First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (32 page)

This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition.
However, God rules all, and, as He will rule to His glory and our welfare, His will be done.
I fear, owing to circumstances, that my affairs are pecuniarily not over bright…your affectionate brother, C.
G.
GORDON.

P.S.
I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have TRIED to do my duty.

On January 6, Omdurman fell.
The fort had been putting up a surprisingly stout resistance since the summer, particularly in light of its lack of artillery.
As long as the Mahdi’s hold on the banks of the Nile remained tenuous, the defenders could count on periodic support from one of Gordon’s river steamers.
But since October, when the fort was cut off from the river and surrounded by the Ansar, there was no longer any hope of resupplying the garrison, neither of relieving or withdrawing it.
All Gordon could do was offer what little encouragement he could, urging the defenders to hold out as long as possible.
The volume of small arms fire that the Arabs brought to bear on the fort increased and so did the little garrison’s casualties.

On December 16, the Mahdi’s army launched a determined attack on the town, which was thrown back with heavy losses; but that would prove to be the Omdurman garrison’s last hurrah.
Though there were no more large-scale assaults, three weeks later the Egyptian officer commanding the fort signaled to Gordon that he could no longer hold out.
Gordon, bowing however reluctantly to the inevitable, gave his permission to surrender, trusting the garrison’s fate to the Mahdi’s mercy.

By the middle of January, the strain and fatigue were finally beginning to take their toll on Gordon.
The fatalism of his farewell letters sent off on the
Bordein
in mid-December gave way to the beginnings of despair: “I have given 6,000 pounds of biscuits to the poor.
Half will be stolen.
The shells fall about 200 yards short of the palace.
I am worn to a shadow with the food question.
Five men deserted today.” In another passage he recorded bitterly that the remaining Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent and the soldiers were cowards—hardly a fair judgment, perhaps, as these men still retained the courage to remain within the city.
There are also touches of admiration for the Mahdi’s followers, the meanest of whom, he said, was “a determined warrior, who could undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than if he were stone.”

Still, he was able at times to make a show of fearless defiance.
Bordeini Bey, a merchant in Khartoum and a close friend of Gordon who managed to survive the siege, recounted how he was the reluctant participant in one such demonstration.

In spite of all this danger by which he was surrounded, Gordon Pasha had no fear.
I remember one night some of the principal men of Khartoum came to my house and begged me to ask Gordon Pasha not to light up the rooms of the Palace, as they offered a good mark for the enemy’s bullets.
When I mentioned this to Gordon Pasha he became very angry, saying, “Who has said that Gordon was ever afraid?” A few evenings afterward I was with Gordon in the Palace, and as the rooms were still lighted up I suggested that he should put boxes full of sand in front of the windows to stop the bullets.
He called up the guard, and gave them orders to shoot me if I moved; he then brought a very large lantern which would hold twenty-four candles.
He and I put the candles into the sockets, placed the lantern on the table in front of the window, lit the candles, and sat down at the table.
The pasha said, “When God was portioning out fear to all people in the world, at last it came my turn, and there was no fear left to give me; go, tell all the people in Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God created him without fear.

For his part, the Mahdi had come to what would be the great crisis of his meteoric career, though of course he couldn’t of known it.
He did have a growing sense of urgency, however, as Wolseley’s Relief Expedition gradually made its way up the Nile.
With his scouts informing him daily of the progress of both the Camel Corps and the River Column, Muhammed Ahmed was able to develop a sense of how much time remained for him to take the city.
He knew that he had two, perhaps three, weeks left before Wolseley arrived.
Ordering some of his followers northward to delay the advancing British columns as best they could, he gave instructions to prepare for the final assault on Khartoum.

The great mystery in these last days of the siege, as events were rapidly approaching their climax, is Gladstone.
Just why had he chosen to act as he did throughout the entire Sudan affair?
He had been adamantly opposed to any sort of “adventure” that would see Great Britain become deeply involved in the affairs of the Sudan, had been reluctant to send Gordon to Khartoum when it became clear that the Egyptian government had lost control of the situation, had resisted with all his strength and for as long as possible sending troops to the Sudan—and had only permitted that with the understanding that the Relief Expedition was not to actually relieve Khartoum but merely bring the Gordon out.

What is never explained, particularly because he never openly, specifically addressed the issue, is what Gladstone would have done if, after taking Khartoum, the Mahdi had moved further down the Valley of Nile and invaded Egypt.
That Muhammed Ahmed might not be content with just the Sudan—and from all of his proclamations and pronouncements he clearly would not have been—never seemed to have occurred to the Prime Minister.
While it may be that he genuinely believed his assertion that the revolt in the Sudan was that of “a people struggling to be free,” he certainly knew of Gordon’s letter in which the General asserted that the great danger of the Mahdi was not that he might extend the reach of his power, but that his success might catalyze a popular Islamic uprising throughout the Middle East.
It was a shortsightedness that Western politicians would continue to share for the next century and a quarter—a willingness to assign benign motives to radicals in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and a resistance to acknowledging the possibility that they could present a continued, wider, or spreading danger.

While his latter-day colleagues may arguably be excused for their lack of prescience, Gladstone was the latest of a long line of British Prime Ministers trained to think in terms of global responsibilities and the security of the Empire.
His failure to appreciate that the Mahdi posed a threat to the Empire was little short of dereliction of duty, or at the least an abrogation of responsibility.
The political balance of the Middle East, Afghanistan and India would be fundamentally altered if the Suez Canal were lost to Great Britain: the defense and security of the Canal had, in little more than a decade, become one of the critical strategic demands on Imperial defense policy.
To simply assume, without reason, that the Mahdi would not or could not threaten Britain’s hold on the Canal was a risk of enormous proportions.

The looming danger was Russia, seemingly far from the Sudan but very much a factor in the consequences of whatever transpired at Khartoum.
Should the Mahdi take the city and continue to advance down the Nile, and an uprising similar to that led by Colonel Arabi three years earlier erupt, the closure of the Suez Canal that would certainly result would mean that Great Britain would be compelled to reinforce India by means of the long and dangerous Cape of Good Hope around the southern tip of Africa.
Russia had been contesting control of Afghanistan, which was the northern gateway to India, with Great Britain for nearly half a century.
With control of the Suez Canal lost and the time for reinforcements to reach India from Great Britain increased from two weeks to two months, a Russian army could lunge across Afghanistan and into the Khyber Pass before Britain could bring up sufficient troops to stop it, leaving the “jewel in the Imperial crown” in peril.

There was also the added complication of the need for a military operation to recapture the Canal, which would be a difficult undertaking if only because of its complexity.
By trying to avoid one “imperial adventure” in the Sudan, Gladstone was risking more prolonged, extended, and expensive military adventures and operations in widely separate parts of the Empire.
It was not only bad politics, it was foolhardy, and Gladstone would indeed shortly pay for his political and ideological myopia.

On the morning of January 20, the entire city of Khartoum was roused when what sounded like a full-scale bombardment began, only to discover that it was a hundred-gun salute fired off at the orders of the Mahdi.
It was a ruse on his part, an elaborate bluster to deceive Khartoum’s defenders into believing that the Ansar were celebrating a great victory over the approaching Relief Expedition.
The truth became evident when the wailing and mourning of the Arab women widowed the previous day by the action at Abu Klea were faintly heard floating across the Nile from the Arab camps.

Abu Klea came as a shock to the Mahdi.
Heretofore he had a great respect for the fighting skills of the British soldier, but when he learned of the appalling cost of the battle at the wells, and that the Arabs had been defeated by a force little more than a tenth the size of their own, Muhammed Ahmed was badly shaken.
Calling a council of war with his Khalifas, he suggested that the Ansar break camp and fall back to El Obeid, or even into Kordofan.
He recalled that he had once had a vision in which he had been told by Allah to make a Hegira—a flight into the desert, just as the Prophet Muhammed had done—and that the time for such a flight had come.

The Khalifas were vehemently opposed to the idea of any such withdrawal.
They pointed out that starvation had already taken a severe toll on Khartoum’s defenders; more importantly, the falling Nile had now left the moat along the south side of the city hardly more than a wide ditch in places, rapidly filling with mud.
Gordon’s men, exhausted and hungry, no longer had the strength to build new earthworks or even adequately man the defenses already in place.
The time had come, they argued, to take the city by storm; if the assault failed, the retreat to El Obeid or even Kordofan was still possible.
Success at this point, however, would compel the advancing British column to fall back into Egypt, where it could be disposed of in time, but with Khartoum lost it would have no reason to remain in the Sudan.
For five days the arguments ranged back and forth, but by the afternoon of January 25, Muhammed Ahmed had recovered much of his nerve and self-confidence, and he ordered the attack on the city to take place in the pre-dawn hours of the next morning.

The Egyptian merchant, Bordeini Bey left behind a poignant portrait of the penultimate night of Gordon’s life:

At last, Sunday morning broke, and Gordon Pasha, who used always to watch the enemy’s movements from the top of the Palace, noticed a considerable movement in the south, which looked as though the Arabs were collecting at Kalakala (one of the forts on the ditch to the south of the town).
He at once sent word to all of us who had attended the previous meeting and to a few others to come at once to the Palace.
We all came but Gordon Pasha did not see us.
We were again addressed by Giriagis Bey, who said that he had been told by Gordon Pasha to inform us that he had noticed much movement in the enemy’s lines, and believed an attack would be made on the town; he therefore ordered us to collect every male in the town from the age of eight even to the old men, and to line all the fortifications, and that if we had difficulty in getting this order obeyed we were to use force.
Giriagis said that Gordon Pasha now appealed to us for the last time to make a determined stand, for in twenty-four hours’ time he had no doubt the English would arrive; but that if we preferred to submit, then he gave the commandant liberty to open the gates and let all join the rebels.
He had nothing more to say.
I then asked to be allowed to see the pasha, and was admitted to his presence.
I found him sitting on a divan; and I came in he pulled off his fez, and flung it from him, saying, “What more can I say, I have nothing more to say, the people will no longer believe me, I have told them over and over again that help would be here, but it has never come, and now they must see I tell them lies.
If this, my last promise, fails I can do nothing more.
Go and collect all the people you can on the lines and make a good stand.
Now, leave me to smoke these cigarettes.” I could see he was in despair, and he spoke in a tone I had never heard before.
I knew then that he had been too agitated to address the meeting, and thought the sight of his despair would dishearten us.
All the anxiety he had undergone had gradually turned his hair a snowy white.
I left him and that was the last time I saw him alive.

At one point during the siege Gordon had an immense store of powder laid under the cellars of the Governor’s Palace and a fuse prepared which he could light from his quarters, anticipating that the city might fall and the palace be stormed by the Ansar.
The idea was to wait until the last possible moment and then blow himself and as many of the Mahdi’s followers as possible to atoms.
But in the end he reconsidered: blowing up of the palace and himself with it would have, he thought, “more or less the taint of suicide”—in a way, “taking things out of God’s hands.”

Up to the very moment the end arrived, he remained undecided as to what he would do when the city fell.
One of the small river steamers, armed and armored, was kept ready on the waterfront, with steam up, day and night, to transport him south to the wilderness of Equatoria province, though to what purpose apart from survival he never made clear.
Ultimately the sudden appearance of the Arabs within the city walls and the complete collapse of Khartoum’s defenses took the decision out of his hands.