rifles to protect themselves
against the Mullah's people, but were using these weapons, in their
light-hearted way, to argue questions of grazing as they arose. Early in
1913 "a small dervish outpost" was reported to be preventing our
friendlies from grazing in the Ain valley south of Burao at a time when
no other pasturage was locally available, and the Somali camel-corps,
about a hundred strong with three white officers, was sent to occupy
Burao as its base and from there to afford moral and material support
enabling the friendlies to graze unmolested in the threatened area. This
cheery opportunism was the Government's wobbling attempt at equilibrium
between the barefaced desertion of our protected tribes and its avowed
policy of non-intervention unless on the cheap. It was done too much on
the cheap; that little force was attacked by an overwhelming force of
dervishes while out on the grazing grounds affording moral and material
support. The Maxim was put out of action by an unlucky bullet, and the
friendlies skedaddled with their Government rifles at the first shot,
but returned later to loot the dead. The half-trained Somali camelry
suffered severely and were most unsteady, but the two white officers
surviving managed to extricate the remnant with difficulty, the gallant
commandant having died for his trust early in the fight. He was blamed
posthumously for having exceeded his orders; whether he ought to have
exercised his moral and material support at a safe distance from the
place where it was needed or have led his command in headlong flight was
not made clear, and they were the only two military alternatives to the
action he _did_ take. At all events the incident shamed the Government
into taking more adequate measures to protect its friendlies in spite of
bitter Nationalist opposition.

Missionaries point to our long and fruitless struggle in Somaliland as
an illustration of the force of fanaticism. It is nothing of the sort;
the Mullah was a man with a grievance who was driven into outlawry by
the sequence of events, and the movement was entirely political. Having
once tasted the sweets of temporal power, he wanted to expand it, and
used his spiritual and material influence to that end, not hesitating to
order the wholesale massacre of other equally orthodox Moslems when it
seemed to him politically expedient. He owed his success to his ruthless
treatment of his compatriots, the difficult and scantily watered