The Sun.
London, England, 1858-10-28 00:00:00

there is waterway to the foot of the hills. Had
General Tremenheere and his coadjutors been lis-
tened to, by this time a thousand women and chil-
dren would have been saved; for let none believe
that the five hundred so recorded as dead are
all the victims that pestilence will claim, for even
those who have survived for the time will drop
hereafter week by week and month by month.
Had these lives been saved, a noble help would
have been given to an infant colony, for which the
Government, which has for many years been
anxious to give encouragement, could not so readily
enlist settlers from England.
Did this sad tale stand by itself it might be read
with silent sorrow, in the wish to banish it from
our minds. We can give no such poor comfort.
It has happened in the east, within reach of Cal-
cutta—it has happened in the west, on the waters
of the Indus—it is the tale of every cantonment in
India—it is what Ronald Martin and Julius Jef-
freys have disinterestedly laboured for years to set
at rest, and for which they have still to labour, for
the re-construction of the Indian army will not be
complete till the English soldier is cared for as
Runjeet Singh would have cared for him, and the
main stations of our army are placed in the Hima-
layas, the outlines of the Hindoo Koosh, the Vind-
lugs, range, and the Ghauts.
We have spoken of many of these poor women,
living and dead, as vicious and depraved, but we
cannot forget whose they are and who are the
fathers of their little neglected children. Many,
even of the worst, are the wives of the best con-
ducted
of our soldiers, of the older men who have
withstood temptation and have good conduct re-
wards, of the medal men of our former campaigns.
The women, too,, more particularly, are the wives
of the noncommissioned officers, of those well-de-
serving men to whom we are so much indebted for
the discipline and prowess of our own regiments
and of our native levies. If, too, we have
spoken of those whose life, having been one of..
temptations, they are now the sacrifice to those
temptations, who cannot bethink himself of the
hard life, the thrift, the pinching, the toil, travel,
homeless wandering and patient suffering of the
soldier's poor wife, with her little family, tried as
none now, in England are tried, as none in what
was once poor Ireland are tried—women who live
a life of penury, to share their husband's scant pen-
sion till widowhood, and then to reach the Work-
house. Few are there of these well-behaved toiling
women, even the wives of non-commissioned officers,
who, in their unsettled life, can obtain any means
of achieving a better condition for themselves or
their children. Soldiers' wives are truly of the
poor, for whom charity barely steps in, when the
triumph of the nation has been won by the widow-
hood of many. What must be the feeling of those
men, for whom our love has been earned, and on
whom our lavish praise is boastingly bestowed,
when they hear the saddening news of these cala-
mities, when every mail that leaves takes home
tidings of their glory, when every mail they get
brings tidings of the loss of those they love ? The
young soldier goes to the field with no care for this,
but not unmindful of the sufferings of women he has
known, of children with whom he has played as
soldiers will play, and of the sorrows of men older
and more honoured than himself, whose present lot
is the glass in which he sees his own future. Those
older men—there are noble Highlanders among
them, whose wives were from their native hills
there are gallant Irish, of whom their mothers were
in earliest years the youthful brides, the sweet-
hearts of the same townland—there are men with
grey hairs, whose elder sons fell in the Crimea and
at Lucknow, and whose last young favourites have
died unseen, unkissed, unblest at Dum Dum.
These are the men on whom the tardiness of the,
Government has fallen, and the sufferers are
many; one mournT a wife, and one a child, and
moodily a man drops upon the march, or rushes
desperately to the fight, and throws away a life the
more. None will think these men do not feel ; but
those must know the soldier's life to sunimon to
their thoughts, as he does, in the lone watch-hour
of the night, or that dull waiting-time of doubt and
hope before the light, the memory of a woman loved
for years and far away—of children starved, and
the babe whose features, perhaps, the fortunes of
that fight may leave to him unknown for ever.
There is a sad and solemn pleasure in these
thoughts, a long-enduring hope and steadfastness
in their contemplation ; but when those hopes are
shattered, and their object lies in some coffin far
away, then is that man desolate, with the stern
dictates of military duty to check his grief, and
nought but the rough kindness of his comrades to
soothe such woe.