tion without publicly humiliating his superior. When you hear that the sergeant - instructors are highly endowed with tact, you will guess that in the virtues that come more naturally to the British sergeant they shine exceedingly. Their passionate devotion to duty rises to a daily heroism. Living year in, year out, in a climate very hard upon Europeans, they are naturally unable to palliate it with the comparative luxuries of the officer; though it must be said that the consideration of the officer for his non-commissioned comrade is one of the kindliest of all the many kindly touches with which the British-Egyptian softens privation and war. But the white officer rides and the white sergeant marches. "Where a nigger can go, I can go," he says, and tramps on through the sun. Early in the year one of them marched with the 4th every step of the road from Suakim-the only white man who ever did it. In action the white sergeant has no particular place or duties, so he charges ahead of the first line. At Halfa, training the recruits, he has no officer set over him, and can do pretty well what he likes; so he stands five hours in the sun before breakfast with his men on the range. must needs be a keen soldier or he would not have volunteered for his post, and a good one, or he would not have got it. But on the top of this he is also essentially a fine man. Stiffened by marches and fights and cholera camps, broadened by contact with things new and strange, polished by a closer associa

He

AN ARMY OF YOUNG MEN.

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tion with his officers than the service allows at home, elevated by responsibility cheerfully undertaken and honourably sustained, — he is a mirror of soldierly virtue.

The position of the British officer is as assured as that of the sergeant is ambiguous. No British regimental officer takes lower rank than major (Bimbashi); none has any superior native officer in his own corps. The lieutenant-colonel (Kaimakam) commanding each battalion is usually a captain or major in the British army, and the Bimbashis usually subalterns: so many of both ranks, however, have earned brevets or been promoted, that in talking of officers in the Egyptian army it will be simplest to call a battalion commander Bey, which is the courtesy title by which he is usually addressed, and his British subordinate Bimbashi.

To take a man from the command of a company and put him to command a battalion is a big jump; but with the British officers in Egypt the experiment has richly justified itself. The Egyptian army is an army of young men. The Sirdar is forty-eight years old; General Hunter was a major-general before he was forty. The whole army has only one combatant officer over fifty. Through the Dongola campaign majors commanded brigades and captains battalions; at Abu Hamed, last year, a subaltern of twenty-eight led his regiment in action. With men either rash or timid such sudden promotion might be dangerous;

but the officers of the Egyptian army are at the same time unafraid of responsibility and equal to it. Their professional success has been very great-some whisper, too great. "After Tel-el-Kebir," said a captain in the British brigade, "one of our officers came to me and talked of joining the Egyptian army. 'For God's sake, don't,' I said; 'don't: you'll spend your life thrashing fellahin into action with a stick.' Now, here am I commanding a company, and a man who was under me in the Kandahar show is commanding a brigade." Certainly the Egyptian officers may have passed over men as good as they; but their luck has lain solely in getting the chance to show their merit.

For after all the fact remains, that while the British campaigns in the Sudan are a long story of failure brightened only by stout fighting, the Egyptian campaigns have been a consistent record of success. With inferior material, at a tithe of the expense, they have worn their enemy down by sheer patience and pluck and knowledge of their business. In the old days campaigns were given up for want of transport; now rations are as certain in Khartum as in Cairo. In the old days we used to be surprised and to fight in square; now we surprise the enemy and attack in line. In quite plain language, what Gordon and Wolseley failed to do the Sirdar has done. The credit is not all his : part must go to Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Francis Grenfell, his predecessors, and to the whole body of

A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT.

21

officers in due proportion. They have paid for their promotion with years on the frontier-years of sweat and sandstorm by day, of shivering and alarms by night, of banishment always; above all, they have richly earned it by success. Now that the long struggle is crowned with victory, we may look back on those fourteen indomitable years as one of the highest achievements of our race.

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III.

THE S.M.R.

HALFA is nearly four hundred miles from the Atbara; yet it was the decisive point of the campaign. For in Halfa was being forged the deadliest weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism — the Sudan Military Railway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolseley's campaign and the machine-like precision of Kitchener's. When civilisation fights with barbarism it must fight with civilised weapons; for with his own arts on his own ground the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan without complete transport and certain communications is as near madness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar's side, whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley; and of that, as of every point in his game, the Sirdar has known how to ensure the full advantage. There was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara: the campaign would have