Among those who had taken agin the young Churchill was the sirdar of the Egyptian Army himself, General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener. This was unfortunate, because it was his army Churchill now wanted to join as it prepared to reconquer the Sudan and sort out the followers of the mahdi’s successor, the caliph, while avenging General Gordon once and for all. Though the War Office approved Churchill’s application and his own regiment was prepared to grant leave (and the 21st Lancers to accept him), Kitchener was having none of it. Given that he had leave owing following his Tirah service, Churchill decided to go to London to take up the cudgels, another example of the lengths to which this indefatigable young man was prepared to go to get his way.
But Kitchener was too powerful an enemy and too implacable an obstacle for Churchill and his string pulling to shift on his own. It was a slice of luck, therefore, that Prime Minister Lord Salisbury happened at that moment to be reading The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Having enjoyed it, he asked to see Churchill, and as a parting pleasantry asked Churchill to contact him if there was ever anything he could do for him. Churchill didn’t need to be asked twice, and he acted on it promptly, as time in which to effect his attachment to the Egyptian Army was fast running out (this was July, and the march toward Khartoum was to begin in August). A telegram was duly sent from the prime minister, though Kitchener’s reply was that he had all the staff officers he needed and that, in the event of vacancies cropping up, there was a queue well ahead of young Churchill.
In the meantime, another stone had been unturned in the form of Sir Francis Jeune, a friend of the family whose wife, Lady St. Helier, was intimate with Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant general of the British Army. Wood was of the opinion that Kitchener should not be allowed to pick and choose officers in disregard of War Office wishes, and that besides, while Kitchener was sirdar of the Egyptian Army, the composition of British Army units attached to it was War Office business. Two days later, a telegram arrived from the War Office appointing Churchill a supernumerary lieutenant with the 21st Lancers (meaning that he went at his own expense and that the army would do nothing to repatriate him or his remains if he were killed or wounded). A friend’s father was the proprietor of the Morning Post, the most influential Conservative newspaper of the day, and so Churchill was also able to secure employment as a correspondent at £15 a column. So, in July 1898, Churchill was off to the wars again, though not before he had made a speech at Bradford, testing political waters that he hoped soon to plunge into. Six days after catching the train to Marseilles, he was reporting to Regimental Headquarters in Cairo. Though this was traveling at speed, it was lucky that he did not arrive sooner, for the officer who took the troop of lancers from Cairo to join Kitchener’s army—the troop that had been intended for Churchill—soon fell, along with ten of his men.
So began Churchill’s involvement in what he named (in the book that soon followed) the River War, and its famous set-piece battle at Omdurman, a cipher for Victorian military triumph over “savage” enemies on the imperial frontier. From Cairo the 21st Lancers moved fourteen hundred miles into the depths of equatorial Africa, by train and river steamer to Aswan, then on foot and on horseback, a significant feat in a war noted for its logistical achievements, especially the use of machine guns, trains, and gunboats. During the journey, Churchill speculated about the role that might be performed by the only cavalry regiment attached to Kitchener’s army and fretted about how the sirdar would receive him, given the fact that his rejection of Churchill had been overcome through string pulling and bloody-minded persistence.
On August 28, the army began its final advance toward Khartoum and the nearby city of Omdurman, moving in full battle order. It marched alongside the Nile, from where water could be drawn for thirsty men and horses, and stores taken from the steamers and the river gunboats that, as Churchill wrote, “scrutinized the banks with their guns.” “We filed down in gold and purple twilight to drink and drink and drink again from the swift abundant Nile.”68
On September 1, and only eighteen miles or so from Omdurman, Churchill was riding with the advanced screen reconnoitering ahead of the main body of the army. From the vantage point of a broad swell of sand, he saw, scarcely a mile away, “all our advanced patrols and parties halted in a long line, observing something which lay apparently immediately across their path.” A “long brown smear” visible in the distance was in fact the enemy. Churchill was sent galloping to consult with the colonel in the advanced line. Colonel Martin reported that the enemy was advancing fast and that Churchill should report this to Kitchener, marching about six miles behind with the infantry. Pausing to observe the scene, Churchill saw a “truly magnificent” sight:
The British and Egyptian army was advancing in battle array. Five solid brigades of three or four infantry battalions each, marching in open columns, echeloned back from the Nile. Behind these great blocks of men followed long rows of artillery, and beyond these there trailed out interminable strings of camels carrying supplies. On the river abreast of the leading brigade moved masses of heavily laden sailing-boats towed by a score of stern-wheel steamers, and from this mass there emerged gleaming grimly seven or eight large white gunboats ready for action. On the desert flank and towards the enemy a dozen squadrons of Egyptian cavalry at wide intervals could be seen supporting the outpost line, and still further inland the grey and chocolate columns of the Camel Corps completed the spacious panorama.69
Churchill found Kitchener marching beneath a red banner and made his report, informing the sirdar that he probably had an hour or an hour and a half. Churchill was then invited to lunch by a staff officer and beheld a low wall of biscuit boxes, a white cloth spread across them, and dishes of bully beef, mixed pickles, and “many bottles of inviting appearance.” Everyone was in high spirits. The event was “like a race luncheon before the Derby. . . . It really was a good moment to live. . . . This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed.”70
The following day, Churchill and the lancers stayed as close as possible to the great mass of the Dervish army in order to report their movements to headquarters. Thus the battle drew near. Churchill and his troop occupied a ridge four hundred yards from the enemy, a distance soon closed to two hundred yards as they came on. From their vantage point, Churchill and his men were able to see both sides, the twenty thousand British and Egyptians with their backs to the Nile, the Dervishes climbing toward them. Churchill witnessed the first shots as the armies engaged, and saw the “full blast of Death” as the British gun batteries and river gunboats poured fire into the white-flagged mass of about sixty thousand men. Churchill was then called back by his commanding officer into the shelter of a zareba (a protective enclosure, usually thornbushes) as the infantry were about to open fire. Now the two forces fully engaged, and “the weapons, methods and the fanaticism of the Middle Ages were brought by an extraordinary anachronism into dire collision with the organization and inventions of the nineteenth century.”
After great slaughter, Kitchener wheeled his five brigades south and marched toward the city of Khartoum with the Nile on his left flank, intending to cut off the remnants of the Dervish army from their capital and chief supply base. But the Dervish army still had a left flank as yet unblooded, and a reserve of perhaps fifteen thousand men. This force now advanced upon Kitchener’s army, which was no longer dug in, but in line of march. All along the line, the enemy succeeded in getting to within two hundred yards, only to be stopped by the hitting power of the modern guns, as “discipline and machinery,” in Churchill’s words, “triumphed over the most desperate valour.”
The 21st Lancers “were the only horsemen on the left flank nearest Omdurman.” They had been ordered to scout and discover what forces lay between Kitchener’s army and the city and, if possible, to drive them back and clear a line of passage for the advancing army. Thus began Churchill’s participation in what was to be the British Army’s most famous c
avalry charge since the Crimean War. Ascending the slopes of Jebel Surgham, the lancers soon saw “the whole plain of Omdurman with the vast mud city, its minarets and domes, spread before us six or seven miles away.” Churchill commanded a troop of about twenty-five lancers, strung out in line ahead along with the fifteen other troops that comprised the regiment. As they moved forward, the lancers expected at some point to be ordered to charge, the time-honored role of the cavalry. Three hundred yards away, the enemy were spotted on the column’s flank, and the trumpet sounded “Trot.” The line of enemy soldiers, thought at first to be spearmen, began firing at the mounted figures with rifles. Unable to approach the enemy, the colonel ordered “right wheel into line” and “almost immediately,” Churchill wrote, “the regiment broke into a gallop, and the 21st Lancers were committed to their first charge in war!”71
Essentially, the lancers had been taken by surprise at a moment when it was too late to do anything about it other than gather speed and hope for the best. As Churchill put it, “it is very rarely that stubborn and unshaken infantry meet equally stubborn and unshaken cavalry.” But this is what happened. Churchill chose his Mauser pistol rather than his sword as the charge began, a result of the injury sustained in India two years before. As they galloped toward the blue-black line of the enemy and made first contact, Churchill beheld a depression (a dried watercourse) behind the enemy line, “crowded and crammed with men rising up from the ground where they had hidden. Bright flags appeared as if by magic, and I saw arriving from nowhere Emirs on horseback among and around the mass of the enemy.” The lancers had been taken by surprise, committing themselves to a charge against an enemy that outnumbered them by at least ten to one. The lancers rode into the watercourse, Churchill’s horse dropping “like a cat four or five feet down . . . and in this sandy bed I found myself surrounded by what seemed to be dozens of men,” though in a flash Churchill found himself scrambling up the other side of the depression, regaining “the hard, crisp desert, my horse at a trot.” Immediately a Dervish drew back his sword to slash at the horse’s hamstring, which Churchill avoided and shot him down. Another appeared and Churchill fired, so close that the pistol struck his foe; then he shot an Arab horseman to his left at ten yards.
Those unlucky enough to be stopped by the Dervish mass were pulled from their horses and stabbed and hacked to death, though at this point Churchill considered the lancers to be masters of the field. Soon, however, he began to feel that he was totally alone on the battlefield, and experienced “a sudden sensation of fear” as he discerned three riflemen taking aim at him. He spurred his horse and galloped away and found his troop faced about and forming up, the other three troops of the squadron forming up close by. Churchill shot a man who sprung up amid the troop, then reloaded his Mauser. From the jumble of fighting men, “a succession of grisly apparitions” emerged as horses and men in various states of bloody distress appeared, “gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.” Instead of charging again, two squadrons were ordered to dismount and use their carbines to enfilade the watercourse, forcing the Dervishes to retreat.72
“We therefore remained in possession of the field. Within twenty minutes of the time when we had first wheeled into line and begun our charge, we were halted and breakfasting in the very watercourse that had so very nearly proved our undoing.” Among the Dervish corpses that had not been carried from the field lay the bodies of over twenty lancers, “so hacked and mutilated as to be mostly unrecognizable.”73 In the space of about two or three minutes, the regiment had lost five officers and sixty-five men killed and wounded, along with 119 horses. Despite this extremely high casualty rate, the action was successful. As for the wider action, the British and Egyptian forces had scored a crushing victory, killing over ten thousand Dervishes. In a letter to his mother, Churchill described the stench of bodies littering the field of battle. Given the finality of this victory and the expense of maintaining cavalry, Churchill’s regiment was released three days after the battle and marched northward on the journey home. Churchill hitched a lift on a Nile sailing boat carrying the Grenadier Guards. In Cairo, he was obliged to render up a piece of flesh from his forearm so that a colleague from the 21st Lancers, wounded in the charge at Omdurman, might have a much-needed skin graft. As the Irish doctor explained: “Ye’ve heeard of a man being flayed aloive? Well, this is what it feels loike.”74
Home and Back Again: England and India
After this latest adventure, and now having been blooded in both Africa and Asia, Churchill thought long and hard about his next move. Time pressed, and he’d already been a soldier for three years. He had considered leaving the army for some time, and the lure of politics grew stronger by the year. His father, in Churchill’s words, had died at a moment when “his fortune almost exactly equalled his debts,” about £70,000, which shares in South African mines took care of. Jennie Churchill, however, still had the property, and this was enough “for comfort, ease and pleasure,” but not enough for two adult sons.75 Churchill was determined not to add to his mother’s financial burden. He concluded that the army could never allow him to be independent, at least not if he were to maintain polo-type expenses and a lifestyle in which old brandy and Havana cigars were considered essential groceries. It was on the basis of this calculation that Churchill planned his assault on the year 1899. He would return to his regiment in India and play in a polo tournament; write a book on the war in the Sudan in which he had so recently fought; accept any journalistic commissions that came his way; and look for an opportunity to enter Parliament.
As a result of his writing, Churchill’s stock was rising. His Morning Post reports from the Sudan had been generally well received, and he found that he was something of a celebrity. Not all felt comfortable with this, however, and the Prince of Wales wrote in October 1898 to suggest that he stick to being a soldier and leave off the writing. If not, then he should go for the parliamentary and literary life he clearly craved. “Life in an Indian station can have no attraction for you—though fortunately some officers do put up with it or else we should have no at all!”76 Falling in with a group of young Conservative MPs, including Lord Hugh Cecil, Churchill’s political appetite was sharpened. Among this smart set, however, Churchill felt himself “the earthen pot among the brass.” They were all silver tongued, former scholars of Oxford or Cambridge, and now, though only a few years older than Churchill, “ensconced in safe Tory constituencies.” Despite his high birth, privileged upbringing, and family fame, Churchill was still self-conscious about perceived educational and social deficits and the chasm between where he was and where he wanted to be. He thought that in order to join in the quick-witted and educated banter to which he was exposed, self-learning was not enough and that he should go to Oxford when he returned from India. But there was the entrance exam, and “I could not contemplate toiling at Greek irregular verbs after having commanded British regular troops.”77 So it was upon sedulous self-education and a professional attitude toward the pursuit of political recognition that he came to depend. In an age when politicians were generally to the manner born, and the cult of the amateur at its height, this was to doubly mark him out as one to watch, a zealot as well as a naturally talented, impetuous, elemental force, questing for renown.
Between his adventures in the Sudan and returning to his regiment in India, Churchill lined up his political contacts, addressed Conservative meetings, cultivated political agents and made friends with the newspaper baron Alfred Harmsworth. Churchill had made his maiden political speech at a Bath meeting of the Primrose League, founded by his father at Blenheim and named in memory of Disraeli (whose favorite flower was the primrose). His contacts ensured that reporters were dispatched to cover the event. He spoke in support of a bill to protect people injured while at work, removing “the question from the shifting sands of charity” and placing it “on the firm bedrock of law.” He then went on to strike an ebullient note concerning Britain’s place in the world, symptomatic of late-Victo
rian confidence in the face of emerging challenges. “There are not wanting those who say that in this Jubilee year [1897] our Empire has reached the height of its glory and power, and that now we shall begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage, Rome declined. Do not believe these croakers but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired.”78 The speech went well; the Morning Post devoted a whole column to it the following day, though the Eastern Morning News was less taken in, writing that he was “in danger of being spoilt by flattery and public notice” and warning that “political talent is the least hereditary of our tendencies.” But Churchill had been launched upon the turbid waters of British politics. In a speech to the Southsea Conservative Association in October 1898, he reflected on Britain’s need for “the Imperial spark” in order to retain its position in the world. This required “a free people, an educated and well fed people.”79 Given this, he claimed, he was in favor of social reform, such as the introduction of old-age pensions. “Imperium et Libertas” was his motto, and that of the Primrose League. While in Britain after the Sudan campaign, he engaged in the press debate surrounding the ethics of killing wounded on the battlefield and made speedy progress with the manuscript of The River War.
Churchill had decided to leave the army in order to pursue a place in Parliament, though a final, polo-dominated fling with his regiment began when he sailed for India in January 1899. Having swept across the continents of a British-dominated world, he now knuckled down to the serious business of regimental polo at Meerut, to where the team journeyed with its thirty horses and five hundred tons of gear. While in Jodhpore en route, Churchill had a fall and dislocated his shoulder. “I trust the misfortune will propitiate the gods—offended perhaps at my success & luck elsewhere,” as he told his mother.80 Despite this accident, the captain of the polo team decided to play Churchill anyway rather than bring in the reserve, a measure of how good Churchill’s polo was. As the 4th Hussars’ team progressed, Churchill played with his bad arm strapped to his torso and in the final scored some of the goals that won the match. After this triumph, and providing another instance of the good fortune of having well-connected parents, he stayed for a week in Calcutta with the recently appointed viceroy, Lord Curzon, and was charmed by a man whom he had previously viewed with hostility. With leave owing, Churchill returned to Britain.
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