There is perhaps even a greater bond of union between the sepoys and the white officers of a native regiment than between the soldiers and the commissioned ranks in a British corps. In the first place the Indian Army is a long-service one; and so officers and men remain longer together. Many of my sepoys have watched me advance from subaltern to captain, from captain to major; and youngsters I knew as recruits are now native officers under me. Then the Indian soldier leans more on his British officer. He comes to him with all his troubles about lawsuits over land and his fields--for every man is a land-holder--and confidently expects that his Sahib will fight for justice for him. Some continental armies would be horrified to see the sepoy off parade talking with friendly freedom to his British officer or playing hockey with him on terms of perfect equality. The flag of the fort was half-mast high, as the funeral-party marched out to pay the last honours to their dead comrade. As the deceased sepoy was a Rajput his body was carried down to Santrabari to be there placed on a pile of wood and burned with all the ceremonies of his religion; for, while Mohammedans are buried, Hindus are cremated. But we had little leisure to brood over the dead man's fate. The position of the fort and of the Station of Buxa was very precarious, now that the fires had reached the hills. The former I safeguarded by burning the grass on the isolated mound on which it stood. But our bungalows, hemmed in by the jungle which grew to within a few yards of them, were in constant danger. The diary of parades which I was obliged to furnish every week to the brigade office in Shillong for the information of the General bore for a fortnight the words "fighting fires," instead of the usual entries of "company drill," "musketry," "field training," and the like. Day and night whenever the bugles rang out the alarm, we had to turn out to fight the intruding flames. Once we had to battle the whole day to save the forest officer's bungalow from being burned. I well remember how, while we officers and men toiled in the heat and smoke to beat back the fire, the Bengali clerks, whose houses were also in danger, stood at a safe distance, weeping and wringing their hands, but never attempting to help. At night the burning forests below were a gorgeous though pitiable sight. And when the fires, repelled from Buxa, swept past us upwards, and the semicircle of hills around blazed to the summit of Sinchula one night, the spectacle was sublime. In one spot, high overhead, the trees had been felled and left lying on the ground after a half-hearted attempt at cultivation by the Bhuttias. Here the long sparkling lines of fire from the burning undergrowth were changed to pillars of flame, as the huge, dry tree-trunks blazed fiercely up in the darkness.