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Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 51, 28 August 1915, Page 3

New Zealand or Britain. As the system is in the hands of New Zealand civil servants in uniform, it naturally follows that New Zealand civil service methods are the methods employed in Egypt. Although these civil service colonels and majors and captains are bound by King's Regulations 1 , you make take it for granted that they know a thing or two better than any K.R., and that the "parcel system" spoken of by the old soldier will hardly suit the "business" man who is temporarily in: uniform, and who is therefore going to revolutionise an army system that has taken many wars and two hundred years to perfect.

New Zealand Members of Parliament who hope to get civilians appointed' to interfere with military administration in Egypt don't know the British Army. They might with equal fatuity suggest sending civilian grocers to teach Navy quartermasters their jobs. At present in Egypt civilian New Zealand colonels and majors, captains, lieutenants and non-coms, are being taught the Army way of doing business— which is the only way for the Army. The civilian who 1 butts into the Army method is a fool, and the M.P. who wants him to butt in merely because he is a civilian should; undertake the vulgar task of "getting bis head read." To be quite plain, the civilian offioeris who are in Egypt for us are, despite their ranks, recruits, and they've got to be pounded into shape, just as if they were recently off the turnips. All they have to do to satisfy the most exacting in New Zealand is to learn their military jobs, and not to revolutionise or reorganise the Army or King's Regulations. You can't make a military officer by keeping him in the "Big Buildings" for twenty years, and he is dashed hard to teach when'he escapes from the slow shackles of meaningless red tape. All we have to do is to be patient with these commissioned recruits until they learn their jobs. No doubt the Army permits an odd army sergeant to instruct our suddenly created colonels in the primary methods of army book-keeping—and it will all dry straight. Some of those administrative colonels will be auite useful when the sergeants have one with them. The one point to be remembered by the people who want civilian administrators in Egypt is that they have them there already, and that the only change for the better to be effected is to replace them with (soldiers.