During the spring the troops of the Allies gradually assembled in the dominions of the Sultan; and in the month of March, and for many subsequent months, the blue waters of the Mediterranean were ploughed by the fleet of transports, under steam and sail, all bound eastward; while the straits which divide Europe from Asia were almost as crowded as the Thames. The pressing question at the beginning of May was to organise the military machine; to put it into fighting and marching order; to provide more for its future than its present wants; to lay up stores of provisions and depôts of ammunition; and, above all, to gather together the means of setting the military machine in motion when it was completed. This was no easy task. The French, by habit, were better prepared for war than the British, but the former found it difficult to give legs to their transport corps. As to the latter, they had been hurried into action almost totally unprepared. They had neither a military train, nor even the nucleus of such a corps; they had no effective medical staff; they had an inexperienced and undermanned commissariat. They had magnificent regiments, individually perfect; but they had no army. Everything had to be done on the spot; and being done in a hurry, and by men not accustomed to the work, it was imperfectly done. The British had not been a week in Turkey before there was an outcry for transport. Lord Raglan had a splendid collection of soldiers; but he could not have marched them fifty miles. Marshal St. Arnaud was, to judge from his letters, in a state of feverish impatience for action; but, according to the statements of Kinglake, he was also in a disturbed as well as ambitious frame of mind. It is said that he tried first to obtain the command of the Turkish army, next to effect an arrangement which would have given him a control over that of Britain. These vagaries of a vain and ambitious man were frustrated by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and Lord Raglan, and they did not meet with the approval of the Emperor. But events pressed. The Russians were certain not to wait until the Allies had devised some plan. It became imperative to see the facts a little more clearly than they could be seen at Constantinople; and, in the middle of May, Lord Raglan and the marshal went to Varna, to meet the Turkish general, and hear from Omar Pasha his view of the situation, and his conception of its requirements. Omar Pasha told them he had 45,000 in Shumla, and with these he could defend it. He had 18,000 in Silistria; but these, he believed, could not hold the place longer than six weeks, that is, to the end of June. He had about 20,000 at Kalafat. The rest of his forces were scattered in detachments. He naturally suggested Varna as the point of concentration for the Allies. The two generals agreed to bring up their troops to Varna.