Chapter XI: “Tell Everyone I Died Facing the Enemy”: Rorke’s Drift (1879) and Khartoum (1885)

0.     Much of Greco-Roman Alexandria is now under water, due entirely to natural “climate change,” but none of it owing to “man-made climate change.”

0.     The early histories of South Africa and the United States are strikingly similar: the flight from religious persecution, a war with the British, a push westward or northward, and the creation of a stable political entity in a region that had never known one.

0.     Perhaps the greatest of the Victorian-era explorers, Burton, in mufti upon pain of death, was the first European to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and also translated the Arabian Nights into unexpurgated English. An astounding linguist who was conversant in some 29 languages and dialects, he also spent time in India and Brazil. In many ways, Burton typified the kind of Englishman who made the British Empire not only great but possible.

0.     German South-West Africa (1884–1919), now known as Namibia. It figures in the plot of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan the Untamed (1919).

0.     Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902) is set in the Belgian Congo. The story forms the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

0.     Neither the Indians nor the Zulus ever became very good shots with firearms.

0.     Later, Frederic Augustus Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford, GCB, GCVO. His father, Frederick, the 1^st Baron Chelmsford, was twice Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain; his sister, Julia, married Sir John Inglis, who commanded the British forces during the Siege of Lucknow during the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857. With friends in high places, Chelmsford largely escaped blame for the disaster.

0.     iSandlwana, in Zulu orthography.

0.     Writing in 1878, Chelmsford had said, “If I am called upon to conduct operations against them … I shall strive to be in a position to show them how hopelessly inferior they are to us in fighting power, altho’ numerically stronger.”

0.   A throwback, perhaps, to the Norse axman at Telford Bridge in 1066. History rhymes.

0.   Sigidi kaSenzangakhona.

0.   Once again, the power of religion enters the champs de Mars.

0.   “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms,” observes Sherlock Holmes in the short story “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes’s sidekick and amanuensis, Dr. Watson, served as a British Army surgeon and saw action in Afghanistan.

0.   Killed in action during the Second Boer War in 1899. Gut-shot during the Battle of Talana Hill, near Dundee in northern Natal province, but refusing to admit his wound to his men, Symons died at age 56 three days later in the hospital, saying to one of the medical officers, “Tell everyone I died facing the enemy; tell everyone I died facing the enemy!”

0.   Which is to say, the walls were punctured for rifle firing ports.

0.   A legacy of the three-tiered Roman maniples, with troops from the rear constantly moving forward to spell the men at the front.

0.   “As in their dancing they stalked out of their concealment, pranced up with a high stepping action, and caring nothing for the slaughter, endeavoured to get over the barricade.” Symons, ibid.

0.   Pvt. Joseph Williams, a Welshman, killed at least 14 Zulu warriors until he ran out of ammunition and fought with his bayonet. He was eventually dragged out, killed, and mutilated. Others died in their beds.

0.   Symons, ibid.

0.   Two of the most memorable scenes in the movie Zulu never occurred. The first was the choral battle between the African warriors as they steeled themselves for the fight and the defensive Welshmen singing “Men of Harlech” in response. The second was the final salute to British bravery by the departing Zulus on the ridge.

0.   There is some doubt whether the message was, in fact, communicated to the troops at the time or, if it was, exactly when.

0.   Khoikhoi, in native parlance. They are related to the San, also known as Bushmen to the Europeans.

0.   In the wake of their conquest of Roman Egypt, Muslim Arabs had attempted to subdue Christian Nubia—southern Egypt and the Sudan—but failed; however, under the terms of a truce, the Nubians were required to trade slaves for needed foodstuffs. By the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans had conquered Nubia. Henceforth, blacks were routinely captured and sold into slavery.

0.   The Byronic echoes of his middle and surnames were wholly appropriate to his character.

0.   Jesus is considered a major prophet in Islam; his mother, Mary, is mentioned more often in the Koran than in the Christian New Testament.

0.   The White Nile is the main tributary of the mighty river, flowing north from its origin at Lake Victoria. The shorter Blue Nile arises in Lake Tana in present-day Ethiopia, but supplies most of the volume of the river downstream during the rainy season.

0.   As the emissary of the Ottomans—the real Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even Persians were all long gone from the area—and the newly appointed governor-general of the Sudan, Gordon was entitled to the honorific Pasha.

0.   In this capacity, Gordon was to succeed Henry Morton Stanley, the veteran of Shiloh, at a greatly reduced salary. But money was never an object for Gordon. He also had offers to go to India as the private secretary to the governor-general of India (he briefly accepted, and quickly resigned), and then back to China, with war between Russia and China brewing. Against the wishes of the War Office, he traveled to Beijing (Peking) and even offered to resign his British citizenship before clashing with the Chinese authorities. The Foreign Office finally ordered him home.

0.   A ferocious civil war in China, 1850–64, between the Manchurian Qing (Ching) dynasty and the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, the latter led by a man proclaiming himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ.

0.   The Land Wars were then at their height, as the dispossessed native Irish revolted against British colonial landlordism.

0.   A London-based group of intellectuals and writers, whose number included the writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, and the economist John Maynard Keynes; the name derives from their fashionable West End neighborhood of Bloomsbury. Dorothy Parker observed of them, “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s finest musical, Aspects of Love, is based on the novella of the same name by David Garnett, another member of the group.

0.   As we learn in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” the action of which Holmesian scholars place in 1888–89. This passage was transferred essentially verbatim to “The Adventure of the Resident Patient,” which takes place in 1886, after Doyle decided that “The Cardboard Box,” first published in The Strand magazine in 1893, was too gruesome for inclusion in the anthology The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

0.   In the Sherlockian resurrection story (which occurs in 1894), “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes remarks to Watson that “I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.” Since Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, often was the British government (as we learn in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” which occurs c. 1895), there can be little doubt that Sherlock Holmes was actively involved behind the scenes in the entire Khartoum affair.

0.   As in Zulu, some scenes were created out of dramatic necessity, including, notably, the desert colloquy between Gordon and the Mahdi; in reality, the two corresponded but never met face-to-face.

0.   The British soldier Lee Rigby was shamefully butchered on the streets of Woolwich near the Royal Artillery barracks in that city in 2013 by African Muslim Nigerian “immigrants.”

0.   On the island of Corfu, in Greece, at age nine Gordon evinced his impulse to court danger by throwing himself off the rocks and into the sea, despite the fact that he couldn’t swim, and thus had to be rescued.

0.   It speaks to the influence of Christianity that ethnic groups and races as distinct from each other as the Hungarians, the Sioux Indians, Arab Muslims, and the Chinese have all adopted or appropriated elements of the religion, either in whole or in part.

0.   “Disobey the Heavenly Will and you will be ground to pieces with a pestle.”

0.   Gordon was offered a large sum of money by the Qings to stay in China and mop up, but he refused, although he did accept a gold medal, struck in his honor, from the emperor.

0.   Stead was the template of the crusading, politically committed journalist, devoted to something called “government by journalism.” In an 1885 series of articles about child prostitution, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” he got Parliament to pass a bill raising the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16. In April 1912, he died when the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage to New York.

0.   Gordon was considered an expert on the Sudan, but he spoke little or no Arabic. Little matter: in China he had learned no Chinese.

0.   Gordon, noted Gladstone, had “a small bee in his bonnet.”

0.   “The Soudanese are a very nice people,” Gordon had told Stead in their interview. “They deserve the sincere compassion and sympathy of all civilized men. I got on very well with them, and I am sincerely sorry at the prospect of seeing them handed over to be ground down once more by their Turkish and Circassian oppressors.”

0.   This is how Gordon dies in the film Khartoum.

0.   As related by Chenevix Trench, The Road to Khartoum.

0.   An echo, perhaps, of the mysterious death of Suleiman at Szigetvár.

0.   In which a young cavalryman named Winston Churchill took part, riding with the Twenty-First Lancers.

0.   Prompting Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.”