Sir Colin resigned his command on July 25th. He declined a farewell banquet to which the officers of the Peshawur garrison desired to invite him, believing that in the circumstances to accept the honour would be contrary to the spirit of the Queen's regulations. After spending three months in the bracing hill-station of Murree, in the end of October he visited at Dugshai the Ninety-Eighth regiment, to his original position as senior lieutenant-colonel of which he had reverted on the resignation of his divisional command; then, after a brief visit to Simla, he sailed from Bombay, arriving in England in March, 1853. Before leaving India he had read the official acknowledgment by the Government of the services of the troops engaged in the recent operations. The despatch recorded the Governor-General's regret "that any incident should have occurred to deserve a censure of any portion of Sir Colin Campbell's conduct;" but it "acknowledged in the most ample terms the ability, the personal intrepidity and activity, and the sterling soldierly qualities, which this distinguished officer had displayed in the military command of the troops at Peshawur upon every occasion on which they had taken the field." The _amende honorable_ was well enough in its lumbering way; but it could scarcely take away the bitter flavour of the barbed and venomous insinuation conveyed in the cruel words "over-cautious reluctance." CHAPTER IV THE CRIMEA Soon after his return to England Sir Colin Campbell vacated the command of the Ninety-Eighth and went on half-pay. He had earned a modest competence, and after those long years of campaigning abroad he considered himself at the age of sixty-one entitled to enjoy peaceful repose at home for the rest of his life. But this was not to be; there was still before him much arduous and active service in the field before he went to his final rest. Kinglake in his _War in the Crimea_ pays Colin Campbell a fine tribute--not less fine, however, than deserved; a passage from which may fittingly be inserted here:-- "After serving with all this glory for some forty-five years, he returned to England; but between the Queen and him stood a dense crowd of families extending further than the eye could reach, and armed with strange precedents which made it out to be right that people who had seen no service should be invested with high command, and that Sir Colin Campbell should be only a colonel. Yet he was of so fine a nature that, although he did not always avoid great bursts of anger, there was no ignoble bitterness in his sense of wrong. He awaited the time when perhaps he might have high command, and be able to serve his country in a sphere proportioned to his strength. His friends, however, were angry for his sake; and along with their strong devotion to him, there was bred a fierce hatred of a system of military dispensation which could keep in the background a man thus tried and thus known."