KASHGATE--A RETROSPECT.
It was pretty clear, on the whole, to Hester, that her cousin, Roland
Lindsay, thought but little of the past, and perhaps, as a general
rule, cared for it even less. While she had been living on the
memory of these dear days, especially since this--his last return
home--he had allowed other events to obliterate it from his mind.
Let us take a little retrospect.
In contrast to the apparently languid and _blasé_ smoker, swinging in
his net hammock, enjoying the balmy evening breeze by the wooded Esk,
and dallying with a girl of more than ordinary loveliness, let us
imagine him in a dusty and blood-stained tunic, with a battered
tropical helmet, a beard unshaven for many a day, haggard in visage,
wild-eyed and full of soldierly enthusiasm, one of the leading actors
in a scene like the following, at the fatal and most disastrous
battle of Kashgate.
It was the evening of the 3rd November in an arid waste of the
Soudan--sand, sand everywhere--not a well to yield a drop of brackish
water, not a tree to give the slightest shade. The heat was awful,
beyond all parallel and all European conception, well-nigh beyond
endurance, and the doomed soldiers of General Hicks--known as Hicks
Pasha--a veteran of the famous old Bombay Fusiliers who had served at
Magdala, and to whose staff Roland Lindsay, then a subaltern, was
attached, toiled on, over the dry and arid desert steppe that lies
between El Duem and El Obeid, in search of the troops of the
ubiquitous Mahdi--the gallant Hicks and his few British officers
training their loosely and hastily constituted Egyptian army to
operations in the field, even while advancing against one, said to be
three hundred thousand strong--doubtless an Oriental
exaggeration--but strong enough nevertheless, as the event proved, to
sweep their miserable soldiers off the face of the earth, in that
battle, the details of which will never be known till the Last Day,
as only one or two escaped.
Like Colonel Farquhar of the Guards, Majors Warren, Martin and other
British officers, Roland Lindsay, by his personal example, had done
all that in him lay to cheer the weak-limbed and faint-hearted
Egyptian soldiers, whose almost sable visages were now gaunt and
hollow, and whose white tunics and scarlet tarbooshes were tattered
and worn by their long and toilsome march through the terrible
country westward of the White Nile--a vast steppe covered with low
thorny trees, purple mimosa, gum bushes, and spiky grass, till the
sad, solemn, and desert waste was reached near Kashgate, where
all--save one or two--were to find their graves!
Mounted on a splendid Arab, whose rider he had slain in the battle of
the 29th of April, Roland Lindsay led one face of the hollow square
in which the troops marched, and in which formation they fought for
three days, with baggage, sick and wounded in the centre, Krupp and
Nordenfeldt guns in the angles, against a dark and surging human sea
of frantic Dervishes, wild Bedouins, and equally wild and savage
Mohammedans and Mulattoes, shrieking, yelling, armed with ponderous
swords and deadly spears that flashed like thousands of mirrors in
the sunshine.
The Dervishes came on, the foremost and most fearless, sent by the
Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, who had declared that they must
vanquish all, as they had the aid of Heaven, of the Prophet and his
legions of unseen angels, as at the battle of Bedr, when he conquered
the Koreish.
Wild and desperate was the prolonged fighting, the Egyptians knowing
that no mercy would be accorded to them, and fearful was the
slaughter, till the sand was soaked with blood--till the worn-out
square was utterly broken, its living walls dashed to pieces, and
hurled against each other under the feet of the victorious Mahdists.
In vain did young Lindsay, like other Britons who followed Hicks,
endeavour to make some of their men front about; calling on them,
sword and revolver in hand, as they flung themselves on the sand now
in despair, face downwards, and perished miserably under sword and
spear, or fled in abject and uncontrollable terror; but in the end he
found himself abandoned, and had to hack his way out of the press
through a forest of weapons till he reached the side of General
Hicks, who was making a last and desperate charge at the head of his
staff alone!
Side by side, with a ringing and defiant cheer, these few Britons
galloped against the living flood that was led by a sheikh in
brilliant floating robes.
'He is the Mahdi--he is the Mahdi!' cried Lindsay, and such Hicks and
all who followed him supposed that sheikh, but in mistake, to be.
He was splendidly mounted, and in addition to his Mahdi surcoat and
floating robes wore a glittering Dharfour helmet, with a tippet of
chain-mail and a long shirt of the same defensive material. Through
this the sword of Hicks gave him a deadly cut in the arm, and his
sword-hand dropped, but with the other he contrived to hurl a club,
which unhorsed the General, who was then slain; but the mailed
warrior, who looked like a Crusader of the twelfth century, was hewn
down by Roland through helmet and head to the chin, and just as he
fell above Hicks all the staff perished then on foot, their horses
being speared or hamstrung--all gallant and resolute soldiers,
Fraser, Farquhar, Brodie, Walker, and others--fighting back to back
or in a desperate circle.
One moment Roland saw the last of them, erect in all the pride and
strength of manhood, inspired by courage and despair--his cheeks
flushed, his eyes flashing, while handling his sword with all the
conscious pride of race and skill; and the next he lay stretched and
bleeding on the heap beside him, with the pallor in his face of one
who would never rise again.
In that _mêlée_ no less than three Emirs of the False Prophet fell
under the sword of Lindsay, who cut his way out and escaped alone;
and spattered with blood from the slain, as well as from two
sword-wounds in his own body, spurred rearward his horse, which had
many a gash and stab, but carried him clear out of the field and
onward till darkness fell, and he found himself alone--alone in the
desert. There the whitening skeleton of more than one camel--the
relic of a caravan--lay; and there the huge Egyptian vultures
('Pharaoh's chickens,' as they are called), with their fierce beaks,
great eyes, and ample wings, were floating overhead on their way to
the field, for the unburied slain attract these flocks from a
wonderful distance.
When his horse sank down, Lindsay remained beside it, helpless and
weary, awaiting the blood-red dawn of the Nubian sun.
As he lay there under the stars that glittered out of the blue sky
like points of steel, many a memory of the past, of vanished faces,
once familiar and still loved; of his home at Earlshaugh, with its
wealth of wood and hill; and recollections which had been growing
misty and indistinct came before him with many a scene and episode,
like dissolving views that melted each other, as he seemed to himself
to sink into sleep--the sleep that was born of fatigue, long
over-tension of the nerves, and loss of blood.
For weeks he was returned as one of the slain who had perished at
Kashgate; but Roland was hard to kill. He had reached Khartoum--how
he scarcely knew--ere Gordon, the betrayed and abandoned by England,
had perished there; and eventually regained the headquarters of his
regiment, then with the army of occupation in Lower Egypt.
Of all this, and much more, with reference to her cousin had Hester
Maule read in the public prints; but little or nothing of his
adventures in the East could she glean from him, as he seemed very
diffident and loth to speak of himself, unlike her father, Sir Harry,
who was never weary of his reminiscences of the war in Central India,
particularly the siege and capture of Jhansi under Lord Strathnairn,
of gallant memory.
So the bearing of Roland Lindsay at the battle of Kashgate and
elsewhere had proved that he was worthy of the old historic line from
which he sprang; and that there was a latent fire, energy, and spirit
of the highest kind under his calm, easy, and pleasant exterior.