ABSTRACT
T en years elapsed between Ginnis and the first movements of the expedition for the reconquest of the Sudan. This decade was a dreary one. Drudgery was its watchword, hardships the order of the day, and privation the routine of life. Lord Cromer had been a soldier before he became a diplomatist. He had also served for a short while as England’s representative on the Egyptian Caisse de la Dette. This made him a specialist in curtailing expenses. He became a veritable watchdog of the Fisc, ever on the look-out to husband a piastre for the Khedivial Exchequer. The result was that “ the British officer was deprived of his leave and the Egyptian' private of his rations, that a few pounds might be saved to the Egyptian Treasury. The clothing of the battalions,” continues Mr. Winston Churchill, in The River War, “ wore thin and threadbare, and sometimes their boots were so bad that the soldiers’ feet bled from the cutting edges of the rocks, and the convoy escorts left their trails behind them” . 1
It may be feared that a measure of exaggeration has crept into these words. Lord Cromer was too great a statesman to have converted economy into parsimony. And one is tempted to doubt the reliability of criticism which equates denying furlough to an officer with depriving a private of rations. But, however this may be, the fact stands out that service in the Khedivial army was not a lark. The Egyptian Treasury received a pound in value for every twenty shillings it spent on its reorganized fighting machine. The force improved in efficiency, and the constant alarms began to produce, even among the fellaheen infantry, first-class soldiers.
