Most of the Dervish ammunition used in the battle seems to have been of home manufacture. All the Martini cartridges I picked up amongst their dead were extremely well made of "solid drawn" brass, and stamped with a Κ and a Π. I imagine that these letters may stand for Khartum and Pentekachi, the unfortunate Greek who succeeded in manufacturing gunpowder for the Mahdi, and was finally blown to atoms by an explosion of the magazine. On a Martini rifle which I secured from the battlefield, the Enfield stamp is still visible. Some disgraceful facts were revealed at the time when Berber was occupied, and the public documents fell into our hands, for, in addition to various offers of assistance addressed to the Khalifa from people in high positions at Cairo, some invoices were discovered which showed clearly that a certain Manchester firm had supplied the Khalifa with lead for the manufacture of bullets! It is difficult to believe that an Englishman could sink so low as to supply his country's enemy with munitions of war for the sake of filthy lucre! A new bullet, by the way, was used in the recent campaign. Its title is sufficiently significant. It is called the "man-stopping bullet," and simply means that an ordinary .303 Lee-Metford bullet is scooped out at the end to the depth of about half an inch. When this missile strikes an object the hollow nose instantly expands like an umbrella, inflicting a tremendous shock, which was frequently not secured when the ordinary solid bullet, with its enormous velocity (two thousand feet a second at the muzzle), passed clean through an enemy's body, but failed to administer a sufficiently crushing blow. At Krugersdorp an ordinary Lee-Metford bullet was driven right through the brain of a Boer; and so far was the tiny puncture from being immediately fatal, that the Dutchman walked to church next Sunday--though it is true that on the Sunday following he went there again in a coffin. Of course this solid bullet, when it chanced to come in contact with a bone, served its purpose well, and shattered the bone to atoms. The first occasion, I believe, on which the Lee-Metford bullet was fired into a human body was at the well-known Featherstone riots; and I remember seeing a drawing made by a medical man at the time of the foot of one of the rioters, which had been struck. Not only was the lower part of the leg bone completely smashed, but almost every bone in the foot had been broken more or less by the terrific force of the bullet.