Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  When Abdullahi heard of his victory, he was overcome with joy. He distributed General al-Zaki’s triumphant report from Gallabat throughout his kingdom. The unchallenged caliph of an uncharted expanse, Abdullahi had triumphed by destroying his subjects as he conquered them. The result was the disintegration of society. Communication with the outside world broke down, and the Sudan drifted into a waste of starvation and disease, a lost paradise of death.

  The greatest prize still lay before him. In the early summer of 1889, Abdullahi’s eye turned north to Egypt. He ordered his general at Dongola, Abd al-Rahman al-Nujumi, to advance on Wadi Halfa. Before al-Nujumi left Dongola, he burned down his house. The hour had come to fulfill the Mahdi’s prophecy.

  “GENERAL GORDON was sent to Khartoum not to act, but to report,” Evelyn Baring explained. “General Gordon had failed to recognise the real facts in connection with the Sudan when he undertook his mission. After his arrival at Khartoum, he recognised them, but he could not enforce their recognition on Mr. Gladstone; the latter’s blindness to facts, which were patent to all the world, eventually resulted in the death of General Gordon, of Colonel Stewart, and of many other brave men.”27

  Like Garnet Wolseley, Baring blamed his superiors and inferiors for the loss of Khartoum, and absolved himself. Unlike Wolseley, Baring was left to clear up the political debris. Britain had forced Egypt to retreat from the Sudan, yet Egypt still claimed the territory, and the Turkish sultan still claimed both Egypt and the Sudan. In March 1885, Gladstone had secured Egypt’s debt repayments to its European creditors, but only by granting Bismarck’s ambitious Germany a seat on the Commission of the Debt. This gave Germany an effective veto over the commission’s future disposal of the Egyptian revenues, which might include funding the reconquest of the Sudan.

  “Berlin, and not Cairo, is the real center of gravity of Egyptian affairs,” Baring warned London.

  Meanwhile, the Mahdi’s sudden death had not altered the threat from the south. In 1885, Habib Anthony Salmone, a Syrian Christian who had volunteered to spy for Britain, infiltrated Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani’s circle at Paris. Salmone reported that when the Nile fell to its lowest level that summer, the Mahdists planned to block it with a dam of boulders and destroy the Egyptian harvest, causing mass starvation. Baring was effectively defenseless. After Wolseley’s withdrawal from the Sudan, only a skeletal force of inexperienced Egyptian troops held the line at Wadi Halfa, and Abd al-Rahman al-Nujumi’s troops had filled the vacuum in Dongola. If Khalifa Abdullahi sent them further north, Egypt could not protect itself without foreign assistance. Worse, the only foreign assistance on offer was of the wrong kind.28

  Gladstone had also shuffled out of office without settling the future of Egypt with Sultan Abdul Hamid II. In August 1885, the new prime minister, Lord Salisbury, dispatched Sir Henry Drummond Wolff to Constantinople to negotiate an Egyptian settlement. Within two months, the sultan signed an Anglo-Turkish Convention, setting out “the nature of the subjects which were to be discussed,” and resolving the question of authority in Egypt: Pending the eventual exit of British troops and officials, Egypt was to be governed by a pair of British and Turkish commissioners.

  Drummond Wolff believed that this twin-headed executive would help Egypt “in the elaboration of institutions which must combine both Eastern and Western elements.” As it would be difficult “for English gentlemen, however able and conciliatory, to come to terms with races who had suffered so severely at our hands,” the same went for the Sudan. Blithely dismissing the theological aspect of the Mahdi’s revolt, Wolff reasoned that as Muslims, the Sudanese rebels recognized the sultan as their caliph. Therefore, Ottoman diplomacy was the best means of “tranquilising the Sudan by pacific means.”29

  “A delusion,” Baring responded. The Mahdi, he said, had confounded Christians and Turks alike in one common anathema.” The Ottoman Empire had been the Mahdi’s nearest enemy, but not his only enemy.

  Baring had survived the Mahdi’s revolt, Gordon’s defeat, the loss of the Sudan, and the fall of Gladstone’s government. Now a few “imaginary facts evolved from the brains of Turkish diplomatists” threatened to return Egypt to the Turkiyya, and the Sudan, too. Apart from bringing catastrophe upon Egypt, this would mean the end of Baring’s reign as the power behind the khedivial throne. The Gladstonian alternative, to dilute the sultan’s ambition by sharing Egypt with the other European powers, had failed in the crisis of Urabi’s revolt. To Baring, multilateralism and “Internationalism” meant “political egotism, a disregard of the rights of subject races and, in the case now under discussion, a decadence in the authority of that European Power on the maintenance of whose paramount influence the advance of true civilization in Egypt depends.” What to do?30

  Viewed from the consular villa, only one country could bring “true civilisation” to Egypt: “That Power is Great Britain.” The Turks were incompetent, the French devious, and the Germans malevolent. Only Britain possessed the requisite integrity. Baring had always expected that Britain’s economic and strategic investments in Egypt would necessitate a permanent British presence. With Khedive Tawfik in his pocket and British officers in the garrisons, he had planned Egypt’s financial recovery, honoring its debts through high taxation and total fiscal transparency. He had forcefully suppressed any nationalist rumblings, even banning Wilfrid Blunt from entering the country, and had organized the training of a new Egyptian army, staffed by British officers and commanded by a new sirdar, Major General Francis Grenfell. This benign despotism had remarkable economic results. Although the Mahdi had deprived Egypt of its illicit Sudanese revenues, Egypt’s economy underwent rapid paper growth. This allowed Baring to reduce Egypt’s obligations to the bondholders and to plan for the day when British Egypt could fund its own reconquest of the Sudan.

  Baring received little help from London. Between 1885 and 1887, the government changed four times. Lord Salisbury and the Conservatives had capitalized on Gladstone’s Sudanese problems when they were in opposition, but in office they followed in Gladstone’s Egyptian footsteps. At first, Salisbury refused to lead a minority government, until he was personally persuaded by Queen Victoria to do his patriotic duty. Beset by the Irish controversies that had undermined Gladstone, Salisbury’s caretaker government lasted barely a year. In February 1886, Gladstone returned for a third ministry, but the Grand Old Man could do no better. Having allied with the Irish nationalists to bring down Salisbury, Gladstone then introduced a bill granting Home Rule to Ireland. The bill spilt the Liberal Party. In July 1887, Salisbury returned, and with a workable majority.

  At the same time, negotiations crawled forward between Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and the Sultan’s advisers. On May 22, 1887, Wolff finally presented London with a finished draft of the Anglo-Ottoman Convention. In Article V of the convention, Britain and Turkey agreed that within three years of the sultan’s ratification of the treaty, Britain would withdraw its troops from Egypt. The withdrawal would not be unconditional. Britain reserved the right to cancel it if there was any “appearance of danger in the interior, or from without.” And if “order and security” broke down in Egypt, both parties had the right to send in troops, singly or together. Still, it looked as if Baring might be toppled from his Egyptian throne—but then the sultan saved him.31

  Abdul Hamid II distrusted foreigners in general, and his British friends in particular. His attempts to manipulate Great Power rivalries took unpredictable and erratic forms, partly because they were filtered through a swirl of advisers, each of whom backed a different Great Power. On May 26, 1887, Abdul Hamid II assured Sir William White, the British ambassador at Constantinople, that he was about to ratify the convention. A week later, the sultan’s astrologer Abu al-Huda endorsed the opinions of the advocates of France and Russia. The sultan refused to sign the convention.

  Sir Henry Drummond Wolff expected that a shift in planetary alignment would soon remind the sultan that Britain was his chief patron. Wolff hovered in Constantinop
le for two months, waiting for the sultan to relent, until a disgusted Lord Salisbury recalled him to London. When Abdul Hamid II realized that by refusing to assist Britain in its departure from Egypt, he had thrown away his best hope of regaining his prized province, he ordered his ambassador at London to renew the negotiations. Lord Salisbury turned him down.

  “So long as the Sultan was so much under the influence of other advisors as to repudiate an agreement which he had himself so recently sanctioned, any fresh agreement would obviously be liable to meet the same fate,” Salisbury told Abdul Hamid II. Just as he had in 1882, the sultan had bungled the chance to recover Egypt for the Ottoman Empire. Britain had done its best to leave Egypt. The sultan’s folly had demonstrated that there was no alternative to extended occupation.32

  Baring had prepared for that all along. Through the slow rotation of governments in London, and the elaborate dance between Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and the sultan’s advisers in Constantinople, the consul had continued rebuilding Egypt on the assumption that Britain would stay there. In 1888, for the first time since the collapse of cotton prices in the mid-1860s, Baring recorded a small surplus in Egypt’s accounts. Immediately, he created a reserve fund for “extraordinary expenditure.”

  He hoped to collect Egypt’s budget surpluses, so that when the time came to retake the Sudan, Egypt could fund the invasion from its own savings. That way, he could bypass “Internationalism”: the Commission of the Debt and the threat of a German veto. But the commissioners insisted that these revenues must also be subject to international division, and the Salisbury government assented, unwilling to risk confrontation over a hypothetical issue. Baring kept telling London that a British reconquest of the Sudan was strategically inevitable, and Salisbury agreed with his analysis. But so long as Britain had a choice, the government preferred not to fund an expensive and difficult war in the Sudan.

  Meanwhile, Baring pared small slices from the Egyptian budget to fund the training of the Egyptian army, his only bulwark against the “barbarous tribes” beyond Wadi Halfa. Egypt’s position had not worsened, but neither had it improved. Baring possessed excellent information about the entropic collapse of the khalifa’s empire; Colonel Kitchener’s intelligence aide Major Reginald Wingate had organized an efficient spy network in the Sudan. On the Red Sea, Kitchener had mobilized a coalition of disaffected tribes and pushed Osman Digna’s raiders back into the hills. Yet Baring worried constantly about the sheer mass of Abdullahi’s followers, the thinness of Egypt’s defenses, and the untested nature of his new troops. To remind Baring of their unfinished business, Khalifa Abdullahi sent him abusive letters, threatening the slaughter of all infidels at Cairo.33

  The Egyptian army had been trounced at Tel el-Kebir, dismantled after Urabi’s revolt, reassembled for the Hicks expedition, and shamed in the flight from the Sudan. Baring rebuilt it from the bottom up. No slave raids filled its ranks, and no corrupt officers robbed their men. The recruits were trained by British officers and commanded by a mixture of British and Egyptians. By the summer of 1889, the Nile Frontier Force numbered ten battalions of Egyptian and six battalions of Sudanese infantry, eight cavalry squadrons, and eight companies of Camel Corps, all augmented by horse artillery, field guns, a battery of new Maxim machine guns, and transport and railway battalions.

  In May 1889, Baring heard of General al-Nujumi’s advance from Dongola. More than six thousand Dervish warriors, and a supporting column of women and children, were moving north along the Nile. As on previous Mahdist campaigns, al-Nujumi carried no provisions; he expected that Allah or the local peasants would provide food along the route. But bad harvests and a local population swollen by refugees meant that his army traveled hungry. The Dervish advance soon resembled a disordered retreat.

  Within days, the Ansar had been reduced to eating powdered date stones and their own pack animals. To bypass Wadi Halfa and Egyptian gunboats on the Nile, al-Nujumi led his force into the desert toward Balaja. Again, he found no food or water along the route. When he attempted to fight a path back toward the river villages, Egyptian steamers landed troops and pushed him back. Many of his men collapsed from thirst in the desert, and many more deserted. His column left a trail of dying men, dead animals, and abandoned ammunition. When he camped at Balaja, al-Nujumi counted only three of his thirty-five artillerymen. Most of his bodyguards had abandoned him. Even his water-carrier had deserted.

  Major General Grenfell led the new Nile Frontier Force south to meet the invaders. Hearing of al-Nujumi’s plight, Grenfell offered terms.

  “After me, thousands of English and Egyptian troops are about to arrive. I had in mind to wipe you out, and obliterate your traces, you and those who follow you, from the face of the earth in view of the barbarous deeds which your hands have committed.” Grenfell reminded Al-Nujumi that he had nowhere to go. “You will find only English and Egyptian armies, long-trained and dreaming only of shedding the blood of their enemies. They await your coming, hour by hour, to drink your blood and send you to destruction.” Grenfell begged him to spare the camp followers. “I call upon you to surrender, so that helpless women and children shall not die. If you surrender, your life and the lives of your commanders and the lives of all who are with you shall be preserved from evil.”34

  Al-Nujumi responded with fierce piety. “Our object is to come into the country and to compel all its people to enter the Faith. Do not be deceived by your soldiers, guns and rockets, or the quantity of your powder, which is void of God’s help.” He warned Grenfell to expect the fate of “Hicks, Gordon and their like,” whose soldiers and weapons had proved worthless. “If you will profess Islam and surrender all your guns and weapons, you shall be saved and have the safe conduct of Allah, his Prophet, his Mahdi and his Khalifa.”35

  On August, 3, 1889, the armies met on the western bank of the White Nile, near the village of Toski. As more than three thousand of al-Nujumi’s followers raced forward with the last of their strength, the Frontier Force formed into lines and began firing as if on the parade ground at Cairo. The new Maxim guns mowed down the fearless Ansar in heaps, their white jibbas piling up like fresh cotton. Al-Nujumi was shot three times, and as his guards ferried him from the battlefield on a camel, further Egyptian volleys killed his guards, the camel, al-Nujumi’s five-year-old son, and the general, too.

  As the survivors of al-Nujumi’s wild charge melted back toward Dongola, thousands of starving camp followers surrendered. The khalifa’s invasion of Egypt had dissolved on its first encounter with the new Egyptian army. More concerned with holding power at Omdurman than fulfilling the Mahdi’s vision of permanent revolution, Abdullahi had dispatched an insufficient force to Egypt. He expected that they would face yet another terrified Egyptian motley. Instead, the Ansar had been slaughtered by well-drilled troops with the latest weaponry.

  “It is my pleasant duty to bring to your notice the excellent condition of the Egyptian troops on the occasion of the action of Toski,” Grenfell reported. “The conduct of the black troops has been tested on previous occasions, but the conduct of the purely Egyptian troops who were brought into close contact in line formation, with large numbers of Dervishes, was satisfactory.”36

  The rout at Toski demonstrated that properly trained and motivated troops could, with the help of improved machine guns, resist the Ansar’s onslaught. But by demonstrating that Egypt could be defended by native troops on a limited budget, it made the reconquest of the Sudan seem less urgent to the London government. So long as the Egyptian surplus was under the control of the Commission of the Debt, and Baring and the sirdar could guarantee the Suez Canal and the India Route, Salisbury would permit no military operations.

  Baring had his own reasons for agreeing with Salisbury. Expanding the Egyptian army would raise “a whole crop of local and international difficulties” in the Egyptian finances. If Khedive Tawfik and his ministers were permitted to recover the Sudan unsupervised, Baring foresaw “the most serious risk” of a relapse into mis
government. The desirable alternative, British troops, seemed remote. The abolitionist lobby’s influence over Africa policy had declined with the deepening of Britain’s economic and strategic involvement. Only a “small but influential section of public opinion” still advocated the conquest of the Sudan, and Baring was too clever to align himself with a minority. In 1886, he calculated that the Egyptian government would have to wait twenty-five years before it could finance an invasion of the Sudan without British funds and soldiers. The Sudan must wait, and Gordon’s unquiet memory with it.37

  From his plinth twenty-three feet above the swirling carriages of Trafalgar Square, a bronze Gordon looked down Whitehall toward Parliament. In a crumpled, beltless patrol jacket, carrying no weapon except his “Wand of Victory,” Gordon gazed sightlessly toward the political heart of the empire, arms almost folded, his left foot resting on a broken cannon. His left hand holding a Bible, he raised his right to his chin as if reflecting on some distant, unattainable goal.

  10

  Gladstone’s Egg

  1889–96

  The Third Marquess of Salisbury.

  I had no difficulty in finding the Company’s offices. It was the biggest thing in town, and everyone I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end of coin by trade.

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 18991

  PRONE TO ILLNES s and privately tutored in an ancestral palace, Lord Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil grew from a delicate, lonely second son into a large, awkward, and aimless young man. Withdrawn from Eton after being bullied, he scraped a Fourth Class degree in Mathematics from Christ Church, Oxford. He considered becoming an Anglican bishop, tinkered with his botanical collection, and became depressed. Alarmed by their pale, lonely son, his parents sent him on a tour of the empire. Fresh air and vigorous company, they hoped, would strengthen his physical and mental health.