the naval brigades (that is, men landed for service
ashore) which have fought alone or with the Army, or with many foreign
armies and navies, all over the world for hundreds of years. Drake, as
we have seen, always used naval brigades, and they have always been the
same keen "first-class fighting men" wherever they went. The only
trouble was in holding them back. At the siege of Tangier in North
Africa in the seventeenth century Admiral Herbert "checked" Captain
Barclay "for suffering too forward and furious an advance, lest they
might fall into an ambush"; whereupon Barclay said, "Sir, I can lead
them on, but the Furies can't call them back." A naval brigade
man-handled the guns on the Plains of Abraham the day of Wolfe's
victory, and took forty-seven up the cliff and into position before the
army had dug itself in for the night. Nelson lost his right arm when
leading a naval brigade at Teneriffe in 1797. Peel's naval brigade in
the Indian Mutiny (1857-9) man-handled two big guns right up against
the wall that kept Lord Clyde's army from joining hands with the
British besieged in Lucknow, blew a hole in it, though it was swarming
with rebels, and so let the Marines and the Highlanders through.

In Egypt (1882) Lord Fisher, of whom we shall soon hear more, rigged up
a train like an ironclad and kept Arabi Pasha at arm's length from
Alexandria, which Lord Alcester's fleet had bombarded and taken.
Lieutenant Rawson literally "steered" Lord Wolseley's army across the
desert by the stars during the night march that ended in the perfect
victory of Tel-el-Kebir. Mortally wounded he simply asked: "Did I lead
them straight, Sir?"

The Egyptian campaigns continued off and on for sixteen years
(1882-1898) till Lord Kitchener beat the Mahdi far south in the wild
Soudan. British sea-power, as it always does, worked the sea lines of
communication over which the army's supplies had to go to the front
from England and elsewhere, and, again as usual, put the army in the
best possible place from which to strike inland. Needless to say, the
naval part of British sea-power not only helped and protected the
mercantile part, which carried the supplies, but helped both in the
fighting and the inland water transport too.

At one time (1885) the little Naval Brigade on the Nile had to be led
by a boatswain, every officer having been killed or wounded. In the
attempt to rescue the saintly and heroic General Gordon from Khartoum,
Lo