THE CONDITION OF THE NATIVE ARMY.
IT is useless to write any more about Candahar just now. The Government has evidently decided to risk the dangers involved in retaining the province for the winter, and as the Opposition approve that course, effective resistance is impos- sible. When Parliament meets, some satisfactory reason may be offered for a decision which remains, for the present, almost unintelligible. The letter from Simla published in the Times of Thursday contains, we presume, the official explanation, and it amounts to this :—Abdurrahman Khan, the new Ameer, has not yet shown himself strong enough to be trusted with Can- dahar, and the British will, therefore, remain there in military occupation for another six months. As Abdurrahman will never be strong while he is suspected by the Afghans of friend- liness to the British, and is avowedly allowing them to retain the richest Afghan province, this is no argument at all, but merely a statement that Government chooses, for reasons un- explained, to wait events a little longer, before it replaces itself in the only position in which it can be either safe or strong. It is useless to discuss the decision further, though we regret it this week more deeply than ever, not only because we deprecate financial waste and anticipate another Afghan cam- paign, but because we perceive that the great Sepoy question is becoming more urgent than ever, and that the reform which has become peremptory will be delayed by the occupation of Candahar.
For the past three years at least the condition of the three Sepoy Armies has given the Government of India great anxiety. They are compelled, by the exigencies of climate and finance to maintain bodies of auxiliaries, numbering in the aggregate 120,000 men, who are scattered all over India, who are con- stantly needed for all kinds of soldiers' work, including foreign service, and who, it is admitted on all hands, are
not in a satisfactory condition. They obey orders, they do occasionally noble service, as with General Roberts, but they are, nevertheless, known to require as bodies what is called " reorganisation?' In Bengal, the first difficulty is that recruits are almost unprocurable. The value of money has fallen till the pay, once very high, no longer tempts the fighting classes ; the service beyond the frontier is detested beyond measure or reason ; and there is, owing, it is alleged, to the method of officering the regiments, a certain decay of confidence between officers and men. The officers are shifted so rapidly, that the home-like feeling of the regi- ments is destroyed, and nothing is left to secure willing obedience except exceptional ability—always a poor support in very large organisations—and military law. The com- plaints on this score may be exaggerated, and we have no intention of entering on a controversy fit only for experienced soldiers, but the result is admitted on all hands. Recruits will not serve without bounty ; even with bounty they do not come forward in sufficient numbers; and the value of the regiments depends too much on individual officers and fluc- tuating circumstance. There are admirable corps in the Bengal Army, regiments as good as the Europeans, but the system does not enable Government to treat every regiment as efficient for every work. The Government, in fact, instead of possessing an Army, has a large number of regiments, seldom or never full, among which it may pick and choose a few on which it can rely for hearty and effective performance in the field. That condition of affairs, which deprives the Bengal Army of half its force, is admitted even officially, is distinctly bad, and requires immediate reform. It cannot be reformed, because the Government, while it keeps Candahar, must use up its picked regiments on the frontier; cannot carry out any new system of officering, and is most re- luctant to sanction the large indispensable increase in the pay of the rank and file.
In the Madras and, Bombay Armies the difficulty is some- what different. It is maintained that, apart from any qpes- tion about defective officering, the men in those armies are inferior to the Sepoya of Bengal. It is not, as we believe, certain that this assertion is true. The Madras regiments, though organised on a strangely clumsy system, and there- fore comparatively immobile, have always done their duty ; and the Bombay regiments are full of Oude Sepoys and Rajpoots, and behaved strikingly well on the last occasion on which they had much to do,—the great Mutiny of 1857. They kept their faith, they marched across India, and they were never defeated. Nevertheless, it is quite certain that competent Generals of repute hold the Madras Army to be an excellent local militia, but no more ; and the Bombay Army to have become within the past twenty years sadly deteriorated. Indeed, the Government of India have admitted the last proposition, in a most unexpected and even alarming way. According to the telegrams re- ceived this week, they have withdrawn all Bombay troops from the front in Candahar, and superseded them by troops from Bengal, the reason assigned on all sides being that the Bombay men are, for some reason, unable to face the Afghans, while the Bengal men are able. The order is probably based on full knowledge, and is prima' facie justi- fied by the failure of General Burrows's force to win at Maiwand, and of General Phayre's force to advance in time to his relief ; but in issuing it, the Government have made reorganisation an immediate necessity. If the Bombay troops are reasonably efficient, officers and men alike have received a stigma which will break their hearts ; and if they are not efficient, one which will destroy the last relics of pro- fessional pride. Soldiers without honour, whether Sepoys or Europeans, are valueless, and for regiments to be told that they are unsuited for the front is to take away from them their motive power. We cannot, of course, vouch for the accuracy of special correspondents ; but if their statements are correct, the Army of Bombay ought to be instantly reorganised, or fused with that of Madras, in a com- pletely reconstructed Army of Southern India. No army, and least of all an army officered by aliens, and not imbued with national feeling, can survive the kind of treatment to which this one has been subjected, by the public and by the Supreme Government of India. The treatment may be justified or otherwise—we are carefully avoiding that point—but it is an inevitable corollary of it that reorganisation should commence at once. Yet how is it to commence at once, with a war beyond the frontier lingering on, with the Government still preoccupied by foreign policy, and the Treasury still exhausted by a steady drain for the support not only of the army in Candahar—an army of at least 10,000 men—but of the larger army which must be held together to support it against contingencies ? It is nearly impossible, more especially as any fresh reorganisation must be so arranged that old officers may be pensioned at once, and not allowed to hang on,
as they were by the former scheme, till field-officers, literally in scores, are doing dispiritedly the work of captains, and so blocking the road that subalterns are almost unprocurable.
And yet, can we conceive a position more unhappy than that of the Government of Bombay, obliged to hold large and scattered territories, which touch on the north on Afghani- stan, on the east on the Mahratta States, and on the south on the Nizam's Dominion, with an army said almost officially to be in bad condition, certainly dispirited by recent failure, and this week ordered away from the front to make way for better soldiers? There is in such a condition of affairs every element of a great catastrophe.
We are not contending in any way for any particular method of reform. Our own belief is that there should be one Southern Army, that its cavalry should be en- tirely native, officers and men, and that its infantry should have the old, full complement of European officers, —twenty-two per regiment, who should not be eligible for any work outside cantonments, but make their regiments their homes ; but that is the one unpopular opinion for which it is useless to contend. The system is costly, imposes a dull life
of duty upon officers, and is supposed to have produced the Mutiny, though it was so far from doing it, that when the
Sepoys revolted they adhered to the olgenisation, as the one that suited them best. ft will not be adopted, and our object is not to press that or any other scheme, but to urge the British public to demand that any scheme accepted by the authorities shall be put in force at once,. There is no official re- sistance to overcome. The Indian ieoverninent is perfectly aware.
of the defects existing, as aware as it was ill Me. has ordered and completed all inquiries, and has a di zen I ully elaborated schemes before it, and only delays action till it has a little
more leisure, more money, and more opportunity. It wants, in fact, to be done with Afghanistan, before it commences another most laborious and irksome and costly task. That looks sensible, and if India were England, or if we could be assured of peace, it would be sensible ; but it involves, as affairs stand, very grave nsk. You cannot wet spilled powder too rapidly, and there is spilled powder lying about just now everywhere in India. In a few weeks, say, at latest by the end of the cold weather, the Government of India will be stronger in capacity on the military side than it has been since Lord Clyde left it ; and it ought to be empowered and en- joined to settle the question of the Native Army, without wasting more years in correspondence or inquiry. It knows what it wants well enough, namely, one hundred strong Native regiments of infantry, and twenty of cavalry, so paid that recruits will never be wanting, so disciplined that hesitation to obey shall be unknown, and so provided that they can move at fifteen miles a day without previous preparation. It is absurd to say that in a continent of soldiers, where a fighting man still thinks 3s. 6d. a week endurable pay, and feeds himself on it, and where Native armies march thirty miles a day, such an ideal can be difficult, far less impossible, of attainment.
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