PREPARING FOR TARDY VENGEANCE.

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And when we said we

camel- loads of the stuff. wouldn't have it, all the men stood round and gabbled, and half the camels girned and gnashed their teeth, and the neighbouring donkeys lifted up their voices and brayed like souls in torment, and when you moved to repulse an importunate Arab you kicked a comparatively innocent camel. Allah was their witness that the camels-which, when we hired them two days before, were very strong-were very weak.

But little we cared. We were going up to Omdurman and Khartum. Camel - loads adjust themselves, but war and the Sirdar wait for nobody. We were marching into lands where few Englishmen had ever set heel, no Englishman for fifteen years. We were to be present at the tardy vengeance for a great humiliation.

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XXVIII.

THE DESERT MARCH TO OMDURMAN.

up

THE column was to move out of camp at five in the morning. But at half-past, when our tardy caravan filed up to join it, dim bulks still heaved themselves in the yellow smoke, half-sunrise, half-dust-cloud -masses of laden camels, strings of led horses proclaiming that the clumsy tail of our convoy was still unwinding itself. Threading the patchy mimosa scrub, we came out into a stretch of open sand; beyond it, straight, regular, ominous of civilisation, appeared the telegraph wire which crosses the Nile at Fort Atbara, and now ran on to beyond Metemmeh.

In two black bars across the sand, as straight as the wire itself, the flat rays of sunrise shadowed the 21st Lancers. Two travelling or nearly three campaigning squadrons, they were the first British cavalry in the Sudan since 1885. On their side it was their first appearance in war. They were relatively a young regiment, and the only one in the British army which

A LECTURE IN CAVALRY.

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has never been on active service. You may imagine whether they were backward to come.

To tell truth, at this first glimpse of British cavalry in the field, they looked less like horsemen than Christmas-trees. The row of tilted lances, the swing of heavy men in the saddle when they moved, was war and chivalry. The rest was picketing pegs lashed to carbines, feeds of corn hanging from saddles, canvas buckets opposite them, waterproofs behind, bulky holsters in front, bundles of this thing and that dangling here and there, water-bottles in nets under the horses' bellies, khaki neck screens flapping from helmets, and blue gauze veils hooding helmets and heads and all. The smallest Syrian-they had left their own big hungry chargers in Cairo-had to carry 18 stone; with a heavy man the weight was well over 20.

But though each man carried a bazaar, the impression of clumsiness lasted only a moment.

When they moved they rode forward solidly yet briskly,-weighty and light at the same time, each man carrying all he wanted as behoves men going to live in an enemy's country. The sight was a better lecture in cavalry than many text-books. It is not the weapons that make the cavalryınan you saw, but the mobility; not the gallop, but the long, long walk; not the lance he charges with, but the horse that carries him far and fast to see his enemy in front and screen his friends behind. So much if you wished to

theorise; if it was enough merely to look and listen, there was a fine piquancy in the great headpiece, the raking lance, all the swinging apparatus of the freebooter-and then, inside the casque, a round-faced English boy, and the reflection, "If I was to go and see my brother now, as keeps a brewery, it'd be just right." Masterpiece of under-statement, more telling than a score of superlatives-"just right!" But we must not hurry on too fast. Before the cavalry were well observed, before even thirst became appealing, it was necessary to wait for the whole force-column, or convoy, or circus, or whatever is the technical name for it-to form up in the open. By degrees it did. Leading, the cavalry with its scouts and advanced guard and flanking parties. Then a line of tarbushes. on grey horses-Egyptian gun-teams, and with them a couple of Maxims scoring the desert with the first ruts of all its immemorial years. Then a ragged line of khaki and helmets, of blue and crimson and gold and green turbans and embroidered waistcoats-the officers' chargers and transport mules of the two British brigades some with soldier-grooms, some with Berberi syces. Is not the waistcoat of the groom the same radiant marvel whether he be of Newmarket or Kalabsheh ? Likewise there were British Maxim mules and the miscellaneous donkeys of all the army. Lastly, lolloping their apathetic two and a half miles an hour, the baggage camels lumbered up the plain-wellfurnished Government beasts, with new sound saddles