What were the British doing on the Nile? To the public at home, and to Churchill, who wrote ardently of Queen, Empire, and Flag, the answer was obvious. They were there, he wrote, to assure the destruction of an autocracy, “a state of society which had long become an anachronism—an insult as well as a danger to civilisation; the liberation of the great waterway; perhaps the foundation of an African India; certainly the settlement of a long account.” That long account was the martyrdom of Chinese Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi’s howling dervishes. After Khartoum had been retaken, Churchill thought, it would be rather a good thing to “tell some stonemason to bring his hammer and chisel and cut on the pedestal of Gordon’s statue in Trafalgar Square the significant, the sinister, yet the somehow satisfactory word, ‘Avenged.’ ”75
But over thirteen years had passed since Gordon had been butchered. The Mahdi, as inscrutable as his victim, had died suddenly (and mysteriously) five months later. Before his death he had chosen Abdullah Ibn Mohammed as Khalifa—literally “successor”—to lead the forces in Mahdism. Under the Khalifa the Sudanese situation had been transformed. After suppressing a conspiracy by the Mahdi’s relatives and disarming the forces of other leading emirs, he had sought to accomplish the Mahdi’s dream of a universal jihad, or holy war, reforming Islam throughout the Moslem world. Although the Sudanese people were of mixed Arab, Hamitic, and Negro ancestry, all of them were, and are, commonly called Arabs, and their devotion to the Prophet Mohammed approached the absolute. The Khalifa’s hordes attacked north, south, east, and west. They were checked everywhere, notably by the Belgians in the Congo and the British in Egypt. Then the Mahdist Sudan entered a three-year period of great suffering. Almost no rain fell. Crops shriveled, herds grew emaciated, dervishes starved, epidemics broke out, thousands died. Eventually the rains returned; improved harvests brought prosperity. The Khalifa became a popular leader. He was an autocrat, but his people had never known democracy, and in any event the charge of autocracy was hardly one to be flung about carelessly by a twenty-three-year-old youth who was deftly exploiting his own membership in a privileged class to build popular support among his fellow countrymen.
England’s real enemy on the Nile was France. Now that the British held Egypt, they wanted to insulate the length of the river, without which Egypt could not survive. “The Nile is Egypt,” said Roberts, “and Egypt is the Nile.” The Italians, the Belgians, and the Germans agreed to stay out of the river’s valley. The French declined. Instead, they sent an expedition to Africa under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, whose orders were to land on the continent’s west coast, march inland, and seize Fashoda (now Kodok) on the upper Nile, where, it was believed, a dam could be built to shut off Egypt’s water. Fashoda, not the ruins of Gordon’s Khartoum, would be Kitchener’s ultimate destination. The Khalifa’s tribesmen merely lay between him and his objective. Since all this was beyond Churchill, it was probably beyond the Khalifa, too. All he knew was that an army of British and Egyptian troops, led by the Sirdar, was coming after him. He sat in the Mahdist capital of Omdurman, built opposite Khartoum after Gordon’s death, and plotted the movements of his sixty-thousand-man army. His confidence was sky-high. Kitchener, after all, had only twenty thousand men, counting his Egyptian Camel Corps and the disaffected Sudanese he had enlisted. What the Khalifa did not realize was that the new technological superiority of European armies—resulting from such innovations as shrapnel, magazine rifles, and Maxim guns—had rendered his passionate masses, clad in their patched blue-and-white jibbas, or smocks, waving their obsolete weapons and their banners inscribed with passages from the Koran, almost meaningless. And logistics, another technological development, solved the Sirdar’s supply problems, permitting him to plan the orderly arrival of reinforcing troops like the Twenty-first Lancers, setting out from Cairo, fourteen hundred miles away.
The journey took two weeks: by steamer to Aswân, where they led their horses around the cascading water at Philae and reembarked; on to Wadi Halfa, a four-day trip by boat; then four hundred miles by military railroad to Kitchener’s main camp, where the waters of the Atbara flow into the vast, brown, muddy, fifteen-hundred-foot-wide Nile. Many of the place-names in Churchill’s dispatches are meaningless today: Shellal, Metemmeh, Wad Habeshi, Wad Bishara, and, nine miles above the main camp, the Shabluka gorge and cataract, beyond which long, low heights overlooked Omdurman and the ruins of Khartoum. But Winston’s reportorial skills were growing. A khor, he carefully explained to his readers, “is a watercourse, usually dry. In India it would be called a nullah; in South Africa a donga; in Australia a gully.” A zareba was a hedgehog. He described the lovely gazelles running along the riverbanks, and the Sirdar’s telegraph wires, strung above them; how, where the Nile narrowed to two hundred yards, “great swirls and eddies disturb its surface”; the disembarkation of an entire division—with fifteen hundred horses, mules, camels, and donkeys—and how, when ashore, “our line of march lay partly in the desert and partly along the strip of vegetation by the Nile, to which we returned every evening to water, and by which we camped at night.”76
It was serene, hardly like war at all, and he commented on that. Ordinarily one might expect patrols, sniping, skirmishing, preludes to a major operation: “Usually the game gets warmer by degrees.” The enemy lurked near Omdurman but had sent no one, except perhaps lone horsemen, to investigate the British approach. Not a shot had been heard. The British and Egyptian camps were “as peaceful as Aldershot or Bisley.” And yet they knew that one day the guns would “begin to fire and a big battle open.” At Wad Habeshi he wrote his mother: “We are but 60 miles from Khartoum and on the 27th we march 21 miles putting us in front of the infantry and in full contact. Within the next ten days there will be a general action—perhaps a vy severe one. I may be killed. I do not think so.” He was more worried about his other enemy, the Sirdar. Nothing could be easier for the commander than to send Churchill back and say, “Let him come on with the remounts after the battle.” At every stage along the way Winston half expected to be detained by a staff officer. “I suppose,” he wrote, “a criminal flying from justice goes through the same emotions at every stopping-point.” Toward the end hope replaced fear, though he knew his presence was resented at the top. He wrote home that Frank Rhodes, the Times correspondent, had “talked to the Sirdar about me. Kitchener said he had known I was not going to stay in the army—was only making a convenience of it; that he had disapproved of my coming in place of others whose professions were at stake & that E. Wood had acted wrongly & had annoyed him by sending me. But that I was quite right to try my best.” Churchill concluded that Kitchener “may be a general—but never a gentleman.” That was arrogant. But Churchillian swagger was almost always redeemed by his boyish charm and the quickness with which he could laugh at himself. He captured an Arab who turned out to be a British intelligence agent. Lionel James of Reuters wanted to write a story about it, “but I prevailed on him not to do so,” Winston wrote, “having a detestation of publicity.”77
Before they even reached the battlefield he had a bad fright. From Atbara the Twenty-first Lancers marched to Shabluka, bandoliers filled, lances with pennons tightly rolled, ready for action. Various duties kept Winston behind on the river’s east bank; he had been told to join the column that evening at its first camp, fifteen miles away. His chores took longer than he had expected, and it was late afternoon before the ferry steamer Tahra carried him over to the west shore. He asked for directions and was told: “It is perfectly simple. You just go due south until you see the campfires and then turn towards the river.” He nodded and left. An hour later the sun sank; darkness enveloped him. To avoid the thorny bushes on the Nile bank he struck inland and rode down through the desert, steering southward by keeping his back to the North Star. After two hours of trotting he paused for a drink and rations. To his dismay, clouds drifted across the star, and the pointers of the Great Bear became invisible. He was lost. Unless the overcast lifted, he would
have no choice but to wait. Picking a spot, he passed the reins around his waist, leaned against a rock, and tried to sleep. The night was sultry; “a hot, restless, wearing wind blew continuously with a mournful sound”; slumber was impossible. Then, at 3:30 A.M., the sky cleared and “the beautiful constellation of Orion came into view. Never did the giant look more splendid.” He rode toward it, and after two hours he found the Nile. He and his mount drank deeply. But it was broad daylight before he found the lancers’ camp, and the regiment had gone. Nearby villagers spoke no English; he made himself understood, indicating hunger by pointing to his mouth and stomach, but nothing happened until he uttered the magical Arabic word baksheesh. Now that they knew he was going to give them money, everything changed; “all difficulties melted.” Three women appeared to serve him dates and milk. His pony was fed doura. What he now needed was information. Using the point of his sword, he sketched a profile of a lancer on the red mud wall. A man wearing a fez nodded excitedly, made lapping motions with his tongue to convey the fact that the troopers had watered their horses here, and pointed southward. “Then he gazed hard at me, and, with an expression of ferocious satisfaction, pronounced the word ‘Omdurman.’ ” Thus Churchill first learned where battle would be joined.78
Churchill in Cairo, 1898
He caught up with the column at its camp that evening. By August 27 all Anglo-Egyptian forces, both the army in the desert and the gunboats on the Nile, were concentrated south of the Shabluka Hills. The following morning they began their final advance, covering only eight to ten miles a day to save their strength. The heat was “intense. In spite of thick clothes, spine pads, broad-brimmed pitch helmets, one felt the sun leaning down upon one and piercing our bodies with its burning rays.” But that was the only enemy Churchill saw. Omdurman seemed undefended. He began to doubt the villager in the fez. The crisp surface of the desert plain, through which the Nile meandered in its broad sweeps, stretched wide and vacant: “Everyone in the British cavalry had made up his mind that there was to be no battle,” that “ ‘we shall be marching like this towards the Equator for months and months.’ ” At nine o’clock on the morning of September 1, the Twenty-first Lancers, riding ahead as scouts, sighted Omdurman. If the Khalifa meant to fight, he would fight here. Winston was studying the city’s mud huts and the dome of the Mahdi’s tomb—and trying to ignore a hundred vultures circling overhead, which made him extremely uncomfortable (“It would be difficult,” he told readers of the Morning Post, “to assign limitation to the possibilities of instinct”)—when another subaltern motioned toward a ridge ahead and cried: “Enemy in sight! They haven’t bolted!”79
Churchill squinted at the ridge. It lay three miles away, between them and the city. At first he saw only “a long black line with white spots.” The white spots appeared to be dervishes, perhaps “three thousand men behind a high dense zareba of thorn bushes.” They thought this “better than nothing. There would in any case be a skirmish.” They rode closer for a better view. At 11:00 A.M., to his astonishment, “the whole black line, which seemed to be zareba, began to move. It was made of men not bushes. Behind it other immense masses and lines of men appeared over the crest, and while we watched, amazed by the wonder of the sight, the whole face of the slope became black with swarming savages.” It crossed his mind that this was what the Crusaders had seen. The Khalifa’s army, five miles from end to end, advanced while the sun, glinting on over forty thousand spear points, “spread a sparkling cloud. It was, perhaps, the impression of a lifetime, nor do I expect ever again to see such an awe-inspiring and formidable sight.”80
“Mr. Churchill!” called Colonel Rowland Martin, the Twenty-first’s commander. Winston cantered up and was told to first take a long look “and then go back as quickly as you can without knocking up your horse and report personally to the Sirdar. You will find him marching with the infantry.” So there it was. He was going to meet Kitchener after all. After further scrutiny of the enemy position, it took him forty minutes to cover the six miles separating his advance party from the main body of the army, and on the way he appraised the Anglo-Egyptian formation: five solid brigades in open columns, with the gray and chocolate mass of the Camel Corps on his left below the rocky Kerrari Hills, and, to his right, seven or eight large white British gunboats on the river. He found the Sirdar riding between the Union Jack and the flag of the Egyptian khedive. Reining in, he identified himself as an officer from the Twenty-first—but gave no name—and described the situation. Kitchener said: “You say the Dervish Army is advancing. How long do you think I have got?” In a rough calculation, Churchill estimated that the enemy was jog-trotting at four miles an hour and had another seven miles to cover. He said, “You have got at least an hour—probably an hour and a half, sir, even if they come on at their present rate.”81
There followed an interval which would have been impossible for any youth who was not a member of the Victorian privileged class. Kitchener gave no sign of knowing who Winston was, but his chief of intelligence, Sir Reginald Wingate, recognized him and invited him to lunch. They dined on a white picnic cloth with knives and forks and what was, under the circumstances, remarkable nonchalance. The outcome of the imminent battle was by no means certain. Dervishes had overwhelmed Egyptian troops in several encounters. At Abu Klea and Tamai they had broken British squares, and only seven thousand of the Sirdar’s bayonets were British anyway. Moreover, the enemy was armed with more than spears; twenty thousand of the Khalifa’s men were equipped with old Martini-Henrys. Yet Sir Reginald and his guests were, Winston wrote, “in the highest spirits and the best of tempers. It was like a race luncheon before the Derby.” They watched, as interested but detached spectators, while the infantry formed a defensive arc and the leading brigade built a thorn-bush zareba. A young lieutenant on a passing gunboat shouted: “How are you off for drinks? We have got everything in the world on board here. Can you catch?” It was David Beatty—like Ian Hamilton he would play a larger role in Churchill’s later career—and he tossed Winston a large bottle of champagne.82
No engagement was fought that day. The dervishes halted. Kitchener’s howitzers pounded Omdurman, and Churchill returned to his regiment, which pitched camp that night inside the zareba, under the steep bank of the river. Reports, considered reliable, predicted that the enemy would attack that night. They were wrong, but the threat was real. Churchill defied it, strolling around in the moonlight to inspect the Sirdar’s defenses, and when the Twenty-first’s buglers blew at 4:30 A.M., he swung into his saddle, ready to join the spray of officers’ patrols which would serve as Kitchener’s eyes at dawn. Daybreak arrived and revealed the enemy. Churchill was delighted. “This,” he wrote, “is an hour to live.” He mounted a ridge which had been christened Heliograph Hill. Afterward, writing Ian Hamilton of that morning’s events, he said that he believed he was “the first to see the enemy—certainly the first to hear their bullets…. I and my little patrol felt very lonely.” At 5:50 A.M., kneeling, he scribbled in his field service notebook the first of two messages to the Sirdar, both of which survive.
Dervish army, strength unchanged, occupies last nights [sic] position with their left well extended. Their patrols have reported the advance and loud cheering is going on. There is no zeriba.
Nothing hostile is between a line drawn from Heliograph Hill to the Mahdi’s tomb, and river. Nothing is within three miles from the camp.
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
Lieut 4th Hussars
attd 21st Lancers
Handing this to a corporal, he climbed for a better view. The sun was high now. Scarcely four hundred yards away he beheld the humps and squares of the Khalifa’s multitude, bright with glittering weapons and iridescent standards. He wrote: “Talk of fun! Where will you beat this? On horseback, at daybreak, within shot of an advancing army, seeing everything, and corresponding direct with Headquarters.” He was a target now; enemy bullets were swatting sand around him. The corporal, spurring his weary horse to a ful
l gallop, returned with a request from the Sirdar’s chief of staff for word of new developments. It was 6:20 A.M. Winston scrawled his second report:
About ¼ Dervish army is on their right which they have refused at present. Should this force continue to advance it would come the South side of Heliograph Hill.
Most of the Cavalry are with this force.
Duplicate to Col Martin
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
Lieut 4th Hussars