IN Forty-One Years in India, my father de-scribed his life in that country, from the time he landed in Calcutta as a young subaltern to the day when he left Bombay at the age of sixty, having finished his work as Commander-in-Chief, a post he held for nearly eight years.
In that book he has given an account of the Mutiny of the Indian Army, and as a thread running through it is the story of the part he himself played in that struggle. But his object in writing was not so much to tell of his own doings as to record the gallant deeds and splendid fortitude of the small body of men, British and Indian, who by their valour saved India from relapsing into that state of unrest and misrule which, except perhaps for a brief period of good government under the en-lightened ruler Akbar, had been the normal condition in which the peoples of India had lived for centuries.
He hoped, too, that by pointing out the causes which led to the outbreak, and the lessons to be learnt, as he interpreted these by the light of his experience, he might be of assistance in preventing a recurrence of the disaster, and, above all, he wished to promote among his fellow-countrymen a more intimate knowledge and a better understanding of the Indian races and the Indian Army.
Since his death a packet of letters, labelled in his own handwriting "Letters written during the Mutiny by Fred. Roberts," has come to light. In these letters, thirty in number, is to be found the story of his personal experiences and adventures during the stirring days of 1857-58 as told to his father, mother, and sister. The first was written just as the earliest news of the disturbances at Meerut and Delhi reached him at Peshawar, and although it is evident that one or two are missing-not to be wondered at when the disturbed state of the country is borne in mind, -the majority reached their destination, and they tell their tale almost uninterruptedly to the day when he is able to give his family the joyful news that his leave has been sanctioned and that he is starting for home.
It is interesting to compare the letters with the book written many years later, when, in the calm of peace, my father looked back on his first campaign. It was but natural that fuller knowledge should lead him to modify some of the criticisms of men and actions: criticisms written in the stir of strife, and when the first news, or rumours, of events reached him. Equally natural, too, that the expressions of antipathy to be found in the letters for the country in which he had witnessed and heard of the many dastardly crimes perpetrated by the mutineers, should give place to the terms of real affection in which he always speaks of India in his book, for he grew to love "the wonderful land of my adoption,"¹ and his love bred an understanding which gained him many a valued friendship. Rulers of states, landowners, stalwart men of the frontier, soldiers and sportsmen, he reckoned among his friends, and he gloried in the soldierly qualities of the Indian Army and the comradeship which exists between the British officers and their men. He never tired of telling of the tie between certain British and Indian regiments; the link forged on the Ridge before Delhi which binds the 60th Rifles and the 2nd Gurkhas; the friendship between the 72nd Highlanders (now the 1 st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders) and 5th Royal Gurkhas, which sprang from their mutual support in many a fight in Afghanistan.
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