Each company had a Regular non-commissioned officer as Company Sergeant-Major and another Regular as Company Quartermaster-Sergeant for office duties under the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant. Regulars from the Artillery, Cavalry, and Infantry were also attached as Farrier-Sergeants, Saddlers, and Signallers, and from the Indian Commissariat as Transport Sergeant. The Maxim Gun Contingent, under Captain Holmes was raised and equipped by the East India Railway Company, who offered its services to Colonel Lumsden. The Calcutta Committee had decided, with the sanction of the Government, that Lumsden’s Horse should not want for adequate regimental transport in the field, but, on the contrary, should leave India as a thoroughly organised unit in that respect, with a complete train of transport carts, ponies, and pack mules, all properly equipped. It is hardly necessary to say that the grant of transport, saddlery, and draught harness, for which provision was made in the mobilisation order, did not comprise all that the committee desired; but the inexhaustible Ordnance Stores were again open to be requisitioned ‘on payment,’ and carts of the Indian Army Transport pattern were drawn in a similar way from the Commissariat Department. The ponies and mules, however, had to be collected by agents in the hill districts of Assam and Thibet, a distance of 1,000 miles from Calcutta. When all this was done, the corps could justly be considered fit for active service, and it is certain that no contingent, Volunteer or Regular, landed in South Africa with a more efficient transport than Lumsden’s Horse. It came near being upset, however, by a War Office decision. Almost at the last minute Colonel Lumsden was told that the native drivers would not be permitted to accompany the corps, and that no natives could go except one personal servant for each officer and a limited number of syces, or grooms, in the proportion of one to each charger, as laid down in the mobilisation scheme. This allowance of three native attendants to every officer was on a sufficiently liberal scale, but it did not meet the requirements for transport purposes. Therefore Colonel Lumsden had to enlist European drivers, of whom twenty-six were needed for each company. In ordinary circumstances Anglo-Indian prejudices would have combined to make this an insuperable difficulty; but so keen was the anxiety of men to see war service in South Africa that they volunteered to go in any capacity not necessarily menial, and so Colonel Lumsden got the full complement of drivers together just as readily as lie had filled the ranks with fighting men. War Office conditions stipulated that officers and troopers of the corps must provide their own horses and saddlery, though nearly all of the latter might be drawn from Ordnance Stores at cost price. Naturally the supply of suitable animals for Mounted Infantry work had to be made a corps affair from the outset. Very few of the