An Honourable Death by Iain Crichton Smith

Author:Iain Crichton Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

In fact Hector went next to the Egyptian Gendarmerie, and served under Valentine Baker, a reputed friend of the Prince of Wales, who had served a year’s sentence in prison for indecently assaulting a young girl in a railway carriage in a Liphook to Waterloo train on a hot June afternoon. He had been a forty-year-old colonel at the time: his victim was a Miss Dickinson aged twenty-two, of respectable background, who had accused him of indecent advances. As a result of this episode he was cashiered from the army but later became a Turkish mercenary before taking command of the Gendarmerie. (Kitchener was to fall in love with his daughter, Hermione, perhaps the only female love of his life. She was aged sixteen at the time, and Kitchener was thirty-three, but there was no formal engagement. She died aged eighteen of typhoid fever in Cairo. At times Kitchener wore under his shirt a locket given to him by Valentine Baker, which contained a miniature portrait of Hermione.)

In spite of Baker’s peculiar reputation Hector got on well with him, but in any case he was not to be with him permanently. While with him, however, he began to mould fellahin troops into a fighting force and was then transferred to the Egyptian army with the rank of captain. He also learned Arabic to add to his Gaelic and Urdu. At the battle of Tel el Kebir, Baker was killed and the Gendarmerie disbanded.

Until 1884 there had been only eight battalions of fellahîn infantry, but in that year in Suakin on the Red Sea a ninth battalion was formed. Hector was put in charge of it with five British officers under him. So it was that it was these jet-black Sudanese that he trained and drilled in weaponry as they lived in the desert in tents in the most intolerable heat and fire of the day and the chill of the night.

So it was that Hector was promoted, and had very little to spend his money on, and was in action, and all this suited him.

The Sudanese soldiers were very black, very tall, very thin in the arms and legs, but brave, loyal and impulsive. They were fond of music and Hector taught them how to love the bagpipes, and they could play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. Before battle three freshly killed goats had to be placed on the sand in front of them, the blood drying in the sand while each soldier stepped over them for good fortune.

Hector walked and rode and taught weaponry to the ‘blue’ men, as they were called. He was indomitable, resolute, patient. He was in his element, even in the intense, brutal heat of the Sudan. He seemed to wear armour under his clothes.

Hector’s ethic was that there was no man who could not be taught. His spindly-legged battalion was to be made to approach that Platonic ideal he had in his mind. Sometimes they rebelled, often they hated him, but they grew to respect and love him.

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