Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/566

554 the veranda were a couple of lounging-chairs and a low table with bottles and glasses, and, seating himself, invited his companion to take a cheroot and glass of brandy-and-water. Yorke accepted the cheroot, but declined the other refreshment, and the two began talking.

The conversation turned naturally on late events and the temper of the army, for already there had been hangings and disbandments. At the mess-table the subject was avoided, because some of the servants understood English; but in private little else was now talked about.

"Braywell, after all, is no worse than others, with his tomfoolery about hot fire, and gallant conduct, and the rest of it," observed Braddon, at one point of the conversation. "It is merely what he has been brought up to. Look at the way in which Lord Ellenborough belauded the troops which did not surrender in Afghanistan or had the pluck to face the enemy in the open. That wasn't the way old Lord Lake and the duke went to work. We have gone on pampering and buttering up the sepoy whenever he does his duty, till really one might suppose it was the recognized business of a soldier to run away, and quite a surprising and creditable circumstance if he does not. Every little skirmish, too, nowadays is magnified into a great battle."

"Still we had our real battles too," said Yorke. "Surely there has seldom been harder fighting anywhere than in the Sutlej campaign."

"But the sepoys did run away then; at any rate a great many of them did, and a good many Europeans too. For the matter of that Europeans know how to run away very freely sometimes, but then there is this difference between them and the sepoy, that they are always thoroughly ashamed of themselves, and ready to come up to the scratch again fresher than ever; but at the end of the first day at Ferozshah the sepoys had got the heart pretty well taken out of them; Lord Hardinge clubbed what European troops he could get together next morning and went in at the enemy; and if that handful of men had not been game, we should have been driven out of the country. There were no reserves to speak of."

"And yet the sepoys have fought well at times."

"Yes, and will fight well again if kept in order. The sepoy is a brave fellow enough — no man faces death, as a rule, with more indifference when he is in the humour; but you can't expect mercenary troops to fight properly without discipline."

"But don't you think the discipline, on the whole, is good? Where would you find less crime in an army, or better conduct?"

"Well, they don't drink," said Braddon, bitterly, "and so have no cause to misbehave; and they are obedient enough, no doubt, so long as you don't give them any orders."

"How not give them any orders?"

"Oh, of course, so long as you give them any customary orders, which they think proper, they will obey you readily enough. If a parade is ordered for tomorrow morning, I daresay you will find all the men there. But tell them to do anything they don't like — to intrench themselves on a campaign, for example, or to use a new kind of cartridge, or to march to a bad part of the country out of their turn — and then see the sort of fashion in which you are obeyed. It wasn't so long ago that our own noble regiment refused to go on a campaign for the precious reason that they had just come off a campaign. Or meet the sepoy of another regiment off duty, and see if he treats you as a soldier should behave to an officer. No; discipline has departed from the Bengal army this long time, and small blame to it. Everybody in office, from the governor-general and commander-in-chief downwards, has been doing his best for years past to undermine it, taking away power from commanding officers in one direction, and adding privileges in the other, till there is nothing left to hang any discipline upon, and the wonder is that the machine keeps together at all. Your commanding officers are mere dummies to take charge of the parade and draw a certain amount of pay; just as well perhaps that they are no more, considering the sort of creatures some of them are. Poor old Dumble, for example, isn't exactly the sort of man to put much responsibility upon."

"But how is it that the authorities are blind to this state of things, if it is so bad as you make out?"

"They are not blind; at any rate, not all of them. Lord Hardinge, who was a thorough soldier if ever there was one, saw plainly enough what a rotten state we were in. One day after the battle of Sobraon, when the staff were talking rather freely about the behaviour of certain regiments, he turned round and said — I was about headquarters, then, you know: 'I can tell you what, gentlemen,