It thus keeps up its average
of health and diminishes its rate of mortality; but the sum and the
rates of sickness and mortality in the community are both thereby
increased.
During the Crimean War, 17.34 per cent, were invalided and sent home
from the British army, and 21 per cent, from the French army, as unable
to do military service. By this means, 11,994[43] British and 65,069[44]
French soldiers were lost to their Governments. The army of the United
States, in the Mexican War, discharged and sent home 12,252 men, or 12
per cent, of the entire number engaged in that war, on account of
disability.
The causes of this exhaustion of personal force are manifold and
various, and so generally present that the number and proportion of
those who are thus hopelessly reduced below the degree of efficient
military usefulness, in the British army, has been determined by
observation, and the Government calculates the rate of the loss which
will happen in this way, at any period of service. Out of 10,000 men
enlisted in their twenty-first year, 718 will be invalided during the
first quinquennial period, or before they pass their twenty-fifth year,
539 in the second, 673 in the third, and 854 in the fourth,--making
2,784, or more than one-quarter of the whole, discharged for disability
or chronic ailment, before they complete their twenty years of military
service and their forty years of life.
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