336 KHARTOUM CAMPAIGN.

had been killed. There was practically no mention of the wounded. . . . How, then, was it that no wounded were accounted for at the Atbara?” Again he writes: —‘ But I cannot help thinking that if the killing of the wounded had been sternly repressed. at Tel-el-Kebir and during the earlier Soudan campaigns, our dervish enemies would have learned to expect civilised treatment,” etc. Gaining courage, probably from his own audacity, Mr Bennett had the hardihood to virtually declare that the cruelties permitted by British officers made the dervishes what they were.

Now, I went through the 1882 war in Egypt as well as most of the campaigns in the Soudan. [am therefore in a better position than he to declare, that his allegations are a perversion of the truth. It was neither the practice at Tel-el-Kebir nor subsequent thereto for British led troops to kill wounded men. The insinuation that they did so, or connived at such slaughter, is a stupid or a malicious falsehood. In every battle within the period referred to, large numbers of wounded and unwounded prisoners were taken, and invariably great lenience was shown. Surgical treatment also was, whenever possible, always promptly rendered.

Indeed, they were in countless cases treated as tenderly as our own wounded. This further: in action there are no soldiers less prone to needless blood-spilling, or men readier to forgive and forget, than ‘ Tommy Atkins.” Official returns exist setting at rest the fiction about Tel-el-Kebir and the Soudan battles. At Telel-Kebir many thousand prisoners were made, and in other engagements our hands were always full of dervish