First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (9 page)

The expedition was the brainchild of the Khedive’s government, acting against the advice of its British political and military advisers.
The Khedive was warned not to think of attempting the reconquest of the Sudan, but instead to make every effort to evacuate the Egyptian troops and civilians living in that increasingly chaotic country, in particular the garrisons at Khartoum and Sennar.
Instead Tewfik chose to act aggressively, hunting the Mahdi down in the Sudan rather than waiting for him to come to Egypt.
A column of six hundred infantry was dispatched to Berber to keep the road clear from there to Khartoum, while the mass of the Egyptian Army was ordered to concentrate at fortified positions around Aswan for the defense of upper Egypt and the Valley of the Nile, preparatory to swinging over onto the offensive in support of Hicks.

Despite the misgivings of his government, Colonel Hicks, who was given the rank of Major General in the Egyptian army, and a number of other British officers who were retired or on leave, placed themselves at the Khedive’s disposal, which he readily accepted.
It was not an unusual state of affairs in the British Empire of the 19th century, as there were now more British officers than there were billets for them in the British Army, so foreign service was regarded as an ideal way to gain campaign experience and perhaps actually see some combat.

William Hicks was born in 1830, and entered the Bombay Army, the private Army of the British Bombay Company, in 1849.
A few years later, in 1854, he married Sophia Dixon, and together they had four children.
Hicks served through the course of the Indian Mutiny, and when the private armies of the Bombay Company and the East India Company were incorporated into the newly formed Indian Army following the Mutiny, he transferred his commission to it.
He was mentioned in dispatches—a recognition of notable service for which there is no appropriate medal—for his conduct at the action of Sitka Chaut in 1859, and two years later he was promoted captain.
During the Abyssinian expedition of 1867–68 he was again mentioned in dispatches and made a major.
He retired in 1880 with the honorary rank of colonel and returned to England, but found he missed army life, and after the Arabi Revolt in 1882 he offered his services to the Khedive Tewfik, who gladly took him on, awarding him the Egyptian title “pasha.”

Hicks was in most ways a typical British officer of the late Victorian Era.
Not outstandingly brilliant nor possessing any great tactical or strategic gifts, he was a brave and competent, if unexceptional, soldier-–disciplined, steady, moderately intelligent, not given over to much imagination.
It was his misfortune to be given a command that would have taxed the genius of a Wellington, for the Egyptian force given him by the Khedive, was, to use the words of the Iron Duke, “an infamous army.” Numbering some eight thousand fighting men, many of them were recruited from the
fellahin
(soldiers) of Col.
Arabi’s disbanded regiments, sent up the Nile in chains from Cairo.
The presence of several hundred common criminals, the sweepings of the Cairo jails, among their ranks did nothing to improve the army’s quality or its morale.
Still, Hicks was determined to do his best with what little he had.

Hicks’ staff was composed entirely of English officers who mustered considerable campaigning experience among them.
They included Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon.
John Colborne, formerly a major of the 11th Infantry Regiment and the scion of a distinguished military family; Lieutenant-Colonel Coetlogou of the 70th Infantry; Major Martin, who had served in a cavalry unit in South Africa; Major Farquhar of the Grenadier Guards; Captain Forestier Walker, late Lieutenant of the “Buffs” or East Kent Regiment; Captain Massey, late Lieutenant of the Duke of Cambridge’s Own (Middlesex Regiment); Surgeon Major Rosenberg, Major Warner, Captain W Page Phillips and Mr.
E.B.
Evans, Intelligence Department.
The cavalry was under the command of Major Martin; the artillery, armed only with light Nordenfeldt guns rather than heavier field-guns, was commanded by Captain Forestier Walker.
Two German officers, one of them a Major Seckendorf, accompanied Hicks’ staff as observers.

It was early in 1883 when Hicks, as a Major General in the Egyptian Army, went to Khartoum as chief of the staff of the army there, then commanded by Suliman Niazi Pasha.
Hicks’ own force followed a few weeks later and made camp at Omdurman, where he drilled and trained them as best he could for a month.
On April 29, near the fort of Kawa on the Nile, Hicks led five thousand of his men against an equal force of the Mahdi’s dervishes who were advancing on Sennar, defeated them, and then cleared the country between Sennar and Khartoum of the enemy.
It was, Hicks hoped, a good omen, a success from which his men could build their confidence, both in themselves and in him.

At the same time, though, within Khartoum, the victory at Kawa resulted in the dismissal of Suliman Niazi, who because of his lack of success against the Mahdi’s army was seen in Cairo as being ineffectual.
No sooner was he relieved, his pride piqued and his sources of graft removed, than Niazi immediately began intriguing against Hicks with the Egyptian officials at Khartoum.
In disgust, Hicks tendered his resignation to Tewfik in July.
Rather than accepting it, Tewfik responded with a set of written instructions directing Hicks to lead his troops, now styled an “expeditionary force,” into Kordofan to crush the Mahdi once and for all.

Hicks, who was not a stupid man, was well aware that his force was thoroughly inadequate for the proposed expedition, and in a telegram sent to Cairo on August 5, made this clear to the Khedive, stating his opinion that it would be best to wait for the situation in Kordofan to settle before attempting any further advance into the Sudan.
The Egyptian ministers, however, did not believe that the Mahdi’s strength was nearly as great as it actually was, and pressed their instructions on the reluctant general.

The expedition started from Khartoum on the 9th of September, 1883.
It was made up of seven thousand infantry, a thousand cavalry, and two batteries of artillery, with nearly two thousand camp followers in its train.
There were a total of thirteen Europeans with the column, most of them British officers on some form of official leave.
On September 20 the force left the Nile at Duem and struck inland toward Bara, across the almost waterless wastes of Kordofan, for El Obeid.
It was at the outset of the campaign that Hicks made his only really irredeemable mistake-–he trusted the native guides assigned to him, not knowing that they were feeding information about the column’s route and strength to the Ansar.
At the same time, per the Mahdi’s instructions, they were following a deliberately circuitous route through the desert.

Hicks’ courage and determination were never in question, but his ignorance of the Sudan was abysmal.
Rather than following any formulated strategy, Hicks seemed content to merely chase the Mahdi and his disciples to and fro across the landscape, apparently in the vain hope of running Ahmed to earth or simply driving his followers to exhaustion.
Instead it was his Egyptians who were worn down, marching seemingly endlessly onward in the unbearable desert heat, suffering cruelly from hunger and thirst as their supplies dwindled.
The morale of Hicks’ force, brittle from the outset, was rapidly disintegrating as the column approached the city of El Obeid.

While from the outset Hicks had grave—and well-founded—doubts about the overall quality of his command, his task wasn’t an impossible one.
The Egyptian infantry was well-armed, each man carrying a .50 caliber M1867 Remington rifle, along with sixty rounds of ammunition, with a ready supply of extra ammunition carried on pack animals in the column, a lesson learned from the British Army’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the Zulus at Isandhlwana some four years earlier.
The Remington, when properly used, could be a devastating weapon, throwing a massive soft-nosed lead bullet a half-inch in diameter and nearly an inch long at a velocity of 1,100 feet per second out to ranges that exceeded a thousand yards.
The destruction wrought by such a round was best summed up by Kipling, who wrote of one of the weapon’s victims having “a round blue hole in his forehead, and the back blown out of his head.” Seven thousand Remington rifles firing five to seven rounds a minute would presumably present any attacker with a near-impenetrable wall of fire.

But for such a mass of fire to be effective, an enemy had to be willing to give battle, and the Mahdi’s forces refused to stand and fight, instead drawing Hicks and his column deeper into the arid waste west of the Sudan, where heat, flies, dust, thirst, hunger, and boredom gradually took their toll on the Egyptian troops.
On November 5th (some sources say the 3rd) the Egyptian army followed its native guides into a cul-du-sac in a Saharan wadi at Kashgil, some thirty miles south of El Obeid.
With little or no warning, Hicks’ column found itself attacked on three sides by the Mahdi’s army.
Forming a square, Hick’s Egyptians stood on the defensive all that day and two succeeding days.

It should have been a massacre—and in fact it was, but not of the Mahdi’s army.
The formation of the hollow square is a formidable tactic for infantry to use against native troops, especially those who are armed with antiquated weapons.
The “square” is just that–an open square or rectangle formed by the infantry, who form four ranks with fixed bayonets; the first two ranks kneel and hold their muskets or rifles forward, bracing the butts on the ground, presenting a hedge of bayonet points to the charging enemy.
The third and fourth ranks are free to fire on the attackers, either individually or in massed volleys.
Often field artillery, Gatling guns, or Maxim machine guns were deployed at the corners, where they could rake the faces of the square as the enemy advanced.
When properly employed, the square is devastating in its power: volleys of hundreds of rifles pouring into the ranks of an assaulting enemy, with rows of razor-sharp bayonets preventing the attacking troops from closing with the men firing into them.
A properly commanded square can shred the enemy’s ranks in a matter of minutes.

The keys to the success of the square were firepower and discipline, and, not surprisingly, when employed by British infantry the hollow square was nigh-on impregnable: at the battles of Ulundi and Gindgindlovhu in the Zulu War of 1879, the previously invincible Zulu impi, composed of thousands of the finest native warriors in the world, literally dissolved under the concentrated fire from faces of the British squares they were charging.
Not a single Zulu warrior got closer than sixty yards to the British lines.
Firepower, as with so many components of modern warfare, is essentially a British invention, and when the massed volleys for which British infantry was justly famous the world over was combined with the equally legendary steadiness of “Tommy Adkins,” a battle’s outcome was often preordained before the fighting even began.

But when employed by mediocre troops—and the soldiers given to William Hicks barely merited that level of quality—a square was another matter entirely.
From the reign of the Pharaohs to the modern day, the average Egyptian peasant has at best made an indifferent soldier.
Egypt has always been rightfully proud of its cultural heritage, while its warrior tradition has barely warranted notice.
Discipline has never been a strength of any Egyptian army, and Hicks’ force was no exception.
That much of his infantry was composed of the leavings of various Egyptian jails and poorhouses only exacerbated the problem.
Consequently, by the third day of the battle, despite the fact that Hicks’ Egyptians had held firm against the Mahdi’s forces for two whole days, their already feeble morale began to crumble, and with it the square which was their only hope of survival.
Some troops tried to surrender to the attacking dervishes, others simply fled their positions, seeking the rather dubious shelter of the square’s interior.
In any case, during the third day the faces of the square began to give way, and in a mighty rush the Mahdi’s forces surged forward and overwhelmed the defenders.
Once the square began to waver, it was probably all over in less than an hour.

Over the months to come, fragments of news about the fate of Hicks’ army drifted back to Egypt.
Roughly a third of the Egyptian troops tried to surrender to the Mahdi, but most of them suffered the same fate as those Egyptian soldiers who were captured at the fall of El Obeid-–most were executed outright, the remainder press-ganged into slavery.
Those who stood their ground and fought died on the battlefield or in the orgy of slaughter that followed.
Hicks was killed along with all of the other European officers; two or three of the European non-combatants are said to have been spared, taken prisoner and sent to Obeid, although none ever returned to Egypt.

One of the handful of survivors was General Hicks’ cook, who later said that Hicks was the last officer to fall, run through by a spear wielded by the Khalifa Muhammed Sherif.
Legend has it that Hicks defended himself ferociously, repeatedly emptying his revolver into the ranks of the advancing dervishes, and when he ran out of ammunition he kept his attackers at bay with his sword.
In the end exhaustion caused him to let his guard down long enough for Muhammed Sherif to deliver his coup de grace.
In what was meant to be a final humiliation for the defeated general, Hicks’ head was cut off and presented as a trophy to the Mahdi.

The Mahdi’s victory over Hicks was seen throughout the whole of the Sudan as a sign of Allah’s blessing on his
jihad
.
Who but one under the guidance of Allah, it was believed, could win such astonishing victories against the invaders?
Now the Mahdi’s army surged out of Kordofan, sweeping northward along the banks of the White Nile, threatening to cut off the remaining Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan, then pour through the Wadi Halfa into Egypt itself.
What had been a serious situation for Tewfik and his government was now a crisis, as he feared another uprising among his own people.