The numbers of the army grew with its responsibilities.  Up to the end of 1883 the infantry still consisted of eight fellahin battalions.  In 1884 the first Soudanese battalion was raised.  The black soldier was of a very different type from the fellahin.  The Egyptian was strong, patient, healthy, and docile.  The negro was in all these respects his inferior.  His delicate lungs, slim legs, and loosely knit figure contrasted unfavourably with the massive frame and iron constitution of the peasant of the Delta.  Always excitable and often insubordinate, he required the strictest discipline.  At once slovenly and uxorious, he detested his drills and loved his wives with equal earnestness; and altogether ’Sambo’—­for such is the Soudanese equivalent of ’Tommy’—­was a lazy, fierce, disreputable child.  But he possessed two tremendous military virtues.  To the faithful loyalty of a dog he added the heart of a lion.  He loved his officer, and feared nothing in the world.  With the introduction of this element the Egyptian army became a formidable military machine.  Chance or design has placed the blacks ever in the forefront of the battle, and in Lord Kitchener’s campaigns on the Nile the losses in the six Soudanese battalions have exceeded the aggregate of the whole of the rest of the army.

It was well that the Egyptian troops were strengthened by these valiant auxiliaries, for years of weary war lay before them.  Sir Reginald Wingate, in his exhaustive account of the struggle of Egypt with the Mahdist power, [Mahdism and the Egyptian Soudan, Sir Reginald Wingate] has described the successive actions which accompanied the defence of the Wady Halfa frontier and of Suakin.

The ten years that elapsed between Ginniss and the first movements of the expedition of re-conquest were the dreary years of the Egyptian army.  The service was hard and continual.  Though the operations were petty, an untiring vigilance was imperative.  The public eye was averted.  A pitiless economy was everywhere enforced.  The British officer was deprived of his leave and the Egyptian private of his rations, that a few pounds might be saved to the Egyptian Treasury.  The clothing of the battalions wore thin and threadbare, and sometimes their boots were so bad that the soldiers’ feet bled from the cutting edges of the rocks, and the convoy escorts left their trails behind them.  But preparation was ever going forward.  The army improved in efficiency, and the constant warfare began to produce, even among the fellahin infantry, experienced soldiers.  The officers, sweltering at weary Wady Halfa and Suakin, looked at the gathering resources of Egypt and out into the deserts of the declining Dervish Empire and knew that some day their turn would come.  The sword of re-conquest which Evelyn Wood had forged, and Grenfell had tested, was gradually sharpened; and when the process was almost complete, the man who was to wield it presented himself.