Ghosts of Empire (35 page)

While the Mahdi was treated by the British as a figure of some importance and dignity, his successor, the Khalifa, has been portrayed in all the most lurid colours of late Victorian sensationalism, as a monster of human wickedness and depravity. In 1890 he was described in an intelligence report as a ‘tall, stout man' whose hair was beginning to turn grey. At that date, the Khalifa would have been in his mid-forties, as he was roughly the same age as his former master, the Mahdi. The British depicted him as an ignorant, cunning savage, and tales of his sexual depravity titillated both the official classes and the wider public. It seems strange that a description of the Khalifa's seduction techniques should find itself in a ‘General Report on the Sudan', but the intelligence agent could not resist recounting how Abdullah employed an agent, Haj Zubeir, to find out all the ‘good looking women', whereupon the ‘husband of the woman is strictly advised to divorce his wife who is at once brought to the Khalifa'. Once ensconced in the Khalifa's harem, the women ‘are carefully guarded and are not permitted even to see their parents'. In this way, the report claimed, the Khalifa collected a harem of thirty-four wives, one of whom was a daughter of the Mahdi himself. It is difficult to see how these details affected the general security situation. Britain, and its puppet state Egypt, had withdrawn from the Sudan, leaving the country at the mercy of the Khalifa and his marauding army. Abdullah himself was an archetypal despot, which made hating him so much easier for the British officials. People brought into his presence were ‘obliged to enter . . . on all fours', as no one was permitted to look at the Khalifa's face; they had to address him as ‘Ya Sayeedi' (O my Lord) and they were compelled to retire
backwards, with their heads bent and their eyes fixed to the ground, when they left his presence.

The Khalifa's intelligence, in British eyes, was impressive; he was a man of force and power with whom the British of the late Victorian era could identify, but he ‘neither reads nor writes and is said to be a man of exceptional ignorance', which was compensated for by his ‘great determination' and his being ‘well versed in every art of fraud and deception'.
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The British response to the disaster Gordon had suffered at Khartoum was to sit and wait. Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, who for so many years effectively ran the nominally independent Egyptian government, later remarked that the Sudan had been ‘left derelict, not so much because the cargo was altogether valueless, but rather because no hands were available to effect the salvage'. He was convinced that any British attempt to reconquer the Sudan would only take place after about ‘twenty-five years', in 1910 or 1911.
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Cautious and pragmatic, Baring believed that ‘any attempt to negotiate with the Mahdist leaders' would prove ‘barren of result'. He took the view that, while the Mahdi could inspire his followers with a genuine religious fervour, the Khalifa was a different case. It was true that the Khalifa had the ability to ‘raise large numbers of men by preaching a “jehad”', but the ‘fanaticism inspired by Mahdiism will never have the force it possessed during the early days of Mohammed Ahmed'.
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Baring, in his clear-cut way–he was yet another product of Woolwich, but had left the army in the 1870s–believed that the Sudan ‘cannot and should not be permanently separated from Egypt'. There were powerful reasons for the reconquest of Sudan. These included the ‘stimulus of commercial interests, a desire to aid in the suppression of the Slave Trade' and humanitarian ‘pity and commiseration for the inhabitants of the Soudan, who, without doubt, groan under the Dervish yoke'. The British government would have to pay for this campaign, as the resources of Egypt, financial and military, were ‘wholly inadequate for the accomplishment of the task'.
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It was simply a matter of timing.

Kitchener, meanwhile, who had been an intelligence officer on the Gordon Relief Expedition which arrived in Khartoum two days late, was slowly climbing the ladder of preferment within the Egyptian army,
gathering honours and titles. He had time to join the Freemasons in 1883 and kept up a lifelong involvement with the organization. In Cairo, where he was stationed before setting out to relieve Gordon, he is even believed to have fallen in love. Hermione Baker was the elder of the two daughters of Valentine Baker, a senior army officer, who lived with her mother and sister in the city's Shepheard's Hotel. Kitchener visited the Bakers often in Cairo in 1883 and 1884 and, it was rumoured, had been engaged to Hermione, a young lady in her late teens. But Hermione died of typhoid fever on 13 January 1885, two weeks before the fall of Khartoum, and at a time when Kitchener himself was deep in the Sudan, trying to save Gordon. Ever since this supposed love affair, there have been rumours about Kitchener's sexuality, with a remark of a contemporary journalist being often cited–that Kitchener had ‘the failing acquired by most of the Egyptian officers, a taste for buggery'. Hermione's younger sister, Sybil, was never in any doubt that her sister's death was the great tragedy in Kitchener's life.
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Kitchener destroyed most of his personal correspondence, so the depth and nature of his feelings for Hermione, as well as his other passions, homosexual or otherwise, are likely never to be known.

Posterity does, however, have a much fuller record of Kitchener's promotions and his achievements as an officer. His success in the field, his knowledge of Arabic, the stories of the disguises he adopted while operating as an intelligence officer, began to build up a picture of a glamorous, even magnificent British officer, made more mysterious by the mask of impenetrability he always wore. Kitchener was also adept at making friends with powerful people. He quickly became a favourite in Lord Salisbury's family circle and was invited to Hatfield House as early as spring 1888. It was at this time that Queen Victoria pleaded for him to be appointed one of her aides de camp. The secret of his networking and ability to win influential friends remains something of a mystery, given his shy, rather gauche personality. While in Britain, Kitchener led the life of a Victorian bachelor, passing time in the grand houses of friends and spending innumerable evenings and nights in the clubs of Pall Mall and Piccadilly. The late nineteenth century was perhaps the heyday of the gentleman's club, an institution which grew out of the coffee houses of nearly 200 years before. Kitchener's favourite haunt was the United Service Club, at 116 Pall Mall,
which was founded for the use of army and naval officers above the rank of major or commander. Like many others, the club ran into difficulties in the 1970s and closed its doors for the last time in 1978. Kitchener also frequently stayed with his friend Pandeli Ralli, the wealthy scion of a Greek trading family, whose house in Belgrave Square practically became Kitchener's home when he was on leave.
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In September 1888, at the precocious age of thirty-eight, thanks to the influence of his new friend the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Kitchener was appointed adjutant general of the Egyptian army, the effective deputy in command of that force. This army was run by the British, even though it was nominally controlled by the Khedive, a descendant of the ethnic Albanian Mohammed Ali Pasha, who had been appointed governor of Egypt, under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, in 1805. In April 1892, Kitchener was promoted to be head of the Egyptian army, or sirdar, at a time when the situation relating to the Sudan was still relatively undecided. Intelligence reports in the early 1890s referred to the Khalifa's efforts to rebuild the wall of his capital at Omdurman, which now looked like a besieged town. None of the inhabitants was permitted to pass the wall; only Beggara tribesmen and the Khalifa's fighters were allowed in and out of the city.
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The shift in policy towards the Sudan, a move from containment to active involvement, occurred during the second half of the 1890s, as a result of a change in attitude in Britain. According to Evelyn Baring, now ennobled as Lord Cromer, there had been a ‘rapid growth of Imperialist spirit' in England. More particularly, Italy's failure in its imperial mission finally forced Britain to reveal its hand in the Sudan. In Cromer's acerbic words, the Italians ‘had shown but little skill, either political or military, in the management of their newly acquired possession [Abyssinia, modern Ethiopia]', and when they were totally defeated by the Ethiopians at Adowa, the situation in Sudan was brought ‘to a crisis'.
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The Italian Ambassador in London urged that a diversion should be made in Italy's interests and it was at this point, in 1896, Cromer asserted, that Lord Salisbury's Conservative government decided to intervene. The Italian excuse may just have been a pretext for a more aggressive action against the Khalifa, but it was a useful figleaf, and the broader point, that the British,
under Salisbury's Conservatives, now supported a more energetic form of imperialism, is uncontroversial.

As head of the Egyptian army, Kitchener was the only candidate for the command of the force which would reconquer Sudan. His hour had come. As Lord Cromer remembered, Kitchener at forty-six was ‘young, energetic, ardently and exclusively devoted to his profession'. He also observed, as many others did, that the Sirdar's qualities did not inspire love among his troops. According to Cromer, the ‘bonds which united' Kitchener and his subordinates were those of ‘stern discipline'. Kitchener had a ‘strong and masterful spirit', which he used to dominate his men and bully them into submission to his will, instead of obtaining from them ‘the affectionate obedience yielded to the behests of a genial chief'. Kitchener left ‘as little as possible to chance' and was, in the language of the period, a ‘rigid economist', which meant that he was very careful with money, suppressing with ‘a heavy hand any tendency towards waste and extravagance'.
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The most famous description of Kitchener from this period comes from the stirring account of the Sudan campaign written by G. W. Steevens, entitled
With Kitchener to Khartoum
, which was a bestseller in 1898. A brilliant Oxford Classics graduate, Steevens was a journalist of genius who worked for the newly founded popular newspaper the
Daily Mail
and wrote with a vividness and fluency which brought him early fame as a war correspondent, before he died in South Africa at the premature age of thirty. His sketch of Kitchener included the line: ‘You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1 . . . the Sudan Machine.'
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The ‘Sudan Machine' was a name that stuck. Steevens referred to the Sirdar's ‘unerring precision', and it was clear that his characteristics were beginning to fascinate the wider public, as the final resolution of the Sudan conflict became more widely anticipated. A great popular journalist, Steevens appreciated the Victorian public's appetite for supermen and imperial heroes. For him, Kitchener was quite simply ‘the man of destiny'.
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Against such a man, with the backing of the resources of the imperial government in London, the Khalifa and his followers, it was believed, stood little chance. Lord Cromer had mentioned the inevitability of a British triumph in a letter to
Lord Salisbury written in 1892: ‘The very name of England is far more feared by the Khalifa and his Beggara than either Turkey or Egypt, and it is practically admitted that they cannot hope for success in fighting against the British.'
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The details of the Sudan campaign, which were recounted in numerous memoirs and descriptions, were once familiar to the British public. The one episode that is still renowned is the Battle of Omdurman, the final stand of the dervishes, made famous by the Charge of the 21st Lancers, the last occasion on which the British army made use of a cavalry charge in battle. Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer who had cajoled and bullied his way on to Kitchener's campaign, would refer to the charge frequently as one of his repertoire of dinner-table anecdotes. It has become part of British military folklore. The Battle of Omdurman itself, which took place on 2 September 1898, was a heavily lopsided affair: at about six in the morning, the dervishes began their advance on the British position. Their ‘array was perfect', and a great number of their flags, which had been covered with texts from the Koran, were visible on the horizon. To the young Churchill, ‘their admirable alignment made this division of the Khalifa's army look like the old representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry'.
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The outcome of all this medieval pageantry and theatre was grisly, and, in accounts of the battle, one can almost detect the sense of wonder and shame the British felt in inflicting so much damage on a brave enemy, since the Victorian cult of the hero was more than matched by a passion for ‘sportsmanship' and ‘good form'. These were, after all, times when the veneration of cricket was perhaps at its height, when the cricket legend W. G. Grace was arguably the most famous man in Britain. The dervishes had been sportsmen: ‘our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb', recounted Steevens.
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Churchill admitted that the ‘Dervishes fought manfully'.
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The famous charge, in which 400 cavalrymen of the 21st Lancers attacked a force of what turned out to be 2,500 dervishes, made very little difference to the outcome of the battle, though it led to the award of three Victoria Crosses. In reality the dervishes were ‘swept away in thousands by the deadly fire of the rifles and Maxims'. Their losses were ‘terrible': out of an army whose strength was estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000 men, some 11,000 were killed, and about 16,000
wounded.
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The British casualties had been negligible: twenty-two men and NCOs killed, and a hundred wounded, while only two officers lost their lives, one of whom, Lieutenant Robert Grenfell, had been the ‘life and soul of the joyous Christmas festivities' at Lord Cromer's house in Cairo the year before. Grenfell had been killed by a ‘Dervish broadsword' while taking part in the charge. Colonel Frank Rhodes, a
Times
journalist and Cecil Rhodes's elder brother, was also wounded in the battle. The Khalifa struggled on for another year before being killed in the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899.