long rush upon inevitable destruction. Such follies issue from the very nature of the Mahdist polity -a jealous ill-informed despot safe at Omdurman 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 commonplace 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 cunning and dogged persistence he has given us more trouble than all the other Emirs together. His own tribe, the Hadendowa, 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 barbarian. He has become a fat old toad now, they say, 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

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 things 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 anything at all.

Whatever there 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 unsurprised instead of vague, as they once were. Nothing

COLONEL WINGATE.

65

is hid from Colonel Wingate, whether in Cairo or at the Court of Menelik, or on the shores of Lake Chad. As a press censor he has only one fault. He is so indispensable to the Sirdar that you can seldom get speech of him. His rise in the army 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 inviolable modesty.

E

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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.

By

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. eight next morning the last detachment had been conveyed 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

close to Berber. And there they learned that the Dervishes had after all not arrived. A halt of twentyfour 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 on Saturday night, February 26; they reached camp on Thursday evening, March 3. Altogether they made 118 miles within five daysfour, if you leave out the day's halt-or 134 in five and a half, if you also add the route-march; continuously 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 disagreeable 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 they poach all your