health inseparable; but as soon as the same men go to India, they are shut up all day in their hot, close barrack-rooms, where they also eat and sleep; they are not allowed to take exercise; all their meals are eaten in the hottest part of the day, and served to them by native servants; and they lie on their beds idle and partly sleeping till sunset! "Unrefreshing day-sleep" is indeed alleged as one of the causes for the soldier's ill-health in India—the soldier, the type of endurance and activity, who now becomes the type of sloth!
3. The Indian social state of the British soldier is not only the reverse of the social state of the soldier at home, and of the class from which he is taken, but there is a great exaggeration in the wrong direction. Yet people are surprised that British soldiers die in India; and they lay the whole blame on the climate.
It is natural to us to seek a scapegoat for every neglect, and climate has been made to play this part ever since we set foot in India. Sir Charles Napier says, "That every evil from which British troops have suffered has been laid at its door." "The effects of man's imprudence are attributed to climate; if a man gets drunk, the sun has given him a headache, and so on." In regard to Delhi, he says, "Every garden, if not kept clean, becomes a morass; weeds flourish, filth runs riot and the grandest city in India has the name of being insalubrious, although there is nothing evil about it that does not appear to be of man's own creation."
