The rioters moved on to Frank Street and the marina. Clubbing and stabbing to death any Europeans they found, they robbed, stripped, and mutilated the corpses, then tipped them into the sea and fought the Mustafezzin for their valuables. Returning from the marina, H. P. Ribton, his two friends, and his five-year-old daughter were pushed back toward the mob by police bayonets. The three men were beaten to death trying to prevent the child’s abduction. A policeman carried her away on his shoulder, but a friendly sheikh who heard her screams saved her and hid her in his house. As Europeans commandeered carriages and raced for the harbor, the mob pulled them down and attacked them, stabbing a Greek sea captain and shooting a Frenchman. They beat up five tars from HMS Superb with naboots, stabbing one to death, and attacked merchant sailors from the SS Tanjore. When a soldier helped one of them to a police station, the policeman at the gate took out his sword, split the sailor’s skull with his first stroke, and decapitated him with his second.
Three hours passed before Osman Lutfi Pasha requested military assistance. When he did, the commanders of the seven thousand soldiers in the Alexandria barracks refused to move without orders from Minister Urabi, and he wanted to demonstrate that only the army could prevent the collapse of Egypt. Three more hours passed. At six in the evening, the troops finally marched out and took up position outside the European consulates. The mob melted away, leaving empty streets littered with bodies and wreckage. Most of the forty-nine corpses in the hospital morgue carried wounds from Mustafezzin bayonets.
Forty years a sailor, Admiral Seymour fumed impotently as the smoke rose in the eye of his telescope and the boats ferried survivors back to his warships. The rioters had killed Strackett, too.49
“BUTCHERED UNDER THE very guns of the fleet, which had never budged an inch to save them!” Lord Salisbury, now leader of the Opposition, blamed Gladstone for the riot. The British press unanimously denounced the massacre as an insult to national dignity: An Arab mob had slaughtered innocent Europeans and beaten a consular agent in the street. But the most alarming response came from within Gladstone’s cabinet. Led by Lord Hartington at the War Office, the Whigs rebelled. “Harty-Tarty” threatened to resign and bring down the government.50
“I am afraid that we are going to give in and submit to a total defeat in Egypt,” Hartington warned. “I do not think that I can stomach this.”51
The Radicals split. John Bright, a Quaker pacifist and Free Trade purist, opposed force on principle. But the younger Radicals joined their Whig rivals in the revolt. Joseph Chamberlain, president of the Board of Trade, warned that “a military adventurer” like Urabi meant “bankruptcy and anarchy” for Egypt. Sir Charles Dilke, the undersecretary for war, raised the strategic fear of a Suez Canal blocked by Islamic nationalists.52
Gladstone faced a decision that revolved around the essence of Britain’s Egyptian policy, and the incarnation of everything he loathed about imperialism: the Suez Canal. Although he had derided it to the voters of Midlothian, Gladstone knew that the Canal was vital to Britain. British steamers carried 70 percent of the Canal’s traffic. Their cargoes weighed over a hundred million metric tons and were worth over £65 million to the British economy. Gladstone had three options: to surrender the Canal to the Egyptians; to protect its neutrality through annexation by the Concert; or to protect it unilaterally by British arms. Having overcome his initial conviction that the Egyptian rebellion was a genuine national movement, Gladstone discarded the first option with a clean conscience.53
For three weeks, he tried the second option. The sultan refused to help. While Abdul Hamid II agreed to host a Concert summit at Constantinople, he blocked any fruitful outcome. Instead of condemning Urabi as a rebel, the sultan honored him with Turkey’s highest honor, the Grand Cordon of Medjidieh and, via Dervish Pasha, offered him a monthly pension of £250. The French turned on Gladstone, too. De Freycinet did not want to spark a reaction in France’s Arab colonies. He refused to take part in any punitive action at Alexandria, or to commit troops to the inevitable land expedition. Instead, he secretly tried to draw Urabi to France, by doubling the sultan’s offer to £500 a month.54
Urabi had no way back: Tawfik and Omar Lutfi Pasha had steered the riot and made him look like a crude xenophobe. He had no way to turn: On one side, Dervish Pasha squeezed him in a treacherous Turkish embrace, and on the other, European gunboats took aim at Alexandria. Only the forward path remained: the narrowing tracks of nationalism and Islam. Urabi broke out stores of rifles stocked up by Khedive Ismail for the day of his independence from Turkey. He accelerated the fortification of Alexandria and laid plans to sabotage the Suez Canal. Writing to Gladstone, he threatened that if British ships fired on Alexandria, he would confiscate all European property, cancel the Dual Control, disown the debt, destroy the Canal, and cut the telegraph connecting Britain to India. Then he would ignite the Islamic world against the British and Ottoman empires.
“Use will be made of the religious zeal of Mohammedans, to preach a holy war in Syria, in Arabia, and in India,” Urabi wrote to Gladstone. “Egypt is held by Mohammedans as the key to Mecca and Medina, and all are bound by their religious law to defend these holy places and the ways leading to them.
“I repeat again and again, that the first blow struck at Egypt by England or her allies will cause blood to flow throughout the breadth of Asia and of Africa.
“England may rest assured that we are determined to fight, to die martyrs for our country, as has been enjoined on us by our Prophet; or else to conquer, and so live independently.”55
Gladstone had no choice but his third option. Admiral Seymour reported up to ten thousand Egyptian soldiers on the fortifications of Alexandria, strengthening the defenses and dragging up heavy cannon. As the Channel squadron steamed south to join Seymour, Egypt’s Europeans crammed onto boats and trains, desperate to escape. British consular staff evacuated Egypt on a P&O steamer, led by the stricken Cairo consul Sir Edward Malet, who suspected that the Urabists had poisoned him. As the Egyptian post offices closed and the Eastern Telegraph Company withdrew its staff and instruments to British ships, communication with India became interrupted. In London, the Stock Exchange fell.
Gladstone insisted he would be “no party” to unilateral annexation, “an act full of menace to the future peace of the world.” But the War Ministry and the Admiralty kept up the pressure: Either Urabi would annex the Canal, or the French would buy him out, and Egypt with him.
“My brain is very weary,” Gladstone admitted in his diary. At dawn on July 10, Admiral Seymour gave Urabi twenty-four hours to surrender, or face bombardment. Gladstone hoped that a little gunboat diplomacy would persuade Urabi to back down. He felt certain that the rebels would not dare to breach the Canal’s neutrality. To do so would make “the whole world their enemies.” It was “improbable that they meditate or desire such a course, unless under the most desperate extremities.” Which was where he had placed Urabi.56
THE MORNING OF JULY 11 was bright and clear, the sea still and glassy. At dawn a gentle northwest wind rustled the leaves of the acacia trees in what remained of Place Mehmet Ali. Sudanese house slaves squatted at their owners’ gates, city employees watered the streets, and Bedouin women from the country sold fresh milk to the soldiers who had passed the night on benches and doorsteps. The clock of St. Catherine’s church struck seven.
As the chimes faded, a single blast issued from the harbor, followed by a wild shriek and a second blast that shook the city. Smoke issued from the burning barracks of the Ras el-Tin palace. Admiral Seymour had run out of patience.
His order was simple. “Attack the enemy’s batteries.”
A mile from the shore, the fleet steamed back and forth, firing constantly at the batteries in perfect shooting weather. The Egyptian gunners, many exposed on open ramparts, blasted back an irregular response. The harbor filled with gunsmoke and the air sang with shellfire. With each hit on the defenses, gouts of debris as tall as the Pharos lighthouse spouted into
the air. The forts were made of soft limestone, with sand parapets coated in cement. Their French architects had built them to resist cannonballs, not the eighty pounds of high explosive in each shell fired by the Inflexible’s four guns.
Yet each time the dust cleared, the Egyptian gunners crawled back to their places and reloaded. Their firing was not all wild. They blew a hole ten feet by four just above the Superb’s waterline. They holed the mainmast and funnel of the Sultan. When the Alexandra sailed too close, they landed twenty-four direct hits, leaving five-inch-deep dents in her armor plating. One shell exploded by the ship’s sheep pen, another blew up the captain’s cabin, and a third landed fizzing at the feet of Gunner Israel Harding, then standing at the entrance to the magazine and its twenty-five tons of gunpowder. Harding picked up the shell—“It was heavy, hot and grimy”—and dropped it in a bucket of water. He won the Victoria Cross.57
The fleet’s bombardment was unrelenting. Stray British shells burst all over the city, hitting the Ras el-Tin harem, the German Consulate, the police headquarters, several schools, a convent, a synagogue, and many private houses. At 1400, with the gunners on the walls either killed by direct hits or fleeing their stations, Seymour dispatched a landing party to spike the guns of the westernmost fort. But by then, the populace had realized that the British only intended to bombard the harbor forts, and not the city behind them.
“Death to the Christians!” went up again. Children beating petroleum tins paraded down the Rue Sharif Pasha beneath a green flag, calling on Allah and his Prophet. Looters, arsonists, and angry soldiers descended on the European quarter. With stray shells exploding around them, they attacked shop shutters and doors with hammers. They threw petroleum-soaked cloths into the houses, or stacked mattresses in the doorways, burning alive the inhabitants or killing them if they tried to flee. By 1600, the British Consulate was on fire. By 1715, when Admiral Seymour called “Cease fire,” the European quarters and Ismail’s avenues had gone up in smoke.58
Omar Lutfi Pasha ordered the inhabitants to quit the city. A tide of people struggled through the Rosetta and Moharrem Bey gates, some in stolen carriages, others lugging mirrors, sofas, and gilt chairs. Bedouin gathered outside the gates to rob the fugitives. The open space before the city walls turned into a mass of looters, brawling over the spoils. When the women and children of the royal harem arrived, all turned on them, hacking off hands and ears to get at the khedive’s jewelry. Behind them, Alexandria went up in smoke.
The fire took two days to burn out. When Admiral Seymour’s marines ventured a landing, they found devastation. Decomposing bodies bobbed in the harbor and swelled in the streets. The damage ran into millions. The entire European Quarter had been destroyed, and five consulates lay in ruins. In Place Mehmet Ali, where only the equestrian statue had survived the flames, looters scavenged in smoldering rubble. Seymour appointed Lord Charles Beresford, captain of the Condor, as Alexandria’s temporary chief of police. Bluejackets armed with Gatling guns took over the city. When they caught a Sudanese slave looting in Place Mehmet Ali, they tied him to a tree and shot him. Order had returned.59
“The fire is a sad misfortune,” admitted Gladstone. He tried to persuade the sultan that the bombardment had “made a clear way” for Turkish troops, but no troops were offered. The French did not help, either. At least the cabinet had held together. Only John Bright followed his Quaker conscience and resigned. Yet though the bombardment had eased tensions in Downing Street, it had worsened the situation in Egypt. The rebels refused to surrender, and Gladstone’s imperial adventure moved to its second phase. Britain had gone in alone, and had to finish the job alone. It was time to send in the troops.60
“Instructions to Wolseley: Put down Arabi and establish Khedive’s power.”61
6
The Wind and the Whirlwind
1883
Adjutant General Sir Garnet Wolseley.
I have always been ambitious, and thought that the higher I mounted the military ladder, the better I should serve the idol I have worshipped since I was capable of understanding what love of country meant. To see England great is my highest aspiration, and to lead in contributing to that greatness is my only real ambition.
—Adjutant General Sir Garnet Wolseley, 18821
ON THECalabria with a cargo of Guardsmen and a heavy cold, Sir Garnet Wolseley rested in his cabin. He had picked up a chill while paying a farewell visit to the queen at Osborne Castle on the Isle of Wight. On the way back to London, it had turned into a fever. For several days Britain’s favorite warrior lay bedridden, worrying that his rivals at the Admiralty might take over the Egyptian expedition. Escaping his sickbed as the fever broke, he had planned to take the speedier route, across Europe by train to catch a steamer at Marseilles. But the doctors had forced him to take the restful but tedious sea route all the way to Egypt.
Their representative on the Calabria was a rotund, red-faced pipesmoker in a too-tight uniform. He inspected the Wolseley bowel movement and sentenced the patient to a light diet and complete rest. For lunch, Sir Garnet ate the grapes Lady Louisa had given him as he had left London. He tried not to think of his “Dearest Loo”—“My eyes fill unpleasantly when I do”—but as the doctor had restricted brainwork to “light literature,” he had little else to contemplate as the Calabria chugged south. Although the Wolseley brain possessed advanced faculties for romance, sentiment, and the Savoy operas, it relished most the heavy mechanics of military strategy, and the glory of their skillful execution.2
Slight and sprightly, with a blind eye from the Crimea and a temper like grapeshot, Garnet Wolseley was a self-made legend. As a boy, he had studied “every work on the theory and practice of war” he could “beg, borrow or afford to buy.” As a young officer, he had been wounded in Burma and blown up at Sebastopol. He had fought the Mutiny in India and the Taiping rebels in China. In Canada, he had organized an expedition up the Red River against French rebels, conquering the “Mississippi of the North” with Canadian voyageurs and the rebels by logistical diligence. In the Ashanti campaign of 1874 and the Zulu War of 1879, Wolseley had found glory in Africa, clearing up the accidents of “forward” policy and leaving a trail of dead Africans.3
The public adored the peppery Jingoist whom Disraeli called “our only General.” He was “The Man Who Wouldn’t Stop,” the fireman of empire, dousing border conflagrations with irregular warfare. His Soldier’s Hand Book in War became the vade mecum of the ambitious officer out to chastise the natives on a tight budget. Everything was “All Sir Garnet,” said his soldiers: in strict order. Gilbert and Sullivan lampooned the Wolseley method in The Pirates of Penzance. 4
I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical,
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.5
Wolseley’s life was a pincer assault on the heights of glory, edging along the narrow paths of patriotism and promotion while treachery massed at his back. In his mind, the enemies of Britain lurked everywhere: Boers and blacks in Africa, mullahs and Russians in Afghanistan, Fenians in Ireland, Jews in the banks, Radicals in the streets, and not forgetting the French. The army had to prepare for the defense of the empire, but a coalition of high-ranking snobs and penny-pinching Radicals cut its ranks and funds. To save it, Wolseley was prepared even to pander to the man he loathed as the chief Radical, William Gladstone.
Gladstone’s first ministry of 1868 had used the Crimean fiasco as a pretext for army reform. To create an efficient, professional army, Lord Cardwell, the secretary for war, had cut back the bureaucratic weeds and rooted out the sale of commissions. But Cardwell had left the upper branches unpruned. Queen Victoria insisted that her obese cousin the Duke of Cambridge remain commander-in-chief, and she rejected Cardwell’s request to create a meritocratic General Staff.
Though Wolseley despised Gladstone, he valued army reform a
s a means of strengthening the empire. He campaigned ceaselessly to oust the duke of Cambridge, the “Great German Sausage.” He intrigued at the War Office and whispered to the press. Cannily identifying the new staff college of Sandhurst as the “Grand Key” to promotion, he built up a circle of ambitious young officers: the “Wolseley Ring,” a party within the army.6
The strategy of subversion backfired. Queen Victoria objected to the upstart general’s vendetta against her cousin. Liberal politicians recoiled from his loud trumpeting of military answers to political questions. The Duke of Cambridge deprived Wolseley and his friends of the greatest prizes, high ranks in the India command. By 1882, Wolseley’s star had ceased to rise. In a rare moment of harmony, Queen Victoria and Gladstone both distrusted him. Defeat at the hands of Afghans, Boers, and Zulus embarrassed the reformed army and tarnished the brilliance of the Wolseley Ring. The Egyptian expedition represented Wolseley’s best and final chance of salvaging the twin destinies of the British Empire and the Wolseley career.
While Gladstone had fought his rearguard action against his cabinet, Wolseley had planned every detail of his campaign. He took no chances, insisting on the latest artillery, twenty-four thousand soldiers from Britain, and a further seven thousand from India. The shortest route to Cairo—from Alexandria—was heavily defended, so he would take the longer but safer route. From Ismailia on the Suez Canal, Cairo lay one hundred miles across the crunchy sand of the Eastern Desert. He would use Ismail’s railway to resupply his troops, and the Sweetwater Canal to sustain his horses. En route he would smash the Egyptian army and silence his domestic foes. To Lady Louisa, he confided, “I long for a real success to make the world feel that England has a lot left in her, and that her soldiers’ strength and courage is unaffected by the influence of Radicalism.”7
Three Empires on the Nile Page 16
