Part 20 (1/2)
”The Gordon Highlanders went straight up the hill without check or hesitation. Headed by their pipers, and led by Lieutenant-Colonel Mathias, C.B., with Major Macbean on his right and Lieutenant A.F.
Gordon on his left, this splendid battalion marched across the open. It dashed through a murderous fire, and in forty minutes had won the heights, leaving 3 officers and 30 men killed or wounded on its way.
The first rush of the Gordon Highlanders was deserving of the highest praise, for they had just undergone a very severe climb and had reached a point beyond which other troops had been unable to advance for over three hours.
”The first rush was followed at short intervals by a second and a third, each led by officers, and as the leading companies went up the path for the final a.s.sault the remainder of the troops, among whom the 3rd Sikhs were conspicuous, streamed on in support. But few of the enemy waited for the bayonet, many of them being shot down as they fled in confusion.
The position was won at 3:15.”
Amongst the losses of this day were--
_Dorsets.h.i.+re_.--Nine men killed; Captain Arnold, Lieutenant Hewitt, and thirty-nine men wounded.
_Gordon Highlanders_.--Lieutenant Lamont and two men killed; Colonel Mathias, Major Macbean, Captain Uniacke, Lieutenants Dingwall, Meiklejohn, Craufurd, and thirty-five men wounded.
_Derbys.h.i.+re_.--Captain Smith and three men killed, eight wounded.
The Victoria Cross was awarded to Lieutenant Pennell, who endeavoured under fire to bring in Captain Smith; to Piper Findlater, who though wounded in both legs still continued to blow his pipes; to Private Lawson for carrying Lieutenant Dingwall out of fire and returning to bring in another, being himself twice wounded; to Private Vickery and Colonel Mathias.
CHAPTER NINETEEN.
THE RE-CONQUEST OF THE SUDAN--1898.
Once more our attention is directed to the doings of our soldiers in Egypt. All the toil, all the bloodshed, and all the treasure expended against Mahdism had been in vain. General Gordon n.o.bly holding out at Khartoum waiting for the relief which the vacillating and divided counsels of the British Cabinet had delayed until it was too late, had been slain, and the inhabitants of Khartoum despoiled and ma.s.sacred by the savage followers of the Mahdi. Berber, Dongola, and Tokar had shared the same fate; and the Anglo-Egyptian army, leaving the Sudan to its fate, had fallen back to Wady Haifa, at which the southern frontier of Egypt was fixed, and which became a barrier against which the tide of Mahdism was to rush in vain. Suakin was also strongly held, and the Mahdi's forces came no farther south; but the whole of the immense territory from the Second Cataract to the Equatorial Lakes was overrun by his fanatic hordes, who carried ”fire, the sword, and desolation” far and wide over that unhappy land. It is not to the British administrators in Egypt that the blame of all this failure, and of the purposeless bloodshed of the two expeditions from Suakin, is to be laid, nor can it be said that after the fall of Khartoum any other course could have been adopted than to retire for a time; but it is to the British administrators in Egypt, and not to the Home Government, that belongs the credit of years of patient perseverance, of restoring the finances and resources of Egypt, and of instilling so much character into an oppressed race that at length the poor fallaheen were able to hold their own against the Sudanese, and to wipe out the disgrace of the defeat at El-Teb and the slaughter of the army of Hicks Pasha in 1883.
And it may be said that it was these same English rulers in Egypt-- administrators, engineers, military officers, and drill sergeants--that made it possible for the English to march in triumph through Khartoum and to avenge the death of Gordon, to some extent to wipe out the humiliations and blunders of past years.
The original Mahdi died within six months of General Gordon, and was succeeded by the chief Khalifa, Abdullah. Abdullah was an ignorant and wholly abominable person, and by his unspeakable cruelty and rapacity soon alienated vast numbers of the followers of his predecessor, and by 1889 Mahdism could no longer be looked upon as an aggressive but as a decaying force; yet, though dwindling, it still existed as a strong military power, with its headquarters at Omdurman.
Meantime the English had been making soldiers of the fallaheen, to whom successful skirmishes under their English officers and drill instructors were yearly giving confidence and self-reliance; and in addition to the fallaheen regiments, Sudanese regiments were formed of the very men who fought so bravely against our squares at Abu Klea, the ”Fuzzywuzzy” of Kipling, ”a first-cla.s.s fighting man.” Whilst the British campaigns in the Sudan, though affording many a brilliant fight, and many an example of the heroism and endurance of the British soldiers, were fruitless in result, the Egyptian campaigns were from 1885 onwards one continual success,--the fruit of steady effort and perseverance directed to one end through every kind of difficulty and disappointment, but which nothing could turn aside from its object, never faltering or swerving for fourteen years, the credit of which is wholly due to Sir Evelyn Baring (now Lord Cromer), Sir H. Kitchener (Lord Kitchener), Sir F.
Grenfell, Colonel Wingate, Colonel H.A. Macdonald, and many others; and their subordinates, among whom must be remembered the English drill sergeants.
In 1888 Osman Digna again threatened Suakin, and threw up trenches against the town, but was defeated by Sir F. Grenfell, the Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian forces, on December 20th. Next, Wad-en-Nejunii, the great Emir who had defeated Hicks Pasha, came south in 1889, attempting to get to the Nile at Toski behind Wady Haifa, the garrison of which, under Sir F. Grenfell, attacked him at Toski, with the result that he was killed and his army annihilated, and Egypt freed from fear of invasion.
After this Egypt began to advance; Sarras, beyond Wady Haifa, was reoccupied, and a railway laid between the two places. In February 1891 Colonel Holled Smith, commanding the Egyptian garrison at Suakin, marched out against Osman Digna's men with only Egyptian and Sudanese troops, and defeated them after a good fight and occupied Tokar. In this action Captain Barrow was killed, and of the enemy a large number of Emirs; but Osman as usual got away. The effect of this battle was to clear away the dervishes from the Eastern Sudan and re-establish Egyptian government there.
In 1892 the dervishes again gave trouble both on the Nile and in the Eastern Sudan, and there were many skirmishes. A serious attempt was made in January 1893 to cut the railway between Wady Haifa and Sarras, but without success; in the fight Captain Pyne, commanding the Egyptian force, was killed. Osman Digna again turned up near Suakin, but had no success except in his usual flight.
In this year Sir Horatio Kitchener, who had had a long experience both of Egypt and the Sudan, having been on active service in one or the other since 1882, became Sirdar in succession to Sir F. Grenfell, who was appointed to the command of the British forces in Egypt, and he set himself to the task of the re-conquest of the Sudan. He had not the British tax-payer to draw upon, but the very meagre Egyptian Treasury, and he had therefore to work with very limited means. His plan was not to raise a costly army for the purpose of winning victories glorious but fruitless, slaughtering Arabs by the thousand and then retiring till they gathered head and then slaughtering more, after the manner of the peace-loving Government of 1885, but to make sure of each stage of his progress as he went along, driving back the Mahdi and bringing confidence and commerce in his train, never retiring from ground once occupied, but never advancing till his course was clear; and his chief instrument for effecting his purpose was, as it will be seen, the railway.
THE ADVANCE TO DONGOLA.
During all these years, as has been said, the Egyptian army was in the making; and in 1896 it was decided to put it to the test, and to make an advance on Dongola. On March 21st the Sirdar left Cairo for Wady Haifa, taking with him a British regiment, the 1st Staffords.h.i.+re, to join the Egyptians already at the front; Indian troops having taken the place of the Egyptian garrisons of Tokar and Suakin. Meantime, railway making had been pushed on apace, and the line reached Kosheh, a distance of 76 miles, by the end of April; but rapid as this was, it was as nothing to the achievements of the following year. On June 7th a considerable force of dervishes was attacked and utterly defeated by the Egyptian army, whose conduct delighted their officers and gave them all confidence in the future. A further advance was made in September, and Dongola was occupied. The campaign had been entirely successful, the character of the Egyptian soldiery was established, the fertile province of Dongola rescued from the devastating rule of the Khalifa, and the frontier pushed back as far as Mirawi and Abu Dis,--the steamboats could pa.s.s to this point up the Nile, and thus a great step was taken upon the road to Khartoum.
The Sirdar now conceived, and at once began to carry out, the bold idea of laying a railway from Wady Haifa across the desert to Abu Hamed, and thence to Berber and to Dakhala, and the junction of the Nile and the Atbara, a distance of nearly 400 miles. A bold idea indeed, for not only had every rail and every sleeper to be brought up to Wady Haifa, and thence along the rail itself as it disappeared into the trackless desert, but every mile the railway advanced the work was getting farther away from its base and penetrating deeper into the enemy's country, for at this time Abu Hamed was still held by the dervishes. Water was bored for and actually found along the route; and before the line arrived there Abu Hamed had been captured, and by the end of the year the railway reached the Nile again, at a point 234 miles from Haifa, and above the Third Cataract. General Hunter, after a sharp fight in which Major Sidney and Lieutenant Fitzclarence were killed, had seized Abu Hamed; and by the end of the campaign, Dongola, Debbet, Khorti, and Berber were held by Egypt, while the Nile was patrolled even up to Metammeh by the six steamers which, despite all difficulties, had been pa.s.sed over the cataracts.
The railway making did not pause at Abu Hamed, but at once set out towards the junction of the Atbara with the Nile, a point 150 miles farther, and just south of the Fifth Cataract; the object being not only to provide for the rapid transport of provisions and stores, but also to get on to the Nile the three new steamers which had been brought from England in sections, so that they might be ready for the final advance.
THE ATBARA CAMPAIGN.
At the beginning of 1897 the Sirdar's force at the front was in four brigades, three Egyptian and one British. The Egyptian division of three brigades was under Major-General Hunter; the first brigade, three regiments of black hoofs, Sudanese, and splendid soldiers, and one of Egyptian, was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel H.A. Macdonald, and quartered at Berber. The second brigade, also consisting of three Sudanese and one Egyptian regiment, and under the command of Lieutenant--Colonel Maxwell, was about half-way between Berber and the Atbara River; while the third brigade, under Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis, consisting entirely of Egyptians, was at the Atbara. The British brigade, commanded by Major-General Gatacre, had its camp about a mile away from the second brigade, and consisted of the 1st Lincolns.h.i.+re, Colonel Verner; the 1st Cameron Highlanders, Colonel Money; 1st Warwicks.h.i.+re, under Lieutenant-Colonel Onagle Jones, and was afterwards joined by the 1st Seaforth Highlanders, Colonel Murray. The whole force in the field, exclusive of the railway battalion and the crews of the gunboats, but including four batteries of artillery under Lieutenant-Colonel Long and eight squadrons of Egyptian cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel Broadwood, amounted to about 14,000 men.