MANAGEMENT 265 



an awkward position by men falling ill. I had no medi- 

 cines, and they were unable to march, so I was obliged 

 to place them on ' dahabeeyahs ' (Nile boats), which 

 were on their way to the front with stores. Spare 

 camels are a necessity, and no convoy should be with- 

 out them. They should never be used on any pretext 

 whatsoever, not even by the officer in command, for any 

 purpose but the legitimate one the relief of sick 

 animals or men ; but for the latter there ought, of 

 course, to be a separate percentage of sick carriage. It 

 is an absolute impossibility to keep up the efficiency of 

 a transport unit if deficient in this respect. The num- 

 ber of points that are inevitable in order to preserve a 

 state of efficiency are so numerous and so self-evident 

 that to advocate and lay stress on them appears to me 

 like the reiteration of some well-known truism, and yet, 

 though they are facts well known, and the truth of 

 which are recognised, no steps are taken to improve or 

 remedy them ; and so we drift and drift until the next 

 war breaks out, when (with the regularity of a recurring 

 decimal) we commit the same blunders, rehearse the 

 same farce, and repeat the same errors that practical 

 men have pointed out and condemned on previous 

 occasions ; and this absence of a proper percentage of 

 spare animals is one of the most important, and one of 

 the chief causes of all our transport breakdowns. As a 

 matter of fact, in nearly all of our expeditions we first 

 of all start with too small a number of animals, already 

 overladen ; so that, though there may have been a small 

 percentage of spare ones, practically speaking there are 

 none, because these few are very soon utilised owing 

 to casualties which are hastened by (1) an insufficiency 



