rk on the line of
communication from Assiut to Korti, a distance of 800 m., and the
training and experience thus gained were of great value in all
subsequent operations. The honesty and discipline of the fellah were
shown to be undoubtedly of a high order. When the crews of the
whale-boats were conveying stores, the forwarding officers tried to keep
brandy and such like medical comforts from the European crews, coffee
and tea from Canadian voyageurs and sugar from Kroo boys. The only
immaculate carrier was the Egyptian. A large sum of specie having failed
under British escort to reach Dongola, an equivalent sum was handed to
an Egyptian lieutenant of six months' service, with 10 men, and duly
reached its destination.

Twelve years later the standard of honesty was unimpaired, and the
British officers had imparted energy and activity into Egyptians of all
ranks. The intelligent professional knowledge of the native officers,
taught under British gentlemen, and the constant hard work cheerfully
rendered by the fellah soldiers, were the main factors of the success
achieved at Omdurman on the 2nd of September 1898. The large depots of
stores at Assuan, Halfa and Dongola could only be cursorily supervised
by British officers, and yet when the stores were received at the
advance depot the losses were infinitesimal.

Character of Egyptian soldier.

By nature the fellah is unwarlike. Born in the valley of a great river,
he resembles in many respects the Bengali, who exists under similar
conditions; but the Egyptian has proved capable of greater improvement.
He is stronger in frame, and can undergo greater exertion. Singularly
unemotional, he stood steady at Tell el-Kebir after Arabi Pasha and all
his officers, from general to subaltern, had fled, and gave way only
when decimated by the British field artillery firing case shot. At El
Teb, however, in 1884 he allowed himself to be slaughtered by tribesmen
formerly despised, and only about one-fourth of the force under General
Valentine Baker escaped. Baker Pasha's force was termed constabulary,
yet his men were all old soldiers, though new to their gallant leader
and to the small band of their brave but strange British officers. Since
that fatal day, however, many of the fellahin have shown they are
capable of devoted conduct, and much has been done to raise in the
soldiers a sense of self-respect, and, in spite of centuries of
oppression, of veracity. The barrack-square dr