Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Hiding his amusement, Afghani replied by explaining “how much slaves gained among Mohammedans in exchange for their freedom.” The Theosophists left shortly afterward, convinced that the Mahdi’s revolt was part of their global upsurge of religious consciousness.5

  Privately, Afghani and Abdu saw a different kind of opportunity in the Mahdi. “He is the forerunner of the Caliph who will be,” Abdu explained to Blunt. Afghani had already initiated contact with the Mahdi via sympathizers at Cairo. In early 1884, a French freelance named Olivier Pain secured a commission from Le Figaro to report on the Sudanese revolt. When Pain approached Afghani for help, Afghani gave him letters of introduction, and ordered his contacts at Cairo to prepare “a caravan of fake merchants” to escort Pain to the Sudanese border. He also gave Pain “secret letters” for the Mahdi, proposing an alliance.

  The Mahdi’s enemies were Afghani’s enemies: the Ottoman caliph, the Egyptian khedive, and the British Empire. They were also Ahmed Urabi’s enemies. So Afghani appointed himself as interlocutor between the Sudanese holy warrior and the Egyptian general. Afghani hoped that the Mahdist revolt would spread downriver to Egypt, forcing Britain to return Urabi from exile. Through smuggled letters and visitors, Afghani and Blunt maintained regular contact with Urabi at Ceylon. Inflating his credentials, Afghani described the Mahdi, who had never left the Sudan in his life, as “my old pupil at al-Azhar.” With Blunt, he devised an exit strategy that Blunt would offer to the Gladstone government. Meanwhile, the British consul at Constantinople reported pro-Mahdi demonstrations and poster campaigns in Beirut and Damascus.6

  Blunt had been banned from Egypt as an agitator and denounced in the Commons for having advised Urabi of Wolseley’s intended line of attack, but he still possessed the social key to the political class. Three days after his Paris intrigue, he visited another attic room. This one was in London’s Connaught Place, and its bed contained the flu-stricken form of Lord Randolph Churchill. Blunt tried to mobilize the maverick Tory as “the champion of the Mohammedans.” On April 23, Blunt offered himself to Gladstone as “mediator for the relief of Gordon.” Offering “opportunely received information” from unnamed sources, Blunt promised to secure both Gordon’s freedom and “the pacification of the Upper Nile,” and all without diverging from Gladstone’s “general principles of policy.” In fact, as Blunt admitted that day in his diary, he intended to use his “mediation” to force the British government to accept a more radical agenda: the withdrawal of all non-Muslims from Sudan, a “treaty of peace” between Britain and the Mahdi, and the return of Urabi to Egypt.7

  Gladstone brushed away the offer. In the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead lambasted Blunt acidly. “If all are to be handed over to the Mahdi and the garrisons are to trust their lives to his tender mercies, our proper agent in the Sudan is not General Gordon, but Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. General Gordon was prepared to go a great length to conciliate the Mahdi. Mr. Blunt is prepared to go to all lengths…Mr. Blunt, then, is obviously the man to whom the Government should turn in this, their hour of need. He represents their policy to a nicety…Mr. Blunt is not less brave than General Gordon, and he could be sacrificed at least as safely.”8

  Blunt’s was not the only proposal. All the strands of British interest had knotted around Khartoum. A chorus of Gordon advocates joined Sir Evelyn Baring’s lonely solo, demanding Gordon’s rescue for reasons foreign, domestic, and ethical. Abolitionists were appalled by the abandonment of the Sudan and its patron saint. Liberal universalists revered Gordon as a Christian martyr in the making. Conservative cynics took him up as a martyr to Gladstone’s prevarication. Jingoists warned of defeat by savages. Strategists warned of the implications for Egypt and the India Route. The great mass of Evangelicals, businessmen, soldiers, bigots, and ordinary Britons were enthralled by Gordon’s bravery and faith.

  Mass meetings gathered in London and Manchester. Gordon’s admirer Mrs. Surtees-Allnatt started a subscription fund to raise eighty thousand pounds as a ransom. In the absence of a governmental address, a torrent of unsolicited donations for funding a relief force poured onto the editor of the Times. He sent them back, but passed the task to the Almighty, calling for public prayers for Gordon. Armchair warriors wondered if the veteran big-game hunter “Curly” Knox, whom Blunt called “a somewhat decayed blood, a rabid damned-nigger Guardsman,” would go alone to Khartoum in disguise and spirit Gordon to safety. Urabi’s lawyer Mark Napier toured clubland, trying to recruit “a thousand sportsmen” willing to blast a passage from Suakin to Berber with elephant guns.9

  The government resisted every public pressure and private entreaty. The policy was withdrawal, not invasion by troops or “Curly” Knox. And judging from his letters, Gordon did not want to be rescued.

  “THE ENEMY HAS established himself about nine miles from here, and we hear his drums from the palace,” Gordon wrote to his brother Henry in mid-March. “We are well off for food, and the people are in good spirits. We shall, D.V., go on for months. The steamers are a great advantage to us, and we only await the rising of the Nile in two months’ time to be still more powerful.”10

  At first, Khartoum did not seem like a city besieged. The local Mahdists set up three camps, to the north, southeast, and southwest of Khartoum, but they did not attempt to encircle it. The Mahdi suspected that Gordon was only the advance party of a major force, and he remained with his Ansar at El Obeid. The gates of Khartoum remained open. Scouting parties went out to gather firewood and skirmish with the rebels, and local farmers came in to sell grain. The government steamers chugged up and down the White Nile and the Blue Nile, buying supplies and exchanging potshots with the rebels on the banks. Food was rationed, but it included fresh meat, and milk for the sick.

  Gordon remained ebullient. The situation suited him: a mortal drama devoid of grubby politicians. Faith, charisma, and a Royal Engineer’s talent for siege warfare would be pitted against a false Messiah and a feeble Foreign Office. If destiny had called him to Khartoum, reason and honor demanded that he stay there. Having evacuated 2,140 Egyptian personnel and their families, on March 11 Gordon suspended all further evacuations, reasoning that he would soon need all available men under arms. Although the escape route north lay open, and the rebels did not yet control fully the White Nile or the desert routes, he made no effort to leave or to lead the remaining inhabitants south to the equator or north toward Berber. Gordon trusted that Baring would secure him Zubair or British troops. He felt sure that flight would be more dangerous than a short siege.

  On March 22, Gordon received the first inkling that he had miscalculated. Three armed Dervish messengers arrived, bearing a letter and a parcel. The Mahdi had refused the Sultanate of Kordofan. Refusing to disarm, they waited while Gordon opened the letter.

  “I am not a trickster, nor do I aspire to thrones, money or prestige. I am a servant of Allah,” the Mahdi announced. “I value humility and hate pride, the boasting of sultans and their deviation from the truth…. For God says, Oh ye who believe, take not the Jews and Christians to be your friends and protectors. They are only friends and protectors to each other.…So renounce your infidel faith and turn to Allah and his Messenger, looking forward to the life hereafter, and then I will take you as my friend and brother.

  “You should know that the Hizb Allah, the party of God, can reach and remove the false authority with which you claim sovereignty over Allah’s worshippers and land…. Know that I am the Expected Mahdi and the successor of God’s Prophet. I have no need of the sultanate, nor of the kingdom of Kordofan, nor of the wealth of this world and its vanity…. If you surrender and follow the true religion, you will gain honor in this world and the next, and will save yourself and all those under you…. Then, if I see improvement and piety in you, I shall grant you a rank.”11

  As Gordon read the letter, the messengers repeatedly prompted him to open the parcel. Angered, he threw it across the room. After they had left, his clerk opened it, and found a jibba, “a filthy patched Dervish
’s coat.” The Mahdi had returned Gordon’s compliment. In response, Gordon severed all contact—“I cannot have any more communication with you”—and went to war, sending out raiding parties on land and water. Cut off from Cairo, he had now cut himself off from the Mahdi.12

  “The town is all right and has become accustomed to firing,” he wrote on March 31. “Be assured for the present and the next two months, we are as safe here as in Cairo.”13

  The communication breakdown between Khartoum and Cairo allowed Gordon to continue in his error, and London to underestimate its dangers. Contact with Cairo, previously instantaneous, now took four weeks or more. Instead of regular, verbose telegrams, Gordon now communicated with Baring via couriers, who tied tiny notes into their hair. But his communication difficulties only complicated a position of his own choosing. Gordon did not leave Khartoum because he did not want to. As a soldier, he saw no reason to retreat before a “trumpery” revolt. As a gentleman, he felt bound to the people of Khartoum by his promise of British troops. He could accept an orderly evacuation, but he would never abandon the people of Khartoum: They had responded to his call to resist the Mahdi, and the fall of the town would be a massacre. A mystic, Gordon felt entitled to follow the urge of conscience and the whisper of glory, regardless of the politicians.14

  On April 9, Gordon received Baring’s letter informing him that London had refused him Zubair. Khartoum was now under daily sniper fire from “some 500 determined men and some 2,000 rag-tag Arabs.” One of Gordon’s palace clerks had been killed at his desk. Most of the White Nile from Halfaya to Berber was still open to his steamers, the Shaygia tribes on its banks remained hostile to the Mahdi, and the seasonal rise in water level made river travel easier. Gordon could still have organized an evacuation. Instead, he replied with open disobedience, turning on Baring, the temporary ally he had always despised.15

  “I consider myself free to act according to circumstances. I shall hold on here as long as I can and, if I can suppress the rebellion, I shall do so. If I cannot, I shall retire to the Equator and leave you the indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons of Sennar, Kassala, Berber and Dongola, with the certainty that you will eventually be forced to smash up the Mahdi under great difficulties, if you would retain peace in Egypt.”

  Gordon had sought this drama, and detected a divine hand behind his return to Khartoum. On the frontier between Christianity and Islam, empire and wilderness, he prepared for the last act of his cosmic drama. It would be a fight to the death. “I do not see the force of being caught here, to walk about the streets for years as a Dervish with sandaled feet; not that, D.V., I will ever be taken alive. It would be the climax of meanness, after I had borrowed money from the people here, had called up them to sell their grain at a low price, etc., to go and abandon them.” Gordon was a prisoner not of the Mahdi, but of honor. “I feel sure,” he told Baring, “whatever you may feel diplomatically, I have your support—and that of any man professing himself a gentleman—in private.”16

  Then he sent word that he appointed Zubair as deputy governor-general of the Sudan. Baring intervened, sending Zubair to Cyprus for safekeeping instead. Gordon now knew he could expect no assistance, and he prepared for a long siege. With supplies in good order but money running short, he ordered the printing of a temporary currency. He spent much of April signing the notes, and the rest of it organizing his defenses, occasionally dueling with Mahdist snipers from the roof of the palace, and nearly losing an eye when a cartridge blew back.

  Khartoum sat on a triangular peninsula. Its two vertices were the Blue and White Niles. Its base, the eight-foot-deep ditch and rampart dug by Hilmi Pasha, ran for four miles between the two rivers. Outside the perimeter were two fortified outworks, Omdurman on the west bank of the White Nile, and North Fort on the east bank of the Blue Nile, both connected with Gordon’s headquarters in the palace by field telegraph. With a fifteen-mile perimeter and only nine thousand regular and irregular soldiers, Gordon identified Hilmi Pasha’s earthwork as his weakest point. He studded the ditch and rampart with spearheads, the first hundred yards of open ground with triple-spiked iron “crow’s feet,” the next five hundred yards with broken glass—“You know the Mahdi’s men are all in bare feet”—and then laid homemade mines composed of “tin biscuit boxes full of powder, nails and bullets” among the obstacles. When Gordon ran out of electrical triggers, he devised triggers built around matchheads. “Messieurs the rebels will have a mauvais quart d’heure before they get to the ditch,” promised Frank Power of the Times. 17

  While Gordon prepared his defense, the level of the Nile dropped. The Mahdi realized that Gordon really had come alone. Gordon’s escape routes closed. In late April, the Shaygia tribes of the Nile Valley surrendered to the Mahdi. On May 18, they took Berber, the key town of northern Sudan, capturing two steamers, sixty thousand pounds in cash, and Gordon’s medals, sent north for safekeeping. Since mid-March, Gordon had claimed to be cut off and unable to escape. Now his prophecy had been fulfilled.

  “GENERAL GORDON IS under no constraint, and under no orders to remain in the Sudan,” Gladstone told the Commons to cheers from his own benches. Nor, Gladstone added, was he aware that Gordon was under “any inability to leave the Sudan at this moment if he chooses.”18

  As far as Gladstone knew, this was true, but with no word from Khartoum since mid-March, he could not know if Gordon’s position had changed. After the cutting of the telegraph on March 12, no word from Gordon reached Cairo for three months. In that time, Gladstone faced a rising tide of public pressure, and an Opposition that used the Gordon affair to stalk Gladstone’s Irish policy and his plans for domestic reform. Capitalizing on the silence from Khartoum, Gladstone cited Gordon’s insouciant final messages to insist that the government needed no new Sudanese policy. This served his immediate needs: The Times and the Tories seemed more dangerous than Gordon and Khartoum. It also accorded with his anti-imperial principles.

  “I have from the first regarded the rising of the Sudanese against Egypt as a justifiable and honorable revolt,” Gladstone admitted privately to his secretary Eddy Hamilton in early April. The Liberal universalist could not understand how “one who bore in his hands a charter of liberation should be besieged and threatened.” His ideals at stake, he did his best to remain ignorant of Gordon’s position.19

  Baring, Hartington, and Wolseley all advised that if Gordon was not already stranded, he would soon be. Giuseppe Cuzzi, Baring’s man at Berber, issued a series of dire warnings: “Situation in Khartoum very critical…. Situation critical, do not delay…. Apparently Khartoum is cut off…. All are afraid for Gordon, Stewart and the Europeans.”

  “The question now is how to get Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from Khartoum,” Baring warned Granville. Baring recommended immediate action. The government should ignore the humanitarian lobby and engage Zubair Rahmat; it should build a two-hundred-mile railway and telegraph between Suakin and Berber; and it should send armed steamers from Berber to Khartoum.20

  “These officers have been sent on a most difficult and dangerous mission by Her Majesty’s Government,” Baring reminded Granville. “Their proposal that Zubair Pasha should be sent to Khartoum, which if it had been acted upon some weeks ago would, without doubt, have entirely altered the situation, was rejected; and the consequences which they foresaw have ensued. No one can regret more than I do the necessity of sending British or Indian troops to the Sudan, but having sent General Gordon to Khartoum, it appears to me that it is our bounden duty, both as a matter of humanity and policy, not to abandon him.”21

  “You shot a heavy cannon ball, your last protest,” replied Granville, before dismissing every recommendation. He and Gladstone suspected that a Suakin-Berber railway might become a bridgehead, from which the annexationists at the War Office would expand their African empire. And had not Gordon’s brother Henry lately assured the Foreign Office that Charley had previously “extricated himself from more dangerous positions than the present
”?

  Granville contrived a marvel of procrastination. As no action could be contemplated without accurate information, the government should draw up a questionnaire for Gordon as to his “actual conditions,” his “plans of proceeding,” and his “wishes in the present position of affairs.” Two weeks later, Gladstone was still working on it. No courier willing to risk the journey to Khartoum would be found until May 18. Gordon would not receive the questionnaire until July 29. Habituated to the world of the telegraph and the steam train, Gladstone and Granville forgot the extent of Gordon’s disconnection. This error fortified their unwillingness to send troops to Berber, build railways into Africa, or cede rhetorical ground to the Opposition.22

  “Gordon is our officer,” Lord Hartington reflected. “Can we sit still and do nothing?” As secretary for war and leader of the Liberal party’s Whig aristocrats, he could have forced Gladstone’s hand. To Hartington, Gordon’s silence indicated imminent crisis. Lord Wolseley warned him that it would take at least three months to prepare an expedition and reach Khartoum. Hartington urged that Gordon be saved.

  “I think it is now clear enough that, whether he has a right to do so or not, he expects help in some shape or another,” Hartington told Granville. “The first thing we have to do is to decide whether to leave Gordon to his fate, because if we do not, the sooner we begin to make preparations, the better.”

  Hartington passed on a plan devised by Wolseley and his intelligence adviser, Sir Charles Wilson, to send troops to Khartoum via Suakin and Berber. He also advised that after rescuing Gordon, Britain should retain influence in the Sudan through “some sort of independent government under our protection.”23