214 
INTRODUCTION OF EUROPEAN DISCIPLINE. 
officer. It was long before he could seize the true routine of ser¬ 
vice, and was slow to discover the necessity of adhering scrupulously 
to regulations, which appeared to him to clog rather than to facilitate. 
After he had one day listened with great patience to a detail of the 
laws and regulations of our service, he exclaimed with a deep sigh," 
“ This discipline is a most difficult thing,” which proved that he merely 
looked upon it as the art of making men act in a bod}' by a single word 
of command, without reflecting upon all the hidden machinery which 
was necessary to be kept in constant motion, to produce the simple 
result which he so much admired. The greatest difficulties in the way 
of our officers, were the knavery and intrigue of the Persian officers 
appointed by the Prince to aid them in their different commands. The 
men themselves, they found most docile and tractable, receiving the 
discipline quicker than even Englishmen ; but the moment a Mirza or 
a Khan interfered, all was trouble and dispute. As for instance, a 
Mirza who was appointed to pay the men would keep a percentage 
from each man for himself—sums which he received for the supplies 
of dress, furniture, &c., he would detain to trade with, or put out to 
usurious interest. A man of some consequence was one day discovered 
to have stolen two muskets ; and similar instances of knavery might be 
cited without end. 
In addition to these difficulties, the officers found that the method of 
providing recruits was defective. They were in general taken from the 
wandering tribes of Aderbigian, who are bound to each other by the 
ties of clanship, and are always ready to support each other upon 
the most trivial occasion. This produced a constant tendency to what 
we should call mutiny, but which they style making the arze^ or an 
exposition. As raw materials for soldiers, nothing could be better than 
the Eelauts. Accustomed from their infancy to a camp life, habituated to 
all sorts of hardships and to the vicissitudes of weather, they are soldiers 
by nature. They have undertaken incredible marches without scarcely 
any food, and without a murmur. In such qualities, they will perhaps 
equal any troops in the world, but they are greatly deficient in the 
soldier’s first art, the art of dying. Accustomed to their old modes of 
