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Assured of pardon and good treatment at our hands, fourteen of the Mahdists and a number of women came in with General Gatacre's people. No attempt was made by the dervishes in the neighbourhood to "snipe" the party. They returned to Darmali on the 27th of June. With the sun gone north came the rising of the Nile and fresh breezes.
The gunboats and the infantry saw to our left, which was not difficult, for upon that hand the country was quite bare. About 2 p.m. the army reached the northern outskirts of Omdurman, the British division upon the left. Gatacre's men were nearest the Nile, Maxwell and Lewis being almost opposite one of the main thoroughfares of the town.
Gatacre's generalship was simply superb. Let the idiotic band of critics who sit in safety in England howl to their heart's content; Gatacre deserves well of his country. Had he dashed recklessly into this hornet's nest he would have sacrificed four-fifths of his gallant officers and a host of his men.
The direction of the march was now almost reversed, owing to Gatacre's misapprehension of his position; and at dawn the column unknown to itself reached certain cross roads on Van Zyl's farm which had been fixed upon as the point from which the attack should be delivered; but the locality was not recognized by the staff, and the guides, who seem to have misunderstood the object of the march, conducted the column still deeper into the valley beneath the Kissieberg ridge.
On the previous evening Gatacre and Lord Roberts received the news that it was in trouble, and a relieving force was hurriedly collected at Bethany from Springfontein and Bloemfontein, and sent out under Gatacre's command. His scouts heard the last shot fired, and the silence which followed seemed to show that all was over.
He adhered to his early decision to employ only as many British troops as were actually necessary to stiffen the Khedivial army, and no more. After the battle and victory of the Atbara in the spring, the British troops, or Gatacre's brigade, marched back from Omdabiya by easy stages to the Nile.
With the enemy so near him it was Gatacre's nature to attack, and the moment that he thought himself strong enough he did so. No doubt he had private information as to the dangerous hold which the Boers were getting upon the colonial Dutch, and it is possible that while Buller and Methuen were attacking east and west they urged Gatacre to do something to hold the enemy in the centre.
Soon after midnight, however, Gatacre's suspicions were aroused by the sudden appearance of a railway which ought not to have been there, and it was discovered that the guides had a mile or two back missed a path on which the column should have diverged to the right. They assured him, however, that they had chosen a better road and that he was now less than 3,000 yards from the Boer position.
The Sterkstroom column were fighting at last, and bravely they bore themselves. It was not their fault if disaster dogged their steps. No braver men could be found than those under Gatacre's command. And yet they, like the rest, had a great objection to the pom-poms. 'I'm not afraid, said one lad, when that strange sound began and the shells came rattling around.
To his left, formed up at right angles, were the representative detachments of the Egyptian army, the 11th Soudanese, with their red heckles in their fezzes, in the front line. Upon the Sirdar's right were the detachments of Gatacre's division, each in its regimental order of seniority.
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