CHAPTER III.
KASHGATE—A RETROSPECT.
It was pretty clear, on the whole, to Hester, that her cousin, Roland Lindsay, thought but little of the past, and perhaps, as a general rule, cared for it even less. While she had been living on the memory of these dear days, especially since this—his last return home—he had allowed other events to obliterate it from his mind.
Let us take a little retrospect.
In contrast to the apparently languid and blasé smoker, swinging in his net hammock, enjoying the balmy evening breeze by the wooded Esk, and dallying with a girl of more than ordinary loveliness, let us imagine him in a dusty and blood-stained tunic, with a battered tropical helmet, a beard unshaven for many a day, haggard in visage, wild-eyed and full of soldierly enthusiasm, one of the leading actors in a scene like the following, at the fatal and most disastrous battle of Kashgate.
It was the evening of the 3rd November in an arid waste of the Soudan—sand, sand everywhere—not a well to yield a drop of brackish water, not a tree to give the slightest shade. The heat was awful, beyond all parallel and all European conception, well-nigh beyond endurance, and the doomed soldiers of General Hicks—known as Hicks Pasha—a veteran of the famous old Bombay Fusiliers who had served at Magdala, and to whose staff Roland Lindsay, then a subaltern, was attached, toiled on, over the dry and arid desert steppe that lies between El Duem and El Obeid, in search of the troops of the ubiquitous Mahdi—the gallant Hicks and his few British officers training their loosely and hastily constituted Egyptian army to operations in the field, even while advancing against one, said to be three hundred thousand strong—doubtless an Oriental exaggeration—but strong enough nevertheless, as the event proved, to sweep their miserable soldiers off the face of the earth, in that battle, the details of which will never be known till the Last Day, as only one or two escaped.
Like Colonel Farquhar of the Guards, Majors Warren, Martin and other British officers, Roland Lindsay, by his personal example, had done all that in him lay to cheer the weak-limbed and faint-hearted Egyptian soldiers, whose almost sable visages were now gaunt and hollow, and whose white tunics and scarlet tarbooshes were tattered and worn by their long and toilsome march through the terrible country westward of the White Nile—a vast steppe covered with low thorny trees, purple mimosa, gum bushes, and spiky grass, till the sad, solemn, and desert waste was reached near Kashgate, where all—save one or two—were to find their graves!
Mounted on a splendid Arab, whose rider he had slain in the battle of the 29th of April, Roland Lindsay led one face of the hollow square in which the troops marched, and in which formation they fought for three days, with baggage, sick and wounded in the centre, Krupp and Nordenfeldt guns in the angles, against a dark and surging human sea of frantic Dervishes, wild Bedouins, and equally wild and savage Mohammedans and Mulattoes, shrieking, yelling, armed with ponderous swords and deadly spears that flashed like thousands of mirrors in the sunshine.
The Dervishes came on, the foremost and most fearless, sent by the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, who had declared that they must vanquish all, as they had the aid of Heaven, of the Prophet and his legions of unseen angels, as at the battle of Bedr, when he conquered the Koreish.
Wild and desperate was the prolonged fighting, the Egyptians knowing that no mercy would be accorded to them, and fearful was the slaughter, till the sand was soaked with blood—till the worn-out square was utterly broken, its living walls dashed to pieces, and hurled against each other under the feet of the victorious Mahdists.
In vain did young Lindsay, like other Britons who followed Hicks, endeavour to make some of their men front about; calling on them, sword and revolver in hand, as they flung themselves on the sand now in despair, face downwards, and perished miserably under sword and spear, or fled in abject and uncontrollable terror; but in the end he found himself abandoned, and had to hack his way out of the press through a forest of weapons till he reached the side of General Hicks, who was making a last and desperate charge at the head of his staff alone!