Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (57 page)

THIRTY-TWO

To Die for the Mahdi’s Cause

In 1895, shortly after Uganda was made a protectorate, Britain’s new Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain – with his trademark monocle in his eye and a home-grown orchid in his button-hole – spoke passionately in Birmingham of the nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ to be ‘a great civilising power’.,
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Ironically, forty years earlier, when David Livingstone had spoken of Britain’s duty to ‘civilise’ the peoples of Africa, and had appealed to Prime Minister Palmerston to support the creation of new colonies, he had received a sharp rebuff. Back then the country’s naval and industrial lead over other nations had seemed unassailable, only requiring Britain to carry on manufacturing, exporting and controlling the high seas in order to increase its power. But around 1870 Britain’s industrial lead over its competitors peaked, and thereafter began to erode as the manufacturing capacity of other nations, such as the United States and Germany, began to grow more rapidly – with both these nations producing more steel than Britain by 1900. So in the 1880s and 1890s, colonial theoreticians came to regard new African colonies as an essential counterweight for island Britain to deploy when facing the massive land powers of Germany, Russia and America.

There had also been a change of moral atmosphere during the intervening decades. In the 1850s Livingstone had declared that new European colonies in Africa would ‘bring peace to a hitherto distracted and trodden down race’.
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By the 1890s, after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, ‘imperialism’ -once a pejorative term associated by the British with the Empire of Napoleon III of France – was being used as a laudatory description of the indiscriminate acquisition of colonies. Its supporters – both Tory and Liberal Imperialists – dressed up
their big idea in the philanthropic and religious phrases which were used by missionaries to justify their own intrusion into far-flung parts of the world. Sometimes the idealism was genuine – the Arab-Swahili slave trade was a great evil that undoubtedly required intervention – but philanthropy (as in the case of King Leopold) could mask baser motives for expansion: the carving out of new markets and the exploitation of minerals.

Among the Nile explorers, Livingstone had not been uniquely naive in seeing colonial advances as the way to usher in ‘civilisation’. In 1858, John Speke had written of the need for concerned and ‘protecting [European] governments’ to reach out into Africa to prevent the strong – whether African or Arab – from exploiting the weak. But he had not wanted ‘any foreign European power to upset these Wahuma [local African] governments [which ought] to be maintained as long as possible’.
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Such gentle attitudes would have caused wry smiles in the British Colonial Office in the 1890s.

In 1896 Britain had still not fitted in the last and largest piece in the jigsaw which would give its rulers control of the Nile from source to sea. But in this year an event occurred that would make it essential, in the British government’s eyes, to end the dozen years of inaction which had passed since General Gordon’s death. On 1 March, Ethiopian warriors armed by the French with modern rifles, inflicted a devastating defeat on a 20,000-strong Italian expeditionary force under General Oreste Baratieri. The hapless general had been bullied by the Italian cabinet (which was in need of a pre-election colonial ‘victory’) into attacking the army of Emperor Menelik II, rather than waiting, as common sense demanded, in a well-defended position until the Ethiopians attacked him. In 1889 the Italians had imposed on Menelik a protectorate which he had never accepted. The expulsion of the Italians after the battle of Adowa was the first comprehensive victory in modern history by a non-white people over a European power, and was therefore inherently alarming to all colonial nations, but it shocked the British government most of all.
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Until Adowa, the Italian presence in Ethiopia had been seen by
Chamberlain as a very satisfactory brake on French ambitions in the region. But with Baratieri’s collapse the way had been opened for a two-pronged French advance from east and west into the Sudan. Apart from the old hurt of their replacement by Britain in Egypt, the French now harboured new resentments – one of which was Lugard’s treatment of their missionaries in Buganda. A French attempt to claim the Sudan seemed likely soon. Sir Samuel Baker wrote to
The Times
warning that unless Britain reestablished control over the Sudan, ‘a civilised power’ (he meant France) might dam or divert the Nile, to the utter ruin of Egypt. This disastrous scenario haunted young Winston Churchill’s imagination when he compared British Egypt’s predicament to that of ‘a deep-sea diver whose air is provided by the long and vulnerable tube of the Nile’.
⁵

So for Britain’s Nile policy to succeed, French expeditions had to be stopped before they reached the river. This was a tall order, since by the early 1890s the French had pressed on from the Atlantic to Chad, and Ubangi-Shari (later the Central African Republic) which was on Sudan’s western border. But if a French force were ever to span the Nile, threatening to divert its waters, members of the British cabinet believed that they would be forced to negotiate the evacuation of Egypt with the loss of the Suez Canal. So when, in the aftermath of Baratieri’s defeat, the Italians appealed to Britain to assist their threatened garrison at Kassala, Chamberlain saw to it that Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener was soon leading an Anglo-Egyptian army of 15,000 men south from Egypt towards Dongola, 200 miles upriver in the Sudan.

Lord Salisbury, it became plain, had authorised the recapture of the Sudan from the Mahdists, and on 6 September 1897 Kitchener marched into Berber, which was little more than 200 miles from Khartoum and Omdurman. With his piercing blue eyes and luxuriant moustache, the Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-Egyptian army) was now forty-eight years old and at the height of his capabilities. Reputed never to have addressed a word to an enlisted man, Kitchener’s only soft spots were for
his young staff officers (provided they were unmarried) and for his porcelain collection.
⁶
His clinical efficiency did not bode well for the Mahdi’s successor, Khalifa Abdullah ibn Muhammad, and his white-robed army. But the lateness of the Blue Nile surge and of the north winds delayed Kitchener, despite his eagerness to get on with the job and erase the memory of his part in the nation’s failure to save General Gordon. His task would be no less difficult than Sir Garnet Wolseley’s had been thirteen years earlier. He must defeat the
khalifa
first and then press on south and throw back the French force reported to be closing in on the Nile near the junction with the Bahr el-Ghazal. But Kitchener was determined not to rush as his engineers unrolled a single-track railway line towards Abu Hamed.

Of course the Sirdar had no means of knowing how extraordinarily ambitious current French plans were. This was as well for his peace of mind. In March 1897, the French cabinet had approved the departure of three expeditions, which were intended to meet at Fashoda on the White Nile. Two would set out from the Red Sea and one would march across the continent from the French possessions in west and central Africa. In the meantime, Menelik of Ethiopia had promised to assist them by advancing to the Nile with his army.
⁷

In mid-January 1898, two of the
khalifa’s
most battle-hardened
amirs,
Mahmoud Muhammad and Osman Digna, united their forces to make a single army of 10,000 men. They ignored the
khalifa
’s advice to withdraw to a strong defensive position at Sabaluqua and instead advanced on Kitchener’s fort at Atbara. On their arrival on the eastern bank of the dried out riverbed they built a
zariba
from thorn bushes and stakes, and waited for Kitchener to arrive from the north. On 8 April, with 12,000 men and an impressive array of field guns, the Sirdar attacked to the sound of bagpipes and fifes. The infantry had little trouble with the thorn bushes, and soon the
amirs’
men were driven down into the riverbed where, lacking cover, they were cut to pieces by the Sirdar’s artillery. Three thousand were killed and four thousand wounded, while the British and Egyptians lost 560,
with five British officers killed and thirteen wounded. Osman Digna managed to flee the field, but the young and handsome Mahmoud Muhammad was captured and led in chains past his captors, who, forgetting all notions of British fair play, pelted him with rubbish. Imprisoned in a tiny cell in the coastal town of Rosetta, he would die in that town in 1904. Kitchener considered
this
engagement, not the more famous battle which followed, as the turning point of his career. Afterwards, according to the young Winston Churchill, he was ‘quite human for half-an-hour’, actually becoming emotional as he acknowledged the cheers of his men.
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By July the Abu Hamed desert railway had reached Atbara, 1,000 miles from Cairo, bringing supplies for Kitchener’s army, by now 26,000 strong, of whom a third were British and the rest Egyptian. On 6 August, the Sirdar’s ten gunboats attacked the forts in the Sabaluqua gorge and drove out the garrisons. Then, on 1 September, the Anglo-Egyptian army halted at Kerreri, four miles north of Omdurman and Khartoum, and dug in behind
zaribas
with their backs to the Nile and their forty-eight guns ranged across their front. They were inviting the
khalifa’s
army to come and get them. Across the sand Kitchener could make out the mud walls of Omdurman dominated by the conical dome and soaring arch of the Mahdi’s tomb.

The battle of Omdurman began at dawn next day. Opposite the British position, the
khalifa’s
army of 50,000 men, foot-soldiers and horsemen, advanced across a front five miles long. The
khalifa
would have been wiser to have attacked at night or to have waited for Kitchener in the desert, away from the river where the British gunboats were at anchor. For here facing one another were two armies from different centuries. Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 21st Lancers watched in disbelief as the Arabs came closer over the flat, sandy plain with their distinguishing banners fluttering above their battalions, looking, he declared, in a phrase that would not have pleased his Muslim adversaries, ‘like the old representation of the crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry’. The Arabs fired two shells from their meagre
artillery which threw up clouds of sand and dust fifty yards from the
zariba.
Seconds later, ‘great clouds of smoke appeared along the front of the British and Sudanese brigades … Above the moving masses shells began to burst, dotting the air with smoke balls and the ground with bodies.’ The killing was happening at a distance of two miles. Churchill felt awe and pity as he heard the gunboats add their fire to that of the land batteries.

Battle of Omdurman.

The entire Mahdist Empire was massed on the last great day of its existence … Twenty shells hit the white flags in the first minute … the banners toppled over in all directions. Yet they rose again immediately as other men pressed forward to die for the Mahdi’s sacred cause … It was a terrible sight for as yet they had not hurt us at all … About five men on the average fell to every shell, and there were many shells … The lines of spearmen and skirmishers came on in altered formation and diminished numbers but with unaltered enthusiasm … The further conduct of the debate was left to the infantry and the Maxim guns … a ragged line of men was coming on, desperately struggling forwards in the face of the pitiless fire … [The British gunners] fired steadily and stolidly without hurry or excitement.

Indeed it was more like a mass execution than a battle, and it angered Churchill to hear colleagues make deprecating comments
about the ‘mad fanaticism of the enemy’ rather than ‘credit them with a nobler motive and believe that they died to clear their honour from the stain of defeat’.
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Between dawn and 11.30 a.m. an estimated 10,800 Mahdists had been killed and 16,000 wounded. Kitchener lost a mere 48 killed and 382 wounded. George W. Steevens of the
Daily Mail
praised Kitchener’s men for their steadiness, but admitted: ‘The honour of the fight must still go with the men who died.’

The destruction of the
khalifa
’s army made Britain the effective ruler of the Sudan – although publicly the whole enterprise was said to be in partnership with Egypt. The whole length of the White Nile was now in British hands.
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‘Remember Gordon,’ Kitchener had told his men before the battle, and two days later he held a memorial service in the ruined courtyard of Gordon’s palace, where he hoisted the Union Jack and the Khedival flag after the assembled regiments had sung Gordon’s favourite hymn: ‘Abide with me.’
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Now Kitchener gave orders for the Mahdi’s shrine to be demolished and his bones to be tossed into the Nile. As a tit-for-tat revenge for the decapitation of Gordon’s dead body, the Sirdar had the Mahdi’s skull brought to him. His macabre plan was to turn it into an inkstand. However, when word of his intention reached Queen Victoria’s ears she forbade it, and he was obliged to pass the skull to Sir Evelyn Baring, the British Consul-General in Cairo, who buried it quietly in a cemetery in Wadi Halfa. Kitchener’s more discreet intelligence chief, General Reginald Wingate, hunted down and killed the
khalifa
and made
his
skull into an inkstand, having kept his own counsel.
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