By the arrival of the reinforcements at Berber the fighting force at the
front was doubled: doubled also was the business of supply. The task of
providing the food of an army in a desert, a thousand miles from their
base, and with no apparent means of subsistence at the end of the day's
march, is less picturesque, though not less important, than the building
of railways along which that nourishment is drawn to the front. Supply and
transport stand or fall together; history depends on both; and in order to
explain the commissariat aspect of the River War, I must again both repeat
and anticipate the account. The Sirdar exercised a direct and personal
supervision over the whole department of supply, but his action was
restricted almost entirely to the distribution of the rations. Their
accumulation and regular supply were the task of Colonel Rogers, and this
officer, by three years of exact calculation and unfailing allowance for
the unforeseen, has well deserved his high reputation as
a feeder of armies.
The first military necessity of the war was, as has been described,
to place the bulk of the Egyptian army at Akasha. In ordinary circumstances
this would not have been a serious commissariat problem. The frontier
reserves of food were calculated to meet such an emergency. But in 1895
the crops in Egypt had been much below the average. At the beginning of
1896 there was a great scarcity of grain.
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