The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no departure from the old system under which not only were army administration and all the higher commands reserved for British officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circumstances rise to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer, whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders of the youngest British subaltern gazetted to the regiment. No other system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a martial reputation and often from families with whom military service was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.