Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  “He has no age but the prime of life, no body but the one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and the whole of the man, a brain and a will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of extremest difficulty, they never seem to know what trouble is,” sang his camp follower, George Steevens of the Daily Mail. “You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire, Exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the Sudan Machine.”1

  The shy son of a lieutenant colonel in the Indian army who had retired to a rundown Irish estate, at fourteen Kitchener lost his mother to tuberculosis. Weeks later, he entered the Royal Engineers’ cadet school at Woolwich. The masks of military discipline and Christian fortitude soon overlaid his natural shyness, and they became Kitchener’s chief weapons in a long frontier war against his emotions. In the summer of 1869, Cadet Sergeant Kitchener met “Chinese” Gordon, the school’s hero. Gordon’s less celebrated brother Henry, then a senior officer in the Ordnance, regularly hosted the school’s commanders and their juvenile charges. Although Gordon never recalled their meeting, the young Kitchener cherished the memory, worshipping Gordon with “unbounded admiration.”2

  Kitchener followed Gordon’s trajectory. At twenty-four, after failing to go “slaying niggers by the dozen” with Sir Garnet Wolseley in glamorous West Africa, he obtained a commission to the Holy Land. The new science of biblical archaeology required modern maps, so the Palestine Exploration Fund had engaged the Royal Engineers.

  “What a glorious land this is, when one can see it through the spectacles of imagination,” he confided to his sister Millie, “those grand old knights, so fierce in war, so gentle in religion.”

  Just as Kitchener’s fluent Arabic rested on the foundation of the biblical Hebrew he had learned at Woolwich with an Evangelical friend, so his sense of Britain’s imperial destiny rested on his Christianity. In 1876, back in London on a furlough from Palestine, he joined the Guild of the Holy Standard, an army brotherhood pledged to maintain its faith amid the profanity of the barracks and the temptations of the foreign posting. Kitchener swore to be “sober, upright and chaste,” to avoid “immoral books,” to pray regularly and receive Holy Communion at least three times a year, and to promote the religious and social welfare of his men and their families.3

  When the Urabi revolt exploded in the summer of 1882, Kitchener was one of the few army officers fluent in Arabic. At the time he was at Cyprus on a second surveying expedition, and weak from malaria, but he hurried to Alexandria in civilian dress to offer his services. After watching the bombardment of Alexandria from the Invincible, Kitchener returned to Cyprus, unable to secure a permanent posting. When Hicks Pasha’s expedition disappeared in Kordofan, Kitchener was in the Sinai Desert on another survey. Disguised as an Egyptian official, and calling himself Abdullah Bey, Kitchener rode two hundred miles by camel and secured a major’s commission in the Egyptian army. For the next fifteen years, he devoted himself to British Egypt, until he succeeded Gordon as an icon of imperial morality.

  Kitchener’s great passion was his army career, and the stage was Egypt. Even his close brush with matrimony occurred within the narrow field of British society at Cairo. In the early 1880s, Kitchener had a chaste, unconsummated romance with Hermione Baker, daughter of Valentine Baker Pasha, the overseer of the new Egyptian gendarmerie, and niece of Sir Samuel Baker. Instead of marrying Kitchener to the British machinery in Egypt, the affair ended as a Victorian tragedy. In January 1885, when Kitchener was down in the desert at ed-Debba waiting for word from Gordon, Hermione succumbed to typhoid. Valentine Baker Pasha gave Kitchener a gold locket containing a miniature of Hermione, which he wore under his shirt, as hidden as the rest of his passions. He continued to attend the balls and dinners that constituted the social round of expatriate Cairo, and to run the gauntlet of ambitious mothers and unmarried daughters, but Kitchener never again exposed his heart to outflanking by love, the great assassin.

  He preferred the male society of the officers’ mess, the Masonic lodge, and the military expedition. In the name of efficiency, he forced all new officers to promise not to marry or even get engaged for the first two years of their Egyptian service. He would not risk ridicule or weakness. Margot Tennant, an aristocratic tourist who met him at Cairo, observed, “Though a little underbred, he is not at all vulgar, and though arrogant, is not vain; but he is either way very stupid or very clever; and never gives himself away.”4

  For Kitchener, the deaths of his hero Gordon and his “dear friend” Colonel Stewart were both a national disgrace and a personal shame. Through the siege of Khartoum, Kitchener had been based in the desert at ed-Debba. Appointed special commissioner for the Arabs, he had gathered a force from the pro-Egyptian Ababdeh tribe, without whom communication in the Nile Valley would have been severed. Living and dressing like a desert Arab, Kitchener took a tribal oath of blood brotherhood with his hosts. As for Gordon before him, the experience of solitude, fraternity, and prayer in the desert increased his sense of isolation and destiny. At the same time, Kitchener had been implicated as both frustrated actor and helpless spectator in Gordon’s slow martyrdom.

  Kitchener had been Gordon’s first and last point of contact, the link between Khartoum and Cairo, but had been powerless to help. Though he had warned, “If any harm befall Stewart, for every hair of his head I will have a life,” he had been unable to assist Stewart’s escape from Khartoum, unable to order Egyptian troops forward, and unable to convince Cairo of the true urgency of the situation.

  Having failed to save Stewart’s life, he had been devastated by the “dreadful” news of Gordon’s death. “I can hardly realise it yet,” he admitted to his father six weeks afterward. Gordon’s death had “taken the heart and soul” out of the expedition, and it further cauterized Kitchener’s heart against treacherous emotion, and its urgings toward misjudgment.5

  In a final, ironic torment, it had been Kitchener’s task to prepare the official report on Gordon’s death. Interviewing witnesses, he had reconstructed his hero’s last, desperate fight on the palace steps. Privately cultivating the flame of revenge, Kitchener drew rigorously professional lessons from the fiasco. He decided that Gordon had died not because he had been abandoned by civilian politicians, but because he had been let down by his fellow soldiers. Wolseley had thwarted the relief expedition through “mismanagement and mistakes.” As he struggled anew against the twin evils of sentiment and bad logistics, for the next ten years Kitchener’s upward progress became entwined with the project of avenging Gordon.6

  Between 1886 and 1888, as governor-general of Suakin, he pushed Osman Digna’s tribesmen back from the Red Sea coast. In one skirmish he caught a bullet in the face that, inaccessible to the surgeon’s knife, eventually dropped into his throat and disappeared into his stomach. From 1889, as adjutant general at Cairo, he oversaw the training of the Egyptian and Sudanese peasants in the khedive’s new army. At Toski, that army’s first real victory over the Mahdists, he led the Egyptian cavalry.

  He built an officer corps of skilled, motivated, and loyal leaders. They included Colonel Reginald Wingate, a brilliant intelligence officer whose sideline, popular histories of the Mahdist revolt, kept the outrage of British humanitarians on a slow simmer; Major General Archibald Hunter, a belligerent Scottish swashbuckler who kept an Abyssinian mistress at Shepheard’s Hotel; and Gordon’s nephew, Lieutenant Colonel William “Monkey” Gordon, who possessed the family traits of bright blue eyes and a taste for playing with high explosives. Kitchener appointed him director of stores.

  In 1890, Kitchener, aged forty, became brigadier general and sirdar. His rise reflected his drive more than his charm. Lord Garnet Wolseley, who recognized ambition when he smelled it, admired Kitchener’s competence as much as he disliked his insistence. Queen Victoria, the great armchair imperialist, succumbed to his graceless charm, its deficiency of social skill reflecting its proprietor’s obs
ession for “the service.” Lord Salisbury admired his soldierly directness and churchman’s rectitude, the marks of utility and reliability. And Lord Cromer, who valued a well-balanced budget as much as he feared for the delicate Egyptian economy, cherished Kitchener’s parsimonious way with military expenditure as much as he resented his constant urging toward conflict with the Dervishes. As British attention turned from the Suez Canal to the Nile Valley, Kitchener harnessed the policy drift to his campaign and waited for Lord Salisbury to return to power.

  In March 1896, the rattle of stones on Kitchener’s window summoned him from sleep to find a dream come true. He was returning to the Sudan, with an army at his back. Kitchener and Cromer sat up until dawn writing orders, so busily that they forgot to ask the khedive’s permission to invade the Sudan. As Abbas II slept the sleep of the puppet at Abdin Palace, Kitchener roused his army. Within three days, it had left for Dongola, and four days after that, it had set up an advance camp at Akasha, nearly a hundred miles north of the Sudanese border. After two months, Kitchener had concentrated ten thousand troops south of Wadi Halfa, armed with artillery and machine guns, and wearing the new khaki camouflage that Queen Victoria so disliked.

  In the first week of June, Kitchener’s troops made their first contact with the Dervishes at the village of Farkah. Kitchener split his force into two columns. In a night march, one approached from the north and the other looped round from the south. At dawn on June 7, the two columns attacked the sleeping village simultaneously. They killed eight hundred Dervishes; many fled by swimming naked across the Nile. The road to Dongola, a further two hundred miles south, lay open. Hunter and Wingate advised a flying column for Dongola before the Dervishes could regroup, but Kitchener paused. He dragged his gunboats past the Second Cataract, stockpiled his supplies at Kosheh and, looking at his maps, planned his advance.

  THE MODERN TRAVELER went by train. Wolseley’s expedition had foundered because it had used the wrong transport. On the river, Wolseley had wasted time in the Cataracts, had struggled to find boats and sailors, and had placed his entire strategy at the mercy of the water level. On land, where he had used the old caravan route that ran haphazardly along the Nile, he had run out of camels. Although Kitchener intended to use the river from necessity and opportunity, he would not depend on it.

  A railway would bypass all of these problems. As in India and the American West, every sleeper laid would be a step forward in creating a new infrastructure of control, forcibly drawing new lands and peoples into the shared modernity of speed and communications. Instead of laboring along the nine hundred miles of the curve of the Nile between Wadi Halfa and Berber, and hauling his force past three of the six Cataracts between Egypt and Khartoum, he would lay 400 miles of track, 230 of them cutting across the waterless Nubian Desert to Abu Hamed, just north of Berber.

  Ignoring the experts who told him that the “Sudan Military Railway” was technically impossible, he engaged Percy Girouard, a French-Canadian sapper in the Royal Engineers whose previous experience included building the Canadian Pacific railway. Restricted by Cromer’s budget, Kitchener rebuilt the first stretch of Ismail’s railway by tracking down its looted parts. Sleepers had been used for the frames of native huts, the roof of a barracks at Wadi Halfa, and even a Dervish gallows. He worked through the summer heat, driving the Sudanese soldiers on in Arabic, personally supervising every stage, always calculating money saved and spent—he was proud to have reconstituted one ten-mile stretch for free—and seemingly impervious to the dysentery and cholera that, sweeping through the camp on the back of the burning south wind, killed ten times as many men as the Dervishes.

  In August 1896, the railway reached Kosheh, bringing a battalion of British troops from the Staffordshire Regiment. Buoyed by the high Nile, four gunboats and three steam transports tied up by the camp. One, the Zakir, had been built in London to Kitchener’s specifications, dragged up in sections, and rebuilt on the banks of the Nile. When the river started to drop in early September, Kitchener was forced to advance. After covering a hundred miles and passing the Third Cataract, Kitchener’s scouts detected at the village of Karma an advance force of three thousand warriors under the khalifa’s emir at Dongola, Mohammed Bishara.

  On September 19, Kitchener moved on the village, to find that in the night Bishara’s force had crossed the Nile and dug in on the opposite bank. Kitchener brought up his gunboats. In the duel that followed, Bishara was wounded, but two of Kitchener’s gunboats were so badly damaged that to continue fighting would have risked their loss. Only a feint suggested by Lieutenant David Beatty, second in command of the Zakir, saved Kitchener from retreat. When the Zakir turned south toward Dongola, only thirty-five miles away, Bishara suspected that the British intended to cut him off. Under cover of night, the Dervishes withdrew.

  Three days later, his whole army met the Dervishes on the plain outside Dongola. Still unsure of his native army, Kitchener stiffened the center of his formation with the Staffordshires and ordered them to swap their khaki jackets for redcoats, so that the enemy would understand that Gordon’s avengers had come. As the gunboats opened up from the river and Kitchener’s troops formed up, a wing of the Dervish army suddenly turned and left the battlefield. Kitchener and his officers suspected subterfuge, but the Dervish force disappeared into the desert. Already dispirited by the long famine, Bishara’s emirs had refused his order to charge into the Egyptian guns. The remaining Dervish troops soon turned after them. Their flight was so wild that Kitchener’s cavalry found in the desert small children abandoned in the route, and came back “laden with black and brown babies.”7

  After the collapse of Mahdist forces north of Dongola, Kitchener faced two obstacles: more than two hundred miles of baking desert, and a stack of superiors who did not want to spend British money on conquering the Sudan. France and Russia had spoiled Cromer’s attempt to fund the war from Egypt’s savings, forcing him to contemplate pausing at Dongola for as long as three years, while he found more funds. In London, the chancellor, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, did not intend to make up the difference. Kitchener went to Britain to personally extract half a million pounds from Hicks Beach and Salisbury, timing his assault on the Treasury to the short afternoon hours between lunch with the queen at Windsor and the departure of his train.

  “His campaign against the Chancellor of the Exchequer was not the least of his triumphs,” Salisbury told Cromer. “But his strategy is all of a piece. The position was carried by a forced march and a surprise.”

  In fact, the cabinet was motivated by news of another march. Captain Marchand, his ten French officers, and their two hundred Senegalese porters had struck out from Dakar, on the West African coast, for Fashoda and the White Nile.8

  CROSSING THE DESERT with a railway proved harder than persuading the chancellor. The Military Railway’s desert route contained no wells, but Kitchener remembered that one of his young sappers, Edward Cator, knew how to divine water. Marking two suitable spots on a map, Kitchener sent Cator and his divining stick out into the desert. To Cator’s astonishment, he found water in both spots. “Kitchener’s Luck” did not extend to Cator, who contracted typhoid on his adventure and died.

  A few days later, when Kitchener reached for a whisky and soda, he swilled brackish water from seventy-two feet below the desert. With water for his workers, he knew he could build the railway. The laborers cost him nothing: he used soldiers and convicts. To save money, Percy Girouard borrowed steam locomotives from South Africa. Laying the tracks for “Cape to Cairo,” Kitchener built his railway not to the Egyptian gauge, but to the South African.

  From the turning of the first shovel at Wadi Halfa on New Year’s Day, 1897, Kitchener supervised everything, driving himself to the breaking point. Sleeping four hours a night, at dawn he would visit the railhead in his dressing gown. If he found an idle locomotive, he personally drove it forward. If he came upon the assembly of a gunboat, he picked up a hammer and banged in rivets. The rate of accidents incr
eased as the drive south intensified. Kitchener blamed his subordinates for the deaths. At one and a half miles per day, by mid-July 1897 the railway had snaked halfway to Abu Hamed. Kitchener was already looking ahead. While the railway worked its way across the desert, he planned to capture its terminus.

  That summer, many of the riverain Jaalayin turned against the khalifa. At Metemma, Mahmoud Ahmed, the khalifa’s nephew and most talented general, repressed a rebellion by massacring all the inhabitants, saving only the young girls for enslavement. The survivors, led by Sheikh Ibrahim Mohammed Farah, fled to Kitchener at Dongola, where they enlisted as irregulars, Kitchener’s “Friendlies.”

  Kitchener ordered Sheikh Farah forward to take Berber before the khalifa could fortify it. Sheikh Farah procrastinated, claiming that the stars were not yet auspicious, until Kitchener informed him that they were. As the sheikh led his Friendlies into the desert for Berber, an Egyptian column under “Archie” Hunter made for Abu Hamed. Marching at night, and resting in the day without tents or shade, they covered 132 miles in just eight days, before storming Abu Hamed at dawn. In the first week of September, Hunter moved on to Berber, reopening the Suakin-Berber road.

  Kitchener could not stop. The Military Railway had to be finished. At any moment, the money might run out. The khalifa might send the whole Ansar south, cutting Kitchener’s supply line. The government might lose its nerve and prevent him from reaching Khartoum. It had already forced him to send men to relieve the Italians at Kassala. Only Lord Wolseley and the War Office supported Kitchener’s repeated insistence that he needed at least a brigade of British troops. He responded to one request from Cairo that he cut back on expenses by cabling his resignation. Cromer ignored the resignation, but he relayed it to Salisbury, describing it as “the production of a sick man who has lost his nerve.”9