"If the Dervishes at Wad Habeshi had succeeded in capturing the steamer, there is no doubt Nejumi would have hastened his march and would have intercepted the English before they could have got away from Gubat, but instead of that he halted when he heard of Wad Faid's death, and delayed some days in consequence at Wad Bishara and at Gereishab. He had a very large force with him ... "(Signed) MURABEK WAD EL TILB" {311} The second extract is translated from the German of Father Orhwalder, long a prisoner of the Mahdi: "... It is an undoubted fact that Lord Charles Beresford's gallant action at Wad Habeshi was the means of saving the lives of Sir Charles Wilson and his party, who would have suffered a like fate to that of Colonel Stewart and his companions, and it is an equally undoubted fact that the Mahdi's success at Khartoum shook the fidelity of the Shagiyeh, but Lord Charles Beresford's victory at Wad Habeshi had the effect of making Nejumi dread meeting the English on the river, and decided him to attack them on the desert. "Lord Charles Beresford deserves the credit of having effected this and was thus the means of saving the entire British force. "(Signed) DON GUISEPPE ORHWALDER "(23_rd February_, 1893)" It is obvious that the estimation of the conduct of the officers and men who fought at Wad Habeshi remains unaffected by the results of the action, which were neither definitely contemplated nor clearly foreseen. And the evidence I have quoted being irrelevant, strictly speaking, to any criticism of the action itself, is here cited, not in order to enhance the credit of the officers and men concerned but, for the sake both of its intrinsic interest, and for the purpose of illustrating, incidentally, the methods occasionally adopted under the system controlling the Royal Navy. The effect of the action at Wad Habeshi exemplifies the extraordinary potency of the element of chance in war. Under what conceivable theory of tactics could it have been maintained that a penny steamer had the smallest chance of rescuing a detachment isolated in a hostile country, upon condition of twice engaging a powerful battery at short range, and twice defeating its garrison of sixty or a hundred to one? Or what self-respecting tactician would have {312} predicted that in the extremely improbable event of success, its effect would have been to check, even momentarily, the advance by land of the main force of the enemy?