That month, Rosebery achieved his third ambition when his horse Ladas II won the Derby. He repeated this success in 1895 with Sir Visto, who romped home at a profitable nine to one. Rosebery’s African gambles were less successful. The French would not allow little Belgium to stand in the way of French access to the lakes and the Nile. In July 1894, French negotiators forced the surrender of their Belgian counterparts “with the knife at their throats.” Leopold signed a treaty with France, cropping back his new acquisition to a slim, rectangular slice of territory resting on the top left corner of Lake Victoria.
This wrecked Rosebery’s Africa policy. He had jumped into central Africa, precipitated a further race for territory, antagonized the Powers, and indulged the Belgians, but had failed to secure the headwaters of the Nile. Instead of blocking the French advance, King Leopold’s enclave could now become the stepping-stone that led the French to the source of the Nile. Britain and France were heading for a direct clash in Africa. Naturally, Rosebery blamed King Leopold.
“He is attempting to combine the position of a second-rate Power in Europe with a first-rate Power in Africa,” Rosebery explained to Queen Victoria.26
In March 1895, Rosebery heard a rumor that the French were preparing an expedition to stake the tricoleur on the Upper Nile. He pressured his foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to make a public statement that Britain regarded the entire Nile and all of its tributaries to be within its sphere of influence, and to threaten France with unspecified consequences if it interfered.
“The advance of a French expedition under secret instructions, right from the other side of Africa, into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long,” Grey told the Commons, “would not be merely an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly well known to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act.”
The diplomats of the Quai d’Orsay had trouble finding a French synonym for “unfriendly,” but they understood its sense. Britain was willing to fight for the Upper Nile.27
In June 1895, only weeks after Sir Visto’s triumph in the Derby, Rosebery resigned. A politician with a brilliant future behind him, his nerves had shattered under the pressure. Taking office for the third time, Lord Salisbury attempted to rebuild his Africa policy like a chemist whose laboratory had been taken over by a promising but immature pupil. The worst of it was that the rumors of a French expedition were true.
“WE SHALL COUNTER the English dream expressed in the formula Cape to Cairo,” declared the colonialiste Francis Deloncle. “We shall counter with the French dream, From the Atlantic to the Red Sea.”28
Economics aside, France needed an empire. Defeated by Germany in 1871, pushed out of Egypt by Britain in 1881, domestically torn by the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, France could not afford defeat in the Scramble for Africa. It was a matter of prestige, as much as strategy. By late 1895, it was a matter of urgency, too. In French eyes, Britain had no legal right to fore-close the question of the Nile. Nor could it ignore international treaties and turn Egypt into a quasicolony.
In 1882, France had only accepted the British occupation of Egypt as a temporary measure. For more than a decade, British diplomats had assured their French counterparts of Britain’s good intentions, securing French support for the Egyptian financial settlement of 1885 and the Drummond Wolff negotiations of 1887. Although the Egyptian economy had recovered, the British had tightened their grip, training native soldiers and claiming rights in the Nile Valley. Lord Cromer had turned Egypt into his private kingdom. As the French residents of Cairo said, it was no good having right on your side, if you did not have Lord Cromer, too. The British had jilted France, and now they wanted the Nile, too, from the Mediterranean to the middle of nowhere.
Rather than planning his departure, Lord Cromer now planned to dam the Upper Nile at Aswan. Although Cromer’s priority was a year-round, stable flow of water to the Delta, security also figured in his calculations.
“If we settle at the headwaters of the Nile, we command Egypt,” Sir Samuel Baker commented, “and a barrage at a low pass, where the Nile cuts through a rocky defile only eighty yards in width below the exit from the Albert Nyanza, would raise the level of the great reservoir of the Nile by fifty feet, and entirely control the water supply of Egypt.”29
In 1885, Cromer had received Habib Anthony Salmone’s intelligence from Paris that the Mahdi had contemplated blocking the Nile with boulders. In 1889, he had predicted that if European rivals approached the river carrying more than boulders, Britain would have to intervene to secure Egypt. In 1893, this specter appeared.
“I wish to re-open the question of Egypt,” announced the French president Marie-Francois Carnot.
By the time Salisbury returned to office, France had initiated a covert policy to gain control of the White Nile above Khartoum. The threat of cutting Egypt’s water supply could force the British from Egypt. The technical aspect of the French plan was supplied by one of Cromer’s own employees. In January 1893, Victor Prompt, a French hydrologist employed in the Egyptian government, presented a lecture to the Egyptian Institute at Paris, entitled “Soudan Nilotique.” Prompt suggested the abandoned Turkish outpost of Fashoda as the location for a dam. Closing the sluice gates in the summer would cause half the crops in the Delta to wither. And if the gates were suddenly thrown open, the resulting flood would destroy everything in its path.
In May 1893, President Carnot summoned to the Elysée Palace his colonial undersecretary Théophile Delcassé, Victor Prompt, and Colonel Parfait-Louis Monteil, a soldier-explorer lately returned from Lake Chad. Handing Monteil a copy of Prompt’s lecture, Carnot told him that France needed a foothold on the Nile.
“Il faut occuper Fashoda,” Carnot said.30
Monteil kicked his heels for a year. First he was delayed by French attempts to negotiate a path to the Nile via the chancellery at Brussels. Then he was blocked by Delcassé’s cautious superior, Gabriel Hanotaux. Frustrated, Delcassé turned to other avenues for French expansion.
Delcassé contracted as a consultant the American mercenary Charles Chaillé-Long, veteran of Gordon’s Equatoria mission and author of Central Africa: Naked Truths About Naked People. Like Lord Cromer, Chaillé-Long identified the hinterland of the Red Sea ports as the key to the Upper Nile. Much of it was controlled by Menelik, the “Lion of Abyssinia.”
The French gave Menelik money, arms shipments, and a promise that the eastern bank of the White Nile would be his if he helped France take the western bank. Menelik duly renounced his treaty with Italy. He granted France permission to build a railway from Obock to the Abyssinian capital of Addis Ababa, and from there to the junction of the White Nile and the Gazelle River at Sobat. Next, Chaillé-Long and Monteil advised that Menelik should be pressured to invade the Sudan, with Chaillé-Long as unofficial military adviser.
The French colonialists now had to choose whether to advance from the Congo and ally with the Mahdists on the Gazelle River or to advance from Abyssinia and fight the Mahdists in eastern Sudan. Lord Rosebery provided the answer. The Anglo-Congolese Agreement threatened to exclude France from the western Nile basin. French attention turned away from Abyssinia and back to the Gazelle River. First France undermined the Anglo-Congolese treaty by forcing Belgium to scale back its claims, reopening a blank space on the map of the Gazelle River. Then France prepared a second expedition, under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand.
Wiry and tanned from the West African sun, with a sharp nose and a long jaw, Marchand had developed a private obsession with the French claim to the Nile. In the summer of 1895, he secured an interview with the skeptical Hanotaux. Sooner or later, Marchand said, an international conference would resolve the partition of the Nile basin. Given two hundred men and six hundred francs, Marchand promised he could cross from French West Africa to the Gazelle River, and stake the French claim that would ensure a seat at the conference table. His party could travel incognito, and would only raise the tricoleur if they bumped into a
rival European party also engaged in violating the khedive and the sultan’s rights.
Although the khalifa had recently chased a Belgian expedition from the Gazelle River, Marchand did not believe that the Mahdists presented any obstacle. Like many colonialistes, his distrust of Britain led him to conspiracy theories. As the colonialiste Francois Deloncle had told the French Chamber earlier that year, the Mahdist threat was a creation of “l’intrigue Brittanique,” which had “created, sustained and fortified” the Mahdists, to keep France from its African inheritance.
Marchand made no mention of the White Nile, either, but Fashoda, the colonialistes’ target, was also his ultimate destination. For the moment, Marchand restrained himself. His aim, he said, was “to force by pacific means” an international conference, at which “France’s colonisation in Africa, currently so gravely threatened by English ambitions,” might be secured.
“Is it not permissible to hope,” Marchand asked, “that the question of the evacuation of Egypt will flow quite naturally from that of the Egyptian Sudan, and that it will impose itself with new urgency upon the conference’s deliberations?”31
Hanotaux’s wish to avoid conflict with Britain might have kept Marchand’s speculations in the realm of hypothesis. But in October 1895, the government changed and Hanotaux, spurning a ministry in a Radical government whose proposals included the introduction of income tax, left office. His successor, Marcelin Berthelot, was a celebrated chemist and historian of alchemy, but no expert on Egypt. Guided by the zealots in the Quai d’Orsay, in November 1895 Berthelot approved La Mission Marchand.
“IT IS OBVIOUS,” advised Lord Cromer, “that if any civilised power holds the waters of the Upper Nile, it may in the end be in a position to exercise a predominating influence on the future of Egypt. I cannot, therefore, help thinking that it will not be possible or desirable to maintain a purely passive attitude much longer.”
In the view from Cairo, if Britain did not move upriver, it risked being pushed into the Mediterranean. “The only question, if this view be allowed to obtain, is, when and how we shall move forward?”
Cromer had already resigned himself to the likely outcome. “We must either yield to the French and make the best terms we can with them, which under the given conditions, must almost of necessity be very bad terms for us; or, if we take any decisive step on our own account, we risk a very serious quarrel with France…. The force of circumstances, much more than the faults of any ministry or of any individual, has driven us into a situation which renders war a not improbable solution of the whole mess.”32
Rather than fund a war for the Sudan, Cromer wanted to use Egypt’s savings to build a dam at Aswan. He recommended that Britain secure the Nile Valley indirectly, by increasing its hold over the hinterland of the Red Sea ports. As for the sources of the Nile, Lord Salisbury had only just secured twenty thousand pounds from Parliament for the construction of the Uganda railway. Salisbury and Baring agreed that advancing up the Nile Valley, and fighting the khalifa, were not the best way to advance British interests. Yet in early 1896, that became their policy.
FIVE DAYS AFTER Marchand received his marching orders, King Menelik of Abyssinia used his new French rifles to devastate an Italian army in the hills above Adowa. Menelik’s tribesmen killed more than six thousand of a ten-thousand-strong Italian brigade, castrating many of their Italian prisoners and mutilating their Askari militia by chopping off their right hands and left feet.
Menelik had aligned with all parties in the Scramble. He had taken modern rifles from Italy, France, and Russia. He had gained territory from British Somaliland by helping Britain against the khalifa. He had gained territory from French Somaliland by secretly consenting to the French railway linking Abyssinia with the Upper Nile. Even his breach with Italy would be temporary.
Menelik’s slaughter of a modern European army had three consequences. The first was to collapse the Italian government. The second was to encourage Khalifa Abdullahi to lay siege to the Italians stranded in their fort at Kassala. The third was to tip Britain into the Sudan.
Desperate to avoid further colonial indignities, Italy asked Britain to use its Egyptian garrisons to relieve the pressure on Kassala. To do its ally a favor, Britain consented.
“The Italian ambassador has pressed me earnestly to take some steps against the Dervishes in favor of Kassala,” Salisbury informed Cromer. “After consulting the military authorities, Her Majesty’s Government are of opinion that the occupation of Dongola would be the most effective demonstration, and that the matter will be greatly in the interest of Egypt, and is a charge she may fairly be asked to bear. It will also tend to repel any disposition to attack Egypt which the recent victories of Africans over Europeans may have created among the Dervishes. Of course, it is intended to keep Dongola.”33
At a stroke, Salisbury had broken the impasse of Egyptian policy and completed the eclipse of idealism by realism. Like Gladstone and Rosebery, Salisbury had been prepared to leave the Sudanese to starve until it suited him. The time, it seemed, had now come, and the Italian request was an ideal pretext. In a private letter the next day, he revealed his thinking. “We desired to kill two birds with one stone, and to use the same military effort to plant the foot of Egypt rather farther up the Nile.”34
Salisbury did not want to annoy the French. In a message to Paris, he obfuscated his motives, and indicated that there would be no further advance.
“We have been applied to by the Egyptian Government to sanction a diversion in favour of Kassala against the Dervishes,” he explained. “We have approved an advance of Egyptian troops as far as Dongola.”35
Cromer feared losing Kassala to the Mahdists, but that did not mean he wanted to fight the eight thousand Dervishes at Dongola. Britain could just as easily support Italy by moving from Suakin up the Berber road. That would be cheaper, and “would give more effective help to the Italians.” Taking Dongola would not make Egypt safer: As Gordon had warned a decade earlier, only “smashing” the Mahdists could do that. It would, however, be extremely expensive. “The Sudan is worth a good deal to Egypt, but it is not worth bankruptcy and extremely oppressive taxation.”36
Having advised against the campaign, Cromer suggested where the five hundred thousand pounds needed to fund it might be found: the “extraordinary expenses” account where he had stored the Commission of the Debt’s budget surpluses. Salisbury secured the assent of the Italian, Austrian, and German governments for this looting of the Egyptian treasury. But the French opposed him, from strategy if not probity, and they secured the support of the Russians.
Together, France and Russia pressured Sultan Abdul Hamid II to emit one of his periodic complaints about a European violation of his rights in Egypt. Adroitly, Cromer prevailed upon Khedive Abbas II to issue a letter to Constantinople, promising that Britain intended only to restore lost khedivial territories, and so was acting well within its treaty rights. Cromer was satisfied that the new khedive, who had begun his reign with rebellious postures, had reverted to type.
“His behaviour is fairly satisfactory,” Cromer told Salisbury, “and I think with a very clear statement to the effect that we will guarantee him against any action from the Sultan, he may be kept straight for the time being.”37
ON THE EVENING of March 12, 1896, Salisbury consulted with the cabinet and Lord Wolseley, and then cabled the Egyptian War Office at Cairo, ordering the advance on Dongola. Just after midnight, the message reached the Turf Club, where it was decoded by Lord Athlumney of the Coldstream Guards and Jimmy Watson of the Sixtieth Rifles, aide-de-camp to new sirdar Sir Herbert Kitchener. The sirdar had last been seen heading for a series of social engagements. It was three in the morning before Watson tracked him down to his official residence.
Kitchener awoke to the patter of stones on his bedroom window. Throwing it open, he saw the night watchman, and beside him Captain Watson, waving a piece of paper. Kitchener went down in his pajamas and read the cable by the light of th
e watchman’s lamp. When Athlumney arrived, he found Kitchener, paper in one hand and lamp in the other, dancing a jig.
The years of waiting were over.38
11
The House of War
1896–99
Brigadier General Sir Herbert Horatio Kitchener.
Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day,
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.
—Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller, 1898
STRAIGHT-BACKED , starchy, and over six feet tall, Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener looked over the head of almost everyone he met. The slight squint in his left eye, the frown with which he tried to mask it, and the scar on his right jaw from a Mahdist bullet all gave an aggressive cast to his mildest gaze. He exploited these accidents for effect and for cover, like the ripe mustache that flowed over his wide mouth and implicitly stiff upper lip. The sirdar liked his relationships distant and productive. He cultivated perfection, as if each order emerged from the flawless machinery of his late Victorian mind.
Three Empires on the Nile Page 31
