Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Kitchener’s passionless veneer finally cracked in the heat of the desert. “You have no idea what continual anxiety, worry, and strain I have through it all,” he admitted to Clinton Dawkins, a friend in the Cairo government. “I do not think that I can stand much more, and I feel so completely done up that I can hardly go on, and wish I were dead. Before next years’ work in the field begins, I must get some leave, or I shall break down.”10

  SITTING ON A CRATE of tinned beef and whisky, George W. Steevens of the Daily Mail watched “a swarm of Arabs,” shoveling up sand to build an embankment. Behind him, a supply train rested on the rails. Fifty yards ahead of him, the embankment ended in an undisturbed dune, and the tiny figure of “a white man with a spirit-level.” Seventy miles away, beyond the shimmering horizon, lay Berber and Kitchener’s forward camp, and somewhere beyond that, the Dervish army.11

  Through the 1890s, Steevens had recycled his newspaper reports into bestsellers like With the Conquering Turk: Confessions of a Bashibazouk; The Tragedy of Dreyfus, and, after a short trip to Chicago, The Land of the Dollar. Now he followed the big story to the Sudan.

  At first, Kitchener had attempted to ban journalists from the front—they took up space that could be better used for supplies—but he had been unable to resist the pressure from London to relent. While Kitchener had been breaking down in the desert, Britain had celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Like the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Jubilee’s rash of retrospectives and parades caused a sudden swelling of the national ego. If the journalists wanted to follow Kitchener, it was because their public wanted to read about him. Not a natural populist, Kitchener slowly grasped that journalists might be allies in his campaign for more men and money. He allowed them to join his camp but forbade them to join reconnaissance parties or to approach him directly. He also asked that they not stand in front of the firing lines during a battle, but he did not insist on it.

  At Cairo, Steevens had bought “two horses and two nigger boys—one to look after the horses and one to look after me.” Then he made his own way south to join the growing platoon of journalists embedded with Kitchener, “the man who has cut out his heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.” At Berber, he found that a Mahdist stronghold had turned into a British barrack town. Greek merchants had reappeared from Egypt, selling Turkish mastik liquor and Scottish whisky. British officers ate asparagus and oysters, their tables draped in linen napery, to the strains of “a full military orchestra wailing for the Swanee Ribber.” The Greeks complained that Kitchener had bought every camel in the district, and had dismissed a deputation protesting this infringement of their supply chain.12

  In the tent city south of Berber, Kitchener received no rest. In the first days of 1897, he heard that Mahmoud Ahmed and Osman Digna had massed twenty thousand Ansar south of Berber on the Atbara River. Alarmed, Kitchener requested a British brigade from Cairo. To his surprise, he received one, and the promise of another. Arriving before the railway was complete, the soldiers of the Warwicks, Lincolns, and Cameron Highlanders wore out their boots marching the last thirty miles to Berber. After securing new boots, Kitchener led his expanded force up the Nile.

  In early March, he found the enemy. Overruling Osman Digna’s idea that he outflank Kitchener, Mahmoud Ahmed had led the Ansar north along the Nile, head-on toward the invaders. When Kitchener’s gunboats started to drop shells onto his column, Mahmoud realized Digna had been right. Turning away into the desert, he hit the dried-up Atbara forty miles above its junction with the Nile. When he found a pool of water in the riverbed, he camped there, ignoring Digna’s requests that they withdraw up the river. Kitchener’s cavalry found them dug in behind a zariba a thousand yards wide, with trenches, artillery, and ramparts of dried mud.

  For three weeks, Kitchener could not decide what to do. Mahmoud had reversed the pattern of a Dervish charge on an Egyptian zariba. Kitchener’s generals did not relish a frontal assault. If Kitchener marched his army forty miles into the desert, they would fight tired, and if they did not win the battle, they would be massacred as they retreated. His troops wilting in the heat, he wavered and consulted Cromer, who forwarded the question to London. Lord Wolseley bounced the dilemma back up the Nile.

  On April 7, Kitchener finally decided to attack the next day, Good Friday. In his battle orders, he warned his troops that the Dervishes preferred death to surrender.

  “The Sirdar is absolutely confident that every officer and man will do his duty. He only wishes to impress upon them two words: Remember Gordon. The enemy before them are Gordon’s murderers.”

  General Gatacre, commander of Kitchener’s British brigade, ordered his troops to file the tips of their ammunition to create dum-dum bullets.13

  The army slept under a full moon in the desert. At one in the morning, with the moon down, a chain of whispers roused the men. Silently, their steps muffled by sand, they moved forward. At four they paused, some sleeping, some walking up and down to stay warm, speculating how they could surmount a zariba rumored to be twenty feet tall.

  In a bunker inside the zariba, Mahmoud awoke to find a line of troops just under half a mile from his defenses. Expecting disaster, Osman Digna and his bodyguards promptly slipped away. At 0616, Kitchener’s artillery launched a forty-five-minute barrage into Mahmoud’s defenses, the rockets fizzing from their launchers as his new Maxim machine guns raked the zariba. The infantry waited, “a line of khaki and dark tartan blending to purple, of flashing bayonets at the slope, and set, two-month-

  bearded faces.” At 0700, the bugles sounded the advance.

  As the Ansar returned to their barricades and launched a maelstrom of Remington and elephant gun fire, all twelve battalions marched forward in perfect order. Halting at three hundred yards, they returned fire with tight volleys. For more than ten minutes, the two armies blasted at each other, with the Cameron Highlanders taking the brunt of the Ansar’s fire, before Kitchener at last ordered the advance again. The British marched forward to the wail of bagpipes, as the Egyptians and Sudanese charged the zariba. 14

  On the left flank, the impact of the Egyptian soldiers drove the defenders back into the riverbed, where they were slaughtered. On the right, the Sudanese troops, many of them sons of the garrisons driven from the Sudan by the Mahdi, set about their revenge. In the center, General Gatacre, leading the British brigade, was first to the zariba. As he pulled at the thorny barricade, a tall Dervish sprang from a trench with a spear.

  “Give it him, my man,” Gatacre shouted to Private Cross, who shot the Dervish, and bayoneted him where he fell.15

  Crying “Remember Gordon,” the Highlanders forced their way through the thorns to meet a maze of trenches, fire pits, and huts. Leading the charge, Captain Findlay, married for less than a month, killed two Dervishes with his sword before he was shot at point-blank range. One bullet grazed the cheek of Colonel Verner of the Lincolns; another took off his upper lip. With bullets flying from all sides, the Highlanders worked forward with rifle and bayonets, killing everyone in their path, including Ansar waving palm leaves in surrender. Many of the defenders had been tied to their posts to prevent them from fleeing. For more than an hour, the attackers hacked and blasted their way through Mahmoud’s camp, until they reached a riverbed stacked with the bodies of escaping Dervishes cut down by the Sudanese troops.

  “A very Good Friday,” Kitchener called it. He had lost 93 killed and 493 wounded. His aide-de-camp Jimmy Watson counted more than 2,000 dead Ansar in the zariba alone, before nausea made him abandon the tally. Passing the corpse of a Dervish pinned to a tree by a rocket, Bennett Burleigh of the Telegraph saw the bodies of women and children in the carnage. When G. W. Steevens saw the work of Kitchener’s “clean-jointed, well-oiled, smooth-running, clockwork-perfect masterpiece of a battle” close up, he was revolted: “Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces; donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with necks writhed back onto their humps, rotting al
ready in pools of blood and bile-yellow water; heads without faces, and faces without anything below; cobwebbed arms and legs; and black skins grilled to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf.”16

  A platoon from the Tenth Sudanese Battalion found Mahmoud hiding in his hut. After jabbing him in the thigh with a bayonet, they brought him to the sirdar.

  “Are you the man Mahmoud?” Kitchener asked.

  Almost as tall as Kitchener, Mahmoud looked the infidel in the eye. “Yes. I am Mahmoud, and I am the same as you.”

  “Why have you come to make war here?”

  “I came because I was told—the same as you.”17

  Kitchener paraded Mahmoud through the streets of Berber, his hands bound.

  AFTER SITTING OUT the summer in a shadeless camp, the military tortoise crawled up to Khartoum. Journalists, fashionable officers, and foreign attachés hared after it. His army bolstered by a second British brigade, Kitchener now commanded twenty thousand soldiers, eight thousand of them British.

  Not all of them welcome. Kitchener had contrived to lose the Prince of Wales’s application to join the force, but he had been obliged to admit to his ranks the queen’s grandson Prince Christian Victor, and her Austrian in-law Prince Francis of Teck. He had also acquired a ragged platoon of fifteen journalists. Their ranks included G. A. Henty, the “Prince of Story-Tellers,” reporting for the Standard. Henty specialized in historical novels that invariably introduced a pair of English adolescents to historical personages and lessons in Christian valor, in locations as various as sixteenth-century Holland (By Pike and Dyke), eighteenth-century India (The Tiger of Mysore), the American Civil War (With Lee in Virginia), and, to tragic and lucrative effect, 1885’s Dash For Khartoum. 18

  Kitchener could tolerate a patriotic fantasist like Henty, but he drew the line at Winston Churchill. Although only twenty-three, Second Lieutenant Winston Spencer Churchill was already notorious in the army. Having taken part in an Indian campaign of imperial repression with the Fourth Hussars, he had parlayed his experiences into a popular book, The Malakand Field Force. A subaltern who criticized his superiors in print, and who appeared to be using the army as a stepping-stone to Parliament, could not expect Kitchener’s favor. By Churchill’s own admission, the terms “Medal-Hunter” and “Self-advertiser” attached themselves to him. Intensely ambitious, Churchill was “deeply anxious to share” in the imminent clash between sirdar and khalifa. From Bangalore in India, he had applied to join the Twenty-first Lancers, a recently formed cavalry unit. Despite the War Office’s approval of Churchill’s commission, Kitchener turned him down.19

  The son of the rebel Tory Randolph Churchill, Winston deployed his connections to thwart Kitchener. His mother, Lady Randolph Spencer-Churchill, née Jenny Jerome of Brooklyn, assisted him by launching a campaign of “pleasant luncheons and dinners” for influential politicians. Securing an interview with Lord Salisbury, to whom he had dedicated The Malakand Field Force, Churchill prompted Salisbury to make a personal appeal to Kitchener. Still Kitchener refused, claiming he already had sufficient officers. So Lady Churchill wheeled out the heavy artillery. After a dinner party conversation between her friend Lady Helier and Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant general, the War Office pulled rank on Kitchener. Two days later, Churchill received orders to proceed to the Abbasiyeh Barracks, Cairo.

  “It is understood,” the War Office informed him, “that you will proceed at your own expense, and that in the event of your being killed or wounded in the impending operations, or for any other reason, no charge of any kind will fall on British Army funds.”20

  Churchill had already made his customary private arrangements. Through a contemporary who happened to be the son of a newspaper proprietor, he had obtained a second commission, to report for the Morning Post at fifteen pounds an article. The night before he left, he picked up a third commission. After dinner, the president of the Society for Psychical Research made him promise to “communicate” from the other side, should anything unfortunate occur. The next morning, Churchill took the boat train for Marseilles. Six days later he was in Cairo.

  “The movement of the regiment 1,400 miles into the heart of Africa was effected with the swiftness, smoothness and punctuality which in those days characterised all Kitchener’s arrangements,” Churchill recorded. “The journey was delightful.”21

  Two weeks of boats and trains were followed by a ten-day, two-hundred-mile march along the Nile to join Kitchener’s column. Scouting ahead, Churchill turned back to see the army dwarfed by the desert. A thin khaki smear, three miles long, it disappeared into a mirage. In this “filmy world of uneven crystal,” long streaks of glistening water seemed to cut across the knees and waists of the marching troops, and then suddenly receded, vanishing like the khalifa’s horsemen, who hovered on the shimmering horizon.

  Some of Kitchener’s officers feared that the khalifa would fall back toward the equator and exhaust his pursuers. But Kitchener guessed that Abdullahi would never abandon his capital and the shrine of his mentor. He could not have known that one of Abdullahi’s reasons for standing his ground was the promise of European support. Via Menelik of Abyssinia, the French government had sent him a flag, to be unfurled in case of emergency. In April 1898, an Abyssinian delegation had visited Omdurman, offering French protection and weapons. In honor of his guests, Abdullahi served alcohol and shot off fireworks, yet his apostasy did not extend to technical matters. Imitating the purism of the Mahdi, he spurned the chance to acquire infidel weaponry.22

  By the last day of August 1898, Omdurman was only eighteen miles away. After laying 760 miles of railway and two thousand miles of telegraph cable, having dragged up eight gunboats, twenty thousand soldiers, and a horde of Sudanese camp followers, only a rolling brown plain separated Kitchener from the ruins of Khartoum.

  THE NEXT MORNING, a patrol of lancers scouting six miles north of Omdurman noticed “a dark discoloration of the horizon.” They took it for a forest of thorn bushes, but then it began to move. Abdullahi’s Ansar was heading toward the advancing troops. Churchill’s commander sent him racing back to Kitchener.23

  Finding the sirdar on horseback with his staff, Churchill estimated that the khalifa could be little more than an hour away. Kitchener received him with a nod slight enough to acknowledge the report without acknowledging its bearer.

  “Come along with us and have some lunch.” One of the intelligence officers invited Churchill to a picnic. As he ate bully beef and mixed pickles and drank from “bottles of inviting appearance,” Churchill tried to imagine the imminent battle: the howling Dervish charge, the hammer drill of the Maxim guns, the gouging spears and torn bodies. Death seemed “only a sporting element in a splendid game.” That British soldiers might one day encounter an enemy also equipped with the “steel flail of artillery and machine-guns” seemed a distant improbability. After lunch, Kitchener’s gunboats opened up, pouring the first of three hundred shells onto the defenseless civilians of Omdurman, and smashing the egg-shaped dome of the Mahdi’s tomb.24

  But the khalifa stopped short of contact. The armies dug in three miles apart, each in its zariba. Kitchener expected Abdullahi would attack at night, and he expected to lose. He ordered that if the Dervishes breached the British lines, they must be repelled only with lances and swords; random rifle fire would contribute to the chaos. To confuse Abdullahi, he sent out spies with word that the British also planned a night attack. Abdullahi believed them. Both armies passed a sleepless night, each waiting for the other’s onslaught.

  Sitting in the dust with his emirs, Khalifa Abdullahi presided over a bitter war council. He, Osman Digna, and Ibrahim al-Khalil, leader of the mulazimin bodyguard, all advocated a night attack.

  “By Allah, these English. I have known them for fifteen years!” Digna burst out. “You cannot beat the English except by deceit.”

  “Let us attack in the morning after dawn prayers,” the khalifa’s son Uthman Sheikh al-Din interjected. “Let us not be like mice or foxes s
neaking into their holes by day and peeping out at night.” Sheikh al-Din’s Army of the Dark Green Flag was the largest in the Mahdist alliance. It included the Baggara elite, and the Sudanese conscripts of the Jihadiya. Their Remingtons would be vital to a daylight battle, and to his share of the glory.

  As the bickering developed into a shouting match, Khalifa Abdullahi decided. “The best course is what Allah chooses. We fight in the morning after prayers.”

  “The best course is what Allah chooses,” Ibrahim al-Khalil echoed as he stood up and dusted himself off, “but there will be no victory.”25

  Abdullahi retired to plan his attack. Kitchener had camped with his back to the Nile and Omdurman to his left, his troops arranged in a semicircle. Abudullahi decided to mimic Kitchener’s arrangement, spreading his armies out in a giant arc. Three hills stood between the desert and the Nile. On Abdullahi’s right was Jebel Surgham, on his left the two hills of Karari. He decided to hold back most of his troops, and to maneuver them behind the hills as the battle developed. The khalifa and the 12,000 men of the Black Flag would wait behind Jebel Surgham. Ali wad Helu’s 4,000 warriors of the Green Flag and Sheikh al-Din’s 10,000 warriors of the Dark Green Flag would advance across the plain toward the Karari Hills.

  Abdullahi chose Ibrahim al-Khalil’s 4,000 elite guards and Uthman Azraq’s 12,000 warriors as his first wave. From the slopes of Jebel Surgham, the British lines were less than two miles away. When the first wave crashed into the left and center of the British zariba, Ali wad Helu and Sheikh al-Din would charge on its right side. Then the Black Flag would emerge from behind Jebel Surgham and hit what remained of Kitchener’s center.

  The khalifa rested in a tent looted from King John of Abyssinia at the Battle of Gallabat, its embroidered crosses replaced with koranic verses. The play of searchlights from the gunboats on the river kept him awake all night.