Page:Sir Henry Lawrence, the Pacificator.djvu/155

sword, yet everywhere our military means are insufficient. There is always some essential lacking at the very moment when troops are wanted for immediate service. If stores are ready, they may rot before carriage is forthcoming. If there are muskets, there is no ammunition. If there are infantry, there are no muskets for them. In one place we have guns without a man to serve them; in another we have artillerymen standing comparatively idle because the guns have been left behind.

'To come to examples. Is Delhi or Agra, Bareilly or Karnál, Benares or Saugor, or, in short, any one of our important military positions, better prepared than Kábul was, should 300 men rise to-morrow and seize the town? Take Delhi more especially as a parallel case. At Kábul we had the treasury and one of the commissariat forts in the town; at Delhi we have the magazine and treasury within the walls.

'Now suppose that any morning 300 men were to take possession of these.

'What would follow if the troops in cantonment (never more than three regiments) were to keep close to their quarters, merely strengthening the palace guards? The palace at Delhi stands much as did the Bala Hissár with respect to the city, except that the former has not sufficient elevation to command the town, as the latter did. What, then, would be the result at Delhi, if the palace garrison were to content themselves, as Colonel Shelton did, with a faint and distant cannonade from within their walls; not even effectually supporting the king's body-guards, who had already sallied into the town, nor even enabling or assisting them to bring off their field-guns when driven back from the city; but should suffer these guns to be abandoned at the very palace gates, and there to lie? Let not a single effort be made to succour or bring off the guards at the