Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure, page 35
In 1892, Wingate, together with agents from the Vatican, secured the escape of Father Joseph Ohrwalder and two Roman Catholic nuns. Ohrwalder’s book Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdist Camp, edited by Wingate, had been a major contribution to the British propaganda effort, as well as a mine of information about the dervishes. Wingate’s own book, Mahdism and the Egyptian Sudan, a massive compendium of virtually everything known about the Mahdist movement, was also published in 1892.
Many officers despised Slatin for changing his religion, and becoming an ‘adviser’ to the enemy. Major Lord Edward Cecil, one of Kitchener’s ADCs, son of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, detested his ‘perky manner’ and his continuous references to ‘mysterious sources of information’. Wingate, though, found in him a soulmate. They became close friends, and Slatin was eventually appointed Deputy Director of the Intelligence Department. Slatin’s book, Fire and Sword in the Sudan, also edited by Wingate, was to become a best-seller. More important, though, was the light Slatin was able to shed on ‘Abdallahi’s character, his modus vivendi, and the inner workings of the Mahdist state, to which he had been privy.
The key aspect of Slatin’s new information concerned the rifts that had appeared in dervish solidarity since the Mahdi’s death. ‘Abdallahi had been named Mohammad Ahmad’s successor both during his life and on his deathbed, but the Mahdi’s family – the Ashraf (‘nobility’) – had not taken kindly to the idea of being led by a rough and uneducated nomad from the goz.
Although ‘Abdallahi’s power was based on his Baggara horsemen, they were a double-edged sword. Like all nomads, they resented authority, even that of their own kinsman, ‘Abdallahi, whom they never considered a superior. In Baggara society, a sheikh ruled only by the consent of his tribesmen. Nomad custom was governed by ‘urf, a set of unwritten traditions handed down over generations. A sheikh had no means of enforcing ‘urf or of punishing offenders. Murder or injury was regulated by the law of tha’r – the blood feud. Adultery was the responsibility of the husband: the seduction of an unmarried woman that of the father and brothers. Other breaches of the code were punished by a simple refusal by tribesmen to cooperate with the offender. This meant, essentially, that he was disowned by his tribe. In the goz, a man without a tribe was a man under a death-sentence, because he could be robbed and murdered by enemies without invoking tha’r. It was the threat of a relentless pursuit of revenge continuing for generations that kept reckless murder and rapine in check.
‘Abdallahi’s Baggara troops felt little personal loyalty to the Khalifa as a leader, but followed him because of the possibilities of plunder. Sorely in need of their support, ‘Abdallahi allowed them to assume the role the Bashi-Bazuks had played under Turco-Egyptian rule. The nomads behaved with equal cruelty and rapaciousness. ‘Twenty or thirty Baggara arrive at a place accompanied by their slaves,’ wrote Times man E. F. Knight. ‘They read out to the people the Khalifa’s proclamation with regard to taxation, and then seize all the land and all the cattle. They apportion to the original inhabitants only just so much land as will enable them to procure the barest subsistence, then enter into possession of all the remainder. The bygone Egyptian regime at its very worst was never so bad as this.’7
Of the northern, riverain tribes, the Ja’aliyyin were the most powerful. Proud of their pure Qurayshite ancestry, they looked down on the Baggara and resented their ascendancy. They had joined the Mahdi largely for economic reasons – to get rid of crippling taxes and reinstate the slave trade – but now found themselves dominated by crass and primitive nomads from the west. In 1894, the Ja’aliyyin sheikh of Metemma, ‘Abdallah wad Sa‘ad, attempted to get backing from the British for a rising against the Khalifa. His plea was turned down, as the time was not yet judged ripe – but Wingate filed away the knowledge carefully for future use.
The Khalifa was aware of wad Sa‘ad’s treachery, but decided to bide his time. Meanwhile, though, he put no further trust in the Ja’aliyyin. All top military posts were given to Baggara tribesmen, and all Ja’aliyyin units strengthened by Baggara troops.
The threat from the Ashraf was always present. ‘Abdallahi exiled the Mahdi’s cousin, Mohammad Khalid, the former governor of Darfur – the man who had made Slatin kiss his feet, and had tortured Major Hamada to death – to the swamps of Equatoria. He removed Mohammad al-Khayr, the Mahdi’s former teacher, who had sent the steamer el-Fasher to pursue Stewart, and whose men had fought at Abu Tulayh, from his position as governor of Berber. He had many of the Mahdi’s wives and children carefully watched. Even the brilliant wad an-Nejumi, the victor of Shaykan and Khartoum, was exiled to Dongola to remove him from court.
Of the Mahdi’s old guard, the only man ‘Abdallahi did not pursue was ‘Osman Digna, whose Beja tribesmen inhabited their own world, aloof from the politics of the Nile Valley and the western Sudan. ‘Osman always behaved self-effacingly when in the Khalifa’s presence.
The tension between ‘Abdallahi and the Ashraf reached its climax in 1891, when the Khalifa unearthed a conspiracy to oust him, led by Mohammad ash-Sharif, the second Khalifa. He went about dealing with the plot in a tortuous way. He pardoned Mohammad ash-Sharif, undermined his support by arresting and confiscating the property of his partisans, then performed a treacherous turn-about by having him thrown into prison, claiming that he had been told to do so in a vision. Seven of the chief conspirators were sent to Fashoda and beaten to death by Zaki Tamal, a Mandala from Darfur, who had assumed the role of ‘Abdallahi’s chief executioner. Among the executed conspirators were the Mahdi’s uncle, Mohammad ‘Abd al-Karim, whose staunch advice had encouraged the Mahdi to move on Khartoum, and Ahmad Sulayman, former chief of the bayt al-mal. Zaki Tamal was himself later accused of treachery and walled up alive.
‘Abdallahi’s ambition had been to continue the jihad or holy war against unbelievers and apostates – the first nominee being the Egyptian state, under the Khedive Tewfiq. In 1885, a dervish advance towards Egypt from Dongola had been defeated by the British and Egyptian armies at Ginnis. ‘Abdallahi had been distracted from the jihad by rebellions in Darfur and northern Kordofan, and by a full-scale invasion of the eastern Sudan by the Abyssinians, under King John II of Tigre. He had dealt with these problems piecemeal. Darfur had been pacified. The leader of the Kordofan rebellion, Kababish chief Salih wad Fadlallah, had been captured and killed. The Abyssinians had been routed at Gallabat, and King John’s head had been brought to Omdurman and, like Gordon’s before it, displayed on a spike.
Though ‘Abdallahi had managed to survive all these challenges, his ruthlessness had gained him few sympathizers. The Ja’aliyyin were already making overtures to the enemy, and were ripe for revolt. The dervish Jihadiyya were also fertile ground for subversion. Many had been captured in the Mahdi’s campaigns, and though they had fought well for the dervishes at Abu Tulayh and in other battles, it was rumoured that they disliked ‘Abdallahi and would be ready to rejoin their old units if given the chance.
When Abu Anja died in 1889, ‘Abdallahi himself had become less trustful of his Jihadiyya. They were gradually superseded as his household troops by the Mulazimin, half of them slave-riflemen from the south, and half free tribesmen from Kordofan and Darfur. The Mulazimin numbered about nine thousand, and were commanded by ‘Abdallahi’s son, Shaykh ad-Din.
After the defeat of wad an-Nejumi at Tushki, ‘Abdallahi had begun to show signs of paranoia. He had started to withdraw behind walls and bodyguards. He had built a new perimeter around his quarters in Omdurman, containing his own house, that of his brother Ya‘gub – now commanding the Black Standard division – and the Mulazimin quarters. He no longer appeared at the Friday parade – a custom established by the Mahdi – but attended only four times a year, on the great festivals. Even then, he arrived surrounded by his guards.
Like most despots, ‘Abdallahi ruled by fear, and had manoeuvred himself into a position where he could trust no one. Wingate thought he was hanging on only by the skin of his teeth.
3
On 1 March 1896 an Italian army, eighteen thousand strong, was wiped out at Adowa, in Abyssinia, by King Menelik of Shoa – later to become the Emperor Menelik II. This calamity, one of the worst ever suffered by a European army in Africa, spelt the end of Italian ambitions in Abyssinia for more than a generation. Italy’s immediate concern, though, was the safety of her garrison at Kassala, now threatened by the Khalifa’s man ‘Osman Digna.
On 12 March the Italian Ambassador in London respectfully requested the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to initiate an action in the Sudan to distract the dervishes from Kassala. The request provided a convenient peg on which to hang an invasion. The British public had never forgotten the national humiliation over the death of Gordon and the fall of Khartoum, and the desire for revenge was still smouldering. Salisbury’s government had already been voted out of office once for failing to do anything about it. Now, Salisbury saw a chance of killing two birds with one stone – assisting the Italians, and occupying the northern Sudan. There was no question at this stage, though, of a full-scale reconquest. While Dongola Province was under dervish control, there would always be a threat to Egypt. The immediate objective was to secure a buffer zone between the central Sudan and the Egyptian frontier.
Soon after breakfast on 13 March, the Egyptian cabinet met and approved the decision to invade the Sudan. Within twenty-four hours, Lieut. Colonel Archibald Hunter, commanding the Nile Frontier Force at Wadi Halfa, received the order to advance. Hunter was delighted. For months the dervishes had been raiding his frontier outpost at Sarras, a fort perched on a crag of black basalt overlooking the Nile, thirty-five miles south of Wadi Halfa. Hunter, a cool but truculent officer, had been restrained from swatting these flea-bite attacks by Kitchener. Now, all that had changed. ‘Am as pleased as Punch,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘It can make a man or a mouse out of me – Never was so pleased in my life.’8
The forty-year-old son of a wealthy Glasgow merchant, Hunter was a brave, blunt, brutal warrior – a drinker and womanizer who was consequently idolized by his men. He was also an old campaigner in the Sudan. His first encounter with the dervishes had come more than a decade earlier, when, after the failure of the Gordon Relief Mission, the Khalifa had pushed his forces north towards the Egyptian frontier. In December 1885 Hunter had been badly wounded at Kosha, near the Third Cataract, just before Anglo-Egyptian forces had turned back the Khalifa’s army at Ginnis. In a skirmish he had shot dead six of the enemy with a Winchester rifle at close-contact range, before being himself shot in the right arm. For this action he had been awarded the DSO. He had also fought with distinction at Tushki in 1889.
Hunter’s orders were to move immediately with a small spearhead force and secure the Nile-side village of Akasha as a forward operating base. It lay fifty miles south of Sarras. Kitchener knew from Wingate’s intelligence briefs that there was no enemy presence at Akasha. The dervish frontier garrison was at Firka, sixteen miles further south, tacked on to a Nubian village beneath a sawtooth mountain on the west bank of the Nile.
Firka lay on the remote Kerma– Sarras reach of the Nile, at the southern end of a labyrinth of plunging khors and spurs known as the Batn al-Hajar, the ‘Belly of Stones’ – some of the worst country in the northern Sudan. From the Second Cataract, twelve miles upstream from Wadi Halfa, the Nile snaked through a moonscape of bluffs and fractured knolls, cut by the shoals of the Dal Cataract, following fault-lines in the basement complex. In places the sheer wind-carved hulks of the hills pressed right up to the water’s edge; in others the river bank was no more than a rough terrace, a few yards wide, criss-crossed by plunging defiles. The Nile was sparsely inhabited here by Nubians of the Mahas and Sukkot tribes, who scratched out a living from tiny patches of alluvial soil. Hamlets of a few mud-brick houses were crammed awkwardly between rock and river. In places the cultivable patches were so high that two sagiyyas had to be employed in tandem to relay the water.
On the east bank, the only viable route passed through a maze of gorges that towered in places more than fifteen hundred feet above the plain. Their ragged spines were dotted with the ruins of ancient watchtowers, forts and temples, dating back to Pharaonic times. Away east, as far as the eye could see, lay a wild confusion of hogsback ridges, and peaks as sharp as icicles. Pools of orange sand lay in hollows against the base of the hills, and in the beds of khors that sliced through the stone labyrinth like giant sabre-cuts.
The Firka garrison was commanded by Hamuda Idris, an emir of the Habbaniyya, a Baggara tribe from Darfur. His warriors, four thousand strong, were mainly Baggara nomads, with contingents of Ja’aliyyin and Danagla. The footmen, armed with swords and spears and a few rifles, were divided into four battalions or rub‘s, made up of all three tribes in varying proportions. The fourth element in the dervish force was the Jihadiyya riflemen, commanded by Baggara chiefs Yusuf Anjar and Dudu wad Badr, both from the Khalifa ‘Abdallahi’s own tribe, the Ta‘isha.
Kitchener’s objective was to capture Dongola. His first action would be to wipe out or capture Hamuda’s garrison, using Akasha as a jumping-off point. Unlike Wolseley eleven years earlier, though, he was in no hurry. Akasha had once been the terminus of a railway, constructed by Isma‘il Pasha and refurbished by Wolseley too late to help the Gordon Relief Mission. The line was still in working order as far as Sarras, but beyond that it had been demolished by dervish patrols. Kitchener intended to reconstruct the line, first from Sarras to Akasha, then further south. Until the railway was completed, Akasha would be supplied by relays of 4,500 camels, which were to be shipped from Cairo on barges. Fortified posts would be set up along the caravan route to protect the convoys at night.
Kitchener had worked out a complex line of communication and supply. It began in Cairo, extended almost eight hundred miles south by railway to Balliana on the Nile, in Upper Egypt, and continued by Messrs Cook Nile steamers to Aswan. Here, stores and men would once more be loaded on railway carriages and trans-shipped seven miles past the First Cataract. From Shellal, just south of Aswan, a second flotilla of gunboats, steamers, barges and felukas – Egyptian Nile boats – would transport men and materiel to Wadi Halfa, where they would be loaded on railway trains for the third time. The railway would carry them to within marching distance of the forward base.
Hunter’s advance guard consisted of the 13th Sudanese battalion, under Major J. Collinson of the Northamptonshire Regiment, two squadrons of Egyptian cavalry under Captain R. G. Broadwood of the 12th Lancers, a camel corps company and a mule-mounted battery. On 15 March the mounted contingent left Wadi Halfa, heading south. Hunter entrained the infantry to Sarras, from where they marched south to rendezvous with the mounted troops. By 18 March the entire column was on its way to Akasha through the Belly of Stones.
Hunter hugged the river bank where he could, but this was not possible in most places. On the way his force passed several deserted villages of the local Sukkot tribe, whose population had been so persecuted by the Baggara that they had migrated to Egypt lock, stock and barrel. Hunter’s cavalry and camel corps fanned out into the rocky warrens ahead, scouring the area for dervishes. Not a living soul was seen. Four days after setting out, Hunter’s column marched into Akasha.
The village had been founded by a holy man whose tomb was still to be seen there, and was noted for its medicinal hot springs. Its gravel banks were thick with forests of tamarisk trees, and looking south, the Nile scintillated like mercury between the arms of serrated dark ridges that closed in from either side. Hunter’s units began to convert the village into a fortress, digging trenches and throwing up gun-banks. By the end of the month a second column had come in escorting six hundred baggage-camels. The 11th and 12th Sudanese battalions followed, commanded by forty-four-year-old Major Hector MacDonald of the Royal Fusiliers, a tough veteran who had seen action in the Afghan war in 1879, had marched with Roberts to Kabul, and had fought at Kandahar, and at Majuba Hill in South Africa in 1881. The son of a humble Scottish crofter, MacDonald had spent nine years as an enlisted man and NCO, attaining the rank of sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders before being commissoned. He took command of the entire forward base.
Further north, a complex game of military musical chairs was being conducted as reserves were called up, battalions were swapped and regiments were shunted around. A British battalion, the 1st North Staffords, was deployed in Wadi Halfa, so that six Egyptian battalions could be freed to move to the front. A four-gun battery of Maxim machine-guns was formed from units of the British army of occupation – the North Staffords and the Con-naught Rangers – and sent to the forward base. The Egyptian army Railway Battalion was mustered at Aswan, and parts for the reconstruction of the line – sleepers, rails, bolts and fishplates – began to pile up on the platforms there ready for the shift to Sarras.
On 29 March Kitchener arrived at Wadi Halfa with his Chief of Staff, Lieut. Colonel Leslie Rundle of the Royal Artillery. Within two days, the whole intricate clockwork of communications, over almost a thousand miles between Cairo and Akasha, was in motion. It was a tribute to the organizing genius of Herbert Kitchener. ‘The first and not the least remarkable instance,’ wrote Winston Churchill, ‘of [the Sirdar’s] strange powers of rapid and comprehensive arrangement.’9
By mid-April, the Railway Battalion, under Lieutenant Stevenson of the Royal Engineers, was working flat out in rough country south of Sarras. The navvies, who carried Remington rifles, were also protected by pickets of the 7th Egyptian battalion. The men were mostly new to the job, and had to be trained as they worked by half a dozen professional platelayers from the Egyptian Railway Department, who acted as foremen. Soon the battalion was laying half a mile a day, and every mile nearer to Akasha shortened the distance over which the camel caravans had to work. Locomotives rattled backwards and forwards to the Railhead camps each day, carrying rails, sleepers and other components, and food and water for the crews.
