The officers
robbed the soldiers of their rations.
The sentries slumbered at their
posts. The townspeople bewailed their misfortunes, and all ranks and
classes intrigued with the enemy in the hope of securing safety when the
town should fall. Frequent efforts were made to stir up the inhabitants
or sap their confidence. Spies of all kinds pervaded the town.
The Egyptian Pashas, despairing, meditated treason. Once an attempt was
made to fire the magazine. Once no less than eighty thousand ardebs of
grain was stolen from the arsenal. From time to time the restless and
ceaseless activity of the commander might discover some plot and arrest
the conspirators; or, checking some account, might detect some robbery;
but he was fully aware that what he found out was scarcely a tithe of
what he could not hope to know. The Egyptian officers were untrustworthy.
Yet he had to trust them. The inhabitants were thoroughly broken by war,
and many were disloyal. He had to feed and inspirit them. The town itself
was scarcely defensible. It must be defended to the end. From the flat
roof of his palace his telescope commanded a view of the forts and lines.
Here he would spend the greater part of each day, scrutinising the
defences and the surrounding country with his powerful glass. When he
observed that the sentries on the forts had left their posts, he would
send over to have them flogged and their superiors punished. When his
'penny steamers' engaged the Dervish batteries he would watch, 'on
tenter-hooks,' a combat which might be fatal to the defence, but which,
since he could not direct it, must be left to officers by turns timid and
reckless: and in the dark hours of the night he could not even watch.
The Journals, the only receptacle of his confidences, display the
bitterness of his sufferings no less than the greatness of his character.
'There is no contagion,' he writes, 'equal to that of fear. I have been
rendered furious when from anxiety I could not eat, I would find those at
the same table were in like manner affected.'
To the military anxieties was added every kind of worry which may weary
a man's soul. The women clamoured for bread. The townsfolk heaped
reproaches upon him. The quarrel with the British Government had cut him
very deeply. The belief that he was abandoned and discredited, that
history would make light of his efforts, would perhaps never know of them,
filled his mind with a sense of wrong and injustice which preyed upon his
spirits. The miseries of the townsfolk wrung his noble, generous heart.
The utter loneliness depressed him. And over all lay the shadow of
uncertainty. To the very end the possibility that 'all might be well'
mocked him with false hopes. The first light of any morning might reveal
the longed-for steamers of relief and the uniforms of British soldiers.
He was denied even the numbing anaesthetic of despair.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 39 of 248
Words from 19726 to 20233
of 127807
