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It would have been madness for 300 Lancers to gallop in among such masses, and we had to be content with the results of the carbine fire. While all this had been going on, the advance of the army on Omdurman was continuing. Nor was it long before we saw the imposing array of infantry topping the sandhills near Surgham and flooding out into the plain which lay between them and the city.
The final struggle for the supremacy in the Soudan would take place on the great plain of Kerrere, to the north of Omdurman; and, pointing to the desert outside Kassala, which is strewn with large white stones, he said: "After this battle has been fought, the plain of El Kerrere will be strewn with human skulls as thickly as it is now covered with stones."
Every train and boat going south was overloaded with officers, men, and transport animals, together with munitions of war galore for the campaign. The gunboats and deserters brought in reports that the dervishes were concentrating at Omdurman. The strongly defensible positions of Shabluka, together with the mud forts, had been evacuated by the dervishes.
And that is all that he will have lost." General Feversham now took his hand away and moved in his chair. He looked quickly at Durrance; he opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind. "Well," he said briskly, and as though the matter were of no particular importance, "if Sutch can manage Harry's escape from Omdurman, I see no reason, either, why he should not come home."
But the significance of the picture grew when the mind, outstripping the eye, passed beyond the long, low heights of the gorge and cataract of Shabluka and contemplated the ruins of Khartoum and the city of Omdurman. There were known to be at least 50,000 fighting men collected in their last stronghold. We might imagine the scene of excitement, rumour, and resolve in the threatened capital.
"I will start to-morrow," he said. "Harry is still in the Soudan?" "Of course." "Why of course?" asked Sutch. "Willoughby withdrew his accusation; Castleton is dead he was killed at Tamai; and Trench I know, for I have followed all these three men's careers Trench is a prisoner in Omdurman." "So is Harry Feversham." Sutch stared at his visitor.
Extra precautions were again observed to secure the Sirdar's army from any night attack. In this and the succeeding chapter, the account given of the victory of Omdurman is substantially the same as that which appeared in the columns of various issues of the Daily Telegraph.
They were mostly negroes for the Arabs refused to surrender, and fought to the last or tried to escape. The captive blacks, who fight with equal willingness on either side, were content to be enlisted in the Soudanese regiments; so that many of those who served the Khalifa on the Atbara helped to destroy him at Omdurman.
In December the army returned to Gallabat, which they commenced to fortify, and their victorious general followed his grisly but convincing despatch to Omdurman, where he received the usual welcome accorded by warlike peoples to military heroes.
With a cool brain, a steady nerve, and a proud heart, he is an ideal leader of infantry, and those who saw him manoeuvre his brigade in the crisis of the battle of Omdurman speak of it as the one great memory which they carried back from the engagement. On the field of battle he turns to the speech of his childhood, the jagged, rasping, homely words which brace the nerves of the northern soldier.
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