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.
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