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Like the River Column, they were disordered by the broken ground, and the XIIth Soudanese, who were unused to camel riding and mounted only on transport saddles, were soon wearied. After one o'clock many men, both in the Camel Corps and in the battalion, fell asleep on their camels, and the officers had great difficulty in keeping them awake.
There was a second beyond it, where the Arabs still lingered, and for that again they went. But the enemy, the fight at last taken out of them, made but a feeble stand, and it was carried at the first onset. But what was that firing in their rear? Had a body of Soudanese lain concealed somewhere? Or had their dead come to life again? Neither.
The infantry column began to march out of Akasha at 3.30 in the afternoon of the 6th, and trailed southwards along the track by the river in the following order: Lewis's brigade, with the Xth Soudanese leading; two Maxim guns and the artillery; MacDonald's brigade; Maxwell's brigade; and, lastly, the field hospitals and a half-battalion forming rearguard. The Sirdar marched behind the artillery.
Always excitable and often insubordinate, he required the strictest discipline. At once slovenly and uxorious, he detested his drills and loved his wives with equal earnestness; and altogether 'Sambo' for such is the Soudanese equivalent of 'Tommy' was a lazy, fierce, disreputable child. But he possessed two tremendous military virtues.
When they strove to stand firm they were pushed bodily back by the dense mass surging upon them since the Soudanese in rear could push on with perfect impunity wherever the bayonets were sheathed in the bodies of the front rank.
Here the Soudanese lay in hundreds, piled up in places in heaps, three or even four deep, one on the top of another. And here too the English dead were terribly thick. But the ambulance had been at work for some hours, and all who had life in them were removed, while many of the dead had been withdrawn from the mingled heaps, and laid decently side by side, and apart.
Colonel Macdonald's oft-tried and famous fighting brigade, made up of the 9th, 10th, and 11th Soudanese, with the true-as-steel 2nd Egyptians. Within the wall of hedge, trenches, and armed infantry, in reserve, was another brigade, the 4th Khedivial, commanded by Major Collinson. It was made up of the 1st, 5th, 17th, and 18th Egyptian battalions.
It will be a tough affair, but I believe we shall have some British troops here to help, before the final advance. We can depend now on both the Soudanese and the Egyptians to fight hard, but there are not enough of them. The odds would be too heavy, and the Sirdar is not a man to risk failure.
The Arab laughed, and asked if the English had any particular enmity to the Soudanese. "No," was the reply. "On the contrary, we wish to be friends with them." "And yet," said the prisoner, "you have killed twenty thousand of us in the last few moons. When we fight we mean to kill; and when we hunt we mean to kill. Are you not the same?"
It is thus among the Soudanese, as also, in an altogether different part of the world, among the Eskimo Innuit and Koniags. The same custom is also found in Australia, where, however other postures are also adopted. In Europe the quadrupedal posture would seem to prevail among some of the South Slavs, notably the Dalmatians.
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