First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (19 page)

Simultaneously, Muhammed Ahmed’s strategy was given a boost when a separate, spontaneous rebellion broke out in the eastern Sudan.
In the last month of 1883, the Hadendoa tribe had risen in a revolt of their own against the oppression and misgovernment of the Egyptians.
Led by the gifted Osman Digna, the Hadendoa surrounded the Egyptian garrisons at the towns of Tokar and Sinkat.
The British government refused to take any action to save them, but the Egyptian government was not so willing to abandon them.
Here geography played a role in Cairo’s decision, for both towns were close to the Red Sea coastline, which gave the Egyptians an opportunity for a naval evacuation.
The result was more comic-opera farce than military operation.

In February 1884, a mixed force of thirty-five hundred ill-trained and untried Egyptian and Sudanese infantry under the command of General Valentine Baker was landed at the port of Suakin and began marching inland to relieve Tokar.
On February 5, near the mud-hut village of Teb, they were attacked by about a thousand of Osman Digna’s Arabs.
The resulting fight should have been no contest as the defenders so heavily outnumbered their attackers, yet the ghost of William Hicks seemed to hover over this Egyptian force as it wavered and then collapsed in the face of the Arabs’ fanatical assault.

It’s easy to hear the frustration in General Baker’s voice when reading his official despatch to Baring, recounting how “The square being only threatened by a small force of the enemy…the Egyptian troops threw down their arms and ran…allowing themselves to be killed without the slightest resistance.” The European officers in command of the Egyptian force desperately tried to rally their men for a determined stand, but failed as friendly troops began firing on each other in the confusion and panic.
Managing to scrape together some twelve hundred men, most of them without their weapons, Baker withdrew to Suakin.
More than twenty-two hundred, including ninety-six officers, had been killed, while the column’s artillery, small arms, and ammunition fell into Osman Digna’s hands.

Emboldened by their success and now armed with modern weapons, Digna’s followers pressed home their attacks on Tokar and Sinkat.
With a courage born of desperation the garrison of Sinkat, eight hundred strong, broke out of the city and attempted to fight its way east to Suakin.
It was hopeless.
Harried and harassed, the little column was destroyed before it got halfway to the coast.
A few days later the garrison at Tokar surrendered, only to be slaughtered out of hand.

Inexplicably, for Khartoum was by far the greater prize, Gladstone’s government chose to bestir itself at this moment to attempt to restore Egypt’s position in the eastern Sudan.
For reasons never made clear, the Cabinet concluded that the loss of the Tokar and Sinkat garrisons were a greater blow to British prestige than would be the loss of Khartoum.
In retrospect it can only be concluded that, with Gordon already at Khartoum, the government felt it had to give the appearance of doing something in the Sudan.
The proximity of the towns to the sea, moreover, not only awakened Britain’s traditional strategy of controlling the sea lanes but made the process of projecting strength there easier.
Consequently an expeditionary force of one cavalry regiment and two infantry brigades was sent to Suakin, under the command of General Sir Gerald Graham, with the express mission of retaking the two towns and avenging the slaughtered garrisons.
This was utter folly to Gordon, who bluntly told Baring that his position at Khartoum would be still further compromised by this operation, sited as it was on one of his only two lines of retreat, the other of course being down the Nile.

The soldiers, their equipment, and mounts were rushed to Suakin with almost obscene haste, particularly when compared with the dawdling that would mark the effort to relieve Gordon six months later.
On March 4, Graham’s forces drew up for battle near Teb, on almost exactly the same ground where Brigadier Baker’s Egyptians and Sudanese had been routed.
This time when Osman Digna attacked, the European-led force systematically cut down over three thousand Hadendoa warriors as they charged the scarlet square, driving the rest from the field in disorder.
Another action was fought at Tamai four weeks later, with the same result.
For the loss of just over three hundred officers and other ranks, the British had killed nearly six thousand Sudanese, effectively gutting the rebel fighting force.

Though Osman Digna, a charismatic warrior who had sworn allegiance to the Mahdi, would remain in the field for years to come, the force of his rebellion had been brought to a swift end.
It was a poignant demonstration of what might have happened had British troops accompanied Gordon to Khartoum.
For all that, it accomplished little, for the rugged country of the eastern Sudan was of little strategic value in the struggle against the Mahdi, and no amount of British success there could do anything to succor the besieged populace at Khartoum.

Because the telegraph line between Khartoum and Cairo was still open, Gordon had some knowledge of these events.
It can only be guessed how much he rued the waste of British strength in what was a secondary conflict, or imagined what he could have accomplished had those same British troops been at his disposal.
While two brigades of infantry and a single cavalry regiment would not have been sufficient to confront and defeat the Mahdi’s army in the open field, within the defensive perimeter of Khartoum they would have made Gordon’s position impregnable.

The frustration Gordon must have felt was one that has been shared by military commanders around the world since time immemorial.
Karl von Clausewitz rightly stated that “War is a continuation of national policy by non-political means.” What is not immediately obvious in that pronouncement—and it is a fine distinction not readily appreciated by most civilians, and almost never by politicians—is that military and political objectives are rarely the same.
It is a point starkly highlighted by Gladstone’s choosing of the time and place to intervene in the Sudan: by pursuing a swift and easy victory, he gave the appearance of taking decisive action at a moment when public opinion was beginning to turn against him, while in fact it accomplished little save the loss of 315 British soldiers and several thousand Sudanese.
The Mahdi was the far greater threat, yet the defeat of Osman Digna had no effect on the progress of the Islamic tide advancing down the Nile.

It would be a problem which in the opening decade of the 21st century would continue to plague the military and political leadership of those nations targeted by Islamic terrorists.
Some national leaders, desperate to reassure their populations and create the impression that they were taking decisive action against Islamic terrorists, would seek easy victories and pursue confrontations where there was little risk of failure, although the results often had little if any effect on what would become known as “the war on terrorism.” Others, hiding behind a smokescreen of moral posturing, would hypocritically proclaim their support for the efforts of those nations confronting Moslem fanatics, while being careful to ensure that such support consisted of little more than lip service.

Gladstone’s primary excuse for refusing to aid Gordon was money-–it would simply be too expensive, he maintained, to send a full-scale relief expedition up the Nile.
Similarly, the question of expense would haunt those nations which a century and a quarter later were earnestly fighting terrorism, although the cost in this case would not be so much monetary as moral.
It would take a good deal of courage and resolve to commit to destroying the infrastructure of international militant Islamic, in particular in those nations which sympathized with them, rooting the terrorists out of hiding and then running them to earth.
As any infantryman can attest, the toughest battlefield job of all is, in the British phrase, “winkling the other fellow out of his hole.”

From this perspective, Gladstone’s decision to authorize General Graham’s expedition was puerile, even craven.
Graham carried out his task with admirable speed and tactical dexterity–there was nothing wrong with his execution of the mission.
But it did nothing to solve the central problem threatening Egypt and, by extension, the security of the Suez Canal—that is, the Mahdi’s rebellion.
Osman Digna was able to lead the Hadendoa in revolt precisely because the Mahdi had diverted so much attention away from the eastern Sudan; if there had been no Mahdist army flooding northward toward Egypt, Digna would have never chanced leading his own uprising.
Gladstone’s decision was a classic example of treating a symptom while ignoring the disease.
Worst of all, it left Gordon stranded in Khartoum, almost completely surrounded by an Arab army that numbered at least a hundred thousand.

Yet Gordon was not without assets.
Of the roughly forty thousand people still in Khartoum, almost eight thousand were soldiers, all of them well armed and equipped.
There were twelve pieces of artillery—Krupp guns, 9- and 16-pounders—which were as good or better than anything fielded by the Mahdi’s army.
There were two million rounds of rifle ammunition in the city’s magazines, and the munitions factory in Khartoum continued to produce about forty thousand rounds a week, so ammunition was the least of Gordon’s concerns.
He estimated that the storehouses held enough food to feed the city for at least six months, and that he would be able to control the river between Khartoum and Omdurman with the nine small paddle-steamers that remained, each of them armed with light artillery pieces and primitive Nordenfeldt machine guns.

All in all it gave Gordon reason to be confident of holding the city until some sort of relief expedition could be mounted.
Given the powerful influence of his personality on the city’s populace, had Gordon been assured of the support of Cairo and London and that relief would eventually come, in all likelihood he could have held the city indefinitely.
As it was, with nothing more than faith in the British public, so that their opinions would force Gladstone’s hand and compel him to send a relief column to save Khartoum, Gordon expressed an amazing degree of confidence.
In another man it might have been a manifestation of a streak of fatalism; in Gordon, it was a demonstration of his faith in God and his own abilities as an engineer.
The latter factor was a huge advantage for Gordon, for it not only gave him the opportunity to exploit the city’s geographic position, it also allowed him to devise weapons and tactics that an ordinary officer of infantry might never have conceived.

Here the geography of Khartoum and Gordon’s engineering skills met in a happy union.
Sitting in a triangle surrounded on two sides by rivers that could only be crossed by boat, Khartoum’s only real vulnerability was the exposed landward approach to the south.
Here Gordon began excavating a huge ditch, four miles long, from the Blue Nile to the White, in essence creating an immense moat and turning the city into an island.
Knocking loopholes in houses and buildings along the waterfront, siting his artillery so that it could cover any water-borne approach, and setting up regular patrols of the rivers by his steamers, Gordon felt confident that the city was secure from that quarter.
Blacksmiths throughout the city began manufacturing caltrops—multi-pronged iron spikes that resembled a child’s jacks, but on a huge scale, some measuring six inches and more across.
Scattered throughout the sand on the landward approach to the city, the caltrops could cripple any man, horse or camel unfortunate enough to step on one.
Aim points were set up for each artillery piece, along with range tables, while primitive landmines, made of wooden boxes filled with gunpowder and set off by fuses, were carefully sited.

Hastily mustering his infantry as sappers, Gordon put them to work reinforcing the city side of the moat, setting up parapets, barbicans, ravelins, revetments, and ramparts.
Some of the earthworks apparently thrown up were deceptive–swaths of dyed cotton were used to simulate new diggings while the real work went on elsewhere.
Chevaux-de-frise
made of sharpened wooden poles were lashed together and positioned on ground firm enough to carry cavalry.
Even broken bottles and window glass were put to work, their shards littering the ground along likely lines of advance.
While his troops worked, Gordon waited.

The Mahdi, suddenly growing cautious in the face of Gordon’s experience and reputation, understood that the wisest strategy to pursue against Khartoum was to first systematically cut off and annihilate the city’s outlying positions and garrisons, gradually eroding Gordon’s strength and steadily restricting his room to maneuver.
Gordon had strengthened the garrison in Omdurman, bringing it up to a total of five hundred infantry, while ensuring it was well stocked with ammunition.
Another eight hundred troops were sent to the oasis at Halfaya, eight miles north of Khartoum.
Smaller outposts were set up in Khojaki outside of North Khartoum on the opposite bank of the Nile and at Fort Mukran on the point where the two Niles converged.

The Mahdi made the opening move in what would become an intricate game of military chess.
In the first week of March he ordered the daring march of four thousand Arabs to the Nile below the city, which cut off the eight hundred Egyptian troops at Halfaya, a village eight miles to the north.
The effect of taking Halfaya would be twofold: first it would cut off the Nile passage as a source of supply or escape; second, it would further constrict Gordon’s room to maneuver, adding to the psychological burden of the inhabitants of Khartoum, heightening their sense of encirclement.
The Arabs quickly entrenched themselves along the Nile opposite Halfaya and around the perimeter of the oasis, and kept up a heavy rifle-fire on the garrison, cutting off its line of retreat.
The Egyptian troops fought back with surprising resolve, but the sheer volume of the Arab fire took its toll and casualties began piling up by the score.
The Arabs cut off three companies of the garrison who had gone out to cut wood, capturing eight of their boats, and killing a hundred and fifty men.