Kairwán is between forty and fifty miles as the crow flies from Susa, and the French calculate that it will be five days’ march, making due allowance for attacks by the Arabs _en route_. After leaving Susa the road to Kairwán for ten or twelve miles passes over hills covered with dense olive forests; after that succeeds a wide expanse of undulating, open country up to the very walls of the Tunisian Mecca. Water supply there is none; the few wells at Sidi-el-Hani have been damaged by the Arabs, and even at Susa the water obtainable is insufficient. In the Kasbah there is an enormous well 240 ft. deep, but its contents are unfit for drinking purposes. A large number of camels will accompany the column, each carrying two casks containing twenty-four gallons of water. During the march through the olive woods the French fully expect to be severely harassed by the Arabs after the manner of their recent reconnaissances, and, as they invariably elude pursuit, it is apprehended that they will take advantage of the French advance into the Kairwán plain to intercept if possible communication with the coast, or, at any rate, to pillage the whole of the province of the Sahel between Susa and Sfax. The district of Susa proper alone contains fifty-three populous villages, including Kala Grande and Mesaken, the latter being larger than Susa itself, and the Sheikhs of these villages have informed the nominal governor of that place that as soon as the French column has passed westwards the insurgents will devastate their farms and carry off the remnant of their cattle. It must also be remembered that in a strategic point of view the seaports of Monastir and Mehdia are quite as important as Susa, and that neither of them has been occupied. This is quite as great a blunder as the undefended French railway turned out to be in Northern Tunis, and which, but for the massacre of Oued Zerga, would have been supplemented by the equally capital error of leaving the unoccupied city of Tunis in the rear of the columns advancing southwards on Kairwán. The expeditionary force from Tebessa will be utterly powerless to prevent the attack of the Arabs on the Sahel, and if this takes place (as it certainly will) and extends even to Sfax and Gabes, the garrisons at those places can effect nothing beyond their own walls, as they are masters of just the land they stand on, and nothing more. The French will meet with no resistance at Kairwán itself. The townspeople have long since arranged this with their more courageous fellow-countrymen, who have agreed to attack the French simultaneously at distant points, and who are now fighting at Kef and Ghardimaou and in the valleys and defiles of Zaghouán, and who, after an obstinate resistance in the olive groves between Susa and Mesaken, will retreat only to carry the fire and sword along the Sahel from Susa to Gabes, and very probably to appear before Monastir and Mehdia.