The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1898-09-11

ant sickness, by lack Of water and
above all by lack of sleep; for night IN
the desert meant eternal watchfulneSs,
lying under canvas with the fear OF
murder, or lying In the open with one
eye for the enemy.
Yet white men are VIGOROUSLY long
suffering and unflinching, and if Queen
Victoria's white men had been coming
along 1000 strong even Mahmoud Pasha
might have had his doubts. But the
real BritisherS were a handful, not
half a dozen regiments; all the rest
were trumpery Soudanese and Egypt
ians, cravens who stood in awe of the
Dervishes and were bound to give in
at the first scare. If the Mahdis ia
vorite general could ignore his dignity
it is probable that Mahmoud Pasha
snapped his fingers in triumph.
Mahmoud Pasha had forgotten
Tommy Atkins.
The British nom commissioned officer
of Kiplingnesque repute is not noted
for polished behavior, neither is his
yoke easy to bear. The recruit who
falls unto his drilling mercies does not
light on pleasant places nor is his ear
accustomed to sweet language; he
wishes many times day that he had
never been born-so does his drill ser
geant. Yet the day comes when each
is proud of the other and their coun-
try of both; and Tommy Atkins had
decreed that that day should dawn for
the black Egyptian. Undoubtedly ne
was the most unpromiSing product that
had ever been swept into the ranks,
but since he was elected to fight for
The Widow he should become worthy
of his high calling if British oaths and
British energy could accomplish the
feat. And so Tommy Atkins drilled and
swore and execrated and licked into
shape" till at last he foresaw the day
when he should weep with pride over
the doings Of his graceless black re-
cruits.
The day dawned on that morning
when the romance of war in it's trail
ing horror, its untamed ferocfty, its
sublime self-abnegation, swept on to-
ward the mimosa- circled Zariba of At
bara. There were hite-skinned heroes,
with time-honored battle-cries in the
van that day; Warwickshires and men
of Lincoln, Seaforths and CameronS in
their vivid tartans, surged up and on,
their ranks thinning before the deadly
Dervish fire; surged on irresistibly to
the sound of bugle and pipe and the
crash Of artillery, till at length the
mimosa hedge was wrenched asunder
and the pitiless hand-to-hand fight be-
gan. But that which blanched the Der
wish heart was the unforeseen on
slaught Of the blacks, the de-
spised blacks, who thirsted
madly for revenge and who
had learned from Tommy Atkins how
to take it. Their brains afire, their
eyes blood red with rage, reckless of
death, their men dropping at the rate
of one to seven, yet blindly faithful to
their white leaders, they swarmed up
ridge and swooped down bank, carrying
everything before them. 1t was their
maddened, vengeful. black faces that
the Dervishes first saw bursting
through the mimosa hedge; the black
faces that they last saw as they sank
in heaps adown the rivers bed the
black faces that they fled from across
the infamed sand. And when the hour
of battle was over, that awful hour,
forty minutes in duration, which reck-
oned it's dead by thousands, it was the
despised, heroic black who was the
hero of the hour, who looked into his
officers face with radiant, adoring
fealty, while Tommy Atkins wept tears
of joy to think that his drill-swearing
should have produced such results.
Yet was that fateful hour but the
initiatory triumph of Tommy and his