f the most humane laws, is to
beggar commonsense and yap intolerable humbug. Yet British
self-respect was such, Mr Bennett to the contrary notwithstanding,
that the dervishes were treated as men, and not as wild beasts.

Started upon his false pursuit, Mr Bennett proceeds from error to
error, abounding in reckless misstatements, atrocious imputations, and
scattering charges void of truth. As briefly as possible, I will deal
with his accusations. One of his first deliverances is as
follows:--"It is, of course, an open secret that in all our Soudan
battles the enemy's wounded have been killed. The practice has, ever
since the days of Tel-el-Kebir, become traditional in Soudanese
warfare. After the battle of Atbara, it was announced that 3000
dervishes had been killed. There was practically no mention of the
wounded.... How, then, was it that no wounded were accounted for at
the Atbara?" Again he writes:--"But I cannot help thinking that if the
killing of the wounded had been sternly repressed at Tel-el-Kebir and
during the earlier Soudan campaigns, our dervish enemies would have
learned to expect civilised treatment," etc. Gaining courage, probably
from his own audacity, Mr Bennett had the hardihood to virtually
declare that the cruelties permitted by British officers made the
dervishes what they were.

Now, I went through the 1882 war in Egypt as well as most of the
campaigns in the Soudan. I am therefore in a better position than he
to declare, that his allegations are a perversion of the truth. It was
neither the practice at Tel-el-Kebir nor subsequent thereto for
British led troops to kill wounded men. The insinuation that they did
so, or connived at such slaughter, is a stupid or a malicious
falsehood. In every battle within the period referred to, large
numbers of wounded and unwounded prisoners were taken, and invariably
great lenience was shown. Surgical treatment also was, whenever
possible, always promptly rendered. Indeed, they were in countless
cases treated as tenderly as our own wounded. This further: in action
there are no soldiers less prone to needless blood-spilling, or men
readier to forgive and forget, than "Tommy Atkins." Official returns
exist setting at rest the fiction about Tel-el-Kebir and the Soudan
battles. At Tel-el-Kebir many thousand prisoners were made, and in
other engagements our hands were always full of dervish wounded. At
El Teb, Tamai, Abu Klea, Abu Kru, Gemaizeh, Atbara, and elsewh