The effort to collect and equip for war the comparatively small body of men forming the British quota of the combined forces had greatly taxed the military resources of England. After the fall of the great Napoleon had restored peace to Europe, enormous reductions had been made in our military expenditure;[160] not only was the _personnel_ of the army cut down, but the _matériel_ was allowed to fall into decay. For more than thirty years every arm and every department of the service was systematically starved, with results well summed up by Lord Palmerston, who in 1846 bluntly informed his colleagues in the Cabinet that our military weakness was such that England existed “only by sufferance and by the forbearance of other Powers.” This opinion was endorsed by the highest authority in the British army, for Wellington himself acknowledged that our supply of guns, arms, ammunition, and all kinds of stores was inadequate. Nor were these grievous shortcomings atoned for by any high standard of efficiency amongst the troops, for though the drill and discipline of the army were alike excellent, neither the soldiers nor the departments vital to their existence in the field were trained in the slightest degree for active service; indeed, until 1853, when a few thousand men spent some weeks under canvas, no camp of exercise had been formed in England since the end of the Great War with France. Marksmanship was almost a lost art; and although the deadly volleys of the British infantry in the Peninsula had won for our troops the reputation of the best shots in Europe, musketry was so entirely neglected during the dead period after Waterloo, that the injunction “Fire low, and hit ’em in the legs, boys,” was the only instruction given to recruits. Even in the Foot Guards the men were considered to be masters of their weapon if, once in every three years, they fired thirty rounds of ball cartridge. The military education of the officers was no better than that of the rank and file; there was no attempt to teach them anything beyond barrack-square drill; the vast majority grew up ignorant of every detail of their profession, and as the Staff College at Camberley was not then in existence, the officers selected for employment on the staff proved in the majority of cases to be blind leaders of the blind. The few veterans of the Peninsula who were still to be found among the Generals had seen war on a grand scale; the officers who had served in eastern and colonial campaigns had acquired much useful knowledge in these distant operations, but with these exceptions the Staff and regimental officers were as untrained in the practice, as they were unversed in the theory of war.