Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  The Ansar now controlled the town. They killed thousands, dragging the exhausted citizens from their houses, shooting, clubbing, and stabbing them in the streets, raping the women, enslaving the children, torturing the wealthy for hidden gold. Gordon awoke to screams and gunfire, a wave of death rolling toward the palace. Axes hacked at the gate to the palace garden, and the Ansar poured into the courtyard below his office.

  Taking up his revolver and rallying the palace guards, Gordon led the defense, firing from the windows of the upper story and working toward the top of the staircase leading down to the courtyard. He may have hoped to fight his way to the ammunition dump in the church, either to get more cartridges or to blow it up. The Dervishes charged up the stairs, but the defenders repulsed them at point-blank range. Rescuing a wounded bodyguard, Gordon was struck in the shoulder by a Mahdist spear, but he kept firing and repelled a second assault on the staircase. When his revolver was empty, he drew his sword and lunged forward.

  In the courtyard below him a Sudanese jihadi took careful aim with his rifle and shot Gordon in the chest. The impact threw him backward against the wall. Gordon pulled himself onto his feet and again led the charge, pushing the Dervishes at swordpoint down the stairs, but as he stepped into the courtyard, a second spear struck his right side. Falling, Gordon disappeared into a swarm of Dervishes, their spearpoints flashing in the early morning sun.66

  The rape, murder, and looting went on all day. By the time the Mahdi ordered a halt to the slaughter, hardly any adult males remained alive to be taken prisoner. The Ansar flogged suspected hoarders until the flesh hung in shreds from their bodies and crushed their skulls with vises made of twisted palm fibers. They strung men up by their thumbs and tortured women in their genitals. Consul Hansal’s servants killed their master, dragged his corpse into the street, piled alcohol-soaked tobacco on top of him, and incinerated him before tipping the remains into the river. So many Ansar pressed forward to share in the killing of Gordon that his body became an unrecognizable pile of butchered flesh.

  In the Mahdi’s camp at Omdurman, a horseman rode up to Rudolf Slatin. Dismounting, he unwrapped a blood-soaked cloth. Inside was the severed head of Charles George Gordon, his blue eyes still open.

  9

  The New Caliphate

  1885–89

  Charles George Gordon immortalized.

  Those that make war against Allah and his apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.

  The Koran1

  WILSON’S PARTY REACHE d Khartoum two days late. As the Bordein steamed past Tuti Island toward the landing stage, the Ansar on the banks blasted it with rifles and government artillery.

  “The bullets began to fly pretty quickly, tapping like hail against the ship’s sides, whilst the shells went screeching overhead or threw up jets of water in the stream round us,” Wilson recalled.

  Gordon’s palace appeared above the palms. Wilson looked for a red Egyptian flag. He saw only a smoldering ruin. With “a heavy feeling at the heart telling of some awful disaster,” he ran in close to the bank, within sixty yards of the sand, before the “loud, rushing noise” of Krupps shells from Khartoum convinced him that the town had fallen. His last sight of Khartoum was of loinclothed gunners and a mass of Ansar waving their rifles over their heads in triumph, as bullets and shells churned the water white around the Bordein. “It seemed almost impossible that we should escape.” On his return through the gauntlet, Wilson was hit above the knee, and his binoculars were shot from his hand.2

  On the night of February 5, Wolseley cabled the War Office, “Khartoum is reported to have fallen.” He could not confirm if Gordon was alive or dead, and asked for further instructions.

  Fourteen hundred miles away, a messenger bearing a scribbled note in an unsealed envelope marked Secret woke Sir Robert Thompson, the permanent undersecretary for war, just after midnight. Thompson tried to prevent the news leaking before the government had settled on its response. After rousing Hartington’s young secretary Reggie Brett, whose appearance on Gordon’s doorstep in Southampton had precipitated Gordon’s final journey to Khartoum, Thompson tried to find the government. But Parliament was in recess.

  Gladstone was holidaying with Hartington at Holker Hall in Lancashire, one of Hartington’s family estates, where the exhausted premier had recuperated through bracing walks and the occasional pheasant shoot. Brett and Thompson woke Gladstone’s secretary Eddy Hamilton, and sent telegrams to Holker Hall and to the queen at Osborne Castle on the Isle of Wight. At 0300 they knocked on the door of Lord Granville’s Mayfair mansion. They waited for half an hour in the hall before Granville’s valet informed them, falsely, that His Lordship was out of town. By then, the messenger, who had been unable to resist an unsealed envelope marked Secret, had sold the story. The morning edition of the Telegraph broke the news.3

  THE QUEEN ROSE EARLIEST. “Dreadful news after breakfast,” Victoria wrote in her journal. “Khartoum fallen, Gordon’s fate uncertain! All greatly distressed. It is too fearful.”

  Victoria felt that Gladstone had disgraced her and the nation. “The government is alone to blame, by refusing to send the expedition before it was too late.” Casting grammar and security to the winds, she communicated her fury to Gladstone, Hartington, and Granville in unciphered telegrams, sharing her thoughts with every telegraph operator between the Isle of Wight and their destinations. “These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.”4

  Up at Holker Hall, Lord Hartington had told his valet not to wake him before noon. The cable from London waited on a tray until Hartington came down for breakfast. As soon as he and Gladstone read it, they took the first train to London, collecting the queen’s humiliating telegram en route.

  “The circumstances are sad and trying,” Gladstone admitted that night in his diary. “It is one of the least points about them, that they may put an end to this Government.”5

  “At Last!” Punch magazine had already prepared a celebratory cover, showing Gordon and his grateful soldiers rushing out of Khartoum to greet the redcoats on the steamers. Now a second cover was devised, with a grieving Britannia hiding her eyes from the sack of Khartoum, lamenting, “Too Late!”

  A wave of sorrow, sentiment, guilt, and patriotism surged through the press, and met another wave of spontaneous public distress and outrage. The loss of Khartoum was a humiliation for British arms at the hands of “Dervish” savages; an embarrassment to ethnic dignity at the hands of half-naked “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”; a defeat for Free Trade; a disaster for the abolitionists; a hammer blow to Britain’s imperial prestige.

  “Our power in the East will be ruined,” raged the queen, whose patriotism and pride in forward policy embodied the national mood. “We shall never be able to hold up our heads again.” Although Wolseley could not confirm if Gordon was alive or dead, from the first the press and public assumed the worst. The blame settled on the government, and on Gladstone in particular.6

  As the wave of contempt crashed onto Downing Street, Gladstone realized he must catch it before it washed away his ministry. At the next cabinet, the great anti-imperial campaigner announced that Britain must not ignore “the effect which the triumph of the Mahdi would have on our Mahometan subjects.” With the survival of British India at stake, the cabinet decided it must avenge Gordon. It informed Garnet Wolseley that it had voted £2.75 million for the financing of an expanded, second Sudanese expedition for the following autumn.

  Sure of his clear conscience, Gladstone then turned to a more pressing matter, the ongoing Great Power negotiations over Egypt’s financial recovery. He had misread the intensity of the public’s response. In the popular perception, a heartless government had abandoned Gordon to savages. On the evening of the eleventh, when the Gladstones went to the Criterion Theater—“The Candidate, c
apitally acted”—his fellow theatergoers hissed him in the street. The next morning, a rumor of Gordon’s death reached London.7

  “How shall I write to you, or how shall I attempt to express what I feel!” the queen wrote to Gordon’s grieving sister Augusta. “To think of your dear, noble heroic brother, who served his country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the world, not having been rescued; that the promises of support were not fulfilled—which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go—is to me grief inexpressible!”

  Parliament voted twenty thousand pounds for Gordon’s family and declared a day of national mourning. Tributes arrived from the emperor of China, and from Khedive Tawfik, whose eulogy elegantly skirted the darker truth of Gordon’s motivations: “In his own death, Gordon has lost nothing, but has gained the glorious object he so fervently desired, to the attainment of which his life was so nobly devoted.”

  A barrage of anonymous hate mail descended on Downing Street. A popular joke inverted the initials of Gladstone’s nickname from G.O.M. to M.O.G.—“Murderer of Gordon”—and a music hall song promised Gladstone that when he died, he would “sit in state on a red-hot plate between Pilate and Judas Iscariot.” On February 12, the prime minister stayed in bed all day, “the disturbance, which has had so many forms, having at last taken the form of an overaction of the bowels.”8

  “IF ANYTHING CAN KILL old Gladstone, this news ought to.”

  Reading Gordon’s journals in a fly-blown tent at Korti, Garnet Wolseley damned the prime minister. “He cannot, self-illusionist though he may be, disguise from himself the fact that he is directly responsible for the fall of Khartoum and all the bloodshed it entails: that it was owing to his influence, active measures for the relief of Gordon were not undertaken in time. Whilst Gordon was starving, this arrogant Minister who poses as a great Statesman, but without any just claim to be considered one, was discussing to himself whether Gordon was hemmed in or surrounded, and no one could persuade him that Khartoum was besieged or that Gordon in any danger. Never were the destinies of any great nation committed to a more incompetent pilot…. What an ending to all our labor, and all our bright hopes is this!!”9

  Wolseley was disgusted by the government’s new orders. Gladstone was prepared to waste men’s lives to win votes. “Let all your soldiers, they say, grill for the summer in the Sudan, let many of them be killed and wounded, we care not, so long as the country will recognise that we have at last roused ourselves and adopted a spirited policy.” If the government’s original expectation of Wolseley’s small force had been optimistic, their new orders courted disaster. The conquest of Khartoum had turned the Mahdi into “a great Military Power,” and now all the Sudanese tribes must follow him or be destroyed: “He will be regarded as irresistible.”

  Like poor, murdered Gordon, Wolseley and his men would be sacrificed to satisfy the “fools and theoretical vestrymen” of the Liberal Party. Expanding the Sudanese war for domestic reasons seemed “a hideous mistake, the outcome of Mr. Gladstone’s foolish policy in Egypt, beginning with that wicked, cruel and senseless bombardment of Alexandria.” In scale and ambition, it would be “the most serious war we have undertaken since the idiotic Cabinet of 1854 declared war against Russia”—and Gladstone had served in that cabinet, too. Wolseley reckoned that the Mahdi could beat any army, British or Egyptian, simply by retreating into central Africa. “We shall have spent ten millions, and done nothing, and when we withdraw we shall very likely have a pack of yelping curs at our heels, take long shots at our retreating troops.”10

  Wolseley could hardly hold the line. The small British force had become stretched over harsh distances, and there was bad news on all fronts. By the Red Sea, General Graham had failed to break Osman Digna’s grip on Suakin. On the Nile, Wolseley’s main force was still caught in the Cataracts above Abu Hamed. After running aground both their steamers, Sir Charles Wilson and his party had to be rescued by the rest of the Desert Column, which staggered back to Korti leaving a trail of dead camels. On February 10, another delaying force of two thousand Ansar attacked a British column at Kirkeban. Although the British beat them off, they killed one of Wolseley’s most able commanders, Major General William Earle, V.C.

  Wolseley’s expedition was falling apart. Sir Charles Wilson’s nerves had “gone so completely from his experience of real war” that Wolseley expected nothing further from him. When Wolseley inspected the surviving members of Gordon’s steamer crews, the possibility of augmenting his troops with Sudanese conscripts seemed absurd. He refused to believe that black Africans could be trained as British soldiers. “I never saw such a lot of men—a large proportion of them of the lowest type—many very little above the monkey in brain development.” Ashamed of his inability to avenge Gordon, he saw no choice but to advise that British troops should withdraw from the entire Sudan and retrench at Wadi Halfa. If this was not done quickly, the Mahdi would push them out, a denouement with potentially fatal implications for the Wolseley career. “Oh, what a campaign of anxieties is this!”11

  ON FEBRUARY 27, Gladstone escaped yet another vote of censure in the Commons. For three days, he defended the government’s conduct with agonizing arguments built on erroneous reports from Garnet Wolseley. The circumstances of the fall of Khartoum still remained obscure, and Gordon’s death had not been confirmed. Wolseley had forwarded an early rumor that the city had fallen not through assault, but treachery; other rumors suggested that Gordon had been taken prisoner. If the city had fallen to treachery, Gladstone argued, how could that be the fault of a government that had committed troops and money to defending it? If Gordon had been murdered, the government was determined to avenge him and save the Sudan, if not for Commerce and Christianity, then for Civilization. But, Gladstone insinuated, was it known for certain that Gordon, the best and toughest Sudanese hand of all, was actually dead?

  Gladstone survived by fourteen votes. The public and political pressure of the last weeks had made him consider retirement again, but his digestion and his prospects both recovered swiftly. His second escape from censure over the Sudan persuaded him to persevere with his tormented coalition. “The final division in my mind turned the scale, so nicely was it balanced.”

  Gladstone knew little of “over-sea,” but he had a lifetime’s experience of Westminster. He knew that his promise to avenge Gordon would be tested against other, more demanding obligations. The international negotiations for a settlement of the Egyptian finances had not yet been resolved. At the other extremity of Britain’s growing Islamic empire, a brewing frontier war in Afghanistan really did threaten India. The public would soon forget about Gordon and find a new focus for its unhealthy imperial obsession. When it did, the flexible consciences and pocketbooks of Gladstone’s coalition would contract sharply. While Gladstone trumpeted promises of vengeance to Parliament, the nation, and Garnet Wolseley, what he wanted most of all was to be rid of the Sudan before the next election.

  “The lowest of all the motives bearing on it,” he admitted to Granville, “is that if we cannot kill the War in the Sudan, it will kill us, and not with an altogether clean death.”

  Gladstone searched for an exit strategy. Overruling Lord Granville, he accepted an offer from Wilfrid Blunt to sound out negotiations with the Mahdi via Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani.12

  “This has been a day of consolation,” Blunt wrote when he heard of the fall of Khartoum, “and I could not help singing all the way down in the train. Why had I so little faith?”

  Blunt felt sure that Gordon had been taken alive. His cousin in the Foreign Office, Algernon “Button” Bourke, assured him that Gladstone would “treat with the Mahdi on almost any terms.” Blunt found Afghani at the Hotel Wagram in Paris, triumphant: The Mahdi’s victory had raised the price of peace, and that raised the prospect of returning Urabi to Egypt. Although Urabi was at Ceylon, the British authorities made no effort to monitor his mail or his visitors. Urabi had already agreed
with Afghani’s plan to divide the Egyptian empire between Urabi and the Mahdi. Blunt returned to London with Afghani’s suggestion. Britain, he advised Gladstone, should send a negotiator to the Sudan.13

  Gladstone was still calculating if the press and public would permit him this betrayal of Gordon’s memory when his Sudanese position suddenly changed. At Suakin, General Graham finally defeated Osman Digna’s rebels, securing the Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal. In London, the Great Powers’ negotiators assented to continued British supervision of Egypt’s finances. With Britain’s most important regional interests secure, Gladstone sensed an opportunity to shake off his Sudanese commitment. In early April, he played the financial card. Launching a second Sudanese expedition would cost £11.5 million, with more money required for an advance on Khartoum. Parliament had just funded an expedition to shore up the Afghan border against Russia and had reached the limit of its patriotism and its generosity. Just as Gladstone hoped, political and popular pressure for a renewed Sudanese campaign began to falter. The catastrophe at Khartoum was now a drama of public memory, not a current political issue.

  On April 21, Wolseley received orders from Lord Hartington to withdraw to Wadi Halfa. There would be no second Sudanese campaign, and no chance for Wolseley to avenge Gordon and redeem his reputation. Britain would hold on to Suakin, but the rest of the Sudan would be surrendered to the Mahdi.

  “Of all the miserable, foolish policies, this is the worst!” Wolseley suspected that the government intended to make him a scapegoat for the failed campaign and the withdrawal. The Wolseley brain preferred dividing the spoils to dividing the blame. It settled on two targets: Gladstone the Radical hypocrite, and Sir Charles Wilson, who, Wolseley now decided, had cost Gordon’s life by wasting time at Metemma.