Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  To Gladstone, this sounded less like a program for rescue than a conspiracy for annexation. Replying that an expedition should only be sent “in the last and sad necessity,” he then devoted himself to demonstrating that this necessity had not been reached. To avoid splitting the cabinet, Hartington did not insist. This permitted Gladstone to continue playing for time. On April 21, he explained to the House that Gordon’s description of Khartoum as “hemmed in” did not mean that the town was “surrounded.” Rather, the “bodies of hostile troops” in its vicinity formed “more or less a chain around it.” Two days later, he claimed, “If Berber was to fall into the hands of the tribes around it, the position of General Gordon would not then become one of peril.”24

  It was not Hartington who forced Gladstone to defend his position, but the Opposition. On May 1, the government published Gordon’s correspondence, with its warning of “indelible disgrace” and its criticism of Gladstone’s inertia. Supported by prointervention Liberals and Radicals, the Conservatives called a vote of censure against the government, forcing the debate that Gladstone and Granville wanted to avoid.

  From the gallery above the seething Commons, Wilfrid Blunt watched Gladstone wriggle from the charge of incompetence “more as a man might in a debating club, than as a statesman arraigned on a dishonourable charge.”25

  Gladstone began by rolling out a Liberal broadside. What did the sending of an army to the Sudan mean? “It meant a war of conquest against a people rightly struggling to be free.”26

  “No! No!” the Opposition benches exploded.

  “Yes, these are people struggling to be free, and rightly struggling to be free!”27

  “You will incur indelible disgrace!” the old Tory Sir Michael Hicks shouted, jabbing an accusing finger at Gladstone.

  “What does he mean by pointing to me?” Gladstone screamed back. “What does he mean by pointing to me, to dishonor me in the eyes of my country?” Gordon had criticized the abandonment of four garrisons, but what of the other six in more remote corners of the Sudan? Did the Conservatives intend to send expeditions to relieve all of them? Had they an alternative policy?

  “What is the answer of the Right Honourable gentleman?” cried Gladstone, pointing to the Opposition benches. “I think he has no answer to give—probably does not want to give me an answer…the Right Honourable gentleman is dumb!”28

  Scaling the moral high ground, Gladstone conceded that he had entered into “a solemn covenant with General Gordon.”

  “It may,” he allowed, “be our duty to plant a British force in that terrible country.” If he received “reasonable assurance” that Gordon was in danger, he would “use the resources of this country” to protect him. But Parliament must consider “the treasure of the nation, the blood of the nation, the honour of the nation” before it sent “British and Christian arms among the Mohammedan people struggling for their liberty in the Sudan.”29

  This was bravura stuff, but when the disaffected Liberal W. E. Forster insisted that Gordon was in danger, it looked as if Gladstone would not get away with it.

  “I believe everyone but the Prime Minister is convinced of that danger. I do not say that he is aware of the danger himself; I think he would act very differently if he was. And I attribute his not being convinced to his wonderful powers of persuasion. He can persuade most people of most things and, above all, he can persuade himself of anything.”30

  It was Hartington who saved Gladstone. By promising that the government would, with sufficient evidence, “grudge no sacrifice to save the life and honour of General Gordon,” Hartington mollified the dissident Liberals, and persuaded them to abstain from the censure vote.31

  The government won by twenty-eight votes. Sending their questionnaire to Cairo, Granville and Gladstone ordered Gordon to withdraw: He must avoid “aggressive operations” and prepare “measures for his own removal.” To lay the ground for Gordon’s escape or his rescuers’ advance, they ordered that a British intelligence officer be sent to negotiate with the tribes on the Suakin-Berber road.32

  The next day, Berber fell to the Mahdi, and Giuseppe Cuzzi, his warnings ignored, chose conversion to Islam over death.

  Gladstone’s questionnaire would take three months to reach Khartoum.

  “WE ARE ALL WELL and can hold out for four months,” Gordon wrote to Baring on July 13.33

  Every Friday and Saturday night through the hot summer of 1884, the garrison band played jaunty tunes outside the palace. When not supervising the daily duel with the Mahdist snipers, Gordon drilled platoons of citizen irregulars, tracked down hidden supplies of grain, inspected his sentries day and night, sent backgammon and chess boards to the wounded in the hospital, and smoked incessantly. He did all he could to convince the populace of Khartoum not to abandon him. When Ramadan began at the end of June, he persuaded the Khartoum clergy to announce that as the town was at war, its people were freed from the obligation to fast. He ordered the town foundry, already producing forty thousand rounds of Remington ammunition each week, to smelt a Khartoum siege medal, and distributed it liberally among the defenders. He wrote to the sultan, the khedive, and the pope, asking them to raise funds for a Turkish force to take over the Sudan. He corresponded with the Mahdi’s local supporters, sending gifts of soap with his letters, but without success. Above all, he repeatedly assured the people that troops were on their way.

  Each week, the situation worsened. Further Mahdist bases mushroomed in the country around Khartoum, stringing together a net of camps and trenches that prevented Gordon from sending out foraging parties. The Mahdists wheeled up captured Egyptian artillery, and the sniper fire turned into a barrage. Colonel Stewart was wounded while firing a Krupps cannon from the palace roof. After a series of successful raiding parties along the Blue Nile, Gordon’s ablest commander, Mohammed Ali Bey, was ambushed in the woods and killed with all his troops. On Gordon’s next foray upriver, Ansar artillery nearly sank one of the steamers. The last escape route, south to the lakes, had closed. Gordon continued to send out optimistic messages, but from late July, he could no longer gather food from outside Khartoum, or delay the tightening of the siege. While Gordon doled out corn and biscuits, shortages of money and grain were exacerbated by hoarding and theft, and inflation ran at 3,000 percent.

  On July 29, a lone messenger sneaked through the lines and delivered Gladstone’s questionnaire. Gordon read with incredulity its request that he give his “intentions,” and he replied with contempt. “I say I stay at Khartoum because Arabs have shut us up, and will not let us out…I fear it is too late. We must fight it out by our own means; if blessed by God, we shall succeed; if not His will, so be it.”34

  Gordon showed the dispatches to Stewart and Power. “All hope of relief by our Government is at an end,” Power concluded, “so when our provisions (which we have at a stretch for two months) are eaten, we must fall. Nor is there any chance, with the soldiers we have and with the great crowd of women, children, etc., of our being able to cut our way through the Arabs.”35

  When Ramadan ended in late July, the Mahdi moved the main body of the Ansar toward Khartoum. As his followers left El Obeid, they burned their huts, faithful to the Mahdi’s promise that their next home would be in Khartoum or Paradise. The sixty thousand warriors and their families carried no stores. Taking food and water from the villages in their path, they devastated the countryside; as the Mahdi promised, Allah had provided for his warriors. On the way, the French journalist Olivier Pain, who had converted to Islam in order to join the Mahdi, came down with fever. The Mahdi left him to die by the road. Reaching the Nile at Dueim, the Baggara massed awestruck on the banks of the first major river they had ever seen. When two of Gordon’s steamers appeared on a reconnaissance, some Baggara jumped into the water to stop them with their bare hands, and were threshed beneath the steamers’ paddles.

  Realizing his predicament, Gordon decided to send Stewart, Power, and the French consul Herbin down the Nile on the steamer Abbas, w
ith orders to force their way past Berber and report the situation at Khartoum from the telegraph station at Dongola. On September 9, Gordon said good-bye to Stewart and Power and watched the Abbas, escorted by the Safia, the Mansura, and two boatloads of heavily armed Greeks, sail away up the White Nile. They took with them a letter for Baring, Gordon’s papers, and his cipher keys; either Gordon expected to be able to send few further messages, or he had now resigned himself to the fall of Khartoum.

  “How many times have we written asking for reinforcements?” Gordon asked Baring bitterly. “While you are eating and drinking and sleeping on good beds, we and those with us, both soldiers and servants, are endeavouring to quell the movement of this false Mahdi…. You have neglected us, and lost time without doing any good…. Send troops as we have asked, without any delay.”36

  As rifle fire from the banks pinged off the steamers’ homemade armor plate, Stewart’s flotilla sped safely past Mahdist-held Berber. Approaching the Fifth Cataract, Stewart felt safe enough to send his escorts back to Khartoum. But below Abu Hamed the White Nile split into two channels, and Stewart picked the wrong one. The Abbas ran aground in the shallows. With no help available on the deserted river, Stewart, Power, and Herbin climbed into a dinghy and were about to go on alone when a man appeared on the bank wearing a government uniform and fez, offering to take them overland to Dongola by camel. They accompanied him to his house, and as they waited, a group of Ansar rushed in and hacked them to death.

  On October 21, the first day of the Islamic new year, the Mahdi reached the Ansar’s camp before Omdurman. Gordon’s cipher keys and private papers were waiting for him. They told the Mahdi everything: that the British government intended to cede the Sudan, that Gordon had gone against his orders, that the British had apparently abandoned him, and that he was trapped in Khartoum with unreliable troops and diminishing stocks of grain.

  “We never miss any of your news, nor what is in your innermost thoughts,” the Mahdi gloated to Gordon. “We have now understood it all.”37

  “POOR GORDON, his ammunition will soon be all expended,” Garnet Wolseley predicted to Sir Samuel Baker. “He will have his throat cut or be made a prisoner by the Mahdi. I do not wish to share the responsibility of leaving Charley Gordon to his fate.”38

  Wolseley remembered Gordon every night in his prayers. All summer, he had lobbied Lord Hartington to give Gladstone an ultimatum, and to appoint him commander of a relief expedition. “My military experience,” warned Wolseley, “tells me that in all such affairs, the worst course to pursue is to shirk the question, and to imagine you dispose of it by shutting your eyes and trying to ignore it or forget it.”39

  In the three months since the vote of censure, Gladstone had diverted his ministers with proposals for Egyptian finance, delayed a decision on grounds of insufficient information, and insisted that Gordon neither needed nor merited assistance. Lord Hartington believed that Gordon was in danger, he knew that a relief expedition would take at least three months to reach Khartoum, and he knew that as Secretary for War he bore the responsibility for Gordon’s dispatch. But he did not dare confront Gladstone alone. It was not until the end of July 1884 that he found fellow members of the cabinet willing to “share the responsibility,” and when he did, Gladstone fobbed him off with “five minutes at the fag-end” of a cabinet meeting.

  “I cannot be responsible for the military policy under such conditions,” Hartington told Granville, before giving Gladstone another two weeks.40

  On the last day of July, with the summer recess imminent, Hartington threatened to resign if the government did not begin preparing an expedition. “It is a question of personal honour and good faith, and I do not see how I can yield upon it.”41

  Gladstone asked Hartington to be patient. The government already faced “a domestic crisis of the first class” in its Reform Bill, and “a foreign crisis of the first class” in its negotiations with France over the restructuring of the Egyptian debt. Could the Minister do “nothing to accelerate a Gordon crisis,” at least until next week, when the Egyptian finance conference finished? Gladstone preferred to plan his crises ahead.

  Granville, his ringmaster in the cabinet, negotiated a compromise. Just before the recess, the government voted three hundred thousand pounds for a “Gordon Relief Expedition.” Confident that Hartington had been placated, Gladstone packed his summer reading, and Granville planned a seaside holiday to ease his gout.

  Hartington had got his money, but he could not dispatch the expedition to Egypt. Gladstone insisted that any decision be put to a cabinet vote, so that his ministers might be “assured that they were not about to become unawares the slaves of Gordon’s (probably) rebellious ideas.” With the cabinet holidaying on country estates and the Riviera, there could be no vote before the autumn.42

  “I despair of acquitting myself of the responsibility which will be placed on me by my colleagues and Parliament,” Hartington complained, and again threatened to resign. Finally, Gladstone gave way, trimming a few hundred troops from Wolseley’s force as he did so.43

  On September 9, as Stewart and Power left Khartoum on the Abbas, HMS Iris delivered Lord Garnet Wolseley and seven thousand troops to Alexandria. The “usual crowd” were waiting on the dock, Wolesley noted in his diary: General Stephenson, “a real old man”; Khedive Tawfik, “cordial and affectionate”; and Nubar Pasha, “very Turkish in features, a cunning old fox.”

  With assistance from London, Wolseley and the Egyptian administrators managed to waste three precious weeks arguing about which route to take to Khartoum. First, Wolseley dismissed the overland route from Suakin to Berber. He insisted on reaching Berber via the White Nile, so he could use a detachment of Canadian voyageurs, veterans of his glorious Red River expedition. Then, although an advance party of cavalry had been sent ahead to Wadi Halfa ready for a dash to Dongola, and although native boats had been stockpiled at Dongola for the journey upriver, Wolseley insisted that when the water level dropped, the Nile would be too shallow for native boats. No forward move would be made until his voyageurs and four hundred specially commissioned flat-bottomed craft arrived with the main body of his force.44

  The Canadians did not begin to arrive until October. Rather than hardened voyageurs, they turned out to be mercenary lumberjacks and adventurous storekeepers. By then, the Nile had begun to drop, making the Cataracts even harder to navigate. Meanwhile, Wolseley’s chief of staff Sir Redvers Buller failed to organize coal for the Thomas Cook’s steamers that would carry the expedition up to Wadi Halfa. Wolseley did not reach Wadi Halfa until September 30. On the same day, his advance guard under Sir Herbert Stewart entered Dongola. Yet instead of racing forward, Wolseley continued edging up the Nile, slowed by logistical errors and the disappointing performance of his voyageurs, who themselves had to be hauled through the Cataracts by thousands of press-ganged natives. After Wolseley reached Dongola on November 3, he waited there for a further three weeks, while downriver his voyageurs floundered with his supplies and reinforcements. “It is troubles of this sort that make men old before their time,” he complained to Lady Louisa.45

  Egotism and bungling aside, the most significant factor in Wolseley’s slow progress was his inaccurate picture of the situation at Khartoum. Much of it derived from Gordon’s letters. Surounded and unable to speak Arabic, Gordon picked through scraps of information from fugitives and Mahdist deserters. Selecting the most appealing material, he sent it upriver to Colonel Herbert Kitchener at ed-Debba, the terminus of the telegraph line. Kitchener worshipped Gordon and admired Wolseley. His telegrams from ed-Debba to Wolseley’s headquarters emulated Gordon’s nonchalance, while his messages from ed-Debba to Khartoum exaggerated Wolseley’s progress.

  As Gordon had sent away his cipher books with Stewart and Power, he had no way of reading Wolseley’s messages warning that, contrary to Kitchener’s messages, the relief expedition had fallen behind schedule. Gordon’s strategic sense became highly distorted. By the end of October, fal
se reports from fugitives had convinced him that British troops had been seen south of ed-Debba, and that northern Sudan was awash in Madhist forces. So he repeatedly warned Wolseley not to string out his forces as he advanced on Berber, in case of a Mahdist assault on his column, risking his couriers’ lives in the process. “Gordon inundates us with telegrams without giving us any satisfactory intelligence,” Wolseley complained.46

  Gordon counted his supplies. “If they do not come before the 30th November, the game is up, and Rule Britannia!” On Kitchener’s word, Gordon believed that Wolseley would arrive on November 15, two weeks before Khartoum’s supplies ran out. Yet on November 4, with no troops in sight, Gordon extended his ability to resist the siege until mid-December, telling Wolseley, “We can hold out forty days with ease; after that it will be difficult.”

  Gordon still believed that the Mahdists would crumble at the first sight of British troops. He requested Wolseley to send an advance party from the expedition’s forward depot at Um Bakul to Metemma, where they could meet Gordon’s steamers and be ferried to Khartoum. This note reached Wolseley at Dongola on November 14. As the delays continued to multiply, Wolseley now expected to “shake hands with Gordon” around January 31. It was a race against time.47

  “ONE TUMBLES AT 3AM into a troubled sleep; a drum beats—Tup! Tup! Tup! It comes into a dream, but after a few moments one becomes more awake, and it is revealed to the brain that one is in Khartoum. A hope arises it will go away. No, it goes on, and increases in intensity. The thought strikes one, ‘Have they enough ammunition?’”48

  Khartoum was now under constant fire, erratic but enervating. Gordon was now more worried by a revolt in the city than assault from outside. To boost morale, in daylight he paced the palace roof, telescope in hand. At night he sat by the open window of the palace, a lamp lit behind him to give a clear silhouette. He promised that a British column was on its way, shot off fireworks to celebrate victories over Mahdist scouts sent to probe his lines, and broke out rations when he sensed morale was falling.