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Rh gladly into the father's place, and found himself surrounded by kinsmen. The result was that two-thirds of the Bengal Army, and of the 'Contingent Forces' maintained by Holkar, Sindhia and other semi-independent States, consisted of men drawn from the same locality, inspired with the same ideas, and bound together by strong ties of creed, custom, and feeling. In one of the regiments near Calcutta, in which in 1857 disaffection first disclosed itself, it was ascertained that, out of a total of 1083 men, more than 800 were Hindus, and of these no less than 335, including 41 officers, were Bráhmans. An army so composed could scarcely fail to engender forces subversive of its discipline as a military machine, and calculated to give to the sentiments of any influential section the dangerous universality of an epidemic. The seriousness of such a state of things was enhanced by the fact that the Bengal Army garrisoned a territory which stretched from the Trans-Indus frontier on the west to Pegu and the Malay Peninsula on the east, and that it outnumbered the combined numbers of the other two Presidential armies. In 1856 it consisted of seventy-four regiments of Infantry, ten regiments of regular, and eighteen of irregular Cavalry. Part of the Bombay Army, also, was recruited from the same districts in Oudh, and shared the susceptibilities of their fellow-tribesmen in Bengal.

It is possible, also, that the annexation of Oudh may have fostered disaffection in the native soldiery, largely recruited from that country. Some, no doubt,