Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  The Mahdi had never been out of the Sudan, had never made the haj to Mecca, and knew nothing of the blurry world beyond the borders of Islam. But his theological mandate obliged this rhetoric of world domination. Even as he consolidated his local success, concentrating on Kordofan and leaving Khartoum for later, he planned in global terms. He now received visitors from as far afield as Tripoli, Mecca, and India. He corresponded with sympathizers in the Red Sea hills, in Damascus and Cairo, and sent his call to jihad beyond Darfur to Sokoto on the West African coast. As he had always believed, his visions had the power to create reality.

  “I have been enabled to capture Kordofan and all the surrounding country, and Allah will also open your country to me, accepting me as the true Mahdi. Woe, therefore, to those who do not believe in me, for they shall all be destroyed. Why did you not set forth to help the jihad as soon as you heard of me? Are you afraid of the Turks and their strength? Are you not aware that all their armies must fall into my hands? Do you not know that all the infidels will be destroyed by us? Do you not believe that I am the Expected Mahdi?”45

  “IT IS NO PART of the duty incumbent on us to restore order in the Sudan,” Gladstone insisted. “It is politically connected with Egypt in consequence of its very recent conquest, but it has not been included within the sphere of our operations, and we are by no means disposed to admit without qualification that it is within the sphere of our responsibility.”46

  To Gladstone, the only specter worse than permanently occupying Egypt was to be dragged upriver into the Sudan. He wanted to withdraw from Egypt, not defend its empire. Faithful to the necessary fiction of Egyptian independence, he insisted that British advisers were in Egypt at Tawfik’s request. He could not admit that Britain, having taken over the government of Egypt, now bore responsibility for the Sudan. Like Granville, he preferred to concentrate on the more appetizing aspects of the Egyptian problem: rebuilding the international consensus and totting up the indemnity that Egypt should pay for the property lost at Alexandria.

  Within weeks of the British takeover, reports arrived in London of a hidden catastrophe in the Sudan. All of Lord Granville’s correspondents advised urgent action. Sir Charles Wilson, military attaché at the Cairo embassy, recommended abandoning Darfur and Kordofan to the Mahdi. Sharif Pasha and Omar Lutfi Pasha backed him, and both requested that British officers supervise whatever survived of the Egyptian Sudan. On the other extreme, Lord Dufferin suggested Egypt be forced to draw a line in the sand at Wadi Halfa, abandoning totally a failed empire that had proved “a constant drain upon the Egyptian resources.” Diplomatically straddling the middle ground, the outgoing Cairo consul Sir Edward Malet restated the Foreign Office’s position back to the foreign secretary: The Egyptians should be encouraged to take all possible measures to repress the revolt, but “without aid or advice from Her Majesty’s Government.” This sounded more sensible than it was. Egypt had no army with which to fight the Mahdi.47

  Nevertheless, Lord Granville endorsed it. He had little choice. Khedive Tawfik refused to abandon the Sudan. He had already lost his dignity to Urabi and his kingdom to the British. He would not surrender his empire to the Mahdi. He spurned his ministers’ advice that he save the core of the Sudan by surrendering Kordofan and Darfur to the Mahdi. Instead, he ordered Omar Lutfi Pasha to recruit a new army and asked for British officers to command an Egyptian expedition to Kordofan.

  Sir Edward Malet found the compromise that gave Tawfik his British officers without breaching the British policy of nonintervention. Several retired officers had contacted Malet, offering their services to the new Egyptian army and police force. Why not pick a handful of these retirees and adventurers and recommend them to the Egyptians? Once again, Britain sought to achieve its policy goals by renting mercenaries to the Egyptian government. At a meeting on the verandah of Shepheard’s Hotel at Cairo, Valentine Baker Pasha pulled a name from a hat: Colonel William Hicks of the Royal Engineers.48

  Tall, handsome, and polite, with fierce eyes and a long gray goatee, Hicks had been decorated in the Indian Mutiny. With no Sudanese experience, he felt “anxious” about his abilities and “overwhelmed” by responsibility. But he could not resist the hope of “some wonderful decoration” or “£10,000 back-sheesh from the Khedive.” Collecting eight officers from the bars of Cairo, a batch of khaki jackets hurriedly trimmed with gold lace, and a geriatric Egyptian general named Suleiman Nyazi Pasha, Hicks drank “the inevitable coffee” with Tawfik, and sailed for Suakin.49

  An army sailed with him. Omar Lutfi Pasha had scraped together four thousand conscripts from the defeated soldiers of Tel el-Kebir. None of them wanted to go to certain death in the Sudan, most of them had lately rebelled against the khedive they now served, and many of them sympathized with the Mahdi. Their officers trusted them so little that they sent them to Khartoum separately from their arms and ammunition. When Hicks drilled them, he discovered that many did not know how to load their rifles.

  “I have never seen such a disgraceful thing in my life,” Hicks thundered. He sentenced them to daily training, but expected no improvement. “Here I have 4,000 of Wolseley’s enemies under my command. He got great kudos for breaking them—my great anxiety is lest they should run away when I take them before the rebels.”50

  In one session, an exasperated Hicks ordered several conscripts to point their empty rifles at his head and pull the trigger, so that he might check if they kept the barrels steady as they fired. He was appalled that none of them even tried to shoot him. “Who would have thought a short time ago, when they were behind the trenches at Tel el-Kebir, that an English officer would be asking them to pull a trigger at his eye at two feet distance—and they wouldn’t slip a cartridge in?”51

  His officers turned out little better. “It is simply heartbreaking to try to do anything with them.” The Egyptians were “dolts and fools,” the British “helpless as babies.” Several were alcoholics. “Walker is very seedy—he vomits after he eats.” One, Colonel John Colborne, was a notorious Cairo soak who scraped a living as a stringer for the Daily News. The Daily News had also sent its regular war correspondent, Edmund O’Donovan. He spent his first four days in Khartoum getting violently drunk, “using inflammatory language to the natives in the bazaar” before he passed out in the street. When he woke up two days later, he resumed his binge with Frank Vizetelley, a roaming artist for the Illustrated London News. To Hicks’s horror, the two staggered around the streets threatening the natives with revolvers.52

  Suleiman Nyazi Pasha turned out to be a further burden, scheming against Hicks with the governor-general, Ala al-Din Siddiq Pasha. “I cannot tell you how disgusted I am with everything in this place. I am surrounded by intrigue, deception, and liars. The situation is too disgusting.”53

  Watching the long-awaited reinforcements, Carl Giegler Pasha reflected, “It would be difficult even if one tried to gather together again such a bunch of incompetents.”54

  After six months of futile drill, Hicks marched seven thousand men out of Khartoum. He planned to take the shortest route: south 100 miles along the west bank of the Nile to Dueim, then southwest 130 miles to El Obeid. The army marched across a waterless, treeless plain, the temperatures exceeding 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Colonel Colborne was soon invalided back to Khartoum. Even the camels began to collapse. Governor Siddiq Pasha turned up, leading the delegation of Khartoum merchants that he intended to impose on Kordofan once Hicks had killed the Mahdi. Siddiq Pasha and Suleiman Nyazi Pasha forced Hicks to change his plan. They were to divert south towards rumored supplies of fresh water, and then loop round to attack El Obeid from the south. Hicks agreed. The guides led the expedition south, into a terrain of thick mimosa forest, spiky acacia, and impenetrable tall grass. Suspecting that he was being led into an ambush, Hicks kept his guides under armed guard by day and tied them together by the neck at night.55

  The Mahdi watched the infidels stumble into a trap. As scouts blocked up the wells in Hicks’s path, a small
force of three thousand Ansar moved up behind him, cutting his supply line and peppering the stragglers with fire from their new rifles. The Mahdi intended to defeat Hicks through geography. The cumbrous Turkiyya army would destroy itself searching for water. When it collapsed like an exhausted elephant, the main body of the Ansar would attack.

  Helpless, Hicks watched his army disintegrate. A tight square turned into a long column. When thirsty soldiers broke away from the march in groups of four or five, Hicks’s officers ignored his orders to bring their men back into line. His guides led him into thick thorn forests where the trees were festooned with Mahdist tracts. In the day, constant rifle fire from both flanks picked off his men, and at night, the Mahdi’s men probed the zariba. After a stray bullet entered Hicks’s tent and pierced the stool on which he sat, Colonel Farquhar wondered to O’Donovan of the Daily News where they would all be in a week’s time.

  “In Kingdom Come,” replied O’Donovan.56

  The net was closing. On November 1, men sent out to collect water vanished in the woods. At night, the Remington fire was so heavy that the soldiers could not sleep and lay hugging the ground while the bullets stripped the bark from the trees. The next morning, Hicks ordered them into a giant square: one battalion on each side, cavalry on the flanks, guns and stores in the middle. As they crawled forward, suddenly the Ansar appeared.

  “All around, we saw Arabs innumerable. The whole world surrounded us, and flags were waving and spears gleaming in the sunshine.”57

  Hicks opened fire. Although the Ansar had Remingtons, Hicks had new American-made Gardner machine guns that, though susceptible to malfunction in desert conditions, could fire over three hundred rounds a minute. Unusually, they worked perfectly, blasting into the bushes through the day and night. When Hicks resumed his trek the next morning, he passed Ansar bodies piled six deep. Some of the Egyptian soldiers, realizing that the drifts of dead were only a fraction of the Mahdi’s army, lay down and hid in the grass. When Hicks sent his staff officers to tell them to keep marching, the soldiers killed some of the officers.

  “These are bad times,” noted one of Hicks’s officers. “We are in a forest, and everyone very depressed.”58

  No one had any water left. Hicks ordered the bands to strike up, but the fire from the hidden Ansar was so heavy they could not hold a tune. Men, mules, and camels collapsed from thirst. As they convulsed on the ground, groups of twenty or more Ansar fell on them, stabbing them to death. Hicks’s guides now led him into a forest of three-inch thorns. Again the march stalled, and the battle raged through the night. At dawn they pressed on toward a rumor of fresh water, the Ansar firing at them through the trees from all sides. The woods were so thick that Hicks’s artillery and machine guns were useless. As he ordered his force into a triangular shape and tried to wheel onto open ground, he found his path blocked by the main body of the Mahdi’s army.

  “Allahu Akbar!” the Mahdi called three times. “God is great!”59

  The noonday sun was at its apogee, and fresh water within sight, when Hicks’s soldiers heard a rushing sound, “terrible and sudden, sweeping like a torrent from the mountain.” They heard the oceanic roar of the Ansar before they saw its spears. Thousands of screaming tribesmen poured out of the trees. The ground beneath the Egyptians’ feet opened up: Ansar fighters had hidden in pits covered with brushwood as the lead units of Hicks’s army marched over their heads, and jumped up at their backs with spears.60

  Hicks’s lead battalion disappeared like chaff in the wind. As the Ansar poured into the center of Hicks’s troops, the battalions on either side turned inward as if seeking protection, frantically firing in all directions, killing Egyptians and Ansar alike. Hicks and his staff spurred their horses out of the slaughter, and the survivors of the onslaught formed up a short distance away. They emptied their revolvers at the Ansar. When the bullets ran out, Hicks ordered the officers to draw swords and the men to fix bayonets. As a final defiance, Hicks charged his horse straight into the midst of the Ansar. He swung at a sheikh in armor, his saber skidding across a chain mail shirt and slashing the sheikh’s face and arm. A club struck him on the back of the head, a spear cut his sword arm at the wrist, and a lance pierced his body. He fell from his horse into a pile of bodies, blood pouring onto his homemade uniform.

  The Ansar cut off his head and showed it to the Mahdi. His sheikhs queued to mutilate Hicks’s headless body, each stabbing it with a spear so that he might claim to have assisted in the killing.

  The Mahdi had not taken part in the battle. That afternoon he came to inspect the battleground. The destruction was total. The woods were strewn with the bodies of men and animals, arranged in three rough piles in the shape of a triangle. Further trails of bodies streaked in all directions, marking the paths of flight. Only a few camp followers survived. The Mahdi mounted the heads of Hicks and his officers on the walls of El Obeid. Now only Khartoum stood between him and Egypt.

  Four days later, Britain’s political and financial elite gathered at the Guildhall in the City of London for the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet. In his speech, Prime Minister Gladstone restated his Egyptian policy. Contrary to recent impression, Britain had no empire in Egypt, and it never would have one.

  “We are about to withdraw. The order has been given. That withdrawal will include the evacuation of Cairo.”61

  7

  The Unrolling of the Scroll

  1884

  Sir Evelyn Baring.

  The dawdling policy, or to put it another way, the policy of not having a policy at all, is often very good diplomacy, particularly when it is carried out by a man of Lord Granville’s singular tact, quickness and diplomatic experience. This line of action, which involves delaying any important decision until the last moment and not looking far ahead, is rather in conformity with English customs and habits of thought. It was generally practised by many of the statesmen and diplomatists of Lord Granville’s generation.

  —Sir Evelyn Baring1

  GOOD FORTUNE ATTENDED Evelyn Baring like a loyal retainer. Born into the Barings Bank family, he ascended to office with such ease and grandeur that people called him “Evelyn Over-Baring.” After his father bought him a commission in the Royal Artillery, his connections secured him the post of private secretary to the viceroy of India. When the Egyptian Debt Crisis began, Britain needed a representative with diplomatic skill and financial connections. Major Baring became Britain’s commissioner of the debt. He left Egypt for India in June 1880, just as Tawfik’s regime began to unravel, and returned with equal good timing in September 1883, just after Urabi’s defeat. When the Foreign Office blamed Consul Malet for not having foreseen the obvious, Baring took over.

  Tall and heavy-set, with a mustache that strove for gravitas and the plump face of one used to good food, Baring was the pivot of the new Egypt, linking the Foreign Office, Tawfik, and the British army of occupation. He kept his modest rank and villa, but his powers were akin to those of a viceroy. He interpreted Lord Granville’s vague cables with mandarin clairvoyance. At his daily meetings with Tawfik’s ministers, he steered them toward compromise. He explained Egypt’s interests to Khedive Tawfik, never needing to raise the military threat. Cool and competent, he built a regime within a regime. Liberal in politics, imperialist in vision, and pragmatic in policy, Baring saw in Egypt the seed of a second India.

  He saw no such potential in the Sudan. “The origin of the Egyptian Question was financial,” he insisted, not strategic. Although Baring never forgot the Suez Canal and the India Route, he rejected an imperialism of “military or Jingo feeling, which simply desires to annex.” Empire served a considered purpose, the stability of Britain’s economy. The Sudan was economically irrelevant to Britain. It could not be turned to a profit, and the financial verdict was final. Neither the “superficial philanthropy” of the humanitarians, nor the “decided roguery” of “promoters and financiers,” nor even “a magic wave of the diplomatic wand” could turn Sudan into an “Equatorial A
rcadia.”2

  Nor was Baring’s position at Cairo secure. Egypt’s treasury was empty, its economy disrupted by the revolution. Tawfik’s enemies plotted against him from abroad: Abdu at Beirut, Afghani at Paris, Halim at Constantinople, and Khedive Ismail from a hotel suite on the French Riviera. Nationalist rage still bubbled beneath the restored khediviate. In the summer of 1883, a clandestine group calling itself the Egyptian Patriotic League threatened Tawfik with terrorist attacks if the British did not withdraw immediately. The letters were signed “The Avenger.” The police traced them to a Urabist cell. When they broke it up, “The Avenger” turned out to be Dr. Mohammed Said al-Hakim, the French-born son of an Algerian immigrant.

  More urgently, within days of the destruction of Hicks’s column, the Mahdist spark had leaped from the far west of Sudan to its east. Led by an erstwhile gin distiller and slave dealer named Osman Digna, the Hadendowa tribesmen in the hills overlooking the Red Sea ports rose for the Mahdi and the slave trade. They besieged Egyptian garrisons at Sinkat and Tokar, threatened the port of Suakin, and cut the Suakin-Berber road. The ports guarded the southern exit of the Suez Canal, and they linked the Sudan with Jeddah and Mecca. The Mahdi’s shadow now fell upon the India Route and the Arabian provinces of the Ottoman Empire.3

  Baring swiftly reversed his opinion, and recognized what Gladstone and Granville refused to admit. Although the Sudan had no economic value, Britain could not “separate the Egyptian question from the Sudan question”: By taking over Egypt, Britain had inherited Egypt’s empire. Through the autumn of 1883, while Hicks Pasha blundered around Kordofan, Baring discovered the alarming implications. Egypt faced “a serious religious movement” in the Sudan, and no means of defending itself. If the Mahdi took Khartoum, the Nile Valley was open all the way to the Mediterranean. If he took the Red Sea ports, his army could reach Arabia. The provinces of the Ottoman Empire would tumble like dominoes, and their fall would block the India Route.4