234 MAJOR W. HODSON. 



days, and our men, says Seaton, " were more cheer- 

 ful and hoj^eful."^ 



Sickness, however, in other forms was still prev- 

 alent. " We have been nearly losing another 

 general," says Hodson. " General Wilson was very 

 ill for a few days, but is now better. He is older, 

 however, by ten years than he was. I like him 

 very much, but the responsibility and anxiety of 

 what is certainly a very difiicult position have been 

 too much for him, and he has got into the way of 

 being nervous and alarmed, and over-anxious even 

 about trifles, which shakes one's dependence on his 

 judgment. These men are personally as brave as 

 lions, but they have not big hearts or heads enough 

 for circumstances of serious responsibility. This 

 word is the bugbear which hampers all our proceed- 

 ings. AVould we could have had Sir Henry Law- 

 rence as our leader ; we should have been in Delhi 

 weeks ago." 



It was not known in camp that Hodson's dear old 

 friend and master had perished at Lucknow a month 

 earlier, "trying to do his duty."- "The loss of 

 such a man at this crisis," says the Rev. J. E. 



^ From Cadet to Colonel. Chaplain's Narrative. Greathed's 

 Letters. 



2 " On the morning of July 2 a shell burst in Sir Henry's room, 

 not so harmlessly as that which burst there the day before. . . . For 

 two days he lingered with a dreadful wound below the hip, still able 

 at times to issue a few last directions, messages, and commands, 

 worthy alike of a thorough soldier and a guileless Christian. . . . 

 On the 4th of July his great soul fled, the soul of one who, in the 

 words he himself had once suggested for his own epitaph, had always 

 ' tried to do his duty.' . . . The very soldiers who were about to bear 

 his body to the grave stooped down one after another to kiss his cold 

 forehead, so deep was the universal sorrow for the death of 'a public 

 benefactor and a warm personal friend.'" — Trotter's 'India under 

 Victoria.' 



