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Dead bodies lay thick in the streets and open spaces, and numbers were killed in the houses; but the greater part of those who fell were no doubt carried off by the rebels. In the ardour of the fight many non-combatants also lost their lives, our men, mad and excited, making no distinction. There is no more terrible spectacle than a city taken by storm.
There was a railway construction battalion numbering at least 2000 men, but they were non-combatants. As the whole armed strength of Egypt was, for the occasion, practically called into the field, the peace of the Delta had to be secured by other means.
It cannot be said that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants generally. Every age or land has its own morality. "Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck, "involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to distinguish between right and wrong.
Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non- combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God- speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes! and laugh.
Little by little the large red-and-gray creatures, the non-combatants, and the phosphorescent animals were pushed aside, and he, the center of an almost solid black mass, fought, in utter darkness, with the fury of extreme fright. He had no appreciation of the passing of time, no knowledge of his distance from the wall, or the destination of this never-pausing current.
While I was copying out the principles and precedents bearing on the subject, the same Secretary begged me to hasten my report, "because," said he, "the Grand Council is waiting for it to embody in an Imperial Decree." True enough, the next day a decree from the throne announced the outbreak of war; but it added that non-combatants belonging to the enemy would not be molested.
Is there not something a little mediæval in sending a crowd of hungry non-combatants into an invested town? LADYSMITH, November 9, 1899. A day of furious and general attack. Just before five I was wakened by a shell blustering through the eucalyptus outside my window, and bursting in a gully beyond. "Lady Anne" answered at once, and soon all the Naval Brigade guns were in full cry.
He had a smile in his eyes as if appealing to her clemency not to tax him with ascribing a humbler motive to the women than to the men, as he was only making talk and spoke from a natural deprecation of dangers to non-combatants who of right should be exempt from peril. His eyes, which were large, were of a color between gray and brown darker than the one and lighter than the other.
He had been run to earth at his own cabin in the clearing, whence a few relations and friends, mostly women and children, non-combatants, had outflowed, gazing vacantly at the twenty Vigilantes who surrounded them. All were accustomed to scenes of violence, blood-feud, chase, and hardship; it was only the suddenness of the onset and its quick result that had surprised them.
The great wall of Omdurman was breached in many places, and a large number of unfortunate non-combatants were killed and wounded. Meanwhile the Arab irregulars, under Major Wortley, had been sharply engaged. That officer's orders were to co-operate with the flotilla by taking in rear the forts and fortified villages on the east bank of the river.
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