am FEROCIOUS HEROISM. 159 the very devil. Mahmud, however, admitted that, having been round the position, he lay close in his stockade during the bombardment; and as his stockade, or casemate, was the strongest corner in the place, he can hardly speak for the rest. And I saw scores and hundreds of dead goats and sheep, donkeys and camels, lying in pits in the part of the zariba stormed by the British. Now Thomas Atkins does not kill animals needlessly, even when his blood is hottest. The beasts therefore must have been killed by shrapnel; and if so many beasts, we may presume that 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 where 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. In the zariba itself Bimbashi 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 filled 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 significance of the victory. Now you began to comprehend the perfection of the Sirdar's strategy. If he had waited for Mahmud 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 off 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 Adarama or even near Kassala, and were killed by the friendly levies there. For the wounded the desert was certain death. In a word, the finest dervish army was not. Retreat was impossible, pursuit superfluous; defeat was annihilation. XIX. THE TRIUMPH. "Catch 'em alive O! Catch 'em alive O! They'll pop off to kingdom come; Catch 'em alive O! Catch 'em alive O! 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 regimental 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 O. Hardly one but had slung behind him a sword or a spine-headed spear, a curly knife, or a spiky club, or some other quaint captured murdering -iron. Some had supplemented their Martini with a Remington, an inch calibre elephant gun with spherical iron bullets or conical shells, a regulation Italian magazine rifle, a musket of Mahomet Ali's first expedition, a Martini of '85, or L a Tower Rifle of '56 with a handful of the cartridges Some had suits of one or two, Saracen the sepoys declined to bite. armour tucked inside them; 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 Mahmud's ten captured guns; they meant to ask the Sirdar if they might keep it. out. The band stopped, and a hoarse gust of song flung 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 exultant 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 Gurkhas, and these are good enough for me. This 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 saddle tell on the system in a climate that seesaws between a grill and an ice-machine. By the time I got in I was very contented to tie my horse by some whitybrown grass and tumble to sleep with my head on the saddle. At midnight dinner was ready; then solid sleep again. Awaking at five, I found an officer 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 injustice. Why him? Also some come home on their backs, or wrenched and moaning in cacolets bumping on baggage-camels. Lewis's never-weary, neverhungry Egyptians had been bringing in the woundedcarrying stretchers across twelve black miles of desert at something over a mile an hour. And General Hunter, who in the morning had been galloping bareheaded through the bullets, waving on the latest-raised battalion of blacks, now chose to spend the night playing 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. The afternoon of the fight they lay in a little palm-grove northward of the zariba under |