they could smell the river ahead, they could not go on. The wounded were in desperate straits. Stewart knew he would lose most of them unless he could bring them to the water. He sent a runner to summon Penrod. “Ballantyne, I have need of your local knowledge again. How far is it to the river?”
“We are very close, sir, about four miles. You will be able to see it from the next ridge.”
“Four miles,” Stewart mused. He looked back over the exhausted British formation. Four miles might as well have been a hundred for all the hope he had of getting them there. He was about to speak again, but Penrod interrupted him.
“Look ahead, sir.”
Upon the ridge of higher ground that lay between them and the river a small band of fifty or so Dervish had appeared. All the officers reached for their telescopes. Through the lens Penrod at once recognized the banner of Osman Atalan. Then in the centre of the band he picked out his tall lean figure on the back of the cream-coloured mare.
“Not too many of them,” said Sir Charles Wilson, Stewart’s secondin-command, but his tone was dubious. “We should be able to brush them aside without too much trouble. I don’t think they will have the temerity to come at us again, not after the lesson we gave them at the wells.”
Penrod was about to contradict him. He wanted to point out that Atalan was a clever tactician: he had pulled his men out of the lost battle at Abu Klea before they were utterly destroyed. During the previous day and night, his scouts must have shadowed the battered British square, waiting for this moment when they had used up all their strength and endurance and their camels were finished. With an effort Penrod bit back the words.
“You wanted to say something, Ballantyne?” Stewart had not lowered his telescope but he had been aware of Penrod’s reaction.
“That is Osman Atalan himself on the cream horse. I think there are more than just that one troop. He got off comparatively lightly at Abu Klea. His divisions are almost intact.”
“You are probably right,” Stewart agreed.
“There is dust on the right,” Penrod pointed out. All the telescopes turned in that direction, and another group of several hundred more Dervish cavalry appeared upon the ridge. Then there was more dust further to the left. Swiftly the numbers of the enemy swelled from fifty to thousands. Their sullen squadrons stood squarely across the road to the Nile.
Stewart lowered his telescope and snapped it shut. He looked directly at Sir Charles Wilson. “I propose to laager the baggage and the wounded here in a zareba, and leave five hundred able-bodied men to protect them. Then with a flying column of eight or nine hundred of the fittest men we shall make a run for the river.”
“The camels are done in, sir,” Wilson cut in quickly. “They will never make it.”
“I am aware of that,” said Stewart, crisply. Privately he had come to think of his secondin-command as a man who could smell the dung in a bed of roses. “We will leave the camels here with the wounded and proceed on foot.” He ignored the shocked expressions of his staff and looked at Penrod, “How long would it take you lead us to the river, Ballantyne?”
“Without the wounded and the baggage I can have you there in two hours, sir,” Penrod answered, with all the confidence he did not feel.
“Very well. The company commanders will select their strongest and fittest men. We will march in forty minutes’ time, at fifteen hundred hours precisely.”
What kind of men are these?” al-Noor asked with wonder, as they sat on their horses and watched the depleted British square form up and march out of the zareba. “They have no animals and no water and still they come on. In God’s Holy Name, what kind of men are they?”
“They are descendants of the men who fought our ancestor Saladin, Righteous of the Faith, eight hundred years ago before Jerusalem,” Osman Atalan replied, “They are men of the Red Cross, like the crusaders of old. But they are only men. Look upon them now and remember the battle of Hattin.”
“We must always remember Hattin,” agreed his aggagiers. “At Hattin Saladin trapped an exhausted, thirst- crazed army of these men and destroyed it at a single blow. So great were the losses he inflicted upon the infidel that he tore from their bloody hands the entire kingdom of Jerusalem, which they had stolen from the faithful and held for eighty-eight years.” Osman Atalan rose in his stirrups and pointed the blade of his broadsword at the band of marching men, so tiny and insignificant on the stony grey plain. “This is our field of Hattin. Before the setting of the sun we will destroy this army. Not one will reach the river alive. For the glory of Allah and his Mahdi!”
His aggagiers drew their swords. “The victory belongs to God and his Mahdi,” they cried.
As the slow-moving British square climbed the gentle slope towards them the Dervish disappeared behind the ridge. The British toiled on. Every few hundred yards they halted to preserve the order of the wavering ranks and bring in their stragglers. They could not leave them for the Dervish and the castrating knife. Then they started again. In one of the pauses Stewart sent for Penrod. “What lies beyond the ridge? Describe the ground ahead,” he ordered.
“From the ridge we should overlook the town of Metemma on the near bank,” Penrod assured him. “There is an intervening strip of heavy scrub and dunes about half a mile wide, then the steep bank of the Nile.”
“Please, God, from the ridge let us also see Gordon’s steamers moored against the bank and waiting to take us up to Khartoum.” As Stewart said it the ridge ahead was transformed. The entire length was sown with bright white puffs of powder gunsmoke, like a cotton field with ripe pods bursting open in the hot sunlight. The Boxer- Henry bullets began to whip around them, ploughing up the red earth and whining off the white quartz rocks.
“Should we not return their fire, sir?” Wilson asked. “Clear that ridge before we move on?”
“No time for that. We must keep stepping out,” Stewart snapped. “Pass the word for my piper.”
General Sir Herbert Stewart’s personal piper, like his master, was a Highlander. His tartan was the hunting Stewart and he wore his glengarry at a jaunty angle, the ribbons dangling down his back.
“Give us a good marching tune,” Stewart ordered.
“The Road to the Isles”, sir?”
“You know my favourites, don’t you, young Patrick Duffy?”
The piper marched twenty paces ahead of the front wall of the square, his kilt swinging and his pipes skirling the wild, outlandish music that inflames the warlike passions of all men who hear it. The bullets still whipped around them. Every few minutes a man was hit and went down. His comrades lifted him and carried him forward. The Dervish snipers retreated before the resolute advance until at last the ridge was silent and deserted. The square marched on towards it.
Suddenly the drums hidden behind the ridge began a deep bass beat that made the air tremble. Then the ground seemed to tremble in sympathy. To the rumbling thunder of hoofs, the Beja cavalry swept over the skyline ahead.
The square halted and tightened its formation, and the horde of horsemen rode into the first blast of gunfire and reeled back. The second and third volleys decimated them and they turned and galloped away.
The soldiers picked up their wounded comrades and started forward again. The next Beja charge thundered over the skyline. The drums thudded and ombeyas shrieked. The British laid down their wounded and dead, and formed up in the impenetrable walls. The charge broke against them and, like a retreating wave, fell back. The weary march resumed. They passed over the fallen Dervish, and to forestall the treacherous suicidal attack of the warriors feigning death, they bayoneted the living and dead bodies as they stepped over them.
At last, the front rank came out on the skyline. A hoarse cheer issued from their parched throats and they grinned with cracked, bleeding lips. Before them lay the broad sweep of the Nile. The surface of the river splintered the sunlight into myriad bright reflections like spinning silver coins. There, against the far bank, lay the pretty little steamers of Gordon’s flotilla, waiting to take them upriver to Khartoum.
Some of the men sank to their knees, but their comrades hauled them to their feet and held them erect. Penrod heard a youngster croak, “Water! Sweet God, water!” But his voice was gagged by his swollen purple tongue.
The corporal who supported him answered, “The bottles are dry, but there is all the water you can drink down there. Brace up, lad! We’re going down to fetch it. Ain’t no blackamoor going to stop us either.”
“No stopping, lads,” the sergeant major called to them. “Not until you wash off the stink of your sweat in yon wee stream.”
Those who were still able to laughed, and with a new lift in their weary stride they started down towards the Nile. Ahead stood an undulating series of low dunes, the last barrier before the river. The sands were multi-hued:
