After this Egypt began to advance; Sarras, beyond Wady Haifa, was reoccupied, and a railway laid between the two places. In February 1891 Colonel Holled Smith, commanding the Egyptian garrison at Suakin, marched out against Osman Digna’s men with only Egyptian and Sudanese troops, and defeated them after a good fight and occupied Tokar. In this action Captain Barrow was killed, and of the enemy a large number of Emirs; but Osman as usual got away. The effect of this battle was to clear away the dervishes from the Eastern Sudan and re-establish Egyptian government there.
In 1892 the dervishes again gave trouble both on the Nile and in the Eastern Sudan, and there were many skirmishes. A serious attempt was made in January 1893 to cut the railway between Wady Haifa and Sarras, but without success; in the fight Captain Pyne, commanding the Egyptian force, was killed. Osman Digna again turned up near Suakin, but had no success except in his usual flight.
In this year Sir Horatio Kitchener, who had had a long experience both of Egypt and the Sudan, having been on active service in one or the other since 1882, became Sirdar in succession to Sir F. Grenfell, who was appointed to the command of the British forces in Egypt, and he set himself to the task of the re-conquest of the Sudan. He had not the British tax-payer to draw upon, but the very meagre Egyptian Treasury, and he had therefore to work with very limited means. His plan was not to raise a costly army for the purpose of winning victories glorious but fruitless, slaughtering Arabs by the thousand and then retiring till they gathered head and then slaughtering more, after the manner of the peace-loving Government of 1885, but to make sure of each stage of his progress as he went along, driving back the Mahdi and bringing confidence and commerce in his train, never retiring from ground once occupied, but never advancing till his course was clear; and his chief instrument for effecting his purpose was, as it will be seen, the railway.
The Advance to Dongola.
During all these years, as has been said, the Egyptian army was in the making; and in 1896 it was decided to put it to the test, and to make an advance on Dongola. On March 21st the Sirdar left Cairo for Wady Haifa, taking with him a British regiment, the 1st Staffordshire, to join the Egyptians already at the front; Indian troops having taken the place of the Egyptian garrisons of Tokar and Suakin. Meantime, railway making had been pushed on apace, and the line reached Kosheh, a distance of 76 miles, by the end of April; but rapid as this was, it was as nothing to the achievements of the following year. On June 7th a considerable force of dervishes was attacked and utterly defeated by the Egyptian army, whose conduct delighted their officers and gave them all confidence in the future. A further advance was made in September, and Dongola was occupied. The campaign had been entirely successful, the character of the Egyptian soldiery was established, the fertile province of Dongola rescued from the devastating rule of the Khalifa, and the frontier pushed back as far as Mirawi and Abu Dis,—the steamboats could pass to this point up the Nile, and thus a great step was taken upon the road to Khartoum.
The Sirdar now conceived, and at once began to carry out, the bold idea of laying a railway from Wady Haifa across the desert to Abu Hamed, and thence to Berber and to Dakhala, and the junction of the Nile and the Atbara, a distance of nearly 400 miles. A bold idea indeed, for not only had every rail and every sleeper to be brought up to Wady Haifa, and thence along the rail itself as it disappeared into the trackless desert, but every mile the railway advanced the work was getting farther away from its base and penetrating deeper into the enemy’s country, for at this time Abu Hamed was still held by the dervishes. Water was bored for and actually found along the route; and before the line arrived there Abu Hamed had been captured, and by the end of the year the railway reached the Nile again, at a point 234 miles from Haifa, and above the Third Cataract. General Hunter, after a sharp fight in which Major Sidney and Lieutenant Fitzclarence were killed, had seized Abu Hamed; and by the end of the campaign, Dongola, Debbet, Khorti, and Berber were held by Egypt, while the Nile was patrolled even up to Metammeh by the six steamers which, despite all difficulties, had been passed over the cataracts.
The railway making did not pause at Abu Hamed, but at once set out towards the junction of the Atbara with the Nile, a point 150 miles farther, and just south of the Fifth Cataract; the object being not only to provide for the rapid transport of provisions and stores, but also to get on to the Nile the three new steamers which had been brought from England in sections, so that they might be ready for the final advance.
The Atbara Campaign.
At the beginning of 1897 the Sirdar’s force at the front was in four brigades, three Egyptian and one British. The Egyptian division of three brigades was under Major-General Hunter; the first brigade, three regiments of black hoofs, Sudanese, and splendid soldiers, and one of Egyptian, was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel H.A. Macdonald, and quartered at Berber. The second brigade, also consisting of three Sudanese and one Egyptian regiment, and under the command of Lieutenant—Colonel Maxwell, was about half-way between Berber and the Atbara River; while the third brigade, under Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis, consisting entirely of Egyptians, was at the Atbara. The British brigade, commanded by Major-General Gatacre, had its camp about a mile away from the second brigade, and consisted of the 1st Lincolnshire, Colonel Verner; the 1st Cameron Highlanders, Colonel Money; 1st Warwickshire, under Lieutenant-Colonel Onagle Jones, and was afterwards joined by the 1st Seaforth Highlanders, Colonel Murray. The whole force in the field, exclusive of the railway battalion and the crews of the gunboats, but including four batteries of artillery under Lieutenant-Colonel Long and eight squadrons of Egyptian cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel Broadwood, amounted to about 14,000 men.
About the end of February it was known that Mahmoud was concentrating at Shendy, and preparing to make an attack upon Berber, which being held only by Egyptian troops he hoped to capture before the Sirdar could come to its relief. Nor was this by any means an impracticable plan, for Mahmoud’s force consisted of some 20,000 horse and foot, with ample supplies of arms and ammunition, guns, and transport animals; but Mahmoud reckoned without the Sirdar.