When the order for the advance
was issued, the frontier grain stores were nearly exhausted. The new crops
could not be garnered until the end of April. Thus while the world regarded
Egypt as a vast granary, her soldiers were obliged to purchase 4,000 tons
of doura and 1,000 tons of barley from India and Russia on which to begin
the campaign.
The chief item of a soldier's diet in most armies is bread. In several of
our wars the health, and consequently the efficiency, of the troops has
been impaired by bad bread or by the too frequent substitution of hard
biscuit. For more than a year the army up the river ate 20 tons of flour
daily, and it is easy to imagine how bitter amid ordinary circumstances
would have been the battle between the commissariat officers, whose duty
it was to insist on proper quality, and the contractors--often, I fear,
meriting the epithet 'rascally'--intent only upon profit. But in the
well-managed Egyptian Service no such difficulties arose. The War
Department had in 1892 converted one of Ismail Pasha's gun factories near
Cairo into a victualling-yard. Here were set up their own mills for
grinding flour, machinery for manufacturing biscuit to the extent of 60,000
rations daily, and even for making soap. Three great advantages sprang from
this wise arrangement. Firstly, the good quality of the supply was assured.
Complaints about bread and biscuit were practically unknown, and the soap--
since the soldier, in contrast to the mixture of rubble and grease with
which the contractors had formerly furnished him, could actually wash
himself and his clothes with it--was greatly prized.
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