THE FIGHTING FIFTIES I2p

how glad to think that the national spirit was so high and un-
conquerable. The annals of the tough simple soldiery who stuck
to their hopeless task until the Muscovite^ unable to endure
longer, abandoned Sevastopol, were remembered in after years
by one of them, a farm labourer who had enlisted at sixteen,
as cold and starvation, unremitting duty for days at a stretch,
and what to lesser men would have been almost indescribable
suffering.

The Crimean War continued till 1856. It ended in a nominal
gain for Britain and France, though there were no fruits of
victory. But it at least produced two results: it gave time for
the Balkan peoples to achieve independence from the Turk
before the Russian could absorb them, and it awoke in the English
a growing spirit of self-examination that led to a great series
of administrative reforms of which Florence Nightingale's
lifelong work for nursing and military hygiene was only one.
Incidentally the peace treaty that concluded hostilities—signed
at( Paris with a quill plucked from the wing of an eagle in the
Garden des Plantes—involved a voluntary surrender by Britain
of her right to seize goods other than contraband in neutral
ships at sea.

• •••••••

Within a year the country was fighting again. For several
months, until the tide turned in favour of the little handful of
red-coated columns moving under a burning sun across distant
jungle and plain, England waited in suspense at the end of the
electric cable for news of beleaguered Cawnpore, DdSi and
Lucknow. Of the causes and significance of the Mutiny the
English had no notion. A few among them who had spent a
working lifetime under the oriental sun among the "drums
and gaudy idols ... the black faces, the long beards, the yellow
streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears
and silver races" o'f an alien continent, knew something of their
country's Eastern destiny. But to the great mass of the respectable
middle-class electors of Victorian England, India was only a
name.

This philosophical indifference to, almost unawareness of,
the origins and nature of their own empire was a source of
recurring bewilderment to the English. An event like the Indian
Mutiny always took, them by surprise. The Scots, a proud race
trained to poverty who had had to travel to live, and eveh