Cremation has been objected to27 on the score of its being an indecent mode of disposal of our dead, but I for one differ from this view entirely. Anyone who resides on a main road leading to a large metropolitan cemetery, will be able to speak with certainty as to the indecency of very much which they witness appertaining to the present mode of sepulture. And how anyone can be found to uphold against all argument the present unfeeling shams of paid mourners with 'wands, batons, feathers, and fooleries,' indulged in simply from custom's sake and a dread of what the world would say if the 'conventional costumes and mock expressions of woe' were omitted, I cannot imagine. The funerals of the rich are always conducted with decorum, but those of the poor are often hideously the reverse of this, and tend, I am sure, more than anything to blunt the finer feelings of our nature.
We shall have occasion to notice in the proper place the proposed procedure in the new order of things, but may here remark that when cremation has once taken place, shorn of no religious rite, the ashes may be placed in urns or interred in ground duly set apart for the purpose, and surrounding the machinery for incineration. Or they may be removed to distant and loved churchyards without fear of evil effects following. I think that the likeliest place for the reception of the relics would be the vaults of our churches, where they could be taken charge of by the ministers of religion. Once in charge of appointed persons, no unseemly litigation could take place as to the possession of them. In Siam the ashes are sometimes buried in the grounds surrounding the temples, and a small pyramidal mound erected over them.28 There could be no objection to treat them so here, but if urned they could be equally well placed in a columbarium,29 and proper inscriptions put over the receptacles, as was done on the small stone sarcophagi of Italy. An English Catholic writes to the effect that cremation would once more enable us to bury our dead in the churches,30 and the suggestion would commend itself to many minds. Some such practice is hinted at in the book of Isaiah. On All Saints' day31 the vaults could be thrown open for public resort.
In both ancient Greece and Rome the dwelling-house was made the repository of the funeral urns; at all events, the practice was carried on for a very long period. The Thebans at one time had a law that no one should build a house without a specific repository for the dead.32 It is possible that private mausoleums could with due decency be attached to ancestral mansions in our country,33 but such cases will necessarily be rare. Even then they should be subjected to proper supervision. It would most certainly prove unseemly for the poorer classes to place them, as has been mooted, in their residences, subject to all the inconveniences of removal and other easily imagined drawbacks. Disrespect and irreverence only could follow such a recommendation. The Theban regulation just adverted to proves that the heathens, as they are called, were not to be charged with any lack of respect to their departed dead. On the contrary, the most tender sentiments are wound round the practice of cremation. Hercules is reported to have burnt the body of Argius, because only in this way could he return the son to a sorrowing father.34 Nay, in some cases the reverence for the dead became transcendental, and the rites of cremation were carried to such an extent that the funeral pile was shapen like an altar, and bedewed with wine and incense. This, however, was in the decadence of the nation. Nor was this all, for sometimes an altar called an acerra was afterwards built before the sepulchre.
These few remarks upon the cremation of human bodies have as yet referred only to those which have succumbed to the ordinary evils of life; but I cannot forbear recording my conviction that it would be wise in the stricken field to have recourse to the practice. During the sittings of the recent International Sanitary Congress a paper was read by Professor Reclam of Leipzic, in which he most strongly urged the adoption of cremation after destructive battles. He described a new portable burning apparatus capable of reducing the carcase of a horse to ashes within two hours, and at a cost of four shillings' worth of fuel. He moreover declared that the dead, both men and horses, left on the battlefield of Gravelotte might have been by the aid of such machinery reduced to 'a harmless heap of white ashes in four days.' One thing is certain: science, which invented the mitrailleuse, could easily devise a proper apparatus.35
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
Were cremation practised now-a-days in times of warfare, and with our improved appliances, there would be no costly monuments to be kept up by the invaders, such as we now jealously maintain on the heights of Sebastopol38– nothing be left behind to recall a strife best forgotten. The ashes of our warrior dead could even be brought home to lie in the fatherland. When Nestor recommended the bodies of the slain Achæans to be burnt close to the ships, in order that the survivors might be able to carry home the bones, and raise over them a common tomb,39 he proved himself much wiser than our generation.
The general adverse feeling to burning even the dead bodies of animals at the present day, has without doubt often brought about serious evils. During the Crimean war the putrefaction of numberless horses in and around the French camps became ultimately a serious matter,40 and had they been destroyed by fire no evil effects could have followed. Why were they not destroyed by fire? – for fear of offending the prejudices of their