Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (56 page)

The Maxim was the world’s first fully automated machine gun. It was a breakthrough because it was genuinely automatic – the recoil of each shot advancing the next bullet into the chamber. Though not light at sixty pounds, it was much lighter than the six-barrelled Gatling gun. Since the barrel is a large part of any gun’s weight – and cost of manufacture – having only one was far preferable to having six or more. Also the Gatling required hand cranking, whereas the Maxim conformed to the magical idea of automaticity, with one touch of the trigger enough to set it chattering death across the battlefield. This meant that only one person was needed to operate it – another important advantage over the two-man Gatling gun. The final feature of the Maxim that
made it so effective was its comparatively long range – over 2,000 yards – compared to the Gatling gun’s 400 yards.

In his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha in 1887 Stanley took with him: two tons of gunpowder, 350,000 percussion caps, 100,000 rounds of Remington ammunition, 50,000 rounds of Winchester ammunition, and a prototype Maxim machine gun with its portable stand. Stanley was outraged that people should think he needed this to fight his way across Africa – why, he explained, he had already done that armed only with Snider rifles. This great load of ammo and the Maxim were intended for the use of Emin Pasha when they reached him. Yet, in the end, Stanley had to use the Maxim against the Wasukuma tribe during the last, supposedly easy stage, of his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha in 1887–9. In the thirty-two years since Burton and Speke’s first crossing in 1857, an increasing number of explorers and then missionaries had crossed the plains between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. Stanley noticed how high the transit fee known as the
hongo
had become – some missionaries being charged £270 to cross three days’ distance of land. Guns, too, were not so unusual. When the Wasukuma began massing, Stanley attempted to make peace, but to no avail. Wasukuma entered his camp and killed a man; seventeen were shot by Stanley’s Wangwana porters in retaliation. The Wasukuma were bunched around the camp in their hundreds, waving spears and rattling long knives against shields. Stanley had earlier, during peace negotiations, been struck at by a spear and had not retaliated. Now he did. The Maxim was set down from the bier on which it was being carried. The barrel was carefully attached, the cartridge belt unwound. This would be the first time in history that an automatic machine gun would be fired in anger. It was probably Lieutenant Stairs, the rearguard commander, who fired. The results were electrifying. Only one man was killed, since everyone else fled. The noise alone, 600 rounds a minute, suddenly shattering the silence of the savannah, sent the attackers running for their lives.

Stanley had used the gun reluctantly, because to have relied on such a fearsome weapon contradicted his great plans for Africa: after all, how can you say you are helping these people if all you do is kill them? But the next generation were less circumspect. The Maxim took no part in the exploration of the Nile – it came too late for that – but it definitely played a key part in its subjugation. Frederick Lugard, who was sent to Uganda by the British East Africa Company, took the same prototype Maxim to back up his authority, and killed far more people
than Stanley ever did. Its first test in prolonged conflict came with the Rhodesian Matabele War of 1893. In the battle of the Shangani, fifty men armed with four Maxims overcame a force of 5,000 attacking Ndebele warriors. But even bigger victories would come. It has been stated by believers in British superiority that the Sudan was administered by eighty-three political officers in the early twentieth century. In reality it was run by the reputation of the Maxim at Omdurman.

As Hilaire Belloc put it:

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The slaughter

While crossing one river ask about the others you still have to cross
.
Sudanese proverb

The Mahdi’s forces, now under his deputy the Khalifa, could not be allowed to run the Sudan. He began threatening Egypt, even launching small war expeditions across the border. If he wasn’t stopped, it was reasoned in Cairo and London, the whole Middle East could be set ablaze. The British had bided their time, but now, in 1898, they had a plan.

By an odd irony Kitchener had been present at the bombardment of Alexandria, which in 1882 was the event that triggered English involvement in Egypt. In 1884, as an aide de camp he tried everything to get an expedition going to relieve Gordon before it was too late. The government had dithered, chose Wolseley instead and the time lost resulted in Gordon’s downfall. Ten years after the death of Gordon, and now a general, Kitchener sought revenge in the form of retaking Khartoum. (As an interesting aside, the only love of Kitchener’s life was his fiancée Hermione, who was the daughter of Valentine Baker – Sam’s brother. Sadly she died in Cairo of typhoid fever.) Kitchener believed it essential to either secure Khartoum or get out of Africa altogether. And now, with cotton growing on the Nile that needed water, control of the river was essential. It was possibly the first river war in history.

Kitchener was, like Gordon, an engineer. He had been educated at
home in Ireland, commissioned in the army, and early on drew admiration for his mapping of the Levant. The border of Israel and Lebanon stands where it does today because that was where Kitchener stopped his survey. He was a man quite at home with his own company, spoke good Arabic and took no notice of unasked-for help or unfriendly criticism. If he had not proven it to his own satisfaction he took no one’s word on it. When asked how he would reconquer the Sudan his answer was: build a railway. It was the engineer’s answer. The desert was too short of water to allow a massed army to travel. The river had defeated them before despite the Iroquois boatmen. The only sensible method was a railway.

So Kitchener built a railway, and he built a bridge. The 1,000-foot bridge over the Atbara, the other main tributary of the lower Nile after the Blue Nile, was built in forty-two days by an American firm with mechanics imported for the task, a sign of the shifting world order.

The railway finished, Kitchener, like a man on rails, slid his vast army into position against the dervish hordes. He had 8,000 English soldiers and 17,000 Egyptians. The dervish army numbered 50,000.

Winston Churchill wrote about his own experience of what followed, the bloodiest battle fought on the Red Nile, in
The River War
, an extraordinarily accomplished book for a twenty-three-year-old. It explains with lucidity how the British came to be opposing the vast dervish army and is informed, partly, by Churchill’s own role in the battle as a cavalry subaltern. At the battle of Omdurman three things made a vast difference, in fact created the template for the tactics employed to such disastrous effect in the First World War: accurate artillery, accurate, rapid and long-range rifle fire and Maxim machine guns. With these three elements the dervishes did not really have a chance once they had opted for a setpiece battle on an open plain – with minor relief features easily scoured by accurate artillery.

First, let us examine the artillery. It was no accident that Napoleon was an artilleryman. The nineteenth century saw the rise of big guns as the defining force of battle. The invention, in 1803, by Henry Shrapnel, of the shrapnel shell gave momentum to the whole development of exploding munitions delivered through guns. In the 1860s the gas-sealant band on a shell was perfected, allowing shells to be fired through a rifled barrel – with a consequent great increase in accuracy. Even without the machine gun, long-range accurate artillery with exploding shells was a devastating force to be reckoned with.

Next came accurate long-range rifle fire. The rifle used at Omdurman by the British was primarily the Lee-Metford, a .303 rifle that evolved into the highly successful weapon of the First and Second World Wars – the Lee-Enfield. It was a rifle capable of firing eight shots (or ten, on some models) very rapidly by use of a bolt mechanism. The first British breech-loading rifle that used a cartridge – the Snider-Enfield – which was employed by Samuel Baker in his anti-slavery forays, was already a vast improvement on anything the Arab or native chiefs were armed with. The Snider, as already noted, was accurate to 600 yards and a trained man could send ten rounds a minute against three rounds a minute for a muzzle loader in expert hands. It used a metal-cased cartridge that could travel well and suffer rough handling. In short, the Snider returned the advantage of firearms to the imperial colonisers of the world. The Martini-Henry consolidated it, but the repeating Lee-Metford raised it by the power of two.

And finally the Maxim gun. It could fire up to 600 rounds a minute – equivalent to 200 muzzle-loading riflemen. But a Maxim could be fired by one man (though it was easier with two). As we have seen, it was first used by Stanley in his rescue of Emin Pasha and became synonymous with African colonisation. Its effect was not just mechanical, it was also psychologically devastating to come under such sustained fire – probably, in the case of many African troops, for the first time in their lives.

In addition to field batteries there were gunboats on the Nile, placed at either end of the British and Egyptian army, safeguarding the flanks and the river. The gunboats were equipped with 12- and 12.5-pounder guns, 4-inch howitzers, Maxim machine guns and powerful searchlights. The guns on board were manned by Royal Marines, though the crews were a mix of Sudanese, Egyptian and British sailors. The gun-boats had been shipped in sections by sea and rail and then assembled on the Nile. There were ten and, whatever happened on land at Omdurman, these boats effectively sealed the fate of the river.

Omdurman, then, was a stage set for a slaughter. As the vast dervish army charged across the open ground the British guns remained eerily silent. Then the artillery opened up. Churchill described what happened:

Thus did the dervish army come to be beaten before it had even engaged with the British. However, there was still some more equitable fighting to be had – the last charge made by lance carriers of the British cavalry. It was this charge that Churchill had the good fortune to be a part of. He was attached to the 21st Lancers who made the charge, though he was actually an officer of the 4th Hussars.

It was all an accident of course. The 21st Lancers were sent in to clear up some pockets of dervish resistance. The group they charged seemed ‘scarcely a hundred strong’. But these men did not flee, they knelt down and started shooting. ‘On the instant all the sixteen troops [about 350 men] swung round and locked up into a long galloping line, and the 21st Lancers were committed to their first charge in war . . . bullets struck the hard gravel into the air, and the troopers, to shield their faces from the stinging dust, bowed their helmets forward like the Cuirassiers at Waterloo. The pace was fast and the distance short.’

Then, as the Lancers galloped forward, a crease in the ground, a dry watercourse in fact, revealed a horrible secret: ‘from it there sprang, with the suddenness of a pantomime effect and a high-pitched yell, a dense white mass of men nearly as long as our front and about twelve deep’. All of a sudden it became imperative to maintain the velocity of the charge and break through their line. ‘The British squadrons struck the fierce brigade with one loud furious shout. The collision was prodigious. Nearly thirty Lancers, men and horses, and at least two hundred Arabs were overthrown. The shock was stunning to both sides and for perhaps ten glorious seconds no man heeded his enemy . . . several
fallen Lancers had even time to remount. Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on.’

The fight was on. The dervishes gave no quarter, hamstringing horses, pressing their rifles into horse flesh and firing at point-blank range, throwing spears with great dexterity and wielding their heavy swords. The Lancers fought for their lives with lance and pistol. In two minutes, though, it was all over, and the cavalry had broken through and were clear of the dervishes. ‘The men were anxious to cut their way back through their enemies . . . [the main battle] might have been a massacre; but here the fight was fair, for we too fought with sword and spear. Indeed the advantage of ground and numbers lay with them.’

But reality sank in fast. In 120 seconds of contact five officers, sixty-five men and 120 horses had been killed or wounded. The Lancers dismounted and using their accurate Lee-Metford carbines, which easily outranged the dervish muskets, drove their enemy back. In the end modern armaments had won the day again. The rest of the battle was a mopping-up operation.

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Kitchener makes his bones

A son goes out to war in the morning; he comes home when God wills
.
Ethiopian proverb

The Khalifa’s forces were defeated at Omdurman – the world’s most extraordinarily unbalanced battle, with 10,500 Arabs slaughtered and only forty-seven British killed (and 382 injured). These are the figures of a massacre, not a battle. Yet European weapons and tactics, communications and logistics created this imbalance. The sheer scale of the victory no doubt contributed to the heady confidence of the Europeans when they started their own little war in 1914; yet the real model of future warfare was the mass carnage on both sides of the American Civil War.