Sir John French’s first experience of actual warfare was a bitter one.  If ever the British Government bungled one of their military enterprises more thoroughly than another, it was the Nile Expedition of 1884-5.  What began as a forlorn hope ended in complete failure, and in three short months French experienced the miseries of retreat, of failure, and of work under an invertebrate War Office.

To this day no one has ever justified the hidden processes of logic by which the Government responsible came to the conclusion that the Soudan must be evacuated.  It is true that the Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed, had won considerable successes against our forces since his appearance in 1881.  But no army of any dimensions had ever been opposed to his “Divine powers.”  Why Gordon should have been entrusted with the evacuation is not so doubtful.  W.T.  Stead and other journalistic pundits conceived him to be the man for the task, however much Egypt’s ruler, Lord Cromer, might differ from their verdict.  So to Khartoum Gordon was sent with an all too small band of followers.  Presumably the authorities imagined that the man who had worked miracles in China with neither men nor money would settle the Soudan on equally economical terms.  But the Mahdi’s black braves were other mettle than the yellow men, as Gordon himself well knew from his past experience in the Soudan.

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Reaching Khartoum on February 18, 1884, he quickly discovered how perilous the defeat of Baker Pasha at El-Teb had made his position.  He at once warned his superiors, but nothing was done.  In April he found Khartoum besieged, but even that did not startle the Home authorities from their lethargy.  At length, however, the Government realised that to allow their General to perish at the hands of the Dervishes might be to forfeit their prestige in Egypt.  Lord Wolseley was accordingly instructed to relieve Khartoum at all costs.

Those instructions were more easy to give than to obey.  Wolseley decided to send a flying column across the desert from Korti to Metammeh and thence to Khartoum; and a second up the Nile.  With the luckless flying column went part of the 19th Hussars, under Lieutenant-Colonel Barrow.  Major French was second in command.

On December 30, General Herbert Stewart’s little force, with its thousand odd men and two thousand camels, was on parade for inspection near Korti.  At first there was some doubt as to how the camels would stand the attack of the Mahdi’s wild warriors.

“In order to test the steadiness of our camels as regarded noise and firing, the 19th Hussars one day at brigade drill charged on the unprotected mass of camels, cheering and yelling.  Everybody expected to see them break their ropes and career wildly over the desert.  The only result was that one solitary camel struggled to his feet, looked round and knelt down again; the others never moved an eyelid.