During the dreadful ravages of the French and English, or the Carnatic War, the Hindoo women administered to the wounded and suffering European soldiers of both nations with equal tenderness and impartiality, causing one of the English generals to report to head-quarters, "But for the Indian women, who better understand the qualities of love and tenderness than we Europeans, I should have left half of my wounded soldiers to die on the battle-field. They washed the toiling feet of the poor tired soldiers, stanched their flowing wounds, and bore them in their united arms from the strife of the battle-field to the quiet and shelter of their own little huts." In that interesting narrative of occurrences at Benares during the latter days of the month of June, 1857, furnished by a soldier of the Seventy-eighth Highlanders, are several incidents characteristic of the devotion and self-abnegation of the Hindoo women. This regiment or company of soldiers, in its work of retaliation upon the Indian mutineers, often set fire to whole villages in order to punish the rebel sepoys sheltered by them. On one of these occasions a humane Highlander, after having rescued several persons from the fire, rushed into the flames to save a young woman seated calmly by a dying man, whose lips she was wetting with some siste[51] while the fire was raging around her. No inducement of self-preservation could prevail with her to quit his side till they were both carried out. Tenderness and self-devotion, as I said before, are the chief characteristics of the pure Hindoo woman. Her love for her offspring amounts to a passion, and she is rarely known to speak hastily, much less to strike or ill use her child. Her devotion as a wife has no parallel in the history of the world. Marriage is a sacred, indissoluble bond, which even death itself cannot destroy, and the patient, much-enduring women of India took the terrible yoke of sutteeism upon them in becoming wives as calmly as the young English or American girl puts on her bridal veil, and have gone to the funeral pile for centuries without a murmur.