army. When I reached England the medical
men said I should never be able to serve again
in a hot climate, though I was good for many
years' work in England. I was therefore sent
to the depôt of my regiment, where I shall serve
until entitled to my pension. As I had left the
head-quarters of the corps, a sergeant-major had
to be appointed to my troop in my place; so when
I joined the depot, I had to revert to the rank
of sergeant: thus being further off my commission
than I was ten years before.

This is my own case, and yet I am one of the
fortunate men of the army. Before I left India,
and since I came home, I have been told by two
different, commanding-officers, that if I can only
manage to hold on for a few years longer, I may
reckon on being promoted to an adjutancy
or quartermastership. But of what good will
a commission be to me then? The best years
of my life are gone. Even if I had been lucky
enough to obtain what I coveted so much
long ago, should I now have been any the
better for it? The regimental sergeant-major
of my first corps was promoted in the Crimea
to be cornet and adjutant. He has been eleven
years in the same rank—except that he is now
lieutenant and adjutant, but still a subaltern—
and has seen at least twenty officers pass over
his head. They had money; he had none. If
he could have purchased, he would now have
commanded the regiment; for the present
lieutenant-colonel of the corps was junior to him
as a cornet, joined the regiment about twenty
years later than he did, and will in all
probability be a general officer long before his
adjutant is a captain.

I have now given one strong reason why very
few Englishmen who think they can ever better
themselves otherwise in the world, dream of
enlisting in the army.

But why do so few of those who have served
the ten years for which they enlisted in the
army, take service again? For the reason that
they take no root in the service. All soldiers
cannot expect to be officers, nor even non-
commissioned officers. In no army is this the case,
and not a whit more among the French than
among ourselves. Some men are not smart
enough at drills; others (cavalrymen) not good
enough riders; many are not sufficiently well
educated; not a few are too fond of a glass of
liquor more than is good for them—or otherwise
unmanageable. There are many excellent well-
behaved soldiers, who are well up in writing,
and what amount of arithmetic is required
of them, but who have not enough of the devil
in them to make non-commissioned officers.
Every soldier will know exactly what I mean.
None of these classes of men expect or look
forward to becoming even corporals, or, if
they get so far up the ladder, they very soon
come to grief. The over-quiet soldiers make
capital orderly-room clerks, schoolmasters, or
quartermasters' assistants, but they are never
able to command other men. However, this
ought not to hinder them from having
something to look forward to—a pension which will
at any rate keep them from want. But not
only are our pensions very small; they are
extremely difficult to gain, and more difficult to
retain; insomuch that no soldier begins even
to think about them until he has been eighteen
or twenty years in the army, and is already
counting the days when he will be able to leave
the service for good.

I read in the papers that some very well-
meaning people are talking of altering the
period of enlistment, and of reverting to the
old twenty, or twenty-four years of service.
They say this will produce a change. So it
will, but not in the direction hoped for. Make
the term of enlistment twenty years, and you
may give all the recruiting staff unlimited leave
of absence, for you will not get a dozen men
to take the shilling where even now a hundred
are procurable. Instead of augmenting, I would
diminish the period of service from ten to seven
years. For the latter term you will get plenty
of men to enlist; but during those seven years
you must manage to make the good men like the
service, while as for the bad, the sooner you get
rid of them the better.

Military members of parliament frequently
assert that the most troublesome soldiers are
those who have at one period of their lives
filled some better situation in life; and that
they would rather have the most decided rough,
than any broken-down gentleman, or man of
what may be called the better classes. This
may be true—no doubt in some respects it is.
But whose fault is it? Our officers—at least
the greater number of them, for there are some
of them who take a common-sense view of the
subject—have an intense dislike to any scheme
which narrows the gulf between the
commissioned and non-commissioned ranks. When
a recruit joins a regiment, and it comes
to the notice of his officers that he is or has
been in a better position at one time, the
remark generally is, that it is to be hoped
"the dashed nonsense will soon be taken out
of him." The non-commissioned officers almost
invariably take their cue from their superiors,
and so the unfortunate "gentleman recruit" has
certainly not a good time of it. In addition to
every corporal and sergeant in his troop being
more or less "down on him," every awkward
gesture and every blunder at drill or riding-school
is made the subject of public derision in the
barrack-room, for the men too often follow the
example of the non-commissioned officers. Thus
the man who, most likely, entered the army
hoping for speedy promotion, and had in him
the qualities that would make a good soldier, a
capital non-commissioned officer,or an experienced
officer—may take to drink to drown care, pass
his days in the guard-room or the cells, get
flogged, and end his life in hospital from delirium
tremens.

I don't state this as being my own
experience, nor do I think that gentlemen soldiers
are the only good men we can get in the
English army. It happened that when I joined as
a recruit, the captain of my troop was a very