'So much for our share of it.
'On the other flank of the works, the Horse Artillery were pouring in shell, till the Royal Irish carried them at the bayonet's point, after a regular hand-to-hand fight, in which Major Hart shot an Egyptian leader, who endeavoured to wrest away his revolver.
'Our troops swept over the batteries on every hand, and the enemy fled as rapidly and hopelessly as those on the other side of the Canal had fled before the Highlanders, whose costume and fury alike terrified them. Arabi, we are told, informed his people that "the Scottish soldiers were only old women;" but now they dub us demons.
'To hear our pipes send up their pæan of victory over the battered and corpse-strewn trenches of Tel-el-Kebir, was to feel for a time that exultation of the soul which is said to be worth a long life of dull and sluggish quiet.
'The Egyptians did not present the least appearance of order, but fled, a demoralised rabble, at the top of their speed, flinging away everything that might impede their flight, and pursued by our cavalry and Horse Artillery, who mowed them down like sheep.
'As one battery swept past the flank of the Black Watch, the gunners brandished their swords and shouted 'Scotland for ever!' and then we knew them to belong to the new division of Scottish Artillery.
'To hear that cry in such a time of supreme triumph was to make one feel what those must have felt, who heard it raised by the Greys at Waterloo and by the Albany Highlanders at Kotah.
'The total casualties of the Highland Brigade are two hundred and twenty of all ranks.
'One of the first we lost was poor Carslogie, the life of the mess. He was shot by a wounded Egyptian, to whom he had just given a mouthful from his water-bottle, and I blew out the miscreant's brains.
'We have also to sorrow for our noble Serjeant-Major, John M'Neill, whose tall and soldier-like figure was long a feature at the head of the column. He cut down several Egyptians with his claymore, but fell at last, pierced by three wounds. He was, we know, the sole support of a widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly attached.