Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 2.djvu/248

 218 t:ffkct produced by the ■ CHAP, example of their Moslem ally, there was iu the XIII. L_ staff of the French and the English armies a iM^sdisiTke pedantic dislike of wild troops. In this respect "lined'coMi- ^ovd Raglan had no breadth of view. Far from batants. understanding that the hardy, the fierce, the devout, the temperate Moslems of the Ottoman provinces were the rough yet sound material with which superb troops could be made, he always looked upon these brave men, but especially upon the genus which people call ' Bashi-Ba- ' zouks/ with an almost superstitious liorror. He was so constituted, or rather he was so schooled down by long years of flat office labour, that it shocked him to see a man bearing no uniform, yet warlike, and armed to the teeth. Indeed, from Bulgaria he once wrote and complained quite gravely that every Turk he saw had the appearance of being a ' bandit ; ' and the prejudice clung to him ; for long after the period now spoken of, and even in the very hour when the fatal storm of the 14th of November was roaring through his port and his camp, he found time to sit at a desk and write down the Bashi-Bazouks.* This hatred of undrilled warriors was the more perverse, since England above all other nations was rich in men (men like Ilodson, for instance, or Jacob) who knew how to make themselves the adored chiefs of Asiatic soldiers. incline peojile to say how right I.onl Kaglan was in dreading the commission of utroeitics by wild levies of this description; but it does not follow that they might not have been brought under proper control by men like our Anglo-Indian officers.
 * Recent events in the villages iiihaLited by l5ul;,farians will