WARS OF THE NINETIES. 154 two were temporarily abandoned, the gunners carrying off with them the breech blocks and other gear, so that the pieces were useless to the enemy. Caught between the river and the overwhelming mass ofDervishes, separated from the camp on the one hand and the cavalry on the other, the camel corps were for the moment in dire straits. About sixty of them had alreadyfallen,killedorbadly wounded,when rescue arrived, the Melik and two other gunboatssteaming up to close quarters and sending a shower of bursting shells from their quickfirers and a hail of bullets from their Maxims into the Mahdist ranks. Osman withdrew his force from the neighbourhood of the river, leaving great heaps of dead to mark the spot where he had been caught by the gunboats. The camelcorps,marching along theNile bank underthe protection of the flotilla,rodeinto the north end of the camp and formed up behind the right flank of MacDonald's brigade.

CorporalMackenzie,of the SeaforthHighlanders, wounded in the leg by a ricochetting bullet. He had the wound dressed, and promptly returned to his place in the firing line. The next casualty was in the Lincolns, a soldier being shot dead as he fired his rifle. The zereba hedgein front of the British part of the line was never of any real use during the battle, for the Dervishes nevergot near enough for it to serve as an obstacle. It is essentially a defence for a bivouac at night, and on this occasion it would have been better if it had been pulled away in the early morning. It was so high that the men had often to stand to fire over it, thus making the aim less steady and exposing the soldier more completely, for a zereba does not stop bullets. The Soudanese and Egyptian regiments were much better off in their shelter trenches. Shallow as they were, they afforded good cover to a kneelingline and very complete protectiontomenlying down,and both positions meana steadieraim for the firingline. While this was happening, Colonel Broadwood, with the cavalry and the four guns of the horse battery,had got safely away to the northward, fighting all the while with a mass of Dervishes, part of Osman's force. The guns were more than once brought into action; the cavalry acted sometimes with carbine fire dismounted, sometimes charged the overdaring Dervishhorse that ventured to press them too closely. Soon the pressure on his force diminished as the main body of the pursuers fellback. Then he turned, and, marching along the Nile, workedhis way back towards the main battlefield. His troopers had behaved splendidly. They had followedtheir officers as readily as if they hadbeen engagedina field day, instead of in a fight on difficult ground, with an overwhelming force of desperately daring enemies. There were many individual deeds of heroism performed by the Egyptian troopers in helping officers and men who had been wounded, or whose horses had been killed. Broadwood's fight had a useful result on the general fortunes of the day, for at a critical moment it had ■diverted at least ten thousand of the Khalifa's best troops from the attack on the camp.

For five or ten minutes the Dervish fire was heavy. There are said to have been at least ten thousand riflemen engaged in this first onslaught upon the camp, and the marvel is that they did so little damage. For the Dervish cavalry and spearmenthere was no hope but in getting to close quarters with the defenders of the camp, and they pressed on recklessly, wave upon wave, mostly to fall as they came up to the deadly 500 yards' range, or to limp back disabled by Metford orMartini bullet. But the riflemen found somelittle shelter here andthere behind the undulations of the desert ground, and lying down they kept up a sharp fire in comparativesecurity. Some of themestablished themselves within 400 yards of the British zereba hedge,and at that range their Remingtons were effective enough. There were some fifty or sixty casualties in the British portion of the line alone. Captain Caldecott,of the Warwicks, was shot through the head, and diedin the hospital an hour later. Captain Bagot, of the Grenadiers, and Captain de Rougemont,of the Artillery, were wounded. Colonel Rhodes, the Times correspondent, fell badly wounded with a bullet in the shoulder. The veteran Charles Williams, of the Daih Chronicle,had a narrow escape,a Dervish bullet cutting his face just below the temple, his third experience of being hit in action. The officers and men of the Army Medical Corps suffered severely. Lieutenant-Colonel Sloggett, oneof the English surgeons, was badly wounded by a bullet. One Letus now turn to what was being done on the main battlefield. When the Dervish right and centre attacks had advanced to about 800 yards, their fire began to take effect here and there in the ranks of the Sirdar's army, the mass of riflemen on Jebel Surgham, who fired over theheads of theadvancing spearmenandcavalry, doing the most damage. The first man hit was