It was, indeed, a time of sore trouble. To find the servant dead in
the camp kitchen; to catch a hurried glimpse of blanketed shapes hustled
quickly to the desert on a stretcher; to hold the lantern over the grave
into which a friend or comrade--alive and well six hours before--was
hastily lowered, even though it was still night; and through it all
to work incessantly at pressure in the solid, roaring heat, with a mind
ever on the watch for the earliest of the fatal symptoms and a thirst that
could only be quenched by drinking of the deadly and contaminated Nile:
all these things combined to produce an experience which those who endured
are unwilling to remember, but unlikely to forget. One by one some of the
best of the field army and the communication Staff were stricken down.
Gallant Fenwick, of whom they used to say that he was 'twice a V.C. without
a gazette'; Polwhele, the railway subaltern, whose strange knowledge of the
Egyptian soldiers had won their stranger love; Trask, an heroic doctor,
indifferent alike to pestilence or bullets; Mr. Vallom, the chief
superintendent of engines at Halfa; Farmer, a young officer already on his
fourth campaign; Mr. Nicholson, the London engineer; long, quaint,
kind-hearted 'Roddy' Owen--all filled graves in Halfa cemetery or at the
foot of Firket mountain. At length the epidemic was stamped out, and by
the middle of August it had practically ceased to be a serious danger.
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