Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Major General Graham ordered the First Division forward. They fired a volley at 300 yards, rushed up and fired a second at 150 yards, then jumped and scrambled past a defensive ditch and onto the parapet of the Egyptian trench, bayonets fixed. The Egyptian troops turned and fled, their white uniforms blurring into the gray desert. Behind them, the Royal Artillery opened up, firing canister rounds of grapeshot into the Egyptian ramparts.

  To Graham’s right, Major General Alison marched the Highland Brigade forward, the drums beating a tattoo, the bagpipes’ shriek mingling with the fall of Egyptian shells. At 150 yards, they fixed bayonets. A bugle sounded, Colonel Leith galloped to the front, shouting, “Come on the Seventy-ninth!” and the Cameron Highlanders ran cheering up to the trenches. Alone among the Egyptian troops, the Sudanese conscripts in the trenches did not run away. The first private onto the parapet fell back shot in the head, but the Camerons climbed into the rifle fire over each other’s shoulders to fight hand to hand in the narrow trenches. They took the trench with bayonets as the pipers struck up “The March of the Cameron Men.”

  At dawn, the sun rose to reveal thousands of Egyptian soldiers, horses, and camels in flight. The Royal Artillery rained shells down on the flat desert. Then the cavalry swept in with their sabers, slashing at men raising their hands in surrender. Successive waves of infantry killed pack animals and wounded men. The plain filled with dead. “Anything seemed good enough to let off a rifle at,” Colonel Butler admitted. At 0620, Wolseley ordered the Bengal cavalry to race for Cairo.26

  Urabi had been asleep in his tent when the shooting started. Fleeing Tel el-Kebir on horseback without his boots, he reached Cairo just half an hour before Wolseley’s cavalry. The revolutionary council had prepared a decree to be read at morning prayers, ordering that the city be set on fire, but Urabi knew he was beaten, and he countermanded the order. At sunset, the Bengal cavalry reached the walls of Cairo and saw a white flag. In the Citadel, four thousand of Urabi’s troops surrendered to two squadrons of dragoons. The next day, Egyptian garrisons all over the Delta surrendered. In Alexandria, Europeans stopped trading and marched in the streets, crying “Viva Inghilterra!” as the bands struck up the Khedivial Hymn and “God Save the Queen.” Just as Wolseley had planned, he had smashed the revolution in a single battle.

  Steaming into Cairo station on a commandeered train, the victor took a suite at the Abdin Palace as the Highlanders pitched tents on Ismail’s parade ground. “What a change in forty-eight hours!! From the squalor and misery of the desert, with all its filth and flies, to the cool luxury of this spacious palace. Yesterday living on filth, today having iced Champagne.”27

  Wolseley had failed to cut off Urabi’s nose for little Frances—the nose and its owner were locked up in the Citadel—so he posted her one of Urabi’s visiting cards instead. Lady Louisa received a “charming little book, done by hand”: the Mahdist legal book that Urabi had read in his tent before the battle.

  Ten days later, British troops escorted the khedive to Cairo. The city came out to celebrate with bands, bunting, and obsequious cheers. Tawfik trundled along in his carriage with his new friends and “tears in his eyes.” Sharif Pasha and Riaz Pasha settled their differences to form a government. Only the mass graves at Tel el-Kebir and the wreckage of Alexandria attested that anything had happened.28

  Protocol obliged Wolseley to surrender the seat of honor next to the khedive to the Duke of Connaught, who, though only a colonel, was also Queen Victoria’s son. The architect of victory rode backward, next to the consul, Sir Edward Malet. Wolseley had been “very nervous” before Tel el-Kebir, but soon reverted to sour habit as the politicians took over. He griped that the Turkish reward—the Order of the Osmaniyeh, First Class—had recently been granted to the sultan’s favorite bootmaker. Nor did Gladstone’s gift of a baronetcy satisfy him. He felt it should have been a viscountcy. Gladstone had further cheapened the honor by giving it to the Swell of the Ocean for his part in the war.

  “Seymour destroyed Alexandria,” Wolseley grumbled, “I saved Cairo.”29

  “ANOTHER FLOOD OF good news,” Gladstone reacted with delight. “Wolseley in Cairo: Arabi a prisoner: God be praised.”

  Wolseley’s swift victory silenced complaints from bondholders and criticism from the back benches, and it gave Gladstone a chance to show that Liberals could be patriots, too. The prophet who had warned of “the egg of a North African empire” now ordered the church bells to be rung and cannonades to be fired in the London parks in celebration of its delivery. The next day, the Economist reported a “fresh great rise” in Egyptian and Turkish Loan stocks. Parliament voted Seymour and Wolseley a baronetcy and twenty thousand pounds apiece. The only sour note came from Blunt’s friend Sir Wilfred Lawson, who moved that “a vote of thanks should be given to the Egyptian army for running away.”30

  When Wolseley returned to a tumultuous welcome at Charing Cross Station, Gladstone and Granville met him on the platform. A “whirlpool of people descended” on Wolseley, sweeping away the Grand Old Man and his ministers. “If Garnet’s campaign is supposed to have set Mr. Gladstone on his legs politically, the return of the hero very nearly carried him off them practically, for the poor gentleman was sadly pushed and pummelled in the crowd,” joked Lady Louisa Wolseley. Garnet went on to an audience with the queen at Balmoral, her Scottish castle. This time, they got on much better. It turned out that they both loathed Mr. Gladstone and his Radical accomplices.31

  Having successfully managed a war, Gladstone now faced the problem of the peace. He wanted to restore the khedive to his broken throne, uphold the bondholders’ rights, and pull out the troops, but the invasion had destroyed Egypt’s political infrastructure. Egypt had a broken army, an unpopular monarch, a wrecked civil society, and a rebellion in the Sudan. As a Liberal and an internationalist, Gladstone could not bring himself to annex Egypt into the British Empire: That would wreck relations with the sultan, the Concert, and the cabinet. Yet nor could he pull out and leave a vacuum that might endanger the Suez Canal.

  “The difficulty, I feel at this moment,” Lord Granville ruminated, “is not that of persuading the Egyptians to do as we wish, but that of arriving at the plan which we desire.”32

  Informal empire had indulged a khedivial tyranny that had crashed in debt and revolution. The Dual Control had collapsed: “The parties did not act jointly in upholding it.” The only local alternative, the constitutionalist movement, had been crushed along with Urabi’s military government. Britain’s bilateral partners Turkey and France had both betrayed her in the moment of crisis. As Wolseley put it with soldierly bluntness, Tawfik’s authority rested only on British bayonets. Having broken the Egyptian state in the name of security, somehow Gladstone had to rebuild it.

  The only answer was an interim authority, with which Britain might “plant solidly western and beneficient institutions in the soil of a Mohammedan community.” British soldiers and administrators must train up Egypt’s failed institutions, and then withdraw, handing back a working state. The British taxpayer would cover the £2.3 million bill for Wolseley’s expedition, but Egypt must pay the wages of the twelve thousand British soldiers who stayed on. Turkey would be forgiven: The sultan would keep his tribute, but lose everything else. France would be punished. The Gladstone who had warned that a British occupation would “bid a long farewell to all cordiality of political relations between France and England” now excluded France from any role in Egypt.33

  With the confidence of a man settling between two stools, Gladstone imposed his model of liberal imperialism: discreet enough to calm the Concert and his conscience, but strong enough to give Britain complete control over Egypt. Lord Dufferin, the ambassador to Constantinople, arrived to prepare a constitution. The Wolseley Ring stalwart Major General Sir Evelyn Wood stayed on as sirdar, commander of the Egyptian army. Sir Samuel Baker’s younger brother Valentine, disgraced after molesting a female passenger in a First-class railway carriage en route to Waterloo, arrive
d to retrain the Egyptian police. The ex–Dual Controller Major Evelyn Baring returned to inherit Sir Edward Malet’s villa and tennis court. Although Baring had the rank of consul, Gladstone’s arrangement for Egypt turned him into a virtual viceroy, the supreme link between the London government, the Abdin Palace, and the sirdar. Meanwhile, the Turkish aristocrats crept back into their ministries: Sharif Pasha, Riaz Pasha, and Omar Lutfi Pasha, who received Urabi’s seat at the War Ministry as a reward for fanning the Alexandria riot.

  To calm the Concert, Lord Granville sent a circular to the chancelleries of Europe, the first of sixty-six such protestations.34

  “Although for the present a British force remains in Egypt for the preservation of public tranquility, Her Majesty’s Government are desirous of withdrawing it as soon as the state of the country and the organization of proper means for the maintenance of the khedive’s authority will permit it.”35

  Surveying the wreckage, Lord Dufferin had no illusions about the immensity of the task facing Britain: “For some time to come, European assistance in the various departments of Egyptian administration will be absolutely necessary.”36

  Turning to the “proper means,” Lord Dufferin’s constitution was a masterpiece of enlightened despotism. Justice would be fairer—the police would be retrained, the courts reorganized, the army kept out of politics—but power would not be shared. He reduced the Chamber of Notables to forty-six members, with advisory powers only, just as Khedive Ismail had planned. The Chamber communicated the national will to a Legislative Council, which passed it onto a Council of Ministers, who told the khedive, who asked Evelyn Baring, who checked if Egypt could afford it. Opinion flowed upward, but all power remained at the top.

  Lord Dufferin advised Tawfik to declare an amnesty for all junior officers and other ranks that had taken part in the revolution, and to establish a commission of inquiry. Tawfik had no choice but to accept this puppetry, but he and Riaz Pasha wanted revenge. They intended to execute Urabi and destroy the constitutionalists forever.

  “The Egyptians are serpents,” said Riaz, “and the way to prevent serpents from propagating is to crush them underfoot.”37

  Within weeks, his officers had bagged twelve hundred suspects, many of them innocents denounced by their neighbors. The charges included “stirring up the public,” “assisting the rebels,” and “dressing up dogs to imitate Sir Garnet Wolseley and then shooting at them.” The guards extracted evidence against Urabi with thumbscrews and the kourbash. The prisons overflowed, and dysentery broke out. Touring the cells, Tawfik’s eunuchs spat in the faces of Mohammed Abdu and other ringleaders. The local Europeans called for executions.38

  Gladstone wanted the Egyptians to dispose of Urabi quickly, but Wilfrid Blunt had ensured that his hero could not be executed quietly. With A. M. Broadley, a lawyer in the consular courts at Tunis and occasional stringer for the Times, Blunt had formed an Urabi Defense Fund and hired a sympathetic London lawyer, Mark Napier. The Urabi Defense Fund paid Napier’s costs, and not all the donors were Radicals. They included Lord Randolph Churchill, “Chinese” Gordon, and many others incensed by the imminent show trial. Tawfik and Sultan Abdul Hamid had both used Urabi against the British for their own ends. Now they were collaborating on a judicial murder. It seemed unlikely that the trial would be fair. When Broadley and Napier arrived at Cairo, the Egyptian government refused to allow them access to Urabi and returned their letters unopened. The European liberal press started comparing Urabi to an “African Garibaldi.”39

  The trial began on the last day of October 1882, in the court next to the Mattatias Building. It swiftly turned into a farce. For the government, the French lawyer Borelli Bey charged Urabi with setting fire to Alexandria following the British bombardment; inciting the people to civil war; and treason against the sultan and the khedive. For Urabi, Mark Napier swiftly demonstrated that his client had played no role in the burning of Alexandria. He also produced Urabi’s private papers, hidden from Riaz’s policemen by Urabi’s wife, and demonstrated the sultan’s covert encouragement of Urabi’s revolution. Napier then announced his intention to summon four hundred witnesses in Urabi’s defense.

  Tawfik did not want his role in the Alexandria riot to come to light. Gladstone did not want a drawn-out circus. The Defense Fund could not afford one. Defense and prosecution agreed to a deal out of court. Only Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, Urabi, and their army inner circle would be tried. The charges would be reduced from treason to rebellion, and though a death sentence would be passed, Tawfik would commute it to exile. Lord Dufferin convinced Tawfik to accept this compromise. Gladstone wondered if Hong Kong was far enough from Egypt, but accepted Ceylon as the site of exile.

  At 0900 on December 4, 1882, armed guards took Urabi from the Citadel to the courtroom. Thin and pale, in a dark greatcoat and a graying beard, Urabi had aged in his cell. The charges were heard, his lawyers pleaded “Guilty,” the sentence was read and commuted. Mrs. Napier rushed over with a bouquet of white roses, to loud hisses from the Europeans and Turks in the gallery. The court had been in session for six minutes. The artist from the Graphic barely had time for his sketch.

  Late at night on December 26, a sealed train took Urabi, Barudi, and four colonels to Suez. Accompanied by sixty women, children, and servants, and thirty men from the Sixtieth Rifles, they boarded the steamer Mareotis. As they sailed for Ceylon, further decrees exiled most of their minor accomplices to Massowa, Suakin, and other distant, inclement Sudanese garrisons.

  The revolution had been erased. Tawfik and the British were more in control than ever. Three days later, Gladstone sat down to compile his annual accounts. His “Egyptians,” the underperforming loan stocks that comprised nearly 40 percent of his portfolio, had risen to a record high.40

  AT EL OBEID, the defensive trench around the town turned into an open grave filled with decaying bodies. For three months, the defenders had worked their way down the food chain: camels, cattle, donkeys, mice, locusts, and cockroaches. By the end of the year, they grubbed in the earth for ant nests, boiled the leather of their shoes, and picked through animal feces for undigested scraps. Scurvy and dysentery broke out. Refugees lay dying in the streets. At their loopholes, soldiers died from exhaustion and sickness. The air stank with putrefaction, and the sky blackened with hundreds of birds. Carrion-kites grew so bloated from gorging on the dead that they could no longer fly. Soldiers killed and ate them, stomachs and all.41

  From beyond the trench, the Dervishes mocked the defenders for eating dog’s meat, and experimented with their new rifles. When the Mahdi caught smugglers bringing food to El Obeid, he cut off their right hands, tied the stumps to their necks, and paraded them around his camp. The Ansar had plenty of food, and had slaughtered a feeble relief expedition from Khartoum. El Obeid could not resist for long.42

  General Mohammed Said wanted to blow up the arsenal and most of the town and its defenders with it, but his officers preferred to take their chances in a jibba. On January 19, 1883, he surrendered. Barely half of his garrison staggered out of the lines with him. They stood in the heat as the Ansar stripped them of their valuables, then watched as the Dervishes climbed over the bodies in the trench to rob the town. The capital of Kordofan, El Obeid was stocked with the profits of the slave and ivory trades. The Mahdi looted it systematically. He posted guards outside every large house to prevent its inhabitants from escaping. To find out where valuables had been hidden, his men flogged children, servants, and slaves. For two weeks they tortured the inhabitants, emerging loaded with gold, silver, and jewelry.

  The booty included thousands of slaves, six thousand Remington rifles, and five artillery pieces. In General Said’s house alone, they found gold worth six thousand pounds. The Mahdi’s generals embellished their filthy jibbas with silk and their sword hilts with silver, exchanging the life of poverty for harems and divans. When everything had been stolen, they hacked Mohammed Said Pasha to death with axes. They killed his deputy Ali Sharif Bey in front of his
wife and children. An executioner tried to decapitate him with a sword, but failed, so a mob threw him down a well, crowding around its mouth to watch him drown. After these killings, most Egyptian conscripts promptly switched sides, swapping their uniforms for the jibba.43

  Having revised his aversion to infidel technology, the Mahdi issued the six thousand Remingtons to Khalifa Abdullahi and his Baggara. A compliant Egyptian artillery officer drilled the Mahdi’s gunners. Like the Turks, the Mahdi forced black slaves into his ranks. They formed a new wing of the army, the Jihadiya, his holy warriors. He would need them and his new arsenal in the next stage of the jihad. Immediately after the surrender of El Obeid, the Prophet had appeared to the Mahdi and ordered him to sacrifice three cows to celebrate the conquest of Kordofan. He returned a few nights later with a strategy for conquering the entire Ottoman Empire.

  “As you have prayed in the mosque of Obeid, so you will also pray at Khartoum, then you will pray in the mosque at Berber” (the junction of the White Nile and the overland route to the Red Sea ports), “then in the Kaba of Mecca, then in Medina, then in the mosque at Cairo, then in the mosque at Jerusalem, then in the mosque of Iraq” (at the Shia center of Samarra), “and finally in the mosque of al-Kufa,” the Shia shrine at Najaf.44

  The Prophet’s strategy bore remarkable resemblance to the plans of previous enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet Ali, Napoleon, and the czars had all planned to sever its provinces one by one, leaving a limbless Turkish torso at Constantinople. The Mahdi would begin at the weakest points: remote Sudan and puritan Arabia, where the Wahhabis would help with arms and legitimacy. Then down the Nile to Cairo, pushing the Turks and Europeans from North Africa, and on to the eastern Ottoman provinces. At Samarra and Najaf, he would heal the Sunni-Shia split, imposing his caliphate on the entire Islamic world.