The next day, Kitchener steamed off. Leaving six hundred Sudanese soldiers next to the fort, he planted another pair of British and Egyptian flags at the junction of the Sobat and the White Nile, trumping Marchand’s claim to a site near the headwaters on Lake Victoria. The French bluff had been called. Marchand’s government had no way of reinforcing his position; in fact, it was falling apart. From newspapers that Kitchener’s party had left behind at Fashoda, Marchand discovered that the Dreyfus Affair had reached a crisis point. Digesting the news, Marchand and his officers cried silently by the Nile. The French government blustered, but when Salisbury threatened to run out the fleet, they climbed down.
On December 4, 1898, Marchand received orders to leave. Spurning Kitchener’s offer of free passage down the Nile, he prepared to complete his crossing of the African continent by heading for the Red Sea via Abyssinia. Always ambitious, the French expedition had ended in fiasco. As the French flag came down, one of the African soldiers asked the expedition’s doctor why, having come so far, they were leaving so soon.
“Le blanc ne sait pas,” replied Doctor Emily. “The white man does not know.”42
“SIR HERBERT KITCHENER, the Sirdar of the Egyptian Army and the Commander of the Sudan Expeditionary Force, has become the hero of the hour,” the Sketch announced, describing the victor of the Omdurman as “another example of the successful mingling of the Saxon and the Celt.”43
Kitchener sailed back to glory and controversy. Queen Victoria nominated him for a peerage. The crowd that welcomed Lord Kitchener of Khartoum off the boat at Dover was the largest the port had ever seen. But a second scandal further soured his triumph, suggesting that in the days after the conquest of Omdurman, Kitchener’s self-control had given way to unbridled vengeance.
Four days after the battle, “Monkey” Gordon laid a trail of gun cotton around the Mahdi’s tomb and blew the last resting place of his uncle’s tormentor to pieces. Kitchener claimed that the building, damaged in the shelling of Khartoum, was structurally unsound. His real motivation was to prevent the largest building in Omdurman from becoming a shrine to Mahdism.
He had no excuse for what happened to its contents. “Monkey” Gordon’s demolition party tipped the Mahdi’s bones into the Nile by night, and one of them detached the Mahdi’s shapely skull. When Kitchener returned from Fashoda, his acolytes presented it to him as a trophy.
The sirdar did not know what to do with it. Perhaps, a wag suggested, he might use it as an inkpot? Or a drinking sconce? While Kitchener decided, he stored it in an old kerosene tin.
When this story leaked out, it triggered widespread revulsion, and not only among Salisbury’s parliamentary rivals. Churchill thought it “a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.” Salisbury’s government promised that a White Paper would inquire into how such an abomination had occurred.44
Queen Victoria wrote to Kitchener, registering her disgust at “the destruction of the poor body of a man who, whether he was very bad and cruel, after all was a man of certain importance.” Icily, she upbraided him, “It savours too much of the Middle Ages not to allow his remains to be buried in private in some spot where it would not be considered as of any importance politically or an object of superstition. The graves of our people have been respected, and those of her foes should, in her opinion, be also.”45
“When I returned from Fashoda, the Mahdi’s skull in a box was brought to me,” Kitchener protested, “and I did not know what to do with it.”46
He wondered if the Royal College of Surgeons, who already possessed a section of Napoleon’s intestine, might be interested in it. By then, the Mahdi’s skull had reached Egypt, one item among the hoard of souvenirs that Kitchener had stashed in a Cairo warehouse. Kitchener suggested it be interred in a military cemetery at Cairo. Lord Cromer hustled it back to Wadi Halfa as quickly as possible. Finally, the skull was buried secretly in an unmarked grave in the Muslim cemetery on the edge of the desert.
The White Paper was a whitewash, the uproar faded, and the newspapers moved on to new outrages in other remote districts of empire. In South Africa, a new war against the Boers was beginning.
“How strange and varied are the diversions of an imperial people,” Churchill marveled. “It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane. These extraordinary foreign figures, each with his complete set of crimes, horrible customs and ‘minor peculiarities,’ march one by one from the dark wings of Barbarism up to the bright footlights of Civilisation.”
Whatever his revulsion at Kitchener’s methods, Churchill believed the struggle and slaughter had been worthwhile. In the new graveyard at Omdurman, rough piles of red stones and white crosses marked the resting places of the soldiers who had “paid the bill for all the fun and glory.” But they would not be the only monument to Gordon’s crusade and Kitchener’s conquest.
“The destruction of a state of society which had long been an anachronism—an insult as well as a danger to civilisation; the liberation of the great waterway; perhaps the founding of an African India; certainly the settlement of a long account; these are cenotaphs which will excite the interest and the wonder of a not ungrateful posterity.”47
The triumph of Omdurman had been bought so cheaply that the affair of the Mahdi’s skull seemed a minor blemish on Kitchener’s crown. Mahdism, the specter that had threatened the British Empire, had been annihilated, and cheaply. As Kitchener boasted, he had conquered the Sudan for only £2,354,000, a third of the expense of Wolseley’s failed relief expedition. Thanks to Lord Cromer’s budgeting of the Egyptian accounts, the British taxpayer would be asked to cover only £800,000 of the bill. Britain had acquired over a million square miles of Africa, and over two million Muslims, at bargain rates: two pounds, six shillings, and sixpence per square mile, and one pound, three shillings, and threepence a head. No less economically, Salisbury now imposed an “Anglo-Egyptian Condominium” upon his new subjects.
For the first time in history, the Nile was open from source to Delta. From Alexandria to Lake Victoria, the great and ancient river, and the millions who depended on it, were British possessions. A war begun at the turn of a new Islamic century had ended on the cusp of a new Christian century. Its extension of Kitchener’s methods and technology would render him as quaint as the last charge of the Twenty-first Lancers. At Omdurman, Kitchener’s machine guns and artillery killed more than ten thousand Dervishes in a single morning. In July 1916, over nineteen thousand British soldiers would die on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
ON THE FINAL DAY of the nineteenth century, Wilfrid Blunt sat at his desk in his house outside Alexandria and composed an epitaph.
“I bid good-bye to the old century, may it rest in peace as it has lived in war. Of the new century, I prophesy nothing except that it will see the decline of the British Empire. Other worse empires will rise perhaps in its place, but I shall not live to see the day. It all seems a very little matter here in Egypt, with the pyramids watching us as they watched Joseph, when, as a young man four thousand years ago, perhaps in this very garden, he walked and gazed at the sunset behind them, wondering about the future just as I did this evening.
“And so, poor wicked Nineteenth Century, farewell!”48
Epilogue
Cairo, 1899
The Sirdar’s escort, Khartoum.
We took our chanst among the Khyber ’ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman gave us Irriwaddy chills,
An’ a Zulu impi dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We ’eld our own, the papers say,
But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us ’oller.
Then ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an’ the missus and the kid;
Our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’ did.
We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn�
��t ’ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.
—Rudyard Kipling, Fuzzy-Wuzzy (Soudan Expeditionary Force), 18901
AFTER HIS EXPULSION from Egypt, Khedive Ismail attempted to retire at Naples. He left in disgust; after one of his wives eloped with a barber, the prefect of police refused to return her to the harem. Ismail floated around the capitals and spa hotels of Europe, searching for the support that might return him to Egypt and the cure that might ease the ache in his liver. In 1877, against the advice of his friends, he accepted Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s offer of a palace at Constantinople.
Half-guest, half-prisoner, Ismail joined the Ottoman menagerie of broken-down causes. Isolated from society, pining for the spa at Carlsbad whose waters had always cured him, and fearful of assassination by his host, he spent the rest of his life in a gilded cage on the Bosphorus. He died on March 2, 1895, just as his old French allies reignited his dream of an equatorial empire. He finally returned to Egypt in a coffin. “The winding-up of the estate,” admitted a friend from his wild ride in Egypt, “proved to be a very complicated matter.” Visionary and fraudster, the prince whom Lord Cromer called “the great high priest of Sham” was the first great kleptocrat of modern African history.2
Ismail’s trio of accomplices drifted into retirement. After resigning in protest at Gladstone’s plan to force Egypt to abandon the Sudan, Sharif Pasha never returned to office; he died at Graz, Austria, in 1887. In 1893, Lord Cromer and Abbas II agreed on Riaz Pasha as a compromise prime minister, but he retired the following year due to ill health; he died in 1911. In 1895, Nubar Pasha was pensioned off after fifty years’ service to Egypt, the foreign powers, and his own pocket. The negotiator of the Suez Canal, and thrice a prime minister, in 1898 he died at Paris.
Khedive Abbas II declared his full support for the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in the Sudan. As the junior partner, he stood to gain from the British program of justice systems, education, irrigation, and tax remission. Meanwhile, he resumed his polite struggle against Lord Cromer, aligning with the nationalists in the hope of recovering his independence. An enthusiastic breeder of cattle and horses, Abbas II also had numerous children, but none succeeded him. In 1914, Turkey entered the First World War on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government completed Gladstone’s work, declaring Egypt a British protectorate and deposing Abbas II. Retired in Switzerland, Abbas II wrote his own version of events, The Anglo-Egyptian Settlement. In 1944, the last khedive died as he had lived, neutral and rich.
In 1903, Ahmed Urabi returned to Egypt after twenty years’ exile at Ceylon. A small crowd gathered at Cairo station, some to cheer and some to hiss. Eight years later, he died of cancer, addled by senility and ignored by Cromer’s Egypt. Toulba Pasha, who led the defense of Alexandria against Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, had sickened in Ceylon; in 1899, his jailers returned him to Cairo to minimize a popular response to his death. When no response transpired, the British allowed Urabi’s master Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi to return home.
In 1907, Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani died from cancer of the jaw while a “guest” of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. His small circle of admirers alleged that the sultan’s doctor had injected poison into his chin. Although his death was barely noted at the time, his pan-Islamic apologetics and anti-Western spleen made him the founding ideologue of Islamism. Afghani’s protégé Rashid Rida inspired Hassan al-Bana to found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; members of that organization have included the Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qtub and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, after rising to leadership of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, became Osama bin Laden’s deputy.
Of the rebels of 1881, only Sheikh Mohammed Abdu prospered. The failure of Afghani’s revolutionary vision turned Abdu toward reform. In 1899, Lord Cromer appointed Abdu the grand mufti of Egypt, the chief Muslim authority of a Christian occupation. Abdu and his neighbor Wilfrid Scawen Blunt—their gardens backed onto each other—worked on a memoir of the thwarted Urabi revolution and their dashed hopes for an Islamic reformation. On July 11, 1905, the anniversary of the bombardment of Alexandria, Abdu died. Blunt completed their work, Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt, a candid, entertaining, and frequently unreliable account of the Urabi revolution.
Although Blunt persevered with his radically anti-imperial politics, he had shed his romantic illusions about Islam. In 1897, traveling in the Western Desert of Egypt, he was robbed, beaten, and abducted by Senussi tribesmen. This revelation convinced him that a purist revision of Islam would end not in authenticity, but “mere madness.”
“I had made myself a romance about these reformers, but it has no substantial basis,” he admitted. “The less religion in the world, perhaps, after all, the better.” More successfully, the six Arabian mares that he and Lady Anne brought back from Egypt in 1878 became the basis for the Crabbet Stud, one of the most successful bloodlines in European and American horseracing.3
On May 19, 1898, William Gladstone died in bed, sparing himself the spectacle of Kitchener’s triumph at Khartoum. After Gordon’s death and Gladstone’s departure from office, Lord Granville retired from politics; he died in 1891. Sir Charles Dilke lost his parliamentary seat to a divorce scandal, and Lord Hartington crossed the floor to support Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government from the back benches. In 1902, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, presided over the opening of a dam at Aswan, ending the Delta farmers’ millennial dependency on the Nile flood. He retired four years later; Sir Eldon Gorst succeeded him as virtual ruler of Egypt. Lord Salisbury left office in 1902, exhausted and heartbroken by his wife’s death.
In 1895, Viscount Garnet Wolseley finally displaced the “great German sausage” the duke of Cambridge as commander-in-chief of the British army; on his death in 1913, his daughter Frances inherited his viscountcy. Gordon admirer Reggie Brett, later Viscount Esher, became an influential Liberal politician, the governor of Windsor Castle, and a successful historian. In 1912 W.T. Stead, one of the greatest of Victorian journalists, followed the big story to the end and went down with the Titanic. The following year, Major General Hector MacDonald shot himself in a Paris hotel room after being accused as an active homosexual. Afterward, it emerged that he had a wife and son, but had kept them secret; Kitchener tended to promote only unmarried officers.
Kitchener’s conquest of the Sudan brought the imperialists’ “Cape to Cairo” dream closer to realization. No obstacle seemed too great, and certainly not the militia of Boer farmers who objected to the northward expansion of British South Africa. A year after smashing Mahdism at Omdurman, the British army went to war again. This time, the enemy were white guerrillas armed with German-made Mauser rifles. Among the casualties was G.W. Steevens, who, having turned his Sudanese experiences into another bestseller, With Kitchener to Khartum, died of enteric fever at the siege of Ladysmith.
If Kitchener’s triumph had inflated the imperial conceit to its fullest, then the Boer War pricked that delusion. In Britain, blame for the Boers’ humiliating successes settled on General Sir Redvers Buller, V.C., whose logistical errors had handicapped the Gordon relief expedition. Lord Kitchener took over the campaign. He forced the Boers to terms by waging total war against their families and farms, his methods including the imprisonment of civilians in “concentration camps.”
In 1904, France and Britain agreed to the Entente Cordiale, settling centuries of hostility. Ten years later, the rivals of Fashoda allied with Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. The rising generation of 1898 became the presiding generation of 1914 and the “Great War For Civilization.”
Lieutenant David Beatty became a vice-admiral, a commander in the war’s great naval clash at Jutland. Kitchener, now an earl, became secretary of state for war. Against the cabinet’s opinion, he warned that the long-awaited European war would last three years, require mass mobilization, and exact huge casualties. The resulting recruitment poster, in which Kitchener pointed at the view
er’s eye and fixed him with a fiery stare, became one of the twentieth century’s most enduring images. The slaughter of the army that he recruited became a byword in futility. In 1916, en route to Russia on a diplomatic mission, Kitchener drowned with all hands when HMS Hampshire struck a German mine off the north of Scotland.
Just as Kitchener had suspected, Winston Churchill used his soldiering and journalism as a springboard into Parliament. The bumptious second lieutenant rose to First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1915, Churchill attempted to knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war by an amphibious landing at Gallipoli. The operation failed, thousands of soldiers died, and Churchill resigned. Back in favor after the war, he helped draw the map of a new Middle East. An enthusiast of empire, he hoped that Britain would emerge from the Second World War as an imperial power. Instead, in the 1950s Churchill became the empire’s accidental undertaker. His death in 1965 marked its symbolic terminus.
WILFRID BLUNT’S VISION of Arab nations emerging under Anglo-French supervision came true; though not, as he had envisioned, around an Arab caliphate. Instead it happened via the imperialism he detested. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1917; after the Great War, the British and French carved its Arab territories into modern states in the making. In 1924, Turkey’s secular nationalist ruler Kemal Ataturk suspended the caliphate. The restoration of al-Khalifa is a key Islamist ambition.
After the First World War, Britain took Germany’s African colonies as a peace dividend. But economic constraints meant that “Cape to Cairo” remained only a line on a map. After the Second World War, Britain contended not only with its worsening economic position, but also with rising African and Arab nationalism. In 1952, Ahmed Urabi’s ghost returned to Egypt. Once again, a group of radical army colonels raised a nationalist revolt against Britain, France, and their Egyptian puppets.
Three Empires on the Nile Page 35