delegated either to the military Commander-in-Chief, or to the officers of the Intendance (fonctionnaires de l'intendance militaire). This is a body and name unknown in the English army. Composed of officers of various grades permanently withdrawn from regimental duties and promotion, and charged with the administrative direction of garrison and field hospital services, it commands the medical staff in all things pertaining to military discipline, enforces observance of the rules, and superintends the duties of "police" in the hospitals; which police means maintaining regularity in the medical visits, good order among the medical attendants, the orderlies, the sick, and others. The intendance also fixes the number of beds and amount of furniture to be put in a ward, appoints or approves of surgeons to particular charges, and removes them at pleasure, signifying the same through the médecin principal. And if any medical officer is thereby aggrieved, he must, in the first instance, address his complaint through the sous-intendant of his hospital. In a word, as respects military position, and even professional duties, the medical staff hold an inferior relative rank, and are subordinate to the officers of this particular service. Moreover, these exercise the combined functions of the commissariat and purveyor's departments; in the latter capacity contracting for all hospital requirements, and being alone answerable for their proper supply. Lastly, as a distinguishing feature of the two army medical systems, the corps de pharmaciens is a perfectly distinct service, little lower in relative rank to the medical staff, and, equally with it, subject to the orders of the intendance.

Nor do the attributes of this body embrace only

administrative details. Members of it have a seat in the Conseil de Santé, the supreme medical authority of the army, and have a large share in the patronage and power exercised by it. In fact, according to the last published ordonnance on this subject (décret organique du corps de santé de l'armée de terre, 23 Mars 1852), the médecinsinspecteurs, who form only a minority of the body, have their functions jealously restricted to the superintendence of the sanitary state of the army, en ce qui concerne l'art de guérir, and to a simple recommendation (un avis consultative) in respect of the promotion of officers otherwise than by seniority, and their distribution to vacant appointments.*

From this statement of facts may be deduced two just conclusions one, the thorough dependence of the sanitary state of the French troops in the Crimea on the efficiency of its ambulance system; another, the considerable dependence of this efficiency on the intelligence and integrity of the intendance.

Let us then look at the actual condition of these hospital structures, and the number and state of their sick,

* I have been precise and profuse in describing this intendance system, both because I claim to vindicate colleagues second to none, with whom I had the honour to serve in the East, for professional knowledge and devotion to the calls of duty, from the suspicion that they were to blame for the acknowledged failure of the ambulance service to uphold the integrity of an army encumbered with sick; and because I have heard the system vaunted for our imitation by parties who had never witnessed its insufficiency, or been told of its operations in a country where every article of consumption had to be bought, and the price paid through this agency.-L'intendance militaire est généralement connue sous le nom de Jésuits de l'armée. (MS. letter).

as seen in September and October, 1855-that is, just a twelvemonth after the landing of the allied armies on the Crimea. At this period, there were three principal stations for them: one, the largest, on the valley near Kamiesch harbour; a lesser, on the plateau overlooking Inkermann, a position then guarded by twenty thousand French troops, though held by as many hundred English on the day which gives the place celebrity; the smallest, at the quartier général. In these three localities there were severally formed from fourteen to eight groups of hôpitaux ambulans, each group consisting of from fifty to thirty wooden huts, and twenty to fifteen tents; the former designed to contain twenty, the latter eight patients, though these numbers were often exceeded. Thus, altogether, accommodation for twenty-eight thousand sick soldiers was provided and required at the time specified.

But this accommodation, together with the constant large evacuations for the Bosphorus, did not equal the demands of the army at a later period. I have it on most trustworthy authority that, in the months of December, January, and February, following my visit, the daily average of sick treated in the fourteen hospital divisions at Kamiesch alone exceeded fourteen thousand; and that during these three months the aggregate loss by deaths was certainly eighteen thousand-that is, from fifteen to twenty a day in each of the fourteen divisions described above. Other than medical authority augments this mortality by one-fourth.

I reserve for a future and fitter chapter full details concerning the sanitary state of the French camp generally, and the internal condition of the ambulance huts

!

the one and the other contributing equally to the magnitude and certainty of these fatal results. Suffice it for the present to notify that the cases admitted into hospital were typhus, scurvy, dysentery, hospital gangrene; and that filth and destitution of all kinds, overcrowding of sick, neglected ventilation, thoroughly defeated all curative measures. Added to which natural causes of death was the deplorable deficiency of medical attendance. An ambulance containing eight or ten hundred persons had never more than five or six surgeons, all médecins traitans from necessity; but it frequently happened that, in consequence of their large decrease by death and illness, one surgeon had to take a double charge-that is, to prescribe medicine and order food en cahier, on personal inspection, at least once a day for four hundred cases of acute disease; an amount of mental and physical labour undergone in such localities that killed one-half the medical staff in the Crimea, and forced the retirement of many more. In one ambulance service at Kamiesch, of an original appointment of ten surgeons, six died and four outlived attacks of fever within four months. For myself, I can truly state that,

By many a death-bed I have been,

And many a sinner's parting scene,—

but never in my professional experience did I witness such hopeless medicine, or feel myself so close to the destroying angel, as within the precincts of these wooden buildings at Kamiesch.

I am not in possession of equally authentic data respecting the two other principal ambulance stations. But knowing that the hospitals at Kamiesch served for

about one-third of the whole French army, that the causes of disease were general, and the ratio of deaths resulting was uniform-knowing, further, that the numerical strength of that army was strenuously maintained by drafts during the last three months of 1855, and the mortality was only less than that of the first quarter of 1856, we are forced to make an approximate addition to the above of twenty-five thousand deaths, chiefly from disease.*

But the French army did not escape scathless from the first winter, so calamitous to the English. On the contrary it is acknowledged that the losses, first in Bulgaria, and afterwards in the Crimea, from cholera, were very large. The former is estimated by M. Baudens at six thousand, or half of the expeditionary force that marched into the Dobrudscha under General Canrobert. Moreover, the French army bore a share of the Alma and Inkermann fights; also, the chief part of the Tchernaya combat; and it carried the Mamelon and Malakhoff after formidable trench advances. No page has yet published the whole truth in respect to the last of these conquests. All known is that the achievement was as memorable for prodigal sacrifice of life as for military daring. That army would be the first to exclaim against a smaller proportionate loss of killed in

* I have the testimony of several French medical officers, who, for the sake of science and humanity, besought me to make known the truth with regard to the mortality in the ambulance service. Comparing the details of each narrator's personal experience, and employing in every instance the lesser of two or more numbers given for an average, I am sure of the moderation of my statement respecting Kamiesch.