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:
Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
37 • 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:
In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realise what would come to meet them? They were in a dense mass, 2800 yards from the 32nd field battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery . . . They topped the crest and drew out into full view of the whole army. Their white banners made them conspicuous above all . . . Forthwith the gunboats, the 32nd British field battery, and other guns from the zeriba [a fortified camp] opened on them. About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid their ranks. The white banners toppled over in all directions . . . It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.
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 b
e 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.
38 • 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.
Kitchener then had a problem: what to do about the Mahdi’s bones. A European with little experience of the Middle East might have let them lie in their tomb in Khartoum. Kitchener knew better. The tomb was destroyed utterly. The naturally mummified corpse was taken. The head was dumped in kerosene – ‘for future disposal’, said the gruesome Kitchener. He had to be dissuaded from turning the skull into an ink-well. The rest of the bodily remains were cast into the Nile.
There is a strange symmetry to this act, as if Kitchener, despite his long association with the region, only half understood the mythic qualities of the river. We have seen that in ancient times, drowning in the Nile was thought to confer immortality. Casting the Mahdi’s bones into the river perhaps symbolized his rebirth, not his ultimate destruction. In 1947 his tomb was rebuilt by one of the Mahdi’s youngest sons; the dream of a purified Islamic state is still very much with us, long after Lord Kitchener remains best known for his impressive moustache and his demand that ‘Your country needs YOU’.
A good place to remember him is on his Nilotic island near Aswan, a gift to him from the Egyptian (read ‘British-backed’) government. The island is a menagerie, as Kitchener loved animals. It is located at the most symbolically important spot on the Nile, its navel in the ancient Egyptian world.
39 • Two gentlemen of Fashoda
‘Oh river what makes you cry out loud?’
‘The stones blocking my way!’
‘Oh stones what makes you rattle with anger?’
‘The running water pounding on us.’
Sudanese proverb
It was 1898 and Kitchener was busy trying to reconquer the Sudan. Meanwhile, Britain’s eternal enemies of the last millennium, the French, were busy with their own plans for world domination. They had somehow lost the Suez Canal, through the ineptitude of the Egyptian Khedive who had bankrupted the country, allowing the British to buy it up. They did not want to lose the Nile too. The French, in unconsidered moments, revealed their deeply held belief that, since Napoleon had been the first European to conquer the Nile, the Nile was de jure if not de facto French. Jan Potocki, the Polish Nile traveller who wrote in French and authored the Thousand and One Nights-like novel The Saragossa Manuscript (turned into a great 1960s movie – a favourite of Jerry Garcia and Martin Scorsese), mentions in his narrative Voyage in Turkey and Egypt that the French are a people of intellect, the Spanish a people of passion and the English a people of action. He implies that when these peoples attempt something outside their realm of expertise they become either inspired or ridiculous – an English passion, a Spanish theory, a French adventure. And the Fashoda Incident, as it came to be known, was a truly French adventure.
Yet they were also somewhat careful. They did not wish to offend the paper rulers of Egypt, the Turks, even as they wished to oust the force behind them, the English. The French, with their interests in west and central Africa, knew that control of the whole continent was about controlling the Nile. Churchill, in The River War, states wrongly that the Nile drains a quarter of Africa. The real figure is a tenth. But the exaggeration has a truth – the Nile controls a quarter of Africa, perhaps more. A look at the map will explain why: with the north blocked off by the Sahara, the control points on the Mediterranean are Gibraltar, already British, and Cairo. We have seen that controlling the Nile controls Cairo, and by extension the eastern Mediterranean and its most important exit to India and the East. But that is the Med; what about Africa? The centre of Africa has two exits, the Congo and the Nile – control both of these, and you control the centre. The French already had the Congo, but without the Nile they were limited to the western side of the continent. If you take in the Blue Nile and the White, truly the whole eastern half of Africa down to the Equator is within your purview – you have the water source and you have the means of transport.
Naturally the British hold on Egypt looked impregnable, but the Nile did not rise in Egypt. If the French could cut it off somewhere higher up they would achieve their objective like a prankster standing on a garden hose yards away from the bemused gardener holding the nozzle.
The British did not take any of this very seriously until Victor Prompt, a French hydrologist and friend of the French President, delivered a paper before the Institut Égyptien in Paris explaining how the Nile could be controlled by a dam at Fashoda, at the southernmost end of Sudan. ‘Egypt could be ruined,’ he said, by vengeful operation of this dam. And with the ruin of Egypt, or its threat, would return some measure of control over the Suez Canal.
The French, in a way that was truly romantic (and an intellectual, when he turns to adventure, is always a romantic), decided to send an expedition to cut off the Nile and claim it for France. The expedition would leave French territory in Gabon, traverse the most inhospit able parts of central Africa to arrive at the Nile at Fashoda. The man th
ey sent was Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who would make a river journey across Africa the equal of Stanley’s and yet would leave the continent a failure, a blackguard, a mountebank and a usurper.
Jean-Baptiste Marchand was born in 1863, the eldest of five children. His father was a cabinet maker, not a rich man, and Jean-Baptiste left school at thirteen to become a junior copying clerk to a local lawyer, employed chiefly because of his round, clear handwriting. Jean-Baptiste had a broad forehead, wide but deep-set eyes and a small, undistinguished-shaped head, but his gaze, reportedly, was intense; his nickname in the army was, not surprisingly, ‘John the Baptist’. For six years he laboured as a copyist, all the time subject to intense ‘visions’ of a future exploring Africa. He idolised the great explorers – Baker, Burton, Speke, Stanley, especially Stanley, all of them British. He was religious, yet sought inspiration in all religions. At one point he was so taken with Islam that he dressed and lived as a pious Muslim.
With the help of his lawyer boss he gained admission to the Marine Infantry, which offered the best chance of being sent to Africa. After three years in the ranks, in France, his burning ambition and great competence were recognised: he received a commission. Finally he was sent to Africa, landing at Dakar in February 1888. He was twenty-five years old – not bad going. For all those who insist that access is denied to those that seek entrance to the hallowed halls of professions usually monopolised by the rich and entitled, there are all these counterexamples littering the annals of exploration: Stanley, Petherick, Marchand, Livingstone (Livingstone had worked at thirteen in a weaving mill, yet by taking night classes he gained enough of an education to become a doctor). What characterised them all was an intense desire to go to Africa.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 43
