Mayne shifted his burden until it was comfortable, leaving his arms free to swing, remembering how the Mohawk hunters preferred to run rather than walk along the forest trails in Canada. He took a deep breath and nodded. ‘You lead.’
17
Twenty minutes later, they stood panting on a rocky outcrop less than a thousand yards from the British square. To their left lay the rough ground flanking the low plateau of Abu Klea that was their chosen route, and ahead of them was a dried-up watercourse they had spotted between the two armies that was their fallback option should the other route became unviable. At the moment they could not risk moving, as they were within rifle range of the square; the British soldiers would be jittery, likely to shoot at anyone in Arab gear. They would have to wait until all eyes in the square were on the advancing Mahdist army to their right, until the moment when battle was about to be joined. And there was another factor: if the men somewhere behind who had been shadowing them since they had left Korti decided to break cover and ride them down now, it might force them to risk running, fully exposed to British fire, to seek shelter in the gullies in front of the square, hoping that their pursuers would rein up once they saw that they were being led into a murderous dead end. Mayne glanced at the angle of the sun in the sky: it was about 10.30 a.m. The watercourse gully had only become visible to them in the last few yards of their run, and would be invisible to anyone following them until they reached this point. He had to hope that their pursuers would never guess that one option open to the two men was to run a gauntlet that would appear suicidal to anyone bearing down on them from a distance.
He wiped his face with the cloth of his headdress; it had become hot, and he had cast off the chill of dawn. With his telescope he could see the British square more clearly now, the soldiers wearing pith helmets and khaki tunics with bandolier cartridge belts, their rifles at the ready. They were standing four deep, three hundred or three hundred and fifty men to a side, their sword bayonets thrust out like pikes, the slight curve in the blades reflecting wickedly in the sunlight. It seemed an image straight out of the Napoleonic Wars, a garish anachronism in this modern age of rifles with a range and volume of fire many times that of the muskets of Waterloo. The American Civil War twenty years before had shown the horrific consequences of infantry fighting as their forefathers had done in close formation but with modern rifles, and the tactic had been all but dropped from the training manuals for a European conflict. Yet it was precisely that concentration of firepower that made the square such a devastating tactic in this kind of war; that could even the odds for the British in the face of seemingly overwhelming disparity in numbers. And as the Zulu wars had shown, massed assaults by an enemy with weapons little changed since the days of the Romans could still crush a modern army, and firepower was only as good as the resolve of Tommy Atkins to stand his ground in the face of an opponent who was terrifying precisely because he did not play by the rules of modern war.
He thought of those men now: the bluejackets of the naval division manning the Gardner machine gun, the artillerymen with their mountain guns, the sappers who had built the zariba and were now standing stolidly in the square with the rifles, and above all the infantry and the cavalry, the Grenadier Guards and Household Cavalry who made up much of the camel regiments, men whose normal duty was the most intimate defence of the realm, safeguarding London and the Queen. He remembered the fatalistic humour of Corporal Jones and his mates, the intense camaraderie that fortified them against the devilry without. For those men now facing the test of their lives, the true purpose of the expedition, the reason why they were here in the depths of the Sudan and not in their barracks at Knightsbridge, would by this hour have become an irrelevance; all that would concern them was not letting their comrades down. Mayne watched the square bow outwards at the rear as the camels corralled within tried to force their way out but were pulled back and hobbled in the centre, a great mass of grunting and foaming beasts. They could prove the greatest strength of the square, something the soldiers at Waterloo did not have, an imperturbable mass that might break the dervish charge if the front lines of soldiers should collapse.
He thought of the officers he knew well, bunched together around Stewart in front of the camels, their field glasses glinting as they scanned the enemy lines: Colonel Wilson, who had been sent with the column by Wolseley to go ahead and communicate with Gordon; and Fred Burnaby, in his element again, who had hunted out war and would fight like a lion, whose yearning seemed almost a death wish. There would be other officers there too for whom the objective of the expedition would now be secondary, for whom the chance of battle would be a welcome certainty; it would give them a hope of glory little different from the aspirations of the dervish warriors, and freed from the murky uncertainties of Gordon and the opprobrium that would fall on them at home if they failed in their mission to rescue him. Whatever happened here, whether it was a last stand against impossible odds like Isandlwana in the Zulu War or a victory like Rorke’s Drift, their names would be immortalised as soldiers and not as pawns in a political game.
Charrière suddenly cocked an ear towards the ground, and then twisted round to look behind them. ‘Our pursuers. They’re coming.’
Mayne turned and raised his telescope. Over a low knoll they had traversed not long before he could see a knot of four riders, wavering in and out of focus like a mirage. The camels were tall, gaunt, spectre-like, their legs seemingly elongated in the heat haze, cantering in line abreast directly at them. The riders wore robes and headdress and had unholstered their rifles, carrying them angled out with the butts resting against their thighs. They were perhaps twelve hundred yards distant.
Mayne’s mind raced. He could set up his Sharps rifle, and it would be four rifles against one. But to use it now would almost certainly be to compromise his mission: he had adjusted the sights minutely for his expected range when he had test-fired it over the Nile near Korti, and he was loath to risk jolting it. As long as there was still a chance of reaching Khartoum, the Sharps would remain packed in its case. And even if he were able to shoot one of them, the other three would dismount and could pick them off at their ease. Their best chance still lay in the torrent beds and gullies around the plateau of Abu Klea to the east of the square, the escape route they had devised a few minutes before.
A percussive report resounded from the direction of the square, and he looked back in time to see a cloud of white smoke above the screw gun. The round exploded in the front rank of the dervish line, creating a gap that was immediately filled with spearmen in jibbas who joined in the dance, stamping their feet rhythmically. They were now formed up like an ancient Greek phalanx, in a serrated line, with an emir on camelback holding a standard at the apex of each serration. Sharpshooters on both sides were beginning to find their mark, with men falling in the front ranks of the square and the phalanx. For the first time Mayne could see that Stewart had sent out a force of skirmishers, men who were now scurrying back under fire towards the square. He pursed his lips; that had been a tactical mistake. The value of skirmishers was as sharpshooters, and the phalanx was easily within range of the massed riflemen in the square. The minutes needed for their withdrawal would forestall the first volley, as the British would not shoot as long as the skirmishers were still in the line of fire. Stewart had taken a frightening gamble. The closer the phalanx was allowed to get, the more likely it was to overrun the square without being held back by volley fire. Even with the speed of reloading a Martini-Henry, they would only have the chance of a few volleys before the enemy were upon them. If the commander of the Madhist army had any sense, he would see that the British were exercising the kind of restraint to save their own men that would never occur to him, and would order his forces to charge now.