Page:Sir Henry Lawrence, the Pacificator.djvu/160

Rh deficiencies, especially any want of military spirit or soldierly bearing.

'At Kábul we lost an army, and we lost some character with the surrounding States. But I hold that by far our worst loss was in the confidence of our native soldiery. Better had it been for our fame if our harassed troops had rushed on the enemy and perished to a man, than that surviving Sepoys should be able to tell the tales they can of what they saw at Kábul.

'European soldiers and officers are placed as examples to native troops, and a glorious one they have generally set in the field; but who can estimate the evil when the example is bad — when it is not the Hindustaní (most exposed to cold, and least able to bear it) who clamours for retreat and capitulation, but the cry is raised by the men he has been accustomed to look up to and to lean upon as a sure resource in every emergent peril.

'The degenerate legionaries drove their general with their halberds to capitulation and death; but it was the deliberate counsels of the British military commanders that urged their civil chief to his and their own destruction.'

In regard to the army, there is nothing in Lawrence's writings to indicate that he thought there existed, up to 1857, any mutinous spirit, either chronic, at hand, or looming in the distance, although it was liable to be created at any time. He had seen two or three cases of mutinous conduct, but each of these he ascribed to a specific cause — that of the regiments ordered to the Burma war, to their objections to the violation of caste which would be involved — that of the 64th, to an exceptionally bad feeling that seemed local in the regiment — and that of the regiments in the Punjab,