Each sleeper had 8-1/3 square
feet of floor to rest upon, and 25 cubic feet of air to breathe through
the night, with no ventilation, except what air passed in through the
door-way, when left open, and through the porous cloth that covered the
tent. Some of the tents of one of the regiments encamped at Worcester
had 56 feet of floor-surface, and 160 feet of air, which was divided
among six men, giving each 27 feet of air.
In all the camps of Massachusetts, and of most armies everywhere,
economy, not only of room within the tents, but of ground where they are
placed, seems to be deemed very important, even on those fields where
there is opportunity for indefinite expansion of the encampment. The
British army-regulations prescribe three plans of arranging the tents.
The most liberal and loose arrangement gives to each soldier eighty
square feet of ground, the next gives forty-two, and the most compact
allows twenty-seven feet, without and within his tent. These are
densities of population equal to having 348,000, 664,000, and 1,008,829
people on a square mile. But enormous and incredible as this
condensation of humanity may seem, we, in Massachusetts, have beaten it,
in one instance at least. In the camp of the Ninth Regiment at Long
Island, the tents were placed in compact rows, and touched each other on
the two sides and at the back.
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