“Indeed I do. They say that it was a disaster! whereas it was a splendid defence under singularly adverse circumstances! They say that General McNeill permitted himself to be surprised! If he had tried to carry out his instructions to the full extent, it would indeed have been such a surprise that the surprising thing would have been if a single man of us had returned alive to tell the tale—as you and I know full well. The truth is, it was the fault of the Intelligence Department that nearly wrecked us, and it was McNeill’s prudence and our pluck that saved us, and yet these quill-drivers at home—bah!”
The soldier rose in hot indignation and strode from the room.
“He’s a wee thing roosed!” remarked Sutherland, with a good-humoured yet slightly cynical grin. “But guid-nicht to ye, ma man. Keep up hert an’ I’ll come an’ draft yer wull i’ the mornin’.”
So saying the “amytoor” lawyer took his departure, and was soon tramping over the desert sands with a band of his comrades.
They were not, however, permitted to tramp in peace, for their indefatigable foe hung on their skirts and annoyed them the greater part of the way. Toward evening they met the Guards, and as it was too late to return to Suakim the force bivouacked in McNeill’s deserted zereba, surrounded by graves and scarcely buried corpses.
Only those who were there can fully understand what that meant. All round the zereba, and for three miles on the Suakim side of it, the ground was strewn thickly with the graves of Europeans, Indians, and Arabs, and so shallow were these that from each of them there oozed a dark, dreadful stain. To add to the horrors of the scene, portions of mangled and putrefying corpses protruded from many of them—ghastly skulls, from the sockets of which the eyes had been picked by vultures and other obscene birds. Limbs of brave men upon which the hyena had already begun his dreadful work, and half-skeleton hands, with fingers spread and bent as if still clutching the foe in death-agony, protruded above the surface; mixed with these, and unburied, were the putrefying carcases of camels and mules—the whole filling the air with a horrible stench, and the soul with a fearful loathing, which ordinary language is powerless to describe, and the inexperienced imagination cannot conceive.
Oh! it is terrible to think that from the Fall till now man has gone on continually producing and reproducing scenes like this—sometimes, no doubt, unavoidably; but often, too often, because of some trifling error, or insult, on the part of statesmen, or some paltry dispute about a boundary, or, not infrequently, on grounds so shadowy and complex that succeeding historians have found it almost impossible to convey the meaning thereof to the intellects of average men!
Amid these dreadful memorials of the recent fight the party bivouacked!
Next day the troops returned to Suakim, and Sutherland, after breakfast, and what he called a wash-up, went to see his friend Sergeant Hardy, with pen, ink, and paper.
“Weel, serjint, hoo are ye the day?”