by Jan Morris
Beside that sacred ruin, on the Nile, the British sealed their victory with a requiem. Its altar was the Residency itself, upon whose surviving walls, their windows still barricaded with bricks and sandbags, the Union Jack was triumphantly hoisted, together with a very much smaller Egyptian flag. Moored at the bank were two of Kitchener’s gunboats, swirled in steam, and beside them were assembled men from every regiment and corps in the campaign—British guardsmen, Egyptians in white tarbooshes, pipers in sun-helmets and sporrans, dismounted cavalrymen holding their pennanted lances.2
Many celebrities of Empire were in the congregation, some already famous, some tipped for fame to come—Colonel Reginald Wingate, Kitchener’s brilliant intelligence chief, Colonel John Maxwell, the most promising younger officer of the Egyptian Army, young Douglas Haig, its most dashing cavalryman. Brigadier ‘Andy’ Wauchope of the Black Watch was there, ‘the pride of Scotland’. So was Lord Edward Cecil, the Prime Minister’s son and one of the wittiest men in the Empire. That faintly oriental figure in the front rank, with slit eyes and long moustaches, is the disturbing young firebrand Charles Townshend, hero of the Chitral siege on the Indian frontier; the young naval lieutenant who hoisted the Union Jack so reverently is C. M. Staveley, who is certain to go far; elbowing his way to a better view of the ceremony, we may be sure, is the most bumptious subaltern of the whole army, Lieutenant Winston Churchill.
And at the head of his men, ramrod stiff, one hand on the hilt of his curved scimitar, one booted foot raised upon a convenient boulder, Kitchener himself stood impassive and immaculate. A salute was fired by a gunboat at the quay.1 Three cheers for the Queen were called. As the solemn men’s voices sang the old words of ‘Abide with Me’, Gordon’s favourite hymn, to the uncertain harmonies of a Sudanese band, a tear was seen to roll down the Sirdar’s brown and flinchless cheek. ‘The sternness and harshness had dropped from him for the moment’, wrote one of the war correspondents, all of whom he despised, ‘and he was gentle as a woman.’ The parade had to be dismissed by the Chief of Staff, so incapacitated was the victor by his emotions.
When he returned to his camp at Omdurman across the river, though, General Kitchener was recalled at once to harsher realities. He knew that sacramental revenge was not the true purpose of the Army of the Nile. On the previous day he had opened sealed orders from London, to be read immediately after the capture of Khartoum. They required him to proceed at once still further up-river, to forestall any French annexation of the Upper Nile. Gordon had been given his memorial service, but a more truly imperial monument would be British control, once and for all, of the entire White Nile and its headwaters.
2
Britain’s was not the only European empire. Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, all had overseas possessions of their own. The chief arena of their ambitions was Africa, in which there was then proceeding the unlovely process of grab and self-justification known as the Scramble. Most of the imperial Powers were concerned with this free-for-all, and though it had been to some degree regulated by international agreement in 1885, still it was au fond an exercise in which few holds were barred. Black Africans, in those days, hardly counted as real people, and the idea of Europeans simply seizing African territories, to rule, improve or exploit them by their own methods, was generally considered quite justifiable. It was also perhaps inevitable, as the technical power of the West sought out, almost despite itself, vacuums and victims. Most of the Empire-building was peaceful anyway. Africans were persuaded into submission with promises or treaties, or awed into it with demonstrations. Sometimes they asked to be taken under imperial protection: only occasionally did they have to be bludgeoned.
The British had got the lion’s share. They had possessed footholds in West and South Africa for generations. By the 1890s they were also established in Egypt, Kenya and Uganda, and in the vaguely defined territories between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. They had gained their ends by a variety of means—diplomacy, economic pressure, deceit, gasconade. Sometimes they acted openly, sometimes conspiratorially, sometimes as servants of the Crown, sometimes as agents of commercial companies, sometimes in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, or even of his hypothetical overlord, the distant Sultan of Turkey.1
At the end of the century the general direction of their expansion was north-south. Their most remarkable activist, the South African financier Cecil Rhodes, foresaw a British axis running from Cairo to the Cape, fed by access lines to the coast east and west, and giving the Empire effective domination of the whole continent. Though this scheme was blocked for the moment by the presence of the Germans in Tanganyika, still the proposed railway line was already north of the Limpopo River at one end, south of the Egyptian frontier at the other: the first of its feeder lines, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, was nearly finished, and Kitchener had presciently built his Sudan railway to the South African gauge. Essential to the vision was British control of the whole Nile Valley, and to secure this without war was Lord Salisbury’s principal imperial purpose. ‘If you want to understand my policy in any part of the world,’ he said himself, ‘in Europe, Asia, Africa or the South Seas, you will have constantly to remember that.’
The French, who were the principal contenders for African mastery, thought transversely, east to west. Besides their large possessions in North Africa, they were strongly established on the Niger, in the west, and had an east-coast port at Djibouti, in Somaliland. They looked always across the continent, and they dreamed of uniting their eastern and their western footholds to establish their supremacy throughout Central Africa. This ambition clashed with the British, and took the two Empires on a collision course. By their occupation of Egypt the British had staked a claim to the whole Nile valley, and the further their forces advanced up the river, whether their purposes were sentimental, intuitive or purely practical, the less the French chances of a corridor across Africa.
The French overseas empire possessed a brilliance all its own, chiefly because of the extraordinary individuals who administered it in the field, but it had been weakly supported from France, where Governments succeeded each other in febrile succession, and it lacked the strong economic and technical base that gave the British Empire its power. Empire was a sideline for the French: between 1880 and 1889 Britain had seven different Ministers responsible for the Colonies, but France had twenty-one. In 1894, though, the formidable Gabriel Hanotaux became Foreign Minister, and for the first time the imperial urge in France was given a forceful and daring direction. Fortified by a new alliance with Russia, the French turned their eyes upon the Upper Nile. In Hanotaux’ opinion it belonged to nobody. The southern Sudan was in a state of rebellion, and any Power, or at least any civilized Power, had a right to step in. From their base at Brazzaville on the Congo, the outpost of their central African activities, the French set to work on a ‘drive to the Nile’, and the French Press openly discussed the chances of reaching its headwaters from the west or east before the British could get there from the north or south.
In 1893 a well-known French hydrologist, Victor Prompt, had suggested that the key to the control of the Nile valley might lie in the area, some 300 miles south of Khartoum, where the River Sobat joined the greater river. There was nothing much there except an isolated riverain fort called Fashoda, used by the Mahdists as a penal colony, and an attendant hamlet of the Shilluk tribespeople: but Prompt suggested that a dam there might effectively control the flow of water into Egypt. Since Egypt depended entirely upon the flow of the White Nile, control of Fashoda could mean command of Egypt: a French presence there, it was argued, could paralyse British activities down-river, and give the Quai d’Orsay an almost unanswerable bargaining power in Africa.
So as the British strengthened their hold on Egypt, and majestically advanced southwards through the Sudan, the French resolved to make a race of it, and prepared an expedition to travel from Brazzaville clean across Africa to the Upper Nile. Reports of the plan greatly disturbed the British. ‘The advance
of a French expedition … from the other side of Africa’, Sir Edward Grey of the Foreign Office had told the House of Commons, ‘into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long, would not merely be an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly clear to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England.’ The French responded merely by hastening their preparations, and in the summer of 1897, Jubilee summer in England, Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand of the French Marines set out to cross the continent and ‘establish French claims in the region of the Upper Nile’. He took with him 12 Frenchmen and 150 Senegalese riflemen, and his destination was Fashoda.
3
The day after the Khartoum memorial service, while Kitchener was still considering his secret orders, British outposts on the river south of the city intercepted a small steamer flying the crescent flag of the Mahdists. Its crew, who were unaware that Khartoum had fallen to the British, were taken ashore for questioning, and said they had been far up the Nile foraging for the Khalifa’s armies. Near the mouth of the Sobat, they said, they found a strange flag flying over the old fort at Fashoda, and had been fired upon by white men. Several of their crew had been killed.
The British interrogators were startled by this tale. Were the strange Europeans British, working down the Nile from Uganda, or were they foreigners? Wingate asked the Mahdist captain to draw in the sand the flag he had seen at Fashoda, and to describe its colours, and thus learnt that it was the French tricolour. So the French were there already! Five days later Kitchener sailed southward from Omdurman with five gunboats and a dozen barges, with 100 Cameron Highlanders and 2,500 Sudanese askari, with field guns and Maxims and Lord Edward Cecil, and orders to proceed at his own discretion, but to dislodge the French.
So one of history’s famous meetings came about. Purposeful up the Nile went the imperial flotilla, its trim little steamers in line ahead—Dal, Nasir, Sultan, Abu Klea, Fateh.1 Lashed alongside or towed behind were the barges that carried the troops, the Camerons lounging in the sunshine with sun-helmets over their faces, the askaris jostled, cheerful and sometimes breaking into song—‘Oh, them golden slippers’ was a particular favourite of the Sudanese. Kitchener wore civilian clothes, and spent much of his time sprawled on a deck-chair beneath an awning on the Dal, contemplating the baked brown landscape streaming by, or talking to Wingate and Edward Cecil. It was a week’s voyage from Omdurman to Fashoda, and the flotilla made good speed, the stern-wheels of its steamers frothing the muddy waters, the smoke from their funnels billowing far away downstream, to disperse hours later as a murky black cloud across the desert.
Sometimes great storks and cranes flapped away from their passage. Sometimes hippopotami emerged muddy from the swamp. At villages along the way notables flocked to the water’s edge to offer their submission, and intelligence officers went ashore to scribble them notes of pardon. It rained a lot as they sailed further south, the mosquitoes were terrible, and soon the steamers were labouring through the floating mass of decayed and pestilent vegetable matter called the Sudd. At night, though, when the cool descended over Africa, and the helmsmen looked along the banks for somewhere to tie up, marvellous sounds of beast, bird and whirring insect reached the men on board, and made them feel they were penetrating great mysteries (for not even the ship’s officers had been told why they were making this equatorial voyage).
Kitchener was a Francophile. He spoke fluent French, he liked the company of Frenchified women, he delighted in the French style of things. He would be reluctant to dislodge any French outpost by sheer force—there would be no primitive triumph at Fashoda, and Colonel Marchand’s skull ran no risk of immortality as a table ornament. But he did not know the strength of the French force, he had no idea how truculent it might be, and he decided to move cautiously. When they were about twelve miles from Fashoda two Sudanese orderlies were put ashore with a message addressed to the ‘Chef de l’expédition Européenne à Fashoda’. It announced the news of Omdurman, thus implicitly declaring the British to be suzerains of the Upper Nile, and said that General Kitchener hoped to be in Fashoda the following day. Kitchener signed it not as a British general, but as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, and at Wingate’s suggestion he ordered that only the Egyptian flag would be flown by the flotilla as they approached Fashoda, and that he and his officers would wear their Egyptian uniforms. The impact would be less pointed, and the suggestion of a clash between two great Empires less direct.
Next morning as the ships steamed slowly on, the lookouts saw approaching them a small rowing boat, flying at its stern an enormous tricolour, and carrying a black sergeant in French uniform. He brought a reply from Fashoda:
Man général, I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your letter dated 18 September 1898. I hear with the greatest pleasure of the occupation of Omdurman by the Anglo-Egyptian army, the destruction of the Khalifa’s hordes and the final defeat of Mahdism in the Nile Valley. I shall be the very first to present the sincere good wishes of France to General Kitchener, whose name for so many years has epitomized the struggles of civilization against the fanatical savagery of the Mahdists—struggles which are today successful. These compliments therefore I send with all respect both to you and to your valiant army.
This agreeable task completed, I must inform you that, under the orders of my government, I have occupied the Bahr-el-Ghazal as far as Mechra-er-Req and up to its confluence with the Bahr-el-Jebel, also all the Shilluk territory on the left bank of the Nile as far as Fashoda…. I signed a treaty on 3 September with Abd-ed-Fadil, their Reth, placing all the Shilluk country on the left bank of the White Nile under French protection…. I have forwarded this treaty to Europe, via the Sobat-Ethiopian route, also… by Mechra-Er-Req, where my steamer the Faidherbe is at the moment with orders to bring me such reinforcements as I judge necessary to defend Fashoda….
Again, I give you my good wishes for a happy visit to the Upper Nile. I also note your intention to visit Fashoda, where I shall be happy to welcome you in the name of France.
Signed MARCHAND
4
This engaging persiflage, full as it was of meaningless treaties, non-existent reinforcements and unenforceable claims, paved the way for a meeting between the two commanders, and later in the day, proceeding southwards through the desolation of the Sudd, the British sighted Fashoda. Forlornly above the rotted swamp, stretching away as far as the eye could see, the little fort stood half-derelict upon a peninsula, with a few conical huts of the Shilluk outside its walls, a group of palms, and a soggy garden of vegetables. It looked hot, wet and verminous, but the tricolour flew boldly above it, and at the water’s edge, as the gunboats approached, an honour guard of Frenchmen and Senegalese stood bravely at the salute. The British were touched by this show of pride, and by the defiant isolation of the fort. ‘It was a puny little thing’, one officer wrote in reminiscence. ‘Were we to be compelled to break it down?’
At this dismal spot the Empires met. Marchand and his men had reached it after a terrible overland journey, one of the most remarkable in the records of African travel, eight months on foot, three months in their leaky collapsible steamer, which they had dragged laboriously overland from the Niger to the Congo. Kitchener and his men had travelled there more magnificently, in the after-flush of a great victory. Marchand’s force was pale and emaciated, after months among the toads, insects and fevers of the Sudd. Kitchener stood on the foredeck of the Dal bronzed and bulky, his soldiers well-nourished at his back, his gunboats spick-and-span.
At midday, September 19, 1898, the commanders met on board the Dal. Kitchener wore his Sirdar’s regalia, with tarboosh. Marchand, a small bearded figure, wore no military insignia at all—wisely, perhaps, since he was only a captain. They sat with Wingate and Marchand’s adjutant on the deck, watched intently from shore and ship by officers with binoculars. Peace and war hung in the balance, and their conversation was tense. Sometimes, the watchers thought, the talk s
eemed less than amicable, and Marchand was to be seen gesturing angrily at the Sirdar—‘distinct signs of hostility’, reported a British colonel to his colleagues. Presently, though, a steward climbed up the ladder to the deck carrying a tray of glasses, ‘full of golden liquid’, and a moment later Kitchener and Marchand, raising their glasses, were clinking them in agreement and good wishes—in relief too, no doubt, as they sat there, half in shade, half in sunlight, on the deck of the little ship.
It had been a close thing. Kitchener had declared flatly that the episode might lead to a European war—did Marchand, with such stakes at issue, really mean to prevent the representatives of Egypt from hoisting the Egyptian flag over an Egyptian possession? Marchand replied that obviously he was powerless to prevent it, since he was outnumbered ten to one, but that without contrary orders from France he could not retire from his position, and that all his men could do, if Kitchener insisted, was to die at their posts. Proud of his achievement, prickly in his patriotism, he was undoubtedly ready to defend his awful fort to the end—he had a ‘terrible desire’, he later said, to rebuff Kitchener altogether: but he was awed despite himself by the imponderables at stake, and perhaps even by the presence of Kitchener, and so as the servant with his drinks began his precarious ascent of the upper-deck ladder, an accord was reached.
Marchand would not be ejected from his outpost, and the French flag would continue to fly there, pending orders from Europe. The British would establish their own garrison at a discreet but practical distance—500 yards to the south, on Marchand’s only line of retreat through the marshes. The British would formally take possession of the area, but in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, and only the Egyptian flag would fly above their own quarters. There the matter was left, in a compromise that seemed to protect everybody’s face, and would allow the two imperial Governments, far away, to achieve a solution.
