But less than sixteen years ago the length and breadth of it was one crazy hell of murder, torture, and lust, where every man who had a sword used it till he met a stronger and became a slave.  It was—­men say who remember it—­a hysteria of blood and fanaticism; and precisely as an hysterical woman is called to her senses by a dash of cold water, so at the battle of Omdurman the land was reduced to sanity by applied death on such a scale as the murderers and the torturers at their most unbridled could scarcely have dreamed.  In a day and a night all who had power and authority were wiped out and put under till, as the old song says, no chief remained to ask after any follower.  They had all charged into Paradise.  The people who were left looked for renewed massacres of the sort they had been accustomed to, and when these did not come, they said helplessly:  ’We have nothing.  We are nothing.  Will you sell us into slavery among the Egyptians?’ The men who remember the old days of the Reconstruction—­which deserves an epic of its own—­say that there was nothing left to build on, not even wreckage.  Knowledge, decency, kinship, property, tide, sense of possession had all gone.  The people were told they were to sit still and obey orders; and they stared and fumbled like dazed crowds after an explosion.  Bit by bit, however, they were fed and watered and marshalled into some sort of order; set to tasks they never dreamed to see the end of; and, almost by physical force, pushed and hauled along the ways of mere life.  They came to understand presently that they might reap what they had sown, and that man, even a woman, might walk for a day’s journey with two goats and a native bedstead and live undespoiled.  But they had to be taught kindergarten-fashion.

And little by little, as they realised that the new order was sure and that their ancient oppressors were quite dead, there returned not only cultivators, craftsmen, and artisans, but outlandish men of war, scarred with old wounds and the generous dimples that the Martini-Henry bullet used to deal—­fighting men on the lookout for new employ.  They would hang about, first on one leg, then on the other, proud or uneasily friendly, till some white officer circulated near by.  And at his fourth or fifth passing, brown and white having approved each other by eye, the talk—­so men say—­would run something like this: 

OFFICER (with air of sudden discovery).  Oh, you by the hut, there, what is your business?

WARRIOR (at ‘attention’ complicated by attempt to salute).  I am So-and-So, son of So-and-So, from such and such a place.

OFFICER.  I hear.  And ...?

WARRIOR (repeating salute).  And a fighting man also.

OFFICER (impersonally to horizon).  But they all say that nowadays.

WARRIOR (very loudly).  But there is a man in one of your battalions who can testify to it.  He is the grandson of my father’s uncle.