f school and college, the brisk, active officer, passes away into
obscurity. The mother weeps--perhaps some one nearer and dearer than all
is stricken: but the dead Englishman's name vanishes from memory like a
fleck of haze on the side of the valley where he sleeps. England--cold,
inexorable, indifferent--has other sons to take the dead man's place and
perhaps share his obscurity; and the doomed host of fair gallant youths
moves forward ever in serried, fearless lines towards the shadows. That
is what it costs to be a mighty nation. It is sorrowful to think of the
sacrificed men--sacrificed to fulfil England's imposing destiny; it is
sorrowful to think of the mourners who cannot even see their darling's
grave; yet there is something grandiose and almost morbidly impressive
in the attitude of Britain. She waves her imperial hand and says, "See
what my place in the world is! My bravest, my most skilful, may die in a
fight that is no more than a scuffling brawl; they go down to the dust
of death unknown, but the others come on unflinching. It is hard that I
should part with my precious sons in mean warfare, but the fates will
have it so, and I am equal to the call of fate." Thus the sovereign
nation. Those who have no very pompous notions are willing to recognize
the savage grandeur of our advance; but I cannot help thinking of the
lonely graves, the rich lives squandered, the reckless casting away of
human life, which are involved in carrying out our mysterious mission in
the great peninsula. Our graves are spread thickly over the deadly
plains; our brightest and best toil and suffer and die, and they have
hardly so much as a stone to mark their sleeping-place; our blood has
watered those awful stretches from the Himalayas to Comorin, and we may
call Hindostan the graveyard of Britain's noblest. People who see only
the grizzled veterans who lounge away their days at Cheltenham or
Brighton think that the fighting trade must be a very nice one after
all. To retire at fifty with a thousand a year is very pleasant no
doubt; but then every one of those war-worn gentlemen who returns to
take his ease represents a score who have perished in fights as
undignified as a street brawl. "More legions!" said Varus; "More
legions!" says England; and our regiments depart without any man
thinking of _Morituri te salittant!_ Yes; that phrase might well be in
the mind of every British man who fares down the Red Sea and enters the
Indian furn