a small thing, nor a thing that could possibly be done even by
mere power, still less by mere money--and this Kitchener and his
English companions certainly did. There must have been something much
more than a mere cynical severity in "organisation" in the man who did
it. There must be something more than a mere commercial common-sense
in the nation in whose name it was done. It is easy enough, with
sufficient dulness and greed of detail, to "organise" anything or
anybody. It is easy enough to make people obey a bugle (or a factory
hooter) as the Prussian soldiers obey a bugle. But it is no such
trumpet that makes possible the resurrection of the dead.

The success of this second of the three converging designs of
Kitchener, the making of a new Egyptian army, was soon seen in the
expedition against Dongola. It had been foreshadowed in a successful
defence of Suakin, in which Kitchener was wounded; a defence against
Osman Digna, perhaps the first of the Mahdist generals whose own
strongholds were eventually stormed at Gemaizeh; and in the victory at
Toski, where fell the great warrior Wad el Njume, whose strategy had
struck down both Hicks and Gordon. But the turn of the tide was
Dongola. In 1892 General, now Lord Grenfell, who had been Sirdar, or
Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, and ordered the advance at
Toski, retired and left his post vacant. The great public servant
known latterly as Lord Cromer had long had his eye on Kitchener and
the part he had played, even as a young lieutenant, in the new
military formation of the Fellaheen. He was now put at the head of the
whole new army; and the first work that fell to him was leading the
new expedition. In three days after the order was received the force
started at nightfall and marched southward into the night. The detail
is something more than picturesque; for on all accounts of that
formidable attack on the Mahdi's power a quality of darkness rests
like a kind of cloud. It was, for one thing, a surprise attack and a
very secret one, so that the cloud was as practical as a cloak; but it
was also the re-entrance of a territory which an instinct has led the
English to call the Dark Continent even under its blazing noon. There
vast distances alone made a veil like that of darkness, and there the
lives of Gordon and Hicks and hundreds more had been swallowed up in
an ancient silence. Perhaps we cannot guess to-day, after the colder
completion of Kitchener's work, w