xwell's, embarked in very close order on steamers and giassas for
Wad Habeshi. The distance was about 140 miles by water from Dakhala,
but it took the gunboats and their tows over three days to get there,
for the craft were deeply ladened with men and stores. The soupy
whirling Nile flood washed the decks of the steamers almost from stem
to stern. It was little short of the rarest good fortune there was no
accident by the way. Everybody turned out to see the brigades off.
Merrily stepped the black battalions, their women-folk raising the
usual shrill cry of jubilation, whilst the bands played the favourite
air, "O, dem Golden Slippers." Regimental bands do droll things
occasionally. I remember in the year of the Dongola Campaign and the
cholera visitation, 1896, a grim blunder made by a native battalion's
band. The serious surroundings of those days led me to say nothing of
the matter at that time. Military interments, in cholera cases, were
ordinarily made very early in the morning or late in the afternoon,
just before sunset. A popular native Egyptian officer fell a victim to
the epidemic one afternoon. The sun had but set when the funeral
party, headed by the full regimental band, were seen hastening towards
the cemetery, for there was no time to lose. The tune actually being
played was not the "Dead March in Saul" but "Up I came with my little
lot." When the gunboats started up the Nile for Wad Habeshi, towing
alongside barges and giassas, all the crafts crammed with men and
stores, more than one of the fellaheen battalions were regaled with
the full strains of "'E dunno were 'e are."

By the end of July the Egyptian cavalry--nine squadrons--under Colonel
Broadwood, with the camel corps under Major Tudway, the horse
artillery and one or two batteries, had been ferried across from
Dakhala to the west bank. On the 4th of August the whole of the
mounted force named, about 2000 strong, started to march along the
bank to Wad Habeshi. Going along the bank means, at high Nile, leading
the troops upon a course half to a full mile from the river so as to
avoid creeks and overflows and, at same time, secure the advantage of
moving upon the more open ground beyond the zone of cultivation, out
upon the edge of the bare desert. It was also early in August that the
last of the fourteen double-decked iron barges, designed for the
conveyance of troops, was finished at Dakhala. Except the surplus and
reserve stores everything was pu