The Campaigns and History of the Royal Irish Regiment, [v. 1,] from 1684 to 1902

by G. le M. Gretton

The Royal Irish were almost the last troops to leave lower Egypt; but at length the long-expected order reached them, and on the evening of November 12, 1884, they entrained for Assiut, the farthest point to which the railway ran up the Nile. The marching-out state showed a strength of seven hundred and forty-six officers and men.[256]

Next morning, after a journey of 229 miles, the Royal Irish arrived at Assiut, and at once exchanged the train for the barges in which they were to be towed 318 miles to Assouan, at the foot of the First Cataract. The men were packed into four barges, in each of which a subaltern was on duty for twenty-four hours at a time; the remainder of the officers were divided among the steamers and a dahabiah. “That night the halt was not sounded till 10 o’clock, when,” wrote a young officer of the Royal Irish, “a nice job we had of it. Our steamers did not keep together, so that we had to go along the bank for about a mile in the dark, and draw rations for the next day, and very ticklish work it was, as the path was quite close to the river and bits of the bank were continually falling in.” Progress was slow, for both barges and tugs occasionally ran on to sandbanks, and it was not until November 24, that the flotilla, which had been joined by the 2nd battalion, Royal West Kent regiment, reached its destination. As the barges could not pass the rapids the Royal Irish landed, and spent an unhappy day in the belief that they were to remain at Assouan. They had been ordered to encamp, and some of the officers were on their way to select the ground, when a tremendous roar of cheers and Irish yells told them the battalion had received good news; shortly afterwards a staff-officer informed them that they were to proceed up the river forthwith, and after a short journey in the railway turning the rapids, the Royal Irish re-embarked at Shellal, this time in the sailing-boats or dahabiahs in which the traffic of the Nile from time immemorial has been carried on. The next stage (210 miles) in the voyage was to Wadi Halfa, the frontier town of Egypt, and the most southern point which Roman legions had occupied in the valley of the Nile. Here a long stretch of rapids called the Second Cataract barred the passage of all local craft at that time of year, and the troops landed and went into camp, where owing to a block on the line of communication the battalion was detained for more than a fortnight. This halt was by no means a restful one, for the fatigues were incessant, but some of the officers found time to reconnoitre the nearest of the rapids through which they were about to pass, and reported that a task awaited the XVIIIth as arduous in its way as any that had fallen to the lot of the regiment during the two centuries of its existence. The Second Cataract, like that at Assouan, is turned by a line of railway thirty-three miles in length, which ended at Gemai, where, in an improvised dockyard, the whale-boats lay waiting for the Royal Irish. By December 16, the line of communication was again clear, and the first detachment—B and E companies under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Wray—were sent by rail to Gemai, where they took possession of their “whalers,” and many stores. When these were packed the flotilla started in single file, and sometimes sailing, sometimes rowing (with many different strokes and styles), worked up a smooth stretch of river till nightfall, when the boats were tied up to the bank, and the crews disembarked and pitched their camps. Next morning the detachment reached Sarras, where the remainder of the stores were issued. Each whaler carried the arms, ammunition, tents, and camp equipage of her crew, materials for repairing any damage she might sustain on the voyage, and cases containing a hundred days’ rations for twelve men. These cases were not to be opened, but were to be delivered intact at the point of concentration, the supplies for current use being drawn at the various posts on the line of communication. By the time the whole of the freight (about four tons) was on board the boats, the load of boxes at stem and stern rose so high above the gunwales that the men at the oars were half-hidden behind the high-piled cargoes.

Lord Wolseley had always attributed much of the success of the little Red River expedition to the skill of the boatmen, or voyageurs who navigated his canoes over the waterways of Canada. With some difficulty he induced the British government to sanction the enrolment of a corps of Canadian boatmen for the much larger expedition of 1884; nearly four hundred officers and men were raised, many of whom proved themselves as valuable on the Nile as their predecessors had been on the rivers of Ontario and Manitoba. These voyageurs joined the whalers at Sarras: they were placed in charge of the actual handling of the boats, but, except as watermen, they had no authority. The flotilla as a whole was in charge of the regimental officers, who were distributed among the whalers, but in every company many boats were necessarily commanded by sergeants and even by corporals. In most cases the non-commissioned officers were as ignorant of boat work as their men, and with their crews had to learn by experience the use of oars and sails, the employment of poles to prevent the whalers from being dashed against the rocks, and the art of tracking. Even the best of the voyageurs, though experts in other branches of boatmanship, knew nothing of sails, which were not used in the navigation of the rivers with which they were familiar. In the forenoon of December 18, B and E companies pushed off from Sarras, followed by the remainder of the battalion, less G company, which next day brought up the rear. Thus the whole battalion was now afloat, engaged in a ceaseless struggle with the rapids of the Nile, and greatly handicapped by want of voyageurs, of whom the supply had run so short that instead of a couple of Canadians being posted to each boat, as had been the case with the corps first up the river, only two could now be allotted to each company of the Royal Irish. The difficulties encountered, as will be seen, were enormous, but the first battalion of the Royal Irish overcame them with brilliant success, and made the passage up the river faster than any other corps in the expeditionary force. In order to “get the last ounce” of work out of his troops, Lord Wolseley appealed to both the sporting and the patriotic instincts of his soldiers by offering a prize of £100 to the non-commissioned officers and men of the battalion which made the fastest run with the fewest accidents from Sarras to Debbeh, and by promising that the winning corps should be selected for the post of honour in the farther advance towards Khartoum. The money prize was awarded to the Royal Irish, who thus won the right to share in the hardships of the march across the desert to Metemmeh. Before that march is described, some account must be given of the portion of the Nile up which the Royal Irish had to force their way before they could hope to strike a blow for the relief of Gordon. For eighty miles above Sarras the river runs through a wild and barren region known as Batn-el-Hájar or the Womb of Rocks, of which the official historian gives the following description:—

“After leaving Sarras the first serious obstacle to navigation is the cataract of Semneh, the foot of which is reached after an eleven miles’ pull against a smooth, swift current running between high rocky banks. Then come ten miles of swifter-flowing water, against which, however, with the help of a moderate breeze, it is possible to proceed with the help of the track lines. At the head of this rapid is the great ‘Gate of Semneh,’ a narrow gorge, between two rocky cliffs, partly blocked by two islands about equi-distant from the shores and from each other. Through the three passages thus formed the whole pent-up volume of the Nile rushes as through a sluice-gate. Here the boats have to be unloaded, and their cargoes, package by package, carried for half a mile over the rocks and deposited near smooth water above the cataract. Then the track lines are passed round the rocks, and two or three boats’ crews manning one line, each boat is in turn hauled by main force up the water slide and run in opposite its cargo on the beach.

“For the next sixteen miles the course of the river is unimpeded by any serious obstacle, still for every yard the current runs as strong as the Thames in flood, on every side the basalt mountains radiate their heat, and everywhere the sunken rocks lie in wait for the unwary steersman. At the end of this distance the cataract of Ambako is reached, a very different piece of water to that of Semneh. At the latter spot an obstacle to navigation was formed by the volume of the Nile being pent into a narrow gorge; at Ambako the same effect is produced by a broad expanse of river being choked by an innumerable mass of reefs and islets. At full high Nile, when the lower rocks are buried deep beneath the surface, the cataract is not a formidable one; but as the river falls and reef after reef makes its appearance, the difficulties of navigation increase, until at low Nile the cataract has become impassable for the larger native craft, and is a grave source of difficulty even to the buoyant English whalers.

“Here every means of propulsion has to be employed. At one moment the whalers, under the lee of some islet, may be paddled gently up a narrow lane of almost stagnant water. Then, as the shelter of the rock is lost, though its crew pull for dear life, it is carried back some hundreds of yards until a point of vantage is reached near the shore. Next the track line is got out, and step by step the boat is hauled round a projecting point by a treble boat’s crew. Now a fresh breeze and a clear reach of moderate water make it just possible to gain a few hundred yards by making the very most of sails and oars; then a bit of shelving shore is met with, along which good progress may be made by half the crew tracking, while the remainder stay on board and use their punt-poles. At length, by dint of perseverance, the five miles of rapid are surmounted in twice as many hours of incessant labour, and another eight miles of open water are entered on.”[257]

Though no two cataracts are exactly alike, their general features are much the same, and therefore it is enough merely to mention the others passed by the XVIIIth. Above the rapids of Ambako came the cataract of Tanjur, which, though only two miles and a half long, usually took the boats a whole day to ascend, and fifteen miles higher up was another rapid, nearly as troublesome as that of Semneh. This was succeeded by ten miles of smooth water running between hills crowned with ruins, relics of a nation so ancient that its very name has been forgotten. Then followed the cataract of Dal, round which stores had to be carried for three or four miles by hand; these rapids once passed, the boats entered a long reach of calm but swift-running water 100 miles in length, at the head of which two more cataracts, those of Kaiber[258] and Hannek, had to be surmounted. From Hannek to Korti the navigation of the Nile was fairly easy.

The record of the forty days spent by the battalion between Sarras and Korti is one of unceasing toil. The Royal Irish worked like galley slaves. From dawn to dark, in burning and daily increasing heat, they rowed, and poled, and hauled the boats by ropes through the easier portions of the rapids. In the more difficult places it became necessary to lighten the whalers, and the crews had to unload them partially or entirely and to transport the cargo across the rocks, work the boats through the broken water, and then carefully repack them, with the knowledge, acquired by bitter experience, that an hour or two later the performance would have to be repeated. Occasionally, to avoid some especially bad piece of river, the boats had to be emptied, lifted out of the water, and hauled across country on the rollers provided for the purpose. Sometimes a boat missed the narrow passage among the rocks which barred her way, and was whirled backwards down the current until the men on the banks, hanging on to the drag ropes with their arms almost wrenched from the sockets, succeeded in hauling her into slack water. Occasionally a whaler was wrecked; nearly every day and sometimes several times in the day one or more were injured by striking against submerged rocks, and in default of professional boat-builders the officers had to repair the damage themselves. Major-General (then Captain) Burton Forster’s diary contains many references to his labours as a shipwright, and a few are quoted almost at random, to show what “handy men” the officers of the XVIIIth became in the expedition of 1884-85. “Found Sergeant Evans’s boat again broken at a small rapid. Stopped, and put in a plank about nine feet long, as the original one was cracked all that distance.” ... “Got all the ten boats of my Company up rapids by dark and beached them for repairs.” ... “Four-fifths of the keel torn off Corporal ——’s boat, mended her.” The work went on for seven days a-week; there was no rest on Sundays, or even on Christmas day, the entry for which runs—“Divine service for Roman Catholics, then drew boats up main rapids, kept moving, and unloaded in the evening.” In less arduous circumstances the voyage up the Nile would have proved a pleasant experience, for the scenery possesses a weird beauty of its own, wholly unlike that of any other part of the world; the climate is glorious, and the endless series of ruins which line the banks interesting in the extreme. But the officers of the Royal Irish had no time to admire scenery, or to study the archæology of the ancient Egyptians. They had suddenly been turned into fresh-water sailors; they had become jacks-of-all-trades—shipwrights, doctors, dock labourers; they had to maintain discipline, to keep up morale, and to cheer the men when under the strain of unceasing toil even their buoyant spirits for a moment flagged.