His greatest problem was not ammunition, but food. While the Mahdi’s men had exhausted their supply of looted Remington ammunition, and had taken to firing stones, Khartoum’s foundry had turned out over 2 million bullets. But by early November 1884, stocks of grain and biscuits had run low. Gordon had to feed nine thousand soldiers, and a further thirty-five thousand citizens. A windfall of thirty-five cattle, captured after the Mahdists had driven them into the minefield in an attempt to detonate a path, made only a small difference. As food stocks fell and hunger increased, looting broke out. His Egyptian officers robbed their men of their grain, and the soldiers robbed women of their rations in the street.
Gordon also detected traitors in the camp. He caught Khartoum’s civilian elite, the Qadi el-Islam and his circle, communicating with the Mahdi, and placed them all under house arrest. “I judge by the eye, by little signs, etc., for I do not know the language: but I cannot help thinking I am more often right than wrong in my suspicions. One comes on a group of clerks, heads all together, in the chief clerk’s room; one sees disturbed countenances at once. I cannot help thinking, You are concocting devilry!, and I look out for some tricks.”49
The last ranking European at Khartoum was the Austrian consul Martin Hansal, an alcoholic who lived with seven “female attendants.” Gordon turned to his journal for solace. It became the repository of the details of the siege—the hours spent scanning the northern horizon for a smear of steamer smoke, the ceaseless patrolling of his lines and counting of his biscuit supplies, the mounting claustrophobia and filth in the streets, the crowds pulling at his sleeve begging for food—and the vent for his private suffering, the hidden fear and anger with which he faced death. In this memorial in the making, he blamed everyone but himself for his predicament, and for tying the fate of the forty-five thousand people at Khartoum to his selective interpretation of his orders.
“It is simply due to the indecisions of our Government,” he insisted, adding that he felt “in honour bound to the people” of the town. He did not admit that he was bound to them not just by “six months’bothering warfare,” but also by his repeated false claims that British troops were on their way.
If he had not stayed at Khartoum for his own honor, then he had stayed for the honor of Britain, a greater cause than that of the Liberal Party. In his journal, Gordon depicted himself as a martyr to Gladstone’s foreign policy, and especially to Sir Evelyn Baring, who “had deigned to say that he would support me,” and who, Gordon believed, had abandoned him at Khartoum for the sake of his career. Gordon did not know of Baring’s efforts on his behalf.50
“I own to have been very insubordinate to Her Majesty’s Government and its officials,” he admitted, “but it is my nature and I cannot help it.” Yet he refused to accept that the relief expedition came to save him only. “It has come to SAVE OUR NATIONAL HONOUR in extricating the garrisons, etc., from a position our action in Egypt has placed these garrisons. I was Relief Expedition No. 1. They are Relief Expedition No. 2…. We, the first and second expeditions are equally engaged for the honour of England…I am not the rescued lamb, and I will not be.”51
Gordon prided himself on his composure before the garrison and populace, but they could see that since he had come to Khartoum, his hair had turned white. Increasing the psychological pressure, the Mahdi mobilized Gordon’s old officers. Rudolf Slatin, who had exchanged command of the Darfur garrison for membership of Khalifa Abdullahi’s bodyguard, wrote to Gordon, begging him to surrender and embrace Islam. Giuseppe Cuzzi, the ex-commander of the Berber garrison, now known as Mohammed Yusuf, crawled on hands and knees through the minefield to plead with Gordon.
Gordon refused to see him. Apostasy was no less disgraceful than suicide. He had decided to be a Christian martyr, and surrender his body to the torments of captivity. “I toss up in my mind whether, if the place is taken, to blow up the palace and all in it, or else to be taken and, with God’s help, to maintain the faith and, if necessary, suffer for it (which is most probable). The blowing up of the palace is the simplest, while the other means long and weary suffering and humiliation of all sorts.” Nevertheless, he chose it. “I think I shall elect for the last, not from fear of death, but because the former has the taint of suicide, as it can do no good to anyone and is, in a way, taking things out of God’s hands.”52
Everything was ready. Gordon had created his apotheosis. Now he faced the massed Ansar on the plain before Khartoum. On December 13, with artillery shells landing within fifty feet of his office in the west wing of the palace, he wrapped up his journals and entrusted them to a courier. “It is inexplicable, this delay.” Calculating that Khartoum had a maximum of two weeks’ food remaining, he wrote a final entry.53
“Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of my country. Good bye.”
Signing it “C.G. Gordon,” he added a last, bitter afterthought.
“You send me no information, though you have lots of money.”54
AT DONGOLA ON the last day of 1884, Garnet Wolseley received a message from Gordon, written in tiny letters on a scrap of paper no bigger than a postage stamp.
“Khartoum all right. 14/12/84 C.G. Gordon.”
But the courier also carried a verbal message for Wolseley. Khartoum was besieged on three fronts, fighting went on day and night, the defenders were starving at their posts, and the Mahdi controlled the approaches to Khartoum.
“Do not scatter your troops. Enemy are numerous. Bring plenty of troops if you can,” Gordon urged. “We want you to come quickly.”55
A second letter told Colonel Watson, “The game is up, and send Mrs. Watson, you and Graham my adieux. We may expect a catastrophe in the town on or after 10 days’ time.” Having blamed the cabinet, Baring, and Kitchener, Gordon now turned on his friend Wolseley. “This would not have happened (if it does happen) if our people had taken better precautions as to informing me of their movements, but this is spilt milk.”56
Wolseley’s “forward concentration” at Korti, scheduled for Christmas Day, had now been put back to January 22. Still struggling to gather his forces, and now realizing the urgency of Gordon’s plight, Wolseley prepared to bypass Berber and send a “Desert Column” of fifteen hundred men on camels to Metemma. He had no idea what they might encounter as they crossed the desert. Wolseley then discovered that he possessed insufficient camels to reach Metemma in a single lift. He decided that General Sir Herbert Stewart would lead the Desert Column to Metemma in two stages. Adopting Gordon’s advice, Wolseley told General Stewart that he was not to move on Khartoum until the main force had taken Berber.
On the afternoon of December 30, Colonel Kitchener and his Arab guides led General Stewart’s advance party out of their camp at Korti and into the bare, scrubby desert. The shortage of camels obliged General Stewart to move slowly, ferrying the column’s supplies up, establishing a temporary advance camp at Gakdul, and sending Kitchener and the supply train back to Korti. It was not until January 12 that General Sir Herbert Stewart, sixteen hundred men of the Camel Corps, and a further two hundred men from the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Naval Brigade reached Gakdul. By then, their laborious camel treks had alerted the Mahdi to their presence. As Stewart made south for Metemma, twelve thousand Ansar headed along the western bank of the White Nile to meet him.
The Mahdi hoped to defeat Khartoum through starvation. He wanted to take Gordon prisoner, as the trophy he could trade for recognition of his Sudanese empire. The advance of the Desert Column forced the Mahdi to fight, if only to delay its progress. His men had never faced British troops; Stewart, like Gordon and Wolseley, had never seen a Mahdist charge. On January 16, as Stewart reached a ridge overlooking the wells of Abu Klea, little more than twenty miles from Metemma, he saw “a long line of banners fluttering in the breeze and stretching right across the road.”57
General Stewart halted his colum
n and ordered them to prepare a zariba on a stony plateau. As Ansar scouts worked along Stewart’s flanks and fired into the camp, the Camel Corps dug in for the night. Rising before dawn, they moved forward in a loose square, keeping Ansar raiding parties at bay, until they were less than a mile from the main Ansar force. At that moment, the Ansar began the charge, in three formations, each headed by a black or green flag. On the British left flank the Gardner machine gun operated by men from HMS Alexandra fired seventy rounds before jamming. The sailors were cut down as they ran for the square. As the British tightened their ranks and the Camel Corps dismounted to reinforce the line, the square could not open fire without hitting its own skirmishing parties, running back before the Ansar. “One poor fellow who lagged behind was caught and speared at once.”58
Colonel Sir Charles Wilson, Stewart’s intelligence officer, could not believe his eyes. The Ansar simply ran in close formation toward the British lines, in a human tide so densely packed that the rapid fire of Martini-Henry carbines appeared to have no effect. As a huge wall of dead bodies piled up in front of the square, the Ansar divided in two. Over five thousand warriors wheeled around the right side of the square, toward its rear.
“By Jove, they will be into the square!” Wilson realized. He watched a “fine old sheikh on horseback” leading the charge for the rear of the square, banner in one hand, the Mahdi’s ratib in the other, chanting prayers as his horse breasted the line. As the sheikh planted his flag in the center of the square, he was shot from his saddle. The square filled with panicked British camels, Ansar horsemen, and a tidal wave of warriors that subsumed General Stewart and his horse. Ansar and Camel Corps fought hand to hand with spears, knives, and bayonets. To hold back the assault, the rear rank of the British soldiers at the front of the square turned round and directed their fire into the melée, forcing back the Ansar and killing many British troops. The Ansar withdrew, to cheers from the broken British. The bodies of over a thousand Ansar lay piled in and around the square, mingled with those of over seventy British officers and men. Colonel Frederick Burnaby, the popular cavalry officer whom Wolseley had picked to lead the steamer dash from Metemma to Khartoum, lay dead, a Mahdist spear through his throat.59
General Stewart spent a sleepless, frozen night in the desert, his officers huddled and shivering under a looted prayer blanket. He advanced late the next day, hoping to reach Metemma before dawn, but his exhausted camel drivers fell asleep in their saddles. Their mounts wandered loose, appearing “gaunt, spectre-like in the dim starlight” as the column became disordered.
Just after dawn, with the Nile in sight, the Ansar suddenly reappeared. Stewart was forced to regroup and dig in, two miles short of Metemma. By 0800, Ansar bullets “began to drop pretty freely into the square.” The Camel Corps scrambled to tie down their camels and build parapets of saddles and store boxes. Hidden by long grass, the Ansar worked around the square, their enfilade fire hitting the defenseless soldiers. General Stewart was fatally wounded, his aide St. Leger Herbert shot through the head, and Cameron of the Standard, who had hidden himself among his camels, was killed as he rose to receive a box of sardines from his servant.
Stewart’s second in command, Colonel Sir Charles Wilson, had never served in an active campaign. Realizing that his force would be destroyed if he did not move, Wilson left part of his force in the redoubt and formed the rest into a square under heavy fire, the men lying down for cover as they took up their places. Then he ordered a march to the Nile. “The men’s faces were set in a determined way, and I knew they intended to drink from the Nile that night.” Several were hit as soon as they stood up, one marine almost falling dead into Wilson’s arms. Leaving their wounded where they fell, they edged forward. As they reached the last slope before the Nile, the Ansar stopped shooting, and hundreds of horsemen and spearmen came pouring down the hill. At three hundred yards, Wilson’s bugler called “Commence firing,” and the banners and the horsemen crashed into the grass fifty yards short of the square. The Ansar wavered, and then retreated, their charge broken.
Just before dusk, Wilson reached the “line of green vegetation” that hid the river. A tenth of his force had been killed. So many had been wounded that it was necessary to expand the redoubt to accommodate them. The survivors had barely slept or eaten in four days. Resting his force and burying the dead, Wilson waited two days before marching on Metemma. On January 21, as he skirmished with Ansar on the outskirts of the village, Wilson saw smoke trails on the river. Led by the Bordein, four battered boats appeared under Egyptian flags.60
“Gordon’s steamers!” Wilson’s men cried, running down to the river’s edge.61
The Desert Column had linked up with the steamers, but Wolseley’s plan had been ruined. Burnaby was dead. Stewart was dying. The Naval Brigade that was to have accompanied him to Khartoum had been decimated at Abu Klea, its commander, Lord Charles Beresford, so badly wounded that he could barely stand. Wilson’s force was too battered to assault Metemma, and so drained that it had to spend three days organizing its withdrawal before he could board the Bordein.
The Mahdi’s delaying tactic had worked. With word of his advance preceding him, on January 24, 1885, Sir Charles Wilson and a grand total of twenty-four soldiers donned the red uniforms that Wolseley thought would help them intimidate the Dervish horde and set sail for Khartoum.
MORE THAN FIVE WEEKS after Gordon had given Khartoum a life expectancy of ten days, the town still held out. By the end of December, the last cattle had been slaughtered and the soldiers’ daily ration was down to eleven ounces of grain a day. So many civilians died in the streets that to avoid epidemic, Gordon promised extra rations to those who volunteered for burial parties. On January 6, 1885, most of the civilian population surrendered, walking over to the Mahdi, leaving only fourteen thousand within the town. On the twelfth, the outlying fort at Omdurman ran out of food and surrendered, its garrison joining the Jihadiya militia.
Gordon spent hours on the roof monitoring his defenses, the Mahdi’s camp, and the northern horizon through his telescope. He stacked his reserves of ammunition in the Catholic church, rigging a mine so that it could be blown up if the town fell, and prepared a steamer on the quay by the palace so that the town notables could escape. He slept in the day so that he could patrol the lines at night, where sentries collapsed at their posts from hunger. The garrison ate rats, cats, dogs, donkeys, and goatskin water bags, with a bread made from a handful of flour mixed with palm tree hearts. The Khalifa Abdullahi wrote to Gordon, tormenting him, “There is no escape for you from death at our hands, and from death by starvation.”62
The Mahdi wrote to him, too. Gordon had forced the Mahdi’s hand at every stage. The Mahdi did not want to kill Gordon: He hoped to capture him and trade him with the British for Ahmed Urabi, carving the khedive’s empire into two rebel states and breaking the Turkish hold over the Nile. Now the Mahdi made a final appeal for Gordon to surrender.63
“Having seen what you have seen, how long are you going to disbelieve us? We have been told by God’s Apostle, may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him, of the imminent destruction of all those in Khartoum, save those who believe and surrender; them Allah will save. We do not wish you to perish with those doomed to perish because we have frequently heard good of you.” Quoting the Koran, Kill not your people, for surely Allah is merciful to thee, the Mahdi almost begged Gordon not to force a final, futile battle. “We have repeatedly written to you urging you to return to your own country, where your virtue will achieve the highest honour…. If you accept our advice, you will be thereby blessed: but if you wish to rejoin the English we will send you to them without claiming a farthing. Salaam aleikum.”64
Still hoping that the steamers would return with Wolseley’s advance guard, Gordon did not reply. On January 20, his hopes surged. Through his telescope, he observed crowds of grieving women in the Mahdi’s camp. He deduced correctly that the Desert Column had defeated the Ansar, and must be at Metemma.
On the morning of January 25, Gordon observed the Ansar moving to the riverbank. He ordered every man between the age of eight and eighty to man the defenses, but most of the inhabitants and soldiers were too weak and dazed with hunger to respond. He spent the day sitting at his desk, smoking. In the early evening, he heard three tremendous roars as the Mahdi’s followers promised three times, “We swear allegiance to you unto death!”
“If Allah grants you the victory,” the Mahdi ordered, “Gordon is not to be killed.”
The Ansar repeated its oath, “We swear by Allah and his Prophet, and we swear by you, that we will not commit adultery, that we will not disobey your lawful commands, that we will not flee from the jihad.”
The Mahdi pointed his sword toward Khartoum. “Allahu akbar!” 65
At midnight, as Gordon fell into a shallow sleep of exhaustion, the first fighters of the Ansar edged into the wet mud at the edge of Khartoum’s southern defenses. Just before dawn, forty thousand men deluged a single battalion of Egyptian soldiers. At the other end of the rampart, further massive charges melted Khartoum’s defenses.
Three Empires on the Nile Page 25