Looking Back

by Sir Seymour John Fortescue

Two of the officers who did such good work all through that night I still occasionally meet. One was Captain Wenjy Jones, a fine horseman and a well-known owner of race-horses, and the other, then Lieutenant Sinclair, having retired from the Army and adopted a political career, after commencing as Assistant Private Secretary to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, is now Lord Pentland. He has, in his time, occupied several important posts, and has lately returned to England after serving his country for seven years as Governor of Madras.

It was not until we had nearly reached Gibraltar that the gale abated, and we were able to settle down in comparative comfort and take stock of our surroundings. When the weather was fine enough our precious horses were walked up inclined platforms to the upper deck, where they could get some light and air, and where, moreover, the men had room to groom them. They certainly needed strapping, for, having left Ireland as hairy as polar bears, and been suddenly translated into a warm climate, they literally shed their coats in handfuls.

On arriving at Port Said, I was set one of the most disagreeable tasks that ever came my way. Owing to the ridiculous fuss that had been made about the embarkation at Kingstown, the War Office Authorities were seized with one of their occasional spasmodic fits of virtue, and suddenly found it necessary to hold an inquiry into the conduct of the two Lieutenant-Colonels of the regiment; one having been left behind with one wing, while the other was commanding the portion ordered on active service. I received a telegram from the Admiralty ordering me to land the Lieutenant-Colonel in command, so I found myself in the position of having to go to a man who was old enough to be my father, much my superior in rank, and who had actually served in the Crimea, and tell him that he was to leave the ship. Whatever may have been his merits or demerits, it always seemed to me that he was treated with the grossest discourtesy by the Authorities, in his position of an officer commanding the wing of a regiment ordered on active service, and on the eve of taking the Field. Naturally, I had to obey orders, and landed he was, but I have always wondered whether he was not wrong to take such an order from a junior officer belonging to another service, and whether he would not have been wiser to ignore such an irregular communication altogether, and to have gone to Souakim with the troops under his orders.

A few days afterwards the Lydian Monarch arrived at Souakim and the regiment disembarked, and a very fine show they made. The officers and men were, of course, delighted to be quit of the ship, and to be on active service, and the horses, thanks to the fact that we had been able to move them about, were in wonderful condition, considering that they had been cooped up on board for the major part of three weeks.

Having now arrived safely at Souakim and delivered the goods entrusted to my charge in the shape of the regiment, it may be convenient to say something of that almost forgotten campaign, the Souakim Expedition of 1885. The more it is considered in the cold light of history, or from what remains in the memory of a spectator and humble participant, the more absolutely am I convinced that, to use a modern expression, the whole Expedition was designed to be nothing but political “eye-wash.” The fact is the public were extremely indignant at the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon. Their indignation was considerably, if illogically, accentuated by the harmless fact that the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone, had gone to the theatre the very night the news of Gordon’s death was received. Lord Salisbury, in the course of a debate on the announcement that the Government had decided to break the power of the Mahdi, had stated, what certainly looked to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth,—namely, “that Gordon had been sacrificed to the squabbles of a Cabinet and the necessities of Party Politics.” And what probably decided the dispatch of the Expedition, more than anything else, was the fact that a few days afterwards the Government only escaped defeat on a vote of censure on the Soudan policy, moved by Sir Stafford Northcote, by the narrow margin of fourteen votes. Altogether, things were not going at all happily for the Government, and so “eye-wash” of some kind was absolutely necessary, and I believe that those of us who were left till the last, save for the troops that remained to garrison the town of Souakim, one and all realised that nothing had ever been intended, and that all our labour and hardship had been only to keep a tottering Government in power for a little while longer. It is easy to show that nothing was intended, for exactly twelve months before, in March 1884, the hot weather had compelled the withdrawal of the troops from Souakim, although the route to Berber was then open; yet the Authorities were commencing an Expedition and sending troops from England at exactly the same time of the year at which they had brought a half-finished campaign to a close, with troops on the spot, only one year before! Of course, if, in the course of the fighting that would be sure to take place round about Souakim, Osman Digna’s men could be badly beaten and Osman himself captured, then they might reasonably assume that the Expedition had not been in vain, but it was pretty well known that Osman was an extremely elusive person, and anything but a likely captive. But enough has been said of the political emergencies of the moment and the sordid details connected with them. A British Army just taking the Field forms a far purer and more attractive spectacle.

As soon as the various transport officers arrived with the troops that had been put under their charge, they were employed entirely in duties connected with the port. We were about eight all told, under the orders of Captain Fellowes, Principal Naval Transport Officer, Commodore More Molyneux being the Senior Naval Officer who was in command of a squadron of small ships mainly drawn from the East Indian Station. We slept and messed on board a British India boat that had brought troops from India and had been reserved for the purpose, but except for a certain amount of sleep and extremely regular meals, we were never on board her. Captain Fellowes, and his Second in Command, Commander Morrison, who had commanded the Helicon at Alexandria and had been promoted, directed our labours. Two of the lieutenants did the work of harbour masters and brought the transports in and out of the coral reefs that formed the passage into the little harbour of Souakim. Their work was never-ending, from the time the sun was well up until shortly before nightfall. Even they, with all their skill and experience, could not take ships in and out when the sun was low, for the conning of the ships had to be done entirely by eye, and when a low sun was glimmering on the water it became impossible to see the edges of the reef; and on the rare occasions when, owing to the great pressure of work, it was necessary to go on when the sun was setting, we were almost invariably faced with a ship ashore on the reef, and a long day’s work with tugs would ensue, to grind her off.

The rest of us were in charge of gangs of natives who did the work of unloading stores and of landing all sorts of transport animals, from camels to the little Indian bullocks that had been sent for the Indian transport. We toiled from sunrise to sunset under a blazing sun, and it was certainly a strenuous life. Nevertheless, I personally enjoyed my time immensely up to the moment when it began to dawn upon me that the whole Expedition was an imposture, and that the more stuff we landed the more we should have to re-embark again. The gang of which I usually had charge consisted of Egyptian prisoners, who were daily marched down to their work by an armed party of Turkish soldiers. I used to love the procedure of the armed guard. Being practical men and also remarkably lazy ones, the men of the guard invariably made the prisoners carry their rifles!

Shortly after our arrival I succeeded in annexing a stray pony which I found wandering about the beach, apparently belonging to no one in particular. At the same time I secured the services of a beach-comber in the shape of a retired soldier, also found on the beach, and him I made my groom. There was any amount of forage littered about, so with a pony tethered to my tent and a man to look after him, I could always, when there was a spare moment, ride out to the lines and see what was going on.

On the 20th March, a very few days after we arrived at Souakim, General Sir Gerald Graham, who was Commander-in-Chief, ordered a reconnaissance on Hashin to be made in force, Hashin being a collection of huts about seven and a half miles from Souakim. I managed to get a day’s leave and rode out with my friends of the 5th Lancers, but as my pony was not capable of keeping up with the big English horses of the Lancers, I left them after a short time and attached myself to the Guards’ Brigade, amongst whose officers I had various friends. Inside the Guards’ square I found General Lord Abinger, who had commanded a battalion of the Scots Fusilier Guards in the Crimea; he had contrived to come out to Souakim, and had ridden out to be with his old regiment. Another friend of mine in that square, as a spectator, was Lieutenant Alfred Paget, who was serving on board a gun-vessel in the harbour. He, like myself, had got a day’s leave to go out and see the fun, and had attached himself to the Scots Guards, in which regiment his brother, now General Sir Arthur Paget, was serving. At one time it looked as if there was going to be a real action, for some 150 Soudanese, with the greatest gallantry, charged the Guards’ Brigade. Naturally, the fire with which they were received was more than they could stand, and those who were not shot down bolted and fled. It seemed to the spectator that the action was somewhat futile, for though some zeriba posts were established, the works were dismantled again, the place was abandoned a few days afterwards, and, as far as the day was concerned, the force having marched some seven miles out were marched back again, and we reached our base about six in the evening.

There were a certain number of casualties from what I judged to be long-range rifle fire, and, packed as the square was with transport, it presented a wonderful target even to very inferior marksmen. As Lord Abinger remarked at the time: “he had often heard of men shooting so badly that they could not hit a haystack, but nobody could miss a farm-yard.”