by John Wilcox
At last the signal came to advance, and ponderously the great army began to move forward. For Simon, way out ahead, it was the beginning of an eerie, never-to-be-forgotten experience. Little sound came from the thousands of boots sliding into the soft sand behind him, but from the deep rear he could just hear the faint jingling of chain harness from the guns and the crunching of wheels on pebbles. An occasional soft cough told him that the officers behind him were on station. The night was cool and the desert seemed to be allenveloping. Yet at his rear was an army of fourteen thousand men and ahead perhaps twice that number, and, of course, the guns of el Kebir.
Frequently as the night wore on, a call came from behind telling him to halt while the line was adjusted. After just under two hours’ marching, a halt was called to rest all across the line. In the Highland Brigade, just behind Simon, the order was passed quietly down the line but it took time to reach the flanks, which marched on so that the brigade halted in a crescent. Similar disruption occurred on the right of the line, and it took some time and many whispered curses before the army straightened and resumed its orderly advance.
Striding out ahead into the velvet darkness, with only Jenkins on his left for company, Simon tried to recall the last time a whole army had advanced so far in the dark, line abreast, to launch a dawn attack. He could dredge up no previous example from British military history. Wolseley, of course, was taking a huge risk. His front stretched, in all, nearly two miles. If the flanks deviated to north or south they could wander off into the desert on the one hand or the canal on the other. If the line bulged then the middle could stumble right into the Egyptian fortifications and give the whole game away. And none of the foot soldiers had cartridges in their rifles! Simon gulped and looked again up at the north star and then down at his compass. The risk wasn’t just huge. It was gigantic.
Eventually, Simon sensed rather then saw that the darkness was receding, and he looked at his watch: 4.55. Behind him he could now make out the forms of the communicating officers, and also, a lightening of the sky. Ahead, however, still nothing . . . or, at least, what was that? A smudge of blackness running from left to right as far as the eye could see; a black line that was higher than the ground ahead. Yes, the ramparts in front of the trenches! He lengthened his stride, and, as he did so, there was a flash of light directly ahead and a shot rang out, followed by several more. Instinctively, he flung himself to the ground and then, ashamed, rose to his feet to be suddenly flanked by two large Highlanders, fixing their bayonets as they trudged on past him.
‘Well done, laddie,’ said one. ‘You’ve got us there.’
Suddenly a bugler blared from behind Simon and a solitary bagpipe began to wail, then another and another as breath was blown into the bags. As they did so, the parapet ahead began to be pinpricked with rifle flashes, and bullets hissed overhead. But the earth walls were not alight with rifle fire. For the moment, the firing was intermittent. The Egyptians were not manning the parapet in force; the defence was coming from individual sentries and the dreaded guns were silent. Most of the enemy were still asleep. Wolseley’s gamble had paid off – or at least his first throw of the dice had. The ditches ahead still had to be crossed and the earth mounds behind them climbed.
Simon took a deep breath and realised that his mouth was completely dry. He licked his lips and looked across at Jenkins in the half-light. The Welshman’s white teeth flashed under the black smudge of his moustache, and he ran across to take his place at Simon’s side.
‘Let’s do a bit of fightin’, et cetera, et cetera,’ he said. ‘For old Amen.’
Immediately, Simon felt better – and braver. ‘Why not?’ he grinned. He slipped a cartridge into his rifle and they broke into a run beside the Gordon Highlanders, who were now thronging forward as the pipes wailed all around them.
The open ground to be crossed was about three hundred yards, and at first the Egyptian firing remained intermittent. As he ran, Simon looked to his right beyond the accompanying Black Watch to where the blue-coated marines should show the start of the first division’s lines. But there was nothing. Obviously the division had fallen back somehow during the night and the Highlanders were out on their own. The marching line had, in fact, bulged at its end. As he realised this, the top of the high wall of earth beyond the ditch ahead of him exploded into a line of flame as defenders were thrown into the battle. Simon put his head down and sensed rather than saw that men were falling all around him as the first volley crashed deeply into the Scotsmen.
Jenkins, however, was still at his side as he dropped into the ditch. They exchanged grins briefly and then dug the toes of their boots into the loose sand and gravel and began to claw their way up the mound. Looking up, Simon caught a glimpse of a red fez-like tarboosh behind the barrel of a long rifle pointing down at him. Instinctively he ducked, and heard the report of a rifle beside him. ‘Got ’im,’ gasped Jenkins.
Somehow they reached the top of the rampart and immediately became part of a mêlée of men balanced precariously along the narrow causeway, all thrusting at each other with rifle and bayonet in a series of strangely silent, atavistic encounters. Apart from grunts, shouts and the occasional cry of agony, there was little gunfire, for many of the attackers had had no time to insert a round into their rifles and the defenders themselves equally had had little time to reload before the Highlanders had climbed up to be among them.
Simon linked bayonets with a tall Egyptian whose eyeballs showed whitely in his dark face as they swung their yards of steel in a parabolic circle, each trying to force the other back and down. Simon suddenly reversed his rifle, crashing the butt into the face of his adversary and sending him crashing into the trench below. He turned to his left and found Jenkins desperately engaged with two men, their blueblack faces showing that they were Sudanese. In a brief flash of memory, Simon recalled that they were reputedly the best of the Egyptian fighting men, and he lunged forward, thrusting his bayonet into the side of the nearest one, withdrawing it as the man slowly fell to his knees, clutching at the wound, blood spurting from between his fingers, before he too tumbled into the trench below.
Simon felt immediate revulsion. This was the first time since the chaos of Rorke’s Drift that he had plunged a bayonet into living flesh, and the terrible, close, personal nature of the act – he could smell the body odour of his opponent – shocked and, for a brief moment, stunned him. Then a cry from Jenkins revived him. The other Sudanese had twisted his bayonet inside that of Jenkins and pierced the left upper arm of the Welshman, so that blood was pouring down his shirt. For the second time Simon swung his bayonet and felt the point sink through the other’s breast. The man fell to the ground with a sigh and Simon twisted his blade and retrieved it, with an insouciance he did not feel.
‘Thank you, bach,’ panted Jenkins. ‘You’re one ahead now, look you.’
‘Let me bandage that wound.’
‘No. No time. It’s only a scratch. Ah, look be’ind you now.’
Simon whirled and fired his rifle at point-blank range into the breast of a white-clad figure who was swinging a large curved sword above his head. He then presented his bayonet to another man, who, perhaps seeing the bloodstain on the steel, thought better of his attack and turned and plunged down into the trench below, before taking to his heels across the plain. Simon fumbled for another round and slipped it into the breech.
‘Load your rifle,’ he ordered Jenkins.
The Welshman, his breast heaving, inserted a cartridge into his own Martini-Henry and grinned. ‘By God, bach sir. You’re becomin’ a bit ’andy like with that lunger. I didn’t think officers were taught ’ow to use it, see.’
‘I don’t like it. It disgusts me.’
‘Well, it’s best to stay alive and be disgusted, look you.’ Jenkins glanced along the top of the mound as he regained his breath. The hand-to-hand fighting had diminished and the ramparts were strewn with bodies, mainly the white-clad forms of Egyptians. ‘Whoever said that these blo
kes couldn’t fight – and I think it was me – was wrong. My word, I thought I was done for there, I really did.’
Simon took out a knife and tore a length off his shirt, then bandaged it tightly around Jenkins’s arm to stem the bleeding. ‘That should serve for now,’ he said. ‘Go to the rear and see if you can get it treated.’
‘What are you goin’ to do, then?’
‘I shall go on with the advance. There’s the second line to take yet.’
‘Then I shall stay with you. It would be awful to be attacked by some terrible English doctor without you there to defend me, see.’
They exchanged grins. The sun was now up, and Simon looked to the south and then the north. It seemed that the Gordons had broken through their section of the Egyptian line, although they had left many kilts strewn over the desert to the east. From that direction, British reinforcements were now clearly to be seen advancing in perfect order. But the battle was far from over. There was no sign of the first division, who should have now been trotting across the plain towards the northern section of the line, so far, of course, unbroken. The Black Watch, to the right of the Gordons, were obviously having trouble in attacking a big redoubt, the five guns of which were now beginning to play on the first division. The redoubt itself was defended by a double line of emplacements, strongly held, and the dark-kilted Scots had been forced back, leaving a scattering of bodies on the slopes.
‘Those guns will have to be taken or they will tear the first division apart,’ said Simon. ‘We must go and help the Watch.’ He shouted at a small group of Gordons who were climbing to the top of the mound and gestured to the north. ‘You men. Come with me to support the Black Watch.’ Eyebrows were lifted at first at an order coming from a young man in dishevelled mufti, but his air of command, coupled with the blood still dripping from his bayonet, swayed the Scotsmen.
‘My view is that the bloody Watchmen should be big enough to look after themselves, sir,’ said a diminutive young corporal, ‘but we’ll come wi’ ye to help out the wee lads. Lead on, then.’
The group, nine in all, ran along the top of the earthworks, jumping over the bodies that littered the narrow way, slipping and sliding where the conflict had torn up the beaten-down sand, until they reached where the mound rose up to form the redoubt housing the five guns. Two lines of semicircular emplacements ringing the redoubt below were lined with Egyptian infantry coolly firing their Remingtons into the men of the Black Watch down on the plain, now being rallied by their officers to make a fresh assault. Doubling forward to help them were men of the Rifles, part of the reinforcements from the second brigade.
‘Fire down on to the riflemen,’ shouted Simon. ‘Select your target.’
The nine, now kneeling, began directing a steady fire on to the Egyptian infantry in the trenches below them. This attack from a new quarter immediately unsettled the enemy riflemen, who could not hear the crack of the rifles behind them above the boom of the cannon and had no idea from which direction this new attack was coming. The consequent slackening of their fire down on to the Black Watch on the plain in turn encouraged the Scotsmen, and they now followed their sword-waving officers in a new attack on the emplacements.
‘Good,’ shouted Simon, his voice cracking amidst the dust and smoke. ‘They’ll be through there in a minute. Now up to the guns. We’ve got to stop them firing on the first division. Follow me.’
The climb up to the redoubt was more difficult, but at least it was not defended, for the gunners were intent on laying and firing their cannon. The boom of the Krupps at close quarters was deafening, and the edge of the redoubt was ringed in smoke as the heavy fourteen-pounders flashed and rebounded on their carriages. Simon tasted again the tang of cordite on his lips. He found that he was looking down from the rear of the redoubt at more than twenty white-shrouded Egyptian artillerymen, working their pieces with discipline and skill.
He turned to the Gordons. ‘Fire two rounds,’ he shouted, ‘and then down among them with the bayonet. Fire now!’
Nine reports sounded as one and seven of the enemy fell across their guns. The volley was repeated and another six crumpled. Then, with a whoop, the little band jumped down from the lip of the ramparts and launched themselves on the remaining gunners. But these Egyptians were made of stern stuff. They seized whatever was at hand to defend themselves – rifles and bayonets, officers’ swords, long sponging rods – and for a minute the gun emplacement was a scene of fierce individual duels, with steel clashing on steel and cries of anguish and triumph melding into a devilish cacophony as the smoke from the now quiet cannon drifted away.
It was a one-sided conflict, however, for the gunners were not trained in hand-to-hand fighting and the last two threw down their weapons, leapt over the rear of the redoubt and scuttled away across the plain.
‘Well done, lads,’ cried Simon, drawing in deep breaths as he leaned on his rifle. ‘Are you all right, 352?’
‘Right as rain, bach sir. Bit puffed, that’s all. An’ I’m not much good at fightin’ with just one ’and, see.’
‘Blast. Yes. You’re bleeding again.’ He turned to the Gordons. ‘Have any of you boys got a field dressing?’
The corporal fished in his knapsack. ‘You’re lucky, sir. I’m the platoon doctor – which means Ah carry the bandages. Here yer are.’ He handed a paper package to Simon, who tore off the cover, threw away the blood-soaked piece of shirting around Jenkins’s wound, applied a piece of lint to the gash and then tightly wrapped the dressing in a bandage. He had hardly finished when a subaltern of the Black Watch, sword in hand, his face glistening with perspiration, jumped down into the redoubt and regarded Simon and Jenkins with some wonderment.
‘Well done, whoever you are,’ he said. ‘I doubt if we could have broken through without your help.’ He held out his hand. ‘Fraser, Black Watch.’
‘Fonthill . . . er . . . Intelligence.’ They shook hands. Simon turned to his Gordons. ‘Thank you, lads. Better see if you can rejoin your units now.’ He nodded to the west, where some three hundred yards away, a line of smoke and gun flashes showed where the Egyptian second reserve line of trenches was under attack. ‘They’ll be over there.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Soldiers of the Black Watch were now pouring into the redoubt. The little corporal nodded to them and grinned. ‘We wouldn’t want to be seen in the company o’ these hooligans, anyway. Top o’ the mornin’ to yer, sir.’ With that he led his section away, at the trot.
As he spoke, a battery of the Royal Artillery was to be seen crashing through the line of trenches. It broke a wheel in the process, but it carried on and then unlimbered and opened fire, directing its shrapnel shells over the heads of the British troops on to the defenders of the second Egyptian line.
Simon turned back to Fraser. ‘How is the day going?’
The young man brushed the back of his hand across his brow and then his moustache, leaving black cordite smudges. ‘Good, I think. It looks as though the whole of our brigade in the south has broken through. But there’s the problem.’ He pointed with his sword to the north. ‘The first division is damned slow coming up, and unless they look sharp, they could get caught in a blast from the guns across this open ground. Our lot won’t be able to run up the line to hold it for them. We’re under orders to go on to the second line, you see.’
Simon shielded his eyes with his hand and looked to the east. Yes, the first division was at last coming into sight. Even at that range he could see a single figure in the front. Covington?
He held out his hand. ‘May I borrow your glasses for a second?’ Fraser dipped his head under the strap holding his field glasses and gave them to Simon.
‘Thanks.’ He focused across the scrub and sand, and eventually the unmistakable figure of Covington came into view, striding out ahead of the massed ranks, revolver in hand. Simon twirled the wheel on the binoculars and brought up the blue-jacketed marines behind Covington. ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘They’re marching in close order. Th
at’s stupid. They’ll be cut down like corn when the guns open up. Perhaps they think they have already been captured. They’ve got to open out. Stay here, 352. I’ll go. Someone’s got to tell ’em.’
He threw the glasses back to a startled Fraser and leapt over the edge of the redoubt, sinking his heels into the soft sand and earth and plunging to the plain below. There, on impulse, he stopped and turned.
‘No, no,’ he yelled up at Jenkins. ‘You stay there. It only needs one of us.’
‘Sod that,’ gasped Jenkins, floundering down the slope. ‘Where you go, I go.’
The two men began running diagonally across the plain to the north to meet the blue lines slowly advancing, with the lone figure ahead of them. Simon realised that the division had, of course, lost its line during the night and opened up a gap to the south. This, however, could be turned to advantage if Covington deployed it to his left, opening up the thick lines and making them less of an obvious target for the Egyptian artillery. He looked over his shoulder, behind and to his left. The guns were strangely silent. Were they holding their fire until the last moment, the better to create havoc; was it that the gunners were late to their posts; or had the Gordons turned back and attacked the line north of them, to help the advancing first division?
Simon was short of breath and losing speed – and he realised that he had left the wounded Jenkins some way behind. But he was near enough now to be within hailing distance of Covington, who was striding out some hundred yards ahead of the marines. To his right, the first division curled away into the distance, a formidable sight.
Waving his arms, Simon shouted: ‘Covington! For God’s sake, deploy into open order. The guns have not been taken. You’ll be cut down.’