Major Marchand is not, we fear, precisely the kind of
man he was supposed in England to be. He is a very brave and energetic explorer, and probably a good officer too, but he can on occasion be very French indeed. In a letter to a French editor he declares that on receipt of the French papers -with accounts of the Dreyfus case he and his officers burst out weeping on account of the " infamies " hurled at the Army, and for thirty-six hours could not speak to one another ; and in another letter to a friend, published in an illustrated paper, he states that he and his hundred Sene- galese were attacked at Fashoda by thirteen hundred of the Khalifa's best soldiers, that in two hours he killed seven hundred of them, and that "the Sultan of the Shillooks," declaring the hundred men to be worth a million, accepted French protection and the insignia of a French officer. As there is no Sultan of the Shillooks, as the chief of that naked tribe, speaking to Lord Kitchener's Shillook officer, says he took the French for Englishmen, and as Major Marchand admitted that his position if the British had not arrived would have been desperate, this story certainly sug- gests a Gascon element in the narrator. Or has it possibly been "toned" for Paris in the process of publication ?
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