Nor Were The Lives Thus Lost To Be Altogether
Measured By The Number.
[The attacks and deaths from cholera in the
Dongola Expeditionary Force were as follow:
British troops - 24 attacks,
19 deaths; Native troops - 406 attacks, 260 deaths; Followers - 788
attacks, 640 deaths.] To all, the time was one of trial, almost of terror.
The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks
of disease appal the boldest. Death moved continually about the ranks of
the army - not the death they had been trained to meet unflinchingly,
the death in high enthusiasm and the pride of life, with all the world to
weep or cheer; but a silent, unnoticed, almost ignominious summons,
scarcely less sudden and far more painful than the bullet or the sword-cut.
The Egyptians, in spite of their fatalistic creed, manifested profound
depression. The English soldiers were moody and ill-tempered. Even the
light-hearted Soudanese lost their spirits; their merry grins were seen no
longer; their laughter and their drums were stilled. Only the British
officers preserved a stony cheerfulness, and ceaselessly endeavoured by
energy and example to sustain the courage of their men. Yet they suffered
most of all. Their education had developed their imaginations; and
imagination, elsewhere a priceless gift, is amid such circumstances a
dangerous burden.
It was, indeed, a time of sore trouble. To find the servant dead in
the camp kitchen; to catch a hurried glimpse of blanketed shapes hustled
quickly to the desert on a stretcher; to hold the lantern over the grave
into which a friend or comrade - alive and well six hours before - was
hastily lowered, even though it was still night; and through it all
to work incessantly at pressure in the solid, roaring heat, with a mind
ever on the watch for the earliest of the fatal symptoms and a thirst that
could only be quenched by drinking of the deadly and contaminated Nile:
all these things combined to produce an experience which those who endured
are unwilling to remember, but unlikely to forget.
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