rd Beresford rigged up the little Egyptian steamer _Safieh_ with
armour plates and took her past an enemy fort that could easily have
sunk her as she went by, only eighty yards away, if his machine-gunners
had not kept such a stream of bullets whizzing through every hole from
which an Egyptian gun stuck out that not a single Egyptian gunner could
stand to his piece and live.

Lord Beresford was well to the fore wherever hard work had to be done
during that desperate venture; and it was he who performed the
wonderful feat of getting the Nile steamers hauled through the Second
Cataract by fifteen hundred British soldiers, who hove them up against
that awful stream of death while the blue-jackets looked after the
tackle. Beresford's Naval Brigade used to tramp fifteen miles a day
along the river, sometimes work as many hours with no spell off for
dinner, haul the whaleboats up-stream to where the rapids made a big
loop, and then, avoiding the loop, portage them across the neck of land
into the river again. Handling these boats in the killing heat would
have been hard enough in any case; but it was made still worse by the
scorpions that swarmed in them under the mats and darted out to bite
the nearest hand. Beresford himself had to keep his weather eye on
thirty miles of roaring river, on hundreds of soldiers and sailors, and
on thousands of natives. Yet he managed it all quite handily by riding
about on his three famous camels: Bimbashi, Ballyhooly, and Beelzebub.

But let no one imagine that dozens of joint expeditions ever make the
Navy forget its first duty of keeping the seaways clear of every
possible enemy during every minute of every day the whole year round.
When the Russian fleet was going out to the Sea of Japan during the
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) it ran into the "Gamecock Fleet" of British
fishing vessels in the North Sea, got excited, and fired some shots
that killed and wounded several fishermen. Within a very few hours it
was completely surrounded by a British fleet that did not interfere
with its movements, but simply "shadowed" it along, waiting for orders.
There was no fight; and the Russians were left to be finished by the
Japanese. But the point is, that, although the British Empire was then
at peace with the whole world, the British Navy was far readier for
instant action than the Russian Navy, which had been many months at war.

THE HAPPY WARRIOR

Wordsworth's glorious poem is not in pr