Whence it is fair to infer that severity of discipline has no necessary connection with the good behaviour or easy control of troops in the field, such discipline under the Iron Duke himself having been conspicuous for so lamentable a failure. The real fact would seem to be, that troops are difficult to manage just in proportion to the rigour, the monotony, and the dulness of the discipline imposed upon them in time of peace; the rebound corresponding to the compression, by a moral law that seems to follow the physical one. This fact is nowhere better noticed than in Lord Wolseley’s narrative of the China war of 1860, where he says, in allusion to the general love of pillage and destruction that characterises soldiers and was so conspicuously displayed at the shameful burning of the beautiful palaces in and round Pekin: ‘Soldiers are nothing more than grown-up schoolboys. The wild moments of enjoyment passed in the pillage of a place live long in a soldier’s memory.... Such a time forms so marked a contrast with the ordinary routine of existence passed under the tight hand of discipline that it becomes a remarkable event in life and is remembered accordingly.’[301] The experience of the Peninsular war proves how slender is the link between a well-drilled and a well-disciplined army. The best disciplined army is the one which conducts itself with least excess in the field and is least demoralised by victory. It is the hour of victory that is the great test of the value of military regulations; and so well aware of this was the best disciplined State of antiquity, that the soldiers of Sparta desisted from pursuit as soon as victory was assured to them, partly because it was deemed ungenerous to destroy those who could make no further resistance (a sentiment absolutely wanting from the boasted chivalry of Christian warfare), and partly that the enemy might be tempted to prefer flight to resistance. It is a reproach to modern generalship that it has been powerless to restrain such excesses as those which have made the successful storming of cities rather a disgrace than an honour to those who have won them. The only way to check them is to make the officers responsible for what occurs, as might be done, for instance, by punishing a general capitally for storming a city with forces so badly disciplined as to nullify the advantages of success. An English military writer, speaking of the storming of Ismail and Praga by the Russians under Suwarrow, says truly that ‘posterity will hold the fame and honour of the commander responsible for the life of every human being sacrificed by disciplined armies beyond the fair verge of battle;’ but it is idle to speak as if only Russian armies were guilty of such excesses, or to say that nothing but the prospect of them could tempt the Russian soldier to mount the breach or the scaling-ladder. The Russian soldier in history yields not one whit to the English or French in bravery, nor