niform, and is commanded
by a British officer, who has under him his own permanent subordinate
staff, and who is responsible for the well-being and efficiency of all
the men and beasts in his charge.

The enhancement of efficiency and well-being, and, perhaps more than
all, of the personal self-respect of the individual driver, which has
been the result both of the new organised discipline and of the new
_esprit de corps_, is very marked. It remains only to prove conclusively
that in the field, the inter-organisation of transport can be
sufficiently maintained to serve its object, without interfering with
other military considerations. The allotting of their transport to
combatant units, according to their exact requirements, without
destroying the organisation of the transport units themselves, often
constitutes a problem which a chief transport officer has difficulty in
solving. The _via media_, which on this Expedition has afforded a
solution, has been to let the transport organisation, if necessary, go
to the winds on the march itself, but to give it the first claim to
consideration when once a column has reached camp.

Those irregular corps which supplemented the permanent military pack
transport were most indispensable but delightfully heterogeneous. It may
be interesting to describe the journey of, say, a maund of rice from
Siliguri to Lhassa on these various forms of transport. Wrapped in its
waterproof to keep off the rain torrents, the rice was dumped into a
bullock-cart at Siliguri. If the road did not collapse from a landslip
at any awkward moment and so drop the bullock-cart and its contents _en
masse_ into the Teesta river--a not infrequent occurrence--the rice-bag
probably reached Rangpo. From there it probably proceeded for a few
marches on the back of a pack bullock, a patient beast who moved slowly,
and whose feet in that damp climate got very tender, and on those stony
paths very sore. Later on it reached steep gradients where the pack
bullock could no longer carry it, and it was handed over for several
marches to a cooli. The cooli would be a native of some hill district of
India (Panch, for instance, or Darjiling). He and the comrades to whom
he passed it on would take it over either the Jalap-La or the Natu-La,
down into the Chumbi valley. From here a pack mule or an 'irregular'
pack pony would take it up to Phari. From here across the Phari plain
through Tuna and Kalatso and as far as Menza it wo