th evil,
cannot ever be persuaded that under any circumstances evil can be good.

The Burmese peasant had to fight his own fight in 1885 alone. His king
was gone, his government broken up, he had no leaders. He had no god to
stand beside him when he fired at the foreign invaders; and when he lay
a-dying, with a bullet in his throat, he had no one to open to him the
gates of heaven.

Yet he fought--with every possible discouragement he fought, and
sometimes he fought well. It has been thrown against him as a reproach
that he did not do better. Those who have said this have never thought,
never counted up the odds against him, never taken into consideration
how often he did well.

Here was a people--a very poor people of peasants--with no leaders,
absolutely none; no aristocracy of any kind, no cohesion, no fighting
religion. They had for their leaders outlaws and desperadoes, and for
arms old flint-lock guns and soft iron swords. Could anything be
expected from this except what actually did happen? And yet they often
did well, their natural courage overcoming their bad weapons, their
passionate desire of freedom giving them the necessary impulse.

In 1886, as I have said, all Burma was up. Even in the lower country,
which we held for so long, insurrection was spreading fast, and troops
and military police were being poured in from India.

There is above Mandalay a large trading village--a small town
almost--called Shemmaga. It is the river port for a large trade in salt
from the inner country, and it was important to hold it. The village lay
along the river bank, and about the middle of it, some two hundred yards
from the river, rises a small hill. Thus the village was a triangle,
with the base on the river, and the hill as apex. On the hill were some
monasteries of teak, from which the monks had been ejected, and three
hundred Ghurkas were in garrison there. A strong fence ran from the hill
to the river like two arms, and there were three gates, one just by the
hill, and one on each end of the river face.

Behind Shemmaga the country was under the rule of a robber chief called
Maung Yaing, who could raise from among the peasants some two hundred or
three hundred men, armed mostly with flint-locks. He had been in the
king's time a brigand with a small number of followers, who defied or
eluded the local authorities, and lived free in quarters among the most
distant villages. Like many a robber chief in our country a