, and that men had been warned for extra sentry on the
guard-tent. I need not say that I was very sorry to hear the
information, for, although a spy is at all times detested in the army,
and no mercy is ever shown to one, yet I had formed a strong regard for
this man, and a high opinion of his abilities in the short conversation
I had held with him the previous day; and during the interval I had been
thinking over how a man of his appearance and undoubted education could
hold so low a position as that of a common camp-follower. But now the
news that he had been discovered to be a spy accounted for the anomaly.

It would be needless for me to describe the bitter feeling of all
classes against the mutineers, or rebels, and for any one to be
denounced as a spy simply added fuel to the flames of hatred. Asiatic
campaigns have always been conducted in a more remorseless spirit than
those between European nations, but the war of the Mutiny, as I have
before remarked in these reminiscences, was far worse than the usual
type of even Asiatic fighting. It was something horrible and downright
brutalising for an English army to be engaged in such a struggle, in
which no quarter was ever given or asked. It was a war of downright
butchery. Wherever the rebels met a Christian or a white man he was
killed without pity or remorse, and every native who had assisted any
such to escape, or was known to have concealed them, was as
remorselessly put to death wherever the rebels had the ascendant. And
wherever a European in power, either civil or military, met a rebel in
arms, or any native whatever on whom suspicion rested, his shrift was as
short and his fate as sure. The farce of putting an accused native on
his trial before any of the civil officers attached to the different
army-columns, after the civil power commenced to reassert its authority,
was simply a parody on justice and a protraction of cruelty. Under
martial law, punishment, whether deserved or not, was stern but sharp.
But the civilian officers attached to the different movable columns for
the trial of rebels, as far as they came under my notice, were even more
relentless. No doubt these men excused themselves by the consideration
that they were engaged in suppressing rebellion and mutiny, and that the
actors on the other side had perpetrated great crimes.[38] So far as the
Commander-in-Chief was concerned, Sir Colin Campbell was utterly opposed
to extreme measures, and deeply