literally drenched with fear. Of course, we put on a brave front and
smiled complacently as we delivered the orders, and when it was
suggested that we remain overnight in the fort, I nonchalantly refused
the offer under the pretence that we were expected back. The same
thing happened on the return journey, and when the thing was over, we
were the most pitiful-looking objects--fear-stricken soldiers!

Some months later when it was announced to me that we had been
mentioned in dispatches, the absurdity of the thing became for the
first time fully apparent. According to the ethics of military life, I
had done a brave thing--something worth mentioning; but to my own
soul, I had been panic-stricken with physical fear, and, turn it over
as I might, I could not discover a vestige of either courage or
fortitude in the entire transaction.

The phrase, "Everything is fair in love and war," covers a multitude
of sins in both departments. We had a unique way of finding out
whether the wells in the desert were poisoned. We led up to each well
a small detachment of captives and made them drink. If they drank, we
could drink also; if they refused, we took it for granted the wells
were poisoned, and we hanged them. Sometimes this extreme sentence was
mitigated, and we flogged them. Whatever we touched, we destroyed.
What the bullet could not accomplish, the torch could. It was a
campaign of annihilation!

The news of Gordon's death cast a gloom over the entire army. This, of
course, meant relief and return home, but no man wanted to return. We
were seized with a fiendish impulse to proceed at all hazards to
Khartoum to his relief. That, from the point of view of the Government
was, of course, out of the question, and we were ordered home.