First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (36 page)

The entire expedition was to be methodical in the extreme.
Rather than being driven by the urgency to relieve a beleaguered garrison, which fourteen years earlier had forced Wolseley to drive his men at an exhausting pace, Kitchener’s advance up the Nile would take two years.
Steamers hired by the Thomas Cook Company brought the army to Wadi Halfa, old “Bloody Halfway,” where an army headquarters was set up while the border defenses were extended and reinforced.
In March 1896, the campaign officially began as the column moved slowly and majestically into the Sudan, brushing aside an Arab blocking force at Ferket on June 7.
In September, Kitchener captured Dongola, less than two hundred miles from Wadi Halfa.
Then, in order to eliminate several hundred miles from the journey up the river, the British constructed a rail line from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed, cutting off the huge U-shaped bend in the Nile that held Debba, Korti, and the Fourth Cataract.
From Abu Hamed an extension of the rail line ran parallel to the Nile down to Berber.
When it was complete it became possible to move troops and supplies at nearly four times the best speed that steamers could make up the river.

The Sirdar’s Anglo-Egyptian forces continued their leisurely advance, meeting no real opposition until they encountered a few thousand Arabs at Abu Hamed on August 7, 1897.
A short, sharp action was fought before the Arabs withdrew, realizing they were badly outnumbered.
The army halted at Abu Hamed and built up a supply base before moving on again; there was little other significant resistance until Kitchener reached Atbarah, not far from Abu Klea.

There the Emir Mahmoud, one of the Khalifa’s better generals, met the British and Egyptians in a carefully prepared position.
But Mahmoud had not reckoned with the destructiveness of modern weapons, and as the Royal Artillery and the Nile gunboats bombarded the Ansar, the British and Egyptian infantry attacked and drove the Arabs in disorder into the desert.
Mahmoud was captured and in a victory parade a few days later in Berber was forced to walk in chains before Kitchener, who was mounted on a splendid white charger.

It was a calculated humiliation for Mahmoud, made all the more galling because it was Kitchener who had personally devised it.
Even then Kitchener was an enigmatic character.
Intelligent, insightful, a curious combination of by-the-book orthodoxy and imagination, he was distant, extremely reserved, and not at all popular among either his officers or his men, all of whom were nonetheless ready to concede his gifts for strategy, tactics, and especially logistical planning.
While eminently practical and methodical—it was Kitchener who drew up the plans for the Anglo-Egyptian army’s careful advance up the Nile—he was sometimes capable of the most profound insights and intuitions.
In August 1914, when Kitchener had become Secretary of State for War, in the middle of a staff meeting where all the other officers present were—like their French and German counterparts—discussing the likelihood of the war being over in six weeks, Kitchener suddenly declared that the war would last three or four years and require armies of millions of men.
It was this sort of chilling genius that kept men at arm’s length from Kitchener.

He was unmarried (rumors would circulate over the years that he was a homosexual, but it seems more likely that the death of his fiancé many years earlier had left him emotionally scarred), and had little or no social life with his officers, although he was certainly popular in the best Establishment houses in Britain.
He cultivated friendships with people who could be useful to him and his career, yet at the same time he was a consummate professional soldier who refused to rely on “connections” to make up any shortcomings in the performance of his duties or his battlefield leadership.
The confrontation with the Khalifa that both men knew was shortly inevitable would establish Kitchener as Great Britain’s most distinguished soldier.

In mid-summer, the expedition reached Metemma, where they found the remains of positions dug by Wolseley’s troops fourteen years earlier, along with the graves of those who had died at Abu Klea and Abu Kru.
Supplies were again built up, and the troops, Egyptian and British alike, were spoiling for a fight.
By the end of August Omdurman was almost in sight, and on September 1, 1898, the Sirdar halted his army on the bank of the Nile fifteen miles above the city.
There he began preparing for the battle that would seal the fate of the
Mahdyyah
.

As dawn broke that morning, Kitchener sent the British and Egyptian cavalry, with the Camel Corps and Horse Artillery in support, out in advance of the army, where it quickly formed a screen for the infantry and advanced toward Omdurman for a distance of about eight miles.
The 21st Lancers took up positions on the left flank, anchoring the line on the Nile, while the Egyptian horse covered the front and right flank, deploying in a vast arc that stretched back into the desert.
At the same time the gunboat began chugging up the river, keeping pace with the land forces.

As the cavalry advanced, just ten miles north of Omdurman, they came up to the Kerreri Hills, which to their surprise were undefended, although an abandoned Dervish camp was found.
It had evidently been shelled by the gunboats the day before.
It was about this time that the men of the 21st Lancers noticed that a flock of enormous vultures, numbering as many as a hundred, had suddenly begun hovering over the regiment.
The belief was widespread throughout the Sudan that this was an ill omen, a sign the troops over which the birds circled would suffer heavy losses.
The regiment halted at the foot of the hills, and the senior officers and a party of scouts made their way to the highest crest.
From there they could behold a sight no British soldier or civilian had seen for thirteen years: Khartoum.
The advance resumed and shortly every man with a pair of field-glasses or a telescope could make out not only Khartoum but also the now-yellowish dome of the Mahdi’s Tomb and the city of Omdurman.

The cavalry screen began its descent from the Kerreri Hills and onto a wide, gently rolling sand plain, some six to seven miles wide, interrupted here and there with patches of coarse grass and straggling bushes.
On the left, to the east, was the Nile, with a small, deserted mud-hut village perched on its bank.
The remaining three sides of the plain were surrounded by low, rocky hills and ridges, while a single low black hill and a long, low ridge running from it bisected the plain from east to west.
The ground behind the ridge, that is, to the south of it, was invisible to the British and Egyptian cavalry.

Sharp-eyed observers among the Lancers noticed a long black line with white spots running along the ridge.
It appeared to be a dense zeriba, or barricade, of thorn bushes.
The cavalry continued to move forward in a vast line, khaki-colored on the left where the 21st Lancers were positioned, black in the center where the dark-skinned Egyptians sat on their black horses, and mottled on the right, where the Camel Corps and Horse Artillery jostled for position.
As they closed with the zeriba, they could make out enemy horsemen riding about the flanks and front of the Ansar line.

It was now nearly eleven o’clock and the sun was getting hot.
Suddenly the whole black line which had seemed to be the zeriba began moving—it wasn’t a thornbush barricade, it was a mass of fighting men.
Behind it thousands upon thousands of Ansar and Dervish soldiers began to appear over the crest of the ridge.
It was the whole of the Mahdist army.
Stretching across a front of four miles, formed into five huge divisions, it moved with astonishing swiftness.
A cloud of banners—black, white, and green, embroidered in gold with inscriptions from the Koran—floated above them, while their spearpoints glittered in the noon sun.
It was an army of more than 50,000 men.

The Khalifa had assembled every able-bodied fighting man he could muster at Omdurman, determined to achieve the victory over the British that had eluded Muhammed Ahmed.
But remembering only the victory over William Hicks’ Egyptian conscripts in 1883 and forgetting the slaughter at Abu Klea three years later, he ordered his soldiers forward into the attack rather than make a stand on the plains of Kerreri.
On August 30 his scouts informed him that the enemy was nearing Omdurman, and the next day he assembled his army.
Some sense of what was to come seeped through his forces, however, and nearly six thousand men deserted the night before the battle.
Still it was an imposing force that advanced toward the British and Egyptians, forty-eight thousand foot soldiers and four thousand horse.

The first shots of the battle were fired at just after 11:00 AM by the gunboats on the Nile.
Spotting batteries of Mahdist artillery on the riverbanks, the Royal Navy gun crews immediately opened fire on them.
The Arab batteries replied as best they could, as did the forts along the river.
It was a one-sided exchange, for though the Arabs had some fifty guns that could be brought to bear, the Royal Navy’s weapons were heavier and better served, and the combination of better accuracy and greater weight of shells soon took the Arab guns out of the battle.
Rifle pits along the riverbanks were swept by machine-gun fire.
Under cover of this barrage, the Arab Irregulars under Major Wortley began clearing out the forts and their outlying villages, which were defended by Dervishes.
Most of the Irregulars refused to move closer to the buildings than five hundred yards, but Wortley’s reserve—Jaalin tribesmen who despised the Dervishes—moved in and began methodically clearing out each building, executing every Dervish they captured.

A battery of the Royal Artillery began shelling Omdurman, scoring at least three hits on the Mahdi’s Tomb.
The damage to the tomb was an unfortunate consequence of its proximity to Omdurman’s arsenal, but the Arabs took it as a deliberate insult, and in their anger they sped up their advance.
The Egyptian cavalry and the Horse Artillery began to withdraw, followed by the Camel Corps; the 21st Lancers remained on the army’s left flank.
The Mahdist army maintained its order and began to close with the six brigades of infantry that made up the main body of the British force.
The collision of the two armies, if it came, would be shattering.

Kitchener quickly issued orders that drew up the British and Egyptian infantry in lines of parade-ground precision, anchoring each flank on the Nile, the whole of the army forming an arc along the river.
When a junior officer named Winston Churchill reported to the Sirdar that the advancing Arab army would be within range within the hour, Kitchener informed his staff: “We want nothing better.
Here is a good field of fire.
They may as well come today as tomorrow.”

As soon as the troops’ mid-day meal was finished the whole of the army stood to arms, awaiting the approaching Arabs.
But instead, just before 2:00 PM, the Dervish army halted.
Their riflemen loosed a single volley into the air, then the entire force went to ground.
There would be no engagement that day, but it was certain that the battle that both Kitchener and the Khalifa wanted would take place on the morrow.

CHAPTER 12

OMDURMAN

The rest of that day and night were marked by a handful of desultory skirmishes between small groups of British infantry and Ansar on the Kerreri Plain.
The steamers took up positions on the Nile to cover the flanks of the army, and throughout the night shone their searchlights up and down the riverbanks to prevent any surprise attacks.

Kitchener had ordered his troops to bed down for the night in the positions they had occupied during the day, so rather than establishing the checkerboard arrangement of brigade squares which had been typical of the British Army at night, each brigade had constructed rough zeribas of thorn bushes about its position and posted double sentries, while patrols roamed the intervals between brigades.
It was a tactic through which Kitchener displayed his intimate knowledge of the Arab way of making war.
Knowing that they despised night attacks, he gave himself the advantage of having his units sleep in their lines, which in the morning would save valuable time by not requiring the brigades to maneuver into position in the face of the enemy.

As the pre-dawn grayness crept across the sky on September 2, 1899, bugles sounded the morning stand-to across the British camp.
Cavalry patrols were sent out, and by 6:30 AM the first reports were coming in: the Khalifa’s army had spent the night in the same place it had halted the day before.
Suddenly the cavalry scouts realized that the entire Mahdist army was on the move.
A roar of righteous fury arose from the Arab mass as they rode and marched to the attack, a sound so loud that it was faintly heard in the British camp, still nearly five miles distant.

The British and Egyptians were ready.
As the morning light grew, the banners of each Khalifa and Emir became visible to the waiting infantry: on the extreme left the bright green flag of Ali-Wad-Helu; next to his followers flew the dark green flag of Osman Sheikh-ed-Din, surrounded by a mass of spearmen, preceded by long lines of warriors armed presumably with rifles; on the right a host of Dervishes surged forward under a collection of white flags, while visible among them was the red banner of Sherif; in the center flew the sacred Black banner of Abdullahi himself.
Within the ranks of this army were, as Churchill later described it, “Riflemen who had helped to destroy Hicks, spearmen who had charged at Abu Klea, Emirs who saw the sack of Gondar, Baggara fresh from raiding the Shillooks, warriors who had besieged Khartoum—-all marched, inspired by the memories of former triumphs and embittered by the knowledge of late defeats, to chastise the impudent and accursed invaders.”