Old Back-Acher During, the Omdurman Campaign a British infantry brigade was under Colonel William Gatacre, a man of great strength and courage who had distinguished himself in operations on the North-West Frontier of India and in Burma. Known to his hard worked troops as "Old Back-Acher" he was well fitted for the task in hand, though he and his men were at some disadvantage through their inexperience of conditions in the Sudan. Firing Effectiveness At Omdurman in 1898, Kitchener was prepared to put every man into the front line and to rely upon the destructive effect of modern rifle fire sweeping over the gently rising plain which the enemy would have to cross. If the enemy still came on, the British and Egyptian troops needed only time, ammunition and the strength to point a rifle to kill them off to the very last man. So the hot and dry Egyptian, Sudanese and British infantry stood, fired, advanced, fired, changed front, fired - firing, firing always, deaf in the din and blind in the smarting smoke, hot, dry, bleeding and blood-thirsty. At 11.30 a.m., Kitchener shut up his glasses and remarked that the enemy had had "a good dusting". Shot down by artillery, maxims and rifles, in a welter of blood that made it more an execution than a battle, the Dervish army was wiped out as hardly an army has been wiped out in the history of war, losing 11,000 killed, 16,000 wounded and 4,000 prisoners from their total of about 40,000 men. The Anglo-Egyptian army numbered perhaps 22,000 men lost 48 killed and 382 wounded; most of these casualties occurred during the charge of the 21st Lancers. Had the Allies done the some proportional execution at Waterloo, not one Frenchman would have escaped. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 125 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1972 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com