Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals
But, unfortunately, this recent campaign did not, after all,
necessitate these elaborate preparations, for there were no dervishes
for us to shoot at or descriptions of bloody battles to be
telegraphed. At all events, the cloudy ammonia and the thirteen
breeches, with the assistance of a silken sash--a different color for
each day of the week--made the brightest and smartest looking little
man in camp. However, when I reflect on this new style of war
correspondent, who, I forgot to mention, also carried with him two
tents, a couple of beds, sundry chairs and tables, a silver-mounted
dressing case, two baths, and a gross of toothpicks, and I think of
the severe simplicity of the old style of campaigning when a famous
correspondent who is still on the warpath, and who always sees the
fighting if there be any, on one arduous campaign took with him the
modest outfit of a tooth brush and a cake of carbolic soap, I joyfully
feel that with the younger generation our profession is keeping pace
with the luxury of the times.
FROM BERBER TO SUAKIM.
Toward the end of the campaign four colleagues--Messrs. Knight,
Gwynne, Scudamore, Maud--and myself, took this opportunity of
traversing a country very little known to the outside world, and a
route which no European had followed for fourteen years, from Berber
to Suakim. Moreover, there was a spice of adventure about it; there
was an uncertainty regarding an altogether peaceful time on the way--a
contingency which always appeals strongly to Englishmen of a roving
and adventurous disposition. Only quite recently raids organized by
the apparently irrepressible Osman Digna had been successfully carried
out a few miles north and south of Berber. At the moment General
Hunter, with two battalions of troops, was marching along the banks of
the River Atbara to hunt for Osman and his followers, but there was
much speculation as to whether five-and-twenty dervish raiders were
still this side of the river, and drawing their water from the wells
on the Suakim road.
I was hardly prepared for this journey--one, probably, of twelve
days--for my campaigning outfit, which I was compelled to leave on
board my nugger on the Nile, had not yet arrived in Berber.
Unfortunately, I could not wait for the gear, as the Sirdar insisted
on our departure at once, for the road would be certainly insecure
directly General Hunter returned from covering our right flank on the
Atbara. I had no clothes but what I stood up in, and I had been more
or less standing up in them without change for the last two weeks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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