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 Staffordshire, 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
pass 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
passed 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.