The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (33 page)

“He is not a great man. He is a great poster.”

 

W
ith the determined ice-blue set to his eyes, his walrus moustache, and his tall, stalwart, military bearing (as befits a field marshal), Kitchener strides out of old photographs as the very model of a modern (circa 1900) British general. His military career covered the Middle East, Africa from Cape to Cairo, India, and the First World War. He was ambitious, like many a British empire-builder, but it was always an ambition driven by a sense of duty—of doing all he could for the Empire. It made for an adventurous life.

Kitchener was born in Ireland
²
—a country with which he felt no later affiliation—the son of a retired colonel and a clergyman's daughter. He took his father's profession and his mother's religious convictions. Raised in Ireland and Switzerland (where they moved for his mother's health; she died in 1864), Kitchener attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he trained to be a sapper (a military engineer), and was commissioned in 1871 (though not before he caused a diplomatic kerfuffle by crossing the Channel to get a firsthand glimpse of the Franco-Prussian War).

He received further training—and went on junkets to Austria and Germany—before gaining an assignment with the Palestine Exploration Fund, which bankrolled survey expeditions to locate and map Biblical sites in the Holy Land. Under royal patronage, and with the support of the War Office, which willingly lent its officers to scout territory of strategic interest, Kitchener spent three years (1874–77) on work that was ostensibly to prove the historical accuracy of the Bible. It also showed him as an imperial man of action at Galilee, where he faced down a violent mob that intended to “Kill the Christian dogs.”
³
After completing the survey, he stopped on his way home to see the fighting in the Russo-Turkish War from the Turkish side.

As part of the settlement of that war, the British were made governors of Cyprus on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, and Kitchener was duly dispatched to make a survey of the island. While stationed there he became a collector of ceramics and founded the Cyprus museum. His time in Cyprus (1878–82) was interrupted briefly by an appointment as vice consul to Anatolia, where he was to oversee reforms of the Ottoman administration. But what he really wanted was action.

In 1881, Colonel Arabi Pasha led a nationalist revolt against the authority of the Ottomans, which devolved into a revolt against all foreign influence in Egypt. In the summer of 1882, rioters in Alexandria, the center of Arabi's revolt, targeted foreign businesses, killing fifty Europeans. Something, of course, had to be done—especially given the potential threat to the Suez Canal—and the British did it (the French, though they had military and naval forces in the area, refused to join the punitive action). Kitchener wanted to be part of it too, claimed sick leave, jaunted off to Egypt, did reconnaissance work (he spoke fluent Arabic), and then avoided returning
to Cyprus until he had a chance to watch the British naval bombardment of Alexandria.

The British squashed Arabi's revolt and set about creating a new—loyal—army for the Egyptian khedive. Kitchener, who had taken a temporary job surveying in Sinai, was tapped to help form and train the Egyptian cavalry. In 1883, he became a major (
bimbashi
) in the Egyptian army, wore a tarboosh—he took rather a fancy to Arabic habits and customs—and proved his mettle at making something out of unpromising material; Egyptians were not highly regarded as soldiers.

Yet something had to be made of them—and quickly—for the Mahdist revolt had begun in the Sudan. It arrested British attention after the destruction of a 9,000-strong Egyptian army led by a British colonel in Egyptian service, Hicks Pasha (William Hicks), at the Battle of El Obeid (5 November 1883). Word of the massacre reached Kitchener in Sinai, where he had taken leave to do some surveying work. Recalled by the British Consul-General Sir Evelyn Baring, Kitchener disguised himself as an Arab and raced across the desert (the sun and sand permanently damaging his eyes).

Starting in February 1884, Kitchener scouted possible lines of approach for an Anglo-Egyptian army to the Sudan; checked on the Egyptian garrisons in Sudanese cities; raised desert tribes against the Mahdi; gathered intelligence; and acted as a desert intermediary relaying messages from General Gordon, besieged in Khartoum, to Cairo.
⁴
In doing all this, he often traveled in disguise as an Arab, riding a camel, attended by a handful of Arab allies. It was daring, dangerous, and lonely work—and he thrived on it, even finding the loneliness of the desert a blessing.

After the fall of Khartoum, Kitchener advocated a swift advance against the Mahdi to recapture the city and crush the dervish revolt before it grew stronger. But it was not his place to make policy; the Liberal government wanted to rid itself of the Sudan and its troubles, which continued after
the Mahdi died in June 1885. In July, Kitchener resigned his Egyptian commission—perhaps in part because his fiancée, Hermione Baker, the daughter of Kitchener's friend General Valentine Baker,
⁵
had died of typhoid in Cairo—and returned to England, a brevet-lieutenant-colonel.

He wasn't gone from Africa for long. In November 1885 he served on an international commission for the Sultan of Zanzibar and in August 1886 he became governor-general of the Eastern Sudan based at Suakin, where his chief responsibility was to guard the Red Sea coast from the depredations of the dervishes. He took a more aggressive policy than the government wanted, led men into battle (something he was supposed to avoid), and had to be invalided out after getting shot in the jaw. Rather than being punished, he was made a brevet-colonel. He returned to Suakin as adjutant-general of the Egyptian army and with its sirdar (commander in chief), Sir Francis Grenfell, he defeated the dervishes there in December 1888. In August 1889, Grenfell and Kitchener (commanding the cavalry) avenged Hicks Pasha by destroying the dervish army that had annihilated his—that of Emir Wad-el-Nejumi, who was killed.

More important than avenging Hicks was avenging Gordon. In 1892, Kitchener became sirdar of the Egyptian army, and shaped and prepared his force for what he felt certain must be the inevitable call: to finally and forever smash the dervishes of the Sudan. That call would never come from the Liberals, but in 1895 Lord Salisbury's Conservatives were returned to power, and the following year, Kitchener, a Conservative and a friend of Lord Salisbury's family, was ordered to recapture Dongola on the Nile in the upper Sudan. It was taken on 23 September 1896, but no one assumed that was to be the end of the campaign. It was a mere way station to Khartoum.

Kitchener ordered the building of a railway line from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed. Though it took a year to build, Kitchener thought the time well spent. It would make the army's advance much simpler, avoiding three treacherous cataracts of the Nile, and give it a sturdy line of supply. The dervishes fell back as he advanced. But gathering in massive numbers—at least 100,000 men—was a dervish army at Omdurman.

Before that confrontation, Kitchener was compelled to fight a dervish army of 20,000 men under the command of Mahmud Ahmed at the Battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898. Kitchener had 14,000 men. Unable to draw Mahmud out from his trenches and
zareba
(thorn-bush fortifications), he blasted them with a short artillery barrage and then sent his men charging into fierce hand-to-hand combat, in which the British—the Seaforths, the Camerons, the Lincolns, and the Warwicks, among others—bested the dervishes. Kitchener's casualties were 568 men—125 of them British, and of those only 26 were killed. The dervishes lost 3,000 dead and another 2,000 captured, including Mahmud, who was subjected to a Roman processional victory march in which loyal Sudanese could mock and revile him. Mahmud warned his British captors that they would be in for a nasty surprise at Omdurman. It would certainly be a nasty surprise for someone.

Against Khalifa Abdullah, the Mahdi's successor, Kitchener brought a force of some 25,000 men. His artillery—both land-based and mounted on gunboats on the Nile—outclassed that of the dervishes; he also had Maxim guns, which were extremely effective, when they didn't jam. He sent a messenger to the Khalifa asking him to evacuate the women and children from Omdurman, upon which he was about to open fire; and he promised that he was going to save the Sudan “from your devilish doings and iniquity.”
⁶

On 1 September 1898, a young lieutenant and war correspondent assigned to the 21st Lancers, one Winston Churchill, rode hell for leather to inform Kitchener that a dervish army of 60,000 men was on the move to attack him;
he estimated that Kitchener had an hour or perhaps an hour and a half before they would be upon him. Ascending a hill, Kitchener was able to confirm Churchill's report—it appeared the Khalifa's entire army was swarming towards him, perhaps surging with anger at the desecration of the great dome of the Mahdi's tomb by artillery shells fired from Kitchener's gunboats. He ordered his men into camp, established a defensive perimeter, and had the gunboats drawn up for support, their searchlights sweeping over the lines of a possible dervish approach. If the dervishes struck at night, all Kitchener's advantages in artillery, and from the Maxim guns, would disappear. It would be down to hand-to-hand combat. Kitchener arranged for some of his Sudanese camp followers to spread a rumor among the Khalifa's men that the British were planning a night attack. That feint seemed to work. The dervishes did not strike until dawn.

They charged with a fanatic frenzy, armed with rifles, swords, and spears. But British discipline and firepower—about 8,000 of Kitchener's men were British, the rest Sudanese and Egyptians (the former ranked better as soldiers than the latter)—took a devastating toll. With the exception of the charge of the 21st Lancers into an unexpected, hidden mass of 2,500 dervishes and the rearguard action of Hector “Fighting Mac” Macdonald, whose mainly Sudanese forces, 3,000 strong, held off a massive two-pronged dervish counterattack of about 32,000 men, the Battle of Omdurman was a one-sided affair, with the dervishes losing nearly 30,000 men killed, wounded, or captured to fewer than 50 dead and some 400 wounded in the Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese force.