In the case of active war, foreign or civil, the General Hospital is usually an extemporized establishment, the building a makeshift, and the arrangements such as the building will admit.  In Spain, the British obtained any houses they could get; and the soldiers were sometimes crowded into half a dozen of them in one town.  In the last war, the great buildings at Scutari were engaged three months before they were wanted for extensive use; so that there was plenty of time for making them clean, airy, warm, and commodious, and for storing them with all conveniences.  This was not done; and the failure and its consequences afford a lesson by which every people engaged in war should profit.  A mere outline of what was not done at Scutari may be an indication of what should be done with all convenient speed elsewhere.

There was a catgut manufactory close at hand, which filled the neighborhood with stench.  Half a dozen dead dogs festered under the windows in the sun; and a dead horse lay in the aqueduct for six weeks.  The drain-pipes within the building were obstructed and had burst, spreading their contents over the floors and walls.  The sloping boarded divans in the wards, used for sleeping-places, were found, after the building became crowded, to be a cover for a vast accumulation of dead rats, old rags, and the dust of years.  Like all large stone buildings in the East, it was intolerably cold in winter, with its stagnant air, its filthy damps, and its vaultings and chill floors.  This wonderful building was very grandly reported of to England, for its size and capacity, its imposing character, and so forth; and the English congratulated themselves on the luck of the wounded in having such a hospital.  Yet, in the next January, fourteen hundred and eighty were carried out dead.

It appears that nobody knew how to go to work.  Everybody writes to somebody else to advise them to “observe”; and there are so many assurances that everybody means to “observe,” that there seems to have been no leisure to effect anything.  One thinks that this, that, or the other should be attended to; and another states that the matter is under consideration.  It was some weeks before anybody got so far in definiteness as to propose whitewash.  Somebody understood that somebody else was intending to have the corridors scoured; and representations were to be made to the Turkish authorities about getting the drain-pipes mended.  The Turkish authorities wished to employ their own workmen in putting in the stoves; and on the 18th of December the responsible British officer hoped the stoves would be put up immediately, but could not be certain, as Turkish workmen were in question.  This was a month after large companies of wounded and sick had been sent in from the seat of war.  Even then, nothing had been done for ventilation, or, on any sufficient scale, for putting the poor sufferers comfortably to bed.