losses of this day were--

_Dorsetshire_.--Nine men killed; Captain Arnold, Lieutenant Hewitt, and
thirty-nine men wounded.

_Gordon Highlanders_.--Lieutenant Lamont and two men killed; Colonel
Mathias, Major Macbean, Captain Uniacke, Lieutenants Dingwall,
Meiklejohn, Craufurd, and thirty-five men wounded.

_Derbyshire_.--Captain Smith and three men killed, eight wounded.

The Victoria Cross was awarded to Lieutenant Pennell, who endeavoured
under fire to bring in Captain Smith; to Piper Findlater, who though
wounded in both legs still continued to blow his pipes; to Private
Lawson for carrying Lieutenant Dingwall out of fire and returning to
bring in another, being himself twice wounded; to Private Vickery and
Colonel Mathias.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

THE RE-CONQUEST OF THE SUDAN--1898.

Once more our attention is directed to the doings of our soldiers in
Egypt. All the toil, all the bloodshed, and all the treasure expended
against Mahdism had been in vain. General Gordon nobly holding out at
Khartoum waiting for the relief which the vacillating and divided
counsels of the British Cabinet had delayed until it was too late, had
been slain, and the inhabitants of Khartoum despoiled and massacred by
the savage followers of the Mahdi. Berber, Dongola, and Tokar had
shared the same fate; and the Anglo-Egyptian army, leaving the Sudan to
its fate, had fallen back to Wady Haifa, at which the southern frontier
of Egypt was fixed, and which became a barrier against which the tide of
Mahdism was to rush in vain. Suakin was also strongly held, and the
Mahdi's forces came no farther south; but the whole of the immense
territory from the Second Cataract to the Equatorial Lakes was overrun
by his fanatic hordes, who carried "fire, the sword, and desolation" far
and wide over that unhappy land. It is not to the British
administrators in Egypt that the blame of all this failure, and of the
purposeless bloodshed of the two expeditions from Suakin, is to be laid,
nor can it be said that after the fall of Khartoum any other course
could have been adopted than to retire for a time; but it is to the
British administrators in Egypt, and not to the Home Government, that
belongs the credit of years of patient perseverance, of restoring the
finances and resources of Egypt, and of instilling so much character
into an oppressed race that at length the poor fallaheen were able to
hold their own against the Sudanese, and to wipe out t