Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

192

XXIV.

DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS.

ON the 3rd of August the six Sudanese battalions left Fort Atbara for the point of concentration at Wad Habashi. Most people who saw them start remarked that they would be very glad to hear they had arrived.

You may have seen sardines in tins; but you will never really know how roomy and comfortable a tinned sardine must feel until you have seen blacks packed on one of the Sirdar's steamers. Nothing but the Sirdar's audacity would ever have tried it; nothing but his own peculiar blend of luck and judgment would have carried it through without appalling disaster.

Dressed in nothing but their white Friday shirt and drawers, the men filed on to the boats. Every man carried his blanket, for men from the Equator have tender chests, but it was difficult to see how he was ever to get into it. On each deck of each

A MIRACLE OF TRANSPORT.

193

steamer they squatted, shoulder to shoulder, toe to back, chin to knee. Fast alongside each gunboat were a couple of double-decked roofed barges, brought out in sections from England for this very purpose. Both decks were jammed full of black men till you could not have pushed a walking-stick between them: the upper deck bellied under their weight like a hammock. At the tail of each gunboat floated a gyassa or two gyassas: in them you could have laid your blanket and slept peacefully on the soldiers' heads. Thus in this land of impossibilities a craft not quite so big as a penny steamer started to take 1100 men, cribbed so that they could not stretch arm or leg, 100 miles at rather under a mile an hour.

The untroubled Nile floated down brim-full, thick and brown as Turkish coffee, swift and strong as an ocean. The turbid Atbara came down swishing and rushing, sunk bushes craning their heads above the flood, and green Sodom apples racing along it like bubbles, and flung itself upon the Nile. Against the double streams the steamers-seven in all, bigger and smaller, with over 6000 men-pulled slowly, slowly southward. The faithful women, babies on their hips, screamed one more farewell: their life is a string of farewells, threaded with jewels of victorious return. The huddled heaps of white cotton and black skin began to blend together in the blurring sunlight. They started before breakfast; by lunchtime all but one had vanished round the elbow a

N

mile or two up-stream. The blacks were gone out to conquer again.

Blacks gone, whites came. The Headquarters and first four companies of the Rifle Brigade were in camp before the steamers were under way. These things fit in like the joints of your body till you take them for the general course of things; only when you go to Headquarters and see Chiefs-of-Staff and D.A.A.G.S. and orderly-officers and aides-de-camp calculating and verifying and countersigning and telegraphing and acknowledging, do you realise that the staff-work of an army is the biggest and most business-like business in the world.

The Rifles' first morning of Sudan was not endearing. They were shot out on to a little hillock or platform at half-past one in the morning, in the middle of one of the best dust-storms of the season. Through the throttled moonlight they might have seen, if they had cared to look at anything, the correspondent of the Daily Mail' hammering at his uptorn tent-pegs with a tin of saddle-soap, and howling dismally to a mummified servant to bring him the mallet. Tack, tack, tack went the mallets all over camp. But the Rifles had neither tents nor angarebs nor bags: they were dumped down among their baggage and sat down for five hours to contemplate the smiling Sudan. Then they disinterred themselves and their belongings and marched into camp.

But this new brigade was to have a Cook's tour by

TWO FAVOURED REGIMENTS.

195

comparison with the other. They had abundant kit and abundant stores. From the sea to Shabluka they hardly needed to put foot to the ground: thence it was a matter of half-a-dozen marches to Khartum and Omdurman. Fight there-then into boats again and down to the rail-head at the Atbara; train to Halfa, boat to Assuan, train to Cairo or Alexandria-the two new battalions, Rifles and Guards, might be up and down again, in and out of the country inside a couple of months. The sarcastic asked why they were not brought up in ice, unpacked at Omdurman to fight, and then packed in ice again. But that was unjust. Either you must give a regiment time to get fit and weed out its weaklings, or else you must cocker it all you can till you want it. The Rifles and Guards would never be as hard as the splendid sun-dried battalions of the First Brigade-there was not time to harden them. The next best thing was to keep them fresh and fit by sparing them as much as possible.

So the Rifles made their camp on the Atbara bank -cool, airy, and relatively free from dust-drift. Next day-the 4th-the second half of the battalion came in; next day Brigadier-General Lyttelton with his staff and the 32nd field battery; next day the first half of the Grenadier Guards. So they were timed to go on -half a battalion or a battery or a squadron nearly every morning till the whole second brigade was on the Atbara. Before the tail of it had arrived the head

would be off again-men and guns by boat, beasts by road to Wad Habashi.

To transport 5000 men, 600 horses, two batteries with draught cattle, and two siege-guns some 1300 miles along a line of rail and river within four weeks is not, perhaps, on paper, a very astounding achievement. But remember last time we came the same way. Remember 1884-the voyageurs and the Seedee boys, the whalers and the troopers set to ride on camels and fight on foot, and all the rest of the Empire-ballet business-the force that left Cairo about the time of year these were leaving, that began to leave Halfa at the opening of September and struck the Nile at Metemmeh late in January, while most of it never got beyond Korti. It is exactly the difference between the amateur and the professional.

Remember, furthermore, that the railway from Luxor to Assuan and the railway from Halfa to the Atbara are both quite new: at home, with every engineering facility which is lacking in the Sudan, a new line is allowed a few months' trial to settle and mature before heavy traffic is run over it. The track is single, the engines are many of them old, the native officials are all of them incapable. The steamers are few and in great part old. The wind for the sailing boats was mostly contrary. The country is a howling red-hot depopulation. Yet every arriving vessel was not merely up to its time but a little before it. It wanted for nothing by the way, and when it arrived found

« AnteriorContinuar »