the regularity of British main-line expresses. Besides 96,000 actual
fighting men, there was a vast army of men behind the line, and there
were over 100,000 animals to be fed. There were 46,000 horses, 40,000
camels, 15,000 mules, and 3500 donkeys on Army work east of the
Canal, and not a man or beast went short of rations. We used to
think Kitchener's advance on Khartoum the perfection of military
organisation. Beside the Palestine expedition that Soudan campaign
fades into insignificance. In fighting men and labour corps, in
animals and the machinery of war, this Army was vastly larger and more
important, and the method by which it was brought to Palestine and was
supplied, and the low sick rate, constitute a tribute to the master
minds of the organisers. The Army had fresh meat, bread, and
vegetables in a country which under the lash of war yielded nothing,
but which under our rule in peace will furnish three times the produce
of the best of past years of plenty.

A not inconsiderable portion of the front line was supplied with Nile
water taken from a canal nearly two hundred miles away. But the Army
once at the front depended less upon the waters of that Father of
Rivers than it had to do in the long trek across the desert. Then all
drinking water came from the Nile. It flowed down the sweet-water
canal (if one may be pardoned for calling 'sweet' a volume of water
so charged with vegetable matter and bacteria that it was harmful for
white men even to wash in it), was filtered and siphoned under the
Suez Canal at Kantara, where it was chlorinated, and passed through
a big pipe line and pumped through in stages into Palestine. The
engineers set about improving all local resources over a wide stretch
of country which used to be regarded as waterless in summer. Many
water levels were tapped, and there was a fair yield. The engineers'
greatest task in moving with the Army during the advance was always