In connection with the correspondence for the army in the field, post offices were organized to accompany the movable columns under General Havelock, the Malwa Field Force and later the divisions commanded by General Outram and other distinguished leaders. During the campaign soldiers' letters were exempt from forward postage. The large tract of country known as the North-Western Provinces and Oudh was the focus of the disturbance of 1857, and the strain put upon the postal officials in those provinces was greater than in other affected parts of the country. Most of the post offices and mail lines had to be closed at the beginning of the outbreak and were reopened one by one, as order was gradually restored by the British forces. A most interesting narrative of the interruption in the mail arrangements in the North-Western Provinces and Punjab subsequent to the outbreak at Meerut and Delhi on the 10th and 11th May, 1857, was supplied by Mr. Paton, Postmaster-General, and will be found in Appendix G. As might be expected, the outbreak of the Mutiny caused a complete disorganization of postal communications, and the task of restoring mail lines in hostile territory was no easy one. The pay offered by the Department was not sufficient to induce men to risk their lives in isolated places, which were always open to attacks by the mutineers or by bands of armed villagers, and it is characteristic of the Indian Government at the time that they expected men to serve for salaries which were admitted to be inadequate even in times of peace. I will quote extracts from the reports of the Postmasters-General of the North-Western Provinces, Bengal and Bombay, which throw an interesting light upon the difficulties with which the Post Office had to contend in these troublous times. Report of the Postmaster-General, North-Western Provinces, for the year ending the 31st March, 1858: "In consequence of the rebellion, the Post Offices and lines of postal communication in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh were closed more or less, nearly throughout the year under review, and many of those in Oude and Bundelkund have not yet been reopened, owing to a portion of the above Provinces being still in the hands of the rebels, so that a report of the transactions of the present year is chiefly a narrative of the effects of the disturbances on the Post Office Department, The results shown herein cannot therefore be fairly compared with those of the previous years. "The number of complaints of the loss and missending of letters during the year under review is comparatively greater than many of the previous years, which is chiefly owing to the frequent loss of the mails on different lines of road by rebels, their transmission by circuitous routes from the direct lines being closed or unsafe, and their irregular despatch by inexperienced hands employed in the Camp Post Offices.