At Seg-et-taib my companion Cross, who had been far from well for some days past, and suffered especially from sleeplessness, became so ill that I went off in search of his friend, Surgeon-General Taylor, who throughout Cross' illness was invariably most kind and thoughtful. This officer at once came to see the patient, and ordered him to be placed on one of the hospital barges which were being sent up the river to accompany the advance of the army. This was a great relief to my mind, as our surroundings were most uncomfortable for a sick man. We had left behind a good deal of baggage at Wad Hamed, and all our tent except the outer fly, which afforded us only a feeble shelter from sun or rain. On the hospital barges, of course, the invalided men could get proper attention and diet—things practically impossible in our rough camp life; and although I felt rather solitary in the absence of my tent companion, I had every hope that the illness which had attacked him would be speedily checked under medical treatment.
During the latter portion of the advance upon Khartum, internal disorders of various kinds were extremely common. Some of the medical staff ascribed these derangements to the use of tinned meat; but after all, the evidence of experts in England seems to show conclusively that the virulent poison called "ptomaine" is so rare, that the chance of injury from tinned meats is practically infinitesimal. Others maintained, with greater probability, that the drinking water was at fault. The native servants, to save themselves trouble or a slight wetting, invariably filled their buckets from the water close to the bank. Anyone who is acquainted with Oriental habits can realise the peril of drinking such water as this, fouled as it was by hundreds of horses, mules, and camels, and taken from a river which is treated as a vast sewer by all the inhabitants along its banks.
The water question was, indeed, a big one throughout the campaign. Some filtered the muddy water as it was, but the process was a very tedious one, for the Birkfeld filter became choked with mud after about a pint of water had passed through it, and then all its internal arrangements had to be cleaned. The native servants were so stupid at any work of this sort, that one generally had to do one's filtering for oneself; and the exercise was so vigorous that, by the time one had filtered a pint, one was thirsty enough to drink a quart. Another method was to precipitate the mud to some extent by a few grains of alum; but there are hygienic reasons against the employment of this astringent in drinking water. The safest plan is to let the mud settle, and then boil the water. Yet, even if the water is boiled, one is never secure from bacteria, for fresh germs may enter it as it cools. Moreover, it is impossible to boil all the water required for camp purposes; and if a servant "washes up" the plates and cups in unboiled water, or one plunges one's head into it, there can be no absolute guarantee against the intrusion of an evil bacillus into one's system. The only hope is that one's internal zeriba, so to speak, is well guarded by a valiant line of those good bacilli whose chief delight—so bacteriologists tell us—is to gather round the malignant invader and do him to death. Water taken from the middle of the stream was said to be perfectly wholesome, but even here the mud held in solution acted as an irritant. There was another little thing, too, which rather set one against any Nile water at the Atbara camp, to wit, the fact that almost every day a corpse or two of the Dervishes killed at the fight—when the Atbara was nearly empty—were caught up by the flooded stream, and carried down visibly into the Nile. Still, these bodies were almost mummified from the heat; so perhaps there was not much danger, after all, to be feared from their presence in our water supply.
We again advanced with the utmost caution from Seg-et-taib. The cavalry searched the scrub, and two gunboats steamed slowly up the river in support. A party of the Lancers had climbed the hill of Seg-et-taib, and from this point the Khalifa's forces were at length seen by British eyes. A vast camp had been pitched about a mile and a half from the river, in order, probably, to avoid the shells of the gunboats. It stretched along the Wady Shamba, some three miles in front of Omdurman. The alignment of the white tents was perfectly visible with a good glass, and groups of Baggara horsemen were dotted about the plain in front of the Dervish infantry. No incident worth recording occurred during this day's advance along the plain, except, perhaps, a rather gruesome find in one of several deserted villages through which we passed. On the ground lay the corpse of one of our native spies; the body was shockingly mutilated and partially charred, so the poor wretch would seem to have been cruelly tortured before death. Some six or seven miles ahead of us rose the bleak ridge of Kerreri like a vast barrier across the line of our advance. Here it was that the Khalifa had doubtless intended to await our onslaught, but either his heart failed him at the last moment or the rapidity of our advance upset his plans. Yet, in refusing to take his stand on the hills of Kerreri, the Khalifa was acting in opposition to the sentiment of his followers, who trusted in a prophecy of the Mahdi, to the effect that one day Kerreri should be the scene of a great victory over the infidel invaders. "It was called," writes Mr. Bennett-Burleigh, "'the death-place of all infidels'; and thither at least once a year repaired the Khalifa and his following, to look over the coming battleground, and render thanks in anticipation for the wholesale slaughter of the unbelievers, and the triumph of the true Moslems."
À propos of Kerreri, it may be worth noticing how misleading were the accounts of this prospective battlefield which had appeared in some newspapers, and how incorrect the maps were. One account stated that along the wady to the north of Kerreri white quartz stones lay so thickly on the ground that at night-time the place appears to be covered with snow. This description was simply absurd. There were red quartz pebbles, but one came across very few white ones. Again, the maps led one to suppose that the whole of the aforesaid wady was densely overgrown with mimosa, whereas I did not see a bush of any kind whatever as we crossed the gentle declivity leading up to the ridge.
We had now arrived at the last camp which we occupied before leaving Kerreri. Sururab was the least pleasant of all our halting-places, and we pitched our tents on a bare piece of stony ground utterly devoid of vegetation.
Suddenly, after lunch, as we sat under the shade and chatted, there came borne to our ears the dull booming of artillery. The gunboats which had accompanied us had advanced beyond Sururab, and were hard at work shelling the Kerreri ridge, which was occupied by a Dervish outpost. The sound of the guns was faint, and as the vessels were some eight miles ahead of us, and the intervening ground was uneven, we could not, alas, see the effect of their fire, though we afterwards learnt all about it.
The space which was allotted to the correspondents at Sururab was so confined that one could scarcely walk five yards without stumbling across a camel or tripping over a tent-rope, and the donkeys brayed so loudly that sleep was difficult. It was intensely annoying to hear one ass lead off with a full-voiced bray, which died away in spasmodic gasps. Almost immediately a brother donkey would lift up his voice and utter a similar succession of notes, and then groups of donkeys would join in the music, and a species of antiphonal braying between the decani and cantoris donkeys ranged on either side of one's tent would continue till one became absolutely savage, and wished, like Balaam, that one had a sword in one's hand. If an ass is permitted to get well on with its braying, you cannot stop it; when in full voice it takes not the slightest notice of a good-sized stone. I sometimes heard one of my correspondent colleagues call his servant in the darkness, and say, "Hassan, take that moke away—right away into the desert—or I'll kill it." The servant would seize the offender and lead it, still braying, several hundred yards away. But just as he got back again, the banished animal, dismayed to find itself alone, would send forth an anxious bray of diabolical energy, which reached the long ears of its companions, and made matters worse than before.
At Sururab, as before, precautions were taken against night attack. The order went round that lights were to be extinguished and tents struck. Everyone lay down to rest as he was, in his clothes, and officers slept with their swords and revolvers buckled on. Most of us, I think, expected that the enemy, if they refrained from attack, would at anyrate harass us by "sniping" into our camp during the darkness. Nothing would have been easier, for, with the exception of a few native spies, every soul in the army was within the zeriba, and there was a quantity of scrub just along the river north of the camp which would have afforded excellent cover for Dervish sharp-shooters. Against "sniping," little, as a rule, can be done. No form of retaliation is possible if the "snipers" are well concealed; one simply has to sit still and take one's chance. Of course in our own case, camped as we were in an absolutely flat plain, not commanded by any rising ground, the risks from sniping were not considerable. In the frontier wars of India, on the contrary, an appalling number of casualties frequently result from the desultory fire of the hillmen securely posted amongst the rocky heights above the camp.