sufficient strength, irrespective of the garrison necessary for the security of that place, the Commander-in-Chief would be more usefully employed in superintending the reception and despatch to the front of the reinforcements as they arrived from England, and in collecting stores and supplies[1], without which it would be impossible to put an army in the field, than as the chief of an isolated position the communications of which with the capital were cut off. 'However, annoying,' he wrote to a friend, 'here I must remain for the present.'
This delay at Calcutta was not altogether acceptable to the army at large. It was thought that the Commander-in-Chief would have done better to leave the arrangements at Calcutta to subordinate officials, and to push on to the front himself in order to reanimate, by his presence, the wearied and harassed troops operating in the North-West. But when Sir Colin Campbell once made up his mind to a fixed course of action he was not easily diverted from it. In other respects his stay in Calcutta was doubtless an advantage both to himself and to the Government, insomuch as it facilitated the establishment of cordial relations with the Viceroy, Lord Canning, whose ever ready co-operation and advice in the subsequent movements of the army were of no small value.
- ↑ During the Peninsular War, the Duke of Wellington, who was necessarily much occupied with the question of food and supply, used humorously to say that he did not know that he was much of a general, but he prided himself on being a first-rate commissariat officer.
