Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure, page 43
The man who would become the leading statesman of the twentieth century, and the single most famous Englishman who ever lived, was then twenty-three years old and a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars. He had had a somewhat traumatic childhood. His father, who had died of syphilis two years earlier, had suggested that he join the army simply because he thought his son too stupid to sit for the Bar examination.
It had taken Churchill three attempts to pass the same Sandhurst entry examination Garnet Wolseley had polished off first time at sixteen, while working in a surveyor’s office. Yet despite his supposed ‘stupidity’, Churchill – a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature – had an unusually adept mastery of the spoken and written word. He had sponsored his military adventures by obtaining commissions for books and articles. He had already managed to wangle himself on active service in India and South Africa, largely by manipulating social connections, and saw no reason why he should not do the same in the Sudan. Kitchener disagreed, and rejected his application. The Sirdar disliked ‘medal hunters’ who tried to get in through the back door, as much as he detested journalists. In spite of personal appeals by Lady Churchill, a close acquaintance of Kitchener’s, and even by the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury himself, the Sirdar was adamant that he would not have Lieutenant Winston Churchill in his army. Privately, Churchill commented that Kitchener was ‘no gentleman’. It was only when Major General Sir Evelyn Wood, currently Adjutant General, grew tired of Kitchener’s ‘picking and choosing’ of officers recommended by the War Office, that the situation changed. Kitchener, Wood said, was Sirdar of the Egyptian army, but not the ultimate authority with regard to the British contingent. Without the Sirdar’s approval, therefore, Churchill was attached as a supernumerary subaltern to the 21st Lancers and ordered to report to Abbassiyya barracks in Cairo. He embarked on a train for Marseilles a few days later, armed with a Mauser semi-automatic pistol he had bought in London, and a commission for a series of letters from the Morning Post.
On 23 August, Churchill arrived with his squadron at Kitchener’s forward base at Wadi Hamed, a little to the south of Wadi Habeshi, where in 1885 the gunboat Safia had fought a duel with dervish guns. The long journey from Cairo had not been a happy one for the 21st Lancers. Confined to railway trucks for almost two continuous weeks, the regiment’s horses – mostly small Syrian chargers – had lost condition, and more than fifty had had to be destroyed. One man had already died from heat exhaustion, and three others had been evacuated. On a personal level, Churchill found himself treated as an outsider by the other officers, who disdained his status as a freelance journalist, and regarded him as little more than a ‘spy’.
Now he and his troopers were lost amid the bustle of almost twenty thousand British and Egyptian troops, scurrying to get ready for the two-hundred-mile push to the south. The entire force was concentrated along a strip of river bank two miles in length, protected on the desert side by a strong zariba. The advance began three days later from a forward base established opposite Jabal Royan, south of the Sabaluka gorge. Kitchener’s army moved down the western bank of the Nile on a broad front, ready to assume fighting formation as soon as the enemy were spotted. It was a magnificent sight. ‘In the clear air the amazing detail of the picture was displayed,’ Churchill wrote. ‘There were six brigades composed of twenty-four battalions; yet every battalion showed that it was made up of tiny figures, all perfectly defined on the plain. The cavalry, starting later, rode through the army… and the impression of straight lines and clean-cut blocks of men of varied race and different uniform, yet all clothed in the brown colours of field service, and all looking over the plain with interested and confident eyes, was one not to be forgotten…’35
The last clash of dervish and ‘red-faced infidel’ was about to begin.
9
At 1140 hours on 1 September, Kitchener was on the Kerrari plain, about seven miles north of Omdurman. The purple crusts of the Kerrari hills lay to his right and the cluster of mud houses at al-‘Ijayja stood on the river behind him. Riding ahead of a party of staff officers, his intention was to ascend Jabal Surkab (Surgham) to have his first look at the enemy.
Less than an hour earlier, he had occupied al-‘Ijayja. Now, five of his six infantry brigades were forming a vast protective semicircle around the village, and were throwing up a zariba to defend the masses of artillery mules and 2,300 transport camels drawn up inside. The sixth brigade – Collinson’s 4th Egyptians – were bivouacked in the centre as a reserve.
Behind the village the Nile ran high, steel grey in the noon sun, and resonant with the chugging of paddle-steamers, towing dozens of nuggars. From seven miles upstream came the boom and thump of guns. For fifty minutes Kitchener’s armoured steamers had been destroying forts, dismembering batteries, and whacking gaps out of the walls of Omdurman. The whump of fifteen-pound shells was followed by the crackle of machine-gun fire. Further upriver, men of the 37th Field Battery, Royal Artillery, were winching their howitzers ashore through the mud of the east bank, having tried unsuccessfully to land on Tuti. They were about to christen their high-tech fifty-pound Lyddite shells – never before used in battle – by lobbing them into the belly of Omdurman.
Kitchener’s big question had been whether the dervishes would march out, or would remain in Omdurman and fight in the streets – a thorny option from his point of view. His gunboats and howitzers were capable of razing the town to the ground, but that would mean a massacre of civilians, and would not necessarily wipe out the Khalifa’s force. Rudolf von Slatin, Wingate’s DAAG of Intelligence, riding with the Sirdar’s staff, had impressed on Kitchener the psychological benefit of wrecking the Mahdi’s tomb – a powerful rallying signal to the enemy. The Sirdar had tasked the howitzer battery first with punching out the tomb, and second, with making the streets of Omdurman an unsafe refuge for dervish fighters.
The dervishes, though, were not the kind to wait for the enemy to attack. They had begun to pour forth from the town the previous morning, twenty-four hours before the bombardment had started. The first to spot them had been the Egyptian cavalry under Robert Broadwood. At about 1100 hours on 1 September, Broadwood, commanding seventeen squadrons of cavalry and Camel Corps, had crested the sandy ridge west of Jabal Surkab and seen what appeared to be a dark discoloration hanging in the desert on the far side of the Khor Shambat, three miles to the south. Beyond this dark stain he could clearly see the maze of mud-brick houses standing north of Omdurman, and beyond them the city, with the dome of the Mahdi’s tomb peeking over the walls.
Nearer to the river, Lieut. Colonel Rowland Martin, commanding the 21st Lancers, had seen the same dense black line about four miles to the south. He and his men had taken it for a zariba or a thorn forest, defended by a few white spots he thought were the enemy. At about 1105 hours, though, the ‘zariba’ suddenly began to move. Martin realized with a shock that it was the front line of the dervish army, the rest of which had been concealed in dead ground by the same sand-ridge Broadwood had just crossed.
As the dervishes approached, wave upon wave appeared suddenly from behind the khor, until the whole plain seemed black with them. Estimates of their numbers, which had begun with no more than three thousand, increased rapidly from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand, then to thirty and forty thousand. They were advancing quickly at a trot, a thousand banners flying amid their ranks, and mail-clad, helmeted horsemen frolicking to and fro. As they came nearer, the Lancer squadrons heard the crescendo of drums and horns, and – even more ominously – the mesmerizing chant of ‘La ilaha illa-llah’ delivered from so many throats that it sounded to the British scouts like the roar of surf on the sea-shore.
Broadwood’s squadrons began to beat a hasty retreat as Baggara outriders came near. The Camel Corps in particular was hampered by the slippery ground, damp after the rain. Captain Douglas Haig – a future field marshal, commanding an Egyptian cavalry squadron – ordered his men to dismount and cover the camel-men’s retreat. Presently, the Camel Corps reached firmer ground, and the riders whipped their mounts into a gangly-legged trot, leaving their pursuers behind.
Rowland Martin of the 21st Lancers had climbed to the peak of Jabal Surkab, and from the heliograph station set up there by his signals section had had a message flashed to the Sirdar in al-‘Ijayja. ‘Dervish army coming out of Omdurman in battle array, estimated 35,000 advancing NORTH.’ Kitchener, who had received the message sitting on a mud-brick wall in the village, eating a plate of bully beef and pickles, had been unperturbed. Only after he had finished his lunch had he set out to view the advance.
At a quarter to twelve, as Kitchener neared Surkab, a rider approached – a subaltern in the uniform of the Lancers, khaki drill peppered with ochre dust. He drew his horse alongside the Sirdar, a respectable distance to the rear. The officer was young. He had a pudgy face and a rather impertinent expression accentuated by his service helmet, which was pulled down to shadow his eyes. He saluted smartly. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I have come from the 21st Lancers with a report.’ The Sirdar nodded. ‘The enemy are in sight,’ the subaltern continued, ‘apparently in large numbers. Their main body lies about seven miles away almost directly between our present position and the city of Omdurman. Up to 1100 hours they remained stationary, but at 1105 hours they were seen in motion. When I left forty minutes ago they were still advancing rapidly.’
Kitchener listened carefully as the two horses crunched forward through the sand, still wet after the rain. He reflected for what seemed like a long time, while the subaltern, somewhat overawed, studied the heavy moustaches, the cheeks burned raw by the sun, and the strange cast of his eyes. Finally, the Sirdar asked. ‘How long do you think I’ve got?’
‘You have at least an hour,’ the officer replied smoothly. ‘Probably an hour and a half, even if they come on at their present rate.’
Kitchener gave no sign that he accepted the estimate, but merely bowed slightly to dismiss the scout. Neither did he give any intimation that he had recognized him: his informant was none other than Second Lieutenant Winston Spencer Churchill, with the 21st Lancers, the man whose application to join the force Kitchener had rejected out of hand. Churchill had been half expecting him to demand, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ Whether or not the Sirdar did recognize him will never be known.
Minutes later, Kitchener stood on a ridge of Surkab among the Lancers’ signal section, where a rare photograph captured his image for posterity, spruce in his tight-fitting tunic, drill breeches, high boots and service helmet, pointing out enemy dispositions to his ADC. When he returned to the village Archie Hunter, who had been left to organize its defence, rode out to meet him. Hunter thought he looked worried, ‘as if he had seen a ghost’. In fact, Kitchener was simply engaged: he was hoping that the enemy would attack that day, and that it would all be over by nightfall.
At 1400 hours he ordered the Anglo-Egyptian brigades to advance five hundred yards outside the zariba they had constructed, ready to take on the enemy. Colour Sergeant Edward Fraley of the Rifle Brigade recalled that his unit had been in camp only an hour when the order came. ‘Of course we guessed something was up,’ he wrote. ‘I suppose we went about a mile or so perhaps less and then we formed up in line… well we heard they were coming on and stuck there for some time but they did not come…’36
In fact, only minutes after the Anglo-Egyptian battalions had marched out, pickets of the 21st Lancers out on the sand-ridge six miles away had been astonished to see the entire dervish army halt as if on a single command. The warriors let out a deafening roar of ‘Allahu akbar’ (‘God is great’) and the Mulazimin fired their rifles into the air. The dervishes then lay down on the wet sand, and soon a galaxy of fires leapt up amongst them. There would be no battle that day.
The only fighting, indeed, was taking place on the east bank of the Nile, where Eddie Stuart-Wortley had been landed with his three thousand Friendlies, to take out dervish forts. While some of the tribes in Stuart-Wortley’s company baulked at hand-to-hand fighting and simply fired their rifles into the air, the Ja’aliyyin, still driven on by the sacred urge for revenge, fought magnificently. They captured the main dervish headquarters on the east bank, killing 350 of the Khalifa’s troops, losing sixty-five of their own men. The dervish survivors were dragged to the water’s edge. There they were butchered mercilessly by the Ja’aliyyin in payback for the thousands of their fellow tribesmen Mahmud had left dead on the streets of Metemma.
On the west side of the Nile, news of the enemy’s halt suggested strongly that they were preparing for a night attack – the one thing Kitchener feared. In the darkness the superiority of his weapons would be lost. Even with the powerful spotlights deployed by the gunboats behind him, and flares fired by the Royal Engineers, visibility would be no more than four hundred yards. This would be far too near for comfort with warriors as fast and courageous as the dervishes, who would close with them in under a minute. Bullet wounds would not stop them. If they managed to engage the Anglo-Egyptians at close quarters, then the issue would be decided by cold steel. ‘The consequences of the line being penetrated in the darkness were appalling to think of,’ wrote Churchill, ‘…a multitude of fierce swordsmen would surge through the gap, cutting and slashing at every living thing… regiments and brigades would shift for themselves and fire savagely on all sides, slaying alike friend and foe… only a few thousand… demoralized men would escape…’37 Churchill’s rather alarmist view was not shared by everyone: many British officers present believed that, though casualties might have been much higher if it came to a hand-to-hand clash, their dogged British, Sudanese and Egyptian troops would have held as steady as the men at Abu Tulayh, and given a good account of themselves.
If Kitchener feared a night attack, though, he did not show it. He could have ordered his troops to dig shelter-trenches, deployed them in a solid mass four deep, occupied the buildings of al-‘Ijayja and set his guns in strong emplacements, but he did none of these things. In fact, while the Egyptian and Sudanese battalions under Hunter dug shallow trenches, the British brigades under Gatacre merely lay behind their thorn zariba. Kitchener kept them in open order, two deep, relying on the firepower of the Lee-Metford, and the support of his Maxims and quick-firing artillery.
The afternoon was scorchingly hot. The sky was lucid, but the air was muggy at ground level as the sun vaporized the moisture from the night’s rain. From their lying-up place the dervishes could see the lines of British and Egyptian cavalrymen watching them from the ridges of Surkab, and among the sandhills. More patrols of Baggara horse bounded forwards to scare off the silent watchers, but found them resolute – three Baggara skirmishers were killed and nine wounded. Corporal Harris of the 21st Lancers was wounded and his horse shot from under him.
The sound of the howitzers could be heard from the scouts’ position. Some minutes after three, seven fifty-pound shells fired in succession with incredible accuracy smacked gaping holes in the three-foot-thick cupola of the Mahdi’s tomb. The gubba was covered in dust and smoke for what seemed like hours. When the dust cleared, it became apparent that the top of the dome had been sliced flat like a decapitated egg. The British and Egyptian cavalry cheered. An awkward hush fell among the dervish ranks. The Khalifa ‘Abdallahi, looking on from his command post in the Khor Shambat, cried, ‘La hawa wa la guwa illa billah! [There is no power and no might except in God!] They do not fear God, but have destroyed the gubba!’
He had soon recovered from the shock sufficiently to inform his warriors, ‘We built the tomb with mud, and with mud we will rebuild it.’ When a riderless horse passed through the dervish ranks, though, it caused more disquiet. The previous day the Khalifa had declared that the Prophet Mohammad would ride before them on horseback, leading the same host of avenging angels that had aided them at Shaykan. The riderless horse seemed a cruel parody of that vision.
9
The dervishes did not attack that night. After sunset, ‘Abdallahi set up his tent in the Khor Shambat, arranged a number of angarebs, ordered tea, and called his counsellors to a meeting. ‘Osman Digna, Ibrahim al-Khalil and ‘Osman Azraq all argued that they should fall on the enemy by night. The idea was opposed by ‘Abdallahi’s son, Shaykh ad-Din, who voiced the Khalifa’s own fears that at night the commanders would lose control of their rub‘s (battalions). Some would desert. Others would wander off in the wrong direction.
The only major night attack the dervishes had pulled off successfully was the assault on Khartoum, thirteen years earlier. That had been an attack on starving, demoralized and poorly equipped Egyptian soldiers – a very different kind of operation from one against a well-armed enemy in the field. Shaykh ad-Din was also aware that the rifles of his fifteen-thousand-strong Mulazimin would be ineffective in the dark. ‘Let us attack in the morning after dawn prayers,’ he concluded. ‘Let us not be like mice or foxes slinking into their holes by day and peeping out at night.’38
Many have commented on the Khalifa’s lack of strategic ability, but few have understood that all military activity is decided more by cultural standards than by logic. In any case, in the absence of radio communications, controlling even the most disciplined of troops at night was almost impossible. Even the British, though they had conducted night-marches successfully, hardly ever attacked before first light. The idea was to approach by stealth, then launch an all-out frontal attack as soon as it was light enough to see, firing so rapidly that the defenders were obliged to remain in cover until the last ferocious rush with bayonets fixed.
