"And did Sir Charles Napier fight them in square, sir?" asked Green, who was of an inquiring mind on professional subjects.

"No, he met them in line, and his men had no breech-loaders in those days; not even percussion caps; only the old brown bess with a flint and steel lock, and a good bayonet on the end of her."

"But perhaps the odds were not so great."

"Quite, by all accounts. It is true that the Indians fought with swords and shields, and, after firing their matchlocks, charged home with those weapons. A swordsman requires s.p.a.ce for the swing of his arm, so, however more numerous they may be, they must fight in looser order than soldiers armed with the bayonet, and therefore, at the actual point of meeting, each individual swordsman finds at least two antagonists opposed to him in the front rank alone. Now these Arabs, fighting princ.i.p.ally with spears, can very often come in a much denser ma.s.s. I only give that idea for what it is worth. I think it may make a good deal of difference. The nature of the ground, also, would alter the condition of the contest. But, at any rate, I do not quite see how we should be safe against getting taken in the rear in any other than the square formation."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

TOUCH AND GO!

Tired men cannot go on talking all night, even about the events of an exciting day, and one by one our friends rolled themselves up in their coats and went off to sleep. And how the unfortunates on sentry-go envied them! That was an infliction which Tantalus escaped, but it might well compare with those which have caused his name to be embodied in our language.

To feel that the lives of a number of other people as well as your own depend on your keeping extremely wide awake, when you are dead beat and have to fight against the strongest possible inclination to doze even as you walk about, is really no light trial of fort.i.tude, though it is not reckoned amongst the hardships of campaigning. But if you are within sight of your sleeping comrades, and within hearing of their snores, it becomes doubly exasperating, and might really sour the temper if it were not for the consolatory reflection that another time _you_ will be the happy sleeper, and one of the present performers on the nose will be listening to your efforts to play upon that organ.

It has been whispered that evil men when on sentry have been known to feel a grim delight in an alarm which has dissipated the slumber of their comfortable comrades, but we may surely hope that this is slanderous. However that may be, the slumbers of those who were not kept awake by the pain of wounds or by duty the night after El Teb were not disturbed, and next day the main body, after a guard had been left at the wells, went on to Tokar.

"Do you think they will fight?" asked Green of one of his seniors during a short halt.

"Sure to," replied the other. "You saw for yourself what determined demons they are, and it is not likely that they will give up a place they have only just taken without striking a blow for it."

"Do you think they will fight?" asked Tom Strachan of another, not in the hearing of the first oracle, who had moved away.

"Not they!" responded the second. "After such a licking as they got yesterday all the fight will be taken out of them."

"Which shall we believe, Green?" said Tom presently.

"It is very puzzling," replied the inquiring mind. "Suppose we wait and see before we make up our minds."

"A Daniel come to judgment!" exclaimed Strachan. "A second Daniel! We _will_ wait."

"Hulloa! There's Charley Halton!" as a smart young cavalry officer cantered past with a message, having delivered which he came to exchange greetings with his friends.

One of the most enviable of mortals was Halton, a lad who might be the model for either painter or poet in search of an ideal hero. Handsome, strong, active, acquiring proficiency in all games and athletic exercises almost instinctively, a horseman with the hands of a Chaloner, and the seat of a Land, endowed with a bright intelligence which seized the common sense of things, and comprehended the meaning of an order as well as its literal injunctions, and a happy disposition which made a trouble of nothing, he was a general favourite wherever he went. He was attached as a galloper--or bearer of orders--to the General's staff, but, being employed to take a message the day before to his own regiment, he charged with them, and the officers of the Blankshire who knew him, and witnessed the charge from a distance, were anxious to know for certain what had occurred, the reports which had reached them being too contradictory for reliance.

"Well, Charley, did you eat them all yesterday?"

"Not quite; we have left a few for you. Eat them, by Jove! They were near eating us."

"Why, you seemed to go through them grandly."

"Yes, but it was like going through water, which closes on you as you go. The beggars lay flat, or crouched in holes, and cut at the horses as they pa.s.sed, to hamstring or maim them; and good-bye to the poor fellow whose horse fell! We ought to have had lances, and it would have been a very different tale. But the troopers' swords could not reach the beggars, who are as lithe as monkeys. If they had run it would have been easy to get a cut at them; so it would if they had stood up. But they were as cool as cuc.u.mbers, and dodged just at the right moment. Of course some were not quite so spry as others, and got cut down; it was a case of the survival of the fittest. What acrobats they would be in time if this game lasted long enough!

"But it was like a nightmare. You know when you have a dream that you are trying to kill something which won't die; some beast of the eel persuasion. We went through them, cutting all we knew; re-formed; came back, doing ditto; through them a third time; and _then_ there was no satisfaction worth calling such. The fellows were broken up indeed, and a good lot were sabred, but not so many as there ought to have been after undergoing one cutting up, let alone three. And the scattered individuals still showed fight. And we lost awfully; no wonder, for I will tell you what I saw.

"A man rode at an Arab who fired and missed him, and then seized his spear, with the apparent intention of meeting him as an infantry soldier should, according to c.o.c.ker. But when the horse was two yards from him he fell flat as a harlequin. The trooper leant over on the off side as low as he could and cut at the beggar, but could not reach him, and the moment he was past, the Arab jumped up and thrust his spear through him from behind. I never saw anything done so quickly in all my life; it was like magic.

"There was a clever old soldier who was not to be done that way; when he saw he could not get at his Arab, he slipped off his horse before you could say 'knife,' parried his spear-thrust, ran him through the body, and was up again like a shot. But it was heart-breaking business altogether; you should have seen the horses afterwards, cut about awfully, poor things; and we lost heavily in men too. The Colonel has had the dead Arabs' spears collected, and armed his regiment with them; and if they get another chance, you will see much more satisfactory business, I expect. But I must be off."

And off accordingly he went, his horse seeming pleased and proud to carry and obey him. And on went the brigade also towards Tokar.

Oracle number two proved the correct one; the enemy made no stand at the place, but streamed away at their approach, while the inhabitants came out to greet them with every demonstration of joy and grat.i.tude.

Interpreters were few, and apt to be absorbed by senior officers, but it was gathered afterwards that the Tokarites were denouncing the Mahdi as a false prophet and heretic, whose soldiers had despoiled them of their goods, and only spared their lives on condition of their believing in him, and this condition they had thought it best to pretend to comply with, though their consciences rebuked them sorely for the pretended apostacy.

But though our friends of the First Blankshire could not understand all this, whatever officers of other corps may have done, the pantomime of the men, women, and children was unmistakable, and was only intended to express the most enthusiastic delight.

"I shall never make it out," said Green. "Have we relieved the place after all, then?"

"Cannot say; we shall find out, perhaps in general orders."

"Catch a newspaper correspondent; he will tell you all about it."

"At any rate, the grat.i.tude of the poor people is quite touching."

"Not quite, thank goodness!" cried Fitzgerald; "at any rate so far as I am concerned; though a horrid old woman who cannot have washed for years, and who tainted the air with the rancid fat in her hair for yards round, tried to kiss me. But I dodged round the major's horse, and left her to him. In my humble opinion, we want the square formation quite as much to meet our native friends as our enemies."

Major Elmfoot got away from his demonstrative female, and rode up to the group.

"They seem very fond of us, sir," said Stacy.

"Yes," responded the major. "I wonder whether they went through the same performance when the Mahdi's army arrived."

"But they showed fight, and he took the place by storm, did he not, sir?"

"I really do not know; a spy said so. But the place does not look knocked about at all, and the people seem very jolly. I should not be surprised if the whole thing were a farce, and Tokar had not been besieged or taken at all."

"Then you do not think they are genuine in their welcome, sir?"

"I do not say that; these people have shops of a sort, I believe, and a customer is a customer all the world over."

The troops bivouacked outside Tokar, where nothing further occurred of any interest, and shortly afterwards they tramped back to the wells at El Teb, and so to Trinkitat, where they were re-embarked as quickly as might be, and steamed round to Suakim, which now became the base of operations.

And soon Trinkitat was entirely abandoned, and since no natives lived there (how could they when they had no fresh water?) the place ceased to be a place at all in any rational sense of the word.

You may have heard the old explanation of how a cannon is made: "you take a hole, and pour a lot of melted iron round it." Well, Trinkitat was a hole, and the English store-houses tents, soldiers, horses, camels were poured round it, and when they were withdrawn, nothing but the hole remained. But Suakim was a considerable place, built of coral too, and very interesting in its way to some people. And what was of more consequence, there were many good wells close by, from which water could be obtained all the year round.

Suakim itself, as has been explained before, is built on an island, but the British camp was on the mainland, within the circuit of earthworks which protected the town and harbour. It was on the eighth of March that the First Blankshire were landed at this camp. The look of the houses in the town disappointed some of them now they were closer.

"They don't look like coral at all," said Tom Strachan. "If I had not been told I should have thought they were the ordinary sun-dried brick affairs whitewashed."

"I vote we have a regular inspection of them on the first opportunity,"

said Edwards, "and settle the matter once for all."

"It would be kind to posterity," replied Tom.