The 1st Battalion Of The Seaforth
Highlanders Was Brought From Malta To Egypt, And Held In Immediate
Readiness To Reinforce The Troops At The Front.
Other battalions were sent
to take the places of those moved south, so that the Army of Occupation
was not diminished.
The officer selected for the command of the British brigade was a man
of high character and ability. General Gatacre had already led a brigade
in the Chitral expedition, and, serving under Sir Robert Low and Sir Bindon
Blood had gained so good a reputation that after the storming of the
Malakand Pass and the subsequent action in the plain of Khar it was thought
desirable to transpose his brigade with that of General Kinloch, and send
Gatacre forward to Chitral. From the mountains of the North-West Frontier
the general was ordered to Bombay, and in a stubborn struggle with the
bubonic plague, which was then at its height, he turned his attention from
camps of war to camps of segregation. He left India, leaving behind him
golden opinions, just before the outbreak of the great Frontier rising,
and was appointed to a brigade at Aldershot. Thence we now find him hurried
to the Soudan - a spare, middle-sized man, of great physical strength and
energy, of marked capacity and unquestioned courage, but disturbed by a
restless irritation, to which even the most inordinate activity afforded
little relief, and which often left him the exhausted victim
of his own vitality.
By the end of January a powerful force lay encamped along the river
from Abu Hamed to the Atbara.
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