Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  In the other zariba, Lieutenant Churchill also could not sleep. Taking a stroll by the Nile, he was hailed by two white-uniformed officers on a gunboat. One of them was David Beatty, whose quick thinking had saved Kitchener in the Dongola campaign. Amused to hear that the soldiers would not be able to use their rifles inside the zariba, Beatty offered Churchill a place on the gunboat if the worst happened. Then he slung a large bottle of champagne into the shallows. Churchill waded in up to his knees and retrieved the bottle from the mud. He and his fellow officers drank the champagne under the black desert sky. Seventeen years later, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he would appoint Beatty commander-in-chief of the navy.

  Kitchener did not sleep, either. At 0430, with a full moon still in the sky, trumpets and fifes roused his troops. By dawn, the army was ready to move, and the lancers were scouting between the two camps.

  Awestruck, Churchill saw the enemy appear with the rising sun, first as a shimmer in the hills, then as a series of glittering smudges, each composed of thousands of warriors. “The whole side of the hill seemed to move, and the sun, glinting on many hostile spear-points, spread a sparkling cloud.” Color values shifted with daylight, and the Ansar clarified into a white band four miles wide and over forty thousand strong, speckled with red, green, black, and white banners that reminded him of “the Crusaders in the Bayeux Tapestry.” As the lancers raced back to the British zariba, the hills thundered to the drums and the war cry, La Illah illu’ah wa Mohammed rasul Allah! 26

  IBRAHIM AL-KHALIL led his men up the last ridge between Kitchener and Omdurman in orderly files ten men deep. As they crested the rise, they saw the British zariba to their right and, to their left, a two-mile swath of Uthman Azraq’s men. Then the world seemed to explode.

  From the river, the gunboats opened up, their shells blasting spouts of red earth and shrapnel, and ripping holes in the ranks. Al-Khalil was blown from his saddle, and his horse almost decapitated by a splinter. Finding another mount, he ordered his men to close ranks. When the Maxim guns ahead of them crackled into fire, he began to charge.

  It was a fatal error. Firing seven bullets per second, the Maxims worked back and forth across the Dervish lines. Al-Khalil was shot through the head and chest, his ranks shredded by the fire. As the Grenadier Guards joined in with their rapid-firing carbines, the slopes of Jebel Surgham became carpeted with smashed bodies.

  In the center of the field, Uthman Azraq raised his rifle and fired a shot to launch the assault. Leading fifty cavalrymen and a hundred foot soldiers, he raced straight toward a battery of six Maxim guns. Eight thousand warriors followed them, whole families and tribes attacking as single units. As they charged, they compressed into a smaller and smaller target.

  Kitchener ordered further cannon and Maxim guns to be brought up. Every second, a cannon shell landed on the charging warriors, blowing great gaps in the human tide. The Maxim guns hosed along the lines, killing men and horses, the wounded who staggered to their feet and pressed on, the flagbearers who tumbled forward with the momentum of the fanatic dead. When the Dervishes were 800 yards from the British lines, the Sudanese battalions opened up, and the battlefield disappeared under clouds of black powder smoke. Uthman Azraq fell 400 yards from the British line, shot through the thigh. As he struggled to his feet, the machine guns cut him down. The last fragments of his assault were blown to pieces 200 yards from the British guns.

  “Cease fire! Please! Cease fire!” Kitchener shouted. “What a dreadful waste of ammunition!”27

  It was a little past 0800. The smoke cleared to reveal a scene of slaughter. A medieval army had charged frontally into the guns of a modern one and had been annihilated before it could get within range. Piles of dead and dying Dervishes lay across the field like snowdrifts. Small groups of wounded staggered back as fifteen-pound artillery shells showered them with hot shrapnel. Al-Khalil’s army had dissolved into a wreck of torn bodies and bloody jibbas. Most of Uthman Azraq’s men had been massacred five hundred yards short of the British zariba. The rest now went to ground and began firing their rifles toward the zariba. In a more equal contest, they soon picked off two hundred of Kitchener’s men.

  The massacre of the first Dervish wave convinced Kitchener that he had already won the battle. He moved to take Omdurman before Abdullahi could retreat into the city and draw him into house-to-house fighting. He ordered the Twenty-first Lancers out of the zariba to reconnoiter the plain, and the rest of the army to follow them along the Nile to Omdurman.

  In his haste, Kitchener exposed his flank. He also opened his rearmost troops, Sudanese riflemen under Brigadier General Hector MacDonald, to attack from two Mahdist armies.

  AT 0900, COLONEL MARTIN led the Twenty-first Lancers toward Jebel Surgham. Behind him, Kitchener’s whole force moved from behind its zariba toward Omdurman. Although Martin had been ordered to reconnoiter, he wanted to win battle honors for his new regiment. When he spotted a troop of thirty Dervish cavalry, “dark, cowled figures like monks on horseback,” and about two hundred foot soldiers hiding in a shallow fold in the ground, he ordered his four squadrons to draw their swords and lances and prepare to charge. This recourse to premodern warfare was the last cavalry charge in the history of the British army.28

  “Of course, there would be a charge,” thought Winston Churchill as they formed up. “That was the one idea that had been in all minds since we had started from Cairo.”29

  At three hundred yards, Churchill heard the trumpet call “Trot.” The 320 horses began to jingle and clatter as they gathered speed, white smoke puffs marking the rifle fire from the long row of infantry crouching in the depression. As they wheeled round to form a line, “Charge” sounded, and they thundered forward.

  Churchill had a bad shoulder. Deciding that if it came to hand-to-hand fighting, he would use a pistol instead of a sword, he had bought a new Mauser handgun in London. As he bounced toward the Dervishes, he struggled to replace his sword in its scabbard and get out the Mauser. Looking up, he saw he was only fifty yards from the Dervishes.

  “The scene appeared to be suddenly transformed.”30

  Behind the Dervish firing line, over two thousand warriors loomed up, a mixture of Osman Digna’s followers and survivors from the Ansar’s first wave. What had appeared to be a shallow fold turned out to be a deep and steep-sided dry wadi.

  “Bright flags appeared as if by magic, and I saw arriving from nowhere emirs on horseback among and around the mass of the enemy. The Dervishes appeared to be ten or twelve deep at the thickest, a great, grey mass gleaming with steel.”31

  At full tilt, the 320 lancers plunged straight into the wadi. The ground disappeared beneath Churchill’s pony as it slipped five feet into the spearmen. Everything seemed to go silent, the images flickering in his brain “exactly like a cinematograph picture.” Two riflemen popped up before him. He aimed at the gap between them as their bullets went past his head. His pony scrambled up the other bank, trotting back onto the hard, crisp desert.

  Suddenly a man appeared before him, diving to the ground as he drew a curved sword, ready to hamstring Churchill’s pony. Twisting his pony aside, Churchill shot him at three yards. A second man jumped up, and Churchill shot him in the chest, so close that his pistol struck the man’s sword. He fired again at an Arab horseman in a bright tunic and chain mail, but missed. The horseman turned away, and Churchill rejoined the rest of his unit.32

  Fifty yards away, a morass of lancers and Dervishes fought hand to hand in the wadi. Churchill had been on the right flank, where the Dervish ranks had been thinner. In the center, the Second Squadron of Lancers under Churchill’s friend Lieutenant Robert Grenfell had crashed into a mass of spearmen so thick that their charge had faltered. Men had been pulled from their horses and hacked to pieces. When Captain Fair’s sword snapped against a Dervish blade, he threw the stump in his opponent’s face. Grenfell lay dead, his skull split in half by a sword stroke as he scrambled up the wadi.


  A “succession of ghastly apparitions” dribbled back from the melee, “horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.” Lieutenant Nesham, slashed in the shoulder and right leg, emerged with his right hand almost severed by a sword stroke, his reins wrapped around his forearm. Sergeant Freeman tried to regroup the remains of the Second Squadron. “His face was cut to pieces, and as he called on his men to rally, the whole of his nose, cheeks and lips flapped amid red bubbles.” Somehow, Colonel Martin had ridden through the melee without drawing his sword, and without a scratch. In two minutes, a third of his men had been killed or wounded. It was then that the colonel remembered that his chivalrous lancers also carried carbines.

  Churchill’s hearing returned to the crackle of Martini-Henry fire. Within twenty minutes, the wadi was clear of Dervishes.33

  AS THE LEADING brigades raced for the honor of being first into Omdurman, Brigadier General Hector MacDonald and the First Egyptian Brigade fell a mile behind the advance. At the same time, the khalifa’s Army of the Black Flag emerged from behind Jebel Surgham, and the two armies of the Green Flags converged on MacDonald’s rear. The son of a Scottish crofter who had risen to the ranks as an imperial campaigner, “Old Mac” rode along the lines, roaring at his Egyptian soldiers when they wavered. A pony messenger raced off in search of Kitchener and reinforcements.

  Kitchener had glory on his mind. “Can’t he see we’re marching on Omdurman?” he complained. “Tell him to follow on.”34

  Then he reconsidered. Wheeling west, away from the river, he swung around in time to shelter MacDonald’s left flank from the onslaught of the twelve thousand warriors under the Black Flag.

  “Macdonald is in for a terrible time.” Bennet Burleigh of the Telegraph observed the charge from the eastern slope of Jebel Surgham. “Will any get out of it alive?”35

  MacDonald ignored Major General Archie Hunter’s order that he withdraw. He knew that to do so would be to crumple in the face of the Mahdist charge, exposing his men to slaughter. “Old Mac” had personally trained his four battalions of Sudanese riflemen. When the Black Flag’s runners poured out from behind Jebel Surgham, his soldiers held their line, the Egyptians maintaining crisp volleys, the Sudanese firing at will. This bought time for reinforcements to arrive on MacDonald’s left flank. When the cannon and Maxims opened up, they caught the khalifa’s attack in crossfire. Two hundred yards short of MacDonald’s riflemen, the attack faltered, the tide of screaming warriors ebbing in chaos.

  As it did, the Armies of the Green Flag attacked from the north. MacDonald swung the Eleventh Sudanese Battalion around in time to face the onslaught head-on. The Dervishes poured past the Eleventh’s flank and into the seam between the Eleventh and Ninth battalions. For a moment, the path lay open for them to wheel around and encircle MacDonald’s brigade, but the Second Egyptian Battalion ran up at the double and broke the Dervish charge at point-blank range.

  The bravery of MacDonald and his men had saved Kitchener’s army. They had broken Abdullahi’s. Thousands of Dervishes, the flower of the Mahdi’s jihad, lay dead or dying all around his lines. The khalifa fled for Kordofan.

  “A good dusting,” pronounced Kitchener as he closed his field glasses. It was 1130. In four hours, the Mahdi’s dream had been ground beneath the murderous juggernaut of the Sudan Machine. Under the Khalifa’s captured Black Flag, Kitchener led the Sudanese brigade into Omdurman.36

  The city stank. The khalifa’s army had used it as a vast latrine, and Kitchener’s bombardment had strewn the smashed streets with the swelling bodies of donkeys, men, women, and children. Kitchener rode up to the square outside the mosque, littered with abandoned copies of the Koran, and then to the Mahdi’s tomb, its sepulcher covered in debris from its smashed dome. In the khalifa’s house, he found Gordon’s telescope. In the prison, he found the khalifa’s European prisoners. Returning to his tent at dusk, Kitchener reclined on a camp bed, dictating telegrams by the light of a journalist’s matches to Colonel Wingate, who scribbled as he lay on the ground. Outside the tent, an armorer sawed at the European prisoners’ chains.

  “I thank the Lord of Hosts for giving us victory at so small a cost in our dead and wounded,” Kitchener reflected, and fell asleep.37

  THE NEXT DAY, he visited the ruins of Khartoum. Exploring the remains of Gordon’s palace, he paused at the staircase where Gordon had been hacked to death. He spent the rest of the day drafting a memorial service. The next morning, his gunboats ferried detachments from each regiment up to the landing stage by the palace.

  Two flagpoles had been raised on the ruins. When Kitchener raised his hand, a giant Union Jack unfurled. On the Melik, “Monkey” Gordon fired a salute of live ammunition in Uncle Charley’s memory. Kitchener raised his hand again. A smaller Egyptian flag appeared, the shells moaned southward over the water, and the band played the Khedivial Hymn. Kitchener called for three cheers for the queen and three for the khedive, and then General Wauchope of the British division called for three more for Kitchener.

  “Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle?” the Anglican chaplain recited the Fifteenth Psalm. “Who shall rest upon thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.”

  To a muffled drum roll, the pipers played a Highland lament for Gordon, and then the band of the Eleventh Sudanese played his favorite hymn, “Abide With Me.” By the end of the service, many of the British officers were sobbing. Great, round tears poured silently down Kitchener’s sunburned cheeks. Too upset to speak, he signaled Archie Hunter to dismiss the parade.

  “Tell some stonemason,” Winston Churchill wrote home, “to bring his hammer and chisel, and cut on the pedestal of Gordon’s statue in Trafalgar Square the significant, the sinister, yet the not unsatisfactory word, Avenged.”38

  YET THE EXTENT of the revenge troubled even Churchill. In a mostly lopsided slaughter, Kitchener had overseen the killing of over ten thousand Dervishes. Hundreds more had been killed in Omdurman the night after the battle, when the Sudanese troops had exacted their own revenge on the Mahdists. Thousands of wounded were left to die on the sunbaked plain outside the city. Three days after the battle, Churchill rode back onto the field to see what remained of the “valiant warriors of a false faith and a fallen domination.”39

  “All was filthy corruption.” Dead Dervishes lay every three yards, dismembered and contorted, their corpses swollen to twice their size. In some places, the bodies piled two or three high like lumber. The hot wind was thick with the smell of decaying flesh. After the battle, many of the wounded had fought to the last, rising up to spear and stab medical orderlies and souvenir hunters, but others still clung to life, crawling and dragging themselves to the Nile for water. Churchill found a warrior, one foot blown off, who had covered a mile in three days, and had two miles to go. Another, with both legs shattered, dragged himself along in sitting position. More lay face down in the shallows. Churchill felt Kitchener should have sent out either “a large bucket of clear, cool water” to the wounded, or “a nameless man with a revolver and a big bag of cartridges.”40

  Kitchener’s abandonment of the Dervish wounded gave rise to a story that he had ordered their killing. The Liberal opposition in London amplified this rumor until it assumed the dimensions of popular legend. Kitchener insisted that his priority had been the welfare of his own wounded, and that he had engaged the Mahdi’s old physician Hassan al-Zeki to set up a hospital for the estimated sixteen thousand wounded Dervishes. But the stigma adhered. His methods had been brutal. In Britain, even imperialists wondered if Kitchener, by waging total war on savages, had himself become a barbarian.

  His campaign was not yet over. Before leaving England, Kitchener had been given a secret set of orders, written in Salisbury’s hand and sewn into a jacket. Now he opened t
hem. He was to sail seven hundred miles into the far south and complete the conquest of the Upper Nile by forcing the French interlopers from Fashoda without starting a war.

  “No corpses,” Salisbury requested.41

  ON JULY 10, 1898, while Kitchener had geared up for his final advance on Omdurman, Captain Marchand’s party had reached Fashoda after a two-year odyssey through forest and swamp. Renaming the site Fort Saint-Louis, they ran up the tricoleur, built some mud ramparts, and planted a vegetable garden. The local Mahdists did not seem to be aware of the grand French scheme for an anti-British alliance on the Nile. They attacked Marchand’s fort, and though he repulsed them, he knew they would be back. On September 17, he heard that a Dervish army was on its way with five gunboats. The French took to their trenches and prepared to fight to the death.

  The first gunboat appeared the next morning. Impeccably turned out in the red fez and khaki uniform of the Egyptian army, two Sudanese soldiers stepped ashore. Saluting crisply in the Kitchener style, they gave the astonished Marchand a letter from their commander.

  Marchand read that Kitchener, having retaken Khartoum, had come to reclaim the rest of the khedive’s empire. The British general appeared later that morning, the Dal puffing round a bend in the river at the head of three more gunboats. Anchoring offshore, Kitchener’s men trained their rifles on the French garrison.

  Bearing a large tricoleur, Marchand rowed out to the Dal to parley. Neither wanted war, but neither felt able to back down. The two soldiers agreed that they could not honorably resolve their countries’ dispute in a marsh at the wrong end of the Nile, and to refer the matter back to the politicians. Kitchener did not insist that Marchand lower the tricoleur from over the fort, and Marchand allowed Kitchener to run a Union Jack up a nearby tree. Even more generously, he humored Kitchener’s mangled French and agreed to toast their meeting with the awful British drink, warm whisky and soda. The champagne came out later, along with fresh vegetables from the garden.