Under the Red Crescent. John Sandes

Power was almost heart-broken when they sent up Nicholas Leader from Constantinople to replace him as the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He returned to Vienna, and thence to Dublin, where he resumed his old journalistic life for a time. But to such a man as Power a life of comparative inactivity was impossible; and when the troubles broke out in the Soudan, he soon found his way over there, and eventually reached Khartoum, where General Gordon appointed him British consul. Shortly before the fall of Khartoum, Gordon sent him down the Nile in a steamer with Colonel Stewart and an Arab escort to take despatches to the force advancing to the relief of Khartoum. However, before the steamer had got far the smouldering fires of disaffection among the natives on board broke into flame, and they succeeded in running the steamer aground. Lured by the friendly demonstrations of the Arabs on the shore, Colonel Stewart and Frank Power went ashore with their escort while efforts were being made to lighten the steamer and float her off again. The full details of what followed will never be known with certainty; but news of a massacre reached the British column eventually, and the bearers of the despatches were among the missing. Those who are familiar with Dervish methods may picture for themselves the sudden rush of bloodthirsty fanatics, the desperate hand-to-hand combat, and the deaths of Colonel Stewart and of my gallant young comrade when they fell pierced by Arab lances on the scorched and dreadful desert that lies along the banks of the Nile from Wady Halfa to Khartoum.

      Nicholas Leader, who was sent up from Constantinople to take Frank Power's place in Widdin, had already had an adventurous career, and had smelt powder in many lands. After seeing service with the British troops in Canada, he resigned on the declaration of war by France upon Germany in 1870, and took service with the French arms. He was attached to the ill fated army of Bourbaki, and was interned with other prisoners of war in Switzerland. Afterwards, when the Carlist insurrection broke out in Spain, he joined the standard of Don Carlos, and took part in the fierce guerilla warfare which the Carlists waged against the Spanish Government. The war correspondents of those fighting days in Spain were as dare-devil a crew as ever lived; and Leader described to me with many a laugh the circumstances under which he first met Edmund O'Donovan, another Irishman, as gay and reckless as himself. Leader was in command of a small fort in the north of Spain during the height of the insurrection, when one day he espied a strange figure clad in a long, dilapidated overcoat approaching the walls. The Spanish sentries yelled to the suspicious visitor to halt; and as he took no notice of them, they fired on him, and the bullets kicked up the dust all round the stranger. The only result, however, was that he increased his pace, and came on at the double until he reached the walls off the fort amid a rain of bullets. "Cease firing, ye blackguards!" he shouted in the simple dialect of Southern Cork. "I'm Edmund O'Donovan, and how the blazes can I get in unless you open the gate!" Leader was summoned to interpret the strange language of the foreigner, and he let him in. Thus it was that Edmund O'Donovan, who was attached to the Government troops, walked alone into the enemy's fortress.