First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (31 page)

Clearly the situation was urgent, but Wilson inexplicably chose this moment to halt the Corps’ advance outside Metemma, which was still held by the Arabs, to set up his headquarters and establish a bivouac.
The engines of two of the Khartoum steamers were torn down and overhauled, in expectation of using them to ferry troops to the city, but three days were lost while this work was undertaken and a reconnaissance of the river was carried out.
It may be that some of Wilson’s hesitation was due to the emotional shock of the two battles that had just been fought, but his inexperience was certainly a factor, as his actions at this point were strictly “by the book,” not those of a seasoned officer confronted with an urgent situation.
Ultimately the delay would prove critical.

When the steamers were finally readied, on the morning of January 24, two of them, the
Bordein
and the
Tel Hewein
, were loaded with the two hundred Sudanese riflemen that had sailed down to Metemma, along with the detachment of the Naval Brigade that had accompanied the Camel Corps, and twenty men from the Royal Sussex regiment, all of the latter wearing, as Gordon had requested, the British infantryman’s traditional red tunic.
With them went Colonel Wilson.
The river was falling, slowing the steamers’ progress as previously unsuspected rocks and shoals became evident, and often channels that appeared to be clear passages were found to be deadends.
The little ships had to stop frequently for fuel, and do so in sections of the river which seemed deserted, lest they be ambushed as was the
Abbas
four months earlier.
Though both steamers were armed with small brass cannons and a pair of Gardner machine guns, they were too lightly armed to withstand an attack of the kind launched by the Arabs at Abu Klea or Abu Kru.
Indeed, the significance of this little expedition to Khartoum was intended as more of a gesture to reassure Gordon that help was truly on the way than any attempt to relieve the city or raise the siege.

As the steamers neared Omdurman, Arabs on both banks of the Nile began calling out to those aboard that they were too late: Khartoum city had fallen.
Wilson refused to believe it and ordered the two ships to continue onward.
As they drew closer to Khartoum, they came under intense rifle and artillery fire from both riverbanks as well as the city itself, and Wilson noted that there was no flag, British or Egyptian, flying above the Government House.
Wanting there to be no mistake, Wilson ordered the
Bordein
’s captain to put the ship against the riverbank, and once there, Arabs confirmed the news.
Gordon was dead; the city had fallen.
The relief column had arrived two days too late.

CHAPTER 10

THE FALL OF KHARTOUM

In the center of Khartoum a tower had been erected, a vantage point where Gordon was able to keep a sharp lookout for the Mahdi’s forces.
They were daily growing in numbers, and by the beginning of October it was clear that the city was not merely cut off but completely surrounded.
While never really unexpected, this development had an unfortunate consequence—the raids to steal cattle and grain that had proven so successful in the previous months in augmenting the city’s food supplies would no longer be possible, a point that was made emphatic by the disastrous raid in September when eight hundred of Gordon’s soldiers were trapped outside the city and lost.
Now all Gordon could do was wait—and hope.
He made every exertion possible to keep up the morale of the city and its defenders, but although by the end of September he had definite news that a Relief Expedition had been authorized and was making its way up the Nile, with each passing week with no sign of British soldiers approaching Khartoum, the defenders’ faith in Gordon’s ability to triumph over the Mahdi began to erode and grow brittle.

There was, in point of fact, little Gordon could do except wait it out.
Surrender was never a possibility for him, either personally or as the commander of the garrison and governor of the city.
It wasn’t that Gordon possessed a martyr complex, rather that it simply wasn’t in his character.
Certainly if he had ever regarded capitulation as an honorable alternative, he had good reason to do so.
By the end of December, nearly all the grain that had been so carefully hoarded had been consumed, along with every camel, horse, donkey, monkey, dog, and rat in the city.
In late November a large store of grain, concealed by a group of merchants who had planned to sell it to the highest bidders when the shortages became acute, was discovered, and the day of reckoning was delayed for a few more weeks.

But by the end of the year, nearly all that was left was an almost inedible form of palm fibre, and a sort of gum made from tree sap that caused severe intestinal pains some hours after it was eaten.
Starvation was beginning to set in, and soon the sight of dead bodies lying by the hundreds in the streets became common.
Those still alive lacked the strength and the will to bury them.
In late December nearly five thousand of those civilians who could still walk were sent out to the Mahdi’s lines under a flag of truce, one of them bearing a letter from Gordon to Muhammed Ahmed, begging for them to be treated humanely.
Instead they became more fodder for the slavers.

When the contents of Colonel Stewart’s papers, captured when the
Abbas
was ambushed and Stewart killed, were translated for the Mahdi, the game was up, to all intents and purposes, for the city and its populace, unless the Relief Expedition arrived very shortly.
Muhammed Ahmed realized that with conditions as grave as they had become in Khartoum the time had come to force a conclusion.
Having made his camp to the west of Omdurman in October, he brought up fresh reinforcements so that the non-stop fusillades of rifle and cannon fire were doubled.
November 30th—the date Gordon had named in one of the captured despatches as the last possible day the city could hold out—came and went with no sign of the Expeditionary Force.
The Mahdi’s army daily grew more aggressive, the skirmishes along the lines around the city becoming sharper, the casualties mounting.
Every eye among attackers and defenders alike, from Gordon and the Mahdi to the lowest private and Ansar, was directed daily toward the Nile, where the water level grew lower with each passing day, and the moat to the south of Khartoum became less and less of an impassible obstacle.

There were still sporadic exchanges of letters between Gordon and the Mahdi, though these accomplished little for by now the Mahdi knew that he fully held the upper hand.
The relief column, the Mahdi knew, was moving with almost deliberate sluggishness up the Nile.
As his guns kept up a harassing fire on the city, lacking the power to do real damage, they could still prove disruptive, depriving the garrison of sleep at night, causing incidental casualties, and further wearing down morale.
Gordon did what he could, making nightly rounds of the fortifications, cheering his men on when possible, chivvying and cajoling them to action, reprimanding and punishing slackers when they were found.
The threat of the lash was always available to Gordon, but as the days grew shorter and the situation became increasingly grim, he came to realize the futility of such harsh punishment—the threat of shame and disgrace was a much more powerful incentive to duty.

Always he kept the men on the alert against sudden attacks, for he had no idea what strategy the Mahdi would pursue.
Both men were aware that they were in a race against time, the Mahdi hoping that the city would fall before the Relief Expedition arrived, Gordon determined to hold on until it did.
Treachery was always his greatest dread.
Despite the thousands who had left the city in February, as well as those sent out in December, many people still within Khartoum’s walls secretly sympathized with the Mahdi; he knew that with each passing day he could depend less and less on the loyalty of his remaining troops.
When definite news of the relief column’s departure from Cairo reached Khartoum, Gordon ordered an illumination of the city and fired salutes in honor of the news.
Two hundred of his black Sudanese troops, who had already been condemned to death by the Mahdi should the city fall, were loaded aboard four steamers and given instructions to sail down the Nile to Metemma, the obvious staging ground for any attempt to relieve the city.
There they were to wait for the Relief Column and once it arrived guide it up the Nile into Khartoum.
Meantime, morale soared within the city for a time, but plummeted again when there was no sign of the approaching column.

In the bundle of papers the
Bordein
carried down the Nile to Wolseley was a letter Gordon wrote to one of his friends in Cairo.
In it he gave expression to a fatalism that had never before surfaced in any of his correspondence or journal entries.
“Farewell.
You will never hear from me again.
I fear that there will be treachery in the garrison, and all will be over by Christmas.” The melancholy tone of this note, so different from the Charles Gordon whom Wolseley had come to know and admire over the years, seemed to act as a spur to him, and he quickly ordered the Camel Corps to begin its march to Metemma.

That tone was repeated in the farewell letter Gordon wrote to his sister, Augusta: “I decline to agree that the expedition comes for my relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to accomplish.
I expect Her Majesty’s Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out and forcing their hand.” In this confession Gordon demonstrated that he had indeed divined the true character of his original mission as well as the consequences of his stubborn refusal to leave Khartoum under any circumstances.
It was a significant admission, for its implications were twofold.

First was that while Gordon was aware of the ambiguous nature of the mission given him—if he had succeeded in evacuating Khartoum and the northern Sudan, Gladstone and the Cabinet could declare that they had achieved a great foreign policy success without having to resort to another imperialistic adventure.
If Gordon failed, however, the Prime Minister would be able to claim that he had only been acting as an agent of the Egyptian government, without sanction or commission from Her Majesty’s government.
Second, there was the subtle inference that Gordon had played a game of his own, in which his intention was never to evacuate the Sudan or abandon Khartoum, but rather to compel Great Britain into a confrontation with the Mahdi to stop him cold.

If this was the case—and the evidence certainly supports the idea—it is remarkable for what it reveals about Gordon.
While at first glance, and even at second and third, he appears to be a typical Victorian adventurer and soldier of fortune, it becomes evident that there was a far more complex individual residing within.
While he bore all the outward trappings of a stereotypical imperialist, he was anything but one.
The great irony of Gordon’s life and death is that he and Gladstone shared a similar dislike of imperial adventures.
It was unfortunate that Gladstone, who normally was a very perceptive judge of character, could not see deeper than Gordon’s uniform and reputation, and consequently was unable to see how congruent were their attitudes and beliefs.
Both were moral, Christian men in the best sense of those terms, each keenly interested in improving the station of those whose birth had denied them opportunities for improvement.

Where they diverged was in each their comprehension of Gordon’s assignment to Khartoum.
Gladstone could only think of it in terms of an imperial adventure—to Gordon it was a moral mission.
At no point did he express a desire to see the Sudan become a part of the British Empire—indeed, unlike many of his more glamorous contemporaries, such as Cecil Rhodes, Gordon had never acted as an agent of imperial expansion.
He did not bring British institutions, laws, or ways of life with him, did not advocate the introduction of Western technologies or business interests into the lands where he served.
In both his terms as Governor-General in Khartoum, he was careful to work entirely within the framework of the Egyptian legal system.

Rather than being intrusive, as Gordon saw it, his mission to Khartoum was protective in nature.
Not the “protection” of the White Man’s Burden: he had no intention of trying to “civilize and Christianize these people,” as William McKinley would later claim as America’s mission in the Philippines.

To Gordon, the people of Khartoum were already civilized, and as they chose to be Moslem, they were entitled to remain so.
For all of his Christian zeal, Gordon was no thundering missionary, converting all and sundry in sight.
Instead he saw himself as protecting their particular civilized ways and their choice to follow Islam as they saw fit from a tyranny that would eradicate both.
If Khartoum fell, the whole of the Sudan would be submerged in the rule of an oppressive theocracy that was becoming almost indistinguishable from the corrupt regime it was attempting to supplant.
Some semblance of law and order must be maintained in the Sudan if the country was not to be swallowed up in chaos—or worse, religious tyranny.
If the Egyptian government in Cairo was incapable of maintaining civilized rule in the Sudan, which it clearly was, then it was up to Great Britain to provide the means to do so.
This meant British troops confronting and “smashing” the Mahdi, as Gordon had written so many months before, but without the motive of adding the Sudan to the Empire.
Once order was restored, Gordon seems to have believed, Her Majesty’s forces could withdraw and the Egyptian government be allowed to continue to administer the land—after a stern admonishment to not allow such a state of affairs to develop again.

Curiously, Gordon came to this conclusion without developing any deep abiding affection for the Sudanese, or they for him.
There was superficial admiration and respect on both sides, but there was also a distance—Gordon could never be one of the Sudanese, nor did they ever expect him to be so.
He never attempted to, in the mot of the time, “go native.” In fact, there were moments when Gordon’s attitude toward the Sudanese and Egyptians was almost contemptuous.
Nevertheless, he seems to have felt some sort of moral obligation to them, or perhaps more precisely to what the city of Khartoum represented.
The letter to his sister Augusta closed with this farewell: