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 CHAPTER IV

native army, with which Lord Canning had to deal, had been winning its laurels for a century. The French and English, ranging themselves on opposite sides in the War of the Austrian Succession, had carried their quarrel to the Coromandel Coast, and had soon learnt the valuable secret that native troops, disciplined and led by European officers, might be effectively employed against a native or a European foe. The English had turned the discovery to good account, and, when Clive started to rescue Calcutta from Siráj-ud-daulá and to win his great victory at Plassey, he led with him, besides his 900 English soldiers, a well-drilled force of 1200 Sepoys. Since then the Sepoy army had shown its mettle on a hundred well-fought fields, it had carried the standards of England to victory against the greatest armies and most famous commanders of the East—before the ramparts of Seringapatam, in the forest swamps of Burma, on the banks of the Sutlej, in the burning plains of Sind. It had enabled Wellesley to crush the Maráthás at Assaye, and Gough to shatter the Sikh battalions at Gujarat. It had