THE HAGANA 65 



the fetishes dear to the heart of a London soldier, had 

 just arrived. Gone was the experience with Arabs, 

 the good colloquial knowledge, not only of their 

 language, but of the various Kordofan dialects ; gone 

 the brain that swept away the nursery-bred system of 

 discipline (punishments, &c.) culled from the British 

 army, which to this day will keep a soldier " standing 

 in a corner " as punishment, like a naughty child ; 

 that prohibited interference with their family arrange- 

 ments, incidentally eschewing the responsibility for 

 their harimat. In fact, the man who had formed a 

 common-sense corps which, with the fetishes of the 

 past eliminated, promised to be as near perfection 

 as possible, had to go to higher work. Alas, there 

 was no continuity of policy ! I have no doubt that, 

 moulded as the corps later was on the model of the 

 rest of the Egyptian Army, it became a very fine 

 example of it. 



The Hagana wore an adaptation of the dress of the 

 country. The Sudanese soldier in his skin-tight 

 trousers and coat and heavy boots is a painful parody 

 of the English one. The pay of the Arab covered 

 everything except the cost and upkeep of equipment, 

 rifle, saddlery, and camel. 



The devotion of the native soldier to his British 



officer, so marked a feature of the Indian Army, is 



unknown in this one. The system is against it. A 



bimbashi is in one regiment one day, in some other 



employment the next. The time, too, is broken by 



long periods of home leave, so that barely five of the 



seven years of contract can be spent in the country. 



E 



