A Life Apart by Roger M. Kean

Author:Roger M. Kean [Kean, Roger M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay, Fiction
ISBN: 9781481935234
Google: 97s0lQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1481935232
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-01-10T11:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Abu Kru, January 1885

At the coming of the dawn the exhausted and worn-out men found themselves still at a distance from the Nile. Some miles away a long line of greenery—almost black in the haze—showed where the river lay, but General Stewart felt that neither the men nor animals could do more for the moment. “I’m calling a halt for a few hours,” he told his staff officers wearily. “The men should get some rest, and it will give time for the stragglers to catch up. Has anyone any idea how many have wandered off during the night?”

No one answered, until Major Kitchener opened his mouth. “Ah… I don’t think anyone knows, sir. I’ll send some guides back. If they can gather enough stragglers, they might be sufficient a force to reach us.”

Few officers believed this would happen. Patrols of horse and foot prowled among the dunes firing off occasional shots. Information delivered to Kitchener by four men who had surrendered—all blacks, from Hicks’s army, forced by the Arabs to fight—soon reached the weary troopers’ ears. The foe consisted of former army regulars from Berber, Arabs from Kordofan, some of the Madhi’s troops from Omdurman, spared from the siege after the town’s fall a fortnight previously, and local levies from Metemma. The brunt of the charge was delivered, as Richard had correctly identified, by Baqqara of the Duguaim, Kenana, and Hamr tribes, whose contingents with their sheikhs and emirs were almost annihilated. The Ja’alin and Metemma men had been held in reserve and were even now striking at the column.

“The force we had defeated at Abu Klea was only the advanced-guard of a large army which is expected to reach Metemma today,” Kitchener finished, quietly.

To the soldiers not only this gloomy news but also the halt was unwelcome. Though they were tired, now that the river lay a bare four miles off they wanted to push straight on and have done with it. But the condition of the animals made it impossible. Richard, Harry, Alfred, and a few other subalterns set the men to constructing a pitiful zareba using saddles, biscuit boxes, and other stores, while skirmishers tried to keep down the enemy’s fire. It was a thankless task—while the low dunes concealed them, the camp presented an easy target. Musket balls rapped sharply as they struck the boxes, or thudded wetly when they buried themselves among the herd of kneeling camels.

Several men took hits, and soon after nine o’clock General Sir Herbert Stewart received a serious wound. His popularity with the officers and men made his loss of command keenly felt. But his incapacity was a greater loss to the expedition in that Stewart’s second-in-command, Colonel Burnaby, had fallen at Abu Klea, and therefore the command went to Sir Charles Wilson, whose expertise lay in surveying and cartography, and who accompanied the force only in a diplomatic capacity.

As the morning wore on and there seemed to be no decisions coming from the command post, it became increasingly obvious

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