of Spain was forced to meet Howard of Effingham and Drake; Napoleon Bonaparte, the “Man of Destiny,” found Wellington and Nelson of the Nile to deal with him; and, in America, men like George Washington and Grant and Lincoln seem, in the light of history, like timed, calculated, controlling devices in an intricate machine.  It was so when the Indian Mutiny broke out.  The struggle was unexpected.  A handful of Europeans, commissioned and enlisted in the ordinary way, with a view to trade, not statesmanship, found themselves face to face at a minute’s notice with armed and vengeful millions.  Succor was a question of months, not days or weeks.  India was ablaze from end to end with rebel fires that had been planned in secret through silent watchful years.  The British force was scattered here and there in unconnected details, and each detail was suddenly cut off from every other one by men who had been trained to fight by the British themselves and who were not afraid to die.

The suddenness with which the outbreak came was one of the chief assets of the rebels, for they were able to seize guns and military stores and ammunition at the very start of things, before the British force could concentrate.  Their hour could scarcely have been better chosen.  The Crimean War was barely over.  Practically the whole of England’s standing army was abroad and decimated by battle and disease.  At home, politics had England by the throat; the income-tax was on a Napoleonic scale and men were more bent on worsting one another than on equipping armies.  They had had enough of war.

India was isolated, at the rebels’ mercy, so it seemed.  There were no railway trains to make swift movements of troops possible.  Distances were reckoned by the hundred miles—­of sun-baked, thirsty dust in the hot weather, and of mud in the rainy season.  There were no telegraph-wires, and the British had to cope with the mysterious, and even yet unsolved, native means of sending news—­the so-called “underground route,” by which news and instructions travel faster than a pigeon flies.  There was never a greater certainty or a more one-sided struggle, at the start.  The only question seemed to be how many days, or possibly weeks, would pass before jackals crunched the bones of every Englishman in India.

But at the British helm was Nicholson, and under him were a hundred other men whose courage and resource had been an unknown quantity until the outbreak came.  Nicholson’s was the guiding spirit, but it needed only his generalship to fire all the others with that grim enthusiasm that has pulled Great Britain out of so many other scrapes.  Instead of wasting time in marching and countermarching to relieve the scattered posts, a swift, sudden swoop was made on Delhi, where the eggs of the rebellion had hatched.