Chapter XIII: Omdurman and Fashoda (1)

From this point my more violent activities in life may be said to have ended. My health had suffered seriously from the extreme hardships of my journeys, hardships which hitherto I had borne with easily, but which now at my age of fifty-six had taken their revenge on me. The next two years were for this reason an unhappy period of my life, and this, though I do not often make mention in it of my sufferings, is reflected in my diary.

We left Sheykh Obeyd on the 19th April. Four days before, on 15th April, I had gone to wish the Khedive good-bye. He received me pleasantly, as always, with pretty speeches about my friendship for him, and the good report of me he heard from everyone. He asked about my journey to Siwah and the attack made on me. I made rather light of it with him as a _ghazu_ (an accident of travel), but he said he had heard it was the doing of the Senussia. About the state of affairs between Greece and Turkey he said things could not be going worse. The Sultan was ruining the Empire, the end could not be far distant. “But where can we look,” he asked, “for another chief? In Arabia there is only your friend Ibn Rashid, and he is little more than a Bedouin.” With Sheykh Mohammed Abdu too I had a farewell talk.

“_17th April._—Abdu brought me news that war was declared between Greece and Turkey. We agreed that it was better things had come to actual war. Personally I think that it would be no loss for the Ottoman Empire if the Greeks should be able to hold their own in Macedonia, though I do not expect it, for a defeat of the Turkish army would bring about a revolution at Constantinople, and even a European war would do no harm. ‘When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own.’ The Ottoman Empire cannot be made to last in Europe, and as soon as the remnant of the provinces there are lost the better it will be. I expect, however, to see the Turks advance on Athens, when the Powers would doubtless intervene to stop the fighting, which they could do by pressure at Constantinople. Then there may be a second chance for the establishment of a better order of things on the Bosphorus, for it would be too great a scandal to allow the Sultan and his palace clique to go on for another twenty years on a new lease of absolute power; possibly the victorious general might become the leader of a constitutional change in Turkey, but we shall see.”

“_1st May._—Back in England, where we arrived at the end of the month. The Greeks have been smashed badly by Edhem Pasha in Thessaly; they seem to have run away rather than fought, which would be more creditable to them if they had not been the aggressors in the quarrel. I am sorry, on the whole, as the Turkish victory is strengthening the Sultan’s hand at Constantinople, and will put back the clock of reform. There is little chance, I fear, of Edhem’s coming forward as a revolutionist, but I am nearly dead to politics as, indeed, to all else but the horses and the sunshine.

“_8th May._—The Greeks are again beaten and in retreat, and the Turkish army will now advance on Athens and dictate its terms of peace. The Sultan is entirely rehabilitated in public opinion, for the world adores military success, and he will probably now go on in triumph till he dies.

“_18th May._—Newbuildings. On the 13th George Wyndham came to spend the day with me and stopped the night. He was full of his journey to South Africa and of his South African Commission, where he has played the part of advocate for Rhodes and his gang, and is still playing it. With this I am of course in little sympathy, but George and I know how to differ without quarrelling. He told me much of the inner working of the great intrigue and promised more some day. We also talked about the Henley edition of my poems, and about his own ‘New Review.’

“_3rd June._—George was here yesterday. The South African Committee is virtually, not virtuously, over, and no one in his senses can doubt that Chamberlain was privy to the raid, not indeed at the last moment but in its initial stages. I asked George whether it was not so. ‘Chamberlain has denied it,’ he answered diplomatically.

“_15th June._—Drove to Bramber and dined with Button in his newly purchased old house there, St. Mary’s, which he has furnished with bric- à-brac, and had the little meadow behind it laid out in miniature avenues. We talked of old political times. He tells me that at the time Wolseley started for Egypt in 1882, the Rothschilds had the _whole_ of their working capital in Egyptian securities, and were in such a fright about the Domains lest Arabi should flood the country and destroy the property pledged to them, that they got Wolseley to hurry on the campaign at all costs to prevent his cutting the canals. Button had this from Wolseley himself at the time, and it agrees with what he (Button) told me then.

“_17th June._—Hyndman came to breakfast with me in Mount Street, and we discussed the state of Europe, Africa and Asia. He knows a great deal and told me many curious things, among others the genesis of the English connection with the Suez canal. He assures me that it was not Beaconsfield’s idea, but Greenwood’s, who was at that time Editor of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ and on whose staff Hyndman was. Greenwood conceived the plan of the Government buying the shares, and after consulting with his colleagues on the paper went to Lord Derby to suggest it. Derby approved and sent him on to Beaconsfield, who at first was much disinclined, but eventually agreed, giving the job to the Rothschilds, a quite unnecessary waste of commission as the shares could have been bought with Treasury Bonds in the ordinary way. He told me much, too, of his dealings with Lord Salisbury at election times, and about French and German socialism. He stayed two hours with me.

“_20th June (Jubilee Sunday)._—The streets decked out with scaffolding and red cloth. London architecture lends itself to these disguisements, as there is nothing to lose by being hidden.

“_21st June._—Alfred Austin’s ‘Jubilee Ode’ is published in the ‘Times,’ and as good as a thing of the kind can be, and I have written to tell him so. When he was first made Laureate I did not write, because I really could not have said anything about his poetry that would have pleased him, but to-day I am able to do so with a good conscience. We are old acquaintances of something like forty years’ standing, and personally I am pleased at his success.

“_22nd June._—The Queen’s Jubilee Day—the evening and night of which I spent on Chanclebury Down, camped among the thorn bushes near the top of the Ridge, a beautiful but rather hazy evening, quite warm, no moon, little parties of country people out on foot, others in vans, but not enough of them to injure the solitude. At half-past nine rockets began to be fired away at Shoreham, and a light appeared on Leith Hill, then illuminations at Shoreham and Brighton, and precisely at ten bonfires were lit up. I counted ninety-seven of them, and there were probably more, for the clump hid part of the horizon. It was an inspiriting sight, and we tried to make out our own bonfire at Newbuildings, which lies in a straight line between Chanclebury and Leith Hill.

“_26th June._—The day of the Jubilee Review at Portsmouth. A Jingo apotheosis which contrasts strangely with my recollection of Portsmouth seventeen years ago, when our military and naval glory was at so low an ebb that even I felt humiliated.

“_27th June (Sunday)._—I am at Swinford on a visit to Austin. Austin is naïve about his position and dignity as Poet Laureate. He assured me that he had made it a condition in accepting the post that he was not to write Odes to order. I asked him how he had written his Jubilee performance, suggesting that it must have been troublesome to manage. On the contrary, he told me, he had done it without more effort than just to fix his mind determinedly and reverently on Her Majesty, waiting till the inspiration came, ‘and (after a pause) it came.’ He showed me a letter from the Queen’s private secretary, thanking him for the verses, and saying that Her Majesty thought them very pretty, but when he went to present them at Windsor, she did not ask him to recite them. A letter from Lord Salisbury was in the same sense; however, Austin is so loyal that he even apologized for depreciating Victorian architecture. In the afternoon we all sat talking on the lawn, Lady Paget and Lady Windsor being of the party, and it was suggested that each of us should give his idea of Heaven. Mine was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, ‘Are you there?’ and for her to answer, ‘Yes, are you?’ and so turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years. Austin’s idea was to sit also in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea, and a British victory by land. He talked to us a good deal about Irving, and told us that Irving had begun life as a boy of all work in the family of a solicitor in Cornwall, where his father and mother were butler and cook. The solicitor put the boy into his law office as a junior clerk, but dismissed him because he paid no attention to business, only to play-acting in office hours.

“_6th July._—A letter from Joseph Potocki telling the ugly news of the burning of the Countess Branicka’s stud and stables; one hundred and thirty horses perished, including two colts they bought from us last year. It is said to be the vengeance of an English groom dismissed for theft. Her daughter Sophie is engaged to marry Prince Strozzi.

“_12th July._—My new room at Newbuildings which I call the ‘Jubilee Room’ is finished, and looks already part of the old house. It was built without plan, elevation, or sketch of any kind, Thorpe and I working it out together as we went on.” [The Jubilee Room was more than a room, being a separate building with two stories. Thorpe, a plain stone and bricklayer born and bred in the parish, a painstaking, conscientious man working slowly, but with a complete knowledge of his trade and its older traditions. The panelling inside was done by my estate carpenter, Dench.]

“_15th July._—The South African committee has published a report, certainly the most scandalous ever jobbed. It absolves Chamberlain in these words: ‘Neither the Secretary of State for the Colonies nor any of the officials of the Colonial office received any information which made or should have made them or any of them aware of the plot during its development.’ It may be noticed that this pronouncement carefully avoids what undoubtedly happened, namely that Chamberlain’s attitude to Rhodes and Beit was practically this: ‘Manage the matter your own way, but remember I am to know nothing about it.’ Rhodes is condemned publicly in the report, but will be let off all punishment. He will not even be struck off the list of the Queen’s Privy Councillors. I hear that the Queen personally assured the Emperor William when the raid happened that none of her Ministers were cognisant of the affair, and this assurance given by the Queen accounts for the strange attitude of Sir William Harcourt and other Radicals on the Committee who have signed the report. The whole of our public life is rotten, and will remain so till we have received a serious defeat in war. The Queen is at the bottom of half the Imperialistic mischief we do abroad. She is pleased at the title of Empress, and likes to enlarge her borders. I should not be at all surprised if she was really in the Jameson affair with her Ministers, indeed this is the best explanation of the extraordinary manœuvres of the Government, and the connivance of the official opposition.

“_24th July._—Our annual Arab stud sale at Crabbet. Brilliant weather; an immense gathering; 320 persons sat down to lunch; a good many of these, foreigners and colonials; a successful but tiring day.

“_27th July._—To London and lunched with George, whom I found triumphant over the issue of the debate on South Africa last night. He considers the triumph of the Rhodes group, which is his own triumph, due to superior ability in the Parliamentary management, the skill with which they split the Liberal opposition, the capture of old Harcourt, the forcing of Chamberlain’s hand into open support of Rhodes and the bamboozling of the stupid M.P.’s. With regard to Chamberlain, George admires him as the grandest specimen of the courageous, unscrupulous schemer our politics have ever seen. He says that Chamberlain was not an accomplice of the actual armed raid made by Jameson—though he certainly was in the political intrigue—and he (Chamberlain) would not deny it—against the independence of the Transvaal. He described Chamberlain’s speech and the menace he (Chamberlain) threw out to Dilke if any one should dare propose the cancelling of Rhodes’ position in the Privy Council. Chamberlain did not name Dilke, but his eye, while speaking, travelled along the benches of the Opposition, so that it was clear to all what his meaning was. It was a base threat, and he would certainly have followed it up if the Radicals had dared accept his challenge. George triumphs in all this, but to me it is pitiful to see a young man like him, the heir of all the ages, connecting himself with such a scoundrel crew. The whole Cabinet is now the duumvirate of Balfour and Chamberlain, but I told George he would find one day that Arthur would be the victim of some base trick in order that the other might reign alone.”

In August I made a driving tour through the West of England and South Wales. The day before starting I received a letter from Edward Malet breaking the silence of fifteen years. It was very cordial and expressed regret for our troubled relations in the past. I have answered it in a way which I hope may bring about a renewal of our friendship. The occasion of his letter was the discovery among his mother’s papers of a number of MS. poems he thought were mine. In reality they were Lothian’s as I can see by the handwriting, and also by internal evidence—poems of dates between 1861 and 1864, the time Schomberg and I were most together and most with Lady Malet. I need not give a full account of this journey. We passed through Petworth and Rogate, where I found Hugh Wyndham, just retired from diplomatic work after his forty years’ career. Then by Bishop’s Waltham to Salisbury and Stockton, stopping for a couple of hours at Wilton on my way. This time I found Sidney, now Lord Pembroke, at home with his family of boys at cricket, much as I found the former generation thirty years ago. “Wilton is the paradise of England with its three rivers, eternally beautiful and unchanged while its owners change and perish. One passes by and finds Herberts living there, happily idling their lives away, as one finds swallows year after year nesting in a village, and one imagines them to be the same Herberts, as one imagines the others to be the same swallows. At Warminster next day I stopped to bait and dined at the ordinary at the Anchor Inn, it being market day among the farmers with whom I talked agriculture and the price of mutton. But when they found I was not there to buy lambs they lost interest in me. I found to my surprise that of the ten farmers dining with me five drank water only, the rest cider. Our meat was roast ducks carved by a chairman at the head of the table, and at one moment I was half afraid they were going to make speeches.” I spent my Sunday, 8th August, at Mells, where I found a company of “Souls,” then on to Bristol where I put up for the night at an odd place of entertainment called “The Bath,” kept by a Dr. Shaw and his wife, a pretty woman, who had been long in India, and who was the attraction evidently of the guests, mostly retired Anglo-Indians, patients as well as guests, as indicated by the menu cards, which were marked with medicines as well as wines. Bristol is the refuge of such broken-down officials, who live at its cheap lodging-houses. The next day, crossing the Severn Channel by the tunnel to Cardiff and St. Fagan’s, where I spent the inside of a week delightfully with the Windsors in their romantic castle, which is such a perfect thing, an old Carolan house set in the _enceinte_ of an older castle wall, spoilt by nothing modern, the object of my pilgrimage, and back, still driving through the romantic country of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Caerphilly, Caerleon, Chepstow, and the Forest of Dean, where I camped close to what is called the Devil’s Chapel, and thence by Berkeley Castle, Easton Grey, Broad Hinton, and Savernake, Hurstbourne, Minley, and so home. It had been a journey of 385 miles, made in nineteen days with my four Arab mares, not one of which had tired or been off her feed for a single day, and trotted in gamely, eager to be at home. The journey had done me good. My journal of this tour is extremely interesting, but once more it is impossible to give it a place here, as it would lead me too far along the pleasant byways of social life and away from the prescribed high road of public things.

“_4th Sept._—For the last three weeks there have been high doings in India on the Afghan frontier, and to-day expeditions on a large scale are announced. This is closely connected with our absurd policy at Constantinople. The position to-day with Russia protecting the Caliphate at Constantinople, France in alliance with Russia and Germany also in the coalition against us, justifies all I wrote and did in Egypt sixteen years ago. Dined at my club and had some talk with Nicholas O’Conor who, heaven help us! is now Her Majesty’s ambassador to the Emperor of all the Russias.

“_25th Sept._—To Saighton, where I find a house full of friends and acquaintance, Dick Grosvenor, Edward Clifford, Gatty, Henry Milner and Lady Clifden, etc., with nothing for a vegetarian to eat [Lady Windsor had persuaded me to become a vegetarian], and I dined off two mushrooms and a raisin; nevertheless a pleasant evening, George laying down the law about Shakespeare, Ronsard, Brantôme, and a number more.

“_27th Sept._—At Saighton. Played lawn tennis with George. Spent the evening with him, arguing with some heat the eternal question of the right of savage nations to existence. George, who represents the general sense of modern Imperial England, denies them any such right at all. I am sick of their arguments from Darwin and the survival of the fittest.

“_29th Sept._—Back to London and wrote going up in the train a piece of verse for Gatty’s translations, the hymn beginning:

If this dark valley of distress and tears

So green appears.

“_1st Oct._—Shooting at Newbuildings with Charles Wyndham, Scrope, and Evershed. Scrope is a nice young Yorkshireman, very understanding about horses, but in poor health. He gave us a naïve account of the Jameson raid as narrated to him by his brother, who took part in it. It seems to have been a regular drunken frolic. Jameson had up I forget how many wagon-loads of drink the week before he started, including, I remember, thirty-six cases of champagne which he distributed to his men, with leave to get drunk for three days. There were among the men a number of loafers brought up from Cape Town, some of them waiters from the restaurants, who had never been on horseback before, and the whole force was more or less drunk when it started. Jameson had told off three men to cut the telegraph wires, but they were in such a condition that they mistook a barbed wire fence for the telegraph and cut off a hundred yards of it and carefully buried it instead of the other. When they got near Johannesburg, Jameson could not find the way and picked up Boers to show it them, who of course led them wrong. Scrope’s brother and others knew the road but were not listened to. As to drunkenness, I can well believe the story, for I remember how, on a journey in South America in 1868, some English men of the party riding with me took for all provision on the road, a gigantic demi-john of spirits, which they strapped to the back of a horse and drove in front of them.”

I left England in October once more for Egypt, still in bad health, indeed in worse, for I had foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded into becoming a vegetarian as well as the teetotaler I had been for fifteen years, and the life at Sheykh Obeyd, delightful to those in health, was too primitive to be suited to an invalid. On board the ship that took us to Alexandria I found Walter Harris, the “Times” correspondent in Morocco, who told me a good deal about his life at Tangiers where he has a garden four miles from the town. He talked also about the war in Thessaly where his brother was killed last summer while helping the Greeks. The Greeks had abandoned the brother when wounded, after robbing him of everything. They had behaved abominably during the war. The Crown Prince of Greece himself told Harris that he had seen the Evzoni throw paraffin on the Turkish wounded and set them on fire.

I found all well at Sheykh Obeyd, except that the desert round us was beginning to be cultivated and enclosed. The day will come when we shall be caught in a network of gardens and country houses, though so far no great harm has been done. People argue with me and say, “But your property must be increasing in value,” as if that was any consolation for losing the solitude. Foxes are still plentiful in the garden and I have twice seen a very large wolf, old and grey, who, they tell me, has been here all the summer, frightening the boys who cut the grass for the horses. Salem says the wolf pursued him one evening and tore his shirt and Suliman that he had taken two of his lambs from his tent outside our wall. He comes and howls under our window after nightfall. There are certainly two sorts of wolves here besides jackals, unless, indeed, the intermediate size is a cross between wolf and jackal. Our present guest is of the big desert kind.

“_23rd Nov._—I have been reading Froissart’s ‘Chronicles.’ He must have lived a happy life, if what his biographers tell of him is true. The age of chivalry, brutal as it was in its fighting aspect, seems to have been sweetened by a good deal of romance, but to this Froissart hardly alludes, and, tells only of battles and sieges, which were most of them ignoble proceedings. Edward III’s idea of war seems to have been to raid the French towns everywhere, except just where the French army was. Both Cressy and Poitiers were fought by the English because they could not get away from the pursuing French, and the victory in both cases was won by the skill of the English archers on the one side and foolish generalship on the other. As a rule, it was only the unarmed fighters on foot that were killed, the knights and squires surrendered to ransom as soon as they were knocked off their horses. This was all their chivalry of war.

“_26th Nov._—Sheykh Mohammed Abdu came to see me, and told me the political and court gossip. The latest is about a trial in which a young man is being prosecuted for insulting and libelling the Khedive in verse. The true movers in the matter, Abdu assures me are Moharram Pasha Shahin and Sheykh el Bekri in conjunction with Sheykh Abul Huda at Constantinople, and it was done to please the Sultan. Cromer, however, has mixed himself up in it, and in order to obtain a verdict, or rather to screen some persons implicated who are favourable to English policy, has had the Egyptian Procureur of the native courts replaced by Corbet, an Englishman. The Khedive is still on bad terms with the Sultan, and the poem was written to please his Majesty, but by an unfortunate mistake in the printing, one of the insulting epithets applied to the Khedive is ‘Turk,’ so that it has given almost equal offence at Yildiz.

“In India, the Afridis I am glad to see are still gallantly maintaining themselves against General Lockhart, and our troops are getting nicely ‘punished’ in their turn. It is clear from their accounts that but for the superior fighting qualities of the Sikhs and Ghurkas the white regiments could not be got to continue the campaign. Lockhart has had to encourage them publicly not to be ‘downhearted.’ There is talk in England of conscription for the army, and our people will soon begin to understand that they can’t have the amusement of empire without paying the price. The British Empire is a structure that might crumble at any moment, the sooner the better, say I.

“_29th Nov._—We have a guest with us, Nasr el Mizrab, nephew of that Mijuel el Mizrab, who was Lady Ellenborough’s last husband. He is a well-spoken man and has travelled more than once with Frankish explorers in the Syrian desert, Russians and Germans, buying horses for them of his Anazeh kindred.

“_9th Dec._—Young John Evelyn has come to stay with us. His father sent him to me on his way up the Nile, saying that he wished him ‘to learn Arabic, to keep a diary, to acquire habits of observation and self- reliance and not to imbibe Jingo principles, also to marry early.’ I find the young man excellently disposed to all these things except the last.

“_21st Dec._—I am starting on Christmas Eve for Jebel Attaka near Suez, as I think I am well enough now for desert travelling. Eid, Suliman’s young Howeyti cousin, who travelled with us last March to Siwah, and was so good a desert man, is dead. He had joined in a ghazu in the summer beyond Akabah, and, on his way home, being parched with thirst, drank of a well whose property it is to kill the drinker in fourteen days. He reached home alive, but died soon after.

“_23rd Dec._—Had an audience with the Khedive and took Walter Harris with me. The talk was principally about the Turco-Greek war, as to which Harris gave us some curious details. The King of Greece himself told him that the reason that he left Vasos in Crete was so as to bring about a blockade of the Piræus. ‘I should then,’ the King said, ‘have been able to tell my people that but for the intervention of the Powers I would have marched with a hundred thousand Greeks to Constantinople. As it turned out, we were not prevented by the Powers and so had to make a war, for which none of us had bargained.”

Abbas afterwards told us of his cousin Prince Aziz’s attempt to go to Nejd. The Prince had got as far as Sherm, a small port in the Sinai Peninsula, intending to cross over from there to Moelhi, and then on to visit Ibn Rashid, but the Khedive had stopped him by telegram. He was afraid of being compromised in Constantinople by the visit, and was also unwilling that so light-headed a member of the Khedivial family should be the first to visit Nejd after the conquests of old days. Aziz is now at Nakhl, where he is being detained by the Egyptian governor of the fort.

“Lunched with Rennell Rodd, and called afterwards on Riaz Pasha and on Gorst. Harris was to have started with me to-morrow on my desert trip, but has been prevented.”

The desert trip was a bit of exploration connected with a map I was making of the country between Cairo and the Red Sea. I returned from it on the last day of the year.

“_12th Jan._ 1898.—News has come of the death of Mohammed Ibn Rashid at Haïl, ‘in his bed,’ they say after a seven days’ illness. If truly in his bed, he may rank as one of the most uniformly successful of Arabian monarchs. For five and twenty years he has reigned in Nejd, warring every spring upon his neighbours and always victoriously. He has not once been defeated in the field, and has reduced every tribe in succession to his obedience. His only misfortune has been that he has left no son, and his inheritance will probably be disputed between Abdul Hamid, son of Hamoud, his first cousin once removed, and Hamoud Mattaab, his nephew. Both, they say, claim ‘the seat,’ and are appealing to Constantinople for support. This may bring the Turk into Nejd, for the Sultan was never so powerful in the desert as now. Still, it is a far cry to Haïl.

“The Soudan campaign is being pushed on, and British soldiers are being sent up the Nile, on a pretext of defence against an attack by the Khalifa. How anybody can be green enough to believe these official tales I cannot understand. The true reason is the advance of the French expedition [under Marchand] to the Upper Nile at Fashoda, and so the desire to be beforehand with them at Khartoum. The sending of British troops is not at all because they are needed, for our English regiments are inferior in every way to the Egyptian ones for such work, but to gratify the English Government, and especially the Queen, who considers the glory of her reign tarnished by the death of Gordon and who wants it avenged. If Egyptian troops alone recaptured Khartoum it would be a reproach to the British army, which was defeated in its attempts to relieve Gordon there. They like, too, to be able to say that the British military Occupation is necessary to Egypt for its frontier defence—only another false excuse in the long list of false excuses for staying in Egypt begun twenty years ago.

“_21st January._—Gorst and his two sisters and Captain Fitzclarence lunched with us. Gorst has given me a list of the people reported to have been killed at Siwah on the 20th April of last year in a local fight. It includes several of my friends there, including Hassuna, but I feel sceptical about the whole story.

“_22nd January._—A visit from Cogordan, the French Minister here. We talked about the Soudan expedition. He tells me Kitchener will be in command of forty thousand troops including those recently taken over from the Italians at Kassala, and the ten thousand English who were in Egypt. Of the Marchand expedition he disclaimed its importance, and laughed at the talk that a French flag will be found flying at Khartoum.

“_26th January._—Old Charles Villiers is dead, the father of the House of Commons. I remember him at Frankfort as long ago as the winter of 1860-61, dining at our Legation with the Malets. He impressed me at the time as the most wonderful and delightful talker I had listened to. He seemed to take an interest in me too, and drew me out till I talked a deal of boyish nonsense. The recollection of his wit and charm is strong with me still.”

Here follows another six days’ journey in the Eastern desert on _deluls_, travelling fast and map-making as we went, as I was anxious to complete my survey of the country north of the Kalala range. It was bitter cold on the upper plateaux, and the hard life nearly finished me, and hastened my return to England.

“_15th February._—The papers report the Queen’s speech on the opening of Parliament. It contains, perhaps, more than the usual number of insincerities. Politics in England are in a hopeless condition, and will remain so until the Empire begins to break up, when it will be too late to say or do anything. I shall not be sorry if I live to see it. The British Empire has done so much harm to so many nations and peoples that it deserves to perish, and we English will be better off as a Nation shorn of our dependencies than now. It will hurt our pride, but injure no true interest.

“Prince Osman is dead. He was riding to the Pyramids on his camel, and fell off suddenly; they say apoplexy. He was the cleverest and most amusing of the Khedivial family, if not the most reputable; a brother of Princess Nazli, and first cousin, once removed, of the Khedive. He had been brought up at Paris, and was always a bit of a _boulevardier_, very pleasant and good-natured, and with an extraordinary knowledge of the events, political and social, of his time, a fat Falstaff in appearance, but like the others of the Khedivial family, with a certain bodily hardihood and endurance on camel back; my oldest friend among them, and I am sorry to lose him.

“_25th February._—Anne and Judith lunched a few days ago with Bill Gordon, who told them that the real reason for his uncle’s resigning his post as private secretary to Lord Ripon in India was as follows. When Ripon was appointed to India it was resolved by the Cabinet that he should break up the gang of permanent officials who form the Simla ring, and it was on this understanding that Gordon accepted the post. A special point to be attacked was the treatment of Ayub Khan (the Emir of Afghanistan) as to which Government had evidence showing our English officials to have acted unjustly and tyrannically. Gordon had drawn up a special memoir on the subject which was to be acted on immediately upon Ripon’s landing at Bombay, but Ripon was no sooner on shore than the officials got hold of him and persuaded him to let the matter rest. Gordon, upon this, threw up the appointment, for he saw his chief was too weak to carry the policy through. A Viceroy of India needs to be a man of iron to hold his own and Ripon was every good thing except that.

“There is talk of Cromer’s going to the Foreign Office. What the Tories want now is a strong man to carry out their policy of violence, and Cromer will suit them. I care little how things go, for the time of reasoning is past. There will be no change till the Empire breaks up and Cromer may as well sit on the Imperial safety valve as another. I had a long talk to-day with Mohammed Abdu about this and other matters.

“In Paris Zola has been condemned to a year’s imprisonment for bringing forward the Dreyfus case. This is an event of great significance, for it means that in France as in Germany and Russia, militarism reigns supreme. It will be so in England, too, before many years are over, and then good-bye to liberty of any kind. If the nations of Europe will only cut each other’s throats in a Thirty Years’ War there might be some hope for the world, but they are too cowardly for that. All they dare do is to swagger hideously, and talk about their honour. It will be with them as it is with the Spaniards who are ruled by military pronunciamentos. With regard to the Dreyfus case, when I was at Gros Bois last autumn, I asked Wagram the truth of it. He told me that it was to please the Austrian Government that the case had been tried privately, that justly or unjustly condemned, Dreyfus was an _affreux canaille_, and had made some confession of guilt, but I see little difference in point of canailledom between these wretched military spies and their wretched military superiors, who employ and pay them. Spying, whether by a paid agent or a paying agent, demoralises those that indulge in it, and the military code of to-day recognizes every treachery and every baseness as lawful. What nonsense to talk about military honour! There is no such thing. Can one conceive any greater blackguard than the _soidisant_ Esterhazy unless it be his military backers, Pellieux and the rest? On our side the Channel, too, we have some pretty blackguards to show lately.

“_9th March._—Left for England. Mohammed Abdu came to wish me good-bye. I was suffering with great pain so that I felt almost dying. Two years ago under like circumstances I should have made him my profession of faith, but to-day no, though I was moved at parting with him as though I were saying last words to a dearest friend, but I feel now there is no reality in it all. The Moslems of to-day who believe are mere wild beasts like the men of Siwah, the rest have lost their faith. Still less does Christianity appeal to me. I do not wish to live again. I only wish for the extinction of the grave. I am going home alone, Anne staying on for another six weeks in Egypt. I have telegraphed to my servant, David, to meet me at Venice and see me slowly home. My sole idea now is to be for a week with George in Mount Street, and then to be nursed by Cowie at Newbuildings. It was fortunately quite calm weather on my voyage up the Adriatic, and at Venice I found an invitation waiting me from Lady Paget at Bellosguardo in Florence where I stayed two nights, and then on, arriving in London on the 23rd March, where I found George Wyndham established in my rooms in Mount Street, which I had lent him; there was room for us both there, and his cheerful influence did me good.

“_24th March._—George is taking a less practical part now in politics, being up to his eyes in literature, but he walks home most nights with Arthur Balfour from the House and hears a good deal of what is going on. He tells me Lord Salisbury does not intend resigning, and though he has made over the Foreign Office temporarily to Balfour, he still keeps interfering with affairs there not altogether to Arthur’s pleasure. In talking about the scramble for China, I had remarked that I should have thought an alliance with Japan was the obvious English policy. He said, ‘Yes, but it looks as if Japan had been squared by Russia.’ [This is the first mention I can find in my diary of what was afterwards to develop into the Anglo-Japanese alliance.]

“George’s new edition of Shakespeare’s poems is just out, and he is busy editing a new weekly paper, ‘The Outlook,’ started as a ‘raft’ on which to save the fortunes of Henley and the other writers wrecked in the ‘New Review.’ Gladstone is dying of cancer, poor old soul, and it has been agreed to soothe his last days with morphia as he cannot live long.

“_29th March._—Lady Gregory came to see me and talked much about Ireland. She has now become a strong Nationalist, and has been busying herself about the demonstrations for ‘’98.’ If I were well enough I would go over for them in May.

“George is much put out at the inaction of our Government in China, where there is a combination of Russia, France, and Germany against us, and at the general failure of Lord Salisbury’s policy as a check to the British Empire. He asked me why I wished ill to the British Empire. I said, ‘because we had done too much harm in the world, and though the other nations of Europe also do harm, they are not able to do it so effectively as we do through their lack of knowledge, and of those qualities that make of Englishmen an administrating race, also because the _Empire_ is a poor cockney affair invented hardly twenty years ago to the ruin of our position as an honest _Kingdom_ at home.’ I remember well the disgust of George’s father and of other old-fashioned Tories, when Disraeli first foisted on them the Queen’s brummagem Imperial title.’

“_31st March._—‘The Chronicle’ has a sensational but probably true account of an ultimatum sent by the American President to Spain on account of Cuba. It seems likely to lead to war. If so I hope that Spain may be able to hold her own, not that Cuban independence lacks my sympathy, but because between Spain and the United States I am obliged to be on the side of the older and more barbarous country. The Yankees as the coming race of the world would be worse even than ourselves.

“_1st April._—At five to-day Lady Gregory brought me the poet Yeats, an Irish mystic of an interesting type. He is tall, lean, dark, good looking, of the same type of countenance as John Dillon’s, very narrow between the eyes and short-sighted. We talked much about the ‘’98’ demonstrations of which he is organizer, and of the coming doom of England, and we talked also of another mystical poet and patriot, Russell, (A. E.), with whom Yeats was a fellow student at Dublin. Russell, in order to subdue his will, became cashier in a haberdasher’s shop, where he acquired repute as an accountant, but always spent his Sundays and holidays in the Wicklow Hills, writing poetry and seeing visions. Russell has now been removed to a higher sphere as political organizer. Both believe in ghosts and fairies and in the transmigration of souls, and have magic powers of seeing the future and of prophecy.

“Yeats experimented magically on me. He first took out a notebook and made what he called a pyramid in it which was a square of figures, then he bade me think of and see a square of yellow as it might be a door, and walk through it and tell him what I saw beyond. All that I could see at all clearly was that I seemed to be standing on a piece of green, rushy grass, in front of me a small pool from which issued two streams of very blue water to right and to left of me. He then bade me turn and go back through the door, and told me I should see either a man or woman who would give me something. I failed to see anything but darkness, but at last with some effort I made out the indistinct figure of a child, which offered me with its left hand some withered flowers. I could not see its face. Lastly he bade me thank the person to whose intervention the vision was due, and read from his notebook some vague sentences prefiguring this vision. The performance was very imperfect, not to say null.

“_5th April._—Arthur Balfour made his statement in the House to-day of the Government’s China policy. George tells me the speech was ‘statesmanlike,’ but I gather from him that it was no very pronounced success. Indeed, how should it be? The British Government has leased Wei-hai-wei, which seems to be a sort of second best to Port Arthur, but of no very practical value for coercing Pekin as it cannot easily be connected with it by land. I should have thought it would have been wiser either to make an alliance with Japan and war with Russia, or else to let the whole thing severely alone, but George thinks Japan has already been squared by Russia.

“_6th April._—I had a bad return of pain which lasted all night until twelve to-day when I took an infinitesimal dose of morphia, which at once stopped it and raised me from the depths of misery to the state of happiness of a schoolboy just loosed from school.

“_9th April._—There is an announcement in the papers of ‘A great British victory in the Soudan—Gordon avenged.’

“_11th April._—Saighton. I came here for the Easter holiday, arriving in a miserable plight of pain, but to-morrow Sibell (Lady Grosvenor) is to take me to Holywell to be bathed by the miraculous fountain there for my cure. Some Vandals, calling themselves the Town Council, are claiming the well which they want to let to a soda water company at £500 a year, but George intends to oppose this in Parliament. There is nobody here but the family, including little Percy and Bendor, the latter grown into a very nice young man. George has been entertaining Mr. Cecil Rhodes at my rooms in Mount Street while I was away, using them, I fancy, as a place of secret communication between the Government and Rhodes, whom they dare not publicly avow.

“I see the old Tichborne claimant is dead, asserting his rights to the last. Certainly there was something about the man not wholly vulgar. I saw a good deal of him at Buenos Ayres in 1868, and, though a mountain of flesh and of no very refined clay, he seemed to me a gentleman born, gone down in the world, rather than a mere plebeian. Richard Burton, who was there at the same time, and who travelled across the Pampas with him in the Mendoza diligence, believed in him as authentic at the time, and so we all did. I remember seeing him once involved in some vulgar dispute in a café, while playing billiards, and he seemed to me to behave as a gentleman would have done under somewhat trying circumstances, and now they have buried him with considerable pomp and a coffin plate recording his baronetcy, attended by the licensed victuallers who supported him as a show in his last days.

“_12th April._—I have been to St. Winifred’s well at Holywell. After a very bad night of pain I nevertheless made up my mind not to put off the visit. Fortified with a dose of morphia I set out with Sibell and George. We went by train from Chester, passing not far from Hawarden, where the G.O.M. lies dying, and the sands of Dee. We were fortunate in our day, which, though wild at starting, turned into a perfect spring afternoon. Sibell had written to Father Beauclerk, the Jesuit at Holywell, to expect us, but he was away. I was glad of it, as thus I was free to bathe as a plain pilgrim without religious supervision. I suppose no pilgrim ever washed there with less Christian faith and at the same time with so little of the mocking spirit. I have a belief in holy places and holy people quite apart from all religious creeds, and I felt a great confidence in the Saint that she would do me good. We arrived at the best moment of the day, at one o’clock when everybody was away at dinner, so that we were alone and there was no difficulty in that sweet old place in supposing ourselves back in the fifteenth century. The girl in charge of the gate gave me two towels, and I had brought a nightgown with me, and so plunged in. It was cold work, though the water, they say, is 52 degrees, but I did the traditional three journeys through the water up to my armpits, going down into it by steps and up the opposite side, and then took a complete dip over my head in the outer tank and knelt on St. Bruno’s stone. I was quite alone while doing this, except for George. Then, when I had dressed, we sat awhile together in the sun, and went on to the inn for luncheon, where Sibell was, and so home in the afternoon to Saighton. The buildings of the well are still almost perfect, the shrine just as it was put up in Henry VII’s time, not a stone of the pavement renewed nor anything of the modern kind except some wooden dressing sheds and a few stupid scrolls with texts hung up inside the shrine.

“_13th April._—I have had no pain all day, thanks to St. Winifred, a long night of sleep and to-day no pain. I spent the afternoon with Sibell, talking about the chances of life and death and of a world beyond. The longer I live, the less I believe in any such, at least as far as my own living again goes. I feel that I have worn out my vital force and that eternity can bring me nothing but a dreamless sleep. All the same, I believe in St. Winifred and her Well, and include her in my canon prayer as my patron saint, which I have a right to do, seeing that I was named after my great-grandmother, Winifred Scawen.”

My miraculous cure thus wrought did not last long. I had no sooner turned my back to St. Winifred and Saighton than my pains began again, and I began to think that the Saint had made a fool of me. I saw new doctors in London, but they were unable to help me, and after lingering on there until the 6th of May I went down to Newbuildings to bear my troubles alone. “The world,” I wrote, “is only meant for those who are in health, and the maxim of our forefathers was a sound one, that a dying man should keep wholly out of sight.” This was the last entry in my diary before the crisis came. On the following Sunday, after a night of great suffering, I broke a bloodvessel, and for a week or more lay in danger of death, nursed by the careful hands of the good Cowie, our housekeeper, and of Sydney Cockerell, who had just entered on his duties with me as my private secretary. Between them and my hospital nurse, Miss Lawrence, who then first undertook my charge, they saved my life. Then I recognized that St. Winifred had only deferred her benefits, and that, as in the case of most miracles, she had chosen a natural road of cure. However that might be, the cure, though it nearly killed me, was an indisputable one. The pain from which I had been suffering so long had left me desperately weak, it is true, in body but clear in mind, and able once more to take an interest in life, and at the end of three weeks to resume my diary. The first entry I find in it contains the following:

“_28th May._—To-day Mr. Gladstone is being buried in Westminster Abbey.

“_6th June._—Cockerell is a treasure, arranging my books and getting me others. He is full of interesting recollections of Morris. _Apropos_ of the lovely little Kelmscott volume, containing ‘The Nightingale and the Cuckoo,’ he assures me that Morris had never heard the nightingale sing, and that he used to complain of it; also what seems even more incredible, that he had not read the poem through, and was waiting to do so for it to be in print. The proof-sheets came the day he died, and he never read them. We are putting the new bookplate into our Kelmscott books, where it looks a natural part of the volumes as the bookplate was cut by the man Morris employed for his armorial designs. Cockerell has been of the greatest use to me, arranging my papers and giving me new interests in life. I have written several Sonnets and an inscription in verse for the table Mrs. Morris gave me; my mind is vigorous and clear.” [The table here referred to was the dining-table used by Morris and his family when they lived at the Red House, and given to me by Mrs. Morris when she was dispersing her furniture on leaving her house in Hammersmith.]

In the meantime Anne and Judith had returned from Egypt. They had been lingering on at Paris, but had been hastened back by my illness, and were now in London, having taken a house there for Judith’s London season.

“_19th June._—Burne-Jones is dead. This is a vast misfortune. He was to have painted Judith as one of the figures for his last picture, ‘The Vale of Avalon,’ but that will never now be. According to his wish he is to be cremated, and then buried at Rottingdean. It is an honour for Sussex that it should hold his ashes.