His requests for stores and camels that would have enabled him to advance had been refused, and he had been ordered to fall back.

His troops had been rendered almost mutinous, from the want of supplies.
He had seen the invaders growing stronger and stronger, and accomplishing what had seemed an impossibility--the bringing up of stores sufficient for their sustenance--by pushing the railroad forward towards Berber.

Now that their forces had been very greatly increased, and the issue of the struggle had become doubtful, he had received the order for which he had been craving for months; and had been directed to march down and attack the Egyptian army, drive them across the Nile, and destroy the railway.
By means of spies he had heard that, ere long, a large force of British soldiers would come up to reinforce the Egyptians; so that what might have been easy work, two months before, had now become a difficult and dangerous enterprise.

The manner in which the Dervishes had been defeated in their attacks upon Wolseley's desert column, and in the engagements that had since taken place, showed how formidable was the fighting power, not only of the British troops, but of the native army they had organized; and his confidence in the power of the tribesmen to sweep all before them had been shaken.
The Dervishes scowled, when they heard that they were not to have the satisfaction of massacring this Englishman, whose countrymen were still keeping up a terrible fire on their redoubt.

It was not one of their wives who had been rescued, and Gregory's act of jumping overboard seemed to them to savour of madness; and if that plea had been advanced, they would have recognized it as rendering the person of the man who had performed it inviolable.