The Sun.
London, England, 1854-06-03 00:00:00

GOOD NEWS FOR THE SOLDIER.
We have good news to tell from the seat of war. We, - /,\
don't mean the gallant feat of Captains Yelverton and
Hall at Lkness, or the increasing perplexities of Russinalonz
the whole circle of her western frontier, but a victory ovec
the only foe our soldiers have yet had to encounter. The
" stock" has fallen, the hot effulgence of the helmet bids "
'f*-
fair to be subdued, and the whole of the uniform will V4/"."‘
soon be reduced to common sense. Hitherto the campaigze,
though bloodless, has been disastrous. The returns of thi
" fainted" on parade are serious ; marches of three or four
miles are attended with frightful casualties, a large pro•
portion falling out, and only dropping in, if at all,.
hours after muster. After a review file after file disap-
pears, if, indeed, they have ever been able to present
themselves. The enemy more formidable as yet than the
lance of the Cossack or the Minie rifle is the uniform '
and pack. Men are strangulated by the stiff leathern
garotte that prevents the return of the blood from the
head; their brains are baked in the oven that encloses
their skulls; they are pilloried by the huge package that
hangs from their shoulders, or, rather, that refuses to hang
quietly from them, and no strait-waisteoast ever restrained
the most mischievous patient more effectually than their
ill-made coat. Hence the fatal consequences of marching,
and the ill-success on parade. When it comes to actual
fightiug, and the fire of the enemy is added to the folly of
the Horse Guards, we tremble for the result, and only
hope it may be true, as we hear on every side, that on
actual service the British soldier sets the Commander-in-
Chief at defiance, and re-arranges his dress on a working
model. For the good news we promised our readers we
must refer to the replies of Mr. Sidney Herbert to
some questions last night. The stock is to be discarded;
the helmet, if retained, is to be covered with white
linen, other changes are vaguely alluded to, and it
is even whispered that the soldier on march may be ex-
cused a quarter of an hour's fresh morning air hitherto
devoted to the operations of the razor. The attention of
Lord Raglan has been called to this subject, and he will be
regulated in the matter by the results of experience, never
before, as it appears, brought to bear on the question.
It is not, indeed, very satisfactory that we have waited
till the army we have to dress is at a distance of four thou-
sand miles from its tailors. A man prepares for a Swiss
tour in Regent-street, if he is wise, and does not put it off
till he is half-way up the Faulhorn, where his only resource,
if it is a hot day, and he is a tolerably stout man, will be
to hand his coat, waistcoat, hat, neckcloth, knapsack,
Murray,
and spirit flask to his guide. There are days
in the
the year when the Parade in St. James's Park is as
hot as Gallipoli, and when it is quite
possible to Ca*
cover the weak points of a soldier's dress and acooutrements.
With what quiet humour would Herodotus relate that the
Gauls and the Hyperboreans from the Tin Islands sent an
army to the Thracian Chersonesus and Byzantium, who
found the region rather warmer than they expected, and
were obliged to dispense with some of
_their apparel I Yet,
in this country we are rather remarkable for the great
dexterity and little scruple with which we adapt our dress
and our ways to our occupations. A gentleman and his
gamekeeper do their twenty miles over all sorts of ground
—fallow, ploughed, boggy, stubble, turnips, underwood
comes alike, carrying guns and game-bags, and with
no other physical result than an appetite for dinner.
r.;They are prepared for all weathers, and neither sun,
nor wind, nor cold, nor rain takes them by sur-
prise. Why not have regiments of gamekeepers, with
just a few strips of colour to show the game they are
in search of? Men should dress for war as sensibly as
a carpenter or a coalheaver dresses for his work. The Roman
soldier had his limbs tree, and not an ounce more than was
absolutely necessary, though his burden was not a light
one. You may see him still in the has reliefs of Trajan's
Column, with his blouse and his trousers fluttering in the
wind. It is only our cumbrous civilisation, and our gene-
ral system of doing everything on the grandest and most
expensive scale, that exaggerate dress beyond its natural
uses. Modern taste rejects everything that is superfluous
in civil costume, and laughs at the fantasies of semi-bar-
barous tribes; yet no tribe but ours is so barbarous as to
load a marching and fighting man with materials that can
only fetter his feet and manacle his arms
If there is any country in the world that ought to adapt
its dress to the climate, it is ours. The ever-changing
temperature of these isles, and perhaps, to some extent,
the great variety of races that make up the Briton, pro-
duce a being equally capable of living, flourishing,
and working in either arctic or torrid zone. But,
though the delicate structure of our bodies may
adapt itself to these changes, it seems the dress
of the soldier will not. We suspect it will be foiled that
the dress of the soldier employed, possibly, to recover
Finland for the Swedes, will be the same as that of his
comrade now sweltering at Scutari. Even savages don't
fall into such errors, unless we mislead them. The young
New Zealanders, their newly-arrived Bishop informs us,
catch colds, and die wholesale, by wearing summer and
winter the blankets supplied to them by the English. They
live by turns in a vapour bath and in a cold air bath, just
as they may happen to be carrying their huge blankets
on their shoulders. We are only just unlearning the same
folly. The Secretary-at-War tells the House of Com-
mons that the Commander-in-Chief is collecting pat-
terns of the uniforms and accoutrements of different
armies in Europe. For the first time it seems to dawn.
upon us that we may learn something from our neigh-
bours, and that what may snit one climate may not suit
another. If the Commander-in-Chief would send a
sample of every uniform to the Crystal Palace,
with a paper attached to each stating the weight and other
particulars, he would assist the public to some idea of
military costume better than they can now acquire from
the four o'clock parade at the Horse Guards, or the
figures in the sentryboxes at the British Museum, Our
soldiers dress more absurdly than many others in the
world because the mass of our people see no other ; for
public opinion, were it better informed, would soon pick
out the best specimen before it. Nowhere is foppery so
out of place as in the ministers of death • nowhere so dan-
gerous as in our national protectors. We have no doubt
the day will come when the eccentricities of modern utile
forms will be thought even more ridiculous than the va-
garies into which the medimval armourers used to run, and
to which knights used to submit, we presume, for
fashion's sake. The knight's armour, however, was at
least some protection, and saved its wearer from spears
and arrows, if not always from being smothered; that is
more than can be said of the work of the modern army

Mr. Sidney Herbert announced in the House of Com-
mons last night that Lord Raglan has it in contemplation
to dispense with the stock, and to make other alterations
in the dress of the troops, with a view to render it better
adapted to the climate in which they are at present
serving. This is to far satisfactory, but the friends of the
soldier ought not yet to relax their exertions. "A 1 tera-
tions in dress" do not include the great nuisance of a
needlessly heavy kit, under which the strength of the sol-
dier is broken down. Also, Mr. S. Herbert, when pressed
on the question of shaving, could only say that Lord Rag-
lan's attention had been called to it. Now, it may safely be
predicted that the amateur barber taste of our military au-
thorities is the last out of which they will be badgered, ex-
cept perhaps their amateur tailor Last.% Any practice which
it has cost a man great study and continuous exertion to
perfect himself in, he desists from with reluctance, even
after its inutility or absurdity has been demonstrated.
The perfection to which the art of shaving is now carried
in the British army is the result of king and not always
very humane discipline. The men have been taught to
shave close by expedients almost as cruel as those by which
a bear is taught to dance. We could name a regiment,
the commander of which used regularly to inspect the
chins of his men at morning parade, and the slightest
roughness detected was sure to lead to a call upon the regi-
mental barber to shave the delinquent on the spot without
soap or water—a most painful operation for the sufferer.
The smooth chins produced by long years of such inflic-
tions will not willingly be relinquished by our martinets.
It will be as difficult a task to unlather our soldiers' chins
as it was to brown the barrels of their muskets ' • for the
smooth chin and the bright barrel are the fruits of the same
puerile and effeminate taste among the officers.—Daily
Sews.