TOPICS OF THE DAY.
ABOU KLEA.
ABOU KLEA was not a great battle ; but few incidents in the great history of the British Army have been more creditable to the national military character. It was a fitting conclusion—if it was a conclusion, for we have not yet heard of the occupation of Metemmeh—to a most daring adventure, the march of 1,500 white men across 200 miles of an African desert, waterless, except for a few wells fifty miles apart, and one central reservoir, in the face of a brave and active enemy, of whose whereabouts or numbers little was accurately known, while it was known that they were both numerous and brave. Lord Wolseley evidently thought he knew the Mahdi's dispositions; and up to a recent date he was probably exactly right, but facts were occurring beyond his range of vision. He expected that General Stewart would find some two thousand Arabs at Metemineb, more or less inclined to fight, but he did not expect, as he intimates, that Omdurman, the great fortified position opposite Khartoum, commanding the junction of the White and Blue Niles, would have previously fallen. The capture of this place, still unexplained, enabled the Mahdi to send reinforcements to Metemmeh, including, it is believed, a trained negro regiment with regular arms, and to call up a body of Arabs from Berber, under the Emir of that town, who, it is reported, died fighting inside the British square. Thus reinforced, the Emir of Metemmeh, with from 8,000 to 10,000 men,— the prisoners give the former number and Lord Wolseley the latter,—moved out to Abou Klee, a long and comparatively fertile valley, 23 miles from Metemmeh, where there were wells which the British must take, and the possibility of choosing a good position. General Stewart, with 1,500 men in all, made up from every arm of both the fighting services, arrived in sight of the enemy on the 16th inst., bivouacked for the night under constant alarms to rest his men, and on the 17th inst. advanced early in the morning to the attack. Leaving all his camels and stores under guard, he moved forward in square with, as we judge, 1,300 men in all to assail an enemy certainly six, and probably eight times his own numbers, with their ranks full as he well knew of the best untrained fighters in the world, half-caste Arabs and fanatical negroes, sure to charge and sure to die in heaps. No soldier in the Soudan underrates the Soudanese, who have broken British squares. The movement was not exactly rash, because retreat or waiting were from want of water alike impossible, and there were no reinforcements to come up ; but then Sir Herbert Stewart, exceptionally daring as he is, must have been consumed with burning anxiety. He had reason. The enemy at first hesitated; but seeing that they would be taken in flank, their first division, probably 4,000 strong, and including the negro regiment, hurled themselves down the slope into the valley upon the square. They were received with a deadly volley ; but the Dragoons in the centre were a little too far forward, and were driven back by the weight of the rush ; and for ten minutes the Arabs, one-third of them armed with rifles and the rest with spears, were within the square. Fighting handto-hand, with their magnificent courage, and with their heavy superiority in numbers, they might, had the British yielded for an instant, have gained a victory, in which case every European would have perished ; but the English, few as they were, besides their discipline and their indestructible and inexplicable superiority as white men, had two inestimable advantages. Every man, however young, was like a seasoned soldier. The norelaxing work of weeks in the boats upon the Nile, the long and painful desert marches on insufficient rations of water, the training of a month as camel-riders, with its severe exercise and exposure, and the absence for months of any opportunity of drinking, had, as it were, annealed the .men till they were as hard as athletes. Moreover, they were in the position which cynics say helps to make sailors so brave. Every man there knew that the force must conquer or perish ; that the Arabs would spare none ; that there was no second square as at Tamasi to come up in support ; and that retreat across the Desert was physically impossible. The officers, as is evident from the extraordinary proportion killed and wounded—three times the normal rate—sprung to the front, the soldiers and sailors fought with desperate courage, and, though eighteen officers and 151 men fell dead or severely wounded, at the end of the ten minutes the Arabs within the square were all dead or flying, and the division, recovering its formation, moved forward again
to the Wells ; the enemy, under a dropping fire, but unpursued, disappearing towards the river, whither Sir Herbert Stewart, wearied as his troops must have been, followed in a few hours. His men had killed one-half their own number, and wounded a number actually in excess of their own. His arrival at the river-bank has not yet been notified ; and we do not know whether the flying Arabs pursued their way to Berber or Omdurman, or whether—as happened after El Teb—they rallied a few miles off to make a final effort. In either case, Sir Herbert Stewart should be on the river, and in direct watercommunication with Khartoum.
That city is not relieved yet, nevertheless and possibly may not be for weeks. General Gordon may be encouraged and strengthened by the arrival of the small Naval Brigade ; but Metemmeh or Shendy must be held until General Earle's. arrival by water from Abou Hamad, or until Lord Wolseley has pushed further reinforcements across the Desert. It is almost certain that the Mahdi, now master of Omdurman, will fight again between Metemmeh and the city he has besieged so long ; and Lord Wolseley is not the man to risk defeat. It is conceivable, as some in this country hope, that the moral effect of the victory at Abou Klea may dishearten the clansmen ; but the evidence before us all makes this most improbable. The heavy slaughter of Tamasi has not daunted the Arabs, or induced them to abandon the Mahdi ; Osman Digna is still hovering round Suakin ; and the Arabs at Metemmeh charged British troops with all their former daring and much. of their former success. So far from yielding, the Arabs, though beaten in fifty skirmishes with the steamers, have kept up the investment of Khartoum steadily for a twelvemonth, probably relieving each other ; they have just captured the fortified position of Omdurman, probably the greatest exploit of the siege ; and they obey the Mahdi's orders to face the Europeans as implicitly as of old. Their losses, heavy as they have been, have not really affected their numbers ; and the Mahdi's "regulars "—the men whom hepays himself, and has regularly drilled—have not yet been seen in front. Unless the tribes give way, the Mahdi must fight ; and Lord Wolseley cannot attack him until he himself is able to dispose of all the resources he commands. There is no fear of the result, for so far the General has displayed not only the mixture of foresight and audacity expected of him— it was fearfully audacious to divide the small force at Korti into two expeditions—but his possession of that continuous good-luck which in a General reveals a sound insight into the general conditions. But all the same, it is useless, in a land without railways or telegraphs, where forage must be carried as well as food, and where the safety of an army may depend upon its water-skins and the resolution of the soldiers to abstain from them, to expect the breathless rapidity of modern campaigns in Europe. Lord Wolseley can only press forward like an Asiatic commander, who takes little heed of time so that he does but advance ; and the nation behind him, debauched by daily telegrams, must recover its perception that other things are gradual besides the growth of trees. So far all is well ; and the General who has patiently carried his force a thousand miles up the Nile Valley, and flung 1,500 Englishmen across the Desert through 10,000 fighting Arabs' may be trusted to overcome the last hundred miles, though the Mahdi himself, with the last hope of his tribes, stand in the way. We must wait, though Abon Klea has once more aroused that popular interest which it is most strange should have ever died away. What is it that absorbs Englishmen that they cannot be absorbed in such an Expedition as this, with their own men fighting their way strenuously up the Nile to a point which the Pharaohs regarded as an enemy's centre, in the teeth of the people whom Coeur de Lion neither vanquished nor retreated from, but found as brave as they are now ; with supports lingering in Dongola, where a Christian dynasty ruled for six centuries, and letters coming home weekly with the address on them, Meroti (Merawi), the capital of Queen Candace ? It is five hundred years since we fought against Saracens, and the incidents are as romantic as in any Crusade, yet our people hardly watch or listen unless some favourite officer falls dead ; and one of the boldest of publishing firms declares that it is simply impossible to induce the British public to buy any work whatever upon Egypt.
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