The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Gordon’s Imperial Rule

  “If you would rule over native peoples, you must love them.”

  General Gordon, quoted in John Pollock, Gordon of Khartoum: An Extraordinary Soldier (Christian Focus, 2005), p. 192

  For the next four years he was an officer with, in essence, a roving independent commission. He was offered a colonial military appointment in South Africa, work in the Congo by the king of Belgium, and the position of private secretary to Lord Ripon, governor-general of India, which he accepted but resigned almost as soon as he started. He launched his own diplomatic peace initiative in China, traveled in Ireland to study the Irish question (and was entirely sympathetic to the Irish peasants), was free with political and military advice in letters to The Times (he loathed Disraeli for supporting the Turks against the Greeks and because Gordon thought the Tories were more concerned with penny-pinching than empire-building; but the anti-imperialist Liberals were hardly better), was assigned as chief of engineers on Mauritius (where he developed some interesting theories on the Garden of Eden, which he located in the Seychelles), and saw diplomatic service in Basutoland. He spent a year on leave in the Holy Land where he mapped, to his own satisfaction, the actual sites of many Biblical events, and then finally accepted the Belgian king’s renewed offer of governing the Congo. But the British government had other ideas.

  In the Sudan, a religious visionary of fanatical aspect, Mohammed Ahmed, styling himself the Mahdi, had declared a jihad against all who stood against him. His dervishes swept across the country as the sword of Islam and slaughtered an Egyptian army led by a British officer, General (in Egyptian rank) William Hicks. The British government, which had taken responsibility for Egypt and the Sudan, had to do something, and that something, it was decided, was to withdraw from the Sudan as quickly as possible. The press, however, was clamoring for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan. Over the skepticism of Sir Evelyn Baring, British Consul-General in Cairo (who had experience of Gordon), Prime Minister William Gladstone, and even Lord Granville, the foreign secretary who had proposed the idea, it was decided to send Gordon to report on the military situation in the Sudan and how best to evacuate the Europeans and Egyptians. Though it was impossible to believe Gordon would merely file a report, he had proven a remarkable power over native peoples, and it was hoped he might achieve a face-saving exit.

  St. Charlie

  “Gordon was the nearest approach to a saint that I have met in a long life, in spite of his many mistakes.”

  Field Marshal Sir (Henry) Evelyn Wood, quoted in Bryon Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 124

  Reappointed as governor-general, he entered Khartoum in February 1884 to the hosannas of the Sudanese; their miracle-worker had come. He had, however, let slip that the Egyptian government might abandon the Sudan, which cost him the support of wavering Sudanese leaders, who plumped for making their peace with the Mahdi. To regain some of their support, Gordon affirmed he would not abolish slavery. This brought cheers from influential Sudanese—and cries of disbelief from Gordon’s anti-slavery supporters in Britain. In addition, he abolished taxes for two years and promised an end to the heavy-handed ways of the Egyptians, burning debt books and whips, and freeing prisoners. He came as a liberator, “without soldiers, but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sudan.”9

  Having failed to buy off the Mahdi with an offer of making him ruler of a Sudanese province, Gordon immediately set to planning how he could defend Khartoum and “smash up” the dervishes. Though his request for British troops was denied, he assured the people that a relief expedition would be on the way.10 The Mahdi meanwhile was picking off Egyptian forts and setting a noose around Khartoum. By March he was shelling the city and by May he had cut off any hope for an evacuation along the Nile by capturing Berber.

  Gordon used his considerable skills as a military engineer and tactician to strengthen Khartoum’s defenses with ditches, mines, and gunboats. With his flair for drama and his taste for perpetual action, Gordon remained an inspiring figure to the Sudanese: facing an empty treasury, he designed and signed his own banknotes; he burst open the stores of grain merchants who had hid their wares to reap greater profits; he set up a system of relief for the starving poor; he sent troops sallying into the desert to smite the besiegers; and he worked endlessly to rally morale. He capitalized on his own famous lack of fear: “When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me. Go, tell the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear.”11

  But even Gordon knew time was running out. On 14 December 1884, he wrote, “Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men,12 does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country.”13 With Garnet Wolseley’s relief force fighting its way up the Nile, the Mahdi almost gave up the siege, until he was informed of a weak point in the city’s defenses—a point that Gordon had ordered repaired, but that the exhausted, starving Egyptian troops had left vulnerable. On 26 January 1885, the three hundred and twentieth day of the siege of Khartoum, the dervishes struck full force against the city. They burst through the weak point, slaughtering all in their path. When they finally reached the palace of Gordon Pasha he stood before them, armed with a sword and a revolver, at the top of a flight of stairs. There was a sudden silence as the horde looked at the calm figure who had kept them at bay so long. A dervish broke the silence shouting, “O cursèd one, your time has come!” and hurled a spear into Gordon’s chest. “His only reply was a gesture of contempt. Another spear transfixed him; he fell, and the swords of three Dervishes . . . instantly hacked him to death.”14 Gordon’s head was severed, presented to the Mahdi, and then made the sport of birds.

  The relief expedition arrived two days too late. Gladstone was blamed—not just in popular opinion but by Queen Victoria: “To think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.”15 But Gordon would be avenged. Although it would come more than a decade later, the retaliatory sword would be wielded by another stalwart imperialist of piercing blue eye: the perfect recruiting poster, Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert (as he then was) Kitchener.

  Chapter 17

  HERBERT KITCHENER, 1ST EARL KITCHENER (1850–1916)

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

  —Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on Kitchener1

  With 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 Ireland2—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).

  * * *

  Did you know?

  The tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Kitchener could, and did, pass for an Arab

  Kitchener collected porcelain and objets d’art

  He was one of the few who predicted that the First World War would be a long, bloody struggle

  * * *

  He received further training—and went on junkets to Austria and Germany—before gaining an assi
gnment 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.

  Secret Agent in the Sudan

  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.

  Omdurman

  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.

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p; 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.