At Prome there certainly was a dearth of those amusements to which the majority of officers had been accustomed; but this was the case at most Burmese stations. The band and the mess were all that remained. There was very little sport; and libraries and billiard-tables were inadmissible, as part and parcel of campaigning equipage; the ladies too—where were they?
In its palmy days of yore, before the great convulsion, India was celebrated for its sociability, for the brotherly feelings that knit together Europeans of every denomination, and for the deference shown them by the population at large.
In every walk of life there is the hard lesson of how to take the good and bad together; and there is some justification of the way in which the officers yearned after their accustomed dances, picnics and hunting, in the fact that history has proved, in the most unequivocal manner, that the man who shines in the drawing-room and field makes the best officer under any conditions. He possesses more self-reliance, clearer judgment, and greater fertility of resource, not to speak of better-tuned nerves, in an emergency, than the more modern bookworm, whose mind has too often been developed at the expense of his body.
If the human machinery is to work efficiently, bodily and mental training must go hand in hand, and this is especially necessary in the case of the soldier. The pendulum with us is always swinging to extremes, and the present tendency is to train the one, and leave the other to look after itself.
The old Company may have erred in the opposite direction, by permitting young fellows to enter their service before, indeed, their education was sufficiently advanced; yet, what able men they produced!
The Mutiny arose from no fault of theirs, but rather from the evils of interference from home, by which the door of appeal was opened too wide, weakening that authority so essential to commanders, especially in the East. The leaven rapidly permeated throughout the mass, and the Sepoys, recognizing their advantage, improved upon it, as Asiatics know how.
The “annexation of Oude” and the “greased cartridge” episode occurred opportunely, and served as handles.
In judicial matters we were exacting; but in military matters we were far too lenient, the reason of this being presumably that the supreme command was vested in officers imperfectly acquainted with the Asiatic character, these new acquisitions coming periodically fresh from home, and consequently tinctured with much of the maudlin sentiment that thrives there in certain quarters.
In India generally, Europeans were but little given to pedestrian exercise, partly because the youngest subaltern could afford to indulge in a horse or pony, partly because the country was so very uninteresting, hundreds of miles of dead level road, lined on either side with the useful and ubiquitous mango, and acres of cultivation without a break, by way of relieving the depressing monotony.
Riding put a totally different complexion on the matter; the animals, unaccustomed to inequalities, were well suited to the roads; the exhilarating exercise covered a multitude of shortcomings, while hunting obscured them in toto.