IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT.3) /, 1.0 I.I lAil28 12.5 ISO ■^™ Hi 2.2 1^ 1^ i£ <-25 III 1.4 1 6 .« 6" ^ Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 iV iV ^^ :\ \ ^v 4^ ^^ 6^ ^^ #> 4f» ^ '^ laire IS details ques du nt modifier iciger une le filmage The copy filmed here has been reproduced thanks to the generosity of: National Library of Canada The images appearing here are the best quality possible considering the condition and legibility of the original copy and in keeping with the filming contract specifications. 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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul cliche, 11 est filmi d partir de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images ndcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthoda. by errata ned to ent une pelure, fapon A r I I 32X 1 1^ S 4 5 • WITH KITCHENER TO KHARTUM BY Tin: SAMi: a urn on. EGYPT IN 1898. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo. "Set forth in a style that providea plenty of entcrtainnieut. Bright and readable." — Times. THE LAND Crown «vo. OF THE DOLLAR. Third Edition. "One of the smart:<\st books of travel wliich has appeared for a long time past Brings the ^,'ent'ral apptJiruneeof Tniiisatlantic urban and nual life so clearly lief^re the mind s eye of tlie reader, that a perusal of his work almost answei*s the purpose of a ptusonal inspection. New York has pn)bal>ly never been more lightly and cleverly sketched."— Dciiiy Tdtgraplt. WITH THE CONQUERING TURK: Confkssionh OF A Bash:-Ba2ouk. With Four Maps. Hmall demy Svo. "The most entertaining of the volumes we have had about the Ten Weeks Campaign in the spring It gives brightly, and without any desperate striving after realisjii, a vivid idea of what a correspondent with the Turkish forces in Thessaly went through." —Timei. WITH KITClfKNKIt TO KHARTUM BY G. W. 8TEEVENS AUTIIOH Oe> ■EOVPT IN 18i), 3Ik.\I) & CoMi'ANi I INTRODL7CTORY KOTE. Mr. Steevens' earlier work, '^ With tlie Conquering Turk," was received witli sucli cordial recognition that it is periiaps unnecessary to refer to his qualities as a war correspondent or to his literary £?ifts. The Ano-lo- Egyptian expedition is a greater theme, and the writei of these pages has the advantage of a wider experi- ence, lie has a broader comparative basis for his ob- servation, and his criticism, wliicli he always offers modestly and as an " amateur," has a higher value. At the same time the power of vivid narration and keen characterization is quite as striking. As one of the most remarkable campaigns of liistory the Sirdar's move- ment on Khartum would be an interesting topic at any time, but just now it lias a special claim to atten- tion in this country. A fresh experience of war, with the criticism of its management now ringino* in our, ears, naturally gives an incentive to a comparison which, ds a whole, defies the criticism even of non- combatants. How far such a comparison is justified will appear from these pages. The marvelous, ma^ chine-like precision of the Sirdar's movements is INTRODUCTORY NOTE. described by Mr. Stcevens witli accuracy and graphic presentation of detail, but lie shows with the buiiic clearness the dark background of delays and bhinders and futilities in the years that preceded. It was not an affair of one summer. In being at tlu^ right place at the right time, and in missing nothing of importance', Mr. Steevens shared in tlie Ir.ck which lie attril)ures to the Sirdar's star ; but he had to work for it. lie joined the expedition early in 1S1>T, and he toiled along with it to the end. lie went througli tlic battles of the Atbara and Omdurman. He entered Khartum with the coiKpierors, and he saw the raising of the Union Jack on the spot where Gordon felL graphic ) bUlllC unders 'as not t place rtaiice, rll)ures ^ lie 1 al(Hi": :tles of lartum of the CONTEXTS. I. ITALFA TKLLS ITS STOUY. The rnmnnpe of tlio ^n>\^\) in bn'of — The rise of the 'MKhdi— The second act of f.ln' dtMina — 'I'he fir-s — Tiie Sudaiio.-ve l)attah'oiis — A pei'niniial Bcliodllxiy — liicnii-tant \vaiii(»i's — rolyganiy — rnifurni and et|ni|Mncnt — Cavalry and aitilhM-y — Ihiti-h ofhrcfs and native t(o(>|(s — The inorilM of " .S('ix'»'aia What-isniiiie " — A daily horiiisin — r>fy and I'linlMshj -I!ii|ii(] proaiutiun — Une of the inghuat aciiicvenicuLft of our race • • • • 11 III. THK .S.M.R. The deadliest weafwrn apainst Mahdisni — An inipoasiliillty real- ised — A ht'jivy h.indiiMii — Tlie railw.iy l»altalialtern with £'2000 a-year — Saloon j>a.>sengcr!j — A journey tliruugh the desert — A desert railway statiou . . , , . 22 viu COMTKNTS. IV. THE CORUESrONDENTS PIIOGUESS. An outoagt in the Sudan — The Bipnificiince of a "line of com- Uiunicalii»n8 " — 'I'lie <»l(l and the youn^^ cjxnipaigner— A varied e<|iii|iiti(M»t — The 1)11} iiit; t)f caiiiel.s-- An enciKt'tic hfi^'l — A di>ul*Lful te.'-tiniDniiil — A waiting game — A liunied depar- ture—A happy thought 81 V. I MAIICH TO LEIir.ER. The hiring of donkeys — Aiah delihoration — A v »nderful hor«e — The processidn etaru — Tlie luxury of angarelw — A dia- reputiihle caravan — Four miles an hour — The desert tread- mill — A camel riilu to Berber 89 VI. THE SIRDAR. Irrelevant det-ails — The Sudan Machine — The harvest of fifteen years — A stroke of genius — An unsuccessful enterprise— A diplomatic skirmish with the Khedive — Swift, certain, and relentlesH — A stern regime — A well-trusted general — A legi- timate ambition — The Anglo-Egyptiau Mahdi • • • 45 VII. ARMS AND MEN. Major-Ceneral ITunter — The sword-arm of the Egyptian Army — A nineteenth-century crusader — An ofhcer renowned for bravery — A possible new natit»nal hero — I.ieut.-Col. Hector Macdonald — Lieut. -Col. Maxwell — Lieut.-Col. Lewis — Lieut. -Col. Broadwood — Li"Ut.-Col. Long — General Catacre — The soldier's general — Arab notions about ligurea — Osman Digua — Colonel Wiugate 63 VIII. IN THE BRITISH CAMP. A great march under difTiculties — A gunner's adventure— Tlie boot scandal— Ollicial exi)lanations and admissions — Making the men hard — The geneial's morning i-ide — The camp iu a dust storm — A badly chosen site ..... 66 CONTEl^TS. 12 81 IX. FORT ATBARA. Dinnj^r in the Egyptian camp— Untler a roof again — A sand- BU)rm — The Fort— A rovelation of Kgyptian industry — The Egyptian sohliors on fatigue duty — A Ureck caf«5 — The gun- boat fleet — Crossing the Fourth Cataract— The value of the guuboata — War, blockade-ruuuiug, and pouching combined . 75 89 X. THE MARCH OUT. The beginning and end of the Berber season — A palatial house — IJerl'er, old and new — The value of angarebs — Tiie appre- hensions of tlie Greek merchants — A splendid black battalion — The crossing of the luck token— "Like the English, we are not afraid " — A flattering belief 85 46 XI. THE CONCENTRATION. The restrictions laid on correspondents — Loading the camels — Arab ideas of time— Impartial stupidity of the camel — Peri- patetic Christmas trees — The brigade on the march — The result of General Gatacre's methods — Zariba building — Counting the dervishes from a watch tower — A daring feat of a gunboat • • • 02 68 86 XII. AT KENUR. An ideal residence for correspondents — Arrival of the Seaforths — Daily manoeuvres — A stately spectacle — Native ideas of distance and number • 100 Xin. ON THE ATBARA. A veritable paradise— Sambo and the dora-nuts — A land without life — A cavalry skirmish — A strong reconnaissance — A faka alarm— The real enemy — The want of transport begins to be felt — What oflBcers had to put up with— Dervish deserters — A bold stroke 106 CONTENTS. XIV. THE RAID ON SIIENDI. The virtues of bottled fruits — A liquor famine — The Sudan Greek's commercial instincts— A Nansen of trade — Inter- rupteil festivities at Sliendi — A speedy victory — The Jaalin's revenge — The viciassitudcs of married life iu the Sudau — The cook's grievance . . . . • • • • 116 XV. REST AND RECONNAISSANCES. Mahmud stale-mated — The Egyptian cavalry — Dispiriting work — General Hunter's reconnaissance — Malimud marked rl vvn — liuiuours and aurmiaes — Ueasous for storming the zariba 124 XVI. CAMEL-CORPS AND CAVALRY. Camel-corps luck — Distant firing — The hall-mark of the Sudan — The second and third class passengers of the desert — Traces of a dervish raid — A cavalry fight — The vindication of the Egyptian trooper — A cheerful camp .... 131 f- XVn. THE BATTLE OF THE ATBARA. A march by moonlight — Twelve thousand men move forward — The first gun — An hour and twenty minutes' botnbaid.nent — The Camerons' advance — A rain of fire — The zariba de- molished — A wild confusion of Higlilanders — "A very good fight" — Uow our blacks fought— A masterpiece of a battle 140 XVin. LOSSES AND GAINS. From boys to men— Mahmud and the Sirdar— The Cameroni* losses — Crossing the tienclies — General On'Acre's bugler — Hairbreadth escapes — A cheap victory — This Klialifa's losses — The Raggara cavalry — Ferocious heroism — Counting the dead — Perfect strategy , , 152 I CONTENTS. XI 116 XIX. THE TRIUMPH. The blacks returning from battle — A song of thanksgiving— "They're h)vely ; they're rippers " — (JcMieral Hunter con- voying the wounded — How the injured t(jok their fate — Church-parade— The return to T.erber -The captive Mahmud — Tlie tiuest sight of the wliole triumph . , , . 161 XX. EGYPT OUT OF SEASON. Port Said in summer— Cairo, a desf)hitioii— Tlie Aral) overcome - The Contiiieutal ilulel— Nileless Egypt — The keys uf the ^'ile 1^3 XXI. GOING UP. On the Cairo platform— The worst seventeen hours in Egypt— Tiie line at Luxor — The price of victory over the man-eating Sudan— 'J'he Nile-flood — Haifa — Dervish recruits — Tin ee months' progress at Atbara — The master - toast of the Egyptian aruiy 173 140 XXII. THE FIRST STEPS FORWARD. The force for Orndurman — The Egypn m (Hvision — The Waiwitk.s — CavHh-y and artillery — 'I'ltc new j^uidionts Slatin l'a>ha— What the Kh.dila's refusal to ligliL w.xdd. iJieau 1^0 152 XXIII. IN SUMMER QUAKTl-RS. The one important qtiest ion— Sport on the Atliara— A pessiu)- istio senior captain— The Atln.ra Derlty — A varied coineisu- tiou— The recruit and the mirage— Facetious 'i "uinuiie* 187 xii CONTENTS. XXIV. DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS. How the blacks went up the river — The most business-like business in the world — The Rifles' first experience — Two favoured regiments — Amateur aii J professional transport — The perfection of method . 192 XXV. THE PATHOLOGY OF THIRST. Tlie Sudan thirst — Some fine distinctions — The diversions of a correspondent — The Sirdar at work — How to conquer the thirbt — A sweet revenge — The momeut of the day . . 198 W XXVI. BY ROAD, RIVER, AND RAIL. Fort Atbara becomes a British camp — A record for marching— The gyassas fight the wind — Shipping the 40-pounders — The Irith Fusiliers — The effect of lyddite — The arrival of the Guards — British subalterus — One more iuca -nation . . 205 Til XXVIL THE LAST OP FORT ATBARA. The restrictions of the modem war-correspondent — Scenery finer than Switzerland — Two limp battalions — The Sirdar's lightning movements — A dress -rehearsal of camels — Tardy vengeance for a great humiliatioa 212 Ar XXVIII, THE DESERT MARCH TO OMDURMAN. A young regiment — First impressions of cavalry in the field— A piiiuant contrast— A masterpiece of understatement — A military circus — Camping on an old cotton-field — The vagaries of the Nile — A pleasant camp — The traces of M^hdiifTi .......... 218 Th -u-^ CONTENTS. XIU XXIX. METEMMEH. A sip^-post in tlie wilderness — The massacre of the Jaalin Mahmuds foils— iluhmud'a camp— The ceuoLuph of a tribe 226 192 198 XXX. A COIIIIESPONDENT'S DIARY. little world full of life— The best storm of the season— "In the sLiaiglit" — A standing miracle— A disiisLer to a gunboat— Not a white man's country — The Intelligence Department •....••,, 233 XXXI. THE RECONNAISSANCES. With the 21st Lancers — Dervishes at last I — The lines of Kerreri— The first shot— Kerreri abandoned— Omdurman in sight — The Khalifa's army — A perfect reconnaissance . 249 205 XXXII. THE BATTLE OF OMDURMAN. Tlie position— The first attack — " Bearer party there I "—On to Omdurman— The second attack — Bi-oadwood in difficulties — The Lancers' charge— Three against three thousand— The third attack — Macdouald and his blacka— The last Derviah 259 , 212 XXXIII. ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM. An appalling slaughter— Our losses— Casualties among corres- pondents — The Khalifa's blunders and probable fate— The battle of Gedaref — Our mistakes and our merits , , 284 I 218 XXXIV. OMDURMAN. The destruction of the forts— The white flag — A squalid capital — A huge harem — Through the breach— In the Khalifa's citadel — Imposing on the savage — Cone! — Testing the Khalifa's corn — Dog-tired — Flotsam of civilisation — Filth, lust, and blood 297 f XIV CONTENTS. XXXV. TEE FUNERAL OF GORDON. The Avengers— The seal on Klmrtum— The service— In Gordon's garden— We leave him with the flag 810 XXXVI. AFTER THE CONQUEST. A tragedy played out — The vindication of our national self- respect— Tlie trade of the Sudan— Fat Egypt and the lean Sudan — Beggarly, empty, miserable— Egyptian officials— What Egypt has gained by the conquest — The future of the Egyptian army— An empty limbo of torment— Naked nature ••••..... 317 G Si Si Ti K f LIST OF MAPS. 317 General Map — Egypt to Uganda . At the heginning Sketch Map of the Nile and Atbara, to illustrate the operations against Mahmoud . . To/ace p. 78 Sketch Plan op the Battle of Atbara . The Nile— :Metemmeh to Khartum . . Khartum and Omdurman . . . • Battle of Omdurman, Phase One, 7 a.m. . II ft It Two, 9.40 a.m. H w Three, 10.10 A.M. h 144 220 246 260 266 H 278 THE CHIEF EVENTS IN THE ATBARA AND OMDURMAN CAMPAIGNS. Sirdar asks for reiuforcemeuts of British troops ....... British brigade starts for front from Abu Dis II M reaches Dibeika, beyuud Berber Sirdar leases Berber Concentration at Kenur Army moves up the Atbara . First contact with Dervish cavalry Shendi raided and destroyed . General Hunter reconnoitres Mahmud's zariba Second reconnaissance : cavalry action before Mahmud's zariba . Battle of the Atbara Sirdar's triumphal entry into Berber Railhead reaches Abeiditli : construction of new gunboats begun Railhead reaches Fort Atbara Lewis's Brigade leaves Atbara for south Second British brigade arrives at Atbara Sirdar leaves Atbara for front Last troops leave Atbara Final concentration at Gebel Royan March from Gebel Royan to Wady Abid (eight miles) ....... March from AVady Abid to Sayal (ten miiC?i) It Sayal to Wady Suetne (eight miles ) Kerreri reconnoitred and shelled . March from Wady Suetne to Agaiga (six miles); Omdurman reconnoitred and furta silenced Battle and capture of Omdurman . Funeral of Gordon . . . Sirdar starts for Fashoda . • Battle of Gedaref .... Sirdar returns from Fashoda . Dec. 31, Feb. 26, March 3, 15. 16. 20, 21, 27. 30, 1897 1898 •t H It II II II April 4, II 8, II 11, II 29, II 30, n 31, n 31, Sept. 1, .. 2, « 4, n 9, N 22, M 24, II II II H N n N N N II 18, n June (middle) ii July (early) ii Aug. 3-17, II II 13, N II 18, N •I 28, N •I H n II N N M M It M 1897 1898 II II II n N N H m « N II le) ., N II N N N n N N N N II N n N M jf>%a3db. tkft .«ldtl»'?v^ •;! 1 •*^ : 1 th i its 1 wc '1 : ^ 1 loi >. " '1 1 m( * ** I , ^B mj •f i si ' '-• "■■' -- ■--- — .,^ '-- ^■— ■— ..^_,*.. ^ -^^^.^-2S«.* ^ -.-,, - 1 WITH KITCHENEK TO KHAETUM. HALFA TELLS ITS STORY. ^K 1 A' iff } \ To walk round Wady Haifa is to read the whole romance of the Sudan. This is the look-out whence Egypt has strained her vision up-Nile to the vast, silent, torrid, murderous desert land, which has been in turn her neighbour, her victim, all but her undoing, and is now to be her triumph again. On us English, too, the Sudan has played its fatal witchery, and half the tale of Haifa is our own as well as Egypt's. On its buildings and up and down its sandy, windy streets we may trace all the stages of the first conquest, the loss, the bitter failures to recover, the slow recom- mencement, the presage of final victory. You can get the whole tale into a walk of ten minutes. First look at that big white building : it is GENERAL MAP EGY] M E D I T E R II A NS^ A If S t; A .^ju. leb. td^anxfibcvcd hebeb^_ ~ "^ Oiufllmiu.ui'j -, Jbdn2la Wa.ra\ SertFr ^ elj.rett'na] a. K O R, D G F A >{' I Hara' t D A R^- F t3, lO Bu-h;wea "''. >^ J OaiftH y\ /jjiAn /jr bntA'.: V% sS^ '''\l Dark- el-Bixket .^flu-fa.,..,--' S'loiguik^-^' DarTagali) ^ ^ 7:f 7 -'^'"^'^° .! t' ( >.-ij)^;< ^RAL MAP EGYPT TO UGANDA Sy r I. a re V*" D f a e.r t Hal' V, >7 ',> '!'-»"itf>ATn<-»"n.R"¥ '' 1^, 'TBS, 11 Ifi'/inrra Jj .. v. -^ ' ^V^ 'Mpi>>-'» Sin yeVud Desert ilia' '"''/'W Das^R Ditniiut SatabA hit rhebh JhUika -I 'L'''/""'^'it*»^fi'n.,.. w* JiirJlb*ai^.f-^!^fiif^ ; BirKeiei ,' JEiulMEr '(fforf. -Desert *'Aiiil)uU.ol V Ojudmiu;iii7^\Kliarfuxn. M e r Q & el raah ^- "^'"^"^"f ir? ;Av> Island i^f' ■ I HaUUMll • , rr, . ••. 5-Jb^ „c*] Ol.ei.l ,,, -'^ ^ '^ •• • f , Ih.i t'uritfr- 10 .,/,'. il Fein \ „„„ ,• ' ° > . ;l \)i I (-^ ErnJttiiTHii \ " »JiJ I'ashcr 1) A R - F t\IU •Ta.RiWha ^*;;;;^'^'^;^^,i^-^\l Dari-el-Birket „^.„, A , '.. RlSEOWir \\r^-Oomf ^'fashi xter loo" irx^TisK Milt* ilUK ILlIM Jlara* .clOl-.ul ,,, • O H.Zequ jj A . / v I** ^sere ''/, I r IirnJIfauii' nmk \ - V I ± JCu jaiAJ t\ • yuir^. ■•••3^ (}>', Voh J .:-m ■Kn\ ! ''C i^Miii.::!' .■^''/' :■ '^ Sl^itll / c; I *• it * I ■. ' ■ idc" .SM H BV HV V JMatnj Mo Wj*^ SuJai-tn «5JGr-o- ■V{- ■*■ A ^.'iucJlBAj' V -^; »?^ G »fetizu2'i LJs, ''H i TJi.lWO f.'iittV""' ^». ;n^^ " "#"B R I n S H"^ E A S T %A r R I C A ifieton AUei-tJEthnv _ I' ."' =!■• ■ A v SlniniiaeJiSyj, iaiei jdoiTOtt r/^' '.tCi.«, ?^ .Seaac-Arch. ^ Fj c t or i a: ' 'Slow ,^ .''V-'? £« , .'3* rfoOf .0 \.y° .?,; 1 ;(^ 5VfiirJn r ;35 <»■' .'^Hii :■■ ■>V0lBC)2»r so o inglUK MiUt ai>o HALFA TELLS ITS STORY. the Egyptian military hospital, and one of the largest, soliilest structures of Haifa. In shape and style, you will notice, it is not unlike a rail way -station — and that is just what it was meant to be. That was tlie northern terminus of Ismail Pasha's great railway to Khartum, which was to have run up-river to Don^ola aiul l)L'l)h('li, and thence across the linyuda, by Jakdul and Aim Xlea to Metemmeh. The scheme fell short, like all Ismail's grandiose ambitions; (Jordon stopped it, and j»aid for his unforcsight with his life. The railway never reached the Third Cataract. Tiie upper part of it was torn to pieces by the Dervislies, who chopped the sleepers into firewood, and twisted the telegrnph -wires to spear-heads ; the part nearer Haifa lay half-derelict for many years, till it was aroused at length to play its part in the later act of the tragedy of the Sudan. Now, twenty yards along the line — in this central part of !' Ifa every street is also a railway — you see a l»attered, broken -winded engine. It was here in 1884. That is one of the properties of the second act — the nerveless efforts to hold the Sudan when the ^laluli began to rip it loose. For in the year 1881, before we came to Egypt at all, there had arisen a re- ligious teacher, a native of Dongola, named Mohammed Ahmed. The Sudan is the home of fanaticism : it has always been called " the Land of the Dervishes," and no rising saint was more ascetic than the young DongolawL He was a disciple of a holy man named THE BKCill^NlNG OF THE MA111>1. largest, yle, you )n — and was the ilway to Don^ola ' Jakdul 11 short, stopped fc. The le upper hes, who sted the ir Haifa oused at tragedy central you see lere in ;ond act len the ar 1881, en a re- lammed ism : it vishes," e young named Mohammed Slierif, and one day the master gave a feuNi at which there was dancing and sinj^ing. Sueli friv- olity, said jMohammed Ahmed, Wiis displeasing to Allah; whereat the Sherif was angry, cursed him, and cast him out. The disciple sprinkled ashes on his head, put a yoke on his neck, and fell at his master's feet, imploring forgiveness. Again Moham- med Sherif cursed him and cast him out. Angered now himself, Mohammed Ahmed joined a new teacher and became a straiter ascetic than ever. The fame of his sanctity spread, and adherents flocked to him. He saw that the people of the Sudan, smart- ing under extortion and oppression, could but too easily be roused against the Egyptian Government : he risked all, and proclaimed himself El Mahdi el Muntazer, the Expected Guide, the Mussulman Messiah. The Governor - General at Khartum sent two comi)anies to arrest him : the Mahdi's followers fell on them unawares and destroyed them. More troops were sent ; the Mahdists destroyed them : next came a small army, and again the Mahdists destroyed it. The barbarous tribesmen flocked to the Mahdi's standard, and in September 1882 he laid siege to Ei Obeid, the chief city of Kordofan. His assault was beaten back with great slau^^hter, but after tive months' siege the town surrendered ; sack and massacre taught doubters what they had to expect. The Sudan doubted no longer : of a truth this was the Mahdi. Hicks Pasha's army came down from the HALFA TELLS ITS STORY. North only to swell the Mahdi's triumph to immensity. Unorganised, unwieldy, afraid, the Egyptians crawled on towards El Obeid, harassed by an enemy they never saw. They saw them at last on November 4, 1883, at Shekan : the fight lasted a minute, and the massacre spared only hundreds out of ten thousand. The rest you know — Gordon's mission, the loss of Berber, the siege of Khartum, the massacre of Baker's levies at El Teb, Graham's expedition to Suakim, and the hard-fought figlits of the second Teb and Tamai, Wolseley's expedition up the Nile, with Abu Klea and the Gubar and Kirbekan, the second Suakim cam- paign and M'Neill's zariba. Everybody knows these stories, so gallant, so futile. I remember thirteen and fourteen years ago being enormously proud and joyful about Tamai and Abu Klea. I was very young. Read over the tale again now — the faltering and the folly and the failure — and you will feel that if Egypt has Baker's Teb and Hicks's ruin to wipe out, Eng- land was not so very far from suffering precisely the same humiliations. And in the end we failed, with what loss we still remember, and gave the Sudan aw y. The second act is not a merry one. The third was less tragic, but it was perhaps even harder to play. We pass by a mud-walled quad- rangle, which was once the artillery barracks ; through the gateway you look across sand to the mud ram- parts of Haifa. That is the stamp of the days of reorganisation, of retrenchment, of difficulties and \ imensity. 3 crawled my they member 4, 1, and the thousand, e loss of )f Baker's ikim, and id Tamai, Klea and kim cam- Dws these thirteen )roud and !ry young. f and the if Egypt out, Eng- isely the led, with e Sudan |aps even id quad- through lud ram- days of [ties and i THE FIRST ANGLO-EGYPTIAN VICTORY. discouragements, and unconquernble, undisnppointed work. Tliose were the days wlien the Egyptian army was in the making, when Haifa was tlie fron- tier fortress. There are old barracks all over it, where the young fiuhting force of Egypt used to sleep half awake. The brown Hanks of tliose hills beyond the rifle-range, just a couple of miles or so desert- wards, have seen Dervishes stealing up in broad day and insolently slasliing and stal)bing in the main Streets of the bazaar. Yet this time was not all un- avenged insult: the long years between 1885 aid 1896 saw Egypt defended and its assailtints smashed to pieces. Little by little Egypt — British Egypt now — gained strength and new resolution. Four battles mark the stages from weakness and abandonment to confidence and the resoluticm to re- conquer. At Ginnis, on tlie last day but one of 1885, came the first Anglo - Plgyptian strategical victory. The Mahdists had been tactically beaten before — well beaten; but the result had always been that we fell back and they came on. After Ginnis, fouglit by the British army of occupation, aided by a small number of the new Egyptian army, we stood firm, and the Dervishes were washed back. There were men of the Cameron Highlanders on the Atbara, who had fought in that battle : it was not perhaps a very great one, but it was the first time the enemy had been brought to a standstill. He retired behind the Third Cataract. G HALFA TELLS ITS STORY. i 1 ■; 1 ( ;: i TIioii followed three years of raid and counter-raid. .i Cherniside cut up their advance-guard at Sarras; they a 1^ captured the fort of Khor Musa, and Machell Bey of j the 13th Sudanese drove them out within twelve b ji hours. On the Suakim side the present Sirdar made w \ head against Osman Digna with what irregulars and w friendlies he could get together. Then in 1888 Osman N waxed insolent and threw up trenches against Suakim. ri 1 It became a regular siege, and Dervish shells fell into tl] the town. But on December 20 Sir Francis Grenfell, in the Sirdar, came down and attacked the trenches at the battle of Gemaizeh, and Osman fell back shat- ail tered : never again did he come so near his soul's ro ambition. H Meanwhile Wad-en-Nejumi — the great Emir, the lei conqueror of Hicks and the captor of Khartum — had all hung on the southern frontier, gathering strength for W£ his attack on Egypt. He came in 1889, skirting gl^ Haifa in the western desert, striking for a point in tn Egypt proper above Assuan. His Emirs got out of fo] hand nnd tried to get to the Nile; in a hard day's to tussle at Argin, Colonel Wodehouse and the Haifa Y( • garrison threw him back into the desert again. Ne- CO junii pushed on southward, certain of death, certain of ey Paradise. At Toski Grenfell brouglit him to battle tr^ •i with the flower of the Egyptian army. At the end of as the day Nejunii was dead and his army was beginning da to die of thirst in the desert. Egypt has never been th attacked since. m THE TUR^'ING- POINT OF THE DRAMA. mter-raid. Tas; they 2ll Bey of in twelve dar made ulars and 88 Osman t Suakim. s fell into ; Grenfell, enches at ack shat- his soul's Emir, the ;um — had ength for skirting point in Dt out of ard day's he Haifa hm. Ne- ertain of to battle le end of )eginning ver been Finally, in 1891 Colonel Holled - Smith marched against Osman Digna's base outside Suakim, the oasis of Tokat. The Dervishes sprang upon him at Afafil, but the days of surprise and panic were over. They were rolled back and shattered to pieces ; their base was occupied ; and Suakim as well as Haifa had i)eace. Now all ground was finally maintained, and all was ripe for attack again. England heard little of this third act ; but for all that, unadvertised, hard-work- ing, it was the turning-point of the whole drama. And now we have come to the locomotive-sheds and the fitting-shops, the boiler-houses and the store- rooms ; we are back in the present again, and the Haifa of to-day is the Egypt of to-day. Haifa has left off being a fortress and a garrison; to-day it is all workshop and railway terminus. To-day it makes war not with bayonets, but with rivets and spindlc- glauds. Railways run along every dusty street, and trains and trucks clank up and down till ialfa looks for all the world like Chicago in a turban. In chains, too, for to Haifa come all the worst villains of Egypt. You must know that, till the other day, no ICi^ypLian could be hanged for murder except on the evidence of eyewitnesses — just the people whom most murderers try to avoid. So the rails and sleepers are slung ashore to the jingle of ankle - chains ; and after a day in Haifa it startles you in no way to hear that the black foreman of the en;^qne-shop did liis five murders, and that, nevertheless, he is a most iutelli- 8 HAIFA TELLS ITS STORY. i I li gent, industrious, and harmless creature. On the con- trary, you find it admirable that Egypt's ruffians are d.ou\ of every 5 1 in 89, Je-iooting, the birth Jr carried Egyptian e colours 'he small Office to 3 also the ^ to any of con- le fellah salary, in full asy con- For of 14th— is not :JnS. by 1 wher- and he ierrible black it only gives comfort and security in the natural vocation of every man worth calling sucli — war. Many o.f the black soldiers have fought against us in the past, with the same energy and enjoyment as they now exhibit in our service. After each victory the more desirable of the prisoners and deserters are enlisted, to their great content, in one black battalion or another. Every morning I had seen them on the range at Haifa — the British sergeant-instructor teach- ing the ex-Dervishes to shoot. When the recruit made a bull — which he did surprisingly often — the white sergeant, standinp; behind him with a paper, cried, " Quaiss kitir" — " Very good." When he made a fool of himself, the black sergeant trod on him as he lay flat on his belly : he accepted praise and reproof with equal satisfaction, as part of his new game of disciplined war. The black is a perenuial schoolboy, without the schooling. The blac soldier is not adapted lo garrison life. They brought a battalion down to Cairo once ; but the soldiers insisted on driving about all day in carriages, and then beat the driver when he asked for his fare. Ever since then the Sudanese battalions have been kept on the frontier — either up the Nile or on the Suakim side, wherever there has been fighting to do. Having neither knowledge of civilised enjoyments nor desire for them, they are very happy. Their pay is, properly, higher than that of the fellahin — 14s. a- month to begin with and Sjd. a-day allowance for the 14 THE EGYPTIAN ARMY. wife and family of such as are allowed to marry. The allowance is g'ven generously, for woman is to the black soldier a necessary of life. On a campaijjn he must, of course, leave his wife and children behind: there is a large village of them just above Assuan. But since their time, I am afraid, as the frontier has ever advanced up-river, the inconstant warrior has formed fresh ties ; and now at Haifa, at Dongola, at Berber, the path of victory is milestoned with expec- tant wives and children. It is not so abandoned as it sounds, for the Sudan- ese are born of polygamy, and it would be unreason- able to expect them not to live in it. Here is a typical case. One day a particularly smart soldier came and desired to speak with his commanding officer. " I wish to marry, thou Bey," he said. " But aren't you married ? " " Yes ; but my wife is old and has no child, and I desire a child. I wish therefore to marry the sister of Sergeant Mohammed Ali, and he also is willing." " Then you want to send away your present wife ? " "0 no, Excellency. My wife cooks very well, and I want her to cook my rations. She also is willing." So, everybody being willing, the second marriage took place. Mohammed All's sister duly bore a son, and the first wife cooked for the whole family, and they all lived happy ever afterwards. EGYPTIAN CAVALRY. 15 Each infantry battalion, black and Egyptian alike, is divided into six companies, wliich parade between 100 and 120 strong ; a battalion thus counts rouglily, with band and bearer parties, from 650 to 750 rifles. The normal strength of a battalion is 759. The uniform is much the same for all arms — brown jersey, sand-coloured trousers, and dark-blue putties. Over the tarbush the Egyptians have a cover which hangs down behind over the nape of the neck : the blacks need no such protection from their native sun, and do with plaited-straw round the tarbush, bearing a badge whose colour varies with the various battalions. The infantry rifle is the Martini. The cavalry are all Egyptians, recruited mostly from the Fayum oasis : a black can never be made to understand that a horse needs to be groomed and fed. The horses are stout, hardy beasts of 13 hands or so: they get through an amazing amount of work, and so do the men, though they are a little heavy in the saddle. The strength of a squadron is about 100 ; the front rank, as in all civilised armies, carry lance as well as sabre and Martini carbine. Seven of the sqnadron leaders are J^nglishmen. Two batteries of field-artillery are armed with new Maxim-Nordenfeldt quick-firing 9-pounders, or 18- pounders with a double shell — handy little creatures which a couple oi mules draw easily. The horse- battery has 12-pounder Krupps, the rest 9-pounders. Each battery has a white commander: all the men 16 THE EGYPTIAN ARMY. are Egyptians, and their physical strength and teach- ableness niuke them ahnost ideal gunners. The camel corps is some 800 strong — half black, half fellah. They use the mounted-infantry saddle, sitting astride, and carry Martini and bajonet. There are five white officers. Of the fellah battalions some are officered by Englishmen, some not. The former are 1st to 4th and 15th to 18th ; 5th to 8th are officered entirely by natives. Until this campaign the normal number of white officers has been three to an Egyptian and four to a Sudanese battalion: the latter require more holding, and also usually see more fighting, than the former. Most of them were one or even two short. But for this campaign — the final campaign, the climax for which the Anglo-Egyptian army has existed and drudged sixteen years — the number of British officers had been raised to four in some battalions for the fellahin and five for the blacks. There has been com- plaining, both in Egypt and at home, that the propor- tion of British to Egyptian officers seems to grow greater, whereas in theory it ought to grow less; but the objection is political rather than military. Many good judges would like to see a few black bat- talions officered ripht through by white men, like our AVest India lieginient. There is no better regimental officer than the Englishman ; there is no better natural fighter than the Sudanese: there would hardly be a likelier force in th>3 world. BEBOEANT WHATSISNAMB. 17 The native officers are largely of Turkish, Circas- sian, or Albanian race, with the qualities and defects of their blood ; their standard of professional attain- ment and duty is higlier than that of the Turkish army, their courage in action no lower. Native Egyp- tians have furnished the army with one or two con- spicuously useful officers. There is also a certain proportion of black captains and subalterns among the Sudanese : they are keen, work well with the British, and, of course, are utterly fearless ; but, as a rule, lack of education keeps them out of the higher grades. Finally, we must not forget Sergeant Whatsisname, as with grateful appreciation of fame at Mr Kipling's hands he is proud to call himself. Each battalion has as instructor a British non-commissioned officer: he drills it, teaches it to shoot, makes soldiers of it. Perhaps there is no body of men in the world who do more unalloyed and unlimited credit to their coun- try than the colour-sergeants and sergeants with the Egyptian army. In many ways their position is a very dillicult one. Technically they are sub(jiJinate to all native officers down to the latest-joined sub- lieutenant. The slacker sort of native officer resents the presence of tiiese keenly military subordinates, and does his best to make them uncomfortable. But the white sergeant knows how not to see unpleasant- ness till it is absolutely unavoidable ; then he knows how to go quietly to his colonel and assert his posi- 18 THE EGYPTIAN ARMY. tion without publicly humiliating his superior. When you hear that the sergeant - instructors are highly endowed with tact, you will guess that in the virtues tliat come more naturally to the British sergeant they shine exceedingly. Their passionate devotion to duty rises to a daily heroism. Living year in, year out, in a climate very hard upon Europeans, they are natur- ally unable to palliate it with the comparative luxuries of the officer; though it must be said that the con- sideration of the officer for his non-commissioned comrade is one of the kindliest of all the many kindly touches with which the British-Egyptian softens pri- vation and war. But the white officer rides and the white sergeant marclies. "Where a nigger can go, I can go," he says, and tramps on through the sun. Early in the year one of them marched with the 4th every step of the road from Suakim — the only white man who ever did it. In action the white sergeant has no particular place or duties, £ he charges ahead of the first line. At Haifa, training the recruits, he has no officer set over him, and can do pretty well what he likes ; so he stands five hours in the sun before breakfast wi'h his men on the range. He must needs be a keen soldier or he would not have volunteered for his post, and a good one, or he would not have got it. But on the top of this he is also essentially a fine man. StilTcned by marches and fights and cholera camps, broadened by contact with things new and strange, polished by a closer associa- AN ARMY OF YOUNG MEN. 19 ahead ts, he well sun He have would also and with socia- tion with his officers than the service allows at home, elevated by responsibility cheerfully undertaken and honourably sustained, — he is a mirror of soldierly virtue. The position of the British officer is as assured as that of the sergeant is ambiguous. No British regimental officer takes lower rank than major (Bimbashi) ; none has any superior native officer in his own corps. The lieutenant -colonel (KaimaJcam) commanding each battalion is usually a captain or major in the British army, and the Bimbashis usually subalterns : so many of both ranks, however, have earned brevets or been promoted, that in talking of officers in the Egyptian army it will be simplest to call a battalion commander Bey, which is the courtesy title by which he is usually addressed, and his British subordinate Bimbashi. To take a man from the command of a company and put him to command a battalion is a big jump ; but with the British officers in Egypt the experiment has richly justified itself. The Egyptian army is an army of young men. The Sirdar is forty-eight years old ; General Hunter was a major-general before he was forty. The whole army has only one combatant officer over fifty. Through the Dongola cumpaign majors commanded brigades and captains battalions ; at Abu Hamed, last year, a subaltern of twenty-eight led his regiment in action. With men either rash or timid such sudden promotion might be dangerous; 20 THE EGYPTIAN AKMT. but the officers of the Egyptian army are at the same time unafraid of res^ onsibility and equal to it. Their professional success has been very great — some whisper, too great. "After Tel-el-Kebir," said a captain in the British brigade, "one of our officers came to me and talked of joining the Egyptian army. Eor God's sake, don't,' I said; 'don't: you'll spend your life thrashing fellahin into action with a stick.* Now, here am I commanding a company, and a man who was under me in the Kandahar show is com- manding a brigade." Certainly the Egyptian officers may have passed over men as good as they ; but their luck has lain solely in getting the chance to show their merit. For after all the fact remains, that while the British campaigns in the Sudan are a long story of failure brightened only by stout fighting, the Egyptian campaigns have been a consistent record of success. With inferior material, at a tithe of the expense, they have worn their enemy down by sheer patience and pluck and knowledge of their business. In the old days campaigns were given up for want of transport ; now rations are as certain in Kliartum as in Cairo. In the old days we used to be surprised and to fight in square ; now we surprise the enemy and attack in line. In quite plain language, what Gordon and Wolseley failed to do the Sirdar has done. The credit is not all his : part must go to Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Francis Greufell, his predecessors, and to the whole body of A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT. 21 officers in due proportion. They have paid for their promotion with years on the frontier— years of sweat and sandstorm by day, of shivering and alarms by night, of banishment always ; above all, they have richly earned it by success. Now that the long struggle is crowned with victory, we may look back on those fourteen indomitable years as one of the highest achievements of our raca and IIL THE S.M.B. Halfa is nearly four hundred miles from the iitbara ; yet it was the decisive point of the campaign. For in Haifa was being forged the deadliest weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism — the Sudan Military Eailway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolseley's campaign and the machine-like precision of Kitchener's. "When civilisa- tion fights with barbarism it must fight with civilised weapons ; for with his own arts on his own ground the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan without complete transport and certain communications is as near madness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar's side, whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley ; and of that, as of every point in his game, the Sirdar has known how to ensure the full advantage. There was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara : the campaign would have i AN ENGINEEIIING FEAT. 23 the Lord ^ame, itage. the have failed without them ; but without the railway there could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbara was won in the workshops of Wady Haifa. Everybody knew that a railway from Haifa across the desert to Abu Haraed was an impossibility — until the Sirdar turned it into a fact. It was characteristic of the Sirdar's daring — daring based on complete know- ledge and just confidence in himself and his instru- ments ; but to the uninformed it sf'ems mad reckless- ness — that he actually launched his rails and sleepers into the waterless dt sert, while the other end of the line was still held by the enemy. Water was bored for, and, at the third attempt, found, which lightened the task ; but the engineers are convinced that, water or no water, the Sirdar's ingenuity and determination would have carried the enterprise through. Long before the line was due to arrive Abu Hamed had fallen : before the end of 1897 the line touched the Nile again at that point, 234 miles from Haifa, and the journey to Ber- ber took a day instead of weeks. There was no pause at Abu Hamed ; work was begun immediately on the 149-mile stretch to the Atbara. At the beginning of the year, when the rumours of Mahmud's advance began to harden into credibility and the British regiments were started up the river, rail-head was some twenty miles south of Abu Hamed. The object, of course, was to push it on south of the series of rapids ending at Geneineteh, S4 THE S.2I.B. some twenty-odd miles short of Berber, which are called the Fifth Cataract. On the falling river camel portage had to be used round the broken water, which was a serious difficulty in the way of the transport A second object in hurrying on the work was to get the sections of the three new gunboats to the same point south of the cataract, where they could be pub together ready for the final advance. It was a heavy strain, for the railway had not only to carry up supplies and stores : it had also to carry the materials for its own extension. There is no wood for sleepers between Abu Hamed ana the Atbara, much less any possibility of providing riils. So that all day long you heard the wailing lilt, with- out which no Arab can work in time ; all day at intervals the long material train pulled out from the beach-siding piled up with rails and sleepers, paused awhile at the bank of sand which is the platform of the northern terminus, and in due time puffed off southward till it was lost among the desert sand- hills. It was a heavy handicap that an infant railway should be asked for double work, but that was only the beginning of the difficulty. The S.M.E., like every thing else in Egypt, must be worked on the cheap. There is no trouble about the labour — the Eailway Battalions supply that. The Eailway Battalions are raised by conscription, only instead of fighting with Martini and bayonet the conscripts fight with shovel al oi THK RAILWAY BATTALIONS. 25 and pick. I have heard it called the Corv4e in an- other form : so, if you like, it is. But it is no more Corvee than the work of sappers in any European army. The fellah has to shovel for his country in- stead of fighting for it, and he would much rather. It is war service which happens to retain a permanent value when war is over; so much the better for everybody. But if navvy labour is abundant and cheap and efficient, everything else is scarce and cheap and nasty. English firemen and drivers are hard to get, and Italian mechanics are largely employed — so much so, that the Director of Eailways has found it worth wbile to spare a caf^ for them out of his cramped elbow-room. As for native mechanics, there re branches of work in which they are hopeless. As fitters they are a direct temptation to suicide, for the Arab mind can never be brought to see that a tenth of an inch more or less can possibly matter to any- body. "3Ialesh" he says, "it doesn't matter; shove it in." And then the engine breaks down. As for engines and rolling-stock the S.M.E. must make the best of what it can get. Half-a-dozen new engines of English breed there were when I got to Haifa — fine, glossy, upstanding, clean-limbed, power- ful creatures ; and it was a joy to watch the marvelling black sentry looking up to one of them in adoration and then warily round lest anybody should seek to steal it. There were others oi veered, but — miracle of 26 THE S.M.R. national lunacy! — the engineering strike intervened, and the orders had to go to Baldwin's of Philadelphia. For the rest the staff had to mend up anything they found about. Old engines from Ismail's abortive rail- way, old engines from Natal, from the Cape, broken and derelict, had to be patched up with any kind of possible fittings retrieved and adapted from the scrap- heap. Odd parts wen picked up in the sand and fitted into their places again : if they were useless they were promptly turned into something else and made useful. Tnere are a couple of Ismail's boilers in use now which were found lying miles away in the desert and rolled in by lever and hand. In the engine-shed you see rusty embryos of engines that are being tinkered together with bits of rubbish col- lected from everywhere. And still they move. Who moves them ? It is part of the Sirdar's luck — that luck which goes with genius — that he always gets the best conceivable subordinates. Conceive a blend of French audacity of imagination, American ingenuity, and British doggedness in execution, and you will have the ideal qualities for such a work. The Director of Railways, Bimbashi Girouard, is a Canadian, presumably of French derivation. In early life he built a section of the Canadian Pacific. He came out to Egypt for the Dongola campai^^ -one of three subalterns specially chosen from the Railway Department of the lioyal Engineers. The Sudan killed the other two out of hand, but Bimbashi A CEOWNING WONDER. 27 Tvened, delphia. ig they ve rail- broken kind of J scrap- id and useless !se and tiers in in the [n the !S that 3h col- 's luck ilways eive a erican 1, and work. ; is a early . He )ne of ilway sudan bashi Girouard goes on building and running his railways. The Dongola line runs as far as Kernia, above the Third Cataract. The Desert Line must wait at the Atbara for a bridge before it can be extended to Kliar- tum. But already here is something over five hundred miles of rail laid in a savage desert — a record to make the reputation of any engineer in the world, standing to the credit of a subaltern of sappers. The Egyptian army is a triumph of youth on every side, but in none is it more signal than in the case of the Director of Ilailways. He never loses his he^d nor forgets his own mind: he is credited with being the one man in the Egyptian army who is unaffectedly unafraid of the Sirdar. Having finished the S.M.R. to the Atbara, Bimbashi Girouard accepted the post of Director-Genera of all the Egyptian railways. There will be plenty of scope for him in the post, and it will not be wasted. But just reflect again on this crowning wonder of British Egypt — a subaltern with all but Cabinet rank and £2000 a-year! When the time came to go up by the desert line an engine, two trucks, and a fatigue-party called at the door for our baggage: that is the advantage of a rail- way-traffic managed by subalterns. We had the luck to get berths in the big saloon. It is built on the Indian plan — four beds in one compartment, eight in the other, plenty of room on the floor, and shutters everywhere to keep out the sand. The train looked as if the other 5 I 1 as THE S.M.R. end of it must be at Abu Hamed already — a vista of rails, sleepers, boxes, camels, and soldiers, and two turkeys, the property of a voluptuous Brigadier, bub- bling with indignation through the darknes«?. How- ever she ran out smoothly enough towards midnight. We slept peacefully, four of us — the other made night hideous with kicks, and exhortations to vision- ary soldiers to fire low — and in the morning woke up rather less than a liundred miles on our way. But then the first hundred miles is all up-hill, though the gradient is nowhere difficult. The train ran beauti- fully, for while the surface sand is very easy to work it has a firm bottom, and the rails do not settle. All day we rumbled on prosperously, with no mischance more serious than a broken rail, and we crawled safely over that. Half the day we read and half the day we played cards, and when it grew dark we sang, for all the world like Thomas Atkins. Every now and then we varied the monotony with a meal ; the train stopped frequently, and even when it did not the pace was slow enough for an agile butler to serve lunch by jumping off his truck and climbing on to the saloon foot-board. The scenery, it must be owned, was monotonous, and yet not without haunting beauty. Mile on mile, hour on hour, we glided through sheer desert. Yellow sand to right and left — now stretching away endlessly, now a valley between small broken hills. Sometimes the hills sloped away from us, then they closed in again. n a A DESERT SWINDON. 29 Now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, now soft puri)le as we ran under their flanks. But always they were steeped throu','h and through with sun — hazy, immobile, cilent. It looked like a part of the world quite new, with none of the bloom rubbed off. It seemed almost profanity that I should be intruding on the sanctity of the prime. But I was not the lirst intruder. Straight, firm, and purposeful ran the rails. Now they split into a double line : here was another train waiting — a string of empty trucks — and also a tent, a little hut made of sleeper baulks, a tank, points, and a board with the inscription " No. 5." Tliis was a station — a wayside station. But No. 6 is a Swindon of the desert. Every train stops there half-an-hour or more to fill up with water, for there is a great trifoliate well there. Also the train changes drivers. And here, a hundred miles into the iieart of the Nubian desert, two years ago a sanctuary of inviolate silence, where no blade of green ever sprang, where, possibly, no foot trod since the birth of the world, here is a little colony of British engine-drivers. Tl.iey have a little rest-house shanty of board and galvanised iron ; there are pictures from the illustrated papers on the walls, and a pup at the door. There they swelter and smoke and spit and look out at the winking rails and the red-hot sand, and wait till their turn comes to take the train. They don't love the life — who would? — but they stick to it like Britons, and take the trains 30 THE S.M.R. out and home. They, too, are not the meanest of the conquerors of the Sudan. Towards du>k mimosa bushes, dotted park-wise over the sand, began to rise up on both sides of us, then palms; soon we were in a thickish scrub. The air cooled and moistened from death to life : we were back again on the Nile, at Abu Hamed. Thereafter we slept peacefully again, and awoke in the midst of a large camp of white tents. They unhooked the saloon, but the train crawled on, disgorging rails and sleepers, till it came to a place where a swarm of fellahin was shovelling up sand round the last metals. The naked embankment ran straight and purposeful as ever, so far as you could see. Small in the dis- tance was a white man with a spirit-leveL n IV THE COREESPONDENT S PROGRESS. I SAT on a box of tinned beef, whisky, and other delicacies, dumped down on a slope of loose sand. Eound me lay another similar case, a tent, bed, and bath, all collapsible and duly collapsed into a brown canvas jacket, two brown canvas bags containing saddlery, towels, and table-linen, a chair and a table lashed together, a wash-hand basin with shaving tackle concealed inside its green canvas cover, a brown bag with some clothes in it, a shining tin canteen, a cracking lunch-basket, a driving-coat, and a hunting-crop. On one side of me rose the em- bankment of the main line to Berber; fifty yards on it ended suddenly in the sand, and a swarm of Arabs were shovelling up more of it for their lives. On the other side of me, detached, empty, quite alone, stood the saloon which brought me from Haifa. It was going back again to-night, and then I should be quite loose and outcast in the smiling Sudan. I sat and meditated on the full significance of the 32 THE COBRESFONDENT'S PROGRESS. simple military phrase, " line of communications." It is the great discovery of the Sirdar that he has re- cognised that in the Sudan the communications are the essence and heart of the whole problem. And now I recognised it too. It was a long, long story already. I was now just at the threshold of what was regarded officially as the difficult part of the 1150 odd miles between Cairo and the front ; I was still seventy miles or so from Berber — and my problem, instead of just beginning, appeared just on the point of an abrupt and humiliating finish. The original question was how I was to get myself and my belongings to the front ; the threatened solu- tion was that I should get there, if at all, on my feet, and that my belongings would serve to blaze the track for anybody desperate enough to follow. I am not an old campaigner. The old campaigner, as you know, starts out with the clothes he stands up in and a tin-opener. The young campaigner pro- vides the change of linen and tins for the old cam- paigner to open. So in Cairo I bought everything I could think of as likely to palliate a summer in the Sudan. I wore out my patience and my legs a whole week in drapers' shops, and saddlers' shops, and apothecaries' shops, and tobacconists' shops, and tin- and -bottle shops, and general shops. I bought two horses and two nigger boys — one to look after the horses and one to look after me. One of them I bought through Cook, as one takes a railway-ticket ; NATIVE SERVANTS. 33 n the other suddei3ly dashed at me in the street with a bundle of testimonials unanimously stating that he could cook more or less, and clean things if he were shown how. Both wore tarbushes and striped nightgowns, and nothing else visible, which was natural ; though afterwards they emerged in all kinds of gorgeousness. What was inconvenient was that they neither of them understood any language I could talk, that they both had the same name, and that T could not for the life of me remember what it was. However, one was black with red eyes, and the other yellow with white; and it was something to know them apart. The black-and-red one originally alleged that he could talk English. It was true that he could understand a dozen words of that lingo if pronounced sloppily enough and put ungrammatically together. But when it came to his turn he could say "Yes, sir," and then followed it up with an inarticulate burble more like the sound of a distant railway train than any known form of human speech. Anyhow, I started. I started with the properties above named and six packages besides. Some went with me on the tourist boat; others went by rail or post boat, or Government barge, to await me ; others stayed behind to follow me. I got to Assuan, and there a new trial awaited me. I had no camels, and it would be absurd to go to the Sudan without camels. Now I knew nothing at all cf the points of a camel, nor of its market price, nor what it eats, nor could T 34 THE CORRESrONDENT'S PROGRESS. ride it. However, camels had to be bought, and I borrowed an interpreter, and went out to the Bisharin village outside Assuan a.id bought some. The in- terpreter said he knew all about camels, and that they were worth £27 a pair. First, though, they had to be tried. The Bisharin were all standing about grouped round little heaps of dry, cracked mud, which it took a moment's consider- ation to recognise as their houses. Their costume consisted mainly of their hair— in little tight plaits tumbling every way over their heads ; they have it done thus in infancy, and never take it out of curl : it looks like the inside hair of a horse's tail, where the brush can't get at it. They all talked at the same time, and gesticulated furiously. The first Bishari was a wizened old man, with a wisp or two of grey beard, a black shawl, and a large expanse of chest, back, arm, and leg, of a delicate plum-colour. With horrible noises he pulled his camel down on to its knees. The camel made still more horrible noises ; it growled, and screeched, and snarled, and brayed, and gurgled out big pink bladders from its inside. Then the old man tied a pad of sackcloth on to the beast's hump by way of saddle, seized the halter, and leaped on sideways ; the camel unfolded its legs joint by joint and leaped forward. The old man whacked with a will, the camel bounded up and down, the old man bounced in his saddle like an india-rubber ball, his shawl BUYING CAMELS. 36 and I lisharin Che in- id that jisharin eaps of )iisider- sostume t plaits have it )f curl: , where at the Q, with v\, and leg, of ses he camel d, and ed out d man ly way 13 ways ; leaped 11, the uunced shawl flapped out like wings, till all his body was native plum-colour. Then, suddenly, the camel gathered itself together and soared aloft — and the next thing was the old man flying up to heaven, slowly turning over, and slowly, then quickly, thudding to earth. Everybody roared with laughter, including the victim; red was flowing fast over the plum-colour arm, but he didn't notice it. I bought that camel on the spot — to carry five hundredweight of baggage, not me. There was one other cropper before the trials were over, and two of the camels cantered and galloped round the mud warren in a way that made me tremble. However, I trusted to luck against the time when I might have to ride any of them, and bought with a light heart. I also bought two camel- men — a black, apparently answering to the name of Jujube, and a yellow, who asserted he was my grootn's brother. The latter produced, with great pride, a written testimonial: it was from a British oihcer, to the effect that he had discharged the bearer, and would the Director of Transport kindly send him home. But I chanced that too; and now, with the exception of the few necessaries that were following me — and presumably are still — I was ready to march on Khartum. And now came in the question of tlie lines of com- munication. T went to the commandant of Assuau ; could he kindly send up my horses by steamer? Yes, certainly, when there was a steamer to send them by. 36 THE correspondent's PROGRESa But steamers were few and much in request for railway stores and supplies. It was a question of waiting till there should appear military horses to go up river. Mine must go and stand in the camp meanwhile. Hurrah ! said I ; never mind about a few days : that was one load ofif my mind. So I hauled the horses out of the stable, and gave the syce some money, and a letter to say who he was, and peacefully left him to shift. Camels, being straggling and unportable beasts, could not go by boat; so I gave their attendants also money, and told them to walk to Haifa. Then I went to Haifa myself, and waited. At Haifa, knowing its name so well, I had expected to find a hotel. So there -was one — the " Hotel des Voyageurs" — staring the landing-stage in the face. But it was a Greek hostelry, very small, a mile from the military post of Haifa, and at this stage I had a mind above Greek hotels. So I went to Walker & Co., the universal provider of Haifa. There was no immediate accommodation for correspondents. So I pitched my tent a little disconsolately in the com- pound, and sat down to wait until there was. Presently there was a room, and in that I sat down to wait for the camels. One day their attendant grinned in, and shook hands with me; the camels were accommodated with a bunk apiece in the garden, and 1 sat down again to wait for the horses. I waited many days and then wired; the commandant wired TRANSPORT DIFFICULTIES. 3f7 back, " Your horses cannot go by steamer at prcent.'* "When was " at present " going to end ? So next I wired to Cook's agent to send them by road; he replied that they had started four days before. So far, so good. I sat down to wait some more. Only two days before they miglit be expected, on March 1, came the news that the British brigade had gone up to Berber, and that correspondents might go too. Hurrah again ! Only when, how ? 0, you can go to-morrow in the saloon, of course, to rail-head. And beyond ? Well, beyond you must take your chance. Can camels go by train ? It was liardly likely. Horses ? Not at present — and — well — you had better go very light. Clearly everything that was mine must take its chance too. I started the camels to walk across the desert — two hundred and thirty-four miles from Nile to Nile again — and told them to be quick about it. Of course they could never have done it, but that the traffic - manager kindly gave them authority to drink some of the engines' water on the way. I left orders to the horses to do the same; left all my heaviest goods lying about on the bank of the Nile ; definitely gave up all hope of the things that were supposed to be coming up after me ; started, and arrived in the early morning of March 3. Now came the time to take my chance. And here, sure enough, comes a chocolate Arab, witli the in- 38 THE CORRESPONDENT'S PROGRESS. formation that he has any number of camels to let. The chance has turned out a good one, after all. But then comes along a fair Englishman, on a shaggy grey pony ; I was told he was the Director of Transport. That's all right ; I'll ask his advice. Only, before I could speak, he suavely drew the attention of corres- pondents to the rule that any Arab hiring camels already hired by the army was liable to two years imprisonment. The news was not encouraging; and of course the Arabs swore that the army had not hired the best camels at all. I believed it at the time, but came to know the Arab better afterwards. Anyhow here I sat, amid the dregs of my vanishing household, seventy miles from Berber — no rail, no steamer, no horse, no camel. Only donkeys, not to be thought of — and, by George, legs ! I never thought of them, but I've got *em, and why not use 'em. I'll walk. 89 to let. 1. But gy grey msport. )efore I corres- camels years ig; and lad not at the jrwards. mishing rail, no ot to be thought ise 'em. V. I MARCH TO BERBER. The donkeys had been hired, at war prices, abont ten in the morning, delivery promised within an hour. At three in the afternoon two of us sweated over from the rail -head to the village, to try and hurry them up. Fifteen had been ordered ; five were nearly ready. The sheikh swore by i.llah that all should be ready within an hour. At five we went over again. There were only four by now; the sheikh swore by Allah that the others should be ready within an hour. On that we began to threaten violence ; whereupon round a mud -wall corner trotted eighteen donkey«, followed by eight black men and a boy. Twenty-two I It was late, but it was better than could be expected of any Arab. We kept them sedulously in our eye till we had them alongside the mountainous confusion of three correspondents' light baggage. Arrived at the scene of action, they sat down with one consent and looked at it. 40 I MAECH TO BERBER. The only way to hurry an Arab is to kill him, after which he is useless as a donkey-driver; so we sat down too, and had some tea, and looked at them. Presently they made it known that they had no rope. A rope was produced and cut into lengths; each took one, and sat and looked at it. Finally arose an old, old man, attired in a rag round his head and a pair of drawers : with the eye of experience he selected the two lightest articles, and slowly tied them together. Example works wonders. There was almost a rush to secure the next smallest load, and in ten minutes everything was tied together and slung across the little pack-saddles, except one load. This they looked at for a good long time, reluctant to get a piece of work finished ; at last they felt justified in loading this on also. We were ready: we were actually about to start. Gratitude and wonder filled my soul. Three men, nine Arabs, nine more to see them off, twenty-two donkeys — and, Heaven forgive me, I had almost forgotten the horse. That is to say. Ids owner applied to him an Arab word which I understood to mean horse — plural before he was produced, singular when it was no longer possible to allege that there was more than one of him. Experts opined that he might in the remote past have been a dervish horse — a variation from the original type, produced by never feeding the animal. His teeth, what remained of them, gave no clear evidence of his age, but on a .»:> A VETERA24 STEED. 41 ill him, ■; so we it them. had no lengths ; Filially his head ience he jvly tied here was oad, and nd slung id. This Qt to get stifled in to start. hem off, le, I had ds owner :stood to singular lat there that he horse — by never ained of ut on a general view of him I should say he was rising ninety. Early in the century he was probably c astnut, but now he was partly a silver chestnut sua partly pre- sented no impression of colour at all: he was just faded. He wore a pessimistic expression, a coat about an inch and a quarter long, an open saddle sore, and no flesh of any kind in any corner. We offered him fodder — something like poor pea-halm and something like string, only Icf nutritious. He looked at it wearily, smelt it, ana i 'rned in perplexity to his master as if asking instructions. He had forgotten what food was for. ^, The young mo i. was climbing up the sky when we set off. With chattering and yells the donkeys and Arabs streamed out on to the desert track. The first load came undone in the first five minutes, and every one had to be readjusted in the first hour. The Arab, you see, has only been working with donkeys for ten thousand years or so, and you can't expect him to have learned much about it yet. But we kept them going. I was rearguard officer, with five Arabic words, expressing "Get on" in various degrees of emphasis, and a hunting-crop. We only marched three hours to camp that nighi, but by the time we off-loaded in a ring of palms, with the Nile swishing below and the wind swishing over- head, we had earned our dinner and some sleep : had we not induced Arabs to start ? And now came in one of the conveniences — so far the only one — of 42 I MAECH TO BEBBEB. travelling in the Sudan. " Three angarebs ," said the correspondent of experience ; and back came the ser- vants presently with three of the stout wooden frames lashed across with thongs that form the Sudan bed: you can get them anywhere there is a village — as a rule, to be sare, there is none — and they are luxuri- ous beyond springs and feathers. At half-past one I opened my eyes and saw the moon stooping down to meet the fringe of palm leaves. The man of experience sat up on his angareb and cried Awake." They did awake : Jiree hours' sleep is not long enough to make you sleepy. We loaded up by the last moonlight, and took the road again. For nearly three hours the rustling on our right and the line of palms showed that we kept to the Nile bank ; then at five we halted to water the donkeys — they eat when they can and what they can — and started for a long spell across the desert. Grey dawn showed us a gentle swell of stony sand, hard under foot ; freshness came with it to man and beast, and we struck forward briskly. When the sun came up on us, I saw the caravan for the first time plainly; and I was very glad we were not likely to meet anybody I knew. My kit looked respectable enough in the train, and in Berber it went some way to the respectable furnishing of a house. But as piled by Sudanese Arabs on to donkeys it was disreputable, dishevelled, a humiliation beyond blushes. The canteen, the chair and table that had ▲ PICTURESQUE CARAVAN. 43 said the the ser- 1 frames an bed: ^age — as J luxuri- 3aw the 1 leaves, od cried p is not up by n. For ind the i bank ; bhey eat id for a ^ed us a •eshness forward caravan ?lad we My kit Berber ng of a lonkeys beyond lat had looked so neat and workmanlike, on the donkey be- came the pots and sticks of a gipsy encampment. My tent was a slipshod monstrosity, my dressing - case blatantly secondhand, my washing basin was posi- tively indecent. To make things worse, they had trimmed my baggage up with garbage of their own — dirty bags of dates and cast-off clothing. They mostly insisted on riding the smallest and heaviest- laden donkeys themselves, jumping at a bound on to the jogging load of baggage with four legs patter- ing underneath, and had to be Hogged off again. And to finish my shame, here was I trudging behind, cracking and flicking at donkeys and half- naked black men, like a combination of gipsj, horse - coper, and slave-driver. But we travelled. Some of the donkeys were hardly bigger than collies, and their drivi^rs did all that laziness and ineptitude could suggest to keep them back; but we travelled. It came to my turn of the horse about half-past six or so: certainly he was not a beast to make comparisons on, but the donkeys left him behind unless you made him trot, which was obviously cruel. I should say they kept up four miles an hour with a little driving. We gave ourselves an hour at eight for breakfast, and the end of the march was in soft sand under a cruel sun. It was not till nearly one that the camel thorn — all stalk and prickles, no leaves — gave way to palms again, and again we looked down on the 44 I MAECH TO BERBEB. Nile. A sinj^^le palm gives almost as much shade as an umbrella with the silk off, but we found four together, and a breeze from the river, and a drink — that first drink in a Sudan camp ! — and lunch and a sleep, and a tub and tea, and we reflected on our ten hours' march and were happy. At five we jogprled off again. We lost the place we had intended to camp at, and the desert began to get rugged and to produce itself ever so far both ways, like the parallel lines in Euclid, and we never got any farther forward on it. It got to be a kind of treadmill — we going on and the desert going back under us. But at last we did get to a place — didn't know its name, nor cared — and went to sleep a little more. And in the pale morning by happy luck we found two camels, and two of us trotted joyously forward past swimming mirages and an endless string of ruined mud villages into mud Berber. The donkeys were not much behind either: they did about seventy miles in forty-two hours. But 1 am afraid it must have been the death of the horse, and I am sorry. It seems a cruelty to kill him just as he was beginning to be immortaL 46 ch shade imd four drink — [inch and i on our five we p at, and ice itself a Euclid, . It got le desert get to a went to ^ning by of us iges and ito mud 1 either: s. But le horse, 1 just as VI. THE SIRDAR. Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener is forty -eight years old by the book ; but that is irrele- vant. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men's heads ; his motions are deliberate and strong ; slender but firmly knit, he seems built for tireless, steel-wire endurance rather than for power or agility : that also is irrelevant. Steady passionless eyes shaded by de- cisive brows, brick -red rather full cheeks, a long moustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth ; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant too : neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. You could iuKighie the character just the same as if all the externals were different. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry bis mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. ; he brain and the will are the essence and the whole of the man — a 46 THE SIRDAB. brain and a will so peifect in their workings that, ill the face of extremest difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to da and doing it. His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. I., hors concours, the Sudan Machine. It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of feller that ought to be made manager of the Army and Navy Stores. The aphorist's tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those more genial virtues which the Sirdar does not possess, yet the judgment summed him up perfectly. He would be a splendid manager of the Army and Navy Stores. There are some who nurse a desperate hope that he may some day be appointed to sweep out the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of anything. But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Sudan, and he is the com- plete and the only master of that art. Beginning life in the Iloyal Engineers — a soil reputed more favour- able to machinery li^an to human nature — he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beacoustield's military vice-consuls in Asia Minor ; he ! FIFTEEN YEARS OF EGYPT. 47 gs that, er seem [ine the ig to do iierring, eel that ride at !)mpir3 : le. closely and at t to be The f those possess, r. He i Navy te hope 3Ut the ' of the iger of to the e com- ng life avour- I early one of or; he was subsequently director of tho Palestine Explora- tion Fund. At the beginning of the Sudan troubles .he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five oflicers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And in Egypt and the Sudan he has been ever since — on the stair generally, in the field constantly, alone with natives often, mastering the problem of the Sudan always. Tlie ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned cf his subject. He has seen and profited by the errors of others as by their successes. He has inherited the wisdom and the achievements of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man. Captain K.E., he began in the Egyptian army as second-in-command of a regiment uf cavalry. In Wulseley's campaign he was Intelligence Officer. Dur- ing the summer of 1884 he was at Korosko, negoti- ating with the Ababdeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Hamed; and note how characteristically he has now bettered the then abandoned project by going that way to Berber and Kliartum himself — only with a railway ! The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolyeley, and indeed from immemorial Arab caravans ; and then, for his own stroke of insight and resolu- tion amounting to genius, he turned a raid into an irresistible certain conquest, by superseding camels with the railway. Others hud thought of the desert route : the Sirdar, correcting Korosko to Haifa, used 48 THE SIRDAR. it. Others had projected desert railways : the Sirdar made one. That, summarised in one instance, is the working of the Sudan machine. As Intelligence Officer Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart's desert column, and you may be sure that the utter breakdown of transport which must in any case have marred that heroic folly was not unnoticed by him. Afterwards, through the long decade of little figlits that made the Egyptian army, Kitchener was fully employed. In 1887 and 1888 he commanded at Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most important enterprise was half a failure. He attacked Osman Digna at Handub, when most of the Emir's men were away raiding ; and although he succeeded in releasing a number of captives, he thought it well to retire, himself wounded in the face by a bullet, without any decisive success. The withdrawal was in no way discreditable, for his force was a jumble of irregulars and levies without dis- cipline. But it is not perhaps fanciful to believe that the Sirdar, who has never given battle without mak- ing certain of an anniliilatir-g victory, has not for- gotten his experience of haphazard Bashi-Bazouking at Handub. He had his revenge before the end of 1888, when he led a brigade of Sudanese over Osman's trenches at Gemaizeh. Next year at Toski he again commanded a brigade. In 1890 he succeeded Sir Francis Gren- fell as Sirdar. That he meant to be Sirdar in fact as THE SUDAN MACHINE. 49 v^ell as name he showed in 1894. The young Khe- dive travelled south to the frontier, and took the occasion to insult every British officer he came across. Kitchener promptly gave battle : he resigned, a crisis came, and the Khedive was obliged to do public penance by issuing a General Order in praise of the discipline of the army and of its British officers. Two years later he began the reconquest of the Sudan. Without a single throw-back the work has gone forward since — but not without intervals. The Sirdar is never in a hurry. With immovable self- control he holds back from each step till the ground is consolidated under the last. The real tigliting power of the Sudan lies in the country itself — in its barrenness which refuses food, and its vastness which paralyses transport. The Sudan machine obviates barrenness and vastness : the bayonet action stands still until the railway action has piled the camp with supplies or the steamer action can run with a full Nile. Fighting men may chafe and go down with typhoid and cholera : they are in the iron grip of the machine, and they must wait the turn of its wheels. Dervishes wait and wonder, passing from appreliensiun to security. The Turks are not coming ; the Turks are afraid. Then suddenly at daybreak one morning they see the Sirdar ad'^ancing upon them from all sides together, and by noon they are dead. Patient and swift, certain and relentless, the Sudan machine rolls conquering southward. Mf""!* ../ir,U..i^-'''?%*^^ 50 THE isIRDAa In the meantime, during all che years of preparation and achievement, the man has disappeared. The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of old comrades of fifteen years' standing; for the rest jf the world there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. His officers and men are wheels in the machine : he feeds them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he works himself. He will have no married offi- cers in his army — marriage interferes with work. Any officer who breaks down from the climate goes on sick leave once : next time he goes, and the Egyp- tian army bears him on its strength no more. Asked once why he did not let his officers come down to Cairo during the season he replied, " If it were to go home, where they would get fit and I could get more w ^^k out of them, I would. But why should I let ti '•: ^ iown to Cairo?" It is unamiable, but it is war, and it has a severe magnificence. And if you suppose, therefore, that the Sirdar is unpopular, he is not. No general is unpopular who always beats the enemy. When the columns move out of camp in the evening to march all niglit through the dark, they know not whither, and fight at dawn with an enemy they have never seen, every man goes forth with a tranquil mind. He may personally come back and he may not ; but about the general result there is not a doubt. You bet your boots the Sirdar knows : he -^^^ A BUmiLTi CAREExl, 61 3aration 'he man private fifteen -here is Sirdar, ers and enougli cilessly ed offi- work. te goes Egyp. Asked 3wn to vere to aid get lould I but it if you ', he is its the in the :, they enemy ^ith a k and is not vb: he wouldn't fight if he weren't going to \^'n. Other generals have been better loved; none w;;- ever better trusted. For of one human weakness the Sirdar is be- lieved not to have purged himself — ambition. He is on his promotion, a man who cannot afford to make a mistake. Homilies against ambition may be left to tho^e who have failed in their own : the Sirdar's, if apparently purely personal, is legitimate and even lofty. (le has attained eminent distinction at an exceptionally early age : he lias commanded vic- torious armies at an age when most men are hoping to command regiments. Even now a junior Major- General, he has been intrusted with an army of six brigades, a command such as few of his seniors have ever led in the field. Finally, he has been charged with I mission such as almo^l eve'^v one of them would have greedily accepted, — ■'b tvov.'iiing triumph of half a generation's war. Naiurally he has awak- ened jealousies, and he has bouglii permissiou to take each step on the ^ ay only by biilli..iil success in the last. If in this case he be not so stii'^y unbending to the high as he is to the low, who shall blame him? He has climbed too high not to toke every precaution against a fall. l)Ut he will not fall, just yet at any rate. So far as Egypt is concerned he is the niaji of destiny — the man who has l>een preparing himselt' sixteen years for one great purpc i. For Anglo - Egypt he is the 62 THE SIRDAB. Mahcii, the expected ; the man who has sifted experi- ence and corrected error; who has worked at small things and waited for great ; marble to sit still and fire to smite ; steadfast, cold, and inflexible ; the man who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartum. 53 VII ARMS AND MEN. The campaign of 1897, which opened with General Hunter's advance from Merawi on Abu Hamed, ended with the occupation of the Nile valley as far as Ed Damer, seven miles beyond the junction of that river and the Atbara. At the beginning of March, when I reached the front, the advanced post had been withdrawn from Ed Damer, which had been destroyed, and established at Fort Atbara in the northern angle of the two rivers. Between that point and Berber, twenty - three miles north, was stationed the army with which it was proposed to meet the threatened attack of Osman Digna and Mahmud. It was not possible to use the v/hole force at tlie Sirdar's disposition for that purpose. The Anglo- Egyptian strategical position was roughly a semi- circle, with Onidi rmnn and Khartum for a centre, so that the Khalifa held the advantage of the interior. The westward horn of the semicircle was the 54 ARMS AND MEN. garrisons of Dongola, Korti, and Merawi ; the east- ward that of Kassala. In advance of the regular garrisons, friendly Arabs held a fan - shaped series of intelligence posts in the Bayuda desert, and at Adarama, Gos Eedjeb and El Fasher on the upper reaches of the Atbara. The Dervishes maintained one desert post at Gebra to the north-v^est of Omdur- nian, and one to the nortli-east at Abu Delek. But hemmed in as tliey were, they had the manifest advantage that they could always strike at the newly recovered province of Dongola by the various routes across the Bayuda desert. So that Korti and Merawi had to be garrisoned, as well as Kassala. The garrisons, though they never so much as saw the enemy, played, nevertheless, an indispen=':ible part ir the Atbara campaign. The infantry of the force iiam ?diately under the Sirdar's eye was divided into four brigades — three Egyptian, one British. The divi- sion of the Egyptian army, counting three brigades, was under the command of Major-General Archibald Hunter. If the Sirdar is the brain of the Egyptian army, General Hunter is its sword-arm. First and above everytliing, he is a fighter. For fourteen years he has been in the front of all the fighting on the Southern border. He was Intelligence Officer dur- ing the anxious days before Ginnis, when the Camerons and 9th Sudanese were beset by tri- umphant dervishes in Kosheh fort, and reinforce- MAJOR-GENERAL HUNTER. 55 . ments were far to the northward. Going out on a sortie one day, he lingered behind the retiring force to pick off dervishes with a rifle he was wont to carry on such occasions : there he received a wound in the shoulder, which he is not quit of to-day. When Nejumi came down in '89, Hunter was in the front of everything : he fought all day at the head of the blacks at Argin, and commanded a brigade of them at Toski. Here he was again wounded — a spear-thrust in the arm while he was charging the thickest of the Dervishes at the head of the 13th. Thereafter he was Governor of the frontier at Haifa, Governor of the frontier at Don- gola, Governor of the frontier at Berber — always on the frontier. When there was fighting he always led the way to it with his blacks, whom he loves like children, and who love him like a father. Fourteen years of bugle and bullet by night and day, in sum- mer and winter, fighting Dervishes, Dervishes year in and year out — till fighting Dervishes has come to be a holy mission, pursued with a burning zeal akin to fanaticism. Hunter Pasha is the crusader of the nineteenth century. In all he is and does he is the true knight-errant — a paladin drifted into his wrong century. He is one of those happy men whom nature has made all in one piece — consistent, simple, unvarying; every- thing he does is just like him. He is short and thick- set ; but that, instead of making him unromantic, only 56 ARMS AND MEN. draws your eye to his long sword. From the feather in his hehnet to the spurs on his heels, he is all energy and dancing triumph; every movement is vivacious, and he walks with his keen conquering hazel eye look- ing out and upward, like an eagle's. Sometimes you will see on his face a look of strain and tension, which tells of the wound he always carries with him. Then you will see him lolling under a palm-tree, while his staff are sitting on chairs; light-brown hair rumpled over his bare head, like a happy schoolboy. When I first saw him thus, being blind, I conceived him a subaltern, and oflered opinions with indecorous free- dom : he left the error to rebuke itself. Eeconnoitring almost alone up to the muzzles of the enemy's ritles, charging bare-headed and leading on his blacks, going without his rest to watch over the comfort of the wounded, he is always the same — always the same impossible hero of a book of chivalry. He is renowned as a brave man even among British officers : you know what that means. But he is much more than a tilting knight-errant; he is one of the finest leaders of troops in the army. Ee- port has it that the Sirdar, knowing his worth, leaves the handling of the actual fighting largely to Hunter, and he never fails to plan and execute a masterly victory. A f^ )und and brilliant general, you would say his one fault was his reckless daring; but that, too, in an aruiy of semi-savnges, is a necessary qufi^ity of generalship. Furthermore, they say he is "OLD MAO." 57 as good in an oflice as he is in action. AV)ove all, he can stir and captivate and lead men. " General Arcliie" is the wonder and the darling of all the Egyptian army. And when tlie time comes that we want a new national hero, it may be he will be the wonder and tlie darling of all tlie Empire also. The First Ih-igade of Hunter's division was still quartered in Berber. It consisted of the 9tli Sudanese under Walter Bey, 10th Sudanese (Nason Bey), 11th Sudanese (Jackson Bey), and 2nd Egyptian (Pink Bey). The brigadier was Lieutenant-Colonel Hector Archibald Macdonald, one of the soundest soldiers in the Egyptian or British armies. He had seen more and more varied service than any man in the force. Promoted from the ranks after repeated and con- spicuous acts of gallantry in the Afghan war, he was taken prisoner at Majuba Hill. He joined the Egyp- tian army in 1887, and commanded the 11th Sudanese at Gemaizeh, Toski, and Afafit. At Gemaizeh the 11th, ever anxious to be at the enemy, broke its formation ; and it is said that Macdonald Bey, after exhausting Arabic and Hindustani, turned in despair to abusing them in'^broad Scots. Finally, he rode up and down in front of their rifles, and at last got them steady under a heavy fire from men who would far rather have killed themselves than him. In the cam- paigns of '96 and '97 he was intrusted with a brigade ; he showed a rare gift for the handling of troops, and wherever the fighting was hardest there was his •*i>. <...... :, ,.«^.. S^.^fa! IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 1.25 1^128 125 ^ li£ 12.0 11 1.4 1.6 V] v^ />^ ^: e: 0% '\> *^< ^>' .V "2 /A '/ Photographic Sciences Corporation 33 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) S72-4503 fc <" 40 ^ o^ 68 ARMS AND MEN. brigade to be found. In person, " old Mac " — he is under .fifty, but anything above forty is elderly in the Egyptian army — is of middle height, but very broad, — so sturdily built that you might imagine him to be armour-plated under his clothes. He walks and rides with a resolute solidity bespeaking more strength than agility. He has been known to have fever, but never to be unfit for duty. > The Second Brigade also consisted of three Sudanese •'battalions and one Egyptian — the 12th, 13th, and 14th Sudanese (Townshend, Collinson, and Shekleton Beys), and the 8th Egyptian under Kiloussi Bey, a soldierly old Turk who was through the Russo-Turkish war. Lieutenant-Colonel Maxwell commanded it — an officer who has served in the Egyptian army through all its successes; big, masterful, keen, and reputed an especially able military administrator, he is but just entering midtUe age, and ought to have a brilliant career before him. This b:igade was quar- tered at Essillem, about half-way between Berber and the Atbara. At tlie Atbara was Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis with an all -Egyptian brigade — the 3rd, 4th, and 15th, under Sillem, Sparkes, and Hickman Beys, and the 7th under Fathy Bey, a big, smiling Egyptian of great energy and ability, a standing contradiction of the theory that a native Egyptian can never make a smart officer. The brigadier is one of the most popular oflicers in this or any other army. Colonel LEWIS BKY. — ^he is ^ in the )road, — Q to be id rides [th than ,t never udanese ith, and lekleton Bey, a Turkish led it— n army sen, and ator, he have a IS quar- ber and vis with 15th, md the of great of the make a le most Colonel Lewis's talents and abounding vitality would have led him to distinction in any career. From the fact that he is afl'ectionately known as "Taffy," it may be deduced that he is in whole or part a Welshman — certainly he is richly dowered with the vivacity, the energy, and the quickness of uptake of the Celt. He treats his staff" and subordinates like younger brothers, and disci [iline never suff'ers. I have heard him say that he is always talking, but he is also always very much worth listening to. Finally, I once went into a store in Berber and proposed to buy tinned Brussels sprouts. "But are they fit to eat ? " I asked, in sudden doubt " Oh yes, sir," cried the unshaven Greek, with enthusiasm ; " Lewis Bey likes them very much." Taking the strength of a battalion at 700 rifles, each infantry brigade would n'.imber 2800 men. To these we must add the cavalry under Lieutenant- Colonel Broadwood, a rapid, adroit, and daring leader: long-legged, light, built for a horseman, never tired, never more than half asleep, never surprised, never flurried, never slow, he is the ideal of a cavalry general. The Egyptian trooper is a being entirely unlike anything else in the world. Wlmt miracles of patience and tact, toil and daring, have been devoted to him will never be known; for tlie men who did it will not tell. The eight squadrons, with galloping Maxims, were at this time divided between the three Egyptian camps. So were five 60 ARMS AND MEN. batteries of artillery, the command of which was with Lieutenant-Colonel Long — slow of speech, veil- ing a passionate tenderness for guns and a deadly knowledge of everything pertaining to them. Finally, tliere were two companies of camel corps with the Tliird P»rigade. The whole strength of the Egyptian force would thus fall not very far short of 10,000 men, with 46 guns. Operating from Port Atbara were also three gunboats. One mile north of the Second Brigade, Major- General Gatacre's British were encamped at Debeika. At this time it had only three battalions — the 1st Lincolnshire (10th) under Colonel Verner, 1st Cameron Highlanders (79th) under Colonel Money, and Ist "Warwickshire (6th) under Lieutenant-Colonel Quayle- Jones. The 1st Seaforth Highlanders (72nd : Colonel Murray) were under orders, as we heard, to come up and complete the brigade. Besides the infantry, there was a battery of Maxims under Major Hunter-Blair. The brigade was as fine a one as you could well pick out of the army, whether for shooting, average of service, or strength. Two compa:iies of the Warwicks had been sent, to their despair, to Merawi; but even so the strength of the brigade must have been over 2500. General Gatacre came up with a great reputation, which he seized ev^ry occasion to increase. His one overmastering quality is tireless, abounding, almost superhuman energy. From the moment he is first "GENERAL BACK-ACHEn." 61 out of his hut at reveille to the time when he goes nodding from mess to bed at nine, he seems pt^ssessed by a demon that whips lum ever into activity. Of middle height and lightly built, his body is all steel wire. As a man he radiates a gentle, serious courtesy. As a general, if he has a fault it lies on the side of not leaving enough to his subordinates. Restless brain and body will ever be at something new — working out a formaLion, riding hours across country looking for a camp, devising means to get tlirough a zariba, personally superintending the making of a road, addressing the men after church parade every Sunday. In the ranks they call him "General Back-acher," and love him. " He is the soldier's general," I have heard rapturous Tommy exclaim, when the brigadier has been satisfying himself in person that nobody wanted for what could be obtained. Later on in the campaign some thought he drove his officers and men a little hard. But whatever he asked of them in labour and discomfort he was always ready to double and treble for him- self. This, then, was the Sirdar's command — a total of 12,000 to 13,000 men, with 52 guns. The Seaforths might be expected to add about 1000 more. All numbers, I should here remark, are based on the rougliest estimates, as, by the Sirdar's wish, they were never stated publicly. In ary case, there was not much doubt that the force was sufficient to account hand- ^ ARMS AND MEN. somely for anything that was likely to come against it. Whether the dervishes were even coming at all was not at this time very certain. It was known that Mahmud had taken over his i'»rce from Metemmeh, which had hitherto been his head- quarters, to join Osman Digna at Shendi on the eastern bank. That was evidence that the attack, if it was coming, would fall on us rather than the Merawi side. Osman's men, it was further reported, had begun to drift northward in detachments ; though whether this meant business or not it was hard to say. It seemed difficult to believe that they had let Berber alone last autumn and winter when it was weakly garrisoned, only to attack now, when attack must mean annihilation. But you must remember the peculiarities of Arab information. The ordinary Arab spy is as incurious about figures as the Sirdar himself could desire ; " few " and " very few," " many " and " very many," are his nearest guesses at a total. It was not at all certain that Mahmud and Osman, though they probably knew that reinforcements had come up, had the vaguest idea of the real strength of the force. Finally, said those who remembered, this was just like Toski over again. Whispers and whispers for months that the horde was coming j disappointment and disappointment ; and then, just when doubt was becoming security and the attempt madness, a head- OSMAN DIGNA. 63 long rush upon inevitable destruction. Such follies issue from the very nature of the Malidist polity — a jealous ill-informed despot safe at Oiiidurman and ill-supplied Emirs apprehensive at the front Therefore we hoped for the best. What their force might be, of course we knew hardly better than they knew ours. It might be 10,000, or 15,000, or 20,000. If they came they would fight: that was certain. How they would fight we knew not. It depended on Mahmud. Osman Digna has become a common- place of Sudanese warfare — a man who has never shown himself eminent either for personal courage or for generalship, yet obviously a man of great ability, since by evasive cunuing and dogged per- sistence he has given us more trouble than all the other Emirs together. His own tribe, the Hadeiidowa, the most furious warriors of Africa, are long since reconciled with the Government, and have resumed their old trade of caravan -leading. That Osman struggles on might fancifully be traced to his strain of Turkish blood, contributing a steadfastness of purpose seldom found in the out-and-out bar- barian. He has become a fat old toad now, they pay, and always leaves fights at an early stage for private prayer; yet he is still as much alive as when he threw up a position on the Suakim County Council to join the Expected Mahdi, and !•' i) H ARMS AND MEN. you cannot but half admire the rascal's persistence in his evil ways. Had Osman been in command, he doubtless knew too much to risk a general engagement. But it seemed that the direction of thikigs lay mainly with Mahmud. And of Mahmud, but for the facts that he was a social favourite in Omdurman, was comparatively young, and had wiped out the Jaalin for the Khalifa, nobody — except probably Colonel Wingate — knew anytliing at all. Wliatever tliere was to know, Colonel "Wingate surely knew it, for he makes it his business to know everything. He is the type of the learned soldier, in which perhaps our army is not so strong as it is on other sides. If he had not chosen to be Chief of the Intelligence Department of the Egyptian Army, he might have been Professor of Oriental Languages at Oxford. He will learn you any language you like to name in three months. As for that mysterious child of lies, the Arab, Colonel Wingate can converse with him for hours, and at the end know not only how much truth he has told, but exactly what truth he has suppressed. He is the intellectual, as the Sirdar is the practical, compendium of British dealings with the Sudan. With that he is himself the most practical of men, and few realise how largely it is due to the system of native intelligence he has organised, that operations in the Sudan are now certain and unsur- prised instead of vague, as they once were. Nothing COLON KL WINGATE. 05 is hid from Colonel Wingate, whether in Cniro or at the Court of Menelik, or on the shores of Lake Cliad. As a press censor he has only one fault. He is so in- dispensable to the Sirdar that you can seldom get speech of him. His rise in the array has been almost startlingly rapid ; yet there is not a man in it but, so far from envying, rejoices in a success earned by rare gifts and unstinted labour, and borne with an inviol- able modesty. 66 VIII. IN THE BRITISH CAMP. Beyond doubt it was a great march. If only there had been a fight immediately at the farther end of it, it would have gone down as one of the great forced- marches of history. News came to Abu Dis of Mahmud and Osman Digna's advance on a Friday afternoon, February 25 ; the men were just back from a sixteen - mile, seven-and-a-half-hour route-march in the desert. By eight next morning the last detachment had been con- veyed by train to rail-head, which had been moved on past their camp to Surek ; by ten at night the brigade was on the march. They marched all night ; in the early morning came a telegram bidding them hasten, and they marched on under the Sudan sun into the afternoon. A short halt, and at three on Monday morning they were off again. At ten that night they got into Geneineteh, and were out again by three next morning. Six hours' march, seven hours' halt, eight hours' march again, and they were A LiliEAT MAliCII. C7 close to Berbur. And there they learned that the Dervishes had after all not arrived. A halt of twenty- four hours outside Berber rather damaged the record ; but that was better than damaging the troops. Not but that they were quite ready to go on ; it was by the Sirdar that the halt was ordered. They reached Berber — cheering blacks lining two miles of road, and massed bands playing the Cameron men, and the Lincolnshire poacher, and Warwickshire lads, and especially a good breakfast for everybody — and marched through to their camp ten miles beyond. They started out ou Saturday night, February 26 ; they reached camp on Thursday evening, March 3. Altogether they made 118 miles within five days- four, if you leave out the day's halt — or 134 in five and a half, if you also add the route-march; con- tinuously they did 98 miles within three days. That is marching. Furthermore, it was marching under nearly all conditions that make marching a weariness. In India troops on the march have a host of camp-followers to do the hard and disagree- able work. Of course, you and I could easily walk twenty-five miles a day for as long as anybody liked to name. But how would you like to try it with kit and rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition? Also, when you did halt, how would you like to have to set to work getting wood to make your fire and water to cook your dinner ? How would you like to march with baggage-camels, so slow that the}- poach all your 68 IN THE BRITISH CAMP. sleep ? Especially, how would you like to be a cook — to come in tired and sweating, hungry and thirsty, and then stand out in the sun preparing dinner for your comrades ? On the first three days' march some of the cooks got no more tlian four hours' sleep, and had to be relieved lest they dropped at their posts ; few of the officers got more. Plenty of men went to sleep while marching; others dropped with weariness and vigil, like a boxer knocked stupid in a fight. One subaltern, being with baggage in the rear-guard, fell off' his camel without noticing it, and went on peace- fully slumbering in the sand. He woke up some time in the dead of night, and of course had not the vaguest idea where the army had gone to or in which direc- tion he ought to follow it. He had hung his helmet and belts on the camel, which of course had gone on composedly, only glad to get rid of him. He was picked up by a man who was looking for somebody else. A gunner in the Maxim battery had a worse time. He too dropped asleep, and woke up to find himself alone. He found himself near the river, and went on to overtake the force. Only unluckily — so mag- nificently unreasoning can the British soldier some- times be — he followed down the stream instead of up. On top of that, he conceived an idea that he was in the ens^my's country, with prowling dervishes ambushed beliind every mimosa bush. So that while search parties quested for him by day, he carefully THE BOOT SCANDAL. 69 a cook thirsty, ner for ih some 3p, and posts; went to sariness t. One ird, fell peace- le time /aguest I direc- helmet (one on le was Qebodj e time, limself I went ) mag- some- ;t'ad of hat he [•vishes i while refuUy hid himself, and at night pushed on again to- wards Cairo. It was several days before he was picked up. All these are inevitable accompaniments of a forced march; what might have been avoided, and should have been, was the scandal that the men's boots gave out. True, the brigade had done a lot of marching since it came up-country, some of it — not much — over rock and loose sand. True, also, that the Sudan climate, d(;structive of all things, is particularly de- structive of all things stitched. But the brigade had only been up-river about a month, after all, and no military boot ought to wear out in a month. We have been campaigning in the Sudan, off and on, for over fourteen years; we might have discovered the little peculiarities of its climate by now. The Egyptian army uses a riveted boot ; the boots our British boys were expected to march in had not even a toe-cap. So that when the three battalions and a battery arrived in Berber hundreds of men were all but bare- foot: the soles peeled off, and instead of a solid double sole, revealed a layer of shoddy packing sandwiched between two thin slices of leather. Not one man fell out sick ; those who dropped asleep went on as soon as they came to, and overtook their regiments. But every available camel was burdened with a man who lacked nothing of strength or courage to march on — only boots. General Gatacre had half-a-dozen chargers; every one was carrying a bare -fooled soldier, while 70 m THE BRITISH CAMP. 1 1',. I.* ' the general trudged with his men. All the mounted officers did the same. It is always the same story — knavery and slackness clogging and strangling the best efforts of the British soldier. To save some contractor a few pence on a boot, or to save some War Office clerk a few hours of the work he is paid for not doing, you stand to lose a good rifle and bayonet in a decisive battle, and to break a good man's heart into the bargain. Is it worth it ? But it is always happening ; the history of the Army is a string of such disgraces. And each time we arise and bawl, " Somebody ought to be hanged." So says everybody. But nobody ever is hanged.^ ^ A certain stir followed the publication of these criticisms in England, penetrating as far as the HouBe of Commons, and even the War OflBce. The official reply to them was in effect that the boots were very good boots, only that the work done by the brigade over bad ground had tried them too severely. It is a strange sort of answer to say that a military boot is a very good boot, only you mustn't march in it. Having walked myself over most of the same ground as General Gatacre's brigade, I am able to say that, while there is a good deal of rock and loose sand, the greater part of the going is hard sand or gravel. The boots I wore myself I have on at the moment of writing, as sound as ever. It is possible that the War Office is right, and that for other purposes in other countries the boots supplied were very good boots. But in the Sudan, what with the drought and the fine cutting sand, everything in stitched leather goes to pieces with heart-breaking rapidity. It is to be presumed that our authorities could have discovered this fact : in the Egyptian army it is known perfectly well. After Mr Powell Williams had more than once implied in the House that there was no foundation for the criticismB in the text, A SEVEIIE UEGImE. 71 That these men came so sturdily through the test stands to everybody's credit, but especially their brigadier's. From the day he took up his command General Gatacre set to work to make his men hard. Amazing stories floated down to Haifa, rebuking us with tlie stern simplicity of life at rail-head — no drink, perpetual marching, sleep every night in your boots. The general, we heard, had even avowed that he meant to teach his men to march twenty miles witliout water- bottles. He would merely halt them from time to time and water them — most wisely, since the soldier either swigs down all his water in the first hour, and is cooked for the rest of the day, or else, if he thinks he is in for a short march, pours the confounded thing out on the sand to lighten it. A most wise thing — if you can do it. For some of the old inhabitants of the Sudan shook their heads when they heard such tales. " He'll get 'em stale," said they ; " wait till the hot weather; in this country you must make yourself comfortable." They were probably riglit — they knew ; and for myself, I intended to give comfort the fullest possible trial. But so far the fact stood that the Lord Lansdowne, in hia speech .announcing the proposed transmogri- 6cation of the Army Medical ServicoH, gave away the War Office's caae in the following terms : "The Isgyptian cutnpaign had brought to light one weak point which we couUl not ullord to ignore. The Army boot, although a good boot, was apparently un^uited to resist the peculiar and insitlious action of the desert sand. ... Tie trusted they would be able to invent a boot which even General Gatacre and the desert sand would not be able to Wv^ar out." —{' Daily Mail ' Report, May 5.) 72 IN THE BRITISH CAMP. British had done their work brilliantly, and that their brigadier trained them to it. When my camel padded into their camp by moon- light the day's work was done, and they were going to sleep. You came to the camp through a tangle of thick mimosa ; a zariba of the same impossible thorns was heaped up all round it ; the men were quartered along the river overlooking the foreshore. There was only time to be grateful for supper, and a blanket spread under the lee of a straw-plaited hut. Next thing I knew reveille was sounding, at a quarter past five. Directly on the sound stepped out the general — middle height, build for lightness and toughness together, elastic energy in the set of each limb, and in the keen, grave face a determined purpose to be equal to re- sponsibility. He stayed to drink a cup of cocoa, and then mounted, and was away with his aide-de-camp ; General Gatacre's aide-de-camp requires to be a hard man. When break fast- time came the general was no- where in camp, nor was he an hour later, nor an hour later still. He had just taken a little twenty-five mile scamper to look out a new site for his camp. At reveille the camp had suddenly turned from dead to alive. You heard hoarse orders, and the ring of perpetual bugles. The dry air of the Sudan cracks the buglers* lips, as it does everybody else's ; to keep them supple they were practising incessantly, so that the brigade is wrapped in bugling best part of the day. To-day it was also wrapped in something else. AN ILL-CHOSEN SITE. 73 It seemed to me that daylight was very \on^ in com- ing — that lines of khaki figures seemed to pass to and fro in an unlifting mist. But that was only for the first few sleepy moments. As the north wind got up witli the sun it soon became very plain what was the matter. Dust ! The camp was on land which had once been cultivated, black cotton land ; and black cotton land when the wind blows is neither wholesome nor agree- able. It rose off the ground till the place was like London in a fog. On the horizon it lowered like thunder-clouds; close about you it wliirled up like pepper when the lid of the castor comes off. You felt it, breathed it, smelt it, tasted it. It chok«d eyes and nose and ears, and you ground it between your teeth. After a few hours of it you forgot what being a man was like ; you were merely clogging into a lump of Sudan. It was a bad mistake to pitch on such a spot ; and when you came to walk round the camp you saw how ill-equipped were the men to put up with it. Their heavy baggage — officers' and men's alike — had been left at rail-head ; over 2500 men had come with 700 camels. The tents had arrived, but they were only just being unloaded from the steamer. The men were huddled under blankets stretched on four sticks; of the officers, some had tents, others sat in tiny elbow- squeezing tukls (huts of straw or rushes), such as the prophet Jonah would not have exchanged for his 74 IN THE BRITISH CAMP. gourd. Tliere was hardly a shelter in the camp in which a man could stand upright. One or two good tukls had been built — wooden posts with beams lashed across them, and mats or coarse stems of halfa grass plaited between. But, taking the place as a whole, it was impossible to be comfortable, and especially impossible to be clean. It was nobody's fault in particular, and in this good weather it did not particularly matter. It happened not to have begun stoking up at the time ; when it likes it can be mid-summer in March. When it did begin, and especially if it came to a matter of summer quarters, such a camp as Debeika was an invitation to disease and death. You have to learn the Sudan's ways, they say, if you do not want the Sudan to eat you alive. The British brigade had to learn.- Sure enough the Sirdar came to inspect it the day after, and on March 11 the brigade shifted camp to the empty and relatively clean village of Uarmali, two miles higher up the river. ',b IX. PORT ATBARA, It needed only half a look at the Egyptian camp to convince you how much the British had to learn. The liospitable dinner-table was quite enough. In accord- ance with a detestable habit which I intend to correct in future, I arrived late for dinner : it was the fault of the camels, the camel-men, the servants, the guide, my companions, the country, and the weather. None the less kindly was I set down at table and ate of soup and fish, of ragout an.* fresh mutton and game, and was invited to drink hock, claret, champagne, whisky, gin, lime-juice, ginger-beer, Rosbach, and cognac, or any combination or permutation of the same. I was the guest of men who have been on the Sudan frontier for anything up to fifteen years, during which time they have learned the Sudan's ways and over- come its inhospitality. As soon as everybody began to show signs of falling asleep at table — which hot days begun at four or five in the morning and worked hard through till half-past 76 FORT ATBAKA. seven soon lead you to consider the most natural phenomenon in the world — I went to bed under a roof. The owner of the tukl was up the river, o3 Shendi, on a gunboat. His house was palatially built with painted beams from the spoils of a raid on Metemmeh, and plaited with palm -leaf and halfa grass. Other officers preferred their tents ; but the insides of these were sunk anything from one foot to four underground, the excavation neatly backed with dried Nile mud, so that a ten-foot tent became a lofty and airy apartment. The last thing 1 saw was a vast upstanding oblong tukl, which looked capable of hold- ing a company. 1 was told it 'V\as the house of the mess-servants of one Egyptian battt lion. It was more palatial than all the edifices in the British camp put together. In the morning it was blowing a sand-storm, and Englishmen's eyes showed bloodshot through blue spectacles. It was gritty between the teeth, and to walk up wind spelt blindness ; yet it was clean sand, and did not form soil in the mouth like the black dust of Debeika. In the early morning Fort Atbara appeared through the driving cloud as through smoked glass — a long walled camp, with its southern apex resting on the junction of Nile and Atbara. To find so strong a place in the lately won wilderness was a revelation, not of Englisii energy, which is under- stood, but of Egyptinn industry. The wall was over six feet high, firmly built of sun-dried mud; round it A MONUMENT OF EGYPTIAN INDUSTRY. 77 had been a six-foot ditch, only the importunate sand had already half silted it up again. On the inside was a parapet, gun platforms with a couple of care- fully clothed Maxims in each, a couple of guard-houses at the two main gates and a couple of blockhouses outside. Across the Atbara was a small fort ; at the angle of the rivers a covered casemate gallery that would accommodate half a company precluded any attempt to turn the wall and attack from the fore- shore. On the other side of the Nile was a smaller fort, walled and ditched likewise. In the inside straddled a crow's nest — built also with painted beams from Mahmud's house in Metemmeh — with a view that reached miles up both rivers. A couple of miles up the Atbara you could see dense mimosa thickets ; so much of the bank as could get water has dropped back almost to virgin forest in the fourteen years of dervish devilry. But under the walls of Fort Atbara was neither mimosa nor Sodom apple nor any kind of scrub. Only a forest of stumps showed where the field of fire had been cleared — over a mile in every direction. Upright and regular among the stumps you could see a row of stakes ; each marked a range of 100 yards up to 500 : the Egyptian soldier was to hold his fire up to that and gain confidence by seeing his enemy go down. Best of all, the fort, though it dominated the country for miles, was itself hardly visible. From the ridge of the desert a mile away it was a few trees, the yardarms of a few sailing barges, 78 FORT ATBARA. and a shelter trench. The whole dervish army might easily have been persuaded to run their heads on it ; but they might have butted in vain against Fort Atbara till there was not one of them left standing. The whole of this work had been made by the men who garrisoned it. There were none but Fellahin regiments in Fort Atbara; but the Egyptian soldier on fatigue duty is the finest soldier in the world. In a population of ten millions the conscription only asks for 20,000 men or so, and it can afford to pick and choose. In face the fellah soldier is a shade sullen, not to say blackguardly ; in body he would be a joy to a sculptor. Shorter than the taller tribes of blacks, taller than the shorter, he is far better built all round. When he strips at bathing-time — for like all riverine peoples he is more clean than bashful — the bank is lined with studies for Hercules. And all the thews he has he puts into his work. Work is the fellah's idea of life, especially work with his native mud : the fatigue which other soldiers incline to resent as not part of their proper business he takes to most kindly of all his soldiering. Marching, digging, damming, brick-making, building, tree-felling — you can never find him unwilling nor leave him exhausted. He is the ideal soldier-of-all-work, true son of a country where human hand - labour has always beaten the machine. The troops were housed either in post -and -straw tukls or in tents ; but already a vast mud - brick SKETCH MAP OF THE HILE AND ATBARA TO illustrate: the operations against mahmoud QUEEN CITY OF THE SUDAN. 79 barrack stretched its skeleton across the camp. Along the foreshore the mud huts were hospital or officers' quarters or mess -houses. Already one big straw tukl was a cafi, where enterprising Greeks had set up a soda-water machine and instituted a diner du jour. And down on the beach the cluster of slim- sparred gyassas and the little street of box-and-mat built Greek shops marked the beginning of a town. As railway terminus, for this year at present, an American miglit almost call it the queen city of the Sudan. Only for the present it must be a city with- out native population ; for the inhabitants of this reach are very few, and subsist on precarious subsidies paid them for protecting each other against the raids of the dervish. Among the craft at the riverside the first you noticed was the gunboat. White, with tall black funnel amidships, deck above deck and platform top- ping platform, it looked more like a building than a warship. But for all their many storeys these gun- boats draw only some two feet of water, while the loftiness of the gun- platforms enables them to search the highest bank at the lowest state of Nile. Ahead on the uppermost deck points the hungry muzzle of a gun ; there are a couple more amidships, and a couple of Maxims on a dizzy shaking platform higher yet. The war fleet at this time counted three stern- wheelers — the Zafir (Commander Keppel, E.N.), Fatha fli 80 FORT ATBARA. (Lieutenant Beatty, R.N.), and iVasa (Lieutenant Hood» E.N.) Three more — the Malik (King), Sultan, and Sheikh — were down the river, waiting for their sec- tions to be put together against high Nile. Fort Atbara was the Portsmouth of the Sudan: one of Captain Keppel's squadron always lay there, taking a week in its turn to rest and repair anything needful. The other two would be always up the river — one cruising ofif Shendi, and the other patrol- ling the seventy miles of river between. If neces- sary the boats could run past Shendi, forty miles more, to Shabluka, so that they acted as reconnoitnng parties more than a hundred miles from the most advanced m litary post. Naval operations have played a part in Sudan warfare ever since Gordon's time: was not "the Admiral " himself on Beresford's Zafia through those famous - infamous days which saw the tantalising tragedy of Khartum? Here, as elsewhere, the Sirdar has gathered up the experience of the past and brought it to full development. Everybody told him that he would never get the gunboats over the Fourth Cataract : a general who had been there in the Wolseley days delivered a lecture demonstrating unmercifully the mad impossibility of the scheme. A day or two after the Sirdar sent the boats over. To be sure one turned turtle in the attempt, and a naval lieutenant was fished out three-quarters drowned, and WHAT THE r.UNBOATS DID. 81 most two Egyptians had to be cut out through tlie bottom of the boat. Yet here were three vessels steaming up and down unperturbed, right under Mahmud's nose. The value of their services it would be quite impos- sible to exaggerate : they were worth all the rest of tlie Intelligence Department put together. From their reports it was known that the dervishes had crossed to Shendi and were coming down the river. Moreover, you may imagine that officers of her Majesty's navy did not confine their activity to looking on. A day or two before this Mahmud had been transferring his war material in barges from Metemmeh to Shendi. Knowing the ways of " the devils," as they amiivbly call the gunboats, he had entrenched a couple of hun- dred riflemen to cover the crossing. But one boat steamed cheerfully up to the bank and turned on the Maxims, while the other sunk one nuggar and captured two. A fourth lay in quite shallow water under the very muzzles of the dervish rifles. But on each boat are carried about half a company of Egyptian troops with a white officer. While the Maxims poppled away above them, the detachment — it was of the 15th Egyptians on this occasion — landed and cut out the nuggar before its owners* eyes. With men capable of such things as this about on the river, it was only by drilling a hole in the bottom of their boats and sink- ing them during the day that the dervishes could keep any craft to cross the river in at all. 82 FORT ATBAEA, The second day at Fort Atbara I stepped out after lunch, and there were two white sweltering gunboats instead of one. Everybody who had nothing else to do hurried as fast as the heat would let them down to the river. There the first thing they saw was an angareb being laboriously guided ashore by four native soldiers : on it lay a white man. He was a sergeant of marines, shot in the leg while directing the fire of the forward Maxim. " The devils have hit me," they said he cried out, with justly indignant surprise as he felt the bullet, then jumped to the gun and turned it himself on the quarter the shot came from. That was in the early morning; now he was very pale and a little limp, but smiling. Then came down the doctor hastily. "Didn't I say he wasn't to be brought ashore?" he said. "All right, sir," answered the wounded man, still resolutely smiling ; "I expect I'm in for hospital anyhow." And away to hospital they bore him, for the boat would be up river again by dawn the next day. Meantime the detachment of soldiers were stepping ashore with cheerful grins. It was easy to see how valuable was this gunboat work in giving the Egyptians confidence. True, they had lost one man wounded and had a few chips knocked off the stern- wlieel ; but had they not landed at Aliab — thirty miles from Fort Atbara — driven off the dervishes, and captured donkeys and loot? The loot was being AN EXCITING SERVICE. 83 unladen at the moment — an angareb or two and odd garments, especially many bundles of rough riverside hay. '' Take that up to my old horse," said the lieutenant in command, satisfaction in his tones. " Is there any polo this afternoon ? " It was hard to say whether this work best suited the young naval officer or the young naval officer best suited the work. Steaming up and down the river in command of a sliip of his own, bombarding here, reconnoitring there, landing elsewhere for a brush with tlie dervishes, and then again a little way fartlier to pick up loot, — the work had all the charm of war and blockade-running and poaching combined. If a dervish shell did happen to smash the wheel where would tlie boat be, perhaps seventy miles from any help? It was said the Sirdar was a little nervous about them, and to my inexperience it was a perpetual wonder that the boats came back from every trip. But somehow, thanks to just a dash of caution in their audacity, they always did come back. Impudently daring in attack, with a happy eye to catch the latest moment for retreat, they were just the cutting -out heroes of one's youth come to life. They might have walked straight out of the ' Boy's Own Paper.' Every returning boat brought fresh news of the advance. Dervishes at Aliab, even if not in force, could not but mean a movement towards attack. It was quite impossible to wear out the hospitality of 84 FORT ATBAKA. Fort Atbara, but duty began to wonder what the rest of tlie army was doing. So I recaptured my camel — peacefully grazing in the nearest area of dervish raid, and very angry at being called on to work after three days of idleness— and bumped away north towards Berber. 85 THE MARCH OUT. Alas for the Berber season — for the sprightly promise of its budding, the swift tragedy of its blight ! It would have been the most brilliant social year the town has ever known. Berber is peculiarly fitted for fashionable display : its central street *vould hold four Regent Streets abreast, and the low mud walls, with one-storeyed mud-houses just peeping over them, make it look wider yet. On this magnificent avenue the merchant princes of Berber display their rich emporia. Mortimer, Angelo, Walker, and half-a-dozen ending in -poulo, had brought caravans over the desert from Suakim, until you could buy oysters and asparagus, table-napkins and brilliantine, in the middle of the Sudan. Then there are the cafis,— "Officers* Club and Mineral Waters" is the usual title of a Sudan cafi, — where you could drink mastik and kinds of whisky, and listen to limpid streams of modern Greek from the mouths of elegants who shave twice and even three times a-week. There at sun- 86 THE MArCH OUT. down sat the native officers on chairs before the door, every breast bright with the ribbons of hard victorious campaigns, talking their ancestral Turkish and drink- ing drinks not contemplated by the Koran. There were five regiments in garrison, and more outside; the town was alive with generals, and the band played nightly to the Sirdar's dinner. There was flavour in the sensation of sitting at dinner under the half-daylight of the tropic moon, kicking up black -brown sand, looking into a little yard with an unfenced sixty-foot undrinkable well in one corner and a heat-seamed mud wall all round it, and listening to a full military orchestra wailing for the Swanee Ribber, or giggling over the sorrows of Mr Gus Elen's friend, who somehow never felt 'isself at 'ome. For myself, I was just beginning to be very much at home indeed. It was a splendid house to share among three, one of the most palatial in Berber — two rooms as high as an English double-storeyed villa, doorway you could drive a hansom through, two window-holes in one room and one in the otiier, bricks of the finest quality of Nile mud, and roof of mats that never let in a single sunbeam. A fine house ; and we had further embellislied it with two tables — they cost a couple of pounds apiece, timber and carpenters being scarce in Berber — five slielves, a peg, nnd eight cane - bottomed bedroom cliairs, brought across the desert in sections. In a fortnight our entertainments would have been the talk of Berber, and now BERBER — OLD AND NEW. 87 To-night the High Street was as bare and bald, Berber as desolate and forlorn, as old Berber itself. Old Berber, von must know, is the Berber which was before the Mahdists came and took it and besomed it with three days' massacre. It stands, or totters, some half mile south of the present dervish-built town. Palms spread their sunshades over it, and it is era- bosomed in the purple-pink flower, white-green bush, and yellow-green fruit of Sodom apples. At a dis- tance it is cool luxury ; ride into it, and it is only the sun-dried skeleton of a city. In what was once the bazaar the bones are thickest: here are the empty sockets out of which looked the little shops — all silent, crumbling, and broken. Altogether there are acres and acres of Old Berber — quite dead and falling away, not a single soul in the whole desolation. But when the Egyptian army first came last year there were bodies — bodies left thirteen years unburied, and dry wounds yawning for vengeance. New Berber to-day was hardly less forlorn. On tlie morning of March 15, the few passengers down the High Street all carried arms. Here was a man on a fleet camel: he would have sold it the day be- fore for £20; now no price would tempt his Arab covetousness into parting with his possible salvation. Here strode a tall man with white gown kilted up above black legs : he carried a Kemington ritle, and with his free hand pushed before him a donkey bear- ing a bundle and a bed. An angareb is the first 88 THE MARCH OUT. luxury of the Sudan: Egyptian soldiers, when an- garebs are looted, can hardly be restrained from taking them away on their backs. This man was removing wardrobe and furniture together on one donkey. Down at the riverside every boat was busy ; the natives were crossing over to the islands and to the western bank. Down at the landing-stage, three miles north of the town, where the hospital was and the post-office, and whither the telegraph was now removed, the 1st Battalion, now to form all the garri- son of Berber, was building a fort. And in their stores and cafh in the High Street, with twitching faces, sat the Greeks. They explained in half -voices that they could not move their stock because they had 400 camel-loads, and there were not ten camels to be bought in all Berber. They com- mented on the strange strategy that aims at beating the enemy rather than at protecting property. They even made a deputation to the Sirdar on the point; but his Excellency pursued his own plan, and merely served out Remingtons to the traders. Whereat the Greeks pointed out that the rifles and a few cases of wine and tinned meat against their doors would make them impregnable ; and then fell to twitching again. What it was all about, nobody among the outsiders knew. But we presumed that the gradual crescendo of intelligence as to the dervish advance had resulted in the decision that it was better to be in position too early than too late. The Sirdar left early on the 15th; A SPLENDID BATTALION. 8t the greater part of the garrison — MacdonaWa fighting brigade of blacks — had cleared the town the evening before and marched for Kenur, the point of concen- tration, when the moon rose at one in the morning. I saw the start of the 9th, the first black battalion raised ; and fine as are many of our British regiments, these made them look very small. The Sudanese battalions, as has been said, are enlisted for life, and every black, wherever he may be found, is liable, as such, for service. I have seen a man who was with Maximilian in Mexico, in the Russo - Turkish War, across Africa with Stanley, and in all the later Egyptian campaigns, and who marches with his regiment yet. However old the black may be, he has the curious faculty of always looking about eigh- teen: only when you thrust your eyes right in his face do you notice that he is a wrinkled great-grand- father of eighty. But always he stands as straight as a lance. Not that the 9th average that age, I take it ; or if they do, it does not matter. Their height must average easily over six feet. They are willowy in fioure, and their legs run to spindle-shanks, almost ridiculously; yet as they formed up on parade they moved not only with the scope that comes from length of limb, but the snap of self - controlled strength as well. They love their soldiering, do the blacks, and take it very seriously. When they stood at attention they m THE MARCH OUT. might have been rows of black marble statues, all alike as in the ancient temples, filling up the little square of crumbling mud walls with a hole in its corner, c^ typical of the Berber landscape. Then the English coiinel snapped out something Turkish: in an instant the lines of each company had become fours ; all turned with a click ; the band crashed out a march — barbaric Ethiopian, darky American, or Eng- lish music-hall, it is all the same to the blacks — and out swung the regiment. They moved ofif by com- panies through a narrow alley, and there lay four new- killed goats, the sand lapping their blood. Every officer rode, every man stepped, over the luck token ; they would never go out to fight without it. Then out into the main street, every man stepping like a conqueror, the band blaring war at their head ; with each company a little flag — blue, black, white, amber, or green, or vermilion — on a spear, and half-way down the column the colour the Camerons gave them when they shared the glory of Ginnis. Boys trailed behind them, and their women, running to keep up, shot after them the thin screams that kindle Sudanese to victory. A black has been known to kill himself because his wife called him a coward. To me the sight of that magnificent regiment was a revelation. One has got accustomed to associate a black skin with something either slavish or comical. From their faces these men might have been loafing darkies in South Carolina or minstrels in St James's Hall. But in the smartness UNAFRAID "LIKE THE ENGLISH." 91 of every movement, in the pride of every private's bearing, what a wonderful difference ! This was quite a new kind of black — every man a warrior from his youth up. "Lu-u-u, lu-u-u," piped the women; the men held up their heads and made no sound, but you could see the answer to that appeal quivering all down the column. For " we," they say, "are like the English ; we are not afraid." And is it not good to think, ladies and gentlemen, as you walk in Piccadilly or the Mile End Eoad, that every one of these niggers honestly believes that to be English and to know fear are two things never heard of together? Utterly fearless themselves, savages brought up to think death in battle the natural lot of man, far preferable to defeat or disgrace, they have lived with English oil&cers and English sergeants, through years of war and pestilence, and never seen any sign that these are not as contemptuous of death as themselves. They have seen many Englishmen die; they have never seen an Englishman show fear. 92 XL THE CONCENTRATION, At the time I was disposed to blame the Mess Presi- dent, but on calm reflection I see that the fault lay with the nature of the Arab. We knew that the Sirdar was to start early on the 15th on the eighteen- mile ride to Kenur, and it was our purpose to travel shortly behind him. The only restrictions, I may say at once, laid upon correspondents during this campaign were that they were not to go out on reconnaissances, and especially not to go near the Sirdar. They were advised not to stand in front of the firin" line durinir general actions, but even this was not insisted upon. It did indeed require a fair deal of tact and agility to keep out of the Sirdar's eye, since his Excellency had a wearing habit of always appearing at any point where there was anything of interest going on. But practice sopn brought proficiency, and for the rest tlie correspondent, except when he had to work, enjoyed by far the most enviable position in the army. Therefore we had planned to start as soon as the TUB HUMOURS OF TRANSPORT. 98 Sirdar was out of siglit, and arrive just after he had disappeared into his quarters. We rose up at five and gloomily began to dismintle our home. We carted the tables and the chairs into the yard ; we tore down the very shelves : who could tell when they would not be useful ? By seven breakfast was over ; the horses and camels were grouped around our door in the High Street ; the bags and cases were fastened up and lying each on the right side of its right camel. There was nothing left but the chairs and the tables and the shelves and a bucket, and the breakfast things and a case to put them in. At eight I went out to see how things were looking; they were looking exactly the same, a question of precedence having arisen as to whose duty it was to wash up. At nine they were still the same, and we expostulated with the men : they said they were just ready. At ten the chairs and tables and 'breakfast things and camels were still lying about, and the men had disappeared. At eleven they had not returned. At twelve they condescended to return, and, adjourning the question of washing up, began packing the breakfast things dirty. At this point each man separately was called a dog, fined a pound, and promised fifty lashes. They received the judgment with surprised and wounded but respectful expostulation : what had they done ? They had merely been in the bazaar a very little while, thou Excel- lency, to buy food. By this time we were getting hungry ; so, rather than delay the loading up, we went 94 THE CONCENTRATION. to a Greek caf6 and lunched on ptomained sardines and vinegar out of a Graves bottle. When we got back things were exactly as we had left them: the men suavely explained that they had been lunching too. At last at half-past one every camel had been loaded and stood up ; and then it was discovered that all the chairs were being left behind. It became necessary to catch camels one by one, climb up tliem, and, standing on neck or hump, to tie two chairs apiece on to them. While the second was being done, the first walked away and rubbed himself against a wall, and knocked his chairs off again. Every one of the men rushed at him with furious yells ; the second camel, left to himself, waddled up to the wall with an absent-minded air, and rubbed off his chairs. At this point— about two in the afternoon, six hours after the contemplated start — human nature could bear it no longer. With cun"^B and blows we told them to follow immediately if Lliey valued their lives, and rode on. That was all they wanted. Looking back after a hundred yards we saw every camel loaded up and starting. If we had stayed behind we should never have got off that night. If we had ridden on six hours before we should not have been delayed. One time is as good as another to the Arab as long as he feels that he is wasting it. Give him half an hour and he will take an hour ; allow him six hours and he will require twelve. But of course by this time it was hopeless to expect now CAMELS AIIE LOADED. »6 that tlie l)n;4i;;ige would muku ciu^liteeii miles by dark. At Essillciii, a dozLJi iniUm out, we found Colonel [Maxwell's brigade with all its ba;^gage paeked, waiting only camels to move on too. At Darmali we found exactly the same state of things. General Gatacre'a never-failing hospitality produced dinner, after which we fell in with the disposition of the rest of the army, and waited for camels too. At ten, just as we were going to sleep in the sand in the middle of the main street of the village, they loafed up, very cheerful, and feeling quite sure that they would be neither fined nor flogged. Had they not covered thirteen miles iu a trifle under eight hours ? Then suddenly I was awake again, at the shy meet- ing of a quarter-moon and dawn. The beginning of what I knew, after my boy came to my chilly bed- chamber under a wall and said reveille was about to sound, was a monstrous confusion of camels. You could see that the ground was strewn with vague, shapeless, swaying lumps, with smaller, more agile shadows crawling over them. What they were was very plain from the noises : the camels had arrived. The camel, when it is a question of either working or leaving off work — so magnificently impartial is his stupidity —can protest in any voice from a wolf's snarl to the wail of an uncomforted child. As each camel was loaded it jerked up its towering height and tower- ing load — one of ours this time, I blush to say, was two sacks of barley, a deal table, and all the eight 96 THE CO.NCENTRATION. cane-bottomed chairs, waving their legs at the moon ; and a weirdly disreputable sight it was — and then it was the next camel's turn to howl. It is a wonderful sii^ht camels being loaded up, with buckets and table- legs and baths and tea-kettles, hung round them as if they were Christmas-trees ; but one soon has enough of it. So I left them trying to eat the hospital stores, and rode slowly out into the twilight. Outside the zariba a heavy black snake was forging slowly along the desert road ; when I came nearer it changed into a centipede; then the centipede had a kilt on, and finally it divided into the Cameron High- limders. In front of them were the Warwicks, behind ihcm the Maxim battery — four guns with carriages and three mules tandem, two on tripods and one mule to carry the whole gun — and the Lincolns ; the whole brigade was on the march. Only seventy-five men of each regiment remained, to their indignation, as guard for the stores that the camels must make a second journey to fetch. As for the heavy baggage, that was put in the houses of the "illage and left to its fate. Officers started with 30-\). kit, and men with 9-lb. Scarcity of camels perhaps justified the abandonment, but with the thermometer already 100° in the shade, it meant a lot of hardship. After a month and a half of General Gatacre, five miles with ritie and ammunition and 9-lb. kit is very much the same to the British soldier as walking down- stairs to breakfast is to you. They were just getting BX7ILDIN0 A ZAEIBA. 97 moon ; then it nderful . table- tn as if enough stores, forging iarer it had a \i High- behind irriages le naile e whole men of s guard second hat was its fate. Lh 9-lb. mment, hade, it ire, five is very ^ down- getting into their stride when the sun rose. The orange ball stepped up over the desert sky-line briskly and all in one piece, plainly intending to do a good day's work before he lay down again — and behold, we were at Kenur. Behold, also, the Sirdar's flag, white star and crescent on red, borne by one of three orderlies. Be- fore it rode the Sirdar himself, in white apparel, fresh and cool, also like one who has his work before him and knows how it is done, and means to do it. The British halted. There was a word and a rattle, and the battalions which had been formed in one long column, four abreast, were marching off at right angles in columns of a company apiece. In no space and no time the whole brigade had tucked itself away and taken up its quarters. And hardly had the British left the road clear than in swung the second black brigade from Essillem. These were different, many of them, from the lank soldiers of the 9th — short and stubby, plainly of other tribes ; but whether the black has seventy-eight inches or sixty, every one of them is a soldier. They tramped past with their untirable bands drumming and blow- ing beside them ; in a couple of hours they had cut their mimosa and made their zariba, and all tlie Der- vishes in the Sudan would not be too many tor them. The British, too, were out all day in the sun, at the same work, every man with his ride on his back. It had warmed up a little more now — though 100" in the dry Sudan is not near so hot as it would be in 98 THE CONCENTRATION. England — but the British stuck to their work like men, and their zariba, a word unknown to them two months back, was every bit as straight, and thick, and prickly as the natives'. And now we were concentrated, and only waited for them to come on. And, wonderful beyond all hope, they were coming on. The indispensable gunboats, tirelessly patrolling the river, kept the Sirdar fully informed of everything. On Shebaliya Island, forty miles south of the Atbara, they had slung an angareb aloft between a couple of spars. The Dervishes' route led within twelve hundred yards of it. There they passed everlastingly — men, women, and children; horses, goats, and donkeys, singing and braying, flying their banners, thrumming their war-drums, booming their melancholy war -horn. And on the angareb, under an umbrella, sat a man and counted them. There was reason to hope that they were little short of 20,000. Conformably with the traditions of the gunboat service, things did not stop at counting. On the 13th Bimbashi Sitwell and a section of the 4th Egyptians lauded from the Fatha, Lieutenant Beatty's boat, and attacked a large force which had crossed to the island. There were about 1000 Dervishes and 40 Egyptians, but neither of the united services saw anything irregular in the proceedings. In face of the swarm of enemies Bimbashi Sitwell led his men into a ditch, whence they kept up a steady fire. Suddenly he felt TRIUMPHANT AUDACITY. 99 like a tremendous blow on his shoulder; he thought one of tlie soldiers had let his rifle out of hand, but turn- ing round to swear, found himself on his back. Thou he heard the voice of Lieutenant Beatty, R.N. : " It's all right," it said ; " we're doing 'em proper." " ^lake it so," he replied nautically, and then, hearing a new burst of fire from the right, " You'd better order up a few more file, and turn them out of that." The next thing he knew, ail:er the blank, was that they were turned out of that, and that 38 of them were dead, which was very nearly one each for the 40 Egyptians. Birabashi Sitwell had a well-furnished pair of shoul- ders. The bullet ran through both, but missed the spine. Four days after, he was receiving visitors at Fort Atbara in pyjamas and a cigarette. Which was a happy issue to perhaps the most staggeringly auda- cious of all the audacities perpet.ated by the gunboats on the Nila 100 XIL AT KENUR. The first thing I saw of the social life of Kenur was the Press censor shaving himself : he said that any- body might take any quarters that nobody else had taken. As he spoke my eye fell on a round tukl between the Sirdar's quarters, the Censor's, and the telegraph tent — plainly an ideal residence for corre- spondents. It appeared empty. True, it was not much bigger than a 'bus-driver's umbrella ; but you could just get three men and a table into it. It would do very well for to-day: to-morrow we ex- pected to fight. As it turned out, we stayed at Kenur four days, during which the tukl contracted hourly, till in the end it seemed nearly half big enough for one person. Moreover, it turned out to be tenanted after all— by enormous bees, which had dug out the inside of the wooden framework til) the whole place was one large hive. Honour and prudence alike seemed to call for an attack on them. But on reflection I pointed out that the truest courage lay in sitting quite still ARRIVAL OF THE SKAFORTHS. 101 when a large bee settled on the back of yonr neck, and that the truest precaution lay in smoking tobacco. So we sat down quite still and smoked tobacco for four days. Kenur was like all the villages in this part of the world, only if possible longer. All are built along the Nile, that the inhabitants may have as short a way as possible to go for water: Kenur was from two to three miles long, and the camp stretched the whole length of it. Between the camp and the river was nearly a mile of land once cultivated, now overgrown with Sodom apples. Nervous critics pointed out that dervishes might attack the long line of the zariba, and slip in between the force and its water. But most people knew that nothing of the sort would happen. The Sirdar is not the man to wait to be attacj ed, and the long, open camp was beautifully adapted for bringing out the whole army in fighting- line at a moment's notice. The first afternoon at Kenur was enlivened by the advent of the first four companies of the Seaforths. They came by steamer, smiling all over, from colonel to private, to find they were in time. Down by the river to meet them was an enormous band drawn from all the blacks, bristling with half-jocose, half-ferocious swagger as the darlings always are. The Seaforths formed up into column, deep-chested, upstanding, un- deniable, a delight to look upon ; the Sirdar fell in by the colonel, the band began to wail out "Hieland 102 AT EENUB. Laddie" and "Annie Laurie," and anything else it thought would make them feel at home, and ofif they swung towards the southern horn of the zariba. All round it they marched, every regiment, white, black, and yellow, lining the route in its turn, following its colonel in " Hip, hip, hip, hurrah ! " Does not every native soldier know that the Highlanders have sworn to wear no trousers till they put them on in Khartum ? The second four companies came in next day, with an equal ear-splitting. Colonel Lewis's brigade at Fort Atbara was only five miles off, connected by telegraph, so that now we were complete. Meanwhile the days at Kenur were not wasted — days seldom are with the Sirdar about. Every .iiorning at half-past six or so the whole force paraded and manoeuvred. The first day's exercise was an attack in line, British on the right, Maxwell's in the centre, M'Don aid's on the left. The two latter used the attack formation of the Egyptian army — four of each battalion's six com- panies in line and two in support. The British had three Vjattalions in line and the four companies of the Seaforths in support: on each flank were guns, and the extreme battalion in each case was in column of companies. This was the formation in which the Sirdar advanced on Dongola in '96, except that the place of the flanking columns was there taken on the right by the cavalry — who now were of course recon- noitring all day — and on the left by the Kile with the gunboats. . A STATELY SPECTACLK 103 else it S* they I. All black, ing its ■j every sworn artum ? y, with ^ade at jted by mwhile lorn are alf-past Deuvred. British aid's on ation of ix Corn- ish had 3 of the ins, and lunm of lich the that the on the e recon- ile with The next day the force manoeuvred in brigade squares in echelon, and the day after formed one square of the whole army, skeleton companies repre- senting the Third Brigade. It was in the first of these formations that we did all the subsequent marching up the Atbara — a stately spectacle. On the right, and leading, was the British brigade — an advancing wave of desert-coloured khaki, with a dash of dark for the kilts of the Highlanders. They marched in columns of fours, that being a handy and flexible for- mation, and easily kept in line : the officer has only to see that four men are keeping a proper front with the rest of the brigade instead of fifty ; and at the word all can wheel up into line in less than a minute. Next, leftward and clear in rear, so that an attack on its front or the British flank would meet a cross-fire, marched Maxwell's brigade. Leftward and in rear of that came Macdonald. The Egyptian forces, march- ing in line for the front and rear of the square, and in column for its flanks, and having darker uni- form, made a denser blotch on the desert than the British. But dark or light, when you looked along the force it ^vas tremendous, going forward wave by wave irresistibly, devouring the desert. Thus, on ti^e morning of Sunday, March 20, the force broke up from Kenur. The camp went wild, for the news said that Mahmud was actually on the Atbara at last. He had seized Hudi ford, it was said, seven miles from the junction of the rivers ; and to 104 AT KENUR. Hudi we were to march straight across the desert. The Intelligence Department more than half disbelieved the native stories. The native has no words for dis- tance and number but " near " and " far," " few " and "many" ; "near" may be anything within twenty miles, while " many " ranges from a hundred to a hundred thousand. However we marched — eleven miles at two miles an hour, in a choking sand-storm that muffled the sun to a pale winter moon, till at three in the afternoon we struck the river at Hudi. Here we found three battalions of Lewis's brigade, the 15th being left to garrison Fort Atbara ; but devil a dervish. 105 rt. The K'lieved for dis- w " and y miles, mndred iiiles at m that three in lere we le 15th devil a XIII. ON THE ATBARA. Coming down to the Atbara after the desert was like entering the gates of heaven. To you in England, fields pulsing with green wheat and gardens aflame with tulips, it might have seemed faded. To us it was paradise. The north bank drops twenty feet plumb to the sky-blue river. A stone's -throw across, the other bank is splashed with grass that struggles against jaundice; but it is real grass, md almost greenish, and after the desert we are very grateful for it. Be- yond that shelves a bare white-brown beach, thirsty for flood-time; beyond that a wail of white-green new - fledged mimosa topped with turrets of palm. Over it all the intense blue canopy of midday, the fires of sunset, or the black roof of midnight pierced with innumerable stars, so white and clear that you almost hold up your hand to touch them — it was worth a couple of marches of sand - storm to come into such a land. 106 ON THE ATBARA. Our side, too, was thick with mimosa and dom- palm, and tufted with grass — great coarse bunches, mostly as thick as straw and as yellow; but a few blades maintained a bloodless green, and horses and camels went without their sleep to tear at them. The camels eat the mimosa too — elsewhere a bush that grows thorns and little yellow honey-breathing flufif- balls, but on the fruitful Atbara a cedar-spreading tree, with young leaves like an acacia's. The camels rear up their affected heads, and ecstatically scrunch thorns that would run any other beast's tongue through ; their lips drop blood, but they never notice it. And the blacks eat the dom-nuts — things like petrified prize apricots, whose kernel makes vegetable ivory, and whose husks, they say, taste like ginger- bread ; though, having no ore-crusher in my kit, I cannot speak to that. But lanky Sambo was never tired of shying at them as they clustered just above the dead leaves and just below the green, and Private Atkins lent a hand with enthusiasm. Then Sambo would grin all round his head and crack the flinty things between his sliiniug teeth, and Thomas would stand staring at him, uncertain whether he was a long-lost brother-in-arms or something out of a circus. Tiiey might well chew mimosa, and halfa-grass, and dom-nuts, for even on the river we were in a desert. We marched and camped in an utterly empty land. Atbara banks are green, birds whistle and coo in the tree- tops, now and again a hare switchbacks I dom- nches, a few es and The b that fluff- eading camels crunch tongue notice ^s like ge table ginger- kit, I 3 never b above Private Sambo J flinty 1 would was a , circus, a-grass, re in a ' empty and coo 3hbacks AN EMPTY LAND. 107 I across the line of march ; but along all the river there was not one living man. Here on the Atbara there were but rare traces of population — a few stones, half buried, standing for salt-workings, or a round, half washed-out mud-bank for a wall. In the empty Nile villages their bones were long ago gnawed white by jackals and hyenas, their sons were speared and thrown into the river, their wives and daughters led away to the harems of Omdurmau. It is good land for the Sudan in this corner of the two rivers, worth, in places, perhaps as much as a penny an acre; and the Khalifa has swept it quite clean, and left it quite soulless. And soulless it seemed to stay. We slept one night at Hudi in a scnd-floored quadrangle of zariba, and you could hear the men expecting batile througii their sleep. Next day, still looking to see black heads and spears rise over every sky-line, we marched to Eas el Hudi, six miles farther. Both Hudis were fords over the Atbara, and where one ended the other began : as the river was already nearly all ford, and the whole place contained not a single hut, you could call anywhere anything you Tked. That same day (March 21st) the cavalry found the enemy. Perhaps it would be more strictly correct to say that the enemy found them: they were halted and dis- mounted when the Dervish horse suddenly attacked the sentries. The troopers were in their saddles and out at the enemy smartly enough, and after a short 108 ON THE ATBARA. scuffle the Dervishes sheered off into the bush. The cavalry lost seven troopers killed and eight wounded, of whom two died next day. These were the first fatalities of the campaign. Next day, the bulk of the force remaining in Ras Hudi camp, a stronger reconnaissance went out — all the cavalry, with Maxims and the 13th Sudanese in sup- port. Just as we were sitting down to breakfast we heard heavy firing up river. On the sound rang out bugles ; syces could be seen frantically slamming saddles on to horses, and tugging them over to the Sirdar's headquarters. Ten seconds later the whole force was getting under arms. I pushed a tinned sausage down my throat and a biscuit into my holster, looked that my water-bottle was both full and well- corked — of course it was neither — and blundered through tussocks and mimosa - thorns out of camp. Already the long columns of khaki were combining into brigade-squares ; in a matter of minutes the army was riveted together and rolling majestically over the swaying desert towards the firing. This time, by a variation on the usual order, Macdonald's brigade was on the right, its front level with Gatacre's, while Max- well was echeloned on the left, and Lewis in support : the reason for this was that half a mile of bush fringed the Atbara, and the blacks were expected to be handier in it than the British. So we marched and marched. The British officers had had no breakfast, but they were used to that by now : officers and men — white, A FALSE AIARM. 109 black, and brown — all tingled with the exultant anti- cipation of battle. At last, four miles or so out of camp, we halted before a mile- wide slope of stony gravel — a God-sent field of fire. On the brow we could see a picket of cavalry : presently a rider detached himself, and came bucketing towards the Sirdar's flag. The order was given to load, and the sigh of contentment could be heard above the clatter of locks. It had come at last! But it hadn't. We had noted it as ominous that no more firing had beckoned us as we advanced. The reconnaissance and the fight alike seemed to have faded in front of us like a mirage. The sun was getting hot overhead: to go on indefinitely without any kind of baggage was not to be thought of. " Rise up, men, and prepare to go home," came the reluctant order. The army rose up and faced about, and cursed its way into camp again. It turned out afterwards that the enemy'o cavalry had appeared in force, and that ours led them back to the 13th. CoUinson Bey formed square, and gave them a volley or two at half a mile or so. A few Dervishes came out of their saddles ; and that was all, for they fell back and re- appeared no more. After that came to-morrow and to-morrow and to- morrow. Some days there was a little shooting, other days there was not ; and we in camp heard and saw nothing in either case. Every morning one or two native battalions with Maxims went out, support- no ON THE ATBARA. ing the cavalry. They went out about three, and frizzled through morning, midday, and afternoon at a genial spot called Khor Abadar, five or six miles out : a khor is a dij desert watercourse, but this one was no more — nor less — than about a mile of what looked like rather rough sea solidified into clay. Having frizzled duly there all day, they would swing in again at seven or so, striding into camp bolt upright and with a jaunty snap, as if they had been out a quarter of an hour for a constitutional. You could always tell when the reconnaissance was coming in by the rolls of ^ust that blotted out the camp. At the corner where they stepped inside the zariba, Blackfriars on a November night was midday to it. You caught at a black face and the top of a shouldered rifle floating past from one eye to the other ; you felt, rather than beheld, a loom- ing horse-head and lance- butt over your shoulder. You neither saw nor heard, but were aware of regi- ments and squadrons as in the dream of a dog-sleep. And as lazy day sweated after lazy day, the whole camp and the whole army began to dim into the phantom of a dream. The vivacicas, never-sleepy bugles became a singing in your ear, tne ripple of sun on bayonets was spots before the eyes, the rumour of the crouching enemy was the echo of a half-remembered fairy tale very, very far away. For, to be quite truthful, during that long succes- sion of to-morrows at Kas el Hudi, nobody quite knew where the Dervishes were. It was quite certain they WAITING THE ENEMY. Ill were somewhere near, for their cavalry was seen almost daily ; and they must be camped on the Atbara, for there was nowhere else wh<3nce they could get water. We were quite confident that they were there, and that the fight was coming, and we invented all sorts of stories to explain their delay in coming on. They started down the Nile fast; they have slackened now — so we assured ourselves — to wait for their rear-guard, or to reconnoitre, or to knock down dom-uuts, or fur any of a thousand reasons, and we were here a day sooner than was necessary. A day too soon, of course, was nothing — or rather it would be nothing after we had fought ; at present an extra day certanly meant a little longer discomfort. You must remember that the army was nearly 1400 miles from the sea, and about 1200 from any place that the things armies want could possibly come from. It had to be supplied along a sand - banked river, a single line of rail, which was carrying the material for its own construction as well, and various camel-tracks. Tliat 13,000 men could ever have been brought into this hungry limbo at all shows that the Sirdar is the only English general who has known how to campaign in this country. The real enemy, he has seen, is not the Dervishes, whom we have always beaten, but the Sudan itself. He was conquering it; but for the moment the Sudan had an opening, and began trying us rather high. Not me personally, who had three camels 112 ON THK ATBARA. and two blankets and much tinned meat. To me and my likes the Sirdar's refusal of transport — most natural and proper, after all — had been a bless- ing; it had made correspondents self-supporting, and therewith rich. But for the moment the want of transport and Mahinud's delay in coming on was hard on the troops — especially hard on the British brigade, and hardest of all on their officers. Officers and men came alike with one blanket and no overcoat. Now you must know that, though the Sudan can be live coals by day, it can be aching ice by night. It is the healthiest climate in the world if you have shade at noon and many rugs an hour before reveille ; but if you have not, and especially if you happen to be a kilted Higlilander, it interferes with sleep. You must further remember that we left Kenur with the intention of fighting next day or the next. The British took the expectation seriously; the Egyptian oliicers did not. "You see," said one, " I've been in this bally country five years ; so when I was told to bring two days' kit, I brought a fort- night's." He was now sending his private camel back to Fort Atbara for more; the officers of the British brigade had no private camels. The officers had brought only what could go into a haversack, which includes, roughly, soap and a sponge, and a tooth- brush and a towel, but not a clean shirt, nor a handkerchief, nor shaving-tackle; so that the gilded popinjays were a little tarnished just at present. One HOW BRITISH OFFICERS FARED. 113 of them said, most truly, that an English tramp in summer, with a sweet haystack to sleep under, and sixpence a-day for bread and cheese and beer at way- side inns, was out of reckoning better off than a British officer on the banks of the Atbara. He slept on a pillow of dusty sand, which worked steadily into his hair; he got up in the middle of the night to patrol; then he lay down again and shivered. The men could sleep three together under triple layer of blanket ; the officers must sleep each in his position on the flank or in the centre of his company. When he got up in the morning he had nothing to shave with, and lucky if he got a wash. The one camel- load of mess stores was wellnigh eaten up by now; he received the same ration as the men. His one shirt was no longer clean ; he hardly dared pull out his one handkerchief ; he went barefoot inside his boots while his socks were being washed. And always — night or day, on fatigue or at leisure, relatively clean or unredeemedly dirty, when he had borrowed a shave and felt almost like a gentleman again, or when he lay with his head in the dust and the black private doubted whether he should salute or not — his first paternal thought was the wellbeing of his men. When we found Mahmud he should pay for it. But in the meantime where was he ? There was a perpetual series of cavalry reconnaissances, and a perpetual stream of scallywags coming in from liis camp. Any day from dawn to da.*k you might see 114 ON THE ATBARA- half-clofhed black men squatting before Colonel Wingate. Some were fairly fat; some were bags of bones. But all stated with one consent that they were hungry, and having received refreshment felt that they could do no less than tell Colonel Wingate such tidings as they conceived he w( Id like to hear. There was no such thing as a place on the Atbara, as I have explained: there were names on the map, but as they named nothing in particular you could put them anywhere you liked within ten miles or so. Also, there is no such thing as distance in the native mind, so that the native also could locate any- thing anywhere that seemed convenient. On the 27th Bimbashi Haig reconnoitred the op- posite bank of the Atbara up to Manawi — say eighteen miles — and saw no trace of the enemy. Combining that fact with the precipitate from the scallywags' stories, we came to the conclusion that Mahmud and Osman were on the southern bank, somewhere near the spot marked on the map as Hilgi. It was believed that on the first news of the first cavalry contact they entrenched themselves there in a four-mile belt of scrub. Now General Hunter had made a reconnais- sance up the Atbara last winter as far as Adarama — indispensably informative it turned out — and the Staff know what sort of scrub it is. It is an impenetrable, flesh-tearing jungle of mimosa-spears and dom-palm and stumbly halfa-grass and hanging ropes of creeper: no army in the world could possibly attack through it. A BOLD STRATAGEM. 115 That being so, the Sirdar's course appeared to be to wait at Eas el Hudi until Mahmud came out. Hunger might bring him out — only as yet it had not. The more trustworthy of the deserters said that there was still a certain store of food. You must know that the Dervishes have honeycombed the Sudan with caches of buried grain: many have been found and opened by the Egyptian army, but it is possible that some remain to draw on. Moreover, men v/ho were at Toski told how, in the starving army of Wad-el-Nejumi, the fighting men were well fed enough : it was the women and the children and the followers whose ribs broke through the skin. The scallywags were starved, of course: that is why they came in, and being starved themselves they saw the whole army in like case. But it seemed by the best information that what with food they brought, and stores they found, and dom-nuts they knocked off the trees, the dervishes had a few days of fairly filled stomach before them yet. Then how to fetch them out ? The situation called for a bold stroke, and the Sirdar answered it, after his wont, with a bold and safe one. On the morning of March 24 the 15th Egyptians left Fort Atbara in the three gunboats for Shendi. Left at Shendi were all the women of Muhmud's force, and with his women gone the Sudani is only half a man. It might draw him and it might not ; it was worth trying. 116 XIV. THE RAID ON SHENDI. I HAD steppiid out in the morning to pick fruit from the sanduh for breakfast. Below me, in the shallow river, a damson-skitined black was bathing and wash- ing his white Friday clothes and whistling " The British Grenadiers." The sun was just up; but in the Sudan he begins to blister things the moment he is over the horizon. The sanduh lay on the south side of the north wall of our zariba. Greengages were glittering in the young sunshine; but to pull up mis- apprehension, I may as well say at once that sanduk is the Arabic for provision-case, and that our green- gages glittered through glass bottles. It may be that you were never much attracted by bottled fruits. But they taste of fruit a good deal more than tinned ones ; and when your midday is six hours of solid 110 in the shade, you will find bottled fruits one of the things least impossible to eat that you are likely to get. Therewith entered the Mess-President's head camel- A NEW USE FOR ELI-IMAN. 117 man. He was a Jaali by tribe; his name meant "Powerful in the Faith"; and in this wilderness I liked to think that if he were not black, and had no moustache, and no razor-cut tribal marks on his checks, his tilted nose and smiling teeth, and erect, sprightly carriage would make him a rather pretty -ugly Frencli girl. He approached his lord's bed before the tent door and pattered Arabic faster than I can keep up with. But the sum of his tale was this : that the raid on Shendi had been a great success, many Dervishes were slain, and many taken, with many women , \nd children ; that his fellow-Jaalin had done best part of the execution, and that the 15tli Battalion was already back again at Fort Atbara. Then let us go to Fort Atbara, said we, and hear all about it. We are going mouldy for want of exercise — t nd, to be quite open with you, the liquor famine here is getting grave. Last night the boy came up with a couple of bottles : " Only two wine more," said he, and mournfully displayed one Scrubbs's Cloudy Ammonia — try it in your bath, but not in your drinking-cup — and one Elliman's Embrocation. So saddle up; it is 1000 to 5 against a fight here to-da}-, and it is better to sweat a-horseback in the desert oven-blast than fry in sand and camp-smells here. So the Mess-President and I picked our way over the spongy ground outside camp where the water lies in flood time, and then swung out, quarter of an hour canter and ten minutes walk, over the hard sand u.:\d 118 THE RAID ON SHENDL gravel of the desert. The way from Fort Af^ara was trodden already into a road as broad as Berber High Street, and aliuost as populous — now a white under- clothed Jaali scallywag with a Remington and a donkey, now a lolloping convoy of camels, now a couple of Greeks with stores. For the Jew, as we know him, is a child for commercial enterprise along- side the Sudau Greek. A Greek had his o i^ens going on Ferkee field before the last shot was fired; the moment the Suakim road was opened the Greek's camels were on it. The few English merchants here were hard and enterprising, and they had good stuff — only just when you wanted it, it was usually just a day's journey av/ay. The Greek gets his stuff up every- where: it* is often inferior stuff, and he caravans it with a double-barrelled rifle on his shoulder and visions of Dervishes behind every mimosa bush; but he gets it up. He chargps high for it, but he deserves every piastre he gets. At Fort Atbara there stood already a small bazaar of tukls, and a pink shirt -sleeved, black -stubble- chinned Greek in each among his wares. There we laid in every known liquor except claret and beer ; there we even got six dozen Pilsener-bottles of soda- water — of such are the privations of the Sudan. Most of the Greeks seemed to confine their energies to sardines, many degrees over proof. But one had planted a little salad-garden ; another knew where he could get tomatoes; a third specialised in scented !' THK SUDAN GREEK. 119 ara was lY High ; under- and a now a , as we e along- QS going ed; the Greek's nts here 1 stuff— J j^ist a ip every- avans it der and ash; but deserves 1 bazaar stubble- here we id beer ; of soda- Sudan, energies one had vhere he scented soap and stationery. Eemember, we were twelve hundred miles from the nearest place where people buy such things in shops ; remember, too, that not an inch of Government truck or steamer could be spared for private dealers ; and then you will realise what a Nansen of retail trade is the Sudan Greek. But a correspondent cannot live by soda-water and tabasco sauce alone: let us try to acquire some in- formation. In the commanderia — that stable house of mud, six-roomed and lofty roofed, the stateliest mansion of the Sudan — sits Hickman Bey, who swep<: out Shendi. In the English army it would be almost a scandal that an officer of his service should go any- where or do anytbing. The Egyptian army is an army of young men, with the red-hot dash of a boy tempered by responsibility into the fine steel of a man at his best for both plan and deed. But about the raid. To listen to any one of the men who conducted it you would think that he had been a passenger, and that all the others had done all the work: that is their way. The three gunboats with their naval officers — now ara might have made things very unpleasant for us even at Ras el Hudi. But for the patrols of the unwearying cavalry they could easily have crept up in the bush across the river and fired into camp all night every night. They might have got below the camp and cut up convoy after convoy till hunger drove i he Sirdar down to Fort Atbara again and opened the way to Berber. We sat day after day and wondered why they never did it; but they never did. At last, on March 30, General Hunter went out. WitVi him went the cavalry, the horse-battery, and four Maxims, while two battalions of infantry and a field battery were advanced in support to Khor Abadar. When he got back that evening everybody knew that Mahmud's stronghold was found. He had gone on until he came to it. He had ridden up to within 300 yards of it and looked in. What he saw, of course, the Intelligence Department knew better 128 BEST AND RECONNAISSANCES. than I did, but some things were common property. The position faced the open desert — we all breathed freely at this — and went right back through the scrub to the river. Round it ran a tremendous zariba three miles long, and in the centre, on an eminence, were trenches affording three tiers of fire. This proved to be an exaggeration as regarded size, and a misunder- standing otherwise : the triple trench ran nearly round the position. What was certain and to the point was that the place was trimmed with black heads, but that their owners seemed reluctant to come out. The horse-battery gave them a score of rounds or so, but they made no answer, and in their thick bush any casualties they may have had were safely concealed. However, here at last was Mahmud marked down. To be precise, he was at Nakheila, eighteen miles away, as the cavalry and Staff said, though, when the in- fantry came to foot it, they made it well over twenty : every infantry man knows how cavalry and Staff will underrate distances. Wherever he V/as, we knew the way to him, and we could take cur time. Now what would the Sirdar do ? For the next two days tha camp buzzed with strategy and tactics. It was no longer what Mahmud would do: Mahmud, as we have seen, could do noth- ing. But would the Sirdar wait for him to starve into attack or dispersal, or would he go for Nakheila ? Many people thought that, being a careful man, he would wait and not risk the loss an attack would EEASONS FOR THE ATTACK. 129 operty. 'eathed 3 scrub a three e, were oved to mnder- r round int was is, but :. The so, but sh any jealed. . down. s away, the in- wenty : aff will lew the w what i with ^ahmud noth- ve into kheila ? lan, he would cost; but they were wrong. On the evening of April 1 it became known that we were moving; on the morning of the 3rd four miles forward to Abadar. Some theorists still held out that the change of camp was a mere matter of health; and indeed sanitation had long cried for it. Others held that the Sirdar was not the man to lengthen his line of communication for nothing: the move meant attack. What considerations resolved the Sirdar to storm Mahmud's zariba, I do not pretend to know. But many arguments for his decision suggested themselves at once. It was true that the Dervislies could not stay at Nakheila for ever, but as yet there was no sign of starvation from them. On the other hand, it was no joke to supply 12,000 men even seventeen miles from Fort Atbara by camel-transport alone: as time wore on and camels wore out, it became less and less easy. Secondly, the white brigade was beginning to feel the heat, the inadequate shelter, and the poor food : up to now its state of health had been wondt^rfui — only two percent of sick or thereal)0uts — but now began to appear dysentery and enteric. Finally, it was hardly fitting that so large a British force should sit down within twenty miljs of an enemy and not smash him. There was a good deal of lurking sympathy with Mahdism in some Egyptian quarters far enough away not to know what I^Iahdism was: to shrink from a decisive attack would nourish it. The ettect on the troops themselves would be disheartening, and dis- 130 REST AND RECONNAISSANCES. heartenment spells lassitude and sickness. And to the Dervishes themselves a battle would be a far more killing blow than a dispersal and retreat. In all dealings with a savage enemy, I suppose the rule holds that it is better and cheaper in the end to attack, and attack, and attack again. All con- siderations of military reputation pleaded unanimously that Mahmud must be destroyed in battle; and at last the army was on the direct road to destroy him. 131 XVL CAMEL-CORPS AND CAVALRY. "Camel CORPS luck," said the Bimbashi, and smiled bitterly, then swore. " my God, if this is the big show ! " Climbing up over sand -bags on to one of the gun -platforms of Fort Atbara, we crouched in the embrasure and listened. Boom — boom — boom; very faint, but very distinct, and at half-minute intervals. We had ridden in the day before from the Sirdar's camp up the Atbara to buy more bottled fruit and, alas! more gin from the Greek shanties on the Nile beach. A convoy, on a similar errand, had been attacked by Dervishes half an hour after we had passed it, yet we heard not a shot. To-day, all this way off, we heard plainly : it must be an action indeed. Our own army, we knew, was not to move. Could it be that Mahmud had come down and was attacking us at Abadar ? And we eighteen miles away at Fort Atbara, and down there in the sand-drift roadway the wobbling, grousing camels, that were to be conveyed 132 CAMEL-CORPS AND CAVALRY. out at two miles an hour ! We joined the Bimbashi, and cursed miserably on the chance of it. But no, we struggled to ] ersuade ourselves, it couldn't be so bad as that, it must be a battalion come out to clear the road for our convoy. Or it must 1 ^.h^ .connaissance that was going up to the dervish z'-d^\- at Nakheila. Correspondents are not allowed t^ go :?h. reconnaissances, so that if it is only that, there's no great loss after all. Anyhow it is eleven o'clock now. The baggage camels have lolloped out under the mud guard-house, through the fort -gate, through the gap in the mimosa -thorn zariba. The camel-corps escort is closing up in rear : we are ofif. Half a mile ahead ride five blacks, their camels keeping perfect line. The sun flashes angrily on their rifle-barrels, but they look him steadily in the face, peering with puckered eyes over the desert below them: in this land of dust and low scrub a camel's hump is almost a war balloon. Far out on their right I see a warily advancing dot, which is four more ; a black dot on the rising leftward skyline, three more ; out on the right flank of the baggage camels, shaving the riverside thickets, gleam white spider legs, which are a couple of camel-troopers more. They stop and examine a track ; they break into a trot and disappear behind a palm clump ; they reappear walking. But the main force of the two companies rides close about the swinging quadrangle of baggage camels — in front, n CAMEL-CORPS LUCK. 133 in rear : on flank, in rear. Slowly and sleepily the mass of beasts strolls on into the desert, careless what horsemen might be wheeling into line behind the ridge, or what riflemen might be ambushed in the scrub. But the scouts in front are looking at every footprint, over every skyline, behind every clump of camel-thoni. To be out of an exciting action is camel-corps luck ; this is camel-corps work. The Bimbashi missed his part in the reconnaissance to ride all ni^;ht ;nd guard the menaced convoy; he slept one hoi ' at aawn, and now returns in the sun. He is quite fresh and active. This is his usual work ; but he is rot nappy because this also is his usual luck. Only th,. Egyptian army would have found it very difficult to do without him and his desert cavalry in the past, and even now, with all the desert roads except the Bayuda behind it, finds plenty of work for the camel-corps still. And one day they say, " Take out twenty camels," and the next day, "Take out the rest." The next day, " Those twenty that weren't out yesterday can't possibly be tired" — but the Bimbashi goes out every day. The skin is scaled ofl' his nose with sun, and his eyes are bloodshot with sand, and the hairs of his moustache have snapped off short with drought, and his hair is bleaching to white. All that is the hall- mark of the Sudan. Getting into the saddle had been li1* m. Broad- lind his ys leads Persse — charged t before eft fore- troopers ;he Der- i bullet, e to pay y of the jation of iarless of L his in- ss was ft night be. oy : the A moved For the ng work ny also: ;his time Che bush n sappy s, but ft )ody waa DMDABlEfl. 139 1 getting very sick of the Atbara, which had been such a paradise of green when we first camped on it. We missed the ever-blowing breeze of the Nile; the night was a breathless oven and the day a sweaty stewpan. The Atbara seemed even getting sick of itself: day by day it dropped till now it was no river at all, but a string of shallow befouled pools. All longed for the fatherly Nile again. So once more the squares marched forth before day- light, and black dusk lowered under the rising sun. Umdabieh was a novelty for an Atbara camp, in tliat a few mud huts marked the place whence the Dervishes had blotted out a village. The river was punier than ever and the belt of bush thin ; lucky was the man whose quarters included a six-foot dom-palia to lay his head under. I spent both afternoons at Umdabieh chasing a patch of shadow round and round a tree. We did nothing on the 6th, for on the evening of the 7th we were to march, and to fi-^ht on Good Friday, 140 XVII. THE BATTLE OF THE ATBARA. As the first rays of sunrise glinted on the desert pebbles, the army rose up and saw that it was in front of the enemy. All night it had moved blindly, in faith. At six in the evenin<][ the four brigades were black squares on the rising desert outside the bushes of Umdabieh camp, and tliey set out to march. Hard gravel underfoot, full moon overliead, about them a coy horizon that seemed immeasurable yet revealed nothing, the squares tramped steadily for an hour. Then all lay down, so that the other brigades were swallowed up into the desert, and the faces of the British square were no more than shadows in the white moonbeams. The S(piare was unlocked, and first the horses were taken down to water, then the men by half-battalions. We who had water ate some bully-beef and Itiscuit, put our heads on saddle-bags, rolled our bodies in bl.'inkets, and slept a little. The' next thing was a long rustle about us, stealing in upon us, urgently whispering us to rise and mount i 3 desert was in blindly, brigades side the ) march. )ut them revealed n hour. es were of the ill the L'd, and hen the \te some lie-bags, ule. stealing 1 mount THE WAR-MACHINE MOVES FORWARD. Ul and move. The moon had passed overhead. It was cue o'clock. The square rustled into life and motion, bent forward, and started, half asleep. No man spoke, and no liglit showed, but the sand-niunied trampling and the moon-veiled figures forbade the fancy that it was all a dream. The sliapes of lines of men — now close, now broken, and closing up again as the ground broke or the direction changed — the mounted olhcers, and the hushed order, "Left shoulder forward," the scrambling Maxim mules, the lines of swaying camels, their pungent smell, and the rare neigh of a horse, the other three squares like it, which we knew of but could not see, — it was just the same war-machine as we had seen all these days on parade. Only this time it was in deadly earnest, moving stealthily but massively forward towards an event that none of U3 could cpiite certainly foretell. AVe marched till sometliing after four, then halted, and the men lay down again and slept. The rest walked up and down in the gnawing cold, talking to one and another, wondering in half-voices were we there, would they give us a fight or should we find their lines empty, liow would tlie fight be fought, and, above all, how were we to gee over their zariba. For jMalimud's zariba was pictured very high, and very thick, and very prick' ^, which sounded awkward for the Cameron Iliglilanders, wlio were to assault it. Somebody had proposed burning it, either with war- rockets or paraffir and safety matches ; somebody else -t ff. 142 THE BATTLE OF THE ATBAFA. snggested throwiii;; blankets over it, tliongh how you throw blankets over a ten by twenty feet hedge of camel-thorn, and what you do next when you have thrown them, the inventor of the v-Ian never ex- plained. Others favoured scaling-ladders, apparently to take headers off on to the thorns and the enemy's spears, and even went so far as to make a few ; most were for the simpler plan of just taking hold of it and pulling it apart. But how many of the men who pulled would ever get through the gap ? Now tlie sun rose behind us, and the men ro^se, too, and we had arrived. Bimbrshi Fitton had led the four brigades in the half-light lo within 200 yards of the exact positions they were to take in the action. Now, too, we saw the whole army — rigiiij of us Macdonald's, right of him, again, Maxwell's, to our left rear Lewis's in support, f " away leftward of them the grey squadrona of the ■. ivalry. The word came, and the men sprang up. The squares shifted into the fighting formations: at one impulse, in one superb sweep, near 12,000 men moved forward towards tho enemy. All England and all Egypt, and the flower of the black lands beyond, Birmingham and the West Highlands, the half-regenerated children of the earth's earliest civilisation, and grinning savages from the uttermost swamps of Equatoria, muscle and machinery, lord and larrikin, Balliol and the Board School, the Sirdars brain rnd the camel's back — all welded into nr.'^, the awful war machine went forward into action. I '.%'• 7>' . .- , ^ " ; .>■<■■-« THE Fir.ST GUN, U3 We could see their pr=',itiori quite well by nov/, about a mile and a half away — the usual river fringe of grey-green palms meeting the usual desert fringe of yellow-gre} mimosa. And the smoke-grey line in front of it all must be their famous zariba. Up from it rolled a nimbus of dust, as if they were still busy at entrenching ; before its riglit centre fluttered half a dozen flags, white and pale blue, yellow and pale chocolate. The line went on over the crunchinj:: gravel in awful silence, or speaking brielly in half- voices — went on till it was not half a mile from the flags. Then it halted. Thud! went the first gun, and phutt ! came faintly back, as its shell burst on the zariba into a wreathed round cloud of just the zariba's smoky grey. I looked at my watch, and it marked 6.20. The battle that had now menaced, now evaded us for a month — the battle had begun. Now, from the horse battery and one field battery on the right, from two batteries of Maxin -Nordenfelts on the left, just to the riL;ht front of the British, and from a war-rocket which changed over from left to right, belched a rapid, but unhurrie*', re^jular, relent- less shower of destruction. The round grey clouds from shell, the round white puff's from shrapnel, the hissing splutter of rocki ts, flighted down metiiodi- cally, and aligiited on every part of the zariba and of the bush behind. A fire sprang and . .varmed redly up the dried leaves of a palm-tree; bclore it sank H4 TEE BATTLE OF THE ATBABA. another flung np l)csi(le it, and then another. Wlien the shellini,' beLjan a few sparse shots canie back; one gunner was wounded. And all over the zariba we saw dust-clollu'd fl^L;nrcs strolling unconcernedly in nnd out, clu'ckiii;^' when a shell diT)[)ped necr, and then passing eontenij)tuously on again. The eueniy's cavalry a[)[)eared gallojiing and foiining np on our left of the zariba, threatening a charge. But tut-tut- tut-tut went the Maxims, and through glasses we could see oar ca^^alry trembling to be at them. And the Daggara horsemen, remeuiliering the guns that ]iad riddled th.eni and tlie srpiadrons that had shorn through ihem three days before, fell back to cover again. By now, when it lr.d lasted an hour or more, not a man showed along the whole line, nor yet a spot of rille smoke. All seemed emj)ty, silent, lifeless, but for one iiobbled. camel, waving his neck and stupid head in lu'l[)less dumb bewildcrnumt. Pres- enlly the edge of the storm of devastation caught him too, and we saw him no more. An hour and twenty mimit(^s the guns spoke, and Ihen were silent. And now for the advance along the whok. lino,. JMaxwell's brigade on the right — 12th, 13th, (xV'i 14i.h Sudanese to a,ttack and 8th Egyptian supporLing — used the ]"]gyptian attack formation, — ^our CO n panics of a battalion in line and the other two in sui)port. IMacdtjuald, — 9th, 10th, and 11th Sudanese in front and 2nd E.L'yptian supporting, — his space being constricted, had three companies in line il 5. ■5( O 1 1 Line of < t fes THE CAMEUONS ADVANCE. 145 and threo in support. The r>ril:i,^Ii had the Camcrons in line alon^i,' their wliolc front; then, in columns of tlieir eight companies, the Lineolns on the rii^ht, tlie Seaforths in the ccjntre, and the "Warwick s, two com- panies sliort, on the left : the orders to tliese last were i:f>t to advance till it was certain the dervish cf.valry wouhl not charLfe in Hank. Lewis's tliree-battr.l'on bri^L^^ade — .'Inl, 4th, and 7lh Egyptian — liad hy thipi time two battalions to the Lritish left rop.r and one forming square round tliG water - cauicils. All tho artillery accompanied the advance. The Camcrons formed fours and moved away to the left, then turned into h'ne. Tliey halted and waited for the advance. They were sliiflcd back a little to the rin'ht, then halted airain. Th.en a staff oilicer galloped furiously heliind the^T !ine, and sliouted some- tliing in the direction of tl'.e Maxim battery. "Ad- vance ? " yelled the major, and before the answer could come the mules were up to the collar and the Maxims were up to and past the left Hank of the Camcrons. They stood still, waiting on the buyle — a line of kliaki and dark tartan blending to purple, of llasliing bayonets at the slope, and set, two-montli- bcarded faces strained towards tlie zariba. In the middle of the line shone tho Union Jack. The bugle sang out the advance. The pipes screamed battle, and the line started forward, like a ruler drawn over the tussock-broken sand. Up a low ridge they moved forward : when would the Dervishes lire ? The 146 THE BATTLE OF TUE ATBARA. Camerons were to open from the top of the ridge, only 300 yards short of the zariba ; up and up, forward and forward : when would they fire ? Now the line crested the ridge — the men knelt down. " Volley- firing by sections" — and crash it came. It came from both sides, too, almost the samo instant. Wht-t, wht-t, wht-t piped the bullets overhead: the line knelt very firm, and aimed very steady, and crash crash, crash they answered it. ! A cry more of dismayed astonishment than of pain, and a man was up on his feet and over on his back, and the bearers were dashing in from the rear. He was dead before they touched him, but already they found another for the stretcher. Then bugle again, and up and on: the bullets were swishing and lashing now like rain on a pond. But the line of khaki and purple tartan never bent nor swayed ; it just went slowly forward like a ruler. The officers at its head strode self-containedly — they might have been on the hill after red-deer ; only from their locked faces turned unswervingly towards the bullets could you see that they knew and had despised the danger, And the unkempt, unshaven Tommies, who in camp seemed little enough like Covenanters or Ironsides, were now quite transformed. It was not so difficult to go on — the pipes picked you up and carried you on — but it was difficult not to hurry ; yet whether they aimed or advanced they did it orderly, gravely, without speaking. Tlic bullets had whispered to raw INSIDE TUK ZARIBA. 147 younj^sters in one breath the secret of all the glories of the British Army. Forward and forward, more swishing about them and more crashing from them. Now they were moving, always without hurry, down a gravelly in- cline. Three men went down without a cry at the very foot of the Union Jack, and only one got to his feet again ; the flag shook itself and still blazed splendidly. Next, a supremely furious gust of bullets, and suddenly the line stood fast. Before it was a loose low hedge of dry camel-thorn — the zariba, the redoubtable zariba. That it ? A second they stood in wonder, and then, " Pull it away," suggested some- body. Just half-a-dozen tugs, and the impossible zariba was a gap and a scattered heap of brushwood. Beyond is a low stockade and trenches ; but what of that ? Over and in ! Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah ! Now the inside suddenly sprang to life. Out of the earth came dusty, black, half- naked shapes, run- ning, running and turning to shoot, but running away. And in a second the inside was a wild con- fusion of Highlanders, purple tartan and black-green, too, for the Seaforths had brought their perfect columns through the teeth of the fire, and were charging in at the gap. Inside that zariba was the most astounding labyrinth ever seen out of a nightmare. It began with a stockade and a triple trench. Beyond that the bush was naturally thick with palm stem and mimosa- thorn and halfa-grass. But, besides, it was as full of .%y^%, r^%. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) /y 1.0 I.I 1.25 ■i^lM |2.5 |5o "^ IMH ■^ 1^ 12.2 lAo Hi 2.0 1.8 1.4 111^ V] v^ ^>^ > >'^^ k' ^ ^vv^ y; '^ > y >^ Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. MS80 (716) 872-4503 ^4^^ ^># f/ & 148 THE BATTLE OF THE ATBARA. holes as any honeycomb, only far less regular. There was a shelter -pit for every animal — here a donkey tethered down in a bole just big enough for itself and its master ; beside it a straw hut witli a tangle of thorn ; yawning a yard beyond, a larger trencb, clioke- fuU of tethered camels and dcud or dying men. Tliere was no plan or system in it, only mere confusion of stumbling-block and i)ilfall. From holes below and hillocks aljove, from invisible trenches to right and innocent tukls to left, the bewildered bullets curved, and twisted, and dodged. It took some company- leading ; for the precise formations that the bullets only stilTened were loosening now. But the oCficers were equal to it : each picked his line and ran it, and if a few of his company were lost -kneeling by green- faced comrades or vaguely bayoneting along with a couple of chance companions — they kept the mass centred on the work in hand. For now began the killing. Dullet and bayonet and butt, the whirlwind of Highlanders swept over. And by this time the Uncolns were in on the right, and the ^laxims, galloping right up to the stockade, had withered the left, and the AVarwicks, the enemy's cavalry definitely gone, were volleying off the blacks as your board comes oil" under a keen razor. Farther and farther they cleared the ground— cleared it of everything like a living man, for it was left carpeted thick enough with dead. Here was a trench; bayonet that man. Here a little straw tukl; warily round u A VERY GOOD FIGHT. If 149 to the door, and then a volley. Now in column througli this opening in the bushes; then into line, nnd drop those few desperately firing shadows among the dry stems beyond. For the running blacks — poor heroes — still fired, though every second they fired less and ran more. And on, on the British stumbled and slew, till suddenly there was unbroken blue overhead, and a clear drop underfoot. The river ! And across the trickle of water the quarter-mile of dry sand-bed was a fiy-pnper with scrambling spots of black. The pursuers thronged the bank in double line, and in two minutes the paper was still black-spotted, only the spots scrambled no more. "Xow that," panted the most pessimistic senior captain in the brigade — "now I call that a very gixxl fight." Cease fire I Word and whi-tle and voice took a little time to work into hot brains ; then siulden silence. Again, hurrah, hurrali, hurrali ! It had lasted forty minutes; and nobody was quite certain whether it had seemed more like two minutes or two years. All at once there came a roar of fire from tlie h.-ft; the half-sated British saw the river coven^d witli a new swarm of files, only just in time to see them stop still as the others. This was Lewis's half-brinade of Egyptians at work. They had stood the heavy fire that souHit them as if there were no such tilings as wounds or death; now lliey had swept down leftward of the zariba, sliovelled the enemy into the river-bed, and shot them down. Bloodthirsty ? Count up the 150 THE BATTLE OF THE ATBARA. Ejijyptinns murdered by Mahdism, and then say so if you will. Meanwhile, all the right-hand part of the zariba was alive with our blacks. They had been seen from the British line as it advanced, ambling and scrambling over rise and dip, firing heavily, as they were ordered to, and then charging with the cold bayonet, as they lusted to. They were in first, there cannot be a doubt. Their line formation turned out a far better one for charging the defences than the British columns, which were founded on an exaggerated expectation of the difliculty of the zariba, and turned out a trifle unhandy. And if the zariba had been as high and thick as the Bank of England, the blacks and their brigaded Egyptians would have slicked through it and picked out the thorns after the cease fire. As against that, they lost more men than the British, for their advance was speedier and their volleys less deadly than the Camerons' pelting destruction that drove through every skull raised an inch to aim. But never think the blacks were out of hand. They attacked fast, but they attncked steadily, and kt'pt their formation to the last moment there was any- thing to torm against. The battle of the Atbara has definitely plii:'»'d the blacks — yes, and the once con- temned Egyptians — in the ranks of the very best troops in the world. When it was over their officers were ready to cry with joy and pride. And the blacks, every one of whom would beamingly charge the THE JUBILANT SUDAIS^KSK. 151 bottomless pit after his Bey, were just as joyons and proud of their officers. They stood about among the dead, their faces cleft with smiles, shaking and shaking each other's hands. A short shako, then a salute, anotlier shake and another salute, again and a^'ain and again, with the head-carving sndle never narrowed an instant. Then up to the Bey and the Bimbashis — mounted now, but they had charged afoot and clear ahead, as is the recognised wont of all chiefs of the fighting Sudan when they intend to conquer or die with their men — and more handshakes and more salutes. " Dushman qua'iss kitir," ran round from grin to grin ; ** very good fight, very good fight." Now fall in, and back to the desert outside. And unless you are congenitally amorous of horrors, don't look too much about you. Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimbleted black faces, donkeys head- less and legless, or sieves of shrapnel, camels with necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins grilled to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf,— don't look at it. Here is the Sirdar's white star and crescent ; here is the Sirdar, who created this battle, this clean-jointed, well-oiled, smooth-running, clockwork-perfect ma.sterpiece of a battle. Not a tlaw, not a check, not a jolt ; and not a fleck on its shining success. Once more, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah ! 152 XVIII. LOSSES AND GAIN8, It was over. It was a brilliant, crushing victory, and the dervish army was destroyed : so mucli everybody knew. But no more. The figlit liad gone forward in a whirl : you could see men fall about you, and knew that there must be losses on our side; but whether they were 100 or 1000 it was inipossible even to guess. Then, as the khaki ligures began to muster outside the zariba, it was good to meet friend after friend — dusty, sweaty, deep-breathing, putting up a grimed revolver — untouched. It was good to see the Tommies looking with new adoration to the comfort of their rifles, drunk witli joy and triumph, yet touched with a sudden awe in the presence of something so much more nakedly elemental than anything in their experience. Two hours had sobered them from boys to men. Just then there was nothing in the world or under it to which the army would not have been equal. Yet, in that Godlike moment, I fancy Q\erj man in the force thought first of home. MAn.MUD A PRISONER. 153 Now to see what we liad done and suffered. And first, for a new fillip to exultation, Mahmud was a prisoner. Some soldiers of the 10th Sudanese had found him as they swept through the zariba — found him sitting on his carpet, his weapons at his side, after the manner of defeated war-chiefs who await death. He was not killed, and presently he was brought bare- headed before the Sirdar — a tall, dark-brown com- plexioned man of sonietliing between thirty and forty. He wore loose drawers and a gibba — the dervish uniform which still mimics the patched shirt of the ^lahdi, but embroiders it with gold. His face was of tlie narrow-cheeked, higli-foreheaded type, for he is a pure-bred Arab: his expression was cruel, but high. He looked neither to right nor to left, but strode up to the Sirdar with his head erect. " Are you the man Mahmud ? " asked the Sirdar. "Yes; I am Mahmud, and I am the same as you." He meant commander-in-chief. " Why did you come to make war here ?'* " I came because I was told, — the same as you." !Malimud was removed in custody ; but everybody liked him the better for looking at his fate so straight and (leliantly. But small leisure had anybody to pity ^lahmud: the pity was all wanted for our own people. Hardly had the Camerons turned back from tlie river-bank when it flew through the companies that two of the finest ollicers in the regiment were killed. Captains 154 LOSSES AND GAINS. Urquhart and Findlay had both been killed leading their mea over the trenches. The first had only joined the battalion at lius Hudi; he had newly passed the Stall' Cjllege, and only two days before had been gazetted major ; after less than a fortnight's campaigning he was dead. Captain Findlay's fortune was yet more pathetic: he had been married but a month or two before, and the widowed bride was not eigliteen. He was a man of a singularly simple, sincere, and winning nature, and the whole force lamented his loss. Probably his great height — for he stood near 6 feet 6 inches — had attracted attack besides his daring: he was one of the first, some said the first, to get over the stockade, and had killed two of the enemy with his sword before he dropped. Both he and Captain Urquhart had got too far ahead of their men to be protected by rif-a fire ; but they were followed, and they were avenged. Second-Lieutenant Gore of the Seaforths was also killed while storming the trenches : he had not yet, I think, completed one year's service. Among the wounded officers were Colonel Verner of the Lincolns and Colonel Murray of the Seaforths, both slightly : the latter was very coolly tied up by Mr Scudamore, the 'Daily News' correspondent, inside the zariba under a distracting fire. More severely hit were Major Napier (Camerons) and Captain Baillie (Sea- forths): both were excellent officers and good com- panions ; both afterwards died. Besides these the THE CASUALTIES. 165 only Seaforths had three officers wounded, the Lincolns two, and the Warwicks one. Most of the casualties •occurred in crossing the tronchcs, which were just wide enough for a man to stand in and deep enough to cover him completely. As our men passed over, the blacks tired and stabbed upwards ; most of the wounds were therefore below the belt. The Seaforths happened to have most officers hit among the four battalions of the British brigade ; as they advanced in column against the hottest part of the entrenchment, this was quite comprehensible. But the Camerons, who led the whole brigade in line, lost most in non-commissioned officers and men. Count- ing officers, they had 15 killed and 46 wounded. The Seaforths lost (again with officers) 6 killed and 27 wounded; the Lincolns 1 killed and 18 wounded ; and the Warwicks 2 killed and 12 wounded. Of these several afterwards died. Staff-Sergeant Wyeth, A.S.C., and Private Cross of the Camerons, were both men- tioned in despatches. The first carried the Union Jack, which was three times pierced ; the other was General Gatacre's bugler. Wyeth was severely wounded, and Cross presently seized with terrible dysentery: both died within a few days. Private Cross had bayoneted a huge black who attacked the general at the zariba, and it was said he was to be recommended for the V.C. A similar feat was done by a colour-sergeant of the Camerons, whose major was entangled in the stockade, and must have been 166 LOSSES AND GAINS. killed. The colour- sergeant never even mentioned the service to his oflicer, who only discovered it by accident. Of course there were scores of hair-breadth (iscapes, as there must be in any close engagement. One piper was killed with seven bullets in his body ; a corporal in another regiment received seven in his clothing, one switchbacking in and out of the front of his tunic, and not one pierced the skin. Another man picked up a brass box inside the zariba, and put it in his breast pocket, thinking it might come in useful for tobacco. Next instant a bullet hit it and glanced away. The Maxim battery had no casualties — very luckily, for it was up with the firing - line all the time ; probably nobody could stand up against it. Altogether the British brigade lost 24 killed and 104 wounded, of whom perhaps 20 died. The Egyptian loss was heavier. They had advanced more quickly, and by reason of their line formation had got to work in the trenches sooner tlian the British ; but they had not kept down the enemy's fire with such splendid success. The 11th Sudanese, which had the honour of having been one of the lirst inside the zariba, lost very heavily — 108 killed and wounded out of less than 700. Tlie total casual lies were 57 killed, and 4 Brili.^h and IG native olUcers, 2 British non-commissioned ollicers, and 3G5 non- commissioned ollieers and men wounded. The white otlicers were Walter Bey and Shekleton Bey, com- A CHEAP VICTORY. 157 nin?KHng the 9th and 14th Siulaneso respectively, and r.inilnisliia Walsh and Ifarley of the 12th Sudanese. Tlie former lost his leg. The instructors were Sergeants Ilandley of the 9th and Hilton of the 12th. Tiius, out of live white men, the 12th had three hit. More ollicers would probably have been hit, but that none except the generals were allowed to riy the 4th Battalion on Slu'baliya Island as they came down the river; some had been killed in the skirmishes at Khor Altadar, or in General Hunter's reconnai-sances outside Kukheila. Many liad deserted. ]\Iahmud himself said that his strength on the Sth was 12,0UU infantry and 4000 cavalry, with 10 guns. Some days afterwards he 168 LOSSES AND GAINS. asserted that his cavalry had left him the day before, but that was the brag of returning confidence. We all saw his cavalry. To be sure, the cavalry did get away ; and Osman Digna, wlio never fights to a finish, got away with them. The cavalry did nothing and behaved badly, wliicii is significant. For the cavalry were Ikggara — the cattle-owning Arabs of the Khalifa's own tribe, transplanted by him from Darfur to the best lands round Omdurman. They are the lords of the Sudan — and ingloriously they ran away. On the other hand, the Jehadia, the enlisted black infantry, fought most nobly. If their fire seemed bad to us, what hell must ours have been to them I First an hour and a half of shell and shrapnel — the best ammunition, perfectly aimed and timed, from some of the deadliest field- pieces in the world ; then volley after volley of blunted Lee-Metford and of Martini bullets, delivered coolly at 300 yards and less, with case and Maxim fire almost point-blank. The guns fired altogether 1500 rounds, mostly shrapnel; the Camerons averaged 34 rounds per man. A black private, asked by his Bimbashi how many rounds he fired, replied, " Only 15." " Why, you're not much of a man," said his oflicer. "Ah, but then, Eflendim," he eagerly excused himself, "I had to carry a stretcher besides." If the black bearer-parties fired 15 rounds, what must the firing-line have done! Mahmud said tha^ his people had only laughed at the shrapnel, but that the infantry fire was Shcitun tarn- FEKOClOUa IlEKOISM. 159 am — the very devil. Mahmud, however, admitted that, liaving been ruiind ilie position, he lay close in his stockade during; liio boiuljardmcnt ; and us his stockade, or casoniaie, was tlic stron;^est corner in the place, he can hardly speak for ihe rest. And I saw scores and hundreds of dead goats and sheep, donkeys and camel?, lying in pits in the part of the zariba stormed by the Ihitish. Now Thomas Atkins does not kill animals needlessly, even when his blood is hottest. The beasts therefore must have been killed by shrap- nel ; and if so many beasts, we may presume tliat many men, no better protected, were killed too. And so, I am afraid, unavoidably, were many women, for the zariba was full of them. Yet the black Jehadia stood firm in their trenches through the infernal minutes, and never moved till those devilish white Turks and their black cousins came surging, yelling, shooting, and bayoneting right on top of them. Many stayed win re they were to die, only praying that they might kill one first. Those who ran, ran slowly, turning doggedly to fire. The wounded, as usual, took no quarter; they had to be killed lest they should kill. For an example of their ferocious heroism, I cite a little, black, pot-bellied boy of ten or so. He was standing by his dead father, and when the attackers came up, he picked up an elephant-gun and fired. He missed, and the kicking monster half-killed him; but he had done what he could. 160 LOSSES AND GAINS. In the zariba itself Jjimbaslii Watson, A.D.C. to the Sirdar, counted over 2000 dead before he was sick of it. There were others left: trench after trench was found tilled with them. A few were killed outside the zariba ; a great many were shot down in crossing the river-bed. Altogether 3000 men must have been killed on the spot ; among them were nearly all the Emirs, including Wad Bishara, who was Governor of Dongola in 1896. But this was not half the signifi- cance of the victory. Now you began to comprehend the perfection of the Sirdar's strategy. If he had waited for Mahmnd on the Nile, fugitives could have escaped up-stream. If he had waited low down the Atbara, they could still have got across to the Nile. But by giving battle up at Nakheila, he gave the escaping dervish thirty miles of desert to struggle across before he could reach water and such safety as the patrolling gunboats would allow him. A few may have got back to Omdurman — if they dared; some certainly were afterwards picked oil' by the gunboats in the attempt. Others fled up the Atbara; many were picked up by the cavalry through the afternoon : some got as far as Adaraniu or even near Kasbala, and were killed by the friendly levies there. For the wounded the desert was cerUiiri death. In a word, the finest dervish army was not. lietreafc was impossible, pursuit superfluous ; defeat was anni- hilation. 161 XIX. THE TRIUMPH. ** Catch 'em alive 1 Catch 'em alive 1 If they once gets on the gum They'll pop oflf to kingdom come ; Catch 'em alive ! Catch 'em alive I For I am the flyest man around the town.'* Back swung the blacks from battle. The band of the Twelfth specialises on Mr Gus Elen : it had not been allowed to play him during the attack — only the regi- mental march till the bandsmen were tired of it, and then each instrument what it liked — but now the air quoted came in especially apposite. They had caught 'em alive 0. Hardly one but had shing behind him a sword or a spiue-headed spear, a curly knife, or a spiky club, or some other quaint captured murdering-iron. Some had suppleiueiitcd their Martini with a Itemiiigton, an inch calibre elephant -gun with splierical iron bullets or conical shells, a regulation Italian magazine rille, a musket of Mahomet Ali's first expedition, a Martini of '85, or 163 THE TRIUMPH. a Tower Rille of '56 with a handful of the cartridges the sepoys declined to bite. Some had suits of armour tucked inside them ; one or two, Saracen helmets slung to their belts. Over one tarbush waved a diadem of black ostrich plumes. The whole regiment danced with spear-headed banners blue and white, with golden letters thereupon promising victory to the faithful. And behind half-a-dozen men tugged at one of Mah mud's ten captured guns ; they meant to ask the Sirdar if they might keep it. The band stopped, and a hoarse gust of song flung out. From references to Allah you might presume it a song of thanksgiving. Then, tramp, tramp, a little silence, and the song came again with an abrupt ex- idtant roar. The thin-legged, poker-backed shadows jerked longer and longer over the rough desert shingle. They had been going from six the bitter night before, and nothing to eat since, and Nakheila has been 111° in the shade, with the few spots of shade preoccupied by corpses. That being so, and remembering that the British and wounded had to follow, the Second Brigade condescended to a mere four miles an hour. And " By George ! you know," said the Bey, " they're lovely ; they're rippers. I've seen Sikhs and I've seen Gurkha.«, and these are good enough for me. Tliis has been the happiest day of my life. I wasn't happier the day I got the D.S.O. than I've been to-day." It was the happiest day of a good many lives. But forty all but sleepless hours on your feet or in your THE WOUNDED. 163 rtridges 5iuts of Saracen tarbusli le whole ilue and ; victory I tugged neant to ng flung esume it I, a little rupt ex- shadows shingle, t before, leen 111° occupied mif that Second an hour. " they're ;'ve seen This has liappier day." es. But ' in your saddle tell on the system in a climate that seesaws between a grill and an ice-machine. 15y the time I got in I was very contented to tie my horse by some wliity- brown grass and tumble to sleep with my head on the saddle. At midniglit dinner was n-ady ; then solid sleep again. Awaking at five, I found an ollicer of Colonel Lewis's brigade in his spurs and demanding tea. He had got in from Nakheila but two hours before, which brought his fast well over twenty-four hours and his vigil to close on forty-eight. For it isn't everybody that tramps back into camp from battle with bands and praises of Allah. Some stay for good, and it pricks you in your joy when you catch yourself thinking of that swift and wicked injus- tice. "Why him ? Also some come home on their backs, or wrenched and moaning in cacolets bump- ing on baggage-camels. Lewis's never-weary, never- hungry Egyptians had been bringing in the wounded — carrying stretchers across twelve black miles of desert at something over a mile an hour. And General Hunter, who in the morning had been galloping bare- headed through the bullets, waving on the la test- raised battalion of blacks, now chose to spend the night play- ing guide to the crawling convoy. General Hunter could not do an unsoldierlike act if he tried. It was difficult after all to be sorry for most of the men who were hit, they were so aggressively not sorry for themselves. Tlie afternoon of the fight they lay in a little palm-grove northward of the zariba under 164 THE TRIUMPH. tents of blanket — a double row of kbaki and grey flannel shirt, with more blankets below them and above. One face was covered with a handkerchief; one man gasped constantly — ^just the gasp of the child that wants sympathy and doesn't like to ask for it; one face was a blank mask of yellow white clay. The rest, but for the red-splashed bandages and the im- portunate reck of iodoform, miglit have been lying down for a siesta. Their principal anxiety — these bearded boys who had never fired a shot oil' tlie range before — was to learn what size of deed tliey had lieli)ed to do to-day, "A grahn' figlit ? The best ever fouglit in the Sudan? Eh, indeed, sir; ah'm vara glahd to hear ye say so." " Now, 'ow would you sy, sir, this 'd be alongside them fights tlicy've been 'avin' in India?" "Bigger, eh? Ah! Will it be in to- morrow's pyper ? Well, they'll be talkin' about us at *ome." It was not the un happiest day in these men's lives either. The morrow of the fight brought a quiet morning — for all but correspondents, who had now to pay for many days of idle luxury — and in the afternoon we all marched ofl' to the old camp at Ahadar. Thence on Sunday tlie brigare tlian ito firm L XXI. GOING UP. On the half-lit Cairo platform servants flung agonised arms round brothers' necks, kissed them all over, and resigned themselves to the horrors of the Sudan. In- side the study carriages was piled a confusion of bags and bundles, of helmet-cases and sword-cases, of can- vas buckets cooling soda, and canvas bottles cooling water, — of Beys and Bimbashis returning from leave. It was rather like the special train that takes boys back to school. A few had been home — but the Sirdar does not like to have too many of his oihcers seen in Piccadilly; it doesn't look well. Some had been to Constantinople, to Brindisi and back for the sea, to San !^tefano, the Ostend of Egypt, to Cairo and no farther. Like schoolboys, they had all been wild to iwav. and now g^^ iiey Thank the Lord, no more Cairo — sweat all the night instead of sleep, and mosquitos tearing you to })ieces. Give me the ni^lit-breeze of the desert and the clean sand of the Sudan. 174 GOING UP. But first we had to tunnel through the filthiest seventeen hours in Egypt. The servants had spread our blankets on the bare, hard leatlier seats of the boxes that Egyptian railways call sleeping - cars ; a faint grateful air began to glide in through tlie windows. And then came in the dust. AVithout haste — had it not seventeen hours before it ? — it streamed through every chink in a thick colfee-coloured cloud. It piled itself steadily over the seats and the floor, the bags and bundles and cases ; it built up wails of mud round the soda-water, and richly larded the half-cold chicken for the morrow's lunch. We choked ourselves to sleep ; in the morning we choked no longer, the lungs having reconciled themselves to breathe powdered Egypt. Our faces were layered with coffee-colour, thicker than the powder on the latest fashionable lady's nose. Hair and moustaches, eyebrows and eye- lashes, and every corner of sun-puckered eyes, were lost and levelled in rich friable soil. And from the caked, sun-riven fields of thirsty Egypt fresh clouds rose and rolled and settled, till in all the train you saw, smelt, touched, tasted nothing but dust. At Luxor came the first novelty. ^JVhcn I came down the practicable railway stopped short there: now a narrow-gauge railway ran through to Assuan. It is not quite comprehensible why the gauge should have been broken, — perhaps to nuike sure that the line should be kept exclusively military. It can easily be altered afterwards to the Egyptian gauge; THE PRICE OF TAXIING THE SUDAN. 175 filthiest 1 spread ,s of the - cars ; a ugh tlie )ut haste streamed ;d cloud, floor, the 5 of mud half-cold :>urselves iger, the )owdered e-colour, ihiouable and cyc- les, were [rom the h clouds rain you I came t there: Assuan. e should that the It caa 1 gauge; meanwhile the journey is done by train in twelve hours against the post-boat's thirty-six. • Assuan was the same as ever. Shellal, at the head of the cataract, the great forwarding station for the South, was the same, only much more so. The high bank was one solid rampart of ammunition and beef, biscuit and barley ; it clangt'd and tinkled all niglit through with parts of steamers and sections of barges. Stern- wheelers came down from the South, turned about, took in fuel, hooked on four barges alongside, and thudded off up-river again. No hurry ; no rest. And here was the same Commandant as when I came up before. He had had one day in Cairo ; his hair was two shades greyer ; he was still being reviled by everybody who did not have everything he wanted sent through at five seconds' notice ; lie was still drawing unmercifully on body and brain, and ripping good years out of liis life to help to conquer the Sudan. Victory over dervishes may be won in an hour, may be cheap ; victory over the man-eating Sudan — the vietoi/ of the railway, the steamer, the river — means months and years of toil and so much of his life lust, to every man that heljis to win it. The steamer tinkered at her fourteen-year-old boiler for twenty hours, and then tru(l;4tMl '.AX towards Haifa. She did the 200 odd miles in 77 hours, so that it would have been ahnost as quick to have gune by road in a wheelbarrow. lUit llu'u the nu;4!4ars ah^ng- side were lieavy with many mu k-; u( barley, to be 176 GOING UP. turned later into cavalry chargers. Moreover, on the second morning, roinuling a bend, we suddindy saw a line drawn diagonally across the river. All the water below the line was green ; all above it was brown And the brown ])ressed slowly, thickly forward, driv- ing the green before it. This was the Nile-tlood, — the rich Abyssinian mud that comes down ]>lue Nile and Atbara. When this should have floated down below the cataract, Egypt would have water again, air again, bread again, life again. And the Sudan would have gunboats and barges of cartridges and gyassas of food and fodder, and the Sirdar thundering at the gates of Khartum. Next windy, green-treed Haifa — only this time it was less windy than last, and the trees, though still the greenest on the Kile, were not so green. Last time there had been melons growing on the sandy eyot opposite the conimandeiia, and the eyot had grown higher daily ; this time it was all dry sand and no melons, — only it grew daily smaller in the lapping water. But s}>iiiig or summer, Haifa's busi- ness is the same — the railway and the recruits. That line was finished now up to the Atbara, and the fore- shore was clear of rails and sleepers, liut instead they were forcing through stores and supj)!ies, chok- ing the trucks to the thnjat with them. Tiie ghit had only begun when the line reached its terminus; it would be over before the new white brigade came through. Everything in the Siidar's Expedition has CONTENTED RENEGADES. 177 its own time — first material, then trnnF:port, then troops; and woe unto liim wlio is buliiml his lime. The pkitform was bhick and brown, hhie and wliite witli a great crowd of natives. For (h-awn up in line opposite the waiting trucks were rigid squads of black figures in the familiar brown jersey and blue putiies, and on the tarbushes the badges, green, black, red, yellow, blue, and white, of each of tlie six Sudanese battalions. Tiiin-shauked Shilluks and Dinkar. trom the White Nile, stubby Beni-llelba from Darfur and the West, — tliey were just the figures and hudiUed savan^e-smiling faces that we had last seen at Berber. Only — the last time we had seen those particular blacks they were shooting at us. Every one ^lad begun life as a dervish, and had been taken prisoner at or after tlie Atbara. Now, not four months after, here tliey were, erect and soldierly, vvitli at least the rudi- ments of shooting, un their way to fight their former masters, and very glad to do it. Tlicy knew when they were well ofi" Before they were slaves, half- clotlied, half-fed, half-armed, good to lose thuir women at Shendi,and to stay in the trenches of Nukheila when the liaggara ran away. Now tliey are free soldiers, well ]niid, well clothed, well fed, with weapons they can triist and oHicers who charge ahead and would latluT die than leave them. Their women — who, after all, only ])iecetled them into the Egyptian army — are as safe from recapture at Haifa as you are in the Strand. No wonder the blacks grinned merrily as 178 GOING UP. they bundled up on to the trucks, and the women lu-lu-hied them off with the head-stabbing shrillness of certain victory. The first time I travelled on the S.M.R. I enjoyed a berth in the large saloons ; the second time in one of the small saloons ; this time it was a truck. But the tru'k, after all, was the most comfortable of the three. It was a long double-bogie, witli a plank roof, and canvas curtains that you could let down when the sun came in, and ei;.;ht aH'_;arebs screwed to the floor. Therein six men piled tlieir smaller baggage, and set up their tables, and ate and drank and slept and yawned forty-eiglit hours to the Atbara. Of all the three months* changes in tlie Sudan, here were the most stupefying Abeidieh, where the new gunboats had been put together, liad grown from a hut and two tents to a railway station and triangle and Matering- plant and engine - shed, and rows of seemly mud- barracks, soon to be hospital. But the Atbara was even more utterly transformed. I had left it a for- tified camp; I found it a kind of Nine Elms. Lewis Bey's house, tlien the pride of the S^dan, now cowerud in the middle of a huge mud-walU*d station-yard. Boxes and barrels and bags climbed up and over- shadowed and clioked it. Ammunition and stores, food and fodder — the jonrney had been a crescendo of them, but this was the fortissimo. You wandered al)Out among the streets of piles tliat towered over- head, and lost yourself in munitions of war. Along women irillncss enjoyed in one k. But 1 of the nk roof, n when to the id slept Of all s^ere the unboats md two atering- y mud- xra was t a for- Levvis cowered )n-yard. d over- stores, escendo andered id over- Along "FABTIlEli SOUTH." 179 the Nile bank, where two steamers together had been a rarity, lay four. Another paddled ceaselessly to and fro across the river, where the little two-company camp had grown into lines for the cavalry and camel corps. Slim -sparred gyassas fringed all the bank; lateen sails bellied over the full river. Of troops the place was all but empty ; the indis- pensable E-yptians were away up the river cutting and stacking wood for tlie steamers or preparing depots. In mid-April the Atbara was the as yet un- attained objective of the railway; in mid-Tjly the railway was ancient history, and the Atbara was the port of departure for the boats. Just a half-way house on the road to Khartum. What a man the Sirdar is— ■ if he is a man ! We got out and pitched our tents ; and here we found the men who had not been on leave — the railway and the water transport and the camel transport and the fatigues in general — working harder, harder, harder every day and every night. We drank a gin-and-soda to the mast^x-toast of the Egyptian army : " Farther South I " 180 XXIL THE FIRST STEPS FORWAED. At the beginning of August the military dispositions were not, on pnper, very diirerent from those of the end of April. The Sirdar's headquarters had been moved to tlie Atbara in order that the vast operations of transport at that point might go on under his own eye. Of the four infantry brigades which had fought against Malimud, three were still in their summer quarters. Neither of the two additional brigades had yet arrived at tlie front. The force destined for Omdurman consisted of two infantry divisions, one British and one Egyptian; one regiment of liritish and ten squadrons of Egyptian cavalry; one liidd and one howitzer battery, and two siege-guns of DiiLish artillery and one horse and four tifld batteries of Kgyplian, besides both IJritish and K^yptian Maxims; eigliL compjinics of camel-corps; the medical service and the transport cor])s; six fightiug gunboats, with eight transport steamers and a \i06l of sailing boats. THE E(.YPT[AN INFANTKY. 181 The Egyptian infantry division was coniniantlcd, as before, by Major-Gencral Hiuit«3r; but it now counti'd four bii^ades instead of three. The First, Second, and Third (Macdonahl's, Maxwell's, and Lewis's) were con- stituted as in the Atbara ciunpai^ai. The commanding otlicers of battalions were the same except for the 13Lh Sudanese. Sniitli-Dorrien Tey, who originally raised the regiment, now com- manded in place of Collinson JJey. The latter oOicer had been promoted to the command of the Fourth Brigade. It was entirely Egyptian — the 1st (I>im- bashi Doran), 5th (I5orhan Bey, with native o(licers), 17th (lUmbury Bey), and the newly-raised 18th (l)im- bashi Matchett). Of these the first was at Fort Atbara; the 17th and IStli were coming up from Merawi, hauling boats over the Fourth Cataract. They reached Abu Ilanied by the beginning of August. The 5th was half at Berber and half on the march across the desert from Suakim. The Third Brigade was at various points up-river, cutting wood for the steamers. The two Egyptian battalions (2nd and 8th) attached to the First and Second Brigades were at Nasri I.sland, ten miles or so from the foot of the Sliabhdva Cata- ract, forming a depot for supi)lies and stores. Tiie six black battalions left IJerbur on July 30, and ar- rived at the Atbara in the small hours of August 1. Taking the strength of an Kgypiian battalion at 750, the division would number 12,000 men. 182 THE FIRST STEPS FORWARD. Major - General Gatacre commanded the British Division. Of its two bri^'ades the First — the Ih'itish Brigade of the last campaign, now under Colonel Wauchope — was still in siunnier quarters. Head- qnarters, Camerons, Seaforths, and Maxim battery at Darmali; Lincolns and Warwick's at Essillera. The last two had changed commanding odicers — Lieu- tenant-Colonel Louth now had the Lincolns, Lieu- tenant - Colonel Forbes the AVarwicks. The latter officer had arrived at Umdabieh two days before the Atbara fight to relieve Lieutenant - Colonel Quale Jones, ordered home to command the 2nd Battalion of the regiment; with rare tact and common -sense it was arranged that Colonel Jones should lead the bat- talion he knew. Colonel Forbes went into the fight as a free-lance, and I saw him enjoying himself like a schoolboy with a half - holiday. The "VVarwicks rejoiced once more in the possession of their two companies from the Merawi garrison. Casualties in action, and deaths and invalidings from sickness, had brought down the strength of this brigade, though officers and men had stood the climate exceedingly well. The sick-rate had never touched 6 per cent. There were not fifty graves in the cemetery ; and most of the faces at the mess- tables were familiar. The Lincolns, who had come up over 1100 strong, still had 980 ; the other three battalions were each about 750 strong, and the Warwicks were expecting a draft of sixty men. With the Maxims, A.S.C., and Medical THE BRITISH DIVISION. 183 Service the strength of tlic brin[ade would come to nearly 3500. The Second Brigade had not yet come up from Egypt. Colonel Lyttelton was to command. The four battalions com])osing it were the 1st Northumberland Fusiliers (5th, Lieutenant-Colonel Money) and 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers (20th, Lieu- tenant-Colonel Collingwood) from the Cairo garrison, the 2nd Eifle Brigade (Colonel Howard) from Malta, and the 1st Grenadier Guards from Gibraltar. Each battalion was to come up over 1000 strong. The 1st Eoyal Irish Fusiliers, from Alexandria, were sending up a Maxim detachment with four guns, so that the whole division would number well over 7500. Broadwood Bey's nine squadrons of cavalry had concentrated during the last week of July on the western bank opposite Fort Athara. They were to march up, starting on August 4, and to be joined at Metemmeh by a squadron from Merawi. The 21st Lancers (Colonel Martin) were expected up from Cairo about 500 strong ; the total of the cavalry would be abf Mt 1500. British and Egyptian were to be separate commands. The whole of the artillery, on the other hand, was under Long Bey, of the Egyptian Army. The arrival of Bimbashi Stewart's battery from Merawi had com- pleted the strength of the Egyptian artillery ; both this battery and Bimbashi Peake's had been re-armed with 9-pounder Maxim-Xordenfuldts, so that all the field guns were now the same. These, with the horse 184 TUE FIRST STEPS FORWARD. battery, began to go up the Nile at the beginning of August — the pieces by boat, the horses and mules marching. The 32nd Field Battery RA. (Major Wil- liams), the 37th Field Battery with 5-inch howitzers and Lyddite shells and two 40-pounder siege guns, were coming up from Cairo. This would give a total of forty- four guns, besides twenty British and Egyp- tian Maxims. Two companies of camel corps were at the Atbara, timed to march on August 2. One was coming over from Suakim. The other five, under Tudvvay Bey, commandiug the whole corps, were to start with the Merawi squadron of cavalry, about the same time, and march by Sir Herbert Stewart's route across the Bayuda Desert to Metemmeh. The strength would be about 800. The land force was thus over 22,000 men. The three new gunboats — Malik, Sheikh, and Sultan — were put together at Abeidieh, the work beginning immediately after the battle of the Atbara, as soon as the railway reached that place. They carry two 12J-pounder Maxim-Nordenfeldt quick-firers fore and aft, and three Maxims, two on the upper deck and one on a platform above. They are lightly armoured, being bullet-proof all over, and the screw is protected by being sunk in a plated well a few feet forward of the stern. As fighting boat? they might be expected to show superior qualities to tlie vessels of the Zafir class ; but as beasts of burden with barges they were IF THE KHALIFA REFUSED BATTLE! 185 ling of mules .r Wil- svitzers I guns, a total Egyp- A.tbara, ig over y Bey, ith the e time, OSS the I would 22,000 Sultan ginning as soon Ty two ore and ck and noured, otected ward of xpected le Zafir ey were inferior to tliese. Drawing only 18 inches against the older boat's 30 inches, they could not get grip enough of the water to make good headway against the full Nile. From the disposition of the force, extended along the Nile from Shabluka to Alexandria, and across the desert from Korti to Suakim, it was evident that the campaign had not yet opened by the beginning of August. The army was only entering on the move- ments preparatory to concentration. The point of concentration was Wad Habashi, a dozen miles or so south of Shabluka; the time was as yet uncertain. Transport was so far forward tliat we might easily get to Omdurman the first week in September. All de- pended on the weather. Up to now there had been hardly any rain. But the real rainy season — said Slatin Pasha, who is the only white man with real opportunity of knowing — runs from August 10 to September 10. It might be sooner or later, heavier or lighter. A swollen river, a flooded, torrent-riven bank, malaria and ague, would hold us back. A dry season would pass us gaily through. And when we advanced from Wad Ilabashi? It was utterly impossible to say what would befall. If the Khalifa wanted to give us trouble, he would leave without fighting. That would probably mean that he would get his throat cut by one of the innumerable enemies he has made; certainly it would mean the collapse of his empire. But it would also mean a 186 THE FIRST STEPS FORWARD. costly expedition with no finality at the end of it; it would mean years of anarchy, dacoity from Khar- tum to the Albert Nyanza, from Abyssinia to Lake Chad. Only there was always the relieving thought that Khalifa AbduUahi would aim not so much at giving trouble to us as at avoiding it for himself. With Mahmud's experience before his eyes he might think it safest to be taken prisoner. He might, just possibly, even decide to die game. Granting that he fought, it was still hopelessly un- certain where and how he would fight. It might be at Kerreri, sixteen miles north of his capital ; it might be inside his wall. "We could speculate for days; we did ; but to come to any conclusion more likely than any other was beyond any man in the army. 187 XXIII. IN SUMMER QUARTERS. Scene of the dialogue, a mess-room in a village on the Nile. Time, nearly luncli-time. A subaltern is discovered smoking a cigarette under the verandah. Enter I. Suhaltern. Hallo, Steevens ! when did j'ou come up? Get down and have a drink. Hi, you syce! Take this hawaga's hoosan and take tlie sarr/ and bridle off and dim a drink of moyyah. Wliat'U you drink ? . . . Oh no: this isn't so bad- -better than IJas Iludi, any- how. You're looking at our pictures — out of the 'Graphic,' you know — coloured them ourselves— helps you through the day, you know : that's a well-developed lady, isn't it? Have a ci.narctte, will you? We're all getting pretty well fed up with this place by now. Enter a Captain. Hallo, Steevens! when did you come up? Have you got anything to drink? I suppose you've been at home all this time. No, I haven't been farther north than Berber. Had a very jolly ten days up the Atbara, though. Two parties 188 IN SUMMER QUAIITERS. went — one with the General, one afterwards. Seven guns got a hundred and sixty-five sand-grouse in one day. Went up riglit beyond our battlefield. High ? Never smelt anytliing like it in my life. The bush gets very tliick above. No; no lions. Suhaltcrn, We got a croco down here, though, and a bally great fish with a head on him three feet six long, the head alone. No, I liaven't been down either. I went down with a boat party to Geneineteh, though — ripping. There was a grass bank just six inclies above the water, and you could bathe all day. The men loved it, if they were pretty fit to begin with ; if they weren't, you see, what with bully beef and dirty water Cajitain. But we're all getting fed up, as the Tommies say, with this place by now. Enter a Senior CajHain. Hallo, Steevens ! I heard you'd come up. In this country it isn't "Have a drink," but " What'll you drink ? " Well, here we are still in this filtliy country. Yes, I got ten days in Cairo, but T was at the dentist's all the time. Gad, what a c untry ! Wlicn I think of all the lives that have been lost for this miserable heap of sand they call tlie Soudan — ugli ! — it's — it's Suhaltcrn. lvip})ing sport: everybody was wondering how the Pari Mutuel was done so well. The truth was, it was run by the same men of the Army Pay Department that do it at the races in Cairo. Devilish good race, too, the Albara Derby. We thouglit we THE UNIVEKSAL QUESTION. 189 Seven 36 in one High ? 'he bush ;h, and a six long, ither. I ;hough — les above Che men ; if they ad dirty , as the I heard 'Have a re we are days in le. Gad, ives that and they ondering 'he truth rmy Pay Devilish ►ught we hadn't got a chaice against all these Egyptian army fellows, and If air won it by a head, Sparkes second, a bad third. Enter a Major, Well, Steevens, how are you ? Been up loug ? Have a I see you've got one. Good to see all you fellows coming out again ; means busi- ness. River's very full to-day, isn't it ? Captain. Eisen three feet and an inch since yester- day. The Atbara flood, I suppose. You were at Atbara ; did you see it ? /. Eather. It came down roaring, hit the Nile, and piled up on end. Brought down trees, beams, dug- outs Major. Well, now, shall we go in to lunch ? You didn't see the First British Brigade field-firiug to-day, did you? Nothing will come within 800 yards of that alive. Do you think we shall have a figlit ? Enter a Colonel. Good morning, Mr Steevens: have you been up long ? Are you being attended to ? Yes, now ; shall we have a fight ? What will he do now ? I can't bear to think we aren't going to have a fight. Senior Captain. Fi'r A COllliESPONDENT S DIARY. battalions dolayed on the journey up ; they will prob- ably ])roceed to Gebel Koyan by boat, doing the dis- tance in one day instead of two. Perhaps even more striking than the disappearance of the troops is the diminution of the vast accumula- tion of supplies and st-^res. The little town of casts and sacks ha-i had street after street lifted away and sent up to Shabluka. Seeing the process thus in miniature, we can ap- proach an adequate idea of the labour, promptness, and system which brought all the necessaries for 25,('00 men from Atbara, Alerawi, Haifa, Egypt, and England without a break or hitch. Last night the whole upward course of the river was fringed with the taper spars of the gyassas, and festooned with the smoke from the camp-fires of the towing-parties. Everything has gone on in proper time and proper order, and the weight of tiie material shifted is enormous. Multiply all this a hundredfold, and you appreciate the standing miracle of Egyptian transport. Wad named, Aug. S5 (6 p.m.) — The march out of the 1st British Brigade this afternoon was a most imposing spectacle. The four battalions had all their baggage packed to the minute, and at the sound of the bugle moved off and took the road in four parallel columns. A MAGNIFICENT BRIGADE. 239 I prob- lie dis- sarance uiiiula- [ streiit 1. an ap- :!ss, and 25,000 Ingland e river las, and of the proper fted is Dreciate out of a most eked to )ved off The Warwicks were on the left; next to them the Soaforths, then the Camerons, and on the right the Lincohis — the three last carrying battalion flags, a new elenient of colour since the Atbara campaign. The ground just outside the camp was broken, but the men struck along with an easy swing from the loins, ignoring the weight of their kits. Many of the men were bearded, and all were tanned by the sun, acclimatised by a summer in the country, hardened by perpetual labours, and con- fident from the recollection of victory — a magnifi- cent force, which any man might be proud to accompany into the held. Wad named, Aug. S6 {11. 4S a.m.) — The camp this morning shows even an emptier desolation than yesterday. At the north end the Lancers are disembarking their last horses, preparatory to the march to Hajir to-morrow, the gunners are readying the 40-pounders and liowitzers for the steam-up to-day, the rest of the artillery marches. The medical staff is just leaving, having sent the sick down to Nasri yesterday. The rest of the camp is a wilderness of broken biscuit-boxes and battered jam-tins, dotted with the half-naked Jaalin scallywags, male and female, once the richest slave-dealers in the Sudan, now glad to ^, IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) // ^ 1.0 I.I 11.25 ■iilM 12.5 :^ i;2 12.0 ^1^ ^1 A ^7). %z^ '">> > w^^ /A ^ Photogr^hic Sciences Corporation 33 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 873-4503 iV iV :1>^ :\ \ ?v ^^ ^S. hem on four — a vast advantage, as shown on yesterday's march, which was an alternation of stones and wallowing sand. On entering the camp I came on the tail of the British Division, which had made four marches of twenty miles. The Egyptians took two, but the going is exception- ally bad ; natives and British alike fell out somewhat freely. The massed black bands welcomed the British, thun- dering out the march past of each of the regiments. The Eifles, though soft, were commended for smartness in marching, as were the Northumberland Fusiliers. The flood has formed a khor across the original camp, and the British are in detached zariba to the southward, which is lined nightly with a living ram- part of soldiers, alert, eager, and tingling in anticipa- tion of a fight. GeM Eoyan, Aug. S8 ( 1^.W j9.m.)— The " Zafir," the flagship of the gunboat flotilla, Captain Keppel, with General Bundle, chief of the staff, on board, sprang a leak the day before yesterday off Shendi. The boat was headed for the shore, but sank within a few yards of the bank. Only her funnel and mast are above water. The barges in tow were cut adrift, and everybody behaved with the greatest coolness. 244 A CORRESPONDENTS DIARY. Captain Keppel was the last man to leave. All lives were saved, but a quantity of kit was lost. Considering that the navy has been two years at work, that the steamers are of light drauglit, and that there is a tremendous head of water in the river, it is wonderful that this is the first serious mishap. Everybody sympathises with Captain Keppel, and deplores this stroke of bad luck at the end of mouths of splendid work. He transfers his flag to the Sultan. The whole force advances this afternoon about eight miles. Wady Abid, Ang. £9 (8.4O a.m.) — The whole army is camped here, the British division having left Royan in the cool of the evening and marching in by moonlight. The camp is estimated to be twenty-eight miles from Omdurman and eighteen from Kerreri, where there is every reason to believe that the Dervishes are collecting. The army will halt here at least till evening. Meanwhile a reconnaissance, consisting of the Egyptian cavalry, with the Maxims and camel corps, is patrolling ten miles to the southward, and a gun- boat has been despatched to patrol the stream. A dervish patrol of ten men was seen yesterday evening. It fell back. ANOlilER STORM. 245 kit was years at and that river, it lishap. ppel, and : mouths )TL about ole army dng left ching in ht miles ri, where )ervishes g- of the lel corps, d a gun- I. yesterday Deserters are now beginning to arrive in swarms, and a sifting of their reports shows that it may be considered certain that the Dervishes mean to fight. The weather till now has been magnificent, and beyond the most optimistic expectations. The heat is now extreme in the daytime, but the niglits are cool and dry. This morning was overcast, and there were furious gusts of wind from the north-east, which are supposed to be precursors of rain. So far we have had only three rainstorms. Violent and tempestuous weather at this slw*ge might breed discomfort but not delay. The correspondents would find the chief disadvan- tage of rain in the possible interruption of the field telegraph, which has been brought here, and will prob- ably advance farther, though it is only poled as far as Nasri Island, and wet ground might cause a break- down of communications. 10.15 a.m. — The reconnaissance has returned, hav- ing seen only a few fresh tracks of dervish horsemen, owing to the dust blown off the alluvial land into the desert having covered up their traces. The fewness of the tracks confirms the conjecture that the Dervishes have resolved to retire to ground of their own choosing. The cloudy morning turned to the opaquest dust- storm of recent experience. 246 A CORRESPONDENT S DIARY. The rushing south wind swishes through the camp, whirling the dust of the old cultivation in yellow clouds before it, and the desert outside the zariba forms a half -solid curtain of flying earth. Riding round the camp to-day, the dust of which clung to my eyelashes and formed dangling screens of accumulated Sudan before my eyes, I was much struck by the advantage which experience in cam- paigning here gives the Egyptian over the British troops. All alike are under blanket shelters, but the Egyptians rig up all the blankets of one company into a continuous shed on high poles, which gives an airy shelter, leaves the camping-ground clearer, and economises blankets, so that enough are left to hap round the rifles. The British, contrariwise, fix one or two blankets on low sticks, and their ground is less thoroughly cleared of scrub to begin with. Dotted promiscuously over the ground are tiny booths, beneath which the men swelter, with the back flaps of their helmets turned over their faces to screen off the sun. Even through the veil of dust he presses on to the blanket so close that the men cannot uncover their heads. This is not a white man's country. 1.15 p.m. — There is abundant evidence that the spot where we are now camp(^d was in the recent occiipa- he camp, 1 yellow le zariba of which I screens as much in cam- 3 British but the company gives an iarer, and It to hap [7 t- ml •e o e D e y blankets loroughly are tiny with the rieir faces le veil of I that the it the spot it occupa- KHARTUM AND OMDURMAN THK MAZBS (r TIIK ARAB MIND. 247 tion of the enemy — angarebs and women's trinket- boxes being littered all over the place. The Dervishes are almost certainly falling back be- fore us on to positions determined beforduind, where they expect advantage from scrub, and it would be no surprise here if a decisive battle were fought some distance north of Omdurman. The Intelligence Department naturally keeps its own counsel, since a daily interchange of spies between the hostile headquarters is now easy. It is safe to say that all the advantage of informa- tion is on our side, all the stories of the deserters being carefully sifted by men accustomed to thread the tor- tuous mazes of the Arab mind. The Intelligence Department camp is to-day strewn with plum-coloured, thin-cheeked dervishes squatting in groups on the ground munching biscuit, the first earnest of the renewed blessings of civilised rule. It must not, however, be inferred from this that the Khalifa's trusted fighting men are deserting. These are so detested on account of half a gen- eration of barbarities that they know there is no asylum left them in all Africa: they will die resolutely. Wady Ahid, Aug. 30 {940 a.m.) — We ^re again on the march, the army advancing ten miles to Sayal — another stride towards Omdurman. Major Stuart -Wortley's friendlies have captured ^-•. 248 A correspondent's durt. five prisoners, together with a barge laden with grain, after a brush with some dervishes on the right bank of the Nile. During the storm which continues to rage here the British outposts last night heard the pntter of hoofs, and suddenly a dervish horseman rode up, shouting " Allah ! " and hurled his spear over their heads; then, wheeling round, he galloped away unhurt. th grain, 'ht bank 249 age here pntter of rode up, ver their 5d away XXXI. THE RECONNAISSANCES. Eeveille at four had forestalled daybreak ; at five we were between dawn and sunrise. Inside the swarming zariba of camp Sayal impatient bugles were hurrying whites and blacks under arms. Outside it the desert dust threw up a sooty film before the yellow east ; the cavalry and camel -corps were forming up for the day's reconnaissance. Four squadrons of British 21st Lancers on the left, nine squadrons of Egyptian horsemen on the right with the horse guns, they trotted jangling into broad columns of troops, and spread fan-wise over the desert. The camel-corps stayed a moment to practise a bit of drill of their own. One moment they were a huge oblong phalanx of waving necks and riders sillioueLted against the sunrise; a couple of words in Turkish from their Bey and the necks were waving alone with the riders in a square round them ; an instant more and camels and men had all knelt down. The camel- corps was a flat field of heads £iid humps hedged with 250 THE RECONNAISSANCES, a shining quickset of bayonets. That rehearsed, they loped away to the extreme right : they can wait longer for their water than the horses, so that their portion is always the outer desert. One instant we were with the main army by the zariba. The next — so it seemed after a few days of marching with the infantry- -we were off and clear away. The screen was spread far out before the toiling infantry, and the enemy who would harass or even look at them must slip through us or break us if he could. It looked little enough like either. As soon as our scouts were off the country was full of them. It was the last day of August — above a month since the first battalions had left the Atbara, two days before we were to take Omdurman, and the first shot of the campaign was yet unfired. But before us rose cliff-like from the river, and sloped gently down to the plain, the outline of Seg-el-Taib hill ; from that were only a dozen miles to Kerreri; from Kerreri were only ten to Omdurman. From the hill we should surely see. So hoofs pattered, and curb-chains jingled, and stir- rups rang, and behold we were round the inland base of Seg-el-Taib and scrambling up its shaly rise. From the top we looked out at the ten-mile reach of river and the hundred-mile stretch of plain, rejoicing in the young sunlight. On our left, four gunboats — two while of DERVISHES AT LAST! 251 led, they it longer ortion is T by the • days of nd clear fore the d harass or break e either, was full nth since ,wo days first shot e us rose Yn to the that were reri were re should , and stir- [id base of From the 2r and the blie young white of the new class, two black of the old — trudged deviously, slowly, surely up under the right bank. Across the shining steel ribbon of Nile lay a vast tangle of green — only a fifth funnel and MLixira-platforms crawl- ing along its horizon revealed it an island. On our right, the brilliant mimosa-scrub — in this rainy coun- try mimosa grows real leaves and the leaves are gr^en — stretched forward to a dim double hill, a saddle in the middle, gentle ridges dipping down at each end to river and desert. At our feet, round a sandy creek, clustered white and brown cavalry like bees, lances planted in the sand, men bent over bits, horses down on their knees for the water. In the desert a slowly advancing lozenge under a cloud of dust stood for the camel corps. Over our shoulders a black tide licked yet more slowly southward; that was infantry and guns. Sun, river, birds, green ; grim, stealthy gun- boats and that awfully advancing host; it combined into the most heart-winning, most heart-quakiiig pic- ture of all the war. But we were looking for somebody to kill. Mud- walled villages, as everywhere, friui^ed the river-bank; by one the cavalry were watering; another further on focussed the landscape with the conical-pointed tomb of some sheikh or holy man. And — wl ;t? — the glasses, quick ! — yes, by George it is ! One, two, three, four, five — our scouts ? impossible ; there are our scouts a mile this side of them. No : Dervishes — 252 THE RECONNAISSANCES. dervish horse ; the first sight of them, for me, in the campaign. Dervish horse three miles this side of Kerreri. Stand to your horses ! Prepare to meant ! Mount ! This time the plain was fuller, the jingling merrier, the bobbing lance-points more alert than ever. On and on — a troop through the dense bush, a couple of squadrons in line over the open gravel, scrambling through a rocky rent in the ground, halting to breathe the horses and signal the scouts — but always on again. Always, by comparison with infantry, we seemed to fly, to spread out by magic, to leave the miles behind us in a flash. But the Dervishes seemed to have vanished, as their wont is, swallowed up by dervish-land. We had already passed the spot chosen for the night's camp ; we were to go on a mile or two beyond " to make it good," as they say. At last we halted. " We shall water here," said the Colonel, " and then go home." Then suddenly somebody looked forward through his glasses. "By Gad, the Gippy cavalry are charging!" " That's not the Gippy cavalry," sings out somebody else; "that's our advanced squadron." Mount and clatter off again. I didn't see them, but it was good enough to gallop for ; and now, sure enough, we plunge through the mimosa and find the advanced squadron pressing on furiously, and the best gentleman rider in the army with a dervish lance in his hand. The squadron found them in the bush, and galloped at THE LINKS OF KEKREia. 253 le, in the i side of Mount ! merrier, ver. Ou couple of gambling breathe on again, eemed to es behind d, as their id already we were good," as ,ter here," suddenly es, " By somebody ount and was good we plunge squadron nan rider md. The illoped at them, but they were too quick away. We scrambled on, round that bush, down and up that gully, and presently came out again into a rising swell of gravel. And there were the lines of Kerreri. Behind another stretch of thicker bush, perhaps a mile through, under the twin hills, was a flutter of something white — white splashed with crimson. Ker- reri lines beyond a doubt ; only what was the white ? Loose garments of horsemen riding through the bush ? Tents ? Flags ? Yes ; it must be flags. Already a subaltern was picking his way through the bush with an officer's patrol. Immediately another strolled away to the left ; already one white gunboat had almost out- flanked the lines. The whole regiment was now up, and dismounted in columns of squadrons in the open. When the saddle alone weighs eight stone it is always useful to relieve a horse of the man. Colonel and majors, captains and adjutants and subalterns, sergeant- major and privates to hold the horses, grouped on a little knolL Popular the man who had a good field- glass. Tap, tap, tap, floated down the wind. They were beating their war-drum. " Where's Montmorency ? " " Gone into the bush, sir." Pop ! Very faint and muffled, but all hearts leaped : it was the first shot of the campaign. And then through the bushes galloped a bay horse riderless. Tap, tap, tap : they were still beating the war -drum. "What's that to right of the flags ? " " Men, sir," says the sergeant - major, 254 THE RECONNAISSANCES. taking his pipe out of his mouth. " I can see them with the naked eye." Tap, tap, tap. " Where's Mont- morency ? " " In the there he is, sir, coming back." " Very well ; send i man to recall that patrol on the left. We've seen where they are : we'll go home now, quietly." Then in came the smiling subaltern. One man had thrown a spear at him and one had loosed off an elephant gun ; but he had dropped one man off the bay horse. There were thirty flags or so : it might mean perhaps 3000 men. The patrol from the left reported some 200 horsemen striking away to their right rear. It mi<2;ht mean retreat : it might mean a flank attack. It did not matter which. We had seen ; the recon- naissance had succeeded : we walked home quietly The next day, — the army had marched eight miles to Wady Suetne — it was the Egyptian cavalry, — nearly twice as many of them, and the camel -corps and horse-battery besides. This time we started only five miles or so from Kerreri, and before we had gone an hour the 21st were in the lines. It had been a retreat we had seen the day before ; anyhow, it had become so later, when the gunboats shelled the position ; the place was empty. We crossed over to the left and cantered up expectant, but there was nothing to see. Only a few miserable tukls twisted out of bushes: Jonah had a better house under his gourd. Kerreri had been a fable — a post of observation never meant to be held. ▲ CITY WORTH CONQUERINO. 255 see them ;'s Mont- coming at patrol we'll go man had d ofif an f the bay ht mean reported ght rear. k attack. le recon- lietly jht miles , — nearly orps and only five gone an a retreat 1 become tion; the left and g to see. bushes : Kerreri er meant But the lines mattered little: it was to the hill behind it that eyes turned. Now we were on the very brink, and could look over it to forecast the great day. Should we see dervishes coming on, or should we see dervishes streaming away ? We must see something, and we scrambled up, and at last, and at last, we saw Omdurman. We saw a broad plain, half sand, half pale grass; on the rim by the Nile rose a pale yellow dome, clear above everything. That was the Mahdi's tomb, divined from Gebel Eoyan, now seen. It was the centre of a purple stain on the yellow sand, going out for miles and miles on every side — the mud-houses of Omdurman. A great city — an enormous city — a city worth con- quering indeed! A while we looked ; but this was a reconnaissance. The thing was to look nearer and see if there were any enemy. The Lancers had gone on towards some villages along the river, between our hill and aiiother three or four miles on. The Egyptian mounted troops turned south-westward, inland. We did not altogether know what we were going to do or see : perhaps it was that dark patch halfway between our line of advance and the British, which might be trees or might be men. But Broadwood Bey knew very well where we were going, and what we were going to see. W e began to march towards a clump of hills that drew in north-westward within three miles of the outskirts of Omdurman ; the maj. calls it Gebel Feried. We came 256 THE RECONNAISSANCES. into swamps deepened by the last night's rain; we crossed soft-bottomed streams; it would have been desperate ground to be attacked in, but still the leader rode on and the heavy columns rode behind him. At last we came behind the south-easternmost hill, and the squadrons halted and the guns wheeled into line and the camels barracked. We went up the hill and agam we saw. Omdurman was nearer, more enormous, more worth conquering than ever. A gigantic tract of mud- houses; the Mahdi's tomb rising above them like a protecting genius ; many other roofs rising tall above the wont of the Sudan, one or two with galvanL-ed iron roofs to mirror the sunlight. "With its hug^-^ extent, its obvious principal buildings, its fostering cathedral, the distant view of Omdurman would have disgraced no European capital: you might almost expect that the hotel omnibus would meet you at the railway station. But once more we were on reconnaissance; we were theia to look for men. In front of the city stretched a long white line — banners, it might be; more likely tents ; most likely both. In front of that was a longer, thicker black line — no doubt a zariba or trench. Then they did mean to fight after alL Only as we sat and ate a biscuit and looked — the entrench- ment moved. The solid wall moved forward, and it was a wall of men. Whew ! What an army ! Five huge brigades of it THB khalifa's ARMY. 257 n; we e been leader n. At 11, and ito line lill and ! worth mud- like a 1 above i^anL^ed s huga •stering d have almost L at the ce; we le city ;bt be; of that iriba or Only trench- , and it [es of it — a 'iree-mile front, and parts of it eight or ten men deep. It was beginning to move directly for our hill, and — turn, turn, tum — we heard the boom of a war- drum of higher calibre than yesterday's. Now they seemed to halt; now they came on. The five corps never broke or shifted, the rigid front never bent ; their discipline must be perfect. And they covered the ground. The three miles melted before them; our scouts and the Lancers* and theirs were chasing each other to and fro over the interval; we saw a picket of the Lancers fire. " We'll go back now," said the serene voice of the leader. The force formed up, and we started on the eight-mile walk between ourselves and support. The sun had hardened the swamp underfoot, but the guns and camels still made heavy going of it. We had not been moving twenty minutes before we saw a black mass of the enemy watching us from the hill whence we had watched them. And their line was still coming on, black over a ridge not a mile behind us. Tum, tum, tum — they were getting nearer; now we heard their shouts, and saw their swords brandishing in the sun. Tum, tum, turn — roar — brandish — how slowly the camels moved! The troopers in the long column of our outside flank were beginning to look over their shoulders. Then the doc- tor came galloping like mad from behind. "Where's Broad wood ? " — and we saw the rear-guard squadron faced about and galloping towards the enemy. The B 258 THE RECONNAISSANCES. bugle snapped out and the troops of the flanking regiment whipped round and walked towards the enemy too. They were within a thousand yarda Now — It was only a dismounted trooper they were fetch- ing back. The troops turned again, and we walked into camp. It was a perfect reconnaissance, — not a man lost, not a shot fired, and everything seexL ^4 lanking 'ds the yards. Ml B fetch- walked —not a ien. XXXII THB BATTLE OF OMDXTBMAlf. Our camp, for the night of September 1, was in the village of Agaiga, a mile south of Kerreri Hill. On our left front was another hill, higher, but single-peaked and rounder — Gebel Surgham. In front the ground was open for five miles or so — sand and grass broken by only a few folds — with a group of hills beyond. The force had formed up in position in the after- noon, when the Dervishes followed the cavalry home, and had remained under arms all night ; at half-past five in the morning, when the first howitzer-shell from opposite Omdurman opened the day's work, every man was in his place. The line formed an obtuse angle ; the order of brigades and battalions, counting from the left, was the following : Lyttelton's 2nd Bri- tish (Rifle Brigade, Lancashire Fusiliers, Northumber- land Fusiliers, Grenadier Guards); Wauchope's 1st British (Warwicks, Seaforths, Camerons, Lmcolns) j Maxwell's 2nd Egyptian (14th, 12th, 13th Sudanese, 260 THE BATTLE Ot OMDURMAN. and 8th Egyptian in support). Here came the point of the angle ; to the right of it were : Macdonald's Ist Egyptian (11th, 10th, 9th Sudanese, 2nd Egyptian supporting); Lewis's 3rd Egyptian (4th, 15th, and 3rd and 7th Egyptian, in column on the right flank). Cullinson's 4th Egyptian Brigade (Ist, 5th, 17th, and ISth Egyptian) was in reserve in the village. All the P^gyptian battalions in the front were in their usual formation, with four companies in line and two in support. The British had six in line and two in suj)i)ort. On the extreme left was the 32nd Field Battery ; the Maxims and Egyptian field-guns were mounted at intervals in the infantry line. The cavalry had gone out at the first streak of grey, British on the left, as usual, Egyptian with camel-corps and horse-battery from tlie right moving across our front. The gunboats lay with stuam up off the village. Liglit stole quietly into the sky behind us; there was no sound from the plain or the hills before us; there was hardly a sound from our own line. Every- body was very silent, but very curious. Would they be so mad as to come out and run their heads into our fire? It seemed beyond hoping for: yet certainly they had been full of war the day before. But most of us were ex[)ecting instantly the order to advance on Omdurman. A trooper rose out of the dimness from behind the shoulder of Gebel Surgham, grew larger and plainer, e point lonald's ^ryptian bh, and flank), 'th, and e. All n their ind two I two in Jattery ; inted at id gone he left, -battery uuboats j; there fore us; Every- Id they into our ertainly ut most advance lind the plainer, X ^ K V. O M « O o o H H <1 K O THE FIEST ATTACK. 263 spurred violently up to the line and inside. A couple more were silhouetted across our front. Then the electric whisper came racing down the line; they were coming. The Lancers came in on the left ; the Egyptian mounted troops drew like a curtain across us from left to right. As they passed a flicker of white flags began to extend and fill the front in their place. The noise of something began to creep in upon us ; it cleared and divided into the tap of drums and the far-away surf of raucous war-cries. A shiver of expectancy thrilled along our army, and then a sigh of content. They were coming on. Allah help them ! they were coming on. It was now half-past six. The flags seemed still very distant, the roar very faint, and the thud of our first gun was almost startling. It may have startled them too, but it startled them into life. The line of flngs swung forward, and a mass of white fl}'ing linen swung forward with it too. They came vary fast, and tlu*y came very straight ; and then presently they came no farther. With a crash the bullets leaped out of the British rifles. It began with the Guards and Warwicks — section volleys at 2000 yards ; then, as the Dervishes edged rightward, it ran along to the Highlanders, the Lincolns, and to Maxwell's Brigade. The British stood up in double rank behind their zariba ; the blacks lay down in their shelter-trencli ; both poured out death as fast as they could load and press trigger. Shrapnel whistled and Maxims growled siivagely. From all the 264 THK BATTLE OF OMDURMAN. line came perpetual fire, fire, fire, and shrieked forth in great gusts of destruction. And the enemy ? No white troops would have faced that torrent of death for five minutes, but the Baggara and the blacks came on. The torrent swept into them and hurled them down in whole companies. You saw a rigid line gather itself up and rush on evenly ; then before a shrapnel shell or a Maxim the line suddenly quivered and stopped. The line was yet unbroken, but it was quite still. But other lines gathered up again, again, and yet again ; they went down, and yet others rushed on. Sometimes they came near enough to see single figures quite plainly. One old man with a white flag started with five comrades; all dropped, but he alone came bounding forward to within 200 yards of the 14th Sudanese. Then he folded his arms across his face, and his limbs loosened, and he dropped sprawling to earth beside his flag. It was the last day of Mahdism, and the greatest. They could never get near, and they refused to hold back. By now the ground before us was all white with dead men's drapery. Rifles grew red-hot; the soldiers seized them by the slings and dragged them back to the reserve to change for cool ones. It was not a battle, but an execution. In the middle of it all you were surprised to find that we were losing men. The crash of our own fire was so prodigious that we could not hear their bullets "BEARER TARTY THERE!" 265 red forth uld have , but the nt swept )mpanies. rush on axim the line was her lines ley went nes they 5 plainly, yith five hounding Sudanese, his limbs th beside greatest. I to hold ill white hot; the [ed them It was i to find own fire r bullets whistle ; yet they came and swooped down and found victims. The Dervishes were firing at their extreme range, and their bullets were many of them almost spent ; but as they always fire high they often hit So that while you might have thought you were at a shoot of rabbits, you suddenly heard the sharp cry, " Bearer party there, quick," and a man was being borne rearward. Few went down, but there was a steady trickle to hospital Bullets may have been spent, and Captain Caldecott, of the Warwicks, was one of the strongest men in the army ; but that helped him nothing when the dropping ball took him in the temple and came out through the jugular. He lay an hour unconscious, then opened his eyes with " For God's sake, give me water ! " and died as he drank. All mourned him for a smart officer and a winning comrade. Most of all the two Highland battalions dropped men. The zariba behind which they were unwisely posted obliged them to stand, be- sides hampering them both in fire and when it came to movement ; a little clump of enemy gathered in a hole in front of them, and by the time guns came up to shell them out, the Camerons had lost some twenty-five and the Seaforths above a dozen. But loss on this scale was not to be considered beside the awful slaughter of the Dervishes. If they still came on our men needed only time and ammuni- tion and strength to point a rifle to kill them ofT to the very last man. Only by now — small wonder— 266 THE BATTLE OF OMDURMAN. they were not coming on. They were not driven back ; they were all killed in coming on. One section of fire after another hushed, and at eight o'clock the village and the plain were still again. The last shell had burst over the last visible group of Dervishes; now there was nothing but the unbending, grimly expectant line before Agaiga and the still carpet of white in front. We waited half an hour or so, and then the sudden bugle called us to our feet. "Advance," it cried; "to Omdurman ! " added we. Slowly the force broke up, and expanded. The evident intention was to march in echelon of brigades — ihe Second British leading along the river, the First British on their right rear, then Maxwell's, Lewis's, and Macdonald's, with Oollinson's still supporting. Lewis and Macdonald had changed places, the latter being now outermost and rearmost ; at the time few noticed that. The moment the dervish attack had died down the 2l3t Lancers had slipped out, and pushed straight for the Khalifa's capital. Movement was slow, since the leading brigades had to wait till the others had gone far enough inland to take their positions. We passed over a corner of the field of fire, and saw for certain wluit awful slaughter we had done. The bodies were not in heaps — bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres. And it was very remarkable, if you remembered the Atbara, that you saw hardly a black; t driven e section ilock the last shell ^rvishes; ;, grimly jarpet of B sudden ied; "to roke up, ;o march leading gilt rear, 's, with icdonald uterinost at. The the 2l3t t for the ides had iland to r of the laughter — bodies er acres if you a black ; 0: ^ .t>n v?^<=;?"' ,.!>^!^ c: ,1 *0, ^ q: 9 p Q O o ^5',' THE SECOND ATTACK. 269 nearly all the dead had the high forehead and taper cheeks of the Arab. The Baggara had been met at last, and he was worth meeting. Some lay very com- posedly, with their slippers placed under their heads for a last pillow ; some knelt, cut short in the middle of a last prayer. Others were torn to pieces, ver- milion blood already drying on brown skin, killed insiantly beyond doubt. Otl: that he ift of luck IS has, per- e made on ancers was uuate con- ■corrospon- fceling on t the street ast to con- Tge of the 21st for its indisputable heroism ; the War Office will hardly be able to condemn it for its equally indisput- able folly. That being so, it is the less invidious to say that lae charge was a gross blunder. For cavalry to charge unbroken infantry, of unknown strength, over unknown ground, within a mile of their own advancing infantij, was as grave a tactical crime as cavalry could possibly commit. Their orders, it is believed, were to find out the strength of the enemy south of Gebel Surgham, report tc the British infantry behind them, and, if possible, to prevent the enemy from re-entering Omdurman. The charge implied dis- regard, or at least inversion, of these orders. Had the cavalry merely reconnoitred the body of dervishes they attacked, and kept them occupied till Lyttelton's brigade came up, the enemy would have been annihilated, probably without the loss of a man to our side. As it was, the British cavalry in the charge itself suflered far heavier loss than it inflicted. And by its loss in horses it practically put itself out of action for the rest of the day, when it ought to have saved itself for the pursuit. Thereby it contributed as much as any one cause to the escape of the Khalil'a. For the other two points, General Gatacre, being new to zaribas, appears to have throughout attached undue importance to them. At the Atbara he squandered much of the force of his attack through an over- estimation of the difficulty of Mahmud's zariba ; here 294 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISSL he )]ed both defence id readiness of offence througli overestimating^ the dilticuUy of liis own. A zariba looks far more formidable than a liglit shelter- trench such as General Hunter's division employed . in truth it is as easy to shoot through as a sheet of paper, and, for Sudanis, almost as easy to charge through. As for sending out the camel -corps with the Egyptian cavalry, it is exceedingly diflicult to understand why this was done the very day after Broadwood's reconnaissance to Gebel Feried had de- monstrated their in "nobility. The truth appears to be that it is very difficult to find a place for such a force in a general action. When the frontier was Haifa, and the war was mostly desert raids and counter- raids, nothing could have replaced this corps ; for other than desert work it has become something of an anomaly. These amateur criticisms are put forward with diffidence, and will, I hope, be tentatively received. Turning to what is indisputable, it is impossible to overpraise the conduct of every branch of the force. Those of the longest and widest experience said over and over again tliat they had never seen a battle in which everybody was so completely cool and set on his business. Two features were especially prominent. The first was the shooting of the British. It was per- fect. Some thouglit that the Dervishes were mown down principally by artillery and Maxim fire ; but if THE SHOOTING. 295 f offence own. A t shelter- m ployed . , sheet of to charge orps with illicult to day after i had de- ippears to or such a intier was .d counter- ; for other ng of an vard with -• received, possible to the force. 3 said over a battle in md set on prominent. X was per- ^ere mown ire; but if the gun did more execution than the rifle, it was pro- bably for the first time in the history of war. An examination of the dead — cursory and partial, but probably fairly representative — tends to the opinion that most of the killing, as usual, was done by rilles. From the British you heard not one ra^.i^ed volley : every section fired with a single report. The iiuU\id- ual firing was lively and evenly maintained. The satisfactory conclusion is that the British soldier will keep absolutely 'Steady in action, and knows how to use his weapon: given these two conditions, no force e.iisting will ever get within half a mile of him on open ground, and hardly any will try. The native troops vindicated their courage, dis- cipline, and endurance most nobly. The smUlen, un- foreseen charges might well liave shaken the nerve of the Egyptians and over-excited the blacks ; both were absolutely cool. Their only fault was in shooting. At almost every volley you saw a bullet kick the sand within fifty yards of the firing-line. Others flew almost perpendicular into the air. Still, given steadiness, the mechanical art of shooting can be taught with time and patience. When you consider that less than six months ago the equivalent of one company in each black battalion were raw dervishes, utterly untrained in the use of fire-arms, the wonder is they shot as well as thoy did. Anyhow they shot well enough, and in trying circumstances they shot 296 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM. as well as they knew how. That is the root of the matter. As for the leading — happy the country which possessed a Hunter, a Macdonald, a Broadwood, and had hardly heard of any one of them. It has heard of them now, and it will be strange if it does not presently hear further. 297 ot of the y which vood, and las heard does not XXXIV. OMDURMAN, It was eleven o'clock. Four brigades were passing slowly to right and left of Gebel Surgham : the Second British and Second Egyptian were far ahead, filmy shadows on the eye-searing sand. The dervish dead and dying were strewn already c /er some thirty square miles— killed by bullets, killed by shrapnel, killed by shell from the gunboats, dying of wounds by tne water, dying of thirst in the desert. But most lay dead in the fighting line. Mahdism had died well. If it had earned its death by its iniquities, it had condoned its iniquities by its death. Now on to overtake the Sirdar, to see the city of the Khalifa. Even now, after our triple fight, none was quite assured of final victory. We had killed a prodigious number of men, but where there were so many there might yet be more. Probab]/ the same thought ran through many minds. If only they fought as well inside Omdurman ! That would have spelt days of fighting and thousands of dead. 298 OMDURMAN. One thing, indeed, we knew by now : the defences of Onidurman on the river side existed no longer. On the 1st, from Gebel Feried, we had seen the gun -boats begin the bombardment, backed by the 37th Battery, with its howitzers, on the opposite bank. We had heard since of the effects. " It was the funniest thing yo\i over saw," said a captain of marines. " The boats went up one after anotlier ; when we got opposite the first fort, ' pop ' went their guns. ' Bang, bang, bang,' went three boats and stopped up the embrasure. Came to the next fort : ' pop ' ; * bang, bang, bang ' : stopped up that embrasure. So on all the way up. A little fort on Tuti Island had the cheek to loose off its pop-gun ; stopped that up. Then we went on to Khartum. Forts there thought perhaps the boats couldn't shoot from behind, so they lay doggo till we had gone paot. They found we could shoot from behind." So far so good. But what should we find on the land side ? Above all, should we find the Khalifa ? The only answer was to go and see. Four miles or so south of Agaiga the yellow streak of Khor Shaniba marks rouglily the northern limit of Omdurman ; thence to the Mahdi's tomb, the great mosque, and the Khalifa's house is a "^ort three miltis. The Second British Brigade was wat ang at the Khor — men and horses Inpning up the half solid stufl' till they must have been as thick with mud inside as they were out. Beyond it a sprinkling of tumble-down huts refracted THE WHITE FLAG. 299 efences of On iger. gun -boats 1 Battery, We had iest thing The boats posite the mg, bang/ nibrasure. ig, bang': ay up. A )ose off its 3nt on to the boats go till we lOot from nd on the Khalifa ? ailes or so r Shamba ndurman ; e, and the le Second -men and they must were out. ; refracted and heated sevenfold tho furnace of the sunlight ; from amon;' them beckoned tho Sirdar's fln" It was about two o'clock when the re 1 flag moved onward towards the Mnhdi's tomb, heaving its torn dome above the sea of mud walls. The red and white looked light and gay beside the huge, cuml)rous raven- banner of the Khalifa, whicli flew sullenly at its side Before the twin emblems of victory and defeat rodo the straight-backed Sirdar, General Hunter a head behind him, behind them the staff. Behind came the trampling Lnd Egyptian Brigade and the deadly smooth-glidiiig guns of the 32nd Battery. Through the spar?;e hovels they moved on ; presently they began to densen inlo streets. We were on the threshold of the capital of Mahdism. And on the threshold came out an old man o" a donkey with a white flag. The Khalifa — so we beli(3ved — liad fled to Omdurman, and was at this very moment within his wall in tlie centre of the town ; but the inhabitants had come out to surrender. Only one point the old gentleman wished to be assured of : were we likely to massacre everybody if we let them in without resistance? The Sirdar thought not. The old man beamed at the answer, and conveyed it to his fellow-townsmen ; on the top of which ceremony we marched into Omdurman. It began just like any other town or village of the mean Sudan. Half the huts seemed left unfinished, the other half to have been deserted and fallen to 300 OMDURMAN. pieces. There were no streets, no doors or windows except holes, usually no roofs. As for a garden, a tree, a steading for a beast — any evidence of tlirift or intelligence, any attempt at comfort or amenity or common cleanliness, — not a single trace of any of it. Omdurman was just planless confusion of blind walls and gaping holes, shiftless stupidity, contented filth and bea^itliuess. But that, we said, was only the outskirts : when we come farther in we sliall surely find this mass of popu- lation manifesting some small symbols of a great dominion. And presently we came indeed into a broader way than the rest — something with the rude semblance of a street. Only it was paved with dead donkeys, and here and there it disappeared in a cullender of deep holes where green water festered. Beside it stood a few houses, such as you see in Metemmeh or Berber — two large, naked rooms stand- ing in a naked walled courtyard. Even these were rare : for the rest, in this main street, Omdurman was a rabbit-warren — a threadless labyrinth of tiny huts or shelters, too flimsy for the name of sheds. Oppression, stagnation, degradation, were stamped deep on every yard of miserable Omdurman. But the people ! We could hardly see the place for the people. We could hardly hear our own voices for their shrieks of welcome. We could hardly move for their importunate greetings. They tumbled over each other like ants from every mud heap, from behind every A HUGE IIAKE.M. 301 windows [warden, a tlirift or aeiiity or any of it. ind walls iiLed filth when we 3 of popu- [ a great d into a the rude with dead ired in a festered. Du see in lus stand- lese were rman was ly liuts or ppression, on every 5 place for voices for move for over each lind every dunghill, from under every mat. Most of the men still wore their gibbas turned inside out; you could see the shadows of the patches through the sackcloth. They had been trying to kill us three hours before. But they salaamed, none the less, and volleyed " Peace be with you" in our track. All the miscellaneous tribes of Arabs whom Abdullahi's fears or suspicions had congregated in his capital, all the blacks his captains had gathered together into franker slavery — indiscriminate, half-naked, grinning the grin of the sycophant, they held out their hands and asked for backsheesh. Yet more wonderful were the women. The multi- tude of women whom concupiscence had harried from every recess of Africa and mewed up in Baggara harems came out to salute their new masters. There were at least three of them to every man. Black women from Equatoria and almost white women from Egypt, plum-skinned Arabs and a strange yellow type with square, bony faces and tightly-ringleted black hair ; old women and little girls and mothers with babies at the breast ; women who could hardly walk for dyed cotton swaLhings, muffled in close veils, and women with only a rag between themselves and nakedness — the whole city was a huge harem, a museum of African races, a monstrosity of African lust. The steady columns drove through the surge of people: then halted in lines of ebony statues, the open - mouthed guns crawling between them to the 002 OMDLKMAN. front. We had come opposite the corner of a high wall of faced stones, a higli twenty feet solid vvitliout a chip or chink. Now ! This was the great wall of Onidurman, the Khalifa's citadel. And listen ! Boom — boom — a heavy melancholy note, half bellow, half waiL It was the great ombeya, the war-horn. The Khalifa was inside, and he was rallying the malazemin of liis bodyguard to fight their last fight in their last stronghold. Less than 3000 men were standing, surrounded by ten times their number, within ten feet of this gigantic wall. But for the moment they were safe enough. The Khalifa, demented in all he did through these last days of his perdition, had made no banquette inside his rampart ; and if it was hard to scale, it was impos- sible to defend. The pinch would come when we went inside. One column moved off along the street ; another — the 13th Sudanese with four guns of the battery — away to the left under the wall towards the Nile. The road was what you already felt to be typical of Mah- dism — pools of rank stagnation, hills and chasms of rubble. The guns fell behind to cut their road a bit ; the infantry went on till they came down to the brim- ming blue river. Here were the forts and the loop- holed walls, and here, steiming serene and masterful to and fro, were the inevitable gunboats. Cr-r-rack ! Three crisp Maxim rounds: the place was tenanted yet. TIIROUGH TTIK BREACH. 803 )f a high I without ,t wall of n ! Boom How, half )ra. The liihizemiii their last unded by s gigantic i enough, these last Lte inside ^as inipos- when we another — battery — ^ile. The I. of Mah- sliasms of oad a bit ; the brim- the loop- masffrful C^r-r-rack ! 1 tenanted At tho corner we come upon a breach — 500 cubic feet or so of fissure — torn by a lyddite shell. Over the rubble we scrambled, then through a stout double- leafed gate, pulses leaping: we were inside. But as yet only half inside — only in a broad road between another high stone wall on our right and the river on our left. We saw the choked embrasures and a maimed gun or two, and walls so clownishly loop-holed that a man could only get one oblique shot at a gun- boat, and then wait till the next came up to have one shot at that. We saw worse things — horrors such as do not sicken in the mass on the battle-field — a scarlet man sitting with his chin on his knees, hit by a shell, clothed from head to foot in his own blood, — a woman, young and beautii'uUy formed, stark naked, rolling from side to side, moaning. As yet we saw not one fighting man, and still we could feel that the place was alive. We pushed on between walls, we knew not whither, through breathing emptiness, through pulsing silence. Eound a corner we came suddenly on a bundle of dirty patched cloth and dirty, lean, black limbs — a typical dervish. He was alive and unarmed, and threw up his hands : he was taken for a guide. Next at our feet, cutting the road, we found a broad khor, flowing in from the Nile, washing up above the base of the wall. Four dervishes popped out, seemingly from dead walls beyond. They came towards us and pro- bably wished to surrender ; but the blacks fired, and they dived into their dead v/ulls again. The guide 304 OMDURMAN. said the water was not deep, and a crowd of men and women suddenly shooting up from the rear bore him out by fording it. Most of these new - reconciled foes had baskets to take away their late master's loot. We plashed through the water — and here at last, in the face of the high wall on our right, was a great wooden gate. Six blacks stood by with the bayonet, while another beat it open with his rifle-butt. We stepped inside and gasped with wonder and disap- pointment. For the inside of the Kali fa's own enclosure was even more squalid, an even more wonderful teeming beehive than the outer town itself. Like all tyrants, he was constantly increasing his body-guard, till the fortified enclosure was bursting with them. From ths height of a saddle you could see that this was only part of the citadel, an enclosure within an enclosure. Past a little guard-house at the gate a narrow path ran up the centre of it ; all the rest was a chaos of piggish dwelling-holes. Tiny round straw tukls, mats propped up a foot from earth with crooked sticks, dome-topped mud kennels that a man could just crawl into, exaggerated bird's nests falling to pieces of stick and straw — lucky was the man of the Khalifa's guard who could house himself and his family in a mud cabin the size of an omnibus. On every side, of every type, they jumbled and jostled and crushed ; and they sweated and stank with people. For one or two old men in new gibbas came out, and one or two younger IMPOSIKG ON THE SAVAGE. 305 men and bore him econciled ter's loot, it last, in s a great bayonet, utt. We id disap- snre was teeming [ tyrants, 1, till the From the 5vas only nclosure. •ow path chaos of kls, mats d sticks, jst crawl of stick I's guard a mud of every iud they two old younger men nnked and wounded. When we offered them no harm the Khalifa's body-guard broke cover. One second the place might have been an uncouth cemetery ; the next it was a gibbering monkey-house. I'rom naked hovels, presto ! it turned to naked bodies. Climbing, squeezing, burrowing, they came out like vermin from a burning coat. They were just as skinny and shabby as any other dervishes; as the Omdurman Guards they were a failure. They were all very friendly, the men anxious to tell what they knew of the Khalifa's movements — which was nothing — the women overjoyed to fetch drinks of water. But when they were told to bring out their arms and ammunition they became a bit sticky, as soldiers say. They looked like refusing, and a snap-shot round a corner which killed a black soldier began to look nasty. There must have been thousands of them all about us, all under cover, all knowing every twist and turn of their warren. But a confident front imposed on them, as it will on all savages. A raised voice, a hand on the shoulder — and they were slipping away to their dens and slouching back with Remingtons and bandoliers. The first came very, very slowly ; as the pile grew they came quicker and quicker. From crawling they changed in five minutes to a trot; they smiled all over, and informed zealously against anybody who hung back. Why Lct? Three masterless hours will hardly wipe out the rest of a lifetime of slavery. 306 OMDURMAN. Maxwell Bey left a guard over the arms, and went back : it was not in this compartment that we should find the Khalifa. We went on through the walled street along the river-front; the gunboats were still Maximing now and again a cable or two ahead. So on, until we came to the southern river corner of the hold, and here was a winding, ascending path between two higher, stouter walls than ever. Here was a stouter wooden gate; it must be here. In this en- closure, too, was a multitude of dwellings, but larger and more amply spaced. The Sirdar overtook us now, and the guns: the gunners had cut their road and levelled the breach, and tugged the first gate off its hinges. On; we must be coming to it now. We were quite close upon the towering, shell -torn skeleton of the Mahdi's tomb. The way broadened to a square. But the sun had some time struck level into our eyes. He went down ; in ten minutes it would be dark. Now or never! Here we were opposite the tomb ; to our left front was the Khalifa's own palace. We were there, if only he was. A sec- tion of blacks filed away to the left through the walled passage that led to the door. Another filed to the right, behind the tomb, towards his private iron mosque. We waited. We waited. And tlien, on left and right, they reappeared, rather dragL^iii^ly. Gone! None could know it for certain till the place had been searched throuj^h as well as the darkness would let it. Next morning some of the LOOTING THE KHALIFA'S CORN. 307 and went we should [le walled were still head. So ler of the [i between re was a I this en- but larger ertook us :heir road first gate it now. ihell - torn broadened ne struck minutes we were Khalifa's A sec- •ough the )ther filed is private Ind tlien, ig,uiii. we have very much. We have gained 318 AFTER THE CONQUEST. precious national self-respect. We wished to keep our hands clear of the Sudan ; we were drawn unwillin<;ly to meddle with it; we blundered when we suffered Gordon to go out; we fiddled and failed when we tried to bring him back. "We were humiliated and we were out of pocket ; we had embarked in a foolish venture, and it had turned out even worse than any- body had foreseen. Kow this was surely the very point where a nation of shopkeepers should have cut its losses and turned to better business elsewhere. If we were the sordid counter-jumpers that Frenchmen try to think us, we should have ruled a red line, and thought no more of a worthless land, bottomless for our gold, thirsty for our blood. We did nothing such. We tried to; but our dogged fighting dander would not let us. We could not sit down till the defeat was redeemed. We gave more money ; we gave the lives of men we loved — and we conquered the Sudan again. Now we can permit ourselves to think of it in peace. The vindication of our aelf-respect was the great treasure we won at Khartum, and it was worth the price we paid for it. Most people will hiirdly per- suade themselves there is not something else thrown in. The trade of the Sudan ? For now and for many years you may leave that out of the account. The Sudan is a desert, and a depopulated desert. North- ward of Kliartum it is a wilderuess; southward it is a devastation. It was always a poor country, and it always must be. Slavl^s and ivory were its wealth in ) keep our nwilliii*;ly e suffered whea we iated and n a foolish than any- the very d have cut where. If Frenchmen d line, and :,omless foi thing such, ider would defeat waa ^e the lives iidan again, in peace. the great worth the liudly per- Ise thrown d for many ount. The 't. North- hward it is 11 try, and it wealth iu THE WORTHLESS SUDAN. 319 the old time, but now ivory is all but exterminated, and slaves must be sold no more. Guni-;iial)ic and ostrich feathers and Dongola dates will hardly buy cotton stuffs enough for Lancashire to feel the difference. From Haifa to above Berber, where rain never falls, the Nile only licks the lip of the desert. The father of Egypt is the stepfather of the Sudan. With the help of water-wheels and water-hoists a few patches of corn and fodder can be grown, enough for a dotted population on the bank. But hardly anywhere does the area of vegetation push out more than a mile from the stream ; oftener it is a matter of yards. Such a country can never be rich. But why not irrigate ? Simply because every pint of 'vater you take out of the Nile for the Sudan means a pint less for Egypt. And it so happens that at this very mo- ment the new barrages at Assuan and Assiut are making the distribution of water to Egypt more precise and scientific than ever. Lower Egypt is to be enlarged ; Upper Egypt is, in part at least, to secure permanent irrigation, independent of the Nile flood, and therewith two crops a-year. This means a more rigid economy of water than ever, and who will give a thought to the lean Sudan ? What it can dip up in buckets fat Egypt will never miss, and that it may take — no more. As for the southward lands, they get rain, to be sure, and so far they are cultivable ; only there is 320 AFTER THE CONQUEST. nobody left to cultivate them. For three years now the Egyptian army has been marching past broken mud hovels by the river - side. Dust has blown over their foundations, Dead Sea fruit grows rankly witliin their wails. Sometimes, as in old Berber, you come on a city with streets and shops — quite ruined and empty. Here lived the Sudanese whom the Khalifa has killed out. And in the more fertile parts of the Sudan it is the same. "Worse still — in that the very fertility woke up the cupidity of the Baggara, and the owner was driven out, sold in the shive-niarket, shipped up Nile to die of Fashoda fever, cut to pieces, crucified, impaled — anything you like, so long as the Khalifa's fellow -tribesmen got his land. In Kordofan, even of old days, lions in bad years would attack villages in bands : to - day they openly dispute the mastery of creation with men. From Abyssinia to Wadai swelters the miser- able Sudan — beggarly, empty, weed-grown, rank with blood. It will recover, — with time, no doubt, but it will recover. Only, meanwhile, it will want some tend- ing. Tliere is not likely to be much trouble in the way of figliting: in the present weariness of slaughter the people will be but too glad to sit down under any decent Government. There is no reason — unless it; be complications with outside Powers, like Franct or Abyssinia — why the old Egyptian empire should not be reoccupied up to the Albert Nyanza and Western THE l''UTUKE nULE. 321 ee years ing past Dust has lit grows in old shops — Sudanese the more Worse cupidity out, sold Fashoda ling you ?men got lions in to - day ion with le miser- mk with t it will ne tend- e in the ihiugliter ider any mless it ranc( or )uld not Western Daiiur. But if tlii.s is done — and done it sun,'lv ^llould he — two tilings must be remeuibend. First, ii must be niiiiiarily adiniiiisLered for many years to come, and that by British men. Take the native JOg\ptian official even to-day. No words can express his in- eptitude, his laziness, his helplessness, his dread of responsibility, his maddening red-tape formalism. His panacea in every unexpected case is the same. "It must be put in writing ; I must ask for instructions." lie is no longer corrupt — at least, no lon^^er so cor- rupt as he was — but he would be if he dared. The native officer is better than the civilian official ; but even with him it is the exception to find a man both capable and incorruptible. To put Egyjitians, cor- rupt, lazy, timid, often rank cowards, to rule the Sudan, would be to invite another Mahdi as soon as the country had grown up enough to uake him formidable. The Sudan must be ruled by military law strong enougli to be feared, administered by Britisli oflieeis just enough to be respected. For the second point, it must not be exijecled that it will pay until many years have passed. The cost of a military administration would not be very great, but it must be considered money out of pocket. The experience of Dongola, whence the army has been drawing hirge stores of dliurra, where the number cf waterwheels has multi- plied itself enormously in less than a coujile of years, shows well enougli that only patience is wanted. The 322 AFTER THE CONQUEST. Sudan will improve : it will never be an Egypt, but it will pay its way. But, before all things, you must give it time to repopulate itself. Well, then, if Egypt is not to get good places for her people, md is to be cut of pocket for administra- tion — how much does Egypt profit by the fall of Ab- dullahi and the reconquest of the Sudan ? Much. Inestimably. For as the master -gain of England is the vindication of her self-respect, so the master-gain of Egypt is the assurance of her security. As long as dervish raiders loomed on the horizon of her frontier, Egypt v/a3 only half a State. She lived on a perpetual war-footing. Her finances are pincixed enough at the best; every little economy had to go to the Sirdar. Never was general so jealous — even miserly — of public money as the Sirdar; but even so he was spending Egypt's all. That strain will henceforth be loosened. Egypt will have enough work for five years in the new barrages, which are a public work directly transliter- able in pounds and piastres. Egypt will be able to give a little attention to her taxes, which are anomal- ous ; to her education, which is backward ; to her rail- ways, which are vile. Whether she will be able to reduce her army is doubtful. The occupation of the banks of the Blue and White Nile, to say nothing of the peaceful reabsorp- tion of Kordofan and Darfur, would open up some of the finest raw fighting material in the world. Frankly, it is very raw indeed — the rawest savagery you can TITll G,\i:s or EC.YTT. 323 jrypt, but ^ou must )laces for ininistra- ill of Ab- ? Much. agland is ister-gain s long as ' frontier, perpetual ;h at the e Sirdar. of public spending loosened. the new ransliter- able to anomal- her rail- arnjy is Blue and reabsorp- some of Frankly, you can well imagine, — but BrL'ob cfricors and sergeants have made fairly drilled ^ »ops, fairly good shots, superb marchers and bayon* ^-figliiers out of the same mate- rial, and they could do it again. To put the matter brutally, having this field for recruiting, we have too many enemies in the world to afford to lose it. We have made the Egyptian army, and we have saved Egypt with it and with our own : we should now make of it an African second to our Indian army, and use it, when the time comes, to repay the debt to ourselves. "We have saved Egypt, and thereby we have paid another debt. The Khedive is but half a monarch at the best : while a hostile force sat on his borders to destroy him, and every couple of years aciuully cumo down to do it, he was not more than a quarter. T'nere was plenty of sneaking synxpathy with Mahdisai in Egypt — even in Cairo, and not very far from the Khedive's oiv pittace. But for British help the sympathise- would long ago, buc yet too late, have recogjiised ih.MT Toolishress in the obliteration of Egypt. Egypt p loue could by no miracle have saved herself from utter destruction by Mahdist invasion. We have saved her — and therewith we have paid off the purblind, sincere undertakings of Mr Gladstone. We undertook to leave Egypt ; we have redeeu.ed the promise in an unforeseen manner, but we have re- deemed it amply. If we undertook to evacuate the old Egypt, we have fathered a new one, saved from imminent extinction by our gold and our sword. 324 AFTER THE CONQUEST. Without US there would have been no Egypt to-day ; what we made we shall keep. That is our double gain — the vindication of our own honour and the vindication of our right to go on making Egypt a country fit to live in. Egypt's gain is her existence to-day. The world's gain is the downfall of the worst tyranny in the world, and the acquisition of a limited opportunity for open trade. The Sudan's gain is immunity from rape and torture and every extreme of misery. The poor Sudan ! The wretclied, dry Sudan ! Count up all tlie gains you will, yet what a hideous irony it remains, this tight of half a generation for such an emptiness. People talk of the Sudan as the East ; it is not the East. The East has age and colour; the Sudan has no colour and no age — ^just a monotone of squalid barbarism. It is not a country ; it has nothing that makes a country. Some brutish institutions it has, and some bloodthirsty chivalry. But it is not a country : it has neither nationality, nor history, nor arts, nor even natural features. Just the Nile — the niggard Nile refusing himself to the desert — and for the rest there is absolutely nothing to look at in the Sudan. Nothing grows green. Only yellow halfa- grasa to make you stumble, and sapless mimosa to tear your eyes ; dom-palms that mock with wooden fruit, and Sodom apples that lure with flatulent poison. For beasts it has tarantulas and scorpions and serpents, devouring white ants, and every kind A mi'EUUS lUONY. 325 )t to-day ; m of our ght to go Egypt's 's gain is world, and 3pen trade, ind torture m ! Count lis irony it >r such an le East; it jolour; the lonotone of las nothing titutions it it is not a listory, nor Nile— the •t — and for 3k at in the How halfa- mimosa to ith wooden ,h flatulent d scorpions every kind of loathsome bug that flies or crawls. Its people are naked and dirty, ignorant and besotted. It is a Quarter of a continent of sheer squalor. Overhead the pitiless furnace of the sun, under foot the never- easinc' treadmill of the sand, dust in the throat, tune- less singxUg in the ears, searing tlame in the eye, — the Sudan is a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever. Surely enough, "When Allah made the Sudan," say the Arabs, " he laughed." You can almost hear ilie fiendish echo of it crackling over the f^ery sand. And yet and yet there never was an Englishman who had been there, but was ready and eager to go again. "Drink of Nile water," say the same Arabs, "and you will return to drink it again." Nile water is either very brown oi very green, according to the season; yet you do go back and drink it again. Per- haps to Englishmen — half-savage still on the pinnacle of their civilisation — the very charm of the land lies in its empty barbarism. There is space in the Sudan. There is the fine, purified desert air, and the long stretching gallops over its sand. There are the things at the very back of life, and no other to posture in front of them, — hunger and t.liirst to assuage, distance to win through, pain to bear, life to defend, and death to face. You have gone back to the spring water of your infarcy. You are a savage again — a savage with Kosbach water, if tliere is any left, and a Mauser repeating pistol-carbine, if the .^and ha^ not jammed 326 AFTER THE CONQUEST. it, but still at the last word a savage. You are un- prejudiced, simple, free. You are a naked man, facing naked nature. I do not believe that any of us who come home whole will think, from our easy-chairs, unkindly of the Sudan. THE ENDl 15 / ., )u are un- lan, facing ome home ikindly of