The cholera spread steadily southward up the river, claiming successive victims in each camp.  In the second week of July it reached the new camp at Kosheh, whence all possible precautions to exclude it had proved vain.  The epidemic was at first of a virulent form.  As is usual, when it had expended its destructive energy, the recoveries became more frequent.  But of the first thousand cases between Assuan and Suarda nearly eight hundred proved fatal.  Nor were the lives thus lost to be altogether measured by the number. [The attacks and deaths from cholera in the Dongola Expeditionary Force were as follow:  British troops — 24 attacks, 19 deaths; Native troops — 406 attacks, 260 deaths; Followers — 788 attacks, 640 deaths.] To all, the time was one of trial, almost of terror.  The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appal the boldest.  Death moved continually about the ranks of the army—­not the death they had been trained to meet unflinchingly, the death in high enthusiasm and the pride of life, with all the world to weep or cheer; but a silent, unnoticed, almost ignominious summons, scarcely less sudden and far more painful than the bullet or the sword-cut.  The Egyptians, in spite of their fatalistic creed, manifested profound depression.  The English soldiers were moody and ill-tempered.  Even the light-hearted Soudanese lost their spirits; their merry grins were seen no longer; their laughter and their drums were stilled.  Only the British officers preserved a stony cheerfulness, and ceaselessly endeavoured by energy and example to sustain the courage of their men.  Yet they suffered most of all.  Their education had developed their imaginations; and imagination, elsewhere a priceless gift, is amid such circumstances a dangerous burden.

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.