries were sold to them at cost price; and books and magazines and
newspapers, chess, draughts, and other games, were at their command. The
American soldiery are a more cultivated set of men than these, and are
in proportion more inexcusable for any resort to intemperance. They
ought to have neither the external discomfort nor the internal vacuity
which have caused drunkenness in other armies.
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