Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  On the Calabria, the general ate an invalid’s supper of fried sole and a bowl of jelly. He thought of his little daughter Frances, and the gifts he had promised her when he returned in triumph: a little pony, and the tip of Urabi’s nose, cut off with the Wolseley pocket knife.

  WHILE THE FIRES of Alexandria still burned, Urabi sent four hundred soldiers to surround Khedive Tawfik at his al-Raml palace by the city gates. Tawfik bribed his way out and defected to a British warship, taking Dervish Pasha with him. Almost all the notables backed the khedive, some congregating in Alexandria under Admiral Seymour’s guns, others fleeing to Istanbul. The government collapsed. In the Delta, mobs of homeless Alexandrians attacked Jews and Christians, and fellahin tore up their contracts with the government’s Greek moneylenders.

  Urabi declared martial law. He told all ministers and officers to ignore their superiors and the khedive, and to report to him only. He formed a General Council of fourteen soldiers and administrators, and ran the country from a nightly meeting in the War Ministry. To ensure the people’s loyalty, Urabi canceled all debts owed by fellahin to the government. Then he sent orders to the countryside, requisitioning all mules and horses and enlisting twenty-five thousand new recruits. The government Gazette announced a jihad against the British, quoting the Prophet: Truly Allah has purchased a Believer’s life and possessions so that he may attain Paradise fighting for Allah’s religion. Abdullah Nadim, Afghani’s protégé turned Urabi’s secretary, launched a propaganda campaign. In al-Taif, he accused the British of plotting to seize Mecca. In the countryside, he sent Urabist preachers to rouse the fellahin: Islam was in danger, and Urabi’s party was the Hizb Allah, the Party of God. The mosques took up the call at Friday prayers. The momentous, millennarian events promised by the comet that heralded the turn of the Islamic century appeared to be coming true.8

  Next, Urabi dispensed with the Chamber of Notables. He summoned seventy of Egypt’s most influential nobles, merchants, religious leaders, and civil servants to an emergency meeting at the Interior Ministry. With hours to go before Ramadan began, only a handful of notables attended. Debate was furious and brief. The rebels quickly outflanked the rump of Tawfik supporters by claiming the supreme sanction of religion. Before the meeting even opened, Sheikh el-Ullaish of al-Azhar had called for jihad against the infidel trespassers, and his ally Sheikh al-Idwi had made the case for Tawfik’s deposition.

  “What say you of a Sovereign who, being named by the Commander of the Faithful to govern his subjects with justice, and to act according to the rules of Allah, has violated the compact and sown dissension among the Muslims, and has broken their staff of unity?”9

  Once chairman Mohammed Abdu called the meeting to order, two Turkish notables tried to speak for the khedive and caution, but army officers shouted them down. Sheikh el-Ullaish spoke again for jihad, and this time Mohammed Abdu stood up and demanded the overthrow of Tawfik in the name of Islam and Egypt. Then he called for a vote.

  Although the soldiers and clerics wanted war, the nobles, civil servants, and merchants were in no hurry to fight Britain, the sultan, and his appointed deputy the khedive. They voted for compromise: Military preparations should continue, but as the khedive’s position was still unclear, no decision should be made on his future until he had been consulted. The meeting deputed a commission to go to Alexandria.10

  With Admiral Seymour on his side Khedive Tawfik felt no need to negotiate his own demise. Rejecting the commission as illegitimate, he responded to Urabi’s impertinence by sacking him as minister for war. The sultan backed him: Urabi must cease from challenging the Ottoman order, and must repair the damage he had caused by rebelling against it. The sultan and the khedive had both profited by Urabi’s revolt, but now he was on his own.11

  Urabi hid the sultan’s letter from all but the General Council. Abdullah Nadim wanted to publish it in al-Taif, to show that the sultan had betrayed Islam as cravenly as Tawfik had. But Urabi would not let him. Although Urabi posed as a nationalist, he knew that Egyptian nationalism was strongest among the new elite: intellectuals, army officers, and wealthy Turks. The fellahin came out in support of Islam, not Egypt. If they discovered that their revolt no longer acted in the name of Islam and its caliph, they might abandon Urabi. So while Urabi continued to claim to have the sultan’s support, and continued to endorse “Ottomanism,” he worked toward another end: the establishment of a revolutionary government.

  Calling provincial governors and officers to Cairo, he held a second, larger meeting at the Interior Ministry. Ali al-Rubi, founder of the secret Strong Egypt group that had seeded of the officers’ revolt, raged passionately against the British and the khedive. To support Urabi was to support resistance and patriotism, and to defend Islam and Egypt. Who could oppose the cause of Allah?

  The meeting did not dare to. It voted to ignore the khedive’s orders, and to pass all authority to Urabi and his General Council. Soldiers posted at the doors made sure that everyone signed its declaration, sent to Constantinople in the name of “the Egyptian people” and “Islamic-Ottoman Egypt.”12

  Now a military dictator, Urabi dug in for war. Like Wolseley, he saw there were two likely routes to Cairo: from Alexandria, and from the Suez Canal. Urabi pulled his troops back from Alexandria, blocked the Mahmoudiya Canal, the city’s only supply of drinking water, and cut its telegraphic and postal links with Cairo. While his headquarters at Kafr Dawar blocked the Alexandria-Cairo road, the capital’s eastern flank lay exposed. Urabi suspected that the British would breach the Canal’s neutrality; their warships had already been sighted off Suez, where they were poised to plug the Canal’s southern exit. He and his generals had identified four points at which to block the Canal to all traffic, commercial and military. On August 16, Urabi’s generals informed him that Wolseley had arrived at Alexandria, and they advised that he block the Canal preemptively. Urabi ignored them. He had the word of Ferdinand de Lesseps that the British would observe the Canal’s neutrality.

  When de Lesseps had heard that his greatest creation was in danger, he had hurried to Egypt and mounted a one-man diplomatic campaign. He assured Urabi that France would prevent Britain from using the Canal for military purposes. Urabi, whose vanity had grown in tandem with his authority, believed him.

  Unlike Wolseley, Urabi had little battle experience and no training in modern warfare. Instead of blocking the Canal—and forcing the British to advance along the difficult, easily defended road from Alexandria—he cabled de Lesseps that he would not be the first to breach the Canal’s neutrality.

  Instead, he fortified the chokepoint of the Ismailia-Cairo road at Tel el-Kebir, where a military camp sat on a mile-wide wedge of elevated land, with the Sweetwater Canal to its south and soft sand dunes to its north. He expanded its defenses, digging trenches and artillery emplacements. His plan was to hold up the British, and force the Concert to intervene by sending Turkish troops who would be more likely to sympathize with their fellow Muslims than with the British. While Urabi waited, he spent more time consulting with Islamic ideologues from as far afield as Algeria and Tunisia than he did with his generals. Among his reading was a Mahdist handbook expounding the necessity of jihad against non-Muslims who had invaded Dar al-Islam. Even Blunt, his avid publicist, admitted, “Much of the time which he should have given to the secular duty of organizing the defense was wasted with them in chants and recitations.” Urabi did find time, however, to treble his private landholdings.13

  Wolseley did not take the bait at Alexandria. He had planned to bypass the city entirely, but Admiral Seymour’s “criminal” bombardment obliged him to land and split his forces, in case Urabi made a move on the city from Kafr Dawar. On August 18, Wolseley took ship with the rest of his troops. Under cover of darkness, he raced for the Canal.14

  When de Lesseps heard that the British were coming, he cabled Urabi grandly, “Take no action towards blocking my Canal. I am there.” With no grounds for the claim, de Lesseps added, “Not a single Bri
tish soldier will embark without the company of a French soldier. I take full responsibility.”15

  Urabi wanted to believe him. But in a war council at Kafr Dawar, his generals overruled him.

  “Sincere thanks,” they replied. “Assurances consolatory, but not sufficient under existing circumstances. The defence of Egypt requires the temporary destruction of the Canal.”16

  That night, Urabi sent an order to Ismailia for the dynamiting of ships in the Canal. With the telegraph interrupted by the revolution, his message took fifteen hours to travel from Kafr Dawar to Cairo to Ismailia. By then, British warships had moved up from Suez and into the Canal’s southern reaches. At the northern mouth of the Canal, residents of Port Said woke in the small hours to musket fire and the rumble of artillery in the streets. By dawn, the people of Ismailia found their town seized by Wolseley’s soldiers.

  AT KHARTOUM the new governor-general, Abd al-Qadir Hilmi Pasha, received an order from Khedive Tawfik: He must ignore all communications from War Minister Urabi. Shortly afterward, Urabi told Hilmi Pasha to ignore the khedive’s orders. Neither offered Hilmi Pasha the reinforcements he had requested.17

  Tawfik and Urabi used the Mahdi’s revolt against each other. Tawfik wanted to grant Hilmi Pasha his reinforcements; he wanted to draw Urabi’s troops away from the Delta. Urabi refused to send them. He would do nothing that might help Tawfik, and he needed all his troops in Egypt, to fight the British, and to “maintain internal security.” Urabi underestimated the Mahdist threat. Unlike Tawfik, he should have known better. Mohammed Rauf Pasha, the previous governor-general of Sudan, had resurfaced as a member of Urabi’s revolutionary cabinet, the General Council.18

  To win over Hilmi Pasha, Urabi sent telegrams describing imaginary victories over the British. Hilmi Pasha could not tell if he served an Ottoman monarchy or a nationalist republic, but when he read Urabi’s claim that the Alexandria batteries had sunk the entire British fleet, he burst out laughing. Declaring for Tawfik and the Turks, the governor-general proceeded with the only possible strategy. He tried to take the war to the Mahdi without risking a military expedition.

  Hilmi Pasha abandoned the Kordofan countryside to the rebels and fortified its garrison towns. He strengthened the walls of Khartoum, digging a ditch around its southern flank, and patrolled its streets with soldiers. He gave a year’s tax relief to tribes that stayed loyal to the government, and offered them blood money: two pounds for a member of the Ansar, eighteen pounds for a sheikh. He hired assassins to attempt to kill the Mahdi with bullets and poisoned dates, and asked Tawfik to organize a letter bomb that might blow up in the Mahdi’s hands.19

  Although he could not take the war to Kordofan, Hilmi Pasha did take it to the Mahdi’s theological territory. Handwritten Mahdist propaganda seeped constantly from southern Kordofan. To counter it, Hilmi Pasha mobilized the Khartoum clergy. The government’s sheikhs obliged with the Message on the Mahdi and the False Mahdi, and some General Advice to the People of the Sudan on Disagreement with Rulers and Disobedience of the Commander of the Faithful. The sheikhs emphasized the rights of the sultan to the caliphate, and Tawfik to the khediviate. They warned that the Mahdi was an impostor, and that the wrath of Hilmi Pasha was fearful. They did not reject the idea of a Mahdi, only that he might be the Renouncer of Aba Island.20

  “Our refuge,” they said, “the refuge of all, does exist: it is His Highness the khedive and His Excellency the Governor-General.”21

  Their argument made no impact in the face of the Mahdi’s swelling revolt. All through the summer of 1882, the garrison towns of Kordofan fell, as wave upon wave of wild tribesmen descended on isolated contingents of demoralized Egyptian soldiers. The revolt spread to Darfur and the Gazelle River district. Refugees poured into El Obeid with terrifying tales of suicidal savages armed with sticks and spears, climbing over their dead to fling themselves onto rifles and rocket launchers, massacring women and children.

  The Mahdi’s camp grew into the largest settlement in the Sudan. By August, over one hundred thousand warriors and their families had gathered around him. From sympathizers in Egypt, the Mahdi heard that the khedive had been deposed, and that the British had landed at Ismailia. He knew that the Egyptians could not afford a major campaign in the Sudan, and the British had no reason to launch one. This was the moment to carve out his Islamic empire. The Mahdi moved on El Obeid.

  The garrison of El Obeid knew what to expect. Directed by their commander, General Mohammed Said, they had dug two concentric trenches, one around the town perimeter, the other around its core: the barracks, wells, food store, and arsenal. They built thick zaribas in front of them, raising earthworks behind them with loopholes for firing.

  At dawn on September 8, as Garnet Wolseley edged toward Tel el-Kebir, the garrison at El Obeid squinted into the rising sun and saw the glitter of thousands of spearheads pouring toward their eastern flank. General Said waited until the Ansar’s front runners had almost reached the zariba before giving the order. A massive fire of rifles, cannon, and rocket launchers stopped the Ansar’s first wave. “We killed hundreds and thousands of them, though they continued to fall on us, fearless and dauntless.” As the bodies piled up by the zariba, further waves descended on the trench. The defenders’ rifle barrels became so hot that they had to wrap them in wet handkerchiefs. At one point, a wave led by the Mahdi’s brother Mohammed burst through the outer trench and into the town. They were stopped at point-blank range by fire from the rooftops. When the human tide ebbed, there was “nothing but dead people heaped everywhere.”22

  The Mahdi had planned to mark the new Islamic century with a triumph. Instead he had lost over ten thousand followers, and many members of his family. The revolution faltered. The Mahdi was meant to be invincible, but infidel weapons and faithless Turks had stopped the Ansar in its tracks. Khalifa Abdullahi counseled retreat to the hills, but the Mahdi had no choice. His was a divine claim, and to moderate it was to abandon it. Instead, he revised his tactics; the Prophet had conducted sieges, too. The Mahdi sent parties to fill in the wells on the road between El Obeid and Khartoum. In addition, the voice of the Prophet spoke to him, advising that he reconsider his earlier aversion to modern rifles.

  One night, a comet lit the sky just before dawn, a brilliant, narrow band of reddish light, terminating in a flaming nucleus as large and bright as Venus. The Ansar knew nothing of Professor Schuster and his Kreutz Sungrazers. They could not know that for the previous two weeks astronomers in Auckland, Panama, and Cape Town had tracked its progress across the sky. To the Ansar, it was not the Great Comet of 1882. It was a sign from the heavens. Their leader was the true Mahdi.

  “I HAVE RESOLVED upon fighting Urabi next Tuesday or Wednesday,” Wolseley informed his “Dearest Loo.”23

  From Ismailia, Wolseley had edged forward forty miles, skirmishing with Urabi’s cavalry until he came to the defenses at Tel el-Kebir. Cairo lay sixty miles away, but first Wolseley had to break Urabi’s web of trenches. He had no way around them. If he tried to outflank them in a long, looping march around the sand dunes, Urabi could withdraw his army intact into a countryside crisscrossed with irrigation canals. But if Wolseley attacked the lines, the Sweetwater Canal and the sand dunes would force him to advance frontally across gentle pebble slopes. His troops would be in the Egyptians’ view five miles before they reached the trenches, and the Egyptian artillery would blow them to pieces. The only option was “a new thing” that he had not tried before: to advance at night and attack at dawn.24

  In the small hours Wolseley and his generals rode out into the desert. At first light, they saw Egyptian scouts riding out from the lines. It was 0545.

  “Note the time,” said Wolseley. “Our attack must be delivered before this hour.”25

  He picked 0500 the next morning for the attack. That night, his officers ordered their men to strike camp, but leave their fires burning. The men filled their pockets with one hundred rounds of ammunition and their water bottles with cold tea, and t
hey stacked their tents and blankets by the railway line. Navigating by the stars, at 2300 they paused behind a low hill, the last cover before the Egyptian lines. The order of battle listed the risks: no fires, no bugles, no smoking, no talking, each man to paint a diagonal white stripe on the back of his uniform.

  The plan was audacious and dangerous. They would advance frontally, the First Division on the right, the Second on the left, the Artillery Brigade in the center. The reserves of the Indian and Naval brigades would move up the wadi containing the Canal and railway line, keeping well behind the main advance in case they disturbed the dogs and insomniacs of the villages in the wadi. The Muslim dragoons of the Bengal cavalry waited on the far right. If Wolseley’s plan worked, they could dash to Cairo in the long day ahead. If it did not, his men would be caught on open ground.

  At 0130 Wolseley’s whispered order to advance rippled down the ranks in hushed waves. A single soldier, drunk on rum rations and fear, started shouting in the darkness. Before the Egyptians noticed, his companions seized him, tied him up, and chloroformed him.

  On the left, the Highland Brigade led the Second Division forward. In the center of the brigade, Major General Sir Archibald Alison halted periodically to check his position. As each order passed to the edges of the brigade, its flanks drifted out of position. Its line turned into a crescent, the battalions on its tips marching toward each other in the darkness. Alison halted them in time. Wolseley sent Colonel William Butler to locate the lost battalions. It took him half an hour to straighten the line. One mile more, and at 0300 they halted to wait for dawn and the reserves in the wadi. For over an hour they waited in the dark in total silence. Major General Graham and the leading troops of the First Division crouched only half a mile from the Egyptian trenches.

  Suddenly, a streak of brilliant light appeared on the eastern horizon behind the trenches, as though dawn had come early. It was the Great Comet. A single shot rang out from an Egyptian sentry, and then the entire Egyptian line exploded into fire. The troops in the trenches had been waiting for them. Egyptian scouts had seen the British troops packing up their tents. There was no way back.