Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (3 page)

Sometimes great storks and cranes flapped away from their passage. Sometimes hippopotami emerged muddy from the swamp. At villages along the way notables flocked to the water’s edge to offer their submission, and intelligence officers went ashore to scribble them notes of pardon. It rained a lot as they sailed further south, the mosquitoes were terrible, and soon the steamers were labouring through the floating mass of decayed and pestilent vegetable matter called the Sudd. At night, though, when the cool descended over Africa, and the helmsmen looked along the banks for somewhere to tie up, marvellous sounds of beast, bird and whirring insect reached the men on board, and made them feel they were penetrating great mysteries (for not even the ship’s officers had been told why they were making this equatorial voyage).

Kitchener was a Francophile. He spoke fluent French, he liked the company of Frenchified women, he delighted in the French style of things. He would be reluctant to dislodge any French outpost by sheer force—there would be no primitive triumph at Fashoda, and Colonel Marchand’s skull ran no risk of immortality as a table ornament. But he did not know the strength of the French force, he had no idea how truculent it might be, and he decided to move cautiously. When they were about twelve miles from Fashoda two Sudanese orderlies were put ashore with a message addressed to the ‘Chef de l’expédition Européenne à Fashoda’. It announced the news of Omdurman, thus implicitly declaring the British to be suzerains of the Upper Nile, and said that General Kitchener hoped to be in Fashoda the following day. Kitchener signed it not as a British general, but as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, and at Wingate’s suggestion he ordered that only the Egyptian flag would be flown by the flotilla as they approached Fashoda, and that he and his officers would wear their Egyptian uniforms. The impact would be less
pointed, and the suggestion of a clash between two great Empires less direct.

Next morning as the ships steamed slowly on, the lookouts saw approaching them a small rowing boat, flying at its stern an enormous tricolour, and carrying a black sergeant in French uniform. He brought a reply from Fashoda:

Signed
MARCHAND

This engaging persiflage, full as it was of meaningless treaties, non-existent reinforcements and unenforceable claims, paved the way for a meeting between the two commanders, and later in the day, proceeding southwards through the desolation of the Sudd, the
British sighted Fashoda. Forlornly above the rotted swamp, stretching away as far as the eye could see, the little fort stood half-derelict upon a peninsula, with a few conical huts of the Shilluk outside its walls, a group of palms, and a soggy garden of vegetables. It looked hot, wet and verminous, but the tricolour flew boldly above it, and at the water’s edge, as the gunboats approached, an honour guard of Frenchmen and Senegalese stood bravely at the salute. The British were touched by this show of pride, and by the defiant isolation of the fort. ‘It was a puny little thing’, one officer wrote in reminiscence. ‘Were we to be compelled to break it down?’

At this dismal spot the Empires met. Marchand and his men had reached it after a terrible overland journey, one of the most remarkable in the records of African travel, eight months on foot, three months in their leaky collapsible steamer, which they had dragged laboriously overland from the Niger to the Congo. Kitchener and his men had travelled there more magnificently, in the after-flush of a great victory. Marchand’s force was pale and emaciated, after months among the toads, insects and fevers of the Sudd. Kitchener stood on the foredeck of the
Dal
bronzed and bulky, his soldiers well-nourished at his back, his gunboats spick-and-span.

At midday, September 19, 1898, the commanders met on board the
Dal
. Kitchener wore his Sirdar’s regalia, with tarboosh. Marchand, a small bearded figure, wore no military insignia at all—wisely, perhaps, since he was only a captain. They sat with Wingate and Marchand’s adjutant on the deck, watched intently from shore and ship by officers with binoculars. Peace and war hung in the balance, and their conversation was tense. Sometimes, the watchers thought, the talk seemed less than amicable, and Marchand was to be seen gesturing angrily at the Sirdar—‘distinct signs of hostility’, reported a British colonel to his colleagues. Presently, though, a steward climbed up the ladder to the deck carrying a tray of glasses, ‘full of golden liquid’, and a moment later Kitchener and Marchand, raising their glasses, were clinking them in agreement and good wishes—in relief too, no doubt, as they sat there, half in shade, half in sunlight, on the deck of the little ship.

It had been a close thing. Kitchener had declared flatly that the
episode might lead to a European war—did Marchand, with such stakes at issue, really mean to prevent the representatives of Egypt from hoisting the Egyptian flag over an Egyptian possession? Marchand replied that obviously he was powerless to prevent it, since he was outnumbered ten to one, but that without contrary orders from France he could not retire from his position, and that all his men could do, if Kitchener insisted, was to die at their posts. Proud of his achievement, prickly in his patriotism, he was undoubtedly ready to defend his awful fort to the end—he had a ‘terrible desire’, he later said, to rebuff Kitchener altogether: but he was awed despite himself by the imponderables at stake, and perhaps even by the presence of Kitchener, and so as the servant with his drinks began his precarious ascent of the upper-deck ladder, an accord was reached.

Marchand would not be ejected from his outpost, and the French flag would continue to fly there, pending orders from Europe. The British would establish their own garrison at a discreet but practical distance—500 yards to the south, on Marchand’s only line of retreat through the marshes. The British would formally take possession of the area, but in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, and only the Egyptian flag would fly above their own quarters. There the matter was left, in a compromise that seemed to protect everybody’s face, and would allow the two imperial Governments, far away, to achieve a solution.

It was a soldier’s formula, and the soldiers liked each other. They negotiated in French, but they talked the same professional language too, of flags and gunpowder, supplies and disciplines. After the talks the British mounted a parade, and the Egyptian flag was hoisted by a Sudanese detachment, to a twenty-one-gun salute from the artillery. Everybody saluted quiveringly, and did their best to be tactful. The warships flew Egyptian flags, most of the British officers wore Egyptian uniforms, and even the three cheers were in Arabic. The French, for their part, behaved with great courtesy: the officers wore fresh-laundered whites for the occasion, and their Senegalese soldiers, in red fezzes and jerseys, seemed even to the British to be commendably soldier-like.

Later Kitchener was entertained in Marchand’s mess, bending
his gigantic frame almost double to enter it. The two sides toasted each other in sweet champagne, and exchanged fairly ornate pleasantries. A Senegalese guard was then inspected in the blazing heat, and as the Sirdar left the soil of Fashoda—Fort St Louis to the French—he was presented with a huge basket of vegetables and flowers from the garden: French flora from French soil, it was tacitly suggested as the last salutes were exchanged and the boats rowed out to the waiting gunboats.

Almost at once the flotilla sailed, leaving only a regiment of Sudanese and some guns in a bivouac on their mudflat, and soon the trail of black smoke was far away across the empty Sudd. Kitchener left behind him, nevertheless, a steely after-taste, for before he embarked he handed Marchand a formal letter of protest at the presence of the French in the Nile valley, and a list of stern restrictions on their movements. Not even private letters were to be sent down the river without British approval: in effect the French were to be imprisoned in their fort with their flowers, flags and vegetables. This was the iron within the glove. No pretence was made now that Kitchener was acting purely in Egyptian interests. The protest was made in the name of Great Britain, and Marchand and his Frenchmen were left in no doubt, as they watched the gunboats disappear, that the British Empire itself had passed that way.

The British also sent the French, as a parting gift, a package of newspapers. It was a Parthian courtesy, for the papers contained the news of the Dreyfus Affair, the cancer in French public life which festered around the imprisonment on Devil’s Island, for alleged espionage, of the innocent Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus. ‘You have achieved something remarkable, very remarkable‚’ Kitchener had told Marchand in his mess hut, but he had added enigmatically, ‘but you know the French Government will not back you up.’ This was why. The Dreyfus scandal, which divided French society from top to bottom, also hamstrung French foreign policy, while the Russians had chosen the moment to tell their allies that they wanted
no part of the Nile dispute. Marchand was all on his own, far away in the Sudd: France had her mind on closer predicaments.
1

Sure enough, war never came. The British were united behind Kitchener—they realized, Churchill wrote, ‘that while they had been devoting themselves to great military operations, in broad daylight and in the eye of the world… other operations, covert and deceitful, had been in progress in the heart of the Dark Continent, designed solely for the mischievous and spiteful object of depriving them of the produce of their labours. And they firmly set their faces against such behaviour.’ The negotiations between London and Paris were protracted, but the British held all the cards, if only because they really were ready to go to war over Fashoda. ‘We’ve only got arguments,’ said Theophile Delcassé, the new and more conciliatory French Foreign Minister, ‘they’ve got troops.’ Admiral Sir John Fisher, the British naval commander on the North American Station, was standing by to fall upon Devil’s Island and snatch Dreyfus away to freedom, while at home the imperial propaganda machine worked at full blast. ‘What has France to look for?’ asked the
Illustrated
London
News
. ‘Of our ultimate triumph, and of the utter disaster that would befall her, there can be no question whatever.’ George Wyndham, one of the most promising of the younger Conservative imperialists, put the British attitude in a nutshell: ‘We don’t care whether the Nile is called English or Egyptian or what it is called, but we mean to have it and we don’t mean the French to have it…. It is not worthwhile drawing distinctions of right and wrong in the matter, it is a matter entirely of interest.’