167 CHAPTER XXX.

OMDURMAN AT LAST.

ONCE more the order was given to form up facing south for the march into Omdurman. Broadwood's cavalry covered the right of the advance and the gunboats the left, and, thus protected, the Sirdar's army moved across the battlefield, strewn as it was with some 20,000 dead and wounded Dervishes. The loss of the victors didnot amount to 500 men. The enormous disparity between the losses in the contending armies was the result of the conditions under which they had fought. Modern weapons had been used with deadliest effect by trained men against the reckless rush of fanatics, whose advance in dense masses exposed them to the full destructive energy of bullet and shell. Modern military history has no similar record of toss of life on the battlefield. Nor is it likely that it will ever be repeated. Doubtless even larger armies willmeet in action with the same deadly weaponsin the wars of comingyears,but '.t is not likely that we shall again see the same desperate tartics, the same heroic contempt of death, thatlaunchedtheKhalifa's50,000 warriors on their wildcharges against the Sirdar's battle line.

Ferkeh when Hammuda was killed, buthe had escaped from the rout tofight again at the battle of the Atbara. Here, at last, he had fallen, shot down in the last fight under the black banner, after coming unscathed out of the storm of fire that swept away the first Dervish attack. As Slatin approached,Osman, raising himself up, called on the Pasha to kill him at once. It is the custom of tribal warfareamongthe Arabs of the Soudan for the defeated chief to submit to death at thehandsof thevictor,andtodo so with a real or affected air of contempt for even the chance of life. But Slatin had come to seeif he could in any way help his former foe. Osman was so badly wounded that he did not live many minutes. Then Slatin turned to another wounded Dervish, and was actually giving him a drink out of his water-bottle, when a dying fanatic fired on the Pasha at close quarters, happily missing him. Of course, the aggressor was instantly dispatched by the soldiers standingby.

This was not the only case in which the Dervishes whostrewedthe battlefieldattempted to take the life of British or Egyptian officers and soldiers, and the inevitable result was that as the troops crossed the ground any sign of aggressive action by the enemy's wounded was answered immediately with bullet or bayonet. The Soudanese soldiers are, unfortunately,more inclined to dispatch a wounded Dervish than to helphim,andit is not always possible to prevent them from giving way to their old savage impulse 'o "make sure" of even a completely disabled enemy. Thus in theadvance a number of the Dervish wounded were dispatched. But in most cases it was a grim necessity of war. There was at times quite a patter of fire from the enemy's wounded riflemen, and in selfdefence they had to be fired on in return. But in the vast majority of cases wounded menand fugitives whoshowed no sign ofhostility, or who asked for quarter, were perfectly safe. As the army marched on to Omdurman there was quite a crowd of Dervish stragglers, wounded and unwounded, streaming on before them, and in OfthosewhorodebesideSirHerbertKitchener when the Khalifa's black banner went down before the charge of Hickman's battalion,Slatin Pasha must have been the man of all others for whomit wasa day of triumph. It waslittle more than three years since the anxious night of February 20th, 1895, when he had ridden in the darknessnorthward across that very ground, escaping fromOmdurman. He had come back with a victorious army, and the Khalifa, whose slave he had been for so many miserable years, was fleeing for his life. Among the dead and dying on the hill side Slatin recognised the Dongolawi Emir, Osman Azrak, and dismounted to speak to him. Osman was one of the veterans of Mahdism. He had led a division at Toski in 1889. For years after hehad been the organiser, and often the leader, of the murderous raids on the frontier villages along the Nile; he had been in command at