TOPICS OF THE DAY
THE CATASTROPHE IN THE 8017DAN.
?THE stars in their courses fight against the evacuation of Egypt. General Hicks, Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army in the "Soudan," has obviously committed the two mistakes to which the most experienced Indian officers are liable. Habituated to victories gained by a few men over many, they learn to regard audacity as the supreme military virtue, and, warring in a richly cultivated country, they dis- believe in a total failure of supplies. General Hicks had orders to carry El Obeid, the fortified capital of Kordofan, and to defeat Mahommed Ahmed, the pretended " Messenger " of the Prophet, who was known to have made that city his head- quarters, and to be levying tribute throughout the vast de- pendency of Egypt which is called in Cairo "the Soudan," and in modern geographies the States of Nubia, Sen. naar, Kordofan, and Darfur, covering, say, 1,01)0,000 square miles, and inhabited, according to the guesses of the beat explorers, by 12,000,000 of men, of whom, perhaps, a fourth are Arabs and Arab half-castes, the latter as brave as Zulus: Collecting his army, 10,500 Egyptian and Nubian soldiers, with 2,000 camp followers, in August, at Khartoum, the junction of the two Niles, and teaching them, as Mr. O'Donovan reported, some elementary manoeuvres, General Hicks marched up the Nile to Duem, 150 miles from Khartoum. So far, he was safe, for the Nile was with him ; but at this point, about September 25th, he resolved to strike westward, and reach El Obeid by a circuitous route of 250 miles through the Desert,—a march of thirty or more days. It must have been an awful march, for the country is a treeless, waterless, verdureless plain ; the only drink attainable was from sur- face pools of stagnant rain-water, the few cattle were swept off by the enemy ; and all day, the Army, always march- ing in close order, ready to form square, was surrounded by clouds of cavalry, who come out of the horizon, reach fighting distance in fifteen minutes, and disappear as fast. The animals dropped, says poor Mr. O'Donovan in his last communication, from the first ; but General Hicks, with his ships burned behind him, pressed on gallantly, and arrived on November 1st within a short distance of El Obeid. There the Mahdi ordered him to be stopped, and his fierce followers, who are said to number 300,000 men' and may number 80,000, and who are known on direct European testimony to fight like martyrs, dying in heaps at the muzzles of the Remington rifles, made their final attack. It lasted three days, November 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, relays of men coming up incessantly from El Obeid ; and on the last day, as we believe, the exhausted Egyptians, who during the fighting can have had no water, found that their ammuni- tion had given out. They had been firing more or less for twenty-five days, with no fresh supply from any base. Whether that was so, or whether the thirst, which is a certainty, hid done its terrible work, the Egyptian squares described by Mr. O'Donovan were • broken, the Mahdi's best troops, inflamed to madness by victory, rushed in, and the whole Egyptian Army were either massacred, made slaves, Or taken as recruits. Only one European, an artist employed by a German paper, is known to have escaped ; and as the Mahdi's orders were to slaughter all Christians and Pagans, and as he would be egged on by the slave-dealers, who know how formidable Euro- peans are to them, we have little hope for any of the white men with the expedition. All have, we fear, perished, and as the army has been annihilated, as the district between the Blue Nile and Suakim is in arms, as the Abyssinians are in Sennaar, and as the scattered Egyptian detachments still re- maining are flying to Khartoum, the whole Soudan is lost to Egypt, and Mahommed Ahmed, the Mahdi, who claims de- scent from Mahommed, and, say those who have watched him, is reverenced by every tribe, is absolute master of Ethiopia. A victory of this kind will, to every man in the Soudan, appear to reveal the Divine Will ; and, till defeated, the Mahdi may expend a thousand men a day without shaking his followers' con- fidence one jot. And, worse than all, it may be doubted whether the Mahdi, having defeated an army commanded by English- men and defended by the artillery of Europe, will not believe in himself and his own mission, and rush forward with a speed and a self-confidence which he has never hitherto displayed.
There is an end of the conquest of Tonquin ; for either we misread Arabs altogether, or in a month the French will be fighting for their lives from Gabes to Morocco, and must pour
50,000 men into Tunis and Algeria ; but we cannot stop to discuss French misfortunes just now. The point for us is. whether the Mahdi will attempt to descend the Nile. It is a. formidable enterprise, for though he is master down to Khar- toum, and may win that post by treachery, and though there is literally no force between him and Egypt Proper to be. relied on for an hour,—every second Fellah by this time doubting if he is .not divine—Khartoum is eight hundred miles from Cairo, and the Mahdi's Army as it advances north will eat the narrow strip of cultivated soil as bare as if locusts had passed' over it. Still, the cavalry of the Desert can move fast, a con- queror like Mahommed Ahmed cares nothing about human. life, and the Mahdi will be compelled, by his spiritual claiin —which is to the mastery of the whole Mussnlman world—to move forward as rapidly as means will allow. He may wait even for months to organise, but he cannot give up his enter- prise ; and through all that time, be it shorter or longer, the cloud' will overhang Egypt, and the Egyptians will be excited by terror and hope of the most extreme kind. That they can defend themselves by themselves may be gravely doubted. The seven or eight thousand men remaining of the old Army in the' Soudan are already showing want of heart—they threw- their arms away when Captain Moncrieff was attacked— many of them are probably ready to join the Mahdi, as 3,000 of their comrades recently did, and all of them will fight with the feeling that they are warring for the Infidel against the promised Deliverer, whose army is full of dervishes,. santons, and the religious desperadoes who will swarm up from. all manner of monasteries to join the successful Mussulman leader who proclaims a divine Mission. If we retire, Egypt may be divided by insurrection, or accept the Mahdi, and that would mean the advance of a Turkish Army to defend the Otto- man Caliphate, which, if an Arab Mahdi reached Cairo, would not be worth a week's pnrchase. It is impossible for Great Britain. to allow either such utter ruin to Egypt, or such an overthrow of all her policy ; and whatever happens, until the Mahdi has- been defeated, or his movement has died away, the Delta must be garrisoned by British troops. We are not responsible for the Soudan, nor, in spite of the opinion of the ex-Khedive Ismail, are we bound in any way to assist in recovering a dominion which has not extinguished slavery, or, except for a moment under Gordon Pasha, produced any result beneficial to humanity; but we are bound to make Egypt safe against a barbarian invasion. We must hold the Valley up. to Syene at least, and to do it we must retain a force strong enough, should the Mahdi advance, to teach him that, even as against fanaticism, civilisation is clothed in an impenetrable armour. Whether it is either right or expedient to hold Khartoum, at so vast a distance from supplies, we do not know, and leave to the able experts who will consider the question ; but that we must defend Egypt to the First Cataract, or abandon it to. the Turk, we do know ; nor do we believe there will be any hesitation on the part of the Government, which has already directed the Fleet to recover Snakim for Egypt. The troops must remain, and Lord Ripon must be warned that in conceiv- able contingencies he must once more remind the Arabs and the world that, east of Alexandria, Great Britain strikes from- two sides at once. No great effort may be necessary. A movement like this may be shattered by victory, or dissolved by internal dissension; and an Army like the Mahdi's has to feed itself, like any other—rifles and cannon in quantities it has unhappily gained in the overthrow of General Hicks—while in any event, short of a rising in Egypt itself, there is ample time to consider action. Even if the Mahdi is a true soldier, it will take him a hundred days to march from El Obeid to Syene ; and the Egyptians, whatever their feelings, will await his descent. There is time in plenty, but there must be decision also, and in any event, until the designs of the Mahdi are known the evacuation of Egypt can- not proceed, nor can Sir Evelyn Wood be left with 7,000 doubtful Sepoys, to hold down the Delta and resist an advanc- ing army of thousands of brave fanatics, flushed with a victory over a larger army officered like his own.
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