DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CIVIL AND MILITARY LIFE.
Military life, with the labors, exposures, and circumstances of war,
differs widely from civil life. The social and domestic machinery of
home spontaneously brings within the reach of families the things that
are needful for their sustenance, comfortable for their enjoyment, and
favorable to their health. But this self-acting machinery follows not
the soldier through his campaigns. Everything he needs or enjoys is to
be a matter of special thought, and obtained with a special effort and
often with difficulty. Much that was very comfortable and salutary in
civil life must be given up in the camp. The government is the purveyor
for and the manager of the army; it undertakes to provide and care for,
to sustain and nourish the men. But, with all its wisdom, power, and
means, it is not equal to the thousand or thousands of housekeepers that
cared and provided for these men when at home; and certainly it does
not, and probably cannot, perform these domestic offices as well and as
profitably for the soldiers as their natural providers did.
Nevertheless, the Government is the sole provider for the army, and
assumes the main responsibility of the physical condition of its
members.
Starting with the very common belief that the human body has an
indefinite power of endurance, or, if it suffer from disease, or fall in
death, it is from causes beyond man's control,--seeing, also, that it is
impossible to carry the common means of sustaining life into the camp,
Governments seem willing to try the experiment of requiring their men to
do the hard work of war without a certain, full supply of sustenance.
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