Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  In the absence of an indigenous army, Baring saw no choice but a strategy of containment. To keep the Mahdi out, Egypt must withdraw from part or all of the Sudan and fortify the Red Sea ports. This required British officers to organize a defensible border and train new troops. So Britain must delay its withdrawal from Egypt until the Sudan had stabilized, and must provide officers and administrators. All Baring’s partners in Egypt agreed with him: Khedive Tawfik, Sharif Pasha, Sirdar Sir Evelyn Wood, and commander of the British garrison General Sir Frederick Stevenson.

  Gladstone had justified his unilateral invasion of Egypt by promising a swift withdrawal. If he reversed this policy, he opened himself to domestic assault by his own Liberal supporters, and ridicule from the Opposition. Privately, he admitted that British troops must remain in Egypt “till the danger has overblown.” But publicly he refused to alter his policy, only the time required to implement it. “Our engaging in warfare to recover the Sudan is quite another matter, especially now that it seems so clear that Egypt has not the strength enough to hold it.”5

  Yet the Egyptians insisted on holding the Sudan, or at least its core territories. Egypt’s governing class of Turkish landowners, officers, and merchants identified national dignity with Ismail’s empire. Their authority had been shaken by the Urabi revolt, the British invasion, poor harvests, and outbreaks of cholera. Abandoning the empire would encourage the disaffected from Wadi Halfa to Alexandria and fan the flame of Islamic expectancy that Urabi had lit among the fellahin. To salvage what he could, Sharif Pasha prepared to abandon the western and southern provinces of the Sudan, in order to preserve the curved spine of the Egyptian empire: the long meander of the Nile Valley from Khartoum to Aswan. He asked for British, Indian, or even Turkish soldiers.6

  “Very ticklish,” Lord Granville advised.7

  “The Egyptian government will find it impossible, with the forces at its disposal, to hold the Sudan,” warned the British generals at Cairo.8

  “Khartoum is the center of an important commerce, and belongs to Egypt geographically and commercially as truly as Cairo itself,” claimed Garnet Wolseley from the War Office.9

  “We are resting on the edge of a knife,” Granville reflected, and took no action whatsoever.10

  ON THE STEPS of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, a telegraph messenger slipped a piece of paper into the shaky hand of Colonel Colborne.

  “Hicks’ army annihilated.”11

  After Hicks had vanished into the hills of Kordofan, rumor filled the silence: Hicks had won a great victory and besieged El Obeid; Hicks and his officers had been massacred by their Egyptian conscripts; the Mahdi had captured Hicks and cut off his hands; only Mr. Vizetelley of the Illustrated London News had survived because he had sketched the massacre from an elevated rock. Unable to clarify matters, the Khartoum government sent out scouts. The Mahdists caught one and fed him alive to termites by jamming him upside down into an anthill.

  In mid-December 1883 a survivor finally reached Khartoum and reported the annihilation of Hicks’s army. The city panicked. A garrison of two thousand defended sixty thousand inhabitants, many of whom looked to the Mahdi to restore the slave trade. The whole Sudan, from Wadi Halfa to Equatoria, was held by only twenty-four thousand Egyptian soldiers, marooned in their fortified islands against a rising tide of rebellion. In the east, Osman Digna besieged the Red Sea ports that were Khartoum’s lifeline. To the west and south, garrisons in Darfur, the Gazelle River, and Equatoria surrendered. In the north, the riverain tribes of Berber and Dongola stirred to join the revolt. The Mahdi had at least one hundred thousand warriors, with the same rifles as the Egyptians, and much more motivation. Europeans began to flee Khartoum while the road north was still open.12

  After two months without a clear answer from London, Khedive Tawfik and Sharif Pasha grew desperate. If they did nothing in the Sudan, they lost everything. Sharif Pasha moved to save Khartoum and the Nile Valley. He ordered all southern garrisons to retreat toward Khartoum and dispatched Valentine Baker Pasha’s new police force to secure the Suakin-Berber road. Then he begged Baring for British troops.

  In increasingly urgent tones, Baring repeatedly asked London for “more definite instructions.” The Egyptian government lay “absolutely in the hands of Her Majesty’s Government,” and it drifted “without any very definite or practical plan of action.” Correspondents at Khartoum warned Baring that the city could not be held. Its granaries contained only two months’ supplies, its populace could not be trusted, the tribes to its north might rise and block the overland route, and the Nile would soon fall and become impassable to steamers. The consequences would rebound on Britain and Egypt, and on Baring as Britain’s man in Egypt.13

  “If the whole valley of the Nile is to be abandoned down to Wadi Halfa,” Baring warned, “the political and military situation here will become one of very great difficulty.”14

  Yet that was the course on which Gladstone and Granville finally settled. Forty-five days after Baring’s first request for guidance, Granville ordered Egypt to abandon its empire in the Sudan. He deployed Britain’s veto over Egypt’s finances: Britain could not accept “increasing the burden on the Egyptian revenues” through military operations “of doubtful advantage to Egypt.” Britain would maintain order in Egypt, and would secure the Red Sea ports. But Egypt must withdraw all Sudanese garrisons and “abandon all territory south of Aswan, or at least of Wadi Halfa.” Gladstone, having disclaimed any responsibility for the Sudan, now took full charge of Egypt’s Sudanese policy.15

  Baring warned Granville that “only the very strongest language, and possibly a change of ministry” would force the Egyptians to accept this humiliation. Imposing a withdrawal meant surrendering Sudan to the slave trade, and “an increase, rather than a diminution, in the amount of interference” in Egypt. But Gladstone insisted. To preserve its untenable policy of nonintervention in Egypt, Britain intervened in the Sudan.16

  Sharif Pasha refused the order. The Sudan belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and neither Egypt nor Britain could abandon it. “We have thousands of men in the Sudan, and nothing shall ever induce me to allow them to be abandoned to the miseries of Mahdi rule. I am sure I am right. Time and posterity will judge between me and Mr. Gladstone in this matter.”17

  Mr. Gladstone insisted. Sharif Pasha resigned in disgust. For the second time in little more than a year, Britain’s anti-imperialist prime minister had overthrown an Egyptian government. This time, Khedive Tawfik made no trouble. “He is in very good humor, and has behaved exceedingly well,” Baring reported. “He will do anything he is told.”18

  When Sharif’s old rival Riaz Pasha refused the poisoned chalice, Baring summoned Nubar Pasha from retirement. On January 18, 1884, Nubar Pasha ordered all nonmilitary residents at Khartoum to make their own way north, carrying their own food. War Minister Omar Lutfi Pasha drew up a plan to evacuate the Sudanese garrisons, but when Governor-General Abd al-Qadir Hilmi Pasha read it, he refused to implement it. While the politicians in London and Cairo had debated the necessity or desirability of evacuating Sudan, none of them had considered its feasibility. The Sudan had no railway, and the roads were closed. The Mahdi was rumored to be marching on Khartoum. It would take months to move fifteen thousand civil servants, soldiers, and dependents by boat. As soon as Hilmi Pasha announced the evacuation, the whole Sudan would turn to the Mahdi to avoid massacre, and the escape routes would be severed.19

  Nubar Pasha turned to his minister of war, but Omar Lutfi Pasha refused certain death at Khartoum. Baring had a policy, but no one to enforce it.

  “The Egyptian government,” he told Granville, “would feel obliged if Her Majesty’s Government would send at once a qualified British officer to go to Khartoum with full power, civil and military, to conduct the retreat.”20

  With Sir Samuel Baker in gouty retirement, only one “qualified” candidate remained. To Baring’s distaste, his name had floated around the “Sudanese question” for weeks. In spontaneous appea
ls to Lord Granville, soldiers, parliamentarians, abolitionists, and imperialists had all recommended “Chinese” Gordon.

  “He has always exercised a very remarkable influence over wild, uncontrollable, uncivilised peoples,” declared Sir Harry Verney, M.P.21

  “His name alone would do wonders,” advised Colonel Bevan Edwards.

  “If the Mahdi is a prophet, Gordon in the Sudan is a greater,” agreed Sir Andrew Clarke of the Royal Engineers.22

  After Queen Victoria had joined the chorus of Gordon admirers, Lord Granville admitted that Gordon might be the quick fix he needed in the absence of a policy.

  “Do you see any objection to using Gordon in some way?” Granville mused to Gladstone. “He has an immense name in Egypt—He is popular at home—He is a strong but very sensible opponent of slavery—He has a small bee in his bonnet.”23

  “I can quite understand there might be some advantage,” Gladstone replied. “But for what? And by whom?”24

  “IT IS ODD THAT, longing with a great desire for death, I am now quite well,” Charles Gordon confessed to his sister Augusta.25

  For four years the man whom Vanity Fair called “the grandest Englishman now alive” had drifted around the British Empire. He had delighted in his liberation from English manners—“I nearly burst with the trammels which are put on one”—but nothing satisfied him. From India to Hong Kong, Ireland, Mauritius, and South Africa, his obsessions trailed him like an albatross. Life without the dramatic proximity of death had little meaning. “I strike against garden parties, archery and lawn tennis!”26

  All that mattered was the moment of revelation, the Unrolling of the Scroll. He continued to find it in unexpected locations. In the Seychelles, the resemblance of the coco de mer, a local palm fruit, to the female pudenda, convinced him that the island of Praslin had been the Garden of Eden. He struck up a botanical correspondence with Mr. Scott of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Mauritius, sending photographs and drawings. Perhaps Mr. Scott would clarify whether the breadfruit was male, female, or hermaphrodite? And on that note, would Mr. Scott put him in touch with the doctor in Liverpool who had examined a pregnant man?27

  With little else to do, Gordon went to the Holy Land. Restricting his imitation of Christ to geography, he walked around Jerusalem with his Bible in his hand, identifying eccentric locations for the sites of Jesus’ life. “All events in this life tend to the willing or unwilling death of the flesh,” he concluded, “Life is one continual crucifixion, whether we look on it as such or not.”28

  The collapse of the Egyptian empire gave grim satisfaction. “I foresaw the Egyptian and Sudan affair, and was not listened to. I am glad I was humiliated, for the things of this world will pass away.” Gordon sympathized with the Sudanese and the Egyptians, not the corrupt pashas or the squalid policies of the Foreign Office. He detected a divine hand in the Mahdi’s revolt. “I feel for the rebels, and am proud of their prowess, and Our Lord will work good for them out of it.” Against all evidence, he prophesied that the Mahdi’s revolt would end “in the suppression of the slave trade and slave-holding.” In London, he snubbed an invitation to dinner from the Prince of Wales—“Tell him that I always go to bed at half-past nine”—but took breakfast with Wilfrid Blunt and donated to the Urabi Defense Fund.29

  Revolted by Gladstone’s adoption of Disraeli’s imperial style, in late 1883 Gordon accepted an offer from King Leopold II of Belgium to develop the swelling Belgian empire in the Congo. Leopold II’s territory now reached to within 250 miles of the Gazelle River. With Sudan closed by the Mahdi’s revolt, Gordon believed that the Belgian Congo offered an alternative path to cutting off the slave trade “at its head.” He appeared set to repeat his Sudanese vanishing trick, and this time for good. Agreeing to terms with Leopold II, Gordon took ship for Southampton, arriving on the day that Sharif Pasha resigned. Lying low at Augusta’s house, where he could only smoke in the kitchen, he cut his last bond with England. On January 8, 1884, he wrote to the War Office and resigned his commission in the Royal Engineers.30

  The next morning, the War Office came to him. A personal deputation appeared on his doorstep, comprising his War Office friend Captain Henry Brocklehurst and W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and pious imperialist. Gordon had returned only two days after the government’s Sudanese problem had spilled onto the front pages. The Gazette had run the story even before the evacuation policy had been announced. The likeliest source of the leak was the War Office: Lord Hartington’s private secretary Reggie Brett, M.P., was an erstwhile Gazette staffer with a financial interest in the paper. He was also an admirer of Gordon’s.

  The War Office had a different Sudanese policy in mind. Lord Hartington and Garnet Wolseley wanted a “forward” policy. The besieged Red Sea ports could not hold out for long. At Sinkat, the defenders were eating cats and dogs. The Egyptian government could only offer Valentine Baker Pasha’s half-trained police force, but Gladstone and Granville resisted sending British troops. With the Mahdi’s revolt spreading to the borders of Egypt and the India Route, the War Office could not afford to lose the army’s Sudanese expert.

  “I hate the idea of your going to the Congo,” Wolseley wrote to Gordon. “You have had enough of liver-grilling climates, and the world does not seem bounded with the clear horizon that would warrant our very best man burying himself among niggers on the Equator.”31

  Gordon relished Stead’s invitation to savage the government’s inept policy. Gleefully, he demonstrated to Stead the absurdity of Gladstone’s plan, and the immorality of abandoning the Egyptian garrisons.

  You have 6,000 men in Khartoum. What are you going to do with them? You have garrisons in Darfur, in Gazelle River, and Gondokoro. Are they to be sacrificed? Their only offence is their loyalty to their Sovereign. For their fidelity you are going to abandon them to their fate.

  You say they are to retire to Wadi Halfa. How will you move your 6,000 men from Khartoum—to say nothing of other places—and all the Europeans in that city, through the desert to Wadi Halfa? Where are you going to get the camels to take them away? Will the Mahdi supply them? If they are to escape with their lives, the garrison will not be allowed to leave with a coat on their backs. They will be plundered to the skin, and even their lives will not be spared.

  Whatever you decide about evacuation, you cannot evacuate, because your army cannot be moved. You must either surrender absolutely to the Mahdi or defend Khartoum at all hazards.32

  Gordon then demonstrated his profound ignorance of what had happened in the Sudan since 1880. The Mahdi’s movement, said Gordon, was “not really religious, but an outbreak of despair.” An amnesty and a fair government would placate the rebels. “If this were done and the government entrusted to a man whose word was truth, all might yet be re-established.” As Stead left, Gordon gave him a copy of The Imitation of Christ.

  “Chinese Gordon for the Sudan,” ran the Gazette’s headline.

  “We cannot send a regiment to Khartoum,” Stead admitted, “but we can send a man who on more than one occasion has proved himself more valuable in similar circumstances than an entire army. Why not send Chinese Gordon with full powers to Khartoum, to assume control of the territory, to treat with the Mahdi, to relieve the garrisons, and to do what he can to save what can be saved from the wreck of the Sudan?”33

  The next day, the Times reprinted the interview. Sir Samuel Baker, the big beast of Nile politics, stirred in his lair and endorsed Gordon’s analysis. Queen Victoria sent a note to Granville, agreeing with Gordon, and Lord Hartington sent one, too. Even the Liberal Morning Advertiser agreed: “No effort that H.M. Government could make would be too great for securing the safety of the defenders of Khartoum and the remnant of the European population under its protection. If disaster, and possibly massacres, should overtake the column of fugitives from Khartoum, there would be an outburst of indignation from the civilised world.”34

  The following day, the Advertiser added, “It is not too much to say t
hat all England has been looking for the employment of General Gordon in the present crisis in Egypt.”

  “There is a storm brewing over the question of Khartoum,” warned the Pall Mall Gazette, “which ministers will do well to take heed.”

  NOW GLADSTONE FACED the failure of his Egyptian policy. He had invaded Egypt, then sacked its government when it refused to cooperate. He had redrawn the map of the Egyptian empire to suit British interests, devising a policy that the governor-general of Sudan considered unenforceable, and the Egyptian war minister considered suicidal. He could not rely on Turkey: “The Sultan’s whole political nature seems to be so absorbed in vice that he is incapable of entertaining any subject in a straightforward manner.” He could not orchestrate the Concert of Europe and contrive a multilateral shield for the occupation of Egypt. Although he privately conceded that Britain must occupy Egypt for “a few years” to give “confidence to the commercial class,” he did not want to formalize British control. Apart from being “a grave mischief,” that would be an embarrassment to liberalism, as “bastinadoed fellahin would be reported to Parliament at the rate of a hundred cases a week.” As Britain slid into “the wreck of the Sudan,” Gladstone forgot his humanitarian sympathies: “I care more that we keep out of the Sudan than who goes in.” But he could not forget the press and the cabinet.35

  On January 14, Gordon and Baker launched a coordinated attack in the Letters page of the Times. The next day, Gordon met Wolseley at the War Office, where he agreed to go to Suakin and “inquire into the condition of affairs in the Sudan.” Hemmed in by Liberal opinion and the War Office, Granville reminded Gladstone that while the Sudan might be of minimal use to Britain, its loss would harm the government. “The destruction of these poor people will be a great disaster, and will of course create a great sensation here and abroad.”