He maintained a carbine fire, while General Stewart, with his personal staff, including Major Wardrop, the Earl of Airlie, and Captains Skene and Rhodes, galloped from point to point, keeping all in readiness to repulse a sudden charge; but, with all their bravery, it was a trial for our Heavy Dragoons to march on foot and fight with infantry rifles and bayonets—weapons to which they were totally unaccustomed.
The keen, yet dreamy sense of imminent peril—the chances of sudden death, with the spasmodic tightness of the chest that emotion sometimes causes, had passed from Malcolm Skene now completely; he 'felt cool as a cucumber,' yet instinct with the fierce desire to close with, to grapple, and to spur among the enemy sabre à la main; and he forgot even the smarting of his wounded bridle hand as the troops moved onward.
A few minutes after ten o'clock, when the leading face of the square had won the crest of a gentle slope on the other side of a hollow, a column of the enemy, about 5,000 strong, was seen echeloned in two long lines on the left, or opposite that face which was formed by the mounted infantry and heavy cavalry, and looking as if they meant to come on now.
They were still marshalled, as stated, by sheikhs and dervishes on horseback, and, with all their banners rustling in the wind, the battle-drums thundering, and their shrill cries of 'Allah! Allah!' loading the air, they advanced quickly, brandishing their flashing spears and two-handed swords. Abu Saleh, Ameer of Metemneh, led the right; Moussa Abu Hagil led the centre; and Mahommed Khuz, Ameer of Berber, who had soon to retire wounded, led the left, and our skirmishers came racing towards the square.
Strange to say, our fire as yet seemed to have little effect upon the foe; very few were falling, and the untouched began to believe that the spells of Osman Digna and the promises of the Mahdi had rendered their bodies shot-proof; and when within three hundred yards of the square they began to rush over the undulating ground like a vast wave of black surf. Now the Gardner gun was brought into action; but when most required, and at a moment full of peril, the wretched Government ammunition failed to act—the cartridges stuck ere the third round was fired; the human waves of Arabs came rolling down upon the square, leaping and yelling over their dead and wounded, never reeling nor wavering under the close sheets of lead that tore through them now.
Like fiends let loose they came surging and swooping on, their burnished weapons flashing, and their black brawny forms standing boldly out in the glow of the sunshine, unchecked by the hailstorm of bullets, spearing the horsemen around the useless Gardner gun, and fighting hand to hand, Abu Saleh and the Sheikh Moussa leading them on, and then it was that the gallant Colonel Burnaby, of the Blues, fell like the hero he was.
The wild and high desire to do something that might win him a name, and make, perhaps, Hester Maule proud of him, welled up in the heart of Malcolm Skene, even at that terrible crisis, and he spurred his horse forward a few paces, just as Burnaby had done, to succour some of the skirmishers, who, borne back by the Arab charge, had failed to reach the protection of the square, which was formed in the grand old British fashion, shoulder to shoulder like a living wall.
By one trenchant, back-handed stroke of his sword, he nearly swept the head off the yelling Arab, thereby saving from the latter's spear a Foot Guardsman, who had stumbled ere he could reach the square; but now Skene was furiously charged by another, who bore the standard of Sheikh Moussa.
Grasping his spear by his bridle hand, he ran his sword fairly through the Arab, who fell backward in a heap over his horse's crupper, and then Skene tore from his dying grip the banner, which was of green silk—the holy colour—edged with red, and bore a verse of the Koran in gold (for it was a gift from the Mahdi), and, regaining the shelter of the square, threw his trophy at the foot of the General.
'This shall go to the Queen—in your name, Captain Skene!' said the latter.