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The last thing Wyndham did before he died in the grey of dawn and this is told of him by the Gippies themselves-was to cough up the bullet from his throat, and spit it out upon the ground. The Gippies thought it a miraculous feat, and that he had done it in scorn of the Arab foe.
The nearest garrison was at Kerbat, sixty miles away, where five hundred men were stationed. Now that his cup of mistakes was full, Wyndham bimbashi would willingly have made the attempt to carry word to the garrison there. But he had no right to leave his post. He called for a volunteer. No man responded. Panic was upon the Gippies.
There are Englishmen in Egypt who still speak slightingly of Wyndham bimbashi, but the British officer who buried him hushed a gossiping dinner-party a few months ago in Cairo by saying: "Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone, And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him; But little he'll reek, if they let him sleep on In the grave where his Gippies have laid him."
The "Gippies" looked without flinching straight into the eyes of the dervishes, and fired volleys that would have done credit to a British regiment. The hulking, physically strong "Fellah" had at last taken the measure of his enemy, and meant to prove himself the better man of the two.
The last thing Wyndham did before he died in the grey of dawn and this is told of him by the Gippies themselves-was to cough up the bullet from his throat, and spit it out upon the ground. The Gippies thought it a miraculous feat, and that he had done it in scorn of the Arab foe.
At last he sat down on the ledge of the rude fountain, with his face towards the Gippies and the Arabs squatted on the ground, some playing mankalah, others sucking dry lime leaves, many smoking apathetically. One man with the flicker of insanity in his eyes suddenly ran forward and threw himself on the ground before Wyndham. "In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful water!" he cried.
Every morning bands of blue-clad gippies moved out from their lairs behind us, in rough, very rough, military formation, singing their doubtless primeval but rather idiotic chants, laughing, shouting, and generally enjoying life in a way which we admired, but could not imitate.
If Hassan got through to Kerbat his Gippies here would no doubt be relieved, and there would be no more blood on his head. Relieved? And when they were relieved, what of himself, Wyndham bimbashi? He knew what men would say in Cairo, what men would say at the War Office in London town, at "The Rag" everywhere! He could not look his future in the face.
Covered with desert sand and blood, and fighting and raging after the manner of a Sikh, he could hold ten companies together like a wall against a charge of Dervishes. The bimbashi rejoiced at this, for he was a coward; likewise his captain was a coward, and so was his lieutenant: for they were half Turks, half Gippies, who had seen Paris and had not the decency to die there.
Here he was, shut up with Gippies who had no real faith in him, in the house of a Sheikh whose servants would cut his throat on no provocation at all; and not an eighth of a mile away was a horde of Arabs a circle of death through which it was impossible to break with the men in his command. They must all die here, if they were not relieved.
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