02 WITH KITCHENER IN THE SOUDAN Dervishes taken at the battle of Atbara. These were as eager as any to join in the fight against their late comrades.

This was scarcely surprising. The Baggara, the tyrants of the desert, are horsemen. The infantry were for the most part drawn from the conquered tribes. They had enlisted in the Khalifa’s force partly because they had no other means of subsistence, partly from their innate love of fighting. They had, in fact, been little better than slaves; and their condition as soldiers in the Egyptian Army was immeasurably superior to that which they had before occupied.

Broadwood, with nine squadrons of Egyptian cavalry, was already on the western bank of the river opposite Atbara, and was to be joined at Metemmeh by the camel corps and another squadron of horse from Merawi. On the 3rd of August the six Soudanese battalions left Fort Atbara for the point of concentration a few miles below the cataract. To the sides of each gun-boat, were attached two of the steel barges ; behind each were two native craft. All were filled as tightly as they could be crammed with troops. They were packed as in slavers, squatting by the side of each other as closely as sardines in a box. The seven steamers and the craft they took with them contained six thousand men, so crowded that a spectator remarked that planks might have been laid on their heads, and that you could have walked about on them, while another testified that he could not have shoved a walking-stick between them anywhere. White men could not have supported it for an hour, but these blacks and Egyptians had a hundred miles to go, and the steamers could not make more than a knot an hour against the rapid stream, now swollen to its fullest.

While they were leaving, the first four companies of the Eifle Brigade arrived. Every day boats laden with stores went forward, every day white troops came up. Vast as was the quantity of stores sent off, the piles at Atbara did not seem to diminish. Ninety days’ provisions, forage, and necessaries for the whole force had been accumulated there.