Highlander by Tim Newark

Author:Tim Newark [Tim Newark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620876541
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

As Egerton and the other officers predicted, it was difficult to stop men firing to protect their lives and Highland casualties were higher than they should have been. Inside the zareba, Egerton aimed his revolver at two dervishes, but both shots misfired. The hammer of his gun had been bent and was useless. Despite the obvious agony of clambering through a thorn bush in kilts, the Seaforth Highlanders crashed into the camp. They found piles of dead and dying Sudanese knocked over by artillery shells and the intense volley fire of the Camerons.

Having broken through the outer perimeter, the Seaforths had no time to form line, but simply charged at anyone still standing against them. Some Sudanese hid in pits to fire at the Highlanders, while others clashed with them in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Soon the area inside the camp was filled with choking clouds of dust and Egerton could barely see fifty yards in front of him. Into this chaos came uniformed Sudanese troops allied to the British whose random gunfire was as dangerous to the Highlanders as it was to the enemy, causing possibly half of their casualties.

The fighting became desperate in the extreme and even acts of kindness could be punished with death. A Cameron Highlander bent over to help a Sudanese woman out of a pit. When he turned his back on her, she picked up a rifle and shot him. Seven bayonets were plunged into her. Another Highlander was speared in the back by a warrior who had pretended to be dead. The Camerons repaid this treachery with their own ruthlessness. One warrior dropped his weapons and threw up his hands in surrender before a Highlander. The Cameron turned to his sergeant for advice. ‘Put him out of his misery,’ he said. ‘We don’t want none of these buggers ’ere.’8 The young Highlander bayoneted the dervish through the neck. Hardly any Sudanese survived the taking of the camp. After half an hour of this brutal struggle, the battle was over. The surviving Sudanese waded through stagnant pools in the dried-out Atbara riverbed to get away from the furious Highlanders, who stood on the bank firing down at them.

It was a victory for Kitchener, but Egerton was furious at the unnecessary losses sustained by his Highlanders. Over ten years later, when he presented a copy of his memoirs of the Sudan campaign to the library of the Seaforth Highlanders, he wrote an additional note on the pages describing the combat. He condemned ‘Gatacre’s rotten pigheaded idea of this close order formation’9 and blamed him personally for the high level of casualties.

Egerton compared the losses at Atbara to a later more notorious killing field for Highlanders in the Boer War at Modder River when 483 casualties were listed. That fight had lasted all day. At Atbara, a total of 560 men had fallen in just half an hour – almost 5 per cent of the entire force. The Camerons were the worst hit regiment with sixty men dead or wounded.

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