Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Posterity does, however, have a much fuller record of Kitchener’s promotions and his achievements as an officer. His success in the field, his knowledge of Arabic, the stories of the disguises he adopted while operating as an intelligence officer, began to build up a picture of a glamorous, even magnificent British officer, made more mysterious by the mask of impenetrability he always wore. Kitchener was also adept at making friends with powerful people. He quickly became a favourite in Lord Salisbury’s family circle and was invited to Hatfield House as early as spring 1888. It was at this time that Queen Victoria pleaded for him to be appointed one of her aides de camp. The secret of his networking and ability to win influential friends remains something of a mystery, given his shy, rather gauche personality. While in Britain, Kitchener led the life of a Victorian bachelor, passing time in the grand houses of friends and spending innumerable evenings and nights in the clubs of Pall Mall and Piccadilly. The late nineteenth century was perhaps the heyday of the gentleman’s club, an institution which grew out of the coffee houses of nearly 200 years before. Kitchener’s favourite haunt was the United Service Club, at 116 Pall Mall, which was founded for the use of army and naval officers above the rank of major or commander. Like many others, the club ran into difficulties in the 1970s and closed its doors for the last time in 1978. Kitchener also frequently stayed with his friend Pandeli Ralli, the wealthy scion of a Greek trading family, whose house in Belgrave Square practically became Kitchener’s home when he was on leave.40

  In September 1888, at the precocious age of thirty-eight, thanks to the influence of his new friend the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Kitchener was appointed adjutant general of the Egyptian army, the effective deputy in command of that force. This army was run by the British, even though it was nominally controlled by the Khedive, a descendant of the ethnic Albanian Mohammed Ali Pasha, who had been appointed governor of Egypt, under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, in 1805. In April 1892, Kitchener was promoted to be head of the Egyptian army, or sirdar, at a time when the situation relating to the Sudan was still relatively undecided. Intelligence reports in the early 1890s referred to the Khalifa’s efforts to rebuild the wall of his capital at Omdurman, which now looked like a besieged town. None of the inhabitants was permitted to pass the wall; only Beggara tribesmen and the Khalifa’s fighters were allowed in and out of the city.41

  The shift in policy towards the Sudan, a move from containment to active involvement, occurred during the second half of the 1890s, as a result of a change in attitude in Britain. According to Evelyn Baring, now ennobled as Lord Cromer, there had been a ‘rapid growth of Imperialist spirit’ in England. More particularly, Italy’s failure in its imperial mission finally forced Britain to reveal its hand in the Sudan. In Cromer’s acerbic words, the Italians ‘had shown but little skill, either political or military, in the management of their newly acquired possession [Abyssinia, modern Ethiopia]’, and when they were totally defeated by the Ethiopians at Adowa, the situation in Sudan was brought ‘to a crisis’.42 The Italian Ambassador in London urged that a diversion should be made in Italy’s interests and it was at this point, in 1896, Cromer asserted, that Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government decided to intervene. The Italian excuse may just have been a pretext for a more aggressive action against the Khalifa, but it was a useful figleaf, and the broader point, that the British, under Salisbury’s Conservatives, now supported a more energetic form of imperialism, is uncontroversial.

  As head of the Egyptian army, Kitchener was the only candidate for the command of the force which would reconquer Sudan. His hour had come. As Lord Cromer remembered, Kitchener at forty-six was ‘young, energetic, ardently and exclusively devoted to his profession’. He also observed, as many others did, that the Sirdar’s qualities did not inspire love among his troops. According to Cromer, the ‘bonds which united’ Kitchener and his subordinates were those of ‘stern discipline’. Kitchener had a ‘strong and masterful spirit’, which he used to dominate his men and bully them into submission to his will, instead of obtaining from them ‘the affectionate obedience yielded to the behests of a genial chief’. Kitchener left ‘as little as possible to chance’ and was, in the language of the period, a ‘rigid economist’, which meant that he was very careful with money, suppressing with ‘a heavy hand any tendency towards waste and extravagance’.43

  The most famous description of Kitchener from this period comes from the stirring account of the Sudan campaign written by G. W. Steevens, entitled With Kitchener to Khartoum, which was a bestseller in 1898. A brilliant Oxford Classics graduate, Steevens was a journalist of genius who worked for the newly founded popular newspaper the Daily Mail and wrote with a vividness and fluency which brought him early fame as a war correspondent, before he died in South Africa at the premature age of thirty. His sketch of Kitchener included the line: ‘You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1 . . . the Sudan Machine.’44 The ‘Sudan Machine’ was a name that stuck. Steevens referred to the Sirdar’s ‘unerring precision’, and it was clear that his characteristics were beginning to fascinate the wider public, as the final resolution of the Sudan conflict became more widely anticipated. A great popular journalist, Steevens appreciated the Victorian public’s appetite for supermen and imperial heroes. For him, Kitchener was quite simply ‘the man of destiny’.45 Against such a man, with the backing of the resources of the imperial government in London, the Khalifa and his followers, it was believed, stood little chance. Lord Cromer had mentioned the inevitability of a British triumph in a letter to Lord Salisbury written in 1892: ‘The very name of England is far more feared by the Khalifa and his Beggara than either Turkey or Egypt, and it is practically admitted that they cannot hope for success in fighting against the British.’46

  The details of the Sudan campaign, which were recounted in numerous memoirs and descriptions, were once familiar to the British public. The one episode that is still renowned is the Battle of Omdurman, the final stand of the dervishes, made famous by the Charge of the 21st Lancers, the last occasion on which the British army made use of a cavalry charge in battle. Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer who had cajoled and bullied his way on to Kitchener’s campaign, would refer to the charge frequently as one of his repertoire of dinner-table anecdotes. It has become part of British military folklore. The Battle of Omdurman itself, which took place on 2 September 1898, was a heavily lopsided affair: at about six in the morning, the dervishes began their advance on the British position. Their ‘array was perfect’, and a great number of their flags, which had been covered with texts from the Koran, were visible on the horizon. To the young Churchill, ‘their admirable alignment made this division of the Khalifa’s army look like the old representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry’.47 The outcome of all this medieval pageantry and theatre was grisly, and, in accounts of the battle, one can almost detect the sense of wonder and shame the British felt in inflicting so much damage on a brave enemy, since the Victorian cult of the hero was more than matched by a passion for ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘good form’. These were, after all, times when the veneration of cricket was perhaps at its height, when the cricket legend W. G. Grace was arguably the most famous man in Britain. The dervishes had been sportsmen: ‘our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb’, recounted Steevens.48 Churchill admitted that the ‘Dervishes fought manfully’.49 The famous charge, in which 400 cavalrymen of the 21st Lancers attacked a force of what turned out to be 2,500 dervishes, made very little difference to the outcome of the battle, though it led to the award of three Victoria Crosses. In reality the dervishes were ‘swept away in thousands by the deadly fire of the rifles and Maxims’. Their losses were ‘terrible’: out of an army whose strength was estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000 men, some 11,000 were killed, and about 16,000 wounded.50 The British casualties had been negligible: twenty-two men and NCOs killed, and a hundred wounded, while only two
officers lost their lives, one of whom, Lieutenant Robert Grenfell, had been the ‘life and soul of the joyous Christmas festivities’ at Lord Cromer’s house in Cairo the year before. Grenfell had been killed by a ‘Dervish broadsword’ while taking part in the charge. Colonel Frank Rhodes, a Times journalist and Cecil Rhodes’s elder brother, was also wounded in the battle. The Khalifa struggled on for another year before being killed in the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899.

  The Battle of Omdurman marks the end of an era of military adventurism and battlefield heroics. It was a day of frightful carnage for the dervish tribesmen, but it would, perhaps ironically, be dwarfed by the 20,000 dead the British themselves suffered on the first day of the Somme, less than eighteen years after Omdurman. Later observers reflected on this macabre symmetry. The constant theme of the battle is the contrast between what the British called civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. Churchill summed this up when he described Omdurman as the ‘most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians’. Tales of barbarism and savagery sold newspapers. Steevens, the great journalist, with a good eye for sensationalism, threw sex into the mix, and one understands how the Victorian journalist often used exotic barbarians and their customs as a means of titillating the prurient tastes of his reading public. On arriving in the town of Omdurman after the battle, Steevens gave a graphic account of the women of Omdurman:Yet more wonderful were the women . . . There were at least three of them to every man. Black women from Equatoria [the southern province of Sudan] and almost white women from Egypt, plum-skinned Arabs and a strange yellow type with square, bony faces and tightly-ringleted black hair . . . the whole city was a huge harem, a museum of African races, a monstrosity of African lust.51

  Steevens, the sophisticated Classical scholar, would have appreciated the irony of his describing ‘African lust’ in such vivid colours to bored commuters from Bromley and other London suburbs, the ‘office boys’, in Lord Salisbury’s sneering phrase, who read the Daily Mail. This type of mock indignation, combined with a secret titillation, has informed mass-market newspapers ever since. Kitchener, of course, would have regarded himself as being above such basic impulses. As the victor of the Sudan, he reached his apogee as a national hero. At the end of 1898, following the Battle of Omdurman, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, and was known as K of K ever after. He was given £30,000 to support the dignity of his new status, and, because of his frugal bachelor lifestyle, he hoarded considerable wealth. There was the slight scandal of the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb, when it was reported that Kitchener had taken the dead man’s skull as a trophy of war, while throwing the rest of his remains into the Nile. Even Queen Victoria expressed concern about these reports, writing to Kitchener to say that the ‘destruction of the body of the Mahdi who–whether he was very bad and cruel–was a man of a certain importance . . . savours . . . too much of the Middle Ages’.52 Kitchener justified his action in destroying the body and tomb on political grounds, and denied ever taking possession of the Mahdi’s skull.

  The cult of Kitchener now reached its most vivid expression. The New Penny Magazine, a publication which catered for the burgeoning lower-middle-class public, for whom the Daily Mail had been launched, included a lengthy profile of the newly ennobled Kitchener of Khartoum in its edition at the end of November 1898, less than three months after the Battle of Omdurman. Kitchener’s looks were dilated on at some length; he is ‘as dark as an Arab, with a fine figure and commanding presence’. This description was a good excuse to recount tales of his adopting disguises while wandering the Sudan as an intelligence officer. Although Kitchener led a dull private life, the New Penny Magazine tried to present a more human side to the great warlord: he collected porcelain and was a devoted numismatist, possessing an ‘unrivalled collection’ of Eastern coins; ‘though a bachelor, he is noted in Cairo as a host’, while in London the ‘Sirdar spends most of his time at one of the well-known service clubs’; ‘his knowledge of foreign languages is exceptional’.53

  In addition to his status as a cult figure, Kitchener enjoyed warm relations with Queen Victoria. In 1899 the Queen asked him to sit for the Austrian Heinrich von Angeli, whom she described as the ‘greatest living portrait painter’. Victoria was gratified when she duly received the portrait in November that year. She also asked for and received a white donkey from Egypt, which delighted the eighty-year-old monarch. Such was her solicitude for Kitchener that Victoria offered him dates on which to stay at her Isle of Wight retreat, Osborne House: ‘would it be most convenient for you to come here from the 1st to the 3rd, or from the 7th to the 9th?’ –an unprecedented degree of flexibility from a monarch to a subject who, under normal circumstances, would be summoned to the royal residence on a particular date, without having any choice in the matter of timing.54

  Herbert Horatio Kitchener, Ist Earl Kitchener of Khartoum by Sir Hubert von Herkomer and Frederick Goodall (1890). This highly romanticized portrait of Lord Kitchener (1850–1916) outside the walls of Cairo was painted at the zenith of the British Empire. More than any other individual, Kitchener symbolized the British Empire. He would be immortalized in one of the most famous posters in history for the slogan, ‘Your country needs you’.

  Rajah Gulab Singh by an unidentified Indian artist, c. 1840. Gulab Singh (1792–1857) bought Kashmir from the British in 1846 for the enormous sum of £500,000. His descendants would continue to rule as sovereign Maharajas of Kashmir until independence in 1947.

  The Charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman by Richard Caton Woodville (1898). The charge at Omdurman in 1898 is remembered as the last cavalry charge of the British Army, in which Winston Churchill, then just twenty-three, took part. It marked the end of the revolt, which cost 10,000 Mahdist lives, but fewer than fifty British deaths.

  General Charles George Gordon (1833–85). A brave and committed soldier, Gordon was sent to Khartoum to quell the Mahdist revolt.

  Mohammed Ahmed (c. 1844–85), a religious leader who claimed to be the ‘Mahdi’, the successor to Mohammed, was portrayed as a wild fanatic by the British popular press. The Mahdi’s troops famously killed Gordon on the steps of the palace in Khartoum.

  Faisal I (1883–1933) alongside T. E. Lawrence (third from right) and Nuri al-Said (second from left), amongst others, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Faisal was crowned King of Iraq in 1921. Faisal and Lawrence were friends and allies in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War.

  George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925) (second from left) was, according to an undergraduate ditty about him, a ‘most superior person’ who enjoyed a gilded imperial career, appointed Viceroy of India aged just thirty-nine.

  Gertrude Bell (1867–1925), the daughter of a family of industrialists based in Tyneside. She was self-willed, highly intelligent and focused–and one of the founders of modern Iraq. She supported the Hashemite monarchy and was a key figure in building such institutions as the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

  Flora Shaw (1852–1929) was a well-known journalist who married Lord Lugard in 1902. The pair, who both believed fervently in Britain’s imperial mission, became one of the most influential couples in the Empire.

  Lord Lugard (1858–1945) (centre) benignly extending hospitality to Nigerian chiefs at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo. Back in Britain, Lugard fraternized with, and entertained, visiting chiefs, while never questioning the basis of British rule.

  Aung San (centre), the young Burmese independence leader, with the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and other Burmese politicians in the independence talks held in London in January 1947. Independence came a year later in January 1948, but Aung San did not live to see it.

  Hari Singh (1895–1961), the last Maharaja of Kashmir, whose decision determined Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947. Difficult and proud, Hari Singh was exiled in Bombay and then formally deposed by Nehru’s Congress-led Indian Government.

 
Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa (1912–66), a Muslim from the North, was the first Prime Minister of independent Nigeria between 1960 and 1966. His assassination in January 1966 in a military coup marked the beginning of the crisis which led to the Biafran War of 1967–70.