9 JUNE 1894, Page 13

THE SOLDIER'S CAMEL.

THE natural liking of Englishmen for domestic animals of all kinds is quite equalled by the skill they usually show in their management. Yet the sufferings of our transport animals in war are such as at any other time would cause a pang to the national conscience. It is a fact that the feeling of humanity, which will not tolerate the overcrowding of a cattle-ship, is scarcely shocked when, as in the Afghan War, twenty thousand camels perish, mainly from mismanagement, or when a transport officer can write of the fate of those -creatures in the Nile Expedition : "Seeing, as I have done, _hundreds and thousands of camels die from sheer exhaustion, brought on by neglect and ill-treatment, arising from down- right stupidity, obstinacy, and ignorance, is enough to make .one ashamed of having had any connection with the business." The push across the Bayuda Desert was a race against time ; _yet it hardly seems consonant with the usual fairness of Englishmen to their "mounts," that, of the thousand camels used, probably not one survived the treatment it received ; and Count Gleichen, writing after service with the Camel Corps -throughout the war, says, "I am afraid we looked upon them as mere machines for carrying, and hardly thought of their sufferings from hunger and thirst as long as they could be whacked along." This was after the battle of Metemmeh. Of the same example of cruel and disastrous mismanagement, Sir C. Rivers Wilson says :—" The camels had been without water for from six to seven days, having been accustomed to water every second or third day. They were on one-third rations, which they did not always get. For thirty-seven hours they were tied down so tightly in the zeribah, before Abu Klea, that they could not move a limb, and I doubt if they were fed at all during that time. Then for sixteen hours they were on the march, and tied down for another twenty- four hours without any food. The result almost justified the .saying, that we thought we had found in the camel an animal which required neither food, drink, nor rest ; we certainly .acted as if the camel were a piece of machinery." Except .during the time of battle, all this cruelty to the animals and waste of mobility in the force was unnecessary. The so-called " desert " was full of food and well supplied with water. On the day before the retreat from Metemmeh, a camel convoy of the friendly Kababish tribe came in across the -.desert in perfect condition. "It made my month water," writes an officer, "to see these magnificent well-fed brutes swinging along, each with its load balanced on its hump." 'His own beast had holes in its skin into which you could have -put a cocoa-nut." Read in the light of these facts, the inimitable ballad in which Mr. Rudyard Kipling sums up the 'miseries of the commissariat-camel, and the incompetence of

the uninstructed British private to manage it, is an invitation to substitute common-sense and kindness for ignorance and cruelty in the treatment of the four-footed army which helps to fight our battles.

The latest answer to this appeal comes in the shape of a thoroughly practical work on the soldier's camel by Major A. G. Leonard.* The author has been for sixteen years a trans- port officer. He has been engaged in this service in Afghanis- tan, South Africa, India, and the Soudan. That is in itself a credential for his book ; for no one not possessed of an equable and reflective temper could have gone through his experiences and yet be enthusiastic over his branch of the profession, and,

above all, over what he justly calls that "little known and strangely unsympathetic animal," the camel. Yet Major Leonard's practical experience leads him to the conclusion that, of all transport animals, it is the best for military use in the East. Incidentally, he gives us a historical note on Mr. Rudyard Kipling's immortal ballad on the Commis- sariat Camel :—

" The driver question in Afghanistan was enough to appal the heart of the stoutest transport officer. They deserted, and soldiers had to be told off to act as drivers. On December 20th, 1878, I had to leave 161 bags of Commissariat stores on the ground, many of the drivers having deserted, and taken their camels with them. This is a common trick of the Sind drivers. They go back by a circuitous route, and in many cases—it is said —are re-engaged by the Commissariat."

The place assigned to the camel in this estimate need not raise any bright ideal of the creature as a travelling com- panion. Mr. L. Kipling's remark that you might as well lavish your affections on a luggage-van as on a camel, still holds good. But there is a balance in favour of the camel when compared with other Oriental beasts of burden. The experiences of a single march, noted by Major Leonard, give a glimpse of the comparative " cussedness " of different trans- port animals, which is as fresh as it is amusing. The occasion

was the advance of the Candahar force from Quetta in the last Afghan War. At the crossing of the River Lora, at the foot of the Kojak-Amran range, the camels were swallowed up wholesale in the quicksands, owing entirely to their extra- ordinary stupidity. We quote this incident first, because the one serious drawback to the use of the camel consists precisely in this strange insensibility to danger :— " The river was not very broad, and not more than two feet deep in any part of the stream; but the bed was full of quick- sands, in whose treacherous depths many an unfortunate camel perished. It is only natural to suppose that by sheer force of example an ordinarily intelligent animal would have learnt to avoid the danger, by seeing those which preceded it sinking deeper and deeper out of sight. Yet these camels plodded steadily on into the quicksands, though those which had preceded them were disappearing so fast that in many cases only their necks and heads were visible."

Not a single horse, elephant, or mule, was lost in this way in crossing the ford, and they one and all displayed a. marked and consistent caution which was clearly the result of reason:—

" One elephant, which the officer commanding the 6-11 Battery of the Royal Artillery lent to assist in extricating some camels

which were being engulfed in the quicksands, showed an amount of sagacity which was positively marvellous. It was with the utmost difficulty that we could get him to go near enough to attach a drag-rope to one camel I wanted to rescue. In spite of our being about fifty yards from the bank of the river, he evinced the greatest anxiety, while his movements were made with extreme caution. Despite coaxing, persuasive remonstrance, and at last a shower of heavy blows dealt upon his head by the exasperated mahout, this elephant stubbornly refused to go where he was wanted, but, with his trunk shoved out in front of him, kept feeling his way with his ponderous feet, placing them before him slowly, deliberately, and methodically, treading all the while with the velvety softness of a cat, and taking only one step at a time. Then suddenly he would break out into a suppressed kind of shriek, and retreat backwards in great haste. When the animal had nearly completed a circuit of the ground with the same caution and deliberation, he advanced to within ten yards of the poor camel, but not another inch would he move, though several men were walking between him and the camel without any signs of the ground giving way."

But if the camel is too mechanical, the elephant is too soft for the hardships of the baggage train or rough country. He requires good roads, a temperate climate, and meals not only "regular," but luxurious. Ten elephants out of eleven reached Candahar safely in 1878, on a diet of chapatties, rice, sugar, and two bottles of rum apiece after their supper. No wonder "the faces of the men, and their remarks, as they looked on

• The Calla: its reel and Mcssagement. By Major A. G. Leonard, London: Longman'.

with watering months, and overpowering envy, were worthy of a camp-ballad by Rudyard Kipling." Yet this is, we submit, an error on the right side, both in economy and efficiency. Which cost moat, the elephants' comforts on the road to Candahar, or the ninety-two camels, which dropped from exhaustion and hunger on the first day's march back from Metemmeh where the day before 50,000 lb. weight of stores had been flung into the Nile P The "patient ox" combines the cunning of the mule with a spirit of revenge which is generally attributed to the camel, though Count Gleichen states that only one case of camel-bite was reported to him during the Nile expedition. A leading bullock, on the Candahar march, lay down six times, and when it was at last reluctantly agreed that the creature must be dying from exhaustion, it "rushed at a private and tossed him ten feet in the air; then on to the next man and sent him flying, and lastly at its own driver, whom it tumbled over like a ninepin, while the rest took refuge behind the waggons." The creature would not move in harness, and finally had to be unyoked, and driven into camp. The mule is the handiest and hardiest, the donkey the least trouble, and the pony the pleasantest of all pack-animals, according to Major Leonard's experience, the Spanish donkeys and Sicilian mules being perhaps the finest and most useful of their respective kinds. But though mili- tary opinion is, on the whole, in favour of the mule, he gives facts and figures to show that the camel, unmanaged as it now is, is a still more economical and effective beast for military service. Its power of enduring hunger and thirst is greater ; it carries double the load of the mule, needs fewer drivers, is never shod, and costs less to buy, and less to keep ; for food and water have to be carried for mules in desert country, while the camel browses on almost any scrub, and can make the ordinary caravan march from well to well. This opinion must rest on general considerations, for no fair working example of the comparative efficiency of the two animals in a campaign is available. Lord Roberts, on his march from Cabal to Candahar, covered a daily average of fourteen and three-quarter miles for nineteen days. This was done with mules and ponies, the camels belonging to the regiments being exchanged for the former. In the Bayuda desert the camels travelled on an average thirty-four miles daily in the first march; and allowing for two days of rest and two of fighting, nearly thirty miles a day in the second march of two hundred miles. But in this case the camels were starved and worked to death.

The difference between the careful treatment of the cavalry horse—Marbot's Reminiscences of his life as a cavalry officer must have opened many eyes to the practical anxieties of that profession—and the ignorant neglect of the camel, suggests a doubt whether after all the Englishman is as adaptable as we are pleased to think. The two pages which Major Leonard devotes to instruction in feeding, watering, loading, doctoring, equipping, and even buying camels, contain, besides the teachings of experience, so many "glimpses of the obvious," so many appeals to the use of common-sense, and common observation of the customs of countries in which the creature has been the one great engine of transport and locomotion for thousands of years, that the inference of a general neglect of this most important subject is almost irresistible. The two great breeding-grounds of the camel are the whole central zone of Asia, north of the Hima- laya, for the two-humped species, and the centre and northern fringe of the African Soudan. With the latter we are in touch through the frontier trit es of Egypt, and there is little doubt that we could make Egypt the nucleus of a camel transport unrivalled in the history of the world. But unless our officers and men have some training in their management, the suffering camels will continue to cause, as they have hitherto in our frontier wars, an embarrassed strategy, neg- lected sick, and an ill-supported soldiery. A permanent camel transport service in Egypt and on the North-West frontier of India would probably save in our next considerable war, millions of money and hundreds of soldiers' lives.