It was made by the South Staffordshire, under the gallant Eyre, with exactly 19 officers and 527 men of the Regiment, and 2 officers and 20 men of the Royal Engineers in 50 boats, having the Staffordshire Knot painted on their bows, the badge of the old '38th.'
The sight was a fine and impressive one; the band was playing merrily in the leading boat, as usual, Scottish and Irish airs, as England, apparently, has none for any martial purpose. Thus it is that Scottish and Irish quicksteps are now ordered by the Horse Guards for nearly all the English regiments, with Highland reels for the Cavalry, and one other air in the 'Queen's Regulations,' with which we bid farewell to the old colours, is 'Auld Lang Syne.'
Steadily the whole battalion moved up stream, cheering joyously—the first away for Khartoum—exhibiting a regularity and power of stroke as they feathered their oars, and showing how much recent practice had done to convert them into able boatmen, and soon the camp was left behind, and the boats had the bare desert on both sides of the stream; but on and on they went, stemming the current of the famous Nile, famous even in the remotest ages, when the Egyptians worshipped the cow, the cat, the ibis, and the crocodile, and when King Amenchat, sixth of the Twelfth Dynasty, cut his huge river-like canal to join Lake M[oe]ris, 250 miles lower down.
On the 29th the Staffordshire boats were off the island of Massawi, where the atmosphere was grilling, being 120 degrees in the shade; but the soldiers were in the highest spirits, their regiment being the leading one of the whole army.
One scorching day followed another, yet on and on they toiled unwearyingly, passing Merawi and Abu Dom amid date-trees and rank, gigantic tropical vegetation, till the New Year's Day of 1885 found them nearing the foot of a cataract, after passing which the River Column was to form for its final advance on Khartoum. Already the uniforms were more than ever ragged, and scarcely a man had boots to his feet.
Roland and Elliot had command of different boats, so they could commune no more, even when they moored for the night by the river's bank, when the crimson sun had set in ruddy splendour beyond the gray hills of the Bayuda Desert, and the dingy yellow of the Nile was touched by the afterglow, in which its waves rippled in purple and silver sheen, while the dark, feathery palms and fronds swayed slowly to and fro in the friendly breeze, and the great pelicans were seen to wade amid the slime and ooze where the hideous crocodiles were dozing.
In some places the boats were rowed between islets which displayed a wondrous tropical wealth of dhurra, sugar-canes, and cotton-trees, with palms innumerable.
Officers and men—even chaplains—worked hard at the oars in their anxiety to get on. For days some never had the oar out of their hands; on others they were hauling the boats over the rapids and up cataracts, where at times they stuck in rocks and sandbanks, and had to be unloaded and lifted bodily off. At times the pulling was awful, and the hot sun scorched the back like fire, while the boats seemed to stand still in places where the main stream forced itself between masses of rock in a downward torrent, forming ugly whirlpools, about which the only certainty was, that whoever fell into them was drowned.
'Pull for your lives,' was then the cry; 'give way, men—give way with a will! Pull, or you'll be down the rapids.'
Then might be seen the men with their helmets off, bare-headed, and braving sunstroke under that merciless sunshine; steaming with perspiration—their teeth set hard—their hearts panting with the awful and, at times, apparently hopeless exertion of pulling against that mighty barrier of downward rolling water against which they seemed to make no head; yet ever and anon the cry went up: