The Soul of a Regiment | Page 4

who had made and knew the regiment.
The whole civilized world knows -- and England knows to her
enduring shame -- what befell General Gordon and his handful of men
when they reached Khartum. Gordon surely guessed what was in store
for him even before he started, his subordinates may have done so, and
the native soldiers knew. But Sergeant-Instructor Grogram neither
knew nor cared.
He looked no further than his duty, which was to nurse the big black
babies of his regiment and to keep them good tempered, grinning and
efficient; he did that as no other living man could have done it, and
kept on doing it until the bitter end.
And his task can have been no sinecure. The Mahdi -- the ruthless
terror of the Upper Nile who ruled by systematized and savage cruelty
and lived by plunder -- was as much a bogy to peaceful Egypt as
Napoleon used to be in Europe, and with far more reason. Mothers
frightened their children into prompt obedience by the mere mention of
his name, and the coal-black natives of the Nile-mouth country are
never more than grown-up children.

It must have been as easy to take that regiment to Khartum as to take a
horse into a burning building, but when they reached there not a man
was missing; they marched in with colors flying and their six-fife band
playing, and behind them -- two paces right flank rear -- marched Billy
Grogram, his little swagger-cane under his left arm-pit, neat, respectful
and very wide awake. For a little while Cairo kept in touch with them,
and then communication ceased. Nobody ever learned all the details of
the tragedy that followed; there was a curtain drawn -- of mystery and
silence such as has always veiled the heart of darkest Africa.
Lord Wolseley took his expedition up the Nile, whipped the Dervishes
at El Teb and Tel-el-Kebir, and reached Khartum, to learn of Gordon's
death, but not the details of it. Then he came back again; and the Mahdi
followed him, closing up the route behind him, wiping all trace of
civilization off the map and placing what he imagined was an
insuperable barrier between him and the British -- a thousand miles of
plundered, ravished, depopulated wilderness.
So a clerk in a musty office drew a line below the record of the First
Egyptian Foot; widows were duly notified; a pension or two was
granted; and the regiment that Billy Grogram had worked so hard to
build was relegated to the past, like Billy Grogram.
Rumors had come back along with Wolseley's men that Grogram had
gone down fighting with his regiment; there was a story that the band
had been taken alive and turned over to the Mahdi's private service, and
one prisoner, taken near Khartum, swore that he had seen Grogram
speared as he lay wounded before the Residency. There was a battalion
of the True and Tried with Wolseley; and the men used methods that
may have been not strictly ethical in seeking tidings of their old
sergeant-major; but even they could get no further details; he had gone
down fighting with his regiment, and that was all about him.
Then men forgot him. The long steady preparation soon began for the
new campaign that was to wipe the Mahdi off the map, restore peace to
Upper Egypt, regain Khartum and incidentally avenge Gordon.
Regiments were slowly drafted out from home as barracks could be
built for them; new regiments of native troops were raised and drilled

by ex-sergeants of the Line who never heard of Grogram; new men
took charge; and the Sirdar superintended everything and laid his
reputation brick by brick, of bricks which he made himself, and men
were too busy under him to think of anything except the work in had.
But rumors kept coming in, as they always do in Egypt, filtering in
from nowhere over the illimitable desert, bourne by stray camel-drivers,
carried by Dervish spies, tossed from tongue to tongue through the
fishmarket, and carried up back stairs to Clubs and Department Offices.
There were tales of a drummer and three men who played the fife and a
wonderful mad feringhee who danced as no man surely ever danced
before. The tales varied, but there were always four musicians and a
feringhee.
When one Dervish spy was caught and questioned he swore by the
beard of the prophet that he had seen the men himself. He was told
promptly that he was a liar; how came it that a feringhee -- a pork-fed,
infidel Englishman -- should be allowed to live anywhere the Mahdi's
long arm reached?
"Whom God hath touched---" the Dervish quoted; and men
remembered that madness is the surest passport throughout the whole
of Northern