But proud as I was of the Diary, I am not sure that my greatest find was not a wonderful short series entitled "Memoirs of a Soudanese Soldier." It happened that while I was up the Nile I came across an old Soudanese soldier—a lieutenant who had just risen from the ranks, and so avoided having to leave the Soudanese regiment to which he belonged on a rather exiguous pension. The officer in question, Ali Effendi Gifoon, was a typical Soudanese in face and figure. He looked like a large, grave, elderly monkey, but he was as brave as a lion and as courteous, as chivalrous, and as loyal as an Arthurian knight-errant. All the time there was in him a touch of the pathos that belongs to some noble animal. Slavery made him sad just as freedom made him loyal and grateful. I have seen many strange and picturesque people in my time, but of them all AH Effendi Gifoon was the strangest. To begin with, he was a slave-soldier, which seemed to carry one back to Xerxes or some other of the great Babylonian or Persian rulers and their armies. He was caught when a young man high up the Nile by one of the great Arab slave- dealers and raiders of Egypt. The dealer sold him to Mehemet AH the Pasha. He, like most tyrants of Turkish extraction, believed in slave- soldiers if you could get the right breed, and, therefore, he was always ready to buy the right type of man for his Soudanese battalions. In order to keep his ranks full, the dealers caught young Soudanese for him as one might catch young badgers or any other fighting animal "for a gent what wanted them very particular." A village was surrounded, and the children and young men pounced upon, and the rest who were not wanted were either killed or allowed to die of starvation.
His origin was strange enough, but still stranger was a fact which I soon learnt after I made the acquaintance of Gifoon, and travelled up the Nile with him for three days. We sat talking late into the night, on the top deck of the stern-wheeler mail boat, with a British officer acting as interpreter. Gifoon knew only two cities besides Cairo. They were Paris and the City of Mexico, It makes one's head whirl, but it is the truth. It reminds me of a New Zealand patient in our War Hospital. He made from our house his visit to London, and our Sister-in-charge warned him of the dangers and temptations of the metropolis. He assured her that he was all right, for he knew Wollaranga (his native town) and Cairo intimately, and that he was "salted" to the life of great cities.
Gifoon's knowledge of Mexico came about in this way. Napoleon III had no sooner entered upon his Mexican campaign than he found that his French troops died like flies in the piece of swampy country between the coast and the City of Mexico. Yet that fever-haunted track must be held, or communication would have been cut between the French troops on the Mexican plateau and the sea. In his difficulty Napoleon III appealed to his brother tyrant, the Khedive of Egypt. Ismail, wishing to please the Emperor, who could influence the French financiers, from whom he was always borrowing, instantly produced a battalion of Soudanese soldiers who were warranted to stand anything in the way of climate, or, if not, it did not much matter. There would be no complaints if they all died in Mexico, because they would leave nobody behind them with any right to complain. Slaves have no relations. Accordingly the Soudanese were shipped off to Vera Cruz, and there fought for the French. When the war came to an end the remaining Africans were brought back to Paris to grace Napoleon's spectacular effort to get out of his failure. Just as Napoleon gilded the dome of the Invalides when he came home from Russia in order to keep people's tongues off Borodino, so Napoleon III showed a sample of his black contingent on the Boulevards, and awarded Gifoon, the leading black hero, a medal given under the same conditions as the Victoria Cross.
When Gifoon got back to Cairo, one of those strange things happened to him which happen only in Eastern countries. The Khedive made the black man of valour his coachman—partly to show what esteem he had for the French ruler, partly to show how small was any achievement compared with the honour of doing personal service to "Effendina," and partly, perhaps, in order to show off his picturesque hero to stray European visitors, for Ismail on the one side of his head had the instinct of the company-promoter. He liked, as it were, good human copy for his Prospectuses. When, however, Ismail's troubles ending, abdication began and the re-making of the Egyptian Army, the coachman V. C. drifted back to the army and was found there by the British officers who were turning the Soudanese soldiers into some of the best fighting troops in the world.
Captain Machell, who was foremost in the making of the Soudanese, by a lucky accident happened upon Gifoon, saw his worth, made a friend of him, and brought him forward. When I saw Machell in Egypt he not only told me his friend's history, but added that in the leisure of a desert camp he had got Gifoon to write down the story of his life. The old man talked, and the young English soldier, who knew Arabic, or, rather, the broken-down form which Gifoon talked, translated into English, giving the meaning of what was said as clearly as possible, not in literary English but in the straightforward style in which an English officer in the wilds makes out his Reports. For example, when Gifoon talked about regiments, or battalions, or corps, using in his Arabic dialect the nearest word, Machell put down the expression which was most appropriate, such, for example, as "cadre." This fact gave rise to a very curious example of how easily plain people get bemused in matters of style.
It happened that at the time my first number came out, I had a friend at the Reform Club who, as a Civil Engineer, had spent a good deal of time in the 'fifties and 'sixties in the Turkish Empire, and knew, or thought he knew, the East by heart. He was fond of me and greatly interested in my venture in the Cornhill, and also in all I told him about my good luck in getting the memoirs of a genuine Soudanese fighting-man. When I saw him after my new number had come out, I hastened to ask his verdict on the memoirs. I found him very sad and distracted. "Strachey, you have been 'had'—entirely taken in. The memoirs are not genuine. I assure you they are not. They are the most obvious fake. Anyone who has been in the East can see that at a glance." "But," I replied, "I know they are not a fake. I have seen the man myself, and talked with him for hours. I know also that Machell is a perfectly straight man and took down exactly what Ali Effendi Gifoon said. The idea of his trying to take me in is impossible." But he would not be moved. He was certain that the thing was a fake, and said he could convince me. As an infallible proof he pointed to a passage in which Gifoon used the regular military technical language to describe the organization of the troops under the Khedive. For example, the translator made the Soudanese soldier in the British version talk about "military operations," "regimental cadres," "seconded," and so forth." You don't know the Orientals as I do," said the old gentleman over and over again. "They would no more be able to talk like that, Strachey, than you could talk like the Khoran." It was no use for me to point out that nobody suggested for a moment that he used the English words in dispute. How could he? He knew no English. The phrases which were supposed to show the fake were simply Machell's rough-and-ready method of getting through to English readers the ideas that the Soudanese soldier intended to convey. He used some Arabic or Central African phrase which meant "war," or "a body of men," and so forth, and Machell fitted them with the nearest technical phrase at his command. No doubt a more artistic effect would have been produced by using the Arabic word, or finding some primitive Anglo-Saxon equivalent, and then explaining in a note that what was meant was, in fact, a "battalion," "company," or "section." But Machell, not being able to write in what the Americans call the "hath doth" style, boldly used the only language he knew—the language of the Reports, Schedules, and Forms of the British Army. To my mind, and to the mind of anyone with literary instinct, the very fact that made my old friend think the memoirs were a fake made me sure that they were genuine. If Machell had written like Walter Scott, or still more like Kipling, I should have had great doubts as to whether he was not making things up and taking me in. As it was, I felt perfectly happy.
The memoirs, though they never attracted the public attention they deserved, were full of extremely curious and interesting things, and showed, indeed, not only the oriental, but primitive tribesman's mind with a wonderful intimacy. The most curious thing in the memoirs was a prophecy made by a Mohammedan saint. Though I cannot quite expect people of the present generation to realise the full poignancy of this prophecy, I think I can make the chief point clear. The memoirs, which were written down in 1895 and published in 1896, contained the following prophecy:
I remember the great Sayid Hassan el Morghani of Kassala uttering the prophecies which were generally ridiculed then, but which are rapidly being justified as events go on. Sayid Hassan was the father of Sayid Ali el Morghani, who was at Suakin with us, and who is now so greatly respected as the representative of this powerful sect of Moslems.
Sayid Hassan was undoubtedly possessed of second-sight and I implicitly believe him to have been a Ragil Kashif, i.e., a man who could penetrate the mysteries of the future. Wild and improbable as his prophecies must have appeared to most of those who heard them at Kassala, yet his every utterance was received with profound respect, and gradually we saw one after another of his statements borne out by facts.
The burden of the Morghani's prophecies was that evil times were in store for the Soudan. He warned us all "El marah illi towlid me takhodhash" (Take not unto thyself a wife who will bear thee children), for a crisis was looming over the near future of the Soudan, when those who wish to support the Dowlah, or Government, must fly, and they will be lucky if they escape with their lives. Kassala would be laid waste four times, and on the fourth or last occasion the city would begin to live once more.