hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were
many correspondents with many corps and columns,--from the veterans
who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82,
what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first
miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and
the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at
the end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or
invalided.

Among the seniors--those who knew every shift and change in the
perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest
Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a
telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly
appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome--was
the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He
represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had
represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not
concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied
the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of
detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who
insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty
generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and
commissariat.

He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently
abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of
shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.

'What are you for?' said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent