" "5,509 entered the hospitals, and of these, 3,959
died in August, 1829, and only 614 ultimately recovered." "At Brailow
the plague attacked 1,200 and destroyed 774." "Dysentery was equally
fatal." "In the march across the Balkan, 1,000 men died of diarrhoea,
fever, and scurvy." "In Bulgaria, during July, 37,000 men were taken
sick." "At Adrianople a vast barrack was taken for a hospital, and in
three days 1,616 patients were admitted. On the first of September there
were 3,666, and on the 15th, 4,646 patients in the house. This was
one-quarter of all the disposable force at that station." "In October,
1,300 died of dysentery; and at the end of the month there were 4,700 in
the hospitals." "In the whole army the loss to the Russians in the year
1829 was at least 60,000 men."[21]
CRIMEAN WAR.
In 1854, twenty-five years after this fatal experience of the Russian
army in Bulgaria, the British Government sent an army to the same
province, where the men were exposed to the same diseases and suffered a
similar depreciation of vital force in sickness and death. For two years
and more they struggled with these destructive influences in their own
camps, in Bulgaria and the Crimea, with the usual result of such
exposures in waste of life. From April 10, 1854, to June 30, 1856,
82,901 British soldiers were sent to the Black Sea and its coasts; and
through these twenty-six and two-thirds months the British army had an
average of 34,559 men engaged in that "War in the East" with Russia.
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