But, it may be asked, if such was indeed the state of affairs, how came it that the British army rapidly emerged from this condition of darkness to save Europe? How came it that the hard-drinking British officer was able to pull himself together, and become transformed into an upright and zealous soldier, capable of enduring endless hardships and displaying great gallantry? The answer is that all regiments were not bad; that most regiments--even the bad ones--possessed some officers of high moral character and endowed with exceptional talents, and when war came in 1793 these officers, on the principle of the "survival of the fittest," came to the front, and gradually established a tone on active service which had been impossible to uphold in times of peace. Some regiments possessed more of such officers than others, and some regiments, again, chanced to have a colonel with sufficient strength of will to give a short shrift to any of his subordinates who were not likely to be of value to him. As the war progressed many of the junior, and not a few of the senior, officers willingly or unwillingly fell out, to make room for better men; many were found wanting and were removed; and many had undermined their constitutions to such an extent that in their first campaign they were carried off by what was commonly described as "the fever," or the "distemper." While the weeding-out process was at work during the last few years of the eighteenth century, and during the opening years of the nineteenth, the annual wastage of officers was immense; after that, matters righted themselves. Still, it is an error to suppose that the whole army was in so bad a state in 1793 as Bunbury would have us believe, for there are still in existence the printed standing orders of a few regiments of the line of about this date, and from these there is proof enough that very great attention was paid to the wellbeing of corps. The discipline was strict, though of the severe and mechanical order, and it was maintained solely by the lash; duties in quarters were performed with the utmost regularity; and if the standing orders were carried out, the regiments should have been in excellent order. It may, of course, be possible that such regiments as had standing orders were, from this very fact, good regiments, and that the strictures of Bunbury and others applied to the bad regiments, which were, perhaps, more numerous than the good ones.