Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/194

to despatch a force of 25,000 men, no reserve of seasoned soldiers remained at home, and no means existed of supplying the waste of the army in the field except by sending out recruits. Comparing the condition of the army in the Crimea with that of the army in the Peninsula, he pointed out that, when Wellington commenced his campaign in 1808, a system of double battalions had been maintained for several years, while the militia was in a state of high efficiency, having been embodied to resist invasion. In the Crimea it was impossible to expect the same efficiency from boys, who suffered severely from the inclemency of the weather and from hard work in the trenches. He did not consider that an earlier embodiment of the militia would have made any material difference; for in the militia, too, there was at that time a very large proportion of boys. Ten battalions of the line had been brought home from the Colonies; but, before they could be utilised in the Crimea, it was necessary in some cases to fill up their ranks with recruits. These were trained as rapidly as possible, but the Cape regiments and a battalion of Rifles had a large proportion of recruits in the ranks. Their defect did not consist in being untrained, but in being under twenty years of ago. and therefore unfit to bear the hard work and privations of the campaign. The root of the whole matter lay in the fact that we possessed no reserve, and no second battalions to feed the battalions in the field as had been the case in former wars. The Government entered upon the war