[CHAPTER VI]
AFTER THE BATTLE
On the morning of 3rd September our troops moved out of Omdurman and encamped on the banks of the river some two miles to the north. The moment I had finished breakfast I made for the Mahdi's tomb. The interior was an absolute wreck. Vast quantities of stones and mortar, torn away by the Lyddite shells, were heaped upon the floor, and of the superstructure over the Mahdi's grave only the wooden framework remained. Some pieces of tawdry drapery which had covered the tomb lay on the ground, and these I brought away. Outside the tomb, a little to the right, I came across a truly awful spectacle. One of the terrible Lyddite shells had burst amongst some unfortunate Arabs near the Khalifa's palace. Eight men lay dead in a ghastly ring, some of them torn by horrid mutilations; but the curious point about some of the bodies was that they were not lying flat, but were sitting on the ground with fearfully contorted limbs and features. Could this be due to the deadly fumes of the picric acid contained in the Lyddite? The stonework of the tomb and the surrounding buildings was often stained yellow by this chemical. Outside in the open street fragments of Koran manuscripts were lying about in every direction.
I then set out to find Cross and the other correspondents. It was said that they were with the Staff, in strange and unwonted proximity to the Sirdar's tent. However, as nobody seemed to know where the Staff was, I wandered about for hours seeking my colleagues in vain.
As I passed along the river a barge drew up alongside to land the bodies of the British soldiers who had been killed. From some misunderstanding a wounded man slid out of the boat amongst the corpses, and began to walk up the bank, but was promptly sent back with the reprimand—"D——n you, what do you mean by coming ashore with this lot? You aren't dead!" Even amid such gruesome surroundings it was quite funny to see the disappointed look of the man as he returned to the barge to take his place under a separate category.
At last I came by accident upon Cross. The poor fellow was again in a state of prostration, and was lying under the blanket-tent of Captain Luther, R.A.M.C., in the camp of the Lancashire Fusiliers. The officers of this battalion had been most kind to Cross, and as the day was terribly hot he remained under the shelter of their tents until the evening, when he rejoined me in our own camp. He told me that on the previous night he had, like the rest of the correspondents, failed to get any food, and had slept on the sand without a blanket, though Steevens, with his usual kindness, had lent him an overcoat when the night air became chilly.
At length, after wandering up and down for miles in the blazing heat, I discovered the whereabouts of our camp out in the desert to the south-west of the town. All my colleagues were here except Villiers. Nobody seemed to know what had become him, and as the hours passed and he failed to turn up we began to get alarmed. His servant had pitched Villiers' umbrella tent, and beside it stood the bicycle, which was disfigured by an honourable scar, for the top of the valve was gone, and Hassan declared that it had been carried away by a Dervish bullet. I mounted the famous machine, intending to go for a ride to the execution ground, where several fine gibbets were standing, but as the back wheel was "buckled" I soon dismounted—with the proud consciousness, however, of being the first cyclist in Omdurman!
The streets of the town were perfectly loathsome. In every direction lay the decaying bodies of dead animals, and the stench was terrible. Moslems, from a curious intermixture of humanity and cruelty, never give a dying animal a coup de grâce, and they seldom take the trouble to bury the carcass. Moreover, in some parts of the town one could scarcely walk fifty yards without coming across the bodies of men, and occasionally, I am sorry to say, those of women and little children. At least five hundred dead people lay scattered about the streets, some destroyed by Lyddite shells, but the majority pierced with bullets. I saw some of these corpses lying in the shallow water near the bank of the river, and as it seemed to be nobody's business to bury them, it is not surprising that our Guardsmen and other soldiers contracted the germs of enteric fever at Omdurman!
Inside the Khalifa's arsenal there were many curious things—spears, bows and arrows, coats of chain mail, machine guns, Krupps, various kinds of ammunition, and other warlike apparatus, ancient and modern. Three carriages of European make were also visible, which were said to have been used by the Khalifa on state occasions, though these vehicles could never have got beyond the main streets, for the simple reason that outside the town no roads exist.
Most of the Dervish ammunition used in the battle seems to have been of home manufacture. All the Martini cartridges I picked up amongst their dead were extremely well made of "solid drawn" brass, and stamped with a Κ and a Π. I imagine that these letters may stand for Khartum and Pentekachi, the unfortunate Greek who succeeded in manufacturing gunpowder for the Mahdi, and was finally blown to atoms by an explosion of the magazine. On a Martini rifle which I secured from the battlefield, the Enfield stamp is still visible. Some disgraceful facts were revealed at the time when Berber was occupied, and the public documents fell into our hands, for, in addition to various offers of assistance addressed to the Khalifa from people in high positions at Cairo, some invoices were discovered which showed clearly that a certain Manchester firm had supplied the Khalifa with lead for the manufacture of bullets! It is difficult to believe that an Englishman could sink so low as to supply his country's enemy with munitions of war for the sake of filthy lucre!
A new bullet, by the way, was used in the recent campaign. Its title is sufficiently significant. It is called the "man-stopping bullet," and simply means that an ordinary .303 Lee-Metford bullet is scooped out at the end to the depth of about half an inch. When this missile strikes an object the hollow nose instantly expands like an umbrella, inflicting a tremendous shock, which was frequently not secured when the ordinary solid bullet, with its enormous velocity (two thousand feet a second at the muzzle), passed clean through an enemy's body, but failed to administer a sufficiently crushing blow. At Krugersdorp an ordinary Lee-Metford bullet was driven right through the brain of a Boer; and so far was the tiny puncture from being immediately fatal, that the Dutchman walked to church next Sunday—though it is true that on the Sunday following he went there again in a coffin. Of course this solid bullet, when it chanced to come in contact with a bone, served its purpose well, and shattered the bone to atoms. The first occasion, I believe, on which the Lee-Metford bullet was fired into a human body was at the well-known Featherstone riots; and I remember seeing a drawing made by a medical man at the time of the foot of one of the rioters, which had been struck. Not only was the lower part of the leg bone completely smashed, but almost every bone in the foot had been broken more or less by the terrific force of the bullet.