Excerpt from History of the Military Canteen
At the beginning of the last century, and for some years after, the soldiers canteen was a wooden, drum-shaped affair, provided with a nozzle. (See cut p. 120.)
To now return to that shape and adopt a hollow cylinder, modeled after a drum for packing figs in, would be an advance backwards.
The history of mankind is the history of the development of weapons and equipment for war by improvements, in which one nation has overcome another and survived.
Within a few months from now our military organization will have been readjusted. The arms and equipments to be necessitated by the increase in numbers of our permanent military establishment should be new and not of the nineteenth century pattern.
By July, 1901, perhaps 60,000 canteens now carried by, or in the possession of, United States Volunteers and Regulars will have been turned in. Some of these canteens will be suspended by the returned volunteers beside the obsolete muzzle-loading firearms of the civil war period, and some may find their way into the museums for the collection and display of archaic military weapons and equipments.
From being an inconsequential article of a soldier's personal equipment the canteen has become, in fact, one of the most important articles, because connected with hygienic considerations; in other words, because it carries water and because the majority of our troops are in localities where good water is of prime consideration to health.
Those who live a comparatively fixed life can hardly weigh aright the importance of a good canteen.
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