Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/39

Rh These are weighty opinions, coming from one who had no small experience of the working of the military departments. They were always held by his predecessor, the Duke of Wellington, as well as by H.R.H. the present Commander-in-Chief.

On the subject of recruiting for the army Sir Henry Hardinge was opposed, as most military men are, to the enlistment of soldiers under nineteen years of age. In a Memorandum on recruiting, written in 1829, he recorded that the 7th Foot in the Peninsula lost in one year 246 men by disease, of whom 169 were recruits recently landed; whilst out of 1145 old soldiers only 77 died. Similarly, in the 40th Foot in the same campaign, out of 170 recruits 104 were lost to the service from the same causes. He always insisted on the supreme importance of not sending men under twenty years of age upon foreign service. These opinions he still held when he was Commander-in-Chief during the Crimean War; but such was the pressure then placed on the resources of the country from the duration of the siege of Sebastopol and other causes, that the Government was obliged to reinforce Lord Raglan's army in the trenches with young recruits, who perished in large numbers as rapidly as in the Peninsula. Even now, in a time of profound peace, drafts are sometimes sent to India containing a considerable proportion of boys under twenty, a state of things which is one of the great difficulties of maintaining an Indian army by a system of short service.

During his parliamentary career as Secretary at