7th May.
One of the greatest of the many changes which have come over civilised man within the present century is to be found his attitude towards those who suffer. In individual experience he has learnt to escape physical pain by means of anzesthetios and sedatives; in family and school life, his infliction of pain by the use of the rod has generally given place to gentler forms of suasion; the sterner measures formerly thought necessary for criminal repression have been so softened that John Howard to-day would find his self-imposed task entirely unnecessary; and Instly, even war itself has been divested of some of the horror which characterised it in days of yore. Man has begun to pride himself on his humanity, and not without reason, for excepting perhaps the Crimean, the civilised wars of the past half-century, have all shown that spirit of international kindliness exemplified by the Geneva Convention and the heroic bands of the Red Cross, Of late years every army has, in addition to these, provided its own Ambulance Corps with its first and second lines of assistance and their field and base hospitals. It is said that in our little war against Arabi in Egypt, no wounded man ever lay longer than a quarter of an hour without help. There were of course but a few hundreds to attend to. But in earlier times, and even occasionally during the Franco-German war of 1870-1, men lay for days unheard, unseen, lingering on till the "first aid" which might have saved many a precious life came just too late. Terrible beyond conception must have been the battle-fields of the early years of the century. History says little of these things, but individual accounts of the retreat from Moscow, of Sir John Moore's retirement on Corunna, of the rent of the French army of the Loire in 1871, and of: Prussian soldiers in twenty minutes,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.