"With regard to my doing our long march on foot, it was nothing to me; troops necessarily march slowly, and it is pleasanter and less fatiguing (not to speak of its being a better example) for me to walk all the way. I always had my horse with me, and I constantly had to get on to go to the head of the column, or the tail, to see if all was going right, and this made a nice change."
The distance from Railhead to El Hassa, just short of Berber, was sixty-five to seventy miles, and this journey was accomplished between 10 p.m. on Saturday and 11 p.m. on Tuesday—seventy-three hours. Another fifteen miles on Thursday completed the march to Dabeika.
This concentration had its effect on the enemy, who gave up any idea of attacking the Sirdar on the Nile, and the camp was unmolested for the next three weeks. Some critics have on this account made out that Gatacre overtaxed his troops in bringing them along at an unnecessary pace in such a climate; but surely the measure of the necessity for rapidity lies in the danger which this junction averted rather than in the security which it brought about. Moreover, it was the Sirdar on the spot who decided and gave orders: the General carried them out. At the time he wrote of it as a race between himself and Mahmoud.
CHAPTER XIII
1898
ATBARA AND OMDURMAN
Combined force
All through the winter every movement on the part of the Dervish leaders was carefully watched by the gun-boats on the Nile and the Egyptian cavalry on its banks. The Intelligence Department had a system of espionage by which the feeling inside Omdurman was made known to them. The Sirdar knew that the Khalifa was unwilling to turn out his main army, but that a large force was preparing to move out of Metemma under the combined command of the Emir Mahmoud and the cavalry leader Osman Digna. Before long the Sirdar knew that this force had crossed to Shendy on the right bank of the Nile on February 28, and that on March 13 they had reached Aliab, which is only twenty miles south of Dakila, the Egyptian outpost. But their subsequent designs were not known. It was doubtful whether their scheme was to attack the Sirdar at Dakila, a fort which had recently been built on the right bank of the Nile, where the large tributary stream of the Atbara flows in from the south-east, or to make a dash on Berber and sever the railway communication lower down. Eventually the Dervish leader found himself unable to carry out either of these schemes, the fortress appearing too formidable after the arrival of the British contingent, and Berber proving too remote. He decided therefore to threaten both points, and took up a strong position on the banks of the Atbara, about thirty miles above Dakila, which he fortified and entrenched elaborately, and waited for his foes to take the initiative.