Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/154

 relieving them alternately. When an army takes the field, one dooly is allowed for every hundred natives,and for every ten European soldiers; so that the bearers alone of a European regiment of 1000 strong amount to 600 men.

If the bearers were equal to their work and the doolies always serviceable, officers would not complain of the dooly as a mode of transport, for it has the advantage of being waterproof and of forming a good bed in camp. But the system is notoriously inefficient. The doolies are all supplied by contract from the barrack department—most rickety constructions, always breaking down and always undergoing repairs. Indeed it is the interest and the practice of the bearers to render them unserviceable, for a broken dooly is much easier carried than a sound one, with a wounded soldier in it. The bearers are men collected by the commissariat by a sort of press-gang or conscriptive system—men who never carried a dooly before, mere Coolies; and passed into the service to be discharged at the end of the campaign, their number, not their efficiency, being the chief object. I have rarely found the bearers equal to their work, and have often been obliged to set apart two sets to one dooly, having the other conveyed on a cart. They are a troublesome, unmanageable set of men, at all times a great incumbrance to an army, and in a general action,