While disease scored but forty victims in nine months among the soldiers of General Oku, no fewer than 5,127 officers and men were killed and 21,080 wounded. This shows that the period was one of great activity, of hard campaigning and severe fighting--which makes the low disease death rate all the more astonishing. Soldiers in the field cannot be looked after as carefully as those in camp; hygiene and sanitary surroundings are only temporary, and, therefore, more crude; dietetic regulations are more difficult to enforce. Of course, there were many cases of disease in Oku's army--24,642 in all--but the majority were of bronchial troubles, resulting from climatic conditions. Of beri beri, a malady peculiarly Oriental, 5,070 cases were reported. But the progressive Japanese seem to have gotten the mastery even of this, once notable, because of its mortality. It is, however, in battling with those most dreaded scourges of an army--typhoid fever and dysentery--that the Japanese have scored their greatest triumphs. Of typhoid fever they have had only 193 cases, and of dysentery only 342 cases. [Sidenote: Civil War Comparisons] During the first year of the American Civil War typhoid fever attacked 8 per cent. of the Federal troops, killing 35 per cent. of the white and 55 per cent. of the negro soldiers who contracted it. But here is an army in the wilds of Manchuria larger than that of McClellan before Richmond, which had only forty deaths in nine months. The great American conflict was one of the bloodiest in history. In the Federal ranks, 110,070 men were killed in battle or died of wounds, while 249,458 were sent to their graves of disease. Why is it the little brown islanders of the East were so successful in fighting the unseen foe? "Every death from preventable disease is an insult to the intelligence of the age," says Major Louis L. Seaman, late surgeon in the United States Volunteers, who returned from Japan during the war. "When it occurs in an army, where the units are compelled to submit to discipline, it becomes a governmental crime." "Disease bacteria," asserts another writer, in discussing the medical aspects of the Boer War, "are even more dangerous than Mauser bullets shot off with smokeless powder. Both hit without giving a sign to the eye whence they come, and of the two, the Mausers hit less often and hit less hard." It was through prompt recognition of these propositions that the Japanese held down their death rate from disease. Major Seaman relates that, in conversation with a Japanese officer early in the conflict, the subject of Russia's overwhelming numbers was mentioned.