Page:The Indian Mutiny of 1857.djvu/36

12 For a long time they had chafed at the largeness of the powers exercised by commanding officers of native regiments. They were eager to introduce into the guiding of those regiments the rule of red tape and routine. For some time the Adjutants-General, men trained in the native army, and placed at their elbow to prevent the too great exercise of a mischievous zeal, had restrained their action. But after the first Afghán war there arose a series of courtly Adjutants-General who, far from checking, even stimulated the narrow instincts of their chief. It gradually became the fashion at army Headquarters to quote the Horse Guards as the model for all that was practical and military. When it is recollected that in those days the military instincts of the Horse Guards had been displayed by devising a clothing for the European soldier so tight that if he were to drop his bayonet he could scarcely stoop to pick it up, that the weapon known as 'Brown Bess' was lauded up, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards, as the most perfect of weapons, that inventions tending to improve our military system were steadily discouraged, that the highest authorities of the British army — the great Duke himself — deliberately preferred to live in a fool's paradise, declaring that because the British army had been able to go anywhere and do anything in 1814, therefore, without taking advantage of the improvements developed in the course of thirty years of peace, it could accomplish the same results in 1844, it can easily be understood why the Commanders-in-Chief in India, the nominees and adulators of one great man, should do their utmost to bring the native army within the fold of red tape, the fold which they had been taught to regard as the most perfect in the world.

By degrees, then, after the first return from Afghánistán, and when the refusal of the sipáhís to march to Sind afforded an excuse for the contention that the discipline