any kind except rope halters
of sorts, and the officers sampled various devices, without success,
for placing the goods on the donkeys' backs and keeping them there.
They experimented with balancing a roll on the back of one, but it
promptly fell off again. They tied two rolls together and slung them
across the back of another, pannier fashion; but the little beast gave
a kick and a wriggle and deposited the load on the ground. Various
dodges were tried, perspiration poured off the faces of the officers,
they were covered with dust, their language grew stronger and
stronger, and at last, feeling themselves entirely nonplussed, one of
them, looking up at their chief as he sat on his camel with a sardonic
smile on his face, observed deprecatingly, "I'm afraid we really can't
manage it, sir."

[Footnote 3: While this volume has been in the
press Sir G. Arthur's _Life of Lord Kitchener_ has
appeared, giving a different version of this story
and probably the correct one. Walter Kitchener was
speaking, I think, from hearsay.]

"Can't manage it, can't you!" ejaculated the Sirdar; "here, let me
come." He made his camel kneel, and dismounted, stalked over to one of
the donkeys, gripped the animal by the nose, backed it till its hind
feet were inside one of the rolls, turned the roll up over the
donkey's back from behind, gave the beast a smack on the rump, and
after one or two wriggles and kicks, the creature was trotting along,
adorned with a loosely fitting girdle of telegraph-wire round its
waist which it could not get rid of. The same plan was promptly
adopted with the other donkeys. And in a few minutes the party were
riding along again, with the donkeys, carrying the whole of the
abandoned wire, in close attendance.

That Lord Kitchener would cut up rough at times when things went
wrong, as Hubert Hamilton had hinted at Pretoria, was brought home to
me convincingly on the occasion of my first interview with him at the
War Office after that visit to the Admiralty which is mentioned in
Chapter I. General Hanbury Williams had been earmarked in advance for
British Military Commissioner at Russian Headquarters, and he dashed
off in a great hurry to take up the appointment on mobilization. I
believe that he looked in to see me before starting, but I was not in
my room at the moment; I am not sure, indeed, that I knew that he was
go