TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ADVANCE ON THE NILE. THE assault of Firkeb, described at first as if it had been a skirmish in the course of operations on the Nile, may turn out to have been an engagement marking a central point in the modern history of Egypt. The Khalifs at Omdurman, who was once, it should be re- membered, a great and enterprising soldier, aware that he was threatened only by the Egyptian army, resolved, it would appear, upon a forward movement. He sent from Dongola to Firkeh a force of his bravest and most devoted troops, which certainly exceeded five thousand in number, and may have been seven thousand, commanded by his ablest lieutenant, the Emir Hammuda, and by an unusual number of his best fighting officers. It was certain that the Egyptian army could not pass on its way to Dongola without seizing Firkeh, and the Dervish leaders probably intended to defend a difficult defile a mile or two in advance of their encampment. They reckoned rightly upon the importance of Firkeh, but they did not understand that their enemy perceived it also, and being English would be certain to take the initiative. General Kitchener, the young Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, finding that with the Dervishes in front of him the railway would be stopped, planned an attack by his whole force, executed with splendid daring and success a night march of twenty miles, during part of which whole regiments were com- pelled to move in single file, threaded the dangerous pass, and on the morning of the 7th inst., with wearied but enthusiastic troops, was ready for the assault. At the same lime a column of cavalry which had marched by a route farther from the river arrived, as had been planned, and the Dervishes were roused by a combined attack. They were surprised, having, it is said, considered the defile impassable for troops, and, we should fancy, hesitated, for the slaughter among the Emirs was pro- digious, exceeding four-fifths of their whole number, but as the engagement proceeded they recovered themselves and fought as the Baggaras, to which tribe most of them belonged, always fight, with desperation. " Their fire was heavy," say all reports, and groups and individuals, as is evident from the total slaughter, died where they stood around their Emirs, but they were no match for disciplined troops who will fight, and the great revelation of the battle, that which gives it its importance, is that the Egyptian conscript regiments, composed of fellaheen, have become a disciplined army which will fight. In two hours the Dervishes were driven in total rout and fled, leaving from eight hundred to one thousand dead on the field ; the cavalry pursued them to Suardeb, and all their boats, their stores, their animals, and their guns fell into Egyptian bands. The Khalifa's vanguard in fact, on which he relied to bar the way to Dongola, was annihilated in a single engagement under circumstances, including the slaughter of the Emirs, and the bravery shown by the fellaheen, which will spread terror from Omdurman to Darfur. Slatin Pasha, who was present, must have had thoughts as he rode among the dead identifying those he knew. It is but a year since he was a slave among the Emirs whose faces as they lay were almost trampled by his horse.
There has been no such triumph for the British Occupation. Nobody really doubted that British officials, once allowed a controlling power, would set the finances of Egypt straight, would remodel the police, would reduce the judicial system to something like order and efficiency, would terminate the extra-legal oppressions of the Pashas and Sheikhs, and would make the collection of revenue a regular process instead of a series of legalised raids upon the peasantry. Those reforms followed inevitably upon the fact of occupation by men responsible to the British people, and free from even the wish to plunder for themselves. But it was doubted whether even British energy could build up a native Egyptian Army. The officers, it was said, might make good regiments of the blacks, who passed their lives in fighting, but you cannot carve upon rotten wood, and the fellaheen, born in the mud of a tropical delta and enslaved for ages, had lost, if they ever possessed, the Arab courage, and could no more be drilled into fighting men than Bengalees or the Indians of Peru. Egyptian troops would be perfect regiments for parade, being the most obedient and orderly of mankind, but would be use- less in the field. Those who held this opinion were able to justify it, for they could quote the astounding cowardice of General Hicks's army, in which whole regiments, moved, we fancy, as much by superstition as by fear, threw down their arms, fell on their faces before the Dervishes, and begged as fellow-Mussulmans for their lives. The British officers, however, worked on, they gained hope from the behaviour of their men in some petty skirmishes, and at last their young chief, General Kitchener, trusted the fellaheen frankly in the field. The Egyptians, who had been well fed, well treated, and thoroughly disciplined, responded to the call ; they not only did not fly, but they charged as well as the Soudanese, " who are born fighters," and the last doubt as to their efficiency in actual hand-to-hand fighting disappeared. Good treatment and steady discipline had in the course of years restored their confidence in themselves and in their officers, and they showed themselves the equals of men who for generations have despised them as "tame Arabs." That is, as we have said, a triumph for British organisation, with its persistence, its lenity, and its almost automatic justice, and it is a triumph, too, for British honesty of purpose. It is not our interest to make good soldiers of the fellaheen, for the instant conclusion of the Continent will be that if the Egyptians can defend themselves the main argument for the British occupation of Egypt dis- appears. It was not our business, however, to consider that danger, but to show that even in the creation of a native Army British administration was, as a Governor- General of Java once described it, "the most vivifying despotism the world has ever seen," and the work, which has taken fourteen years, was carried on patiently and steadily until the very nature of the conscripts seemed changed, and Arabs of the Delta charged victoriously upon the most renowned fighters among the Arabs of the Desert. The born children of Misr, where for two thou- sand years no man has been free, disciplined and led by British officers, scattered the descendants of the Shepherd Kings in a charge. That, and not the victory itself, is the thing for Englishmen to be proud of, for no one who reads of it, not the most satirical stroller of the Parisian boulevards, can afterwards say, at least if he knows any- thing of history, that the British occupation has debased Egyptians.
We shall have more fighting to do before we reach Don gola, for the tribes which have wasted the Soudan will not easily surrender their ascendency, or retreat to much less tempting quarters in Darfur, so giving up their hope of one day plundering Egypt ; but the effect of the en gage- ment should nevertheless be great, probably greater than if Firkeh had been carried by the Queen's troops. English- men are unaccountable works of God, perhaps protected by magic, but these dogs of Egyptians ! if they are to beat the Khalifa, then clearly the Khalifs has no special protection from above. Every tribe which has been oppressed by the fat Tiberius of Omdurman will begin to hope for vengeance, his repute for good fortune will dis- appear, and even among his own guards and slaves there will be disaffection and conspiracies, as indeed there have been since the commencement of the advance. He will, of course, endeavour to rehabilitate himself by " energy," that is, by insane cruelties, and will slaughter all he sus- pects, including, we fear, all his remaining European prisoners, but the resulting hatreds will but deepen his suspicions, and he will not improbably fly to Darfur, leaving not Dongola only, but the entire Soudan, as Englishmen usally employ that term, open to an Egyptian advance, or, which might be wiser, to an advance from Suakim. The English in fact, if the Khalifs fled, would be masters, or might if they chose become masters, of the whole Valley of the Nile. That may seem a dream, and events may go very differently, but the impact of a lost battle is, among Asiatics and Africans, tremendous ; it releases recalcitrant forces, which are only held down by the conviction that resistance is hope- less ; and it dissolves the great spell of Asiatic tyranny, the belief that the possession of power of itself proves that the ruler is intended by heaven to bear rule. If this were the result, and Europe held aloof, England might for a time reign in peace and without any unbearable exertion to the Lakes, for the blacks of the Soudan are fine soldiers, and appreciate their position under British officers, a situation which would perceptibly reduce the sum of human misery in the world. Millions upon mil- lions of dark human beings would be released from a regime of which no average Englishman can form a con- ception, under which there is no peaceable village that may not on any day be treated like a captured town, its stores plundered, its males slain, its women carried off to be the slaves of savages, and its children sold by auction into lifelong misery. It is the peculiar horror of the region that the extremity of poverty is no protec- tion against the plunderers, for the man himself, his flesh and his bones, and those of his wife and child, are the most valuable and the most portable of all assets. The British suzerainty would terminate all those horrors, and replace trade in human flesh by trade in oils and seeds, while the people would be governed as the Egyptians are now governed, by quiet despots who are seeking justice, and under whom all who are industrious may grow sleek at will. The actual result, we fear, will not be so favour- able, for the English hardly comprehend their position, the Continent is screaming with jealous fears, and the oppor- tunity will pass; but still a province or two, the two Don golas in particular, may now be rescued. It is good work to do, and considering the amount of slaughter for which we are month by month responsible in Africa, we ought to do good work somewhere. Profitable work it is not, nor is it likely to be for many years to come, but if we could introduce peace, order, and prosperity down the whole Valley of the Nile from Alexandria to the Lakes, and so vivify its people that they could become soldiers such as the Egyptian fellaheen have now proved themselves to be, we should justify our sway in many regions where our entrance has in the beginning of it been barely justifiable. The true apology for Rhodesia, if the existence of Rhodesia needs apology, is an East Africa restored in part and reduced in part to a quiet civilisa- tion, and the victory at Firkeh will give all East Africa a new chance.
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