First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (29 page)

Leaving Buller to his work at Gemai, Wolseley, who had gone up the Nile with the river column, now rode ahead with his staff to Dongola and there set up his headquarters.
The sketchy reports coming out of Khartoum told him that his initial estimates of Gordon’s position had been overconfident.
The garrison at Khartoum was becoming weaker with each passing day, and the slow pace of the expedition’s advance began to alarm Wolseley.
For all of his meticulous planning, he had underestimated the challenge of moving his columns up the Nile.
Most seriously, he had failed to anticipate how debilitating the desert heat would be to troops who had only just left the cool climate of the British Isles, and the sheer physical strain imposed by movement across the terrain.
Distances of three hundred, six hundred, or twelve hundred miles may look the same on a map of Europe as they do on maps of Egypt and the Sudan, but what the maps cannot convey is that the effort required to move one mile in the desert can be as much as three-fold that needed to cover the same distance in Spain or Russia.

The heat saps the strength and will of men while flies torment and irritate them; sand and grit create jamming and malfunctions in machinery and equipment, while bringing up supplies can require more effort than the actual operations.
Sanitary conditions are rudimentary at best, and sleep is a precious commodity.
Water is worth its weight in gold, and the apparently endless landscape seems to barely change from one day to the next, creating a mind-numbing monotony.
Since Wolseley’s campaign, two World Wars and two wars fought in the Persian Gulf have demonstrated that men can adapt to and even fight in these conditions, but such adaptation takes time, and time, Wolseley was coming to discover, was now a rapidly diminishing luxury.
He chafed at the delays imposed by the need to portage around the cataracts, fretted at the slow progress of the Desert Column, and worried about was happening at Khartoum.
In his despatches and in the talks he had with the journalists accompanying the expedition he did his best to appear assured and confident, but in the privacy of his journal he vented his frustration at Gladstone’s procrastination in authorizing the expedition.

Doubtless much of Wolseley’s anger at Gladstone was justified, but in fairness some of it should have been directed at himself.
While the memory of the massacre of Hicks’ column continued to exert an influence on Wolseley in his plan of campaign, the fact that he commanded a force of more than ten thousand British regulars, rather than the motley dregs and leavings of Egyptian jails, could have inspired bolder and swifter action.

From Wadi Halfa it was three hundred miles to Dongola, with the Third Cataract to be negotiated just below the town.
Given the exertion required, altogether the River Column’s progress had to be judged as impressive.
The column had left Alexandria on September 27, arrived at Aswan on October 5, reached Wadi Halfa on October 19, and finally joined the Desert Column at Dongola on November 8.
The river force might have made even better progress had not a shortage of coal for the steamers in Alexandria kept scores of whalers from being brought up to Aswan, a delay that eventually proved costly.

Meanwhile, the Desert Column was being reorganized as the Camel Corps.
It was to be a self-contained unit of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, capable of striking out across the desert on its own if need be, possessing sufficient strength of arms to defend itself against enemies several times its number, and swift enough to be able to withdraw to the River Column should it be faced with overwhelming odds.
However, from Dongola to Korti the Camel Corps would move up the Nile alongside the River Column, acting as a scouting force.
The formation of the Camel Corps owed much to Major Kitchener, whose perseverance with Lord Wolseley finally compelled the General to see the wisdom of the concept.
At the same time, it came as something of a disappointment to Kitchener, for he would neither command nor accompany the Camel Corps if and when it made a dash for Khartoum.
Wolseley regarded the young major as too valuable to his intelligence service to risk in the wastes of the Sudanese desert; Kitchener would remain at Debba.

Back in London, almost from the day Wolseley left for Alexandria, an anxious public was kept abreast of the Relief Expedition’s preparations by an equally anxious press; then when the troops left Cairo, their apparently agonizingly slow progress up the Nile was followed just as avidly.
In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Gladstone remained impassive and imperturbable, still unhappy about being forced into authorizing the Relief Expedition at all, but content that no matter what the outcome of events he had done everything he could to answer the dictates of his conscience and the responsibilities of his office.
Lord Hartington regularly briefed the Queen on the latest news from the expedition.

In Cairo, Sir Evelyn Baring was watching Wolseley’s progress as keenly as anyone in London.
While hardly the schemer that Gordon believed him to be—Gordon’s journals would later be found to contain page after page of scathing, though often witty, comments about Baring and his diplomatic posturings—the Consul-General had come to believe that he had probably made a terrible mistake in agreeing to Gordon’s appointment to Khartoum.
Once he arrived in Khartoum, Baring felt, Gordon had essentially ignored his orders, and with his presence in the city had forced the British government, by mounting an expedition to rescue him, into the very course of action he had been sent to the Sudan to avoid.

In the ten months since Gordon had left Cairo, Baring had come to see that the General was, at times, “extremely pugnacious…hotheaded, impulsive, and swayed by his emotions….
In fact, except in personal courage, great fertility in military resource, a lively though sometimes ill-directed repugnance toward injustice, oppression and meanness of every description, and a considerable power of acquiring influence over those…with whom he was brought into personal contact, General Gordon does not appear to have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to undertake the difficult task he had in hand.” The irony of Baring’s words were that their very accuracy made his disapproval ring hollow.
Gordon’s qualities which Baring deplored were the very qualities that made him such an effective soldier, and in fact were the very qualities that recommended Gordon to the mission to Khartoum in the first place.
Baring was lamenting the fact that Gordon was not a diplomat; in essence, he was lamenting that Gordon was not a man like himself.
True, there have been few men as unlike as Gordon and Baring, but the fact remains that Gordon came within a hair’s-breadth of accomplishing what Baring wished he could have done: saving Khartoum and smashing the Mahdi.
That, however, was a task for which Baring lacked the emotional or moral fiber to achieve; his criticisms of Gordon, leveled a quarter-century after the event, would smack more of sour grapes than a legitimate condemnation of ill-considered actions.
In the meantime, with the Relief Expedition on its way up the Nile, Baring knew that should the city fall and the General be lost, no small portion of the blame would fall on his shoulders.
It would be inevitable that Gladstone, who would first feel the wrath of Parliament and people alike should the Relief Expedition fail, would attempt to defend himself by pointing out Baring’s initial opposition to Gordon’s mission, then his later endorsement of it, and claim that he had acted on the best advice available.
If Gladstone were to be accused of failing Gordon, then Baring would be made a party to that failure.

Once it arrived at Korti, the expedition was less than three hundred miles overland from Khartoum.
By now the power of the Mahdi in the surrounding country was palpable, and it was here that the expedition entered its most critical phase.
Each British soldier, all of them long-service veterans of multiple campaigns, was armed with a Model 1871 Martini-Henry .455/.577 rifle.
If the Remingtons with which some of the Mahdi’s followers were armed was a powerful weapon, which it was, the Martini-Henry, popularly known as simply the Martini, was a man-stopper.
The big .577 caliber cartridge fired a .455 caliber round, which weighed over an ounce and was made of soft, unjacketed lead.
On striking its target the round would deform, mushroom, and sometimes fragment, expending its considerable energy within the target—and if that target was a man, it could often literally knock him off his feet.
The British soldier, known even in that day as “Tommy,” was drilled endlessly in the art of volley fire—massed ranks of infantry two, three, sometimes four deep, firing simultaneously on command.
If ever the cliché “hail of fire” was warranted, it would be when an enemy faced a British regiment in square, each face numbering close to three hundred men, firing as many as six or seven times a minute.
It was this sort of volley fire that William Hicks had hoped would save his column—and himself—three years earlier, but which his Egyptian conscripts lacked the training and discipline to be able to produce or sustain.

But volley fire was a British specialty.
Foes ranging from French infantry columns in Portugal and Spain, to Bonaparte’s cuirassiers at Waterloo, to Russian heavy horse in the Crimea, to Zulu impis in southern Africa could attest to the devastating effects of the steady, rolling volleys of British musketry.
How the Ansar would fare when confronted by such firepower no one knew.

For the Mahdi’s followers in this part of the Sudan were mainly from the Hadendoa tribe, popularly if somewhat incorrectly known as Dervishes, almost primitive Arabs, fanatically Moslem, who still fought with sword and shield.
They weren’t a people to be taken lightly, however, for their huge, two-handed swords could dismember a victim in one stroke, while the shield each Dervish warrior carried could be a weapon in its own right, smashing and bashing an enemy senseless before the death-stroke of the sword fell.
Wearing their distinctive, bushy hair, the Dervishes would soon become known throughout the British Army, not in derision but with a hard-won respect, as “Fuzzy-Wuzzies.”

At Korti the Nile changes course, bending back to the north, then swinging around eastward then southeastward, like a huge questionmark stretching for two-hundred fifty miles until it finally runs down to the south, toward Khartoum.
If the relief column remained on the Nile, its progress would actually be taking it farther away from the city, creating further delay at a time when Wolseley had come to realize that Gordon had only days left, not weeks.
At the same time, if the expedition set out directly across the desert to Khartoum, it would risk serious supply shortages, as there were too few camels, mules and horses to carry the column’s ammunition, rations, and equipment.
It would also be moving into the same sort of terrain where William Hicks’ army had come to grief at the hands of the Mahdist forces.
Wolseley had to make a choice between swift action and secure progress.

Not surprisingly, he compromised.
The bulk of the expedition would continue up the Nile, while the Camel Corps would set out across the desert for Metemma, where, it was hoped, more definite word could be gained of the situation at Khartoum.
If the city still held out when the Camel Corps reached Metemma, it could serve as a valuable reinforcement for Gordon, not to mention a huge boost to the morale of the garrison and citizens alike.
Should the news at Metemma be bad, the Camel Corps would be strong enough to defend itself if it had to withdraw back to Korti or down the Nile to Abu Hamed.
Should the city still be holding out but the Mahdi’s forces encircling it prove too strong for the Camel Corps to break through, they could wait until the rest of the column arrived at Metemma so that the combined forces could attack the Mahdi’s army en masse.
In contrast to most compromises, this one appeared to be not only workable, but would satisfy all the strategic circumstances that might arise.

Officially comprised of four regiments, the Camel Corps’ strength totaled some sixteen hundred officers and other ranks, along with three hundred native servants and interpreters, the lot of them mounted on twenty-eight hundred camels.
In addition to the rifles carried by each ranker and the officers’ sidearms, the column was armed with three light cannon manned by a contingent of the Royal Artillery, and a five-barreled Gardner gun, crewed by men from the Naval Detachment.
The Gardner gun was an early form of machine gun, similar to the American Gatling, and was an impressive weapon: in a public demonstration while the Gardner was first being evaluated by the British Army, the prototype had fired ten thousand rounds in twenty-seven minutes.
Command of the Desert Column was given to Brigadier Stewart, with Colonel Frederick Burnaby as second-in-command.

Stewart was one of the more promising officers in the British Army, which he had entered in 1863.
He first served in India and later South Africa, where he fought against the Zulus in 1879, and then in the first Boer War.
He had been captured by the Boers at Majuba in 1881, and held for three months before being released when a peace settlement was reached.
He was no stranger to Egypt, for like many of his fellow officers, he had taken part in putting down the Arabi revolt.
In August 1882 he was serving of the cavalry division in Egypt, and after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir he led the advance upon Cairo, capturing the city.
His personal bravery as well as his leadership caused him to be mentioned in despatches three times, and he was promoted to brevet-colonel, made a Companion of the Bath, and appointed an aide-de-camp to the Queen.
He next saw action in January 1884 when he fought at Suakin, commanding Sir Gerald Graham’s cavalry, which earned him promotion to brigadier.
When Wolseley began assembling his staff for the Relief Expedition, Stewart, on the strength of his experience as well as personal courage, was one of the first officers he requested.
Stewart’s combination of cavalryman dash and steady common sense, shown in his previous actions, made him the ideal candidate for command of the Camel Corps.