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. 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.
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