By now, he wrote Hamilton, “the fire was for the time being as hot as anything I have seen—barring only those 10 minutes with the 35th Sikhs—a year ago today.” An enemy patrol of three horsemen approached him: “They were dark, cowled figures, like monks on horseback—ugly, sinister brutes with long spears. I fired a few shots at them from the saddle, and they sheered off.” But the enemy mass was coming on like a sea. “The tide was rising fast. One rock, one mound of sand after another was submerged by that human flood. It was time to go.” Still he was reluctant. Then a major appeared and ordered him to withdraw; the British infantry was about to open fire. Back he scampered then, to watch, from the flank, the Sirdar’s response to the challenge and, opposite him, “all the pride and might of the Dervish Empire… on this last great day of its existence.”83
Unlike twentieth-century warfare, nearly everything at Omdurman was visible, if distorted, to the naked eye. As Churchill wrote, “the whole scene lay revealed in minute detail, curiously twisted, blurred, and interspersed with phantom waters by the mirage.” It quickly became apparent that the Khalifa had now committed every man he had, including his reserves, hoping to overwhelm the infidels. His sacred black flag floated above the bright banners of lesser emirs and the white standards bearing Mohammed’s most stirring passages in Arabic script. Shrieking as they ran, these troops dipped beneath a swell of ground which briefly concealed the main bodies of the rival armies from one another and then swept up, over, and down into the arena where the invaders of their soil stood shoulder to shoulder, braced to receive them. But the two never met. Lashed and scythed by storms of Lee-Enfield dumdums, by four batteries of howitzers, and by shells from at least seventy big guns on the Nile bank and in the gunboats, the dervishes faltered seven hundred yards from their objective, the last of them stumbling and sprawling over the bodies of seven thousand of their fallen comrades. Kitchener then wheeled his five brigades into echelon formation and prepared to move on Omdurman. That would cut the enemy off from his base and force him into the desert. The fifty-three thousand remaining dervishes regrouped and attacked again. This time they came within a hundred yards of the Anglo-Egyptian lines, but at the appalling cost of twenty thousand men. The Sirdar’s force was virtually unblooded. The city was still accessible to the Khalifa’s survivors, however, and despite their casualties, numbers were still on their side. Kitchener believed that he had to occupy Omdurman before the enemy could flee there. His army, as Churchill noted, “could fight as many Dervishes as cared to come in the plain; among the houses it was different.” But before the Anglo-Egyptian infantry could advance, the Arabs must be driven from the intervening ground. That was a cavalry task. The Twenty-first Lancers, on the spot, waiting in a little hollow, stood to their horses. Then the heliograph at Kitchener’s side instructed them, in flashes of reflected sunlight: “Advance—clear the left flank—use every effort to prevent the enemy entering Omdurman.” The stage was set for Britain’s last great cavalry charge, and Churchill, leading twenty-five troopers, would be in the thick of it.84
Scrambling into their saddles, the massed lancers walked forward at a deliberate pace, stepping over the crisp desert toward the city, stirred by what Churchill called “a high state of excitement.” Presently they noticed, three hundred yards away and parallel to their course, a long row of blue-black objects, two or three yards apart. At that moment the bugles sounded Trot, and the regiment began to jingle and clatter across the front of these crouching dervishes. It was a lull in the battle. Except for the sound of the harnesses, silence was near perfect. Abruptly the Arabs broke it, firing a volley; three horses and several lancers toppled to the ground. Until then the colonel had intended to swing around the flank of the enemy riflemen, but now he decided to attack them head-on. The bugles sounded Right Wheel into Line. There was no further order. As Winston wrote Hamilton: “Gallop & Charge were understood.”85 In a solid line, the regiment lunged toward what appeared to be 150 dervish riflemen.
At this critical moment, Winston became preoccupied with a personal problem. He had every confidence in his gray polo pony, but until the regiment wheeled he, like the other officers, had been carrying a drawn sword. Because of his bad shoulder, he had decided early in the campaign that if hand-to-hand combat loomed, he would rely on his pistol. At full gallop, he had to return his sword to its scabbard and fumble for his wooden holster. He explained to Hamilton: “I drew my Mauser pistol—a ripper—and cocked it. Then I looked to my front. Instead of the 150 riflemen who were still blazing I saw a line nearly (in the middle)—12 deep… of closely jammed spearmen—all in a nullah with steep sloping sides 6 foot deep & 20 foot broad.”86 The lancers found themselves heading into a mob of nearly three thousand dervishes led by mounted emirs waving bright flags. What had happened? The Khalifa’s black flag, which had moved to within five hundred yards of this dry watercourse, should have told them. He had anticipated the flanking movement and reinforced the khor. Thus, the 310 shouting lancers, plunging furiously ahead in crescent formation, their overlapping flanks curving inward like the horns of a moon, their helmets bowed against the enemy musketry like the cuirassiers at Waterloo, were hurtling toward a wall of human flesh.
The collision was tremendous. Nearly thirty lancers and their horses, Churchill wrote, “fell knocked A.O.T. [arse over tip].” Some two hundred dervishes were down. Winston himself had passed between two riflemen; both had fired at him, missed, and hit the trooper just behind him, who was immediately stabbed to death as he slid from his mount. But most of the dervishes—and the British—were too stunned to fight. “For perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his enemy.” Terrified horses were wedged in the mob. Bruised men lay in heaps, dazed and astonished. Several lancers, unhorsed but alert, had time to remount. Then the Arabs began to come to their senses. They threw spears at their enemies, swung heavy swords, cut reins and stirrup leathers, and tried to hamstring horses. Troopers jabbed back with their lances, officers with their sabers. Churchill saw his men being “dragged from their horses and cut to pieces by the infuriated foe.” Finding himself “surrounded by what seemed to be dozens of men,” he “rode up to individuals firing my pistol in their faces and killing several—3 for certain—2 doubtful—one very doubtful.” One was swinging a gleaming, curved sword, trying to hamstring the pony. Another wore a steel helmet and chain-mail hangings. A third came at him “with uplifted sword. I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck him.” The dervish mass, he saw, was re-forming. At this point, he later recalled, “The whole scene seemed to flicker.” He looked around. His troop was gone. His squadron was gone. He could not see a single British officer or trooper within a hundred yards. Instead, “I saw two or three [dervish] riflemen crouching and aiming their rifles at me.”87
In a letter to his mother two days later (headed “Khartoum and be damned to it”) he wrote: “I never felt the slightest nervousness and felt as cool as I do now.” But in another account he was more candid. Staring at the Martini-Henry muzzles, he wrote, “for the first time that morning I experienced a sudden sensation of fear.” And he told Hamilton: “I looked at them stupidly for what may have been 2 seconds.” He thought: “What a fool I was to loiter in the midst of the enemy.” The dervish riflemen fired together and missed. Hunching down over his pommel, he spurred his pony free and found his squadron two hundred yards away, faced about and already forming up. His own troop had just finished sorting itself out, but as he joined it a dervish sprang out of a hole in the ground and into the midst of his men, lunging about with a spear. They thrust at him with their lances; he dodged, wheeled, and charged Churchill. “I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand, and lay there dead. How easy to kill a man! But I did not worry about it. I found I had fired the whole magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I put in a new clip of ten cartridges before thinking of anything else.” It occurred to him that if he hadn’t injured his shoulder in Bombay, he would have had to defend himself wit
h a sword and might now be dead. Afterward he reflected: “One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse.” He wrote Jennie: “The pistol was the best thing in the world.”88
He was ready to charge again; they all were; several of his troopers asked permission to discard their lances and draw their swords. Then they looked back at where they had been, and their blood cooled. Winston saw, coming from the direction of the enemy, “a succession of grisly apparitions; 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.”89 Attending to these came first. As they finished improvising bandages, the colonel, apparently for the first time in the action, remembered that his men carried carbines. Bugles sounded and they trotted off to the flank, where they could enfilade the khor from three hundred yards. This forced the dervishes to retreat toward the ridge where the Khalifa’s black flag still waved. Twenty minutes after the British had wheeled into line and charged, they occupied the watercourse and were breakfasting there, in sole possession of the field.
The question is whether it was worth it. Churchill wrote Hamilton: “It was I suppose the most dangerous 2 minutes I shall live to see. Out of 310 officers & men we lost—1 officer and 20 men killed—4 officers and 45 men wounded and 119 horses of which 56 were bullet wounds. All this in 120 seconds!” He told his mother that he was “about the only officer whose clothes, saddlery, or horse were uninjured.” In the final reckoning it was found that Kitchener had lost fewer than 3 percent of his troops in the entire battle of Omdurman. Yet the Twenty-first Lancers’ casualties, in their brief encounter, had exceeded 22 percent. Churchill conceded in the Morning Post that this isolated engagement “did not greatly influence the fortunes of the battle.”90 Actually, it had no impact whatever. The Sirdar’s fears of house-to-house fighting in the city proved groundless. To be sure, the Khalifa did everything he could to arouse his people there. He ordered the Mahdi’s great war drum beaten, the martial ombya blown, and his sole Krupp gun wheeled into position and fired, while exhorting the inhabitants to prepare for a last stand. But his troops wanted none of it. They had seen enough of pointless slaughter. Disregarding his summons and the pleas of their emirs, they faded into the desert or surrendered. As the Sirdar approached Omdurman’s walls, three men emerged, knelt before him, and presented him with the keys to the city. British soldiers then marched through it, end to end. All this would have happened without the lancers’ charge. The evidence is overwhelming: the blood of Colonel Martin’s men had bought nothing.
The survivors of heavy fighting always try to justify the cost, however, and Churchill was no exception. He reasoned in his dispatches that the regiment had faced “no choice but to charge or gallop away. The definite orders excluded the latter alternative. In any case there was no time to argue. At that close range it was impossible so heavy a fire could be ineffective.” Actually, the lancers had proceeded to outflank the position after the charge, which proves that the enemy could have been outmaneuvered without it. Churchill offered his readers other arguments, which, though irrational, tell much about the era and his enthusiasm for its values. The regiment’s feat, he said, “was of perhaps as great value to the Empire as the victory itself.” It was important that untested British troops show “those intrinsic fighting virtues without which no race can long continue to rule.” Because of the Twenty-first Lancers at Omdurman, he concluded, England “may rise refreshed and, contemplating the past with calmness, may feel confidence in the present and high hope in the future. We can still produce soldiers worthy of their officers—and there has hitherto been no complaint about the officers.”91
There was more of this, most of it, by today’s standards, deplorable. He rejoiced to see that the Union Jack hoisted over the ashes of Khartoum was four times the size of the Egyptian khedive’s flag. He wept over the new English graveyard on an eminence overlooking the desert, with its “protecting crosses which the living raised as a last tribute to those who had paid the bill for all the fun and glory of the game.” To Hamilton he wrote that after his experience in the khor, “my faith in our race & blood was much strengthened.” “Perhaps,” he told his readers with heavy humor, “to these savages with their vile customs and brutal ideas, we appeared as barbarous aggressors”—which is, of course, precisely how they were regarded, and understandably so. After the guns had fallen silent he wrote in the Morning Post, “I raised my voice and helmet in honour of that persevering British people who, often affronted, usually get their own way in the end.” And although he had assured his mother that war could not be gilded, he tried to do it himself; brave deeds, he told his newspaper’s subscribers, “brighten the picture of war with beautiful colours, till from a distance it looks almost magnificent, and the dark background and dirty brown canvas are scarcely seen.” David Beatty’s eye was clearer. He had watched the lancers’ charge from his gunboat. Years later he told Churchill he had seen it, and Churchill eagerly asked him what his impression had been. “It looked,” Beatty said, “like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet.”92
Churchill’s impressions of the dervish rout were melodramatic because he was, and always would be, a romantic. In this he was a man of his time. He was no more persuaded of war’s ennobling virtues than Sir Henry Newbolt or Tennyson in Maud (“… hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!”), or Thomas Hughes. Fighting, to Hughes, was one of the most honorable words in the language, “the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man.” As late as August 24, 1914, when the British cavalry flung itself against a sleet of German bullets, John Buchan felt exalted. He knew that this suicidal act was “as futile and gallant as any other like attempt in history on unbroken infantry and guns in position. But it proved to the world that the spirit which inspired the Light Brigade at Balaclava… was still alive in the cavalry of today.” Somehow carnage had been transformed by concepts of Saint George, the Holy Grail, and “playing the game,” as though butchery were a manlier form of rugby. “Victorian and Edwardian chivalry,” Mark Girouard notes, “produced its own world of myth and legend, just as much as medieval chivalry.”93
Young Winston had fallen under this dark enchantment, and he would never be entirely free of it. But even at Omdurman he was his own man, undazzled by rank and quick to accuse those who betrayed the code of honor, which, he realized, must be observed by all or none. Kitchener soon discovered this. Despite his lordly bearing and his impeccable guardsman’s mustache, the Sirdar was a man of primitive, inclement instincts. On his orders the Mahdi’s tomb was desecrated, the corpse ripped from its shroud, and the head lopped off and dumped in a kerosene can to be “preserved for future disposal”—an official phrase which, the outraged Churchill wrote, could only be interpreted as meaning that it would be “passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo,” where it would be treated as “an interesting trophy.”94
Lord Cromer read this and had the gruesome relic sent back for reinterment. Kitchener seethed. Then Churchill found evidence of battlefield atrocities. He wrote his mother that the triumph had been “disgraced” by atrocities, and that “Kitchener is responsible for this.” Most of the guilty had been Egyptians and Sudanese fighting under the khedive’s colors, but some had been Englishmen. No blind chauvinist would have acknowledged that. Winston accepted it and wrote about it, and that took courage. “The sentiment that the British soldier is incapable of brutality,” he told his readers, “is one which never fails to win the meed of popular applause; but there are in fact a considerable proportion of cruel men in any army.” Kitchener now erupted. Winston wrote Hamilton: “I am in great disfavour with the authorities here…. Generally things have been a little unpleasant.” The Sirdar tried to punish him by putting him in charge of a band of sick camels limping wearily back to Cairo. Churchill tore up t
he orders, took the next launch north, and reached England in time to join the lancers’ triumphant London parade. A “general officer” testily wrote to the Army and Navy Gazette: “What is the position of Lieut. Spencer Churchill in Her Majesty’s Army?” Here he was, a subaltern with less than four years’ service, “acting as special correspondent here, there, and everywhere. Now, as a special correspondent he has, as a matter of course, to criticise general officers highly placed in authority and to influence public opinion. Can it be for the good of the Service…?” Even the Prince of Wales was offended. He wrote Winston: “I fear that in matters of discipline I may be considered old fashioned—and I must say that I think an officer serving in a campaign should not write letters for newspapers or express strong opinions of how the operations were carried out.” HRH said he now realized why the Sirdar “viewed your joining his force with dislike—it is I am sure merely because he knows you write, for which he has the greatest objection I understand—and I cannot help agreeing with him.”95
Winston was unruffled. This was one test for which his pathetic school years had prepared him. He knew how to stand alone. As for the controversy and evidence of his independence, he welcomed them; they would be useful in Parliament. At the same time, he was developing political acumen in other, subtler ways. Earlier he had missed the significance of the French troops on the upper Nile, but now, as Kitchener led a force there, he noted “rumours about Fashoda” in a dispatch and predicted that “the Battle of Fashoda will be fought in Westminster, that tempers rather than lives will be lost, and ink rather than blood expended.” And so it happened. Five days later the Sirdar confronted Captain Marchand and demanded he leave. Paris was furious, but the deputies were split by the growing Dreyfus crisis, and Théophile Delcassé, the foreign minister, ordered Marchand to withdraw. As compensation, the British generously gave France an expanse of Sahara Desert. That was how the Empire did things under Victoria, and Churchill would go to his grave believing that it was the best way, not just for England, but for all mankind. He could hardly wait to get his own hands on the reins of some of this vast power. The lancers’ charge had been less than forty-eight hours old when, itching to reach the hustings, he had written Jennie: “Arrange me some good meetings in October, Bradford & Birmingham. Sunny will help.” He was still obsessed with medals. After he had left Kitchener’s command, to the vast relief of both, he wrote a superior: “I naturally want to wear my medals while I still have a uniform to wear them on. They have already sent me the Egyptian one. I cannot think why the Frontier one has not arrived. Young Life Guardsmen on Sir B. Blood’s staff in Buner have already got theirs. Do try and get mine for me as soon as possible.”96