NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE attack on the dervishes besieging Suakin has succeeded. General Grenfell has made good soldiers of the black regiments in Egyptian service, and on Thursday at daybreak he trusted them to make the assault on the trenches. Supported, but not led by their English allies, who poured in a terrible fire both from their rifles and their machine-guns, the blacks advanced on the trenches, and in spite of a heroic resistance, carried them in half-an-hoar. The dervishes scattered into the bush in all directions, only their cavalry standing, and they were ridden down by the Hussars, whose swords, it is carefully noted, were of inferior workman- ship. (Is it really impossible to trace and disgrace the in- specting officer responsible for passing those swords ?) We lost less than twenty men,—six killed,—and the dervishes from four to six hundred killed. The trenches will be filled, and the remaining works turned into an outlying position to be held by the black soldiery; the Europeans will be returned to Cairo, and we hope, but do not expect, because of "French financial interests "—the source of all evil in Egypt—that the black regiments will be doubled. The dervishes will return in the end, but after months of hesitation, a defeat of this kind inspiriting the Mahdi's domestic enemies, and we have now learned the key-fact of the whole contest, that Negroes can be trained by Englishmen to face and defeat Sondanese fanatics. That settled, the huge problem presented by Egypt is indefinitely reduced.
