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were somewhere near, for their cavalry was seen almost daily; and they must be camped on the Atbara, for there was nowhere else whence they could get water. We were quite confident that they were there, and that the fight was coming, and we invented all sorts of stories to explain their delay in coming on. They started down the Nile fast; they have slackened now-so we assured ourselves-to wait for their rear-guard, or to reconnoitre, or to knock down dom-nuts, or for any of a thousand reasons, and we were here a day sooner than was necessary. A day too soon, of course, was nothing-or rather it would be nothing after we had fought; at present an extra day certainly meant a little longer discomfort. You must remember that the army was nearly 1400 miles from the sea, and about 1200 from any place that the things armies want could possibly come from. It had to be supplied along a sand - banked river, a single line of rail, which was carrying the material for its own construction as well, and various camel-tracks. That 13,000 men could ever have been brought into this hungry limbo at all shows that the Sirdar is the only English general who has known how to campaign in this country. The real enemy, he has seen, is not the Dervishes, whom we have always beaten, but the Sudan itself.

He was conquering it; but for the moment the Sudan had an opening, and began trying us rather high. Not me personally, who had three camels

and two blankets and much tinned meat. Το me and my likes the Sirdar's refusal of transportmost natural and proper, after all-had been a blessing; it had made correspondents self-supporting, and therewith rich. But for the moment the want of transport and Mahmud's delay in coming on was hard on the troops-especially hard on the British brigade, and hardest of all on their officers. Officers and men came alike with one blanket and no overcoat. Now you must know that, though the Sudan can be live coals by day, it can be aching ice by night. It is the healthiest climate in the world if you have shade at noon and many rugs an hour before reveille; but if you have not, and especially if you happen to be a kilted Highlander, it interferes with sleep.

You must further remember that we left Kenur with the intention of fighting next day or the next. The British took the expectation seriously; the Egyptian officers did not. "You see," said one, "I've been in this bally country five years; so when I was told to bring two days' kit, I brought a fortnight's." He was now sending his private camel back to Fort Atbara for more; the officers of the British brigade had no private camels. The officers had brought only what could go into a haversack, which includes, roughly, soap and a sponge, and a toothbrush and a towel, but not a clean shirt, nor a handkerchief, nor shaving-tackle; so that the gilded popinjays were a little tarnished just at present. One

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of them said, most truly, that an English tramp in summer, with a sweet haystack to sleep under, and sixpence a-day for bread and cheese and beer at wayside inns, was out of reckoning better off than a British officer on the banks of the Atbara. He slept on a pillow of dusty sand, which worked steadily into his hair; he got up in the middle of the night to patrol; then he lay down again and shivered. The men could sleep three together under a triple layer of blanket; the officers must sleep each in his position on the flank or in the centre of his company. When he got up in the morning he had nothing to shave with, and lucky if he got a wash. The one camelload of mess stores was wellnigh eaten up by now; he received the same ration as the men. His one

shirt was no longer clean; he hardly dared pull out his one handkerchief; he went barefoot inside his boots while his socks were being washed. And alwaysnight or day, on fatigue or at leisure, relatively clean or unredeemedly dirty, when he had borrowed a shave and felt almost like a gentleman again, or when he lay with his head in the dust and the black private doubted whether he should salute or not-his first paternal thought was the wellbeing of his men.

When we found Mahmud he should pay for it. But in the meantime where was he? There was a perpetual series of cavalry reconnaissances, and a perpetual stream of scallywags coming in from his camp. Any day from dawn to dark you might see

H

half-clothed black men squatting before Colonel Wingate. Some were fairly fat; some were bags of bones. But all stated with one consent that they were hungry, and having received refreshment felt that they could do no less than tell Colonel Wingate such tidings as they conceived he would like to hear. There was no such thing as a place on the Atbara, as I have explained: there were names on the map, but as they named nothing in particular you could put them anywhere you liked within ten miles or so. Also, there is no such thing as distance in the native mind, so that the native also could locate anything anywhere that seemed convenient.

On the 27th Bimbashi Haig reconnoitred the opposite bank of the Atbara up to Manawi-say eighteen miles and saw no trace of the enemy. Combining that fact with the precipitate from the scallywags' stories, we came to the conclusion that Mahmud and Osman were on the southern bank, somewhere near the spot marked on the map as Hilgi. It was believed that on the first news of the first cavalry contact they entrenched themselves there in a four-mile belt of scrub. Now General Hunter had made a reconnaissance up the Atbara last winter as far as Adaramaindispensably informative it turned out-and the Staff know what sort of scrub it is. It is an impenetrable, flesh-tearing jungle of mimosa-spears and dom-palm and stumbly halfa-grass and hanging ropes of creeper: no army in the world could possibly attack through it.

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That being so, the Sirdar's course appeared to be to wait at Ras el Hudi until Mahmud came out. Hunger might bring him out-only as yet it had not. The more trustworthy of the deserters said that there was still a certain store of food. You must know that the Dervishes have honeycombed the Sudan with caches of buried grain: many have been found and opened by the Egyptian army, but it is possible that some remain to draw on. Moreover, men who were at Toski told how, in the starving army of Wad-el-Nejumi, the fighting men were well fed enough it was the women and the children and the followers whose ribs broke through the skin. The scallywags were starved, of course: that is why they came in, and being starved themselves they saw the whole army in like case. But it seemed by the best information that what with food they brought, and stores they found, and dom-nuts they knocked off the trees, the dervishes had a few days of fairly filled stomach before them yet.

Then how to fetch them out? The situation called for a bold stroke, and the Sirdar answered it, after his wont, with a bold and safe one. On the morning of March 24 the 15th Egyptians left Fort Atbara in the three gunboats for Shendi. Left at Shendi were all the women of Mahmud's force, and with his women gone the Sudani is only half a man. It might draw him and it might not; it was worth trying.