WARS OF THE NINETIES. 158 it. In this instance, however,it is very likely that the Lancers would have charged even if they had known from the first the numbers andposition of the Dervish detachment. They hadridden out looking for something to charge, and they took the first opportunity that offered.

of which they hadbeen organised had their own records ofhard fightingin India,the 2ist as such had neveryet ridden acrossa battlefield. Their standards bore no battle honours, and they were eager to signalise this their first fight with some splendid exploit. They had been for some time in garrison at Cairo, and their colonel had carefully trained them for the warfare of the desert. The 350 men who rode that day in Colonel Martin's four squadrons were as fine a body of horsemen as had ever laid lance in rest. There was something of disappointment for them so far in the share they had had in the long-expected battle. Their part till now had been only a skirmish with carbine fire against the advancing Dervishes. For the cavalry soldier the real fight is the dashing charge. To meet an enemy with the carbine is to descend to the more prosaic level of the infantry soldier. So as theytrotted out from the Sirdar's advancing array and up the death-strewn slope of Jebel Surgham they were looking anxiously for some enemy against whom they could spur with levelledlances.

Colonel Martin decide! to get between the enemy and their line of retreat landwards, so the Lancers moved to the westward of the hollow and formed up in line for the charge.

The first squadron, under the command of Major Finn, was on the right. Then came the second, under Major Fowle. The fourth, under Captain Eadon, was next, and on the extreme left was the third squadron, under Captain Doyne. Colonel Martin rode in front ofthe centreof theregiment. Fromthe nature of the ground the charge was unseen bymost of the Sirdar's army,and even those who saw it from a distance could distinguish little more than the great cloud of dust that rolled up as the Lancers gallopedat the enemy.

The regiment presented a very different appearance from that which we in England associate with our splendidly equipped and brilliantly uniformed Lancer regiments. The men were clad in dull-coloured khaki jackets, with brown belts and dark helmets. They were mounted, not on the powerful weightcarrying troop-horses they ride in England, but on wiry little Arabs that a horseman heie at home would perhaps class as big ponies. But though the charge had thus little of " the pomp and circumstance of war," it was an exploit which, so far as the hard fighting went, any cavalry in the world might be proud of. There is no need to discuss here the question whether there was any real reason for the exploit to be performed, looking at the matter from the standpoint of the military critic. Probably the enemy could have been turned out of their sheltering hollow at the cost of a few shells from the artillery or the gunboats and the one British cavalry regiment on the ground kept intact for the pursuit. But such reasonings after the event, even if they are well founded, imply no discredit to the soldier in th who, with only a moment in which to decide, takes the bolder course. And the cavalry Passinground to the south-east of the hill,the Lancers saw a number of scattered Dervishes retiringlandward. Some of thesehalted to take a parting shot at them, but no one was hit by this randomfiring. About half a mile south of the ridge, the scouts who were out in front galloped back and reported that some of the enemy, about two hundred, were hiding in a hollow that ran down to the river. Beyond the hollow could be seen some thirty Dervish horsemen. The impression conveyed by this report, and by what could be seen from the ground the regiment occupied, was that a small party of the enemy who had taken part in the attack on the camp and were demoralised by the failure were waiting for a chance to escape. Mr. Frederic Villiers, who saw the battle from the upper deck of the gunboat Mclik,says that the Dervishes at this points had not as yet taken any share in the fight. " Since the beginning of the battle," he writes, "I had noticed about 1,500 Dervish rifle and swordsmen lying perdu in a depression of the ground, who had not as yet been in action." The Emir Mahmoud, when he heard the story of the Lancers' charge in his prison at Haifa, said it was an old stratagem of Soudanese warfare to thus hide away a body of menin a khor andlureanenemy tothe attack by showing a few more on its edges or beyond leader is, above all others, apt, when he S his enemybefore him, to reason like the poi hero— " There may be rules. For me, Iknow but To dash upon my enemy and win."