CHAPTER III. CREMATION IN TIMES OF WAR. After a battle is over, the field of carnage is covered with the dead. I think it cannot be questioned that these are disposed of in a very careless manner in time of war; not only those who have been killed during an engagement, but also those who succumb to disease. After a great combat the slain are usually hastily interred in large trenches, in which they are arranged in tiers, or piled pell-mell upon each other, whereupon they are left to decompose. That no more calamity and sickness results from such a mode of burial, than is usually the case, is due, I believe, principally to the fact that great battles are generally fought on fields far from the habitations of man. War, God knows, is bad enough, but far worse are the diseases that follow in its wake. The dead on the “field of honor,” which is soon naught but a vast cemetery, are, as I have said above, inhumed as rapidly as possible. There is no time to lose. Hurriedly thousands of fallen braves are thrown into large pits, and barely covered with earth. The comrades who have rendered them this last service move onward to bury others, and leave them to vitiate the air and to form a terrible herd of infection. Thus it is that a country which has already been devastated by war is again brought to the verge of despair by the appearance of typhus fever, dysentery, and other equally serious maladies. Unfortunately, these diseases do not confine themselves to the country in which the war has been waged, but also invade the lands of the peaceful neighbors. [Illustration: THE CREMATORIUM AT ROME (From Dr. Pini’s Work.) ] There is much evidence to prove that what I say is true. Immediately after the defeat of Darius, Alexander the Great was advised by the sage Aristoteles to leave Arbela, to secure himself and his army from the pestilential emanations of the dead. When Syracuse was besieged by Hannibal, he decided to wound the feelings of the Syracusans by desecrating their dead, who had been buried, as was the custom in most ancient cities, outside of the city gates. He ordered his troops to dig up the ill-fated corpses, cut them to pieces, and strew them all over the field of battle, in full sight of their horror-stricken relatives and friends. But this barbarous act was followed by deserved punishment. Pestilence decimated the beleaguerers, and scores upon scores of the soldiers fell victims to the fatal power that arose, slow but sure, from the outraged dead. Lucan has furnished us with an account of the terrible scourge that befell the army of Pompey at Durazzo, because it had neglected to bury the cadavers of the horses killed in the battle. For the same reason the camp of Constantine the Great was once devastated by the plague. Mr. William Eassie, the honorary secretary of the Cremation Society of England, states (_vide_ his “Cremation of the Dead,” page 19):—