191 CHAPTER XXXV CONCLUSION.

SIR HERBERT KITCHENER, with three gunboats, theCamerons, andhalf the 13th Soudanese, returned to Omdurman on September 25th. He found awaiting him there General Sir Francis Grenfell, whohad come up to see Khartoum and confer with the Sirdar on the general situation. There was a great review of the troops remaining at Omdurman warriors a small fort by the river side, with a steamer to keep in touch with other forts along the Nile, is an impregnable citadel that can make a whole district secure. Thus the pacified Soudan can never require a verylarge garrison. Its abandonment in 1885 had been forced upon Egypt and England by a combinati in of circumstances which for the time being in honour of their oldchief, who had led them to victory at Toski, and to whose years of active command the new Egyptian army owed so much.

The Fashoda incident was to give anxious days to the Cabinets of France andEpgland in the next few weeks, but the Sirdar's work upon the Upper Nile was done. The reconquest of the Soudan was practicallycomplete: in 1896, when the word was given to move on to Akasha, even the Government that gave the orderhardly yenmade this temporary retreat a necessity. Egypt, disorganised and all but bankrupt, had no resources for a prolonged struggle upon the Upper Nile. Lord Cromer, then Sir Evelyn Baring, the British Consul-General at Cairo, was mainly responsible for the policy adopted. It is difficult for us now to realise the situation or tojudgeit fairly. But it is well summedup bySir Alfred Milner in his great work on Egypt, publishedin1892. " Sir Evelyn Baring," he wrote, " is a LORD CROMKR. {Photo;J. Heyman,Cairo.)

tured to admit that the reconquest h.id begun. There had been few battles— Ferkeh andHafir in the first year, AbuHamedin the second, theAtbara and Omdurmanin thethird,hadbroken the Dervish power, with less loss of life on the side of the victors than hadbeen paid as the cost of fruitless efforts inour first march up the Nile. In many respects it was an engineer's war,and fittingly it wasdirectedby anengineergeneral. The railway and the steamship had made short the wayinto the heartof Africa. Theyhadcut down weary marches of months to brief journeys of days. They had solved the problem of feeding thousands on the edge of the desert. But besides this, we had reaped in these eventful two and a half years the fruits of long preparation, the results of the long-continued training that had made the Egyptian and the Soudanese ready to follow their European leaders against any odds. And the land thus won could be held at small cost now that Mahdism was dead.

Against even the most reckless of savage man of a decided mind. His view may be right or it may be wrong, but it is always definite, and he is always determined to push it through. In this instance his view was that Egypt could by no possibility retain the Soudan, and that, this being so, her only wise course was to cut it adrift at once and altogether, and keep even man and every shillingthat remained to her for the defence ot her frontier. And the British Government unhesitatingly adopted the advice of its representative. Undoubtedly the decision wasa wise one. In saying that,do not let me be supposed to argue that the possession of the Soudan, or at least a considerable portion of it, is not important,and may not even in the long run be necessary, to Egypt. A hardly-pressed garrison may find it necessary to abandon even the most important outposts in order to preserve its citadel. The fact that Egypt gave up the Soudan, when she simply had not the strength to hold it, is no reason why she should not