CHAPTER XIV
ON THE EDGE OF A STORM
The Storm Centre—To the Frontier—Assouan—Excited Officers—With the Press Men—A Long Camel Ride—Night Marches—Halfa—Gwynne of the “Morning Post”—Anley—A Sudden Voyage—Apricots and Rousseau.
It is impossible to be near great historical events and not to desire to take part in them, or at the least to observe them. Egypt had suddenly become the storm centre of the world, and chance had placed me there at that moment. Clearly I could not remain in Cairo, but must get up by hook or by crook to the frontier. It was March and the weather would soon be too warm for my wife, but she was good enough to say that she would wait with my sister until April if I would promise to return by then. At that time the general idea was that some great event would at once occur, though looking back one can see that that was hardly possible. Anyhow I had a great urge to go South.
There was only one way to do it. The big morning papers had their men already upon the spot. But it was less likely that the evening papers were provided. I cabled to the “Westminster Gazette” asking to be made their honorary correspondent pro tem. I had a cable back assenting. Armed with this I approached the proper authority, and so within a day or two I was duly appointed and everything was in order.
I had to make my own way up and I had to get together some sort of kit. The latter was done hurriedly and was of fearsome quality. I bought a huge revolver of Italian make with a hundred cartridges, an ugly unreliable weapon. I bought also a water bottle, which was made of new resinous wood and gave a most horrible flavour of turpentine to everything put into it. It was like drinking varnish, but before I got back there were times when I was ready to drink varnish or anything else that was damp.
With a light khaki coat, riding breeches, a small valise, and the usual Christmas tree hung round me, I started off from Cairo by train to Assiout, where a small river boat was waiting. It was filled with officers going to the front, and we had a pleasant few days journeying to Assouan together. There were, I remember, several junior officers who have since made names in the world, Maxwell (now General Sir John Maxwell) and Hickman, who also rose to the top. There was a young cavalry lieutenant also, one Smythe, who seemed to me to be too gentle and quiet for such rough work as lay ahead. The next time I heard of him was when he was gazetted for the Victoria Cross. In soldiering there is nothing more deceptive than appearances. Your fierce, truculent man may always have a yellow streak where the gentle student has a core of steel. There lay one of the many mistakes which the Germans made later in judging those “unwarlike islanders” the British.
The great question at the opening of the campaign was whether the native fellah troops would stand. The five negro battalions were as good as could be, but the record of the eight or nine Egyptian ones was not reassuring. The Arab of the Soudan is a desperate fanatic who rushes to death with the frenzy of a madman, and longs for close quarters where he can bury his spear in the body of his foeman, even though he carries several bullets in him before he reaches him. Would the Egyptians stand such onslaughts as these? It was thought improbable that they would, and so British battalions, the Connaughts, the Staffords and others, were brought up to stiffen their battle line. One great advantage the native soldiers had—and without it their case would have been hopeless—and that was that their officers were among the picked men of the British Army. Kitchener would have none but the unmarried, for it was to be a wholehearted and if need be a desperate service, and, as the pay and life were good, he could accept or reject as he chose, so that his leaders were splendid. It was curious to see their fair faces and flaxen moustaches under the red tarbooshes, as they marched at the side of their men.
The relations between these officers and their men were paternal. If an officer of black troops came to Cairo he would go back with a pillow case stuffed with candies for his men. The Egyptians were more inscrutable, less sporting and less lovable, but none the less their officers were very loyal to them, and bitterly resented the distrust shown by the rest of the army. One British officer at some early battle seized the enemy’s flag and cried: “Well, the English shall not have this anyhow.” It is this spirit, whether in Egypt or in India, which makes the British officer an ideal leader of native troops. Even at the great Indian Mutiny they would not hear a word against their men until they were murdered by them.
At Assouan we were held up for a week, and no one was allowed to go further. We were already well within the radius of the Arab raiders, for in the last year they had struck even further north. The desert is like the sea, for if you have the camels, which correspond to the ships, your blow may fall anywhere and your attack is not suspected until the moment that you appear. The crowd of British officers who were waiting seemed little worried by any such possibility and were as unconcerned as if it was a Cook’s tour and not a particularly dangerous expedition—so dangerous that of the last army which went South, that of Hicks Pasha, hardly one single man was ever seen again. Only once did I see them really excited. I had returned to the hotel which was the general head-quarters, and as I entered the hall I saw a crowd of them all clustering round the notice board to read a telegram which had just been suspended. They were on the toes of their spurred boots, with their necks outstretched and every sign of quivering and eager interest. “Ah,” thought I, “at last we have got through the hide of these impenetrable men. I suppose the Khalifa is coming down, horse, foot, and artillery, and that we are on the eve of battle.” I pushed my way in, and thrust my head among all the bobbing sun-helmets. It was the account of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race.
I was struck by the splendid zeal of every one. It was an inspiration. Hickman had been full of combative plans all the way on the boat. When we arrived there was a message for him to go down to Keneh and buy camels. Here was a drop down for a man all on fire for action. “It is quite right,” said he, when I condoled with him. “The force must have camels. I am the man to buy them. We all work for one end.” Self-abnegation of this sort is general. The British officer at his best is really a splendid fellow, a large edition of the public schoolboy, with his cheery slang overlying a serious purpose which he would usually die rather than admit. I heard of three of them at rail-end, all doing essential work and all with a degree of fever on them which might well have excused them from work altogether. Every evening each of them dropped a dollar into a hat, they then all took their temperatures and the highest got the pool.
Assouan is at the foot of the Cataract, which extends for some 30 miles, and everything has to be transhipped and taken on a narrow toy railway to be reloaded on fresh steamers at Shellal. It was a huge task and I remember sympathizing with Captain Morgan, who with fatigue parties of Egyptians and chain gangs of convicts was pushing the stuff through. Morgan had sold me a horse once and was shy of me in consequence, but he soon saw that I bore no grudge. Caveat emptor! I already saw in him those qualities of organization which made him a real factor both in the Boer and in the European war. He has just died a general and full of honours. I remember seeing the 7th Egyptians after a long gruelling desert march working at those stores until they were so played out that it took four of them to raise a sixty-pound biscuit box.
The big pressmen had now arrived—“Where the carcass is there shall the eagles, etc.”—and I had luckily made friends with them, so it was determined that we should all go on together. There were five of us who started out, led by Knight of the “Falcon,” representing “The Times,” and looking not unlike a falcon himself. He was a great man, tall and muscular, a famous yachtsman and treasure-seeker, traveller, fighter and scholar. He had just left the French in Madagascar. Next came Scudamore of the “Daily News,” small, Celtic, mercurial, full of wit and go. He was a great purchaser of camels, which were of course all paid for by the paper, so that when Robinson, the editor of the “Daily News,” heard of the Boer war his first comment was, “Well, thank God, there are no camels in South Africa.” It was a study in Eastern ways to see Scudamore buying camels, and I learned from him how it is done. An Arab leads up the absurd-looking creature. You look deprecatingly at the beast—and you cannot take a better model than the creature’s own expression as it looks at you. You ask how much is wanted for it. The owner says £16. You then give a shriek of derision, sweep your arm across as if to wave him and his camel out of your sight for ever, and turning with a whisk you set off rapidly in the other direction. How far you go depends upon the price asked. If it is really very high, you may not get back for your dinner. But as a rule a hundred yards or so meet the case, and you shape your course so as to reach the camel and its owner. You stop in front of them and look at them with a disinterested and surprised look to intimate that you wonder that they should still be loitering there. The Arab asks how much you will give. You answer £8. Then it is his turn to scream, whisk round, and do his hundred yards, his absurd chattel with its horn-pipey legs trotting along behind him. But he returns to say that he will take fourteen, and off you go again with a howl and a wave. So the bargaining goes on, the circles continually shortening, until you have settled upon the middle price.
But it is only when you have bought your camel that the troubles begin. It is the strangest and most deceptive animal in the world. Its appearance is so staid and respectable that you cannot give it credit for the black villany that lurks within. It approaches you with a mildly interested and superior expression, like a patrician lady in a Sunday school. You feel that a pair of glasses at the end of a fan is the one thing lacking. Then it puts its lips gently forward, with a far-away look in its eyes, and you have just time to say, “The pretty dear is going to kiss me,” when two rows of frightful green teeth clash in front of you, and you give such a backward jump as you could never have hoped at your age to accomplish. When once the veil is dropped, anything more demoniacal than the face of a camel cannot be conceived. No kindness and no length of ownership seem to make them friendly. And yet you must make allowances for a creature which can carry 600 lb. for 20 miles a day, and ask for no water and little food at the end of it.
This, however, is digression. The other pressmen were Beaman of the “Standard,” fresh from Constantinople, and almost an Eastern in his ways, and Julian Corbett, representing the “Pall Mall,” a gentle and amiable man who was destined later to be the naval historian of the Great War. Like myself he was an amateur among professionals, and had to return within a given date to Cairo.
As it was clear that nothing important could take place instantly, we determined to do part of the journey by road. A force of cavalry was going up, and we were ordered to join them and use them as an escort, but we thought we would be happier on our own, and so we managed to lose the Egyptians. There was some risk in our lonely journey along the right bank of the river with our left flank quite unprotected, but on the other hand the dust of a great body of horsemen would be insufferable. Therefore we set forth one evening, mounted upon our camels, with baggage camels in attendance, and quite a retinue of servants. In four or five days we reached Korosko, where we got boats which took us to the frontier at Wady Halfa, while the camels and servants came on by land.
I shall never forget those days, or rather those nights, for we rose at two in the morning and our longest march was before or during the dawn. I am still haunted by that purple velvet sky, by those enormous and innumerable stars, by the half-moon which moved slowly above us, while our camels with their noiseless tread seemed to bear us without effort through a wonderful dream world. Scudamore had a beautiful rolling baritone voice, and I can still hear it in my memory as it rose and fell in the still desert air. It was a wonderful vision, an intermezzo in real life, broken only once by my performing the unusual feat of falling off a camel. I have taken many tosses off horses, but this was a new experience. You have no proper saddle, but are seated upon a curved leather tray, so that when my brute suddenly threw himself down on his fore-knees—he had seen some green stuff on the path—I shot head foremost down his neck. It was like coming down a hose pipe in some acrobatic performance, and I reached the ground rather surprised but otherwise none the worse.
One or two pictures rise in mind. One was of some strange aquatic lizard—not a crocodile—lying on a sand bank. I cracked off my Italian revolver, which was more likely to hurt me than the lizard, and I saw the strange beast writhe into the stream. Once again, as I settled my couch at night, I saw a slug-like creature, with horned projections, the length about 18 inches, which moved away and disappeared. It was a death adder—the sort perhaps which took Cleopatra to her fathers. Then again we went into a ruined hut to see if we could sleep there. In the dim light of our candle we saw a creature which I thought was a mouse rush round and round the floor, close to the wall. Then suddenly to my amazement it ran right up the wall and down again on to the floor. It was a huge spider, which now stood waving its fore-legs at us. To my horror Scudamore sprang into the air, and came down upon it, squashing it into a square foot of filth. This was the real tarantula, a dangerous creature, and common enough in such places.
Yet another picture comes very clearly back to me. For some reason we had not started in the night, and the early dawn found us still resting in our small camp in a grove of palm trees near the path which led along the bank of the Nile. I awoke, and, lying in my blankets, I saw an amazing man riding along this path. He was a Negroid Nubian, a huge, fierce, hollow-cheeked creature, with many silver ornaments upon him. A long rifle projected over his back and a sword hung from his side. A more sinister barbaric figure one could not imagine, and he was exactly the type of those Mahdi raiders against whom we had been warned. I never like to be an alarmist, especially among men who had seen much of war or danger, so I said nothing, but I managed to stir one of my companions, who sighted the newcomer with a muttered “My God!” The man rode past us and on northwards, never glancing at our grove. I have no doubt that he was really one of our own native tribesmen, for we had some in our pay; but had he been the other thing our fate would have been sealed. I wrote a short story, “The Three Correspondents,” which was suggested by the incident.
A strange wooden-faced Turkish soldier, Yussuf Bey, in the Egyptian service, commanding the troops at Korosko, had us up in audience, gave us long pink glasses of raspberry vinegar, and finally saw us on board the boat which in a day or two deposited us on the busy river-bank of Wady Halfa, where the same military bustle prevailed as we had left behind us at Assouan.
Halfa lies also at the base of a cataract, and again all the stuff had to be transhipped and sent on thirty miles by a little track to Sarras. I walked the first day to the small station where the track began and I saw a tall officer in a white jacket and red tarboosh, who with a single orderly was superintending the work and watching the stores pass into the trucks. He turned a fierce red face upon me and I saw that it was Kitchener himself, the Commander of the whole army. It was characteristic of the man that he did not leave such vital things to chance, or to the assurance of some subordinate, but that he made sure so far as he could with his own eyes that he really had the tools for the job that lay before him. Learning who I was—we had met once before on the racecourse at Cairo—he asked me to dinner in his tent that night, when he discussed the coming campaign with great frankness. I remember that his chief-of-staff—Drage, I think, was the name—sat beside me and was so completely played out that he fell asleep between every course. I remember also the amused smile with which Kitchener regarded him. You had to go all out when you served such a master.
One new acquaintance whom I made in those days was Herbert Gwynne, a newly-fledged war correspondent, acting, if I remember right, for the “Chronicle.” I saw that he had much in him. When I heard of him next he was Reuter’s man in the Boer War, and not very long afterwards he had become editor of the “Morning Post,” where he now is. Those days in Halfa were the beginning of a friendship of thirty years, none the less real because we are both too busy to meet. One of the joys of the hereafter is, I think, that we have time to cultivate our friends.
I was friendly also with a very small but gallant officer, one Anley, who had just joined the Egyptian Army. His career was beginning and I foresaw that he would rise, but should have been very surprised had I known how we should meet again. I was standing in the ranks by the roadside as a private of Volunteers in the Great War when a red-tabbed, brass-hatted general passed. He looked along our ranks, his gaze fastened on me, and lo, it was Anley. Surprised out of all military etiquette, he smiled and nodded. What is a private in the ranks to do when a general smiles and nods? He can’t formally stand to attention or salute. I fear that what I did was to close and then open my left eye. That was how I learned that my Egyptian captain was now a war brigadier.
We pushed on to Sarras and had a glimpse of the actual outpost of civilization, all sandbags and barbed wire, for there was a Mahdi post at no distance up the river. It was wonderful to look south and to see distant peaks said to be in Dongola, with nothing but savagery and murder lying between. There was a whiff of real war in the little fortress but no sign of any actual advance.
Indeed, I had the assurance of Kitchener himself that there was no use my waiting and that nothing could possibly happen until the camels were collected—many thousands of them. I contributed my own beast to the army’s need since I had no further use for it, and Corbett and I prepared to take our leave. We were warned that our only course was to be on the look out and take a flying jump on to any empty cargo boat which was going down stream. This we did one morning, carrying our scanty belongings. Once on board we learned that there was no food and that the boat did not stop for several days. The rope had not been cast off, so I rushed to the only shop available, a Greek store of a type which springs up like mushrooms on the track of an army. They were sold out save for tinned apricots, of which I bought several tins. I rushed back and scrambled on board as the boat cast off. We managed to get some Arab bread from the boatmen, and that with the apricots served us all the way. I never wish to see a tinned apricot so long as I live. I associate their cloying sweetness with Rousseau’s “Confessions,” a French edition of which came somehow into my hands and was my only reading till I saw Assouan once more. Rousseau also I never wish to read again.
So that was the end of our frontier adventure. We had been on the edge of war but not in it. It was disappointing, but it was late in April before I reached Cairo and the heat was already becoming too much for an invalid. A week later we were in London, and I remember that, as I sat as a guest at the Royal Academy Banquet on May 1 of that year, I saw upon my wrists the ragged little ulcers where the poisonous jiggers which had burrowed into my skin while I lay upon the banks of the Nile were hatching out their eggs under the august roof of Burlington House.