The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (45 page)

BOOK: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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Gladstone’s government was deeply embarrassed by what had happened, and argued that it had no other choice but to rescue Egypt from self-destruction. Having done so, Britain would, in the same spirit of high-minded altruism, supervise the regeneration of Egypt. This would be accomplished by a cadre of British bureaucrats who would oversee the country’s administration under the direction of Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer. At the same time, the Egyptian army would be revitalised by a body of senior British officers, assisted by a corps of drill-sergeants. At its inception, it was claimed that this system of control was a temporary measure which would last as long as Egypt required tutelage.

What had been created in Egypt was an imperial hybrid. It was neither a colony nor an official protectorate, and outwardly it remained an independent country ruled by a khedive, whose overlord was, in purely legal terms, the Sultan of Turkey. In reality Egypt was, after 1882, a state where power rested in the hands of a higher civil service staffed by British officials, whose first priority was to bring the country to solvency. Two, Cromer and Milner, later produced extensive books which explained Britain’s mission to Egypt and listed what had been accomplished to promote the well-being of the Egyptians.
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This orthodox view of the occupation of Egypt as a service to its people was challenged by those who saw the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 as having been foisted on the government by a clique of investors. Sir William Gregory, a former Tory MP and governor of Ceylon, argued that, ‘We are the only nation which had an honest sympathy with the unfortunate peasants of the Nile Valley, and yet we are forced to be the nigger-drivers, the administrators of the lash to exact the last piastre from these poor wretches for the benefit of bondholders.’
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This line was taken up and expanded by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a Tory squire with an instinctive mistrust of the machinations of all financiers, whom he cast in the same mould as the pushy and dishonest Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now.
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Interestingly, traditionalist Tories and left-wing Radicals both identified the manifestations of the new imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s with the backstairs influence of capital.

Inside Egypt, British occupation provoked sullen resentment. Cromer, while publicly boasting that the fellahin were thankful for even-handed British government, confessed to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 that little loyalty could be expected from Egyptians if their country was invaded by France or Russia. During the winter of 1914–15, the Turko-German high command felt confident that an attack on Egypt would immediately trigger an anti-British rebellion. Such conclusions were not surprising; Britain had entered Egypt to suppress a national movement, and the sentiments behind it did not just evaporate after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, where, incidentally, the fellah soldiers had fought stubbornly. Nationalism remained a strong emotional force among all Egyptians, especially the educated class, who had the added grievance of finding themselves largely excluded from the highest ranks of the civil service, judiciary and army. Despite an energetic and highly competent police intelligence service, run by the British, nationalist agitation continued during the 1880s and 1890s and was covertly fomented by Tawfiq’s successor, Abbas II. In January 1900 Egyptian officers stationed at Khartoum, heartened by the news of British defeats in South Africa and rumours of a Russian advance on India, encouraged their Sudanese askaris to mutiny in the hope that the rebellion might lead to the expulsion of the British from Egypt.
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What then kept the British in Egypt? Free passage through the Suez Canal appeared a compelling reason, since most of its traffic was British-registered shipping; of the 2,727 vessels which used the Canal in 1881, 2,250 were British. And yet at no time did Urabi indicate that he would interfere with the running of the Canal, and it was the British administration in Egypt which terminated the Canal’s status as an international waterway at the outbreak of war in August 1914. Of course, in 1882 there was no way of knowing what Urabi might do in the future, and, most important of all, if Britain did nothing, another power could step in.

In the end, as in so many other areas where the machinery of informal empire broke down, formal, and in this case extremely swift occupation by Britain was the only alternative to annexation by another country. Moreover, there was no way of knowing whether the mood of the French deputies would change and a majority would emerge in favour of intervention, with or without British assistance. Subsequent international developments added weight to this argument. The growth of Anglo-French colonial jealousies after 1885, the Franco-Russian alliance of 1892, and with it the prospect that the Mediterranean might become ‘
le lac français
’ of French imperialist dreams, justified the decisions taken in 1882 and ruled out any withdrawal from Egypt. A firm grip on Egypt could also be defended when it became clear, as it did in the late 1880s, that Turkey could no longer be relied on to stop the Russian navy from passing through the Bosphorus. The cost of Egypt was high in terms of Britain’s international influence. In order to obtain support for her position there, Britain was compelled to make compromises and offer concessions to Germany and France which, had the circumstances been different, she might have refused.

*   *   *

Possession of Egypt gave Britain responsibility for the Egyptian empire in the Sudan. After sixty years of gradual conquest and pacification, the Sudan was still a turbulent province where Egyptian authority was fragile. Forty thousand soldiers and officials struggled to hold the lid down on unrest and gather the taxes needed to sustain the khedive’s credit. Most recently the Egyptian administration had been engaged in the suppression of slave trading, a duty undertaken by foreign governors, including the famous General Charles Gordon.

In 1881 the Egyptian authorities faced a new rebellion, led by Muhammad Ahmad, a thirty-seven-year-old messianic holy man, who called himself the Mahdi. As a chosen servant of Muhammad, it was his mission to purify Islam and chastise those whose faith had lapsed or become contaminated. His simple piety, powerful faith and message of spiritual rebirth won him thousands of converts, the ansars (servants), with whom he attacked and took the town of El Obeid. With the permission of Cromer, a well-equipped Egyptian army commanded by Colonel William Hicks was sent south to crush the insurrection. Led on a desert wild goose chase, Hicks was ambushed at Shaykan in November 1883, where his army was overwhelmed and its rifles, machine-guns and modern artillery captured. During the winter of 1883–4, one of the Mandi’s adherents, Uthman Diqna, started a new front in the vicinity of the Red Sea port of Suakin with attacks on local Egyptian garrisons.

It was now obvious that the Egyptian army could not contain let alone suppress the Mahdist movement, and that Egyptian administration in the Sudan was falling apart. Rather than waste treasure and men fighting a desert war to put it together again, the cabinet agreed in January 1884 to the evacuation of all Egyptian garrisons and personnel. Imperial disengagement proved as complex and vexatious an undertaking as imperial conquest. Forces rushed to Suakin in February 1884 soon found themselves drawn into a trial of strength with Uthman Diqna, and were consequently forced to make a series of limited offensives to uphold British prestige. This was preserved by victories at El Teb and Tamai, where the British soldier had his first and unnerving experiences of the tenacity and courage of the ansars, or Dervishes as they were usually called.

Overall supervision of the withdrawal from the Sudan was given to General Charles (‘Chinese’) Gordon. It was a controversial appointment, ostensibly made because of his previous local experience, but in fact engineered by the press. Gordon was already a popular hero, whose combination of bravery and intense evangelical fervour was bound to appeal to the Victorian public. Wilful and confident of his own charisma, Gordon saw himself as an agent of Providence, and, like Gladstone, answered to God for his decisions. He also had a peculiar talent for inspiring non-European soldiers: in the 1860s he commanded the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, which crushed the Taiping rebellion on behalf of the Chinese emperor, and in the 1870s he led Egyptian troops against Sudanese slave-traders. He spoke hardly any Arabic, but, despite his Christian zeal, believed that he had the hearts of the Sudanese. Their devotion to him was apparently confirmed by the enthusiastic reception he was given when he arrived in Khartoum in February. What he failed to understand was that the city’s population imagined that he had the power to summon British soldiers who, as events around Suakin had shown, could beat the Mandi’s ansars. Not that Gordon was unduly worried by Mahdism, which he mistakenly believed was shallow-rooted and unlikely to make much headway.
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He therefore jettisoned his orders to evacuate the Sudan, and instead prepared to defend Khartoum and resist the Mandi.

Gordon singlehandedly reversed the government’s policy. From Khartoum he issued a series of highly emotional but powerful appeals to the public conscience in which he called upon his countrymen to shoulder the burden of civilisation, and save the Sudan from being overwhelmed by what he considered the forces of darkness. His pleas and predicament captured the public imagination; he was an embattled warrior in a remote land who had placed Christian duty and service to humanity before expediency. Public opinion swung behind Gordon and, early in August, impelled a reluctant government to send an army to rescue him.

Gordon’s position was becoming more and more precarious. Mahdist forces had been concentrating near Khartoum since May, which made evacuation of the city impossible. The main Mahdist army converged on the city in September and a month later the Mahdi took command of the siege. In the meantime, a 10,500- strong expeditionary force, commanded by Wolseley, had mustered and was beginning a cautious advance down the Nile. The press and the public saw the campaign as a race, but Wolseley, as ever, proceeded with care, in the knowledge that the desert had already swallowed up Hicks’s army.

By early January 1885, the advance guard of the army had reached Kurti, from where the Desert Column would move across the Bayuda desert to al Matamma. Here, a token detachment would embark on three steamers sent from Khartoum. At Gordon’s instructions, it was to contain some men in the traditional scarlet jackets rather than khaki in order to convince the Sudanese that the British really had arrived. The Mahdi, alarmed by the nearness of the relief force, ordered his generals to intercept the Desert Column at the wells of Abu Klea (Abu Tulayh).

What followed was a classic imperial battle. The British force of just over 1,000 men, many cavalrymen mounted on camels, had been told by the intelligence department not to expect serious resistance and was unaware of its opponent’s numbers and dedication. Its first sight of the enemy was the appearance of green, red and black banners, inscribed with Quranic texts, waving above a hidden ravine.

All of a sudden the banners were in motion towards us at a rapid pace led by spearmen on horseback. The enemy advanced against our square at a very rapid pace and in a dense black mass, keeping capital order.
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Skirmishers ran back to the square, which opened to receive them, making a gap through which some Dervishes surged. Infantrymen were unable to discern their attackers until the last moment, and sand and mechanical faults jammed machine-guns and rifles. Where the square had fractured there was ‘a mass of yelling men and camels – alive, dead and dying’.
9
What saved the day was the presence of mind of men on an unengaged side of the square, who turned about and fired volleys into the mêlée. The breach was then sealed and the attackers driven off. It was all over in less than twenty minutes, but casualties had been high and all involved were stunned by the ferocity and daring of the ansars.

Among the dead was Colonel Frederick Burnaby of the Blues, whose famous portrait by Tissot represents him as the embodiment of the elegant and devil-may-care insouciance which was the distinguishing mark of a perfect British officer. He would doubtless have approved of colleagues who remarked after the battle that it would have been awful to have been killed without knowing the results of the Derby.
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Burnaby had taken part in the fighting near Suakin a year before, when newspaper reports of his ‘potting’ Dervishes as if they had been partridges shocked left-wing Liberals and humanitarians. That Burnaby was also a Tory candidate for parliament probably added to their indignation.

Abu Klea aroused the imperial muse. In his ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt saw the battlefield as a testing ground for the virtues fostered on the public-school playing field:

The sand of the desert is sodden red, –

Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death had brimmed his banks,

And England’s far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

Kipling turned to the defeated. In his ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ (the soldiers’ nickname for Dervishes taken from the Hadanduwa tribesmen’s characteristic bushy hairstyle), he produced an imaginary Cockney soldier’s tribute to their reckless courage:

’E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,

An’ before we know, ’e’s ’ackin’ at our ‘ead;

’E’s all ’ot sand an’ ginger when alive,

An’ ’e’s generally shammin’ when ’e’s dead.

’E’s a daisy, ’e’s a ducky, ’e’s a lamb!

’E’s a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,

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