, the
officers in command or the men themselves, in regard to encampments,
tents, clothing, food, labors, exposures, etc.

The places of encampment are usually selected for strategic purposes, or
military convenience, and the soldiers are exposed to the endemic
influences, whatever they may be. In some localities these influences
are perfectly salubrious; in others they are intensely destructive.
Malaria and miasms offer to the unpractised eye of the military officer
no perceptible signs of their presence. The camp is liable to be pitched
and the men required to sleep in malarious spots, or on the damp earth,
or over a wet subsoil, exposed to noisome and dangerous exhalations from
which disease may arise. Pringle says, that, in 1798, the regiment which
had 52 per cent, sick in two months, and 94 per cent, sick in one
season, "were cantoned on marshes whence noxious exhalations
emanated."[51] "Another regiment encamped where meadows had been flowed
all winter and just drained, and half the men became sick." Lord
Wellington wrote, August 11, 1811, "Very recently, the officer
commanding a brigade encamped in one of the most unwholesome situations,
and every man of them is sick."[52] One of our regiments encamped at
Worcester, Massachusetts, on the Agricultural Society's grounds, where
the upper soil was not dry and the subsoil was wet. The men slept in
tents on the ground, consequently there were thirty to forty cases of
disordered bowels a day. The surgeon caused the tents to be floored, and
the disease was mitigated. The Eleventh Massachusetts Regiment were
encamped on a wet soil at Budd's Ferry, in Maryland. In a week, thirty
cases of fever appeared. Dr. Russell, the surgeon, ordered the camp to
be removed to a dry field, and the tents to be floored with brush; no
new cases of fever appeared afterward. Moltka says that "the Russian
army which suffered so terribly and fatally in 1828 and 1829 was badly
clothed and badly nourished, and in no way protected against the climate
of the Danubian Provinces, and especially of Bulgaria, where the
temperature varies from 58 deg. in the day to 29 deg. at night, and where the
falling dew is like a fine and penetrating rain."[53]

Lord Wellington was a sagacious observer and a bold speaker. His
despatches to his Government frequently mention, the errors of those who
should provide for the army, and the consequent sufferings of the
soldiers. November 14, 1809, he says, "In the Englis