Before we said farewell to the Herodotus the crew gave us a “musical and dramatic” entertainment. The comic part was largely supplied by the cook’s boy, who represented a European clad in a remarkably battered suit and ordered about a luckless native workman. The great joke was repeatedly to offer him as a seat the ship’s mallet (with which posts for tying up were driven into the bank) and to withdraw it the moment he tried to sit down. His face, and subsequent flogging of the joker, were hailed with shrieks of laughter. Similar pranks interspersed with singing, dancing, and tambourine playing were witnessed by an appreciative audience, including eight or ten native friends of the sailors, who were supplied with coffee and cigarettes.
On March 12th we reached Cairo and, with regret, left our comfortable dahabyah for the Ghezireh Palace Hotel. On the 14th came the rumour that orders had come from England that troops should advance on Dongola. There was the more excitement as it was asserted, and I believe truly, that the Government had taken this decisive step without previous consultation with either Lord Cromer or the Sirdar. However, all was ready, and the climax came when in September 1898 the Dervishes were defeated by Sir Herbert Kitchener, the Mahdi slain, and Gordon avenged.
On October 7th of that year Sir Herbert wrote from Cairo, in answer to my congratulations:
“I am indeed thankful all went off without a hitch. I see the —— says we kill all the wounded, but when I left Omdurman there were between six and seven thousand wounded dervishes in hospital there. The work was so hard on the Doctors that I had to call on the released Egyptian doctors from prison to help; two of them were well educated, had diplomas, and were and are very useful. We ran out of bandages and had to use our first field dressing which every man carries with him.”
LORD KITCHENER
How unjust were newspaper attacks on a man unfailingly humane! Kitchener’s reception in England towards the end of the year was a wild triumph—more than he appreciated, for he complained to me of the way in which the populace mobbed him at Charing Cross Station and pulled at his clothes. I remember at Dover, either that year or on his return from South Africa, meeting the mistress of an Elementary School whom I knew who was taking her scholars to see him land “as an object lesson,” an object lesson being permitted in school hours. The children might certainly have had many less useful lessons.
Lord Kitchener (as he had then become) spent a Sunday with us at Osterley, June 17-19th, 1899. I well recollect a conversation which I had with him on that occasion. He expressed his dissatisfaction at his military work being ended. “I should like to begin again as a simple captain if I could have something fresh to do.” “Why,” said I, “you are Governor-General of the Soudan, surely there is great work to do there.” No, that was not the sort of job he wanted. “Well,” I told him, “you need not worry yourself, you are sure to be wanted soon for something else.”
Little did he think, still less did I, that exactly six months later, on December 18th, orders would reach him at Khartum to join Lord Roberts as Chief of the Staff, in South Africa. He started at once, and met his Commander-in-Chief at Gibraltar on 27th. Indeed a fresh and stirring act in the drama of his life opened before him. Later on, when he had succeeded Lord Roberts in the supreme command, he wrote (January 1902) thanking me for a little diary which I had sent him, and continued:
“We are all still hard at it, and I really think the end at last cannot be far off. Still in this enormous country and with the enemy we have to contend with there is no saying how long some roving bands may not continue in the field, living like robbers in the hills and making occasional raids that are difficult to meet.
“It will be a joyful day when it is over, but however long it may be in coming, we shall all stick to it.