soldier who appeared in India during the eighteenth century.
But no sooner had the European appeared upon the Indian arena, than the men of this new immigration were discovered to be distinctly superior to all Asiatic foreigners in the art of war, and far beyond them in those qualities of united, persistent, and scientific action by which a compact and civilized force must always prevail in the long run over incoherent and uninstructed opponents. Against the French or the English the dissolute and rickety Nawabs of Bengal and the Karnatic could take into the field only a crowd of mutinous soldiery, who often dispersed at the first shock and followed their leader in tumultuous flight. The natural and speedy result was that the military classes of the Indian population very soon began to transfer their services to the standard of leaders who always paid and usually won; who were invariably to be seen in the front line of battle, and who did the hardest fighting with a corps d'élite of their own countrymen.[1]
The British sepoy army was recruited and gradually developed out of the immense floating mass of profes-
- ↑ The rank and file of this corps d'élite, whose fighting qualities decided for us all our earlier battles, were drawn in those days from strange sources. General Smith, in his evidence before a Committee on the East India Recruiting Bill, told the House of Commons "that in 1769, when he left India, the European army in Bengal was in very good discipline, considering the sort of men who being chiefly raised about London were the riffraff of the people, chiefly boys under seventeen or old men above forty to sixty years old, and fitter on their arrival to fill the hospital than the ranks." He added that the Sepoys were "almost too good." – Parliamentary Debates, 1771, April.
