PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION 
111 
of ; in their desperate and repeated assaults on Captain McNeill’s 
zerfba at Sanala in 1901; and at Erigo last year, where men 
were found dead at the muzzles of the guns. 
Of a definite quality must be the courage of “spearmen and 
archers ” who are among those who oppose our troops. 
On the other hand, we seem to have had among those Somdlis 
helping us numbers of men who would not face the Mullah, were 
shaken in the fighting, and subject to nervousness, and have 
shown over-excitability in action ; and it is his intense excitability 
in action which, according to Captain M ‘Neill, detracts from the 
value of a Somdli as a regular soldier, though as an irregular he 
is good enough, and when trained seems to be a good scout. I 
believe a few years of training would do wonders with the 
Somalis, who are naturally a fighting race. 
The cause of these opposite conditions may be due to the 
mercurial temperament of the whole race, the difference in 
courage of different tribes and of individuals, and a natural 
proneness to superstition, intensified by the fact that those who 
are helping us are fighting against their kinsmen (however 
distant), their religion, and such national feeling as they possess. 
That a force of raw Somali levies, outnumbered by twenty to 
one, should, merely with the help of twenty British officers and 
some Indian drill-instructors and details, have kept the Mullah 
on the run during the whole of 1901 is the best argument in 
their favour ; and, after all, it is the SomMis who have had the 
bulk of the casualties on both sides in all these expeditions. 
I am aware that in thus speaking up for the Somalis I am 
taking the risk of having my credibility as a witness assailed by 
any one who does not agree with me ; and I expect to be told 
that I have never visited Somaliland at all. But Captain 
M ‘Neill, who has had more experience of the Somalis in war- 
time than myself, has, I think, taken on the whole much the 
same view in his book, which was published later than mine. 
I propose to show briefly how the present situation with the 
Mullah has been working up for many years. 
When Egypt withdrew her Soudan garrisons after the Gordon 
Relief Expedition, she withdrew also from the city of Harar, 
lying among its rich coffee-gardens at an elevation of five thousand 
five hundred feet, and from the more arid Som&li coast with its 
ports of Berbera, Bulhar, and Zeyla. 
The Som41i coast was taken over by the British and adminis- 
tered by the Indian Government from Aden ; and our interest 
