Balaclava day! Sixty years had passed, and the thought of it was still ready to the minds of those who were now taking the Regiment into another war. That is what a feat of arms in which his Regiment shared means to the soldier—an ever-living memory and example.
The suspense was over. “It is great news,” wrote the Captain commanding the squadron, “far better than we dared hope for, and you may imagine how we are all feeling.” He was the same officer who had commanded the Queen’s escort three years before—the model escort. Now he was going to show whether the men who had won so much admiration in a pageant of peace time would do equally well in the field.
Nothing remained but to complete the number of men and horses, both now below strength in consequence of the draft lately sent to the Eighth Hussars, and to make the final arrangements for a quick departure. Men and horses were found from other regiments, and during the first ten days of November the packing and preparations were completed. Officers disposed of their horses and furniture; many of the polo ponies were taken over by the Remount Department for service as Infantry officers’ chargers; the regimental mess was closed; the heavy baggage and valuable books were sent to England; and the Regiment’s period of peace service in India was at an end.
CHAPTER V.
THE INDIAN ARMY—BEGINNING OF WAR.
The Empire of India, with its population of more than three hundred millions, is held by an army which, compared with the hosts of European nations, is a small one. Great Britain has never had in India much more than seventy thousand British troops, not one man to four thousand of the population—a conclusive proof, if any were needed, of the fact that British rule in India is based rather on the goodwill of the Indians than on force. No doubt in the last resort the white soldier is the mainstay of the Government against sedition and revolt; but if sedition and revolt were ever more than partial they would need a much larger garrison to suppress them. Three hundred millions of people would not be indefinitely “kept down” by an army of seventy thousand foreigners, however brave and well disciplined. The truth is that the British supremacy in India, though it has at times involved hard fighting, was founded upon the consent and active co-operation of the Indian races, and is maintained by the same means.
Not only is the number of British troops in India comparatively small, but the British Government has not feared to raise and keep up alongside of them an army of Indian regular troops twice as strong, and to arm and make efficient for war other bodies of men drawn from the population, notably some fine contingents of soldiery in the Feudatory chiefships. Altogether it may perhaps be roughly computed that at the outbreak of the War in 1914 the Crown had at its disposal in India, counting local volunteers, perhaps a hundred thousand armed white men and two hundred thousand Indians. This force had to maintain internal order throughout a country as large as all Europe excluding Russia, and to defend the frontiers against any aggression from without. It was regarded, and organised, not as two armies sundered by the colour-line and mutually suspicious of one another, but as one army in which the white regiments and Indian regiments served side by side, as they had served for many generations in many wars, mutually trusting one another and fighting as comrades against any enemy who might threaten the interests of the Indian Empire.
Some of these enemies had been fought at a great distance from India—in China, in Persia, in Egypt, and in other countries across the sea; but until now Indian troops had not been employed in the battlefields of Europe. More than a hundred years before a great “sepoy General,” who had learnt his trade in India, had commanded British armies against the soldiers of Napoleon; and countless other British officers and men had served both in India and Europe. India had, in fact, to quote Henderson’s ‘Science of War,’ been “the great training-ground” of the British Army. And Indian troops had at times, in Asia and Africa, crossed swords with European enemies. Nevertheless, the Indian Army, as such, had not fought in Europe, and the British officers who commanded Indian soldiers had not often served, even individually, in European wars. No Indian soldiery fought in the Peninsular War, or at Waterloo, or in the Crimea, or even in the Boer War, though a contingent of white troops from India did go out to South Africa then, and saved Natal. England, in fact, had hitherto regarded the Indian Army, and the vast reserves of Indian races on which that Army could draw, as a source of strength only for her outlying wars, not as a portion of the Imperial power upon which she could rely if attacked in Europe. That may be said in spite of the fact that on one occasion the far-sighted Beaconsfield had as a demonstration brought a few Indian troops to the Mediterranean.
EMBARKING AT BOMBAY. NOVEMBER 1914