[35] Mr. Hemsworth has suggested an apparatus for the purpose.
Combatants who have been slain, or who have perished through sickness, are buried as haste dictates, and often imperfectly. I saw, during the war, relics of the dead protrude from the Sebastopol trenches. The bodies at Metz were in many cases exhumed by the Germans and re-interred, because the superficial burial rendered them dangerous to adjoining tenements, and a source of contamination to watercourses. At Sedan the same thing occurred, only in this instance the dead bodies were consumed with pitch and straw.[36] Cremation is the only practice which seems commendable in times of warfare. Numerous dead Saracens were burnt by the King of Castile. During the wars between the English and the Burgundians and the French--the latter led by Joan of Arc--the dead were on one occasion piled up outside the city of Paris, and consumed in one huge pyre. After the late battle of Cuenca, the Carlists threw many of their dead into fires presumably lit for the purpose. Surely it would be well for sanitation's sake, that the slain were burnt, as in the olden times, upon days set apart by arrangement of neutrals. The Genevan and other Conventions could scarce find nobler work to inaugurate than this. It would be a wise repetition of history, should another great war unfortunately break out, if the combatants would adopt this salutary practice of 3,000 years ago. With the ancient Athenians, when soldiers fell in battle it was the custom to collect them into tents, where they lay for a few days, in order to ensure recognition. Each tribe then conveyed their dead in cypress shells to the _Ceramicos_ or place of public burning; an empty hearse following behind in memory of the missing. It is not necessary, however, that the dead should be burned internationally. During the Trojan war--and since the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann we are almost at liberty to believe in it--men were sent out from each side to collect the dead, and the Trojans and allies burnt on separate pyres. There can be no doubt whatever that the dead were so treated. I have always considered that one or more of the huge earth tumuli on the plains of Troy, which I have frequently visited, would prove to cover ancient funeral pyres, and this point was put beyond all dispute by Mr. Frank Calvert in 1859. He opened up the Hanai-Tepeh tumulus there, and found an immensity of ashes, corresponding to what might have been expected after a great burning of the dead. He came to the conclusion that this was the site of the funeral pyre raised by the Trojans after the first truce.[37]