Tent

TENT, one of the simplest types of temporary shelters serving as protection against atmospheric influences, constructed from various kinds of fabrics. Tents are used for the short-term accommodation of workers, in expeditionary and tourist practice, and chiefly in the army, where they are used both in peacetime and wartime to accommodate combatants in field exercises, in camps, as well as in frontline settings, for the temporary accommodation of the sick and wounded, for deploying dressing stations, field bakeries, and so on. Tents of any type consist of fabric panels (made of dense cotton or

linen fabric) and usually wooden reinforcing parts (poles, stakes, pegs). The method of pitching, dimensions, and arrangement of tents vary depending on their purpose. The marching tent adopted in the Red Army is made up of separate tent panels connected to each other and secured with the help of poles and pegs (the simplest type of marching tent; Fig. 1); Figure 1. Marching tent; one can use such a tent only in the warm season, for short-term accommodation, because it does not provide reliable protection against bad weather and especially cold, is inconvenient to use (low) and insufficiently stable against the wind. For the cold season, the so-called tent-yurt (Fig. 2), made up of 12 separate marching tent panels and heated by a stove, is more suitable; such a tent is designed for 12 people. Figure 2. Tent-yurt. The camp tent (Fig. 3) accommodates 8-10 people, having a usable area of about 16 m² with a height in the middle part of 2.7 m. To increase the cubic capacity and convenience of arrangement, the camp tent has a special base-socket with wooden, clay-plastered or other walls about 1 m high. The walls of the socket from the outside are currently made inclined (better rain runoff and better preservation of the fabric). Tents are equipped with bunks or cot beds. Floors are in the form of a wooden flooring raised by 10-15 cm. The installation and securing of the tent are visible in the figure. To protect against water inflow, a ditch is arranged around the tent. The very site for installing the tent must meet a number of sanitary requirements and above all must be dry, with a low groundwater level. Tents, due to certain shortcomings [poor protection against atmospheric influences, significant air deterioration when the flaps are closed, especially in inclement weather (more detailed data see Camp), insufficient illumination], are inferior in sanitary and hygienic terms to other types of temporary quarters, e.g., barracks. In case of using tents in winter, certain measures are used to insulate them, in particular equipping the tent with an additional internal cloth lining. For heating, simple temporary-type stoves are installed, making it possible, as testing of one of the types of winter camp tents showed, to easily maintain the desired temperature (+16° at an outside temperature of -15°). Due to their relative lightness, mobility, and speed of installation, tents also find fairly wide application in the practice of the military sanitary service. Until recently, tents of the German type, known among us under the name of "Hessian" (Fig. 4), were quite widespread. This tent consists of two covers, of which the outer one is distinguished by special density and impermeability to water. In the cold season, the tent is insulated with a second inner wall of thick camel-hair cloth and the installation of 1-2 stoves; the tent is equipped with 12 windows; the tent floor is covered with waterproof canvas. The dimensions of the Hessian tent—about 100 m²—make it possible to accommodate 20 or more people. Besides

Figure 3. Camp tent.

that, there is a hospital tent of a newer design (modular, assembled from separate parts) with approximately the same area as the Hessian one, and a small tent with a usable area of about 13 m², intended mainly for deploying a dressing station. Both

Figure 4. Section of the Hessian tent: 1 and 2—outer and inner shells; 3—stakes.

and the other types of tents have a double covering, windows, a fabric flooring on the floor; for the cold season, the tents are equipped with a warm cloth lining and adapted for the installation of stoves. Sufficient insulation of the latter tents makes them suitable for accommodating the sick and wounded at any time of the year.