Two officers attached to the second battalion--Captain H. H. Edwards, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and Lieutenant H. H. Drummond-Wolff, Royal Fusiliers, were also mentioned in despatches. CHAPTER XII. THE FIRST BATTALION. 1884-1885. THE NILE EXPEDITION. At the time of England’s armed intervention in Egypt in 1882, the Khedive’s authority extended nominally far beyond the limits of the province which Mahomet Ali had wrested from the Sublime Porte. The founder of the Egyptian dynasty, not satisfied with fighting his Suzerain the Sultan in Syria, had pushed armies up the Nile into the heart of the Soudan, or country of the Blacks, a no-man’s land which stretched from Wadi Halfa, the southern boundary of Egypt, to the Great Lakes far beyond the equator. This region had no form of government; its inhabitants were oppressed by Arab slave-hunters; its condition was pitiable in the extreme. Mahomet Ali gradually conquered every tribe in the Nile valley up to the junction of the White and Blue Niles, where he built Khartoum, and thrust forward outposts in every direction from the capital of his new dominions, which was about a thousand miles south of Cairo. The country thus annexed became known as the Egyptian Soudan, and extended from the shore of the Red Sea to the western frontier of Kordofan; it was about the size of France and Germany put together, and its population in 1883 was estimated at fourteen millions of mixed breed, the descendants of the aboriginal negroes and the Arabs who overran the country early in the Mohammedan era. This blend had produced a race possessing the outward characteristics and mental attributes of the Arab, combined with the endurance and brute courage of the Negro.[252] After anarchy such as had prevailed in the Soudan, almost any form of government might have been expected to improve the condition of the country; but in this respect Egyptian rule completely failed. Taxation was heavy; extortion was the rule, rather than the exception, and slave-hunting, with all its attendant horrors, was not suppressed; indeed, thanks to the connivance of the officials, who were virtually in partnership with the slave-dealers, it so greatly increased that the country was rapidly becoming depopulated, when in 1869, the pressure of British public opinion compelled the Khedive to institute reforms in the administration, and to appoint an Englishman, Sir Samuel Baker, as Governor-General of the Equatorial provinces, which stretched from Khartoum to the Great Lakes. Five years later Baker was succeeded by General (then Colonel) Charles George Gordon, who held the post till 1879. Though both accomplished much towards the establishment of better government and the suppression of slave-hunting, their efforts were cramped and thwarted by the officials at Cairo and at Khartoum, who were naturally disinclined to lose the enormous profits they derived from the trade in slaves. A country so mercilessly treated only needed a