13.  The sepoys were quite right; no other service in the world was managed on such principles.  The illusion of the old Company’s officers about the gratitude and affection of the men generally was rudely dispelled nineteen years after the conversations recorded in the text.  But, even in 1857. a noble minority remained faithful and did devoted service.

14.  The best troops now are the Sikhs, Gorkhas, and frontier Muhammadans.  Oudh men still enlist in large numbers, but do not enjoy their old prestige.  The army known to the author comprised no Sikhs, Gorkhas, or frontier Muhammadans.  The recruitment of Gorkhas only began in 1838, and the other two classes of troops were obtained by the annexation of the Panjab in 1849.

15.  Enlistment in the native army is absolutely voluntary, and does not even require to be stimulated by a bounty.  A subsequent passage shows that the author refuses to describe the British army as an ‘entirety voluntary’ one, because a soldier when once enlisted is bound to serve for a definite term; whereas the sepoy could resign when he chose.

16.  Desertions are frequent among the regiments recruited on the Afghan frontier.  These regiments did not exist in the author’s day.

17.  An ordinance issued in France so late as 1778 required that a man should produce proof of four quarterings of nobility before he could get a commission in the army. [W.  H. S.]

18. ‘Est et alia causa, cur attenuatae sint legiones,’ says Vegetius.  ’Magnus in illis labor est militandi, graviora arma, sera munera, severior disciplila.  Quod vitantes plerique, in auxiliis festinant militiae sacramenta percipere, ubi et minor sudor, et maturiora sunt premia.’  Lib._ II. cap. 3. [W.  H. S.] Vegetius, according to Gibbon and his most recent editor (recensuit Carolus Lang.  Editio altera.  Lipsiae, Teubner, 1885), flourished during the reign of Valentinian III (A.D. 425-55).  His ‘Soldier’s Pocket-book’ is entitled ‘Flavi Vegeti Renati Epitoma Rei Militaris’.

’Montesquieu thought that ’the Government had better have stuck to the old practice of slitting noses and cutting off ears, since the French soldiers, like the Roman dandies under Pompey, must necessarily have a greater dread of a disfigured face than of death.  It did not occur to him that France could retain her soldiers by other and better motives.  See Spirit of Laws, book vi, chap. 12.  See Necker on the Finances, vol. ii, chap. 5; vol. iii, chap. 34.  A day-labourer on the roads got fifteen sous a day; and a French soldier only six, at the very time that the mortality of an army of forty thousand men sent to the colonies was annually 13,333, or about one in three.  In our native army the sepoy gets about double the wages of an ordinary day-labourer; and his duties, when well done, involve just enough of exercise to keep him in health.  The casualties are perhaps about one in a hundred. [W.  H. S.]