When Jack Conolly, of the Irish Shotgun Brigade, the Rory of the Hills
Inner Circle, and the extreme left wing of the Land League, was
incontinently shot by Sergeant Murdoch of the constabulary, in a little
moonlight frolic near Kanturk, his twin-brother Dennis joined the
British Army. The countryside had become too hot for him; and, as the
seventy-five shillings were wanting which might have carried him to
America, he took the only way handy of getting himself out of the way.
Seldom has Her Majesty had a less promising recruit, for his hot Celtic
blood seethed with hatred against Britain and all things British.
The sergeant, however, smiling complacently over his 6 ft. of brawn and
his 44 in. chest, whisked him off with a dozen other of the boys to the
depot at Fermoy, whence in a few weeks they were sent on, with the
spade-work kinks taken out of their backs, to the first battalion of the
Royal Mallows, at the top of the roster for foreign service.
The Royal Mallows, at about that date, were as strange a lot of men as
ever were paid by a great empire to fight its battles. It was the
darkest hour of the land struggle, when the one side came out with
crow-bar and battering-ram by day, and the other with mask and with
shot-gun by night. Men driven from their homes and potato-patches found
their way even into the service of the Government, to which it seemed to
them that they owed their troubles, and now and then they did wild
things before they came. There were recruits in the Irish regiments who
would forget to answer to their own names, so short had been their
acquaintance with them. Of these the Royal Mallows had their full
share; and, while they still retained their fame as being one of the
smartest corps in the army, no one knew better than their officers that
they were dry-rotted with treason and with bitter hatred of the flag
under which they served.
And the centre of all the disaffection was C Company, in which Dennis
Conolly found himself enrolled. They were Celts, Catholics, and men of
the tenant class to a man; and their whole experience of the British
Government had been an inexorable landlord, and a constabulary who
seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis
was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an
intolerable family blood-feud to harden his heart. Savagery had
begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron
mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry.
He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like Jim Holan,
or Patrick McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen the roofs torn from
their cottages and their folk huddled among their pitiable furniture
upon the roadside, it was ill to argue about abstract law. What matter
that in that long and bitter struggle there was many another outrage on
the part of the tenant, and many another grievance on the side of the
landowner! A stricken man can only feel his own wound, and the rank and
file of the C Company of the Royal Mallows were sore and savage to the
soul. There were low whisperings in barrack-rooms and canteens,
stealthy meetings in public-house parlours, bandying of passwords from
mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right
glad when the order came which sent them to foreign, and better still,
to active service.
For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a
distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the
friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their
officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel
hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the
mad joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they
ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades. So it
would be again, according to the officers, and so it would not be if
Dennis Conolly and a few others could have their way.
It was a March morning upon the eastern fringe of the Nubian desert.
The sun had not yet risen, but a tinge of pink flushed up as far as the
cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon
across the horizon. From the coast inland stretched dreary sand-plains,
dotted over with thick clumps of mimosa scrub and mottled patches of
thorny bush. No tree broke the monotony of that vast desert. The dull,
dusty hue of the thickets, and the yellow glare of the sand, were the
only colours, save at one point, where, from a distance, it seemed that
a land-slip of snow-white stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill.
But as the traveller approached he saw, with a thrill, that these were
no stones, but the bleaching bones of a slaughtered army. With its dull
tints, its gnarled, viprous bushes, its arid, barren soil, and this
death streak trailed across it, it was indeed a nightmare country.
Some eight or ten miles inland the rolling plain curved upwards with a
steeper slope until it ran into a line of red basaltic rock which
zigzagged from north to south, heaping itself up at one point into a
fantastic knoll. On the summit of this there stood upon that March
morning three Arab chieftains--the Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowas, Moussa
Wad Aburhegel, who led the Berber dervishes, and Hamid Wad Hussein, who
had come northward with his fighting men from the land of the Baggaras.
They had all three just risen from their praying-carpets, and were
peering out, with fierce, high-nosed faces thrust forwards, at the
stretch of country revealed by the spreading dawn.
The red rim of the sun was pushing itself now above the distant sea, and
the whole coast-line stood out brilliantly yellow against the rich deep
blue beyond. At one spot lay a huddle of white-walled houses, a mere
splotch in the distance; while four tiny cock-boats, which lay beyond,
marked the position of three of Her Majesty’s 10,000-ton troopers and
the admiral’s flagship. But it was not upon the distant town, nor upon
the great vessels, nor yet upon the sinister white litter which gleamed
in the plain beneath them, that the Arab chieftains gazed. Two miles
from where they stood, amid the sand-hills and the mimosa scrub, a great
parallelogram had been marked by piled-up bushes. From the inside of
this dozens of tiny blue smoke-reeks curled up into the still morning
air; while there rose from it a confused deep murmur, the voices of men
and the gruntings of camels blended into the same insect buzz.
“The unbelievers have cooked their morning food,” said the Baggara
chief, shading his eyes with his tawny, sinewy hand. “Truly their sleep
has been scanty; for Hamid and a hundred of his men have fired upon them
since the rising of the moon.”
“So it was with these others,” answered the Sheik Kadra, pointing with
his sheathed sword towards the old battle-field. “They also had a day
of little water and a night of little rest, and the heart was gone out
of them ere ever the sons of the Prophet had looked them in the eyes.
This blade drank deep that day, and will again before the sun has
travelled from the sea to the hill.”
“And yet these are other men,” remarked the Berber dervish. “Well, I
know that Allah has placed them in the clutch of our fingers, yet it may
be that they with the big hats will stand firmer than the cursed men of
Egypt.”
“Pray Allah that it may be so,” cried the fierce Baggara, with a flash
of his black eyes. “It was not to chase women that I brought 700 men
from the river to the coast. See, my brother, already they are forming
their array.”
A fanfare of bugle-calls burst from the distant camp. At the same time
the bank of bushes at one side had been thrown or trampled down, and the
little army within began to move slowly out on to the plain. Once clear
of the camp they halted, and the slant rays of the sun struck flashes
from bayonet and from gun-barrel as the ranks closed up until the big
pith helmets joined into a single long white ribbon. Two streaks of
scarlet glowed on either side of the square, but elsewhere the fringe of
fighting-men was of the dull yellow khaki tint which hardly shows
against the desert sand. Inside their array was a dense mass of camels
and mules bearing stores and ambulance needs. Outside a twinkling clump
of cavalry was drawn up on each flank, and in front a thin, scattered
line of mounted infantry was already slowly advancing over the
bush-strewn plain, halting on every eminence, and peering warily round
as men might who have to pick their steps among the bones of those who
have preceded them.
The three chieftains still lingered upon the knoll, looking down with
hungry eyes and compressed lips at the dark steel-tipped patch.
“They are slower to start than the men of Egypt,” the Sheik of the
Hadendowas growled in his beard.
“Slower also to go back, perchance, my brother,” murmured the dervish.
“And yet they are not many--3,000 at the most.”
“And we 10,000, with the Prophet’s grip upon our spear-hafts and his
words upon our banner. See to their chieftain, how he rides upon the
right and looks up at us with the glass that sees from afar! It may be
that he sees this also.” The Arab shook his sword at the small clump of
horsemen who had spurred out from the square.
“Lo! he beckons,” cried the dervish; “and see those others at the
corner, how they bend and heave. Ha! by the Prophet, I had thought it.”
As he spoke, a little woolly puff of smoke spurted up at the corner of
the square, and a 7 lb. shell burst with a hard metallic smack just over
their heads. The splinters knocked chips from the red rocks around
them.
“Bismillah!” cried the Hadendowa; “if the gun can carry thus far, then
ours can answer to it. Ride to the left, Moussa, and tell Ben Ali to
cut the skin from the Egyptians if they cannot hit yonder mark.
And you, Hamid, to the right, and see that 3,000 men lie close in the
wady that we have chosen. Let the others beat the drum and show the
banner of the Prophet, for by the black stone their spears will have
drunk deep ere they look upon the stars again.”
A long, straggling, boulder-strewn plateau lay on the summit of the red
hills, sloping very precipitously to the plain, save at one point, where
a winding gully curved downwards, its mouth choked with sand-mounds and
olive-hued scrub. Along the edge of this position lay the Arab host--a
motley crew of shock-headed desert clansmen, fierce predatory slave
dealers of the interior, and wild dervishes from the Upper Nile, all
blent together by their common fearlessness and fanaticism. Two races
were there, as wide as the poles apart--the thin-lipped, straight-haired
Arab and the thick-lipped, curly negro--yet the faith of Islam had bound
them closer than a blood tie. Squatting among the rocks, or lying
thickly in the shadow, they peered out at the slow-moving square beneath
them, while women with water-skins and bags of dhoora fluttered from
group to group, calling out to each other those fighting texts from the
Koran which in the hour of battle are maddening as wine to the true
believer. A score of banners waved over the ragged, valiant crew, and
among them, upon desert horses and white Bishareen camels, were the
Emirs and Sheiks who were to lead them against the infidels.
As the Sheik Kadra sprang into his saddle and drew his sword there was a
wild whoop and a clatter of waving spears, while the one-ended war-drums
burst into a dull crash like a wave upon shingle. For a moment 10,000
men were up on the rocks with brandished arms and leaping figures; the
next they were under cover again, waiting sternly and silently for their
chieftain’s orders. The square was less than half a mile from the ridge
now, and shell after shell from the 7 lb. guns were pitching over it.
A deep roar on the right, and then a second one showed that the Egyptian
Krupps were in action. Sheik Kadra’s hawk eyes saw that the shells
burst far beyond the mark, and he spurred his horse along to where a
knot of mounted chiefs were gathered round the two guns, which were
served by their captured crews.
“How is this, Ben Ali?” he cried. “It was not thus that the dogs fired
when it was their own brothers in faith at whom they aimed!”
A chieftain reined his horse back, and thrust a blood-smeared sword into
its sheath. Beside him two Egyptian artillerymen with their throats cut
were sobbing out their lives upon the ground. “Who lays the gun this
time?” asked the fierce chief, glaring at the frightened gunners.
“Here, thou black-browed child of Shaitan, aim, and aim for thy life.”
It may have been chance, or it may have been skill, but the third and
fourth shells burst over the square. Sheik Kadra smiled grimly and
galloped back to the left, where his spearmen were streaming down into
the gully. As he joined them a deep growling rose from the plain
beneath, like the snarling of a sullen wild beast, and a little knot of
tribesmen fell into a struggling heap, caught in the blast of lead from
a Gardner. Their comrades pressed on over them, and sprang down into
the ravine. From all along the crest burst the hard, sharp crackle of
Remington fire.
The square had slowly advanced, rippling over the low sandhills, and
halting every few minutes to re-arrange its formation. Now, having made
sure that there was no force of the enemy in the scrub, it changed its
direction, and began to take a line parallel to the Arab position.
It was too steep to assail from the front, and if they moved far enough
to the right the general hoped that he might turn it. On the top of
those ruddy hills lay a baronetcy for him, and a few extra hundreds in
his pension, and he meant having them both that day. The Remington fire
was annoying, and so were those two Krupp guns; already there were more
cacolets full than he cared to see. But on the whole he thought it
better to hold his fire until he had more to aim at than a few hundred
of fuzzy heads peeping over a razor-back ridge. He was a bulky,
red-faced man, a fine whist-player, and a soldier who knew his work.
His men believed in him, and he had good reason to believe in them, for
he had excellent stuff under him that day. Being an ardent champion of
the short-service system, he took particular care to work with veteran
first battalions, and his little force was the compressed essence of an
army corps.
The left front of the square was formed by four companies of the Royal
Wessex, and the right by four of the Royal Mallows. On either side the
other halves of the same regiments marched in quarter column of
companies. Behind them, on the right was a battalion of Guards, and on
the left one of Marines, while the rear was closed in by a Rifle
battalion. Two Royal Artillery 7 lb. screw-guns kept pace with the
square, and a dozen white-bloused sailors, under their blue-coated,
tight-waisted officers, trailed their Gardner in front, turning every
now and then to spit up at the draggled banners which waved over the
cragged ridge. Hussars and Lancers scouted in the scrub at each side,
and within moved the clump of camels, with humorous eyes and
supercilious lips, their comic faces a contrast to the blood-stained men
who already lay huddled in the cacolets on either side.
The square was now moving slowly on a line parallel with the rocks,
stopping every few minutes to pick up wounded, and to allow the
screw-guns and Gardner to make themselves felt. The men looked serious,
for that spring on to the rocks of the Arab army had given them a vague
glimpse of the number and ferocity of their foes; but their faces were
set like stone, for they knew to a man that they must win or they must
die--and die, too, in a particularly unlovely fashion. But most serious
of all was the general, for he had seen that which brought a flush to
his cheeks and a frown to his brow.
“I say, Stephen,” said he to his galloper, “those Mallows seem a trifle
jumpy. The right flank company bulged a bit when the niggers showed on
the hill.”
“Youngest troops in the square, sir,” murmured the aide, looking at them
critically through his eye-glass.
“Tell Colonel Flanagan to see to it, Stephen,” said the general; and the
galloper sped upon his way. The colonel, a fine old Celtic warrior, was
over at C Company in an instant.
“How are the men, Captain Foley?”
“Never better, sir,” answered the senior captain, in the spirit that
makes a Madras officer look murder if you suggest recruiting his
regiment from the Punjab.
“Stiffen them up!” cried the colonel. As he rode away a colour-sergeant
seemed to trip, and fell forward into a mimosa bush. He made no effort
to rise, but lay in a heap among the thorns.
“Sergeant O’Rooke’s gone, sorr,” cried a voice. “Never mind, lads,”
said Captain Foley. “He’s died like a soldier, fighting for his Queen.”
“Down with the Queen!” shouted a hoarse voice from the ranks.
But the roar of the Gardner and the typewriter-like clicking of the
hopper burst in at the tail of the words. Captain Foley heard them, and
Subalterns Grice and Murphy heard them; but there are times when a deaf
ear is a gift from the gods.
“Steady, Mallows!” cried the captain, in a pause of the grunting
machine-gun. “We have the honour of Ireland to guard this day.”
“And well we know how to guard it, captin!” cried the same ominous
voice; and there was a buzz from the length of the company.
The captain and the two subs. came together behind the marching line.
“They seem a bit out of hand,” murmured the captain.
“Bedad,” said the Galway boy, “they mean to scoot like redshanks.”
“They nearly broke when the blacks showed on the hill,” said Grice.
“The first man that turns, my sword is through him,” cried Foley, loud
enough to be heard by five files on either side of him. Then, in a
lower voice, “It’s a bitter drop to swallow, but it’s my duty to report
what you think to the chief, and have a company of Jollies put behind
us.” He turned away with the safety of the square upon his mind, and
before he had reached his goal the square had ceased to exist.
In their march in front of what looked like a face of cliff, they had
come opposite to the mouth of the gully, in which, screened by scrub and
boulders, 3,000 chosen dervishes, under Hamid Wad Hussein, of the
Baggaras, were crouching. Tat, tat, tat, went the rifles of three
mounted infantrymen in front of the left shoulder of the square, and an
instant later they were spurring it for their lives, crouching over the
manes of their horses, and pelting over the sandhills with thirty or
forty galloping chieftains at their heels. Rocks and scrub and mimosa
swarmed suddenly into life. Rushing black figures came and went in the
gaps of the bushes. A howl that drowned the shouts of the officers, a
long quavering yell, burst from the ambuscade. Two rolling volleys from
the Royal Wessex, one crash from the screw-gun firing shrapnel, and then
before a second cartridge could be rammed in, a living, glistening black
wave, tipped with steel, had rolled over the gun, the Royal Wessex had
been dashed back among the camels, and 1,000 fanatics were hewing and
hacking in the heart of what had been the square.
The camels and mules in the centre, jammed more and more together as
their leaders flinched from the rush of the tribesmen, shut out the view
of the other three faces, who could only tell that the Arabs had got in
by the yells upon Allah, which rose ever nearer and nearer amid the
clouds of sand-dust, the struggling animals, and the dense mass of
swaying, cursing men. Some of the Wessex fired back at the Arabs who
had passed them, as excited Tommies will, and it is whispered among
doctors that it was not always a Remington bullet which was cut from a
wound that day. Some rallied in little knots, stabbing furiously with
their bayonets at the rushing spearmen. Others turned at bay with their
backs against the camels, and others round the general and his staff,
who, revolver in hand, had flung themselves into the heart of it.
But the whole square was sidling slowly away from the gorge, pushed back
by the pressure at the shattered corner.
The officers and men at the other faces were glancing nervously to the
rear, uncertain what was going on, and unable to take help to their
comrades without breaking the formation.
“By Jove, they’ve got through the Wessex!” cried Grice of the Mallows.
“The divils have hurrooshed us, Ted,” said his brother subaltern,
cocking his revolver.
The ranks were breaking, and crowding towards Private Conolly, all
talking together as the officers peered back through the veil of dust.
The sailors had run their Gardner out, and she was squirting death out
of her five barrels into the flank of the rushing stream of savages.
“Oh, this bloody gun!” shouted a voice. “She’s jammed again.”
The fierce metallic grunting had ceased, and her crew were straining and
hauling at the breech.
“This damned vertical feed!” cried an officer.
“The spanner, Wilson!--the spanner! Stand to your cutlasses, boys, or
they’re into us.” His voice rose into a shriek as he ended, for a
shovel-headed spear had been buried in his chest. A second wave of
dervishes lapped over the hillocks, and burst upon the machine-gun and
the right front of the line. The sailors were overborne in an instant,
but the Mallows, with their fighting blood aflame, met the yell of the
Moslem with an even wilder, fiercer cry, and dropped two hundred of them
with a single point-blank volley. The howling, leaping crew swerved
away to the right, and dashed on into the gap which had already been
made for them.
But C Company had drawn no trigger to stop that fiery rush. The men
leaned moodily upon their Martinis. Some had even thrown them upon the
ground. Conolly was talking fiercely to those about him. Captain
Foley, thrusting his way through the press, rushed up to him with a
revolver in his hand.
“This is your doing, you villain!” he cried.
“If you raise your pistol, Captin, your brains will be over your coat,”
said a low voice at his side.
He saw that several rifles were turned on him. The two subs. had
pressed forward, and were by his side. “What is it, then?” he cried,
looking round from one fierce mutinous face to another. “Are you
Irishmen? Are you soldiers? What are you here for but to fight for
your country?”
“England is no country of ours,” cried several.
“You are not fighting for England. You are fighting for Ireland, and
for the Empire of which it as part.”
“A black curse on the Impire!” shouted Private McQuire, throwing down
his rifle. “’Twas the Impire that backed the man that druv me onto the
roadside. May me hand stiffen before I draw trigger for it.
“What’s the Impire to us, Captain Foley, and what’s the Widdy to us
ayther?” cried a voice.
“Let the constabulary foight for her.”
“Ay, be God, they’d be better imployed than pullin’ a poor man’s thatch
about his ears.”
“Or shootin’ his brother, as they did mine.”
“It was the Impire laid my groanin’ mother by the wayside. Her son will
rot before he upholds it, and ye can put that in the charge-sheet in the
next coort-martial.”
In vain the three officers begged, menaced, persuaded. The square was
still moving, ever moving, with the same bloody fight raging in its
entrails. Even while they had been speaking they had been shuffling
backwards, and the useless Gardner, with her slaughtered crew, was
already a good hundred yards from them. And the pace was accelerating.
The mass of men, tormented and writhing, was trying, by a common
instinct, to reach some clearer ground where they could re-form. Three
faces were still intact, but the fourth had been caved in, and badly
mauled, without its comrades being able to help it. The Guards had met
a fresh rush of the Hadendowas, and had blown back the tribesmen with a
volley, and the cavalry had ridden over another stream of them, as they
welled out of the gully. A litter of hamstrung horses, and haggled men
behind them, showed that a spearman on his face among the bushes can
show some sport to the man who charges him. But, in spite of all, the
square was still reeling swiftly backwards, trying to shake itself clear
of this torment which clung to its heart. Would it break or would it
re-form? The lives of five regiments and the honour of the flag hung
upon the answer.
Some, at least, were breaking. The C Company of the Mallows had lost
all military order, and was pushing back in spite of the haggard
officers, who cursed, and shoved, and prayed in the vain attempt to hold
them. The captain and the subs. were elbowed and jostled, while the men
crowded towards Private Conolly for their orders. The confusion had not
spread, for the other companies, in the dust and smoke and turmoil, had
lost touch with their mutinous comrades. Captain Foley saw that even
now there might be time to avert a disaster. “Think what you are doing,
man,” he yelled, rushing towards the ringleader. “There are a thousand
Irish in the square, and they are dead men if we break.”
The words alone might have had little effect on the old moonlighter.
It is possible that, in his scheming brain, he had already planned how
he was to club his Irish together and lead them to the sea. But at that
moment the Arabs broke through the screen of camels which had fended
them off. There was a struggle, a screaming, a mule rolled over, a
wounded man sprang up in a cacolet with a spear through him, and then
through the narrow gap surged a stream of naked savages, mad with
battle, drunk with slaughter, spotted and splashed with blood--blood
dripping from their spears, their arms, their faces. Their yells, their
bounds, their crouching, darting figures, the horrid energy of their
spear-thrusts, made them look like a blast of fiends from the pit. And
were these the Allies of Ireland? Were these the men who were to strike
for her against her enemies? Conolly’s soul rose up in loathing at the
thought.
He was a man of firm purpose, and yet at the first sight of those
howling fiends that purpose faltered, and at the second it was blown to
the winds. He saw a huge coal-black negro seize a shrieking
camel-driver and saw at his throat with a knife. He saw a shock-headed
tribesman plunge his great spear through the back of their own little
bugler from Mill-street. He saw a dozen deeds of blood--the murder of
the wounded, the hacking of the unarmed--and caught, too, in a glance,
the good wholesome faces of the faced-about rear rank of the Marines.
The Mallows, too, had faced about, and in an instant Conolly had thrown
himself into the heart of C Company, striving with the officers to form
the men up with their comrades.
But the mischief had gone too far. The rank and file had no heart in
their work. They had broken before, and this last rush of murderous
savages was a hard thing for broken men to stand against. They flinched
from the furious faces and dripping forearms. Why should they throw
away their lives for a flag for which they cared nothing? Why should
their leader urge them to break, and now shriek to them to re-form?
They would not re-form. They wanted to get to the sea and to safety.
He flung himself among them with outstretched arms, with words of
reason, with shouts, with gaspings. It was useless; the tide was beyond
his control. They were shredding out into the desert with their faces
set for the coast.
“Bhoys, will ye stand for this?” screamed a voice. It was so ringing,
so strenuous, that the breaking Mallows glanced backwards. They were
held by what they saw. Private Conolly had planted his rifle-stock
downwards in a mimosa bush. From the fixed bayonet there fluttered a
little green flag with the crownless harp. God knows for what black
mutiny, for what signal of revolt, that flag had been treasured up
within the corporal’s tunic! Now its green wisp stood amid the rush,
while three proud regimental colours were reeling slowly backwards.
“What for the flag?” yelled the private.
“My heart’s blood for it! and mine! and mine!” cried a score of voices.
“God bless it! The flag, boys--the flag!”
C Company were rallying upon it. The stragglers clutched at each
other, and pointed. “Here, McQuire, Flynn, O’Hara,” ran the shoutings.
“Close on the flag! Back to the flag!” The three standards reeled
backwards, and the seething square strove for a clearer space where they
could form their shattered ranks; but C Company, grim and
powder-stained, choked with enemies and falling fast, still closed in on
the little rebel ensign that flapped from the mimosa bush.
It was a good half-hour before the square, having disentangled itself
from its difficulties and dressed its ranks, began to slowly move
forwards over the ground, across which in its labour and anguish it had
been driven. The long trail of Wessex men and Arabs showed but too
clearly the path they had come.
“How many got into us, Stephen?” asked the general, tapping his
snuff-box.
“I should put them down at a thousand or twelve hundred, sir.”
“I did not see any get out again. What the devil were the Wessex
thinking about? The Guards stood well, though; so did the Mallows.”
“Colonel Flanagan reports that his front flank company was cut off,
sir.”
“Why, that’s the company that was out of hand when we advanced!”
“Colonel Flanagan reports, sir, that the company took the whole brunt of
the attack, and gave the square time to re-form.”
“Tell the Hussars to ride forward, Stephen,” said the general, “and try
if they can see anything of them. There’s no firing, and I fear that
the Mallows will want to do some recruiting. Let the square take ground
by the right, and then advance!”
But the Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowas saw from his knoll that the men
with the big hats had rallied, and that they were coming back in the
quiet business fashion of men whose work was before them. He took
counsel with Moussa the Dervish and Hussein the Baggara, and a woestruck
man was he when he learned that the third of his men were safe in the
Moslem Paradise. So, having still some signs of victory to show, he
gave the word, and the desert warriors flitted off unseen and unheard,
even as they had come.
A red rock plateau, a few hundred spears and Remingtons, and a plain
which for the second time was strewn with slaughtered men, was all that
his day’s fighting gave to the English general.
It was a squadron of Hussars which came first to the spot where the
rebel flag had waved. A dense litter of Arab dead marked the place.
Within, the flag waved no longer, but the rifle stood in the mimosa
bush, and round it, with their wounds in front, lay the Fenian private
and the silent ranks of the Irishry. Sentiment is not an English
failing, but the Hussar captain raised his hilt in a salute as he rode
past the blood-soaked ring.
The British general sent home dispatches to his Government, and so did
the chief of the Hadendowas, though the style and manner differed
somewhat in each.
The Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowa people to Mohammed Ahmed, the chosen of
Allah, homage and greeting, (began the latter). Know by this that on
the fourth day of this moon we gave battle to the Kaffirs who call
themselves Inglees, having with us the Chief Hussein with ten thousand
of the faithful. By the blessing of Allah we have broken them, and
chased them for a mile, though indeed these infidels are different from
the dogs of Egypt, and have slain very many of our men. Yet we hope to
smite them again ere the new moon be come, to which end I trust that
thou wilt send us a thousand Dervishes from Omdurman. In token of our
victory I send you by this messenger a flag which we have taken. By the
colour it might well seem to have belonged to those of the true faith,
but the Kaffirs gave their blood freely to save it, and so we think
that, though small, it is very dear to them.