THE SITUATION IN THE SOUDAN.
THE Daily Telegraph of Thursday heads a telegram from its Cairo correspondent "A Scare in the Soudan," and the telegram below this heading declares that the sending of British troops up the Nile was due to a panic. Sir Herbert Kitchener, it infers, suddenly got into a state of alarm, and imagined that the Dervishes were going to attack him at Berber, and so made an appeal for British regiments. In reality, however, declares the Cairo corre- spondent of the Daily Telegraph, the Dervishes are making no serious advance,—" indeed most of the enemy are practically remaining in their former quarters. Pos- sibly they find the transport difficulty and the feeding of their men impossible." In another passage the same correspondent asserts that "the hurried despatch up the Nile of British troops is due to something like a scare." The event will prove whether the Daily Telegraph corre- spondent or the Sirdar is best informed as to the con- dition of things in Omdurman, but meantime we are by no means inclined to believe that Sir Herbert Kitchener has been the victim of a scare. Liability to panic has not been his fault hitherto, and we do not believe that he has suddenly developed an acute form of military nervousness.
What has really happened in regard to the advance we take to be this. At the end of December we came into possession of Kassala. Now Kassala, if not geographi- cally much nearer to Khartoum than our post at the mouth of the Atbara, is far more in touch with the Der- vishes. When our officers reached Kassala they heard from Dervish deserters—as the Daily Telegraph itself admits— that there was a great deal of activity going on at the headquarters of the Khalifa, and that there were in- dications that this activity meant an early attack on our posts. All the probabilities were in favour of these stories being true. It is well known that after his defeats last year the Khalifs. concentrated all his avail- able forces at Khartoum, expecting an instant attack by the British. But when that attack did not take place the Khalifs began to find himself in difficulties. He had a larger army to feed than he could find food for, con- sidering how much his area of plunder had shrunk, and he was also face to face with a situation full of political perplexities. A tyrannical zealot always finds it difficult to stand still, and we may be sure that the Khalifa is being constantly urged by the more excitable of his followers to seize the opportunity presented by low Nile to drive the unbelievers out of all the land they have conquered from Dongola to Berber. The Sirdar knew, then, that all the probabilities were in favour of the Khalifa being forced by circumstances, and by the zeal of his followers, into an attack. When, therefore, news came from Kassala that a movement of some kind was beginning in Khartoum, and. that the Dervishes were apparently going to take the field, it would have been most foolish to neglect such a warning. To call the Sirdar's precautions a " scare " appears to us to show a singular misapprehension of the real situation. We hold firmly to what we said last week,—namely, that in all probability the Khalifa is far weaker than he has ever been before ; but that is no reason for thinking he will not attack, but rather a reason for believing that he will. His weakness renders it necessary for him to do some- thing, or else risk the gradual mouldering away of his authority. No doubt if the position of the Egyptian army had been a strong one the Sirdar might have waited till he got confirmation of the warnings that he had received from Kassala, and not at once strengthened himself by the advance of three British regiments. But the position of the Egyptian army is not a strong one. As we have several times pointed out, the fact that the Khalifs is weak does not and cannot make the Sirdar strong. How weak strategically must necessarily be the position of the Egyptian army, stretched out as it is in a thin line along the Nile, is well shown in a long telegram contributed by the Egyptian war correspondent of the Daily News. We say "neces- sarily weak" advisedly, for with the forces at his disposal no strategic ingenuity on the part of the Sirdar could have strengthened his position. The telegram in the Daily News to which we refer is, we have no hesita- tion in saying, the best and clearest exposition yet made of the military situation in the Soudan. The corre- spondent begins by pointing out the present situation of the Khalifa's forces between Khartoum and Ed-Darner, a place at the confluence of the Atbara and the Nile, where we have now a fortified post of observation, held by two companies of infantry, a Maxim, and half a battery of field artillery, under the command of two English officers. Our gun- boats, it will be remembered, lie off Ed-Damer, and from there make occasional excursions up the river even beyond, Metemmeh. In all probability, too, communication will before long be opened with Ed-Damer from Kassala down the valley of the Atbara. The distance between Ed-Darner and Metemmeh is about one hundred miles,—Metemmeh being on the opposite bank of the Nile. Opposite Metemmeh is Shendy, where forte have been constructed by the Dervishes in order to- prevent a raid on Khartoum by the gunboats. The Daily. News correspondent apparently holds that at Metemmeh and Shendy the Emir Malmoud has twenty-five thousand men. or more. He considers that at Khartoum the Khalifa may have seventy thousand men. We cannot help thinking that this is a great exaggeration, if by men is meant bond-fide fighting Dervishes. If, on the other hand, he merely means seventy thousand men and boys carrying arms of some sort, then possibly the figures may pass. That the Khalifs, will be able to produce more than, at the very most, forty thousand really well-armed. and dependable men we cannot think likely. If he could muster the forces attributed to him, we should never have been allowed to take Dongola so easily. Be that as it may, the Khalifa has, no doubt, a formidable force at Khartoum, at Metemmeh and at Shendy. It remains to consider what force is possessed by Osman Digna, who is in the Eastern Soudan on the right bank of the river, and between it and the Abyssinian frontier. The Daily News correspondent seems to think that his force has been very greatly reduced, as tribes numbering some eight thousand fighting men have left him. At present, then, he can hardly be considered as a very important factor. Doubtless, however, after a reverse to our arms, he would at once become the leader of a. formidable band.
So much for the Dervishes. The total Egyptian army consists of only eighteen thousand men all told. Some sixteen thousand of these—the rest are at Suakin and Kassala—now form a thin chain stretching from Ed- Darner, fifty miles beyond Berber, to Wady Haifa. But this chain is eight hundred miles long. The principal posts along it are Berber, Abu-Hamed, Merawi. Of these sixteen thousand men some five thousand are at Berber, five hundred at Abu-Hamed ; one thousand five hundred working on the railway, five thousand infantry, one thousand cavalry, and one thousand Camel Corps at Merawi; one thousand five hundred echeloned along the river, at Korti, Dabbeh, Dongola, and Kermeh (the terminus of the river railway), and at portage stations on the cataracts between Kermeh and Berber. Another five hundred are, or were, at Wady Haifa. Again, there are smaller bodies policing various important Nile dis- tricts, occupying small posts in villages between Berber and Abu-Hamed (necessitated by Dervish raids), laying and polling the telegraph, and doing transport and hospital service. It does not take a strategist to see that in any case this must be a very weak position. Sixteen thousand men covering so great a distance. make a line which could, under any circumstances, be easily pierced. But this is not all. The peculiar position which Metemmeh occupies in regard to the Nile bend enables a force acting from there to strike either at Berber or Merawi with equal ease, not to mention Abu-Hamed, or Debbeh, or Dongola, for Metemmeh is, roughly, the centre of a half-circle. No doubt this will also allow us to attack Metemmeh simultaneously from two- points, but the advantage, it must not be forgotten, is mutual. In other words, though the Dervishes are not very strong, our position is so weak that it would have been an act of criminal folly if the Sirdar had not strengthened it by the addition of a British brigade at the very first menace of attack. If this menace does not blow over, or possibly in any case, his safest form of defence may well be an attack on Metemmeh. As long as the Deriishes hold Metemmeh and the routes across the Bayuda Desert our position must be very vulnerable. If Metemmeh were in our hands we should, even if we went no further, have freed our chain of posts along the Nile from the dangers which now threaten them. The river runs straight after Metemmeh, and there are no more desert short-cuts. The problem is how to take Metemmeh without too great a loss of life. Possibly it may turn out that the Sirdar's way will be that which we have hinted at on former occasions, but which it is perhaps better not to do more than hint at. In any case, this talk of an unnecessary scare is ridiculous. There has been no scare, but only the taking of very necessary precautions.
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