Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/120

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112
DALHOUSIE'S WORK IN INDIA

equipped his army in 1852 against the climate, with a foresight which would have saved thousands of lives during the first Burmese War in 1825. 'The care and provision,' wrote General Godwin to whom Lord Dalhousie entrusted the command of the expedition in 1852, 'which has been made to enable us to meet the weather is parental. There are to be bake-houses and a constant supply of fresh meat, hospitals at Amherst to relieve me, and arrangements to carry the sick thither.' Skeleton huts of wood were fitted together on the sea-coast, and a contingent of carpenters marched with the troops to put them up. By a liberal commissariat, Lord Dalhousie found it possible to record at the end of his Governor-Generalship that he had 'abolished the morning dram;' and his arrangements during the Burmese War, personally initiated and directed by himself, form one of the first and most signal triumphs of Indian military sanitation. Lord Dalhousie saw that it was to be a war against climate, and he armed his troops for this conflict with as much care as he equipped them against the enemy.

He grasped the political situation with equal firmness. From the outset he perceived that the Burmese Emperor would not accept the teaching of a few distant defeats on the sea-coast. 'I fear,' he wrote, 'that it must be regarded as probable that operations will not be brought to a termina-