3

In Egypt and Sudan, 1882–92

By mid-1882, the Cyprus survey was winding down. Kitchener had given it yeoman service but could see that his time on the island was coming to an end, and without a clear direction as to what he might do next. In those years, events in the British Empire could be counted upon to offer men such as Kitchener steady opportunities, and so it was in June of 1882 that somewhat bored and suffering from a recurrence of fever he decided to take a leave-of-absence from the survey. Rather than relaxing in Nicosia, however, he used his leave to travel the short distance from Cyprus to Egypt. Just then, Ottoman-controlled Egypt was roiling in anti-European feeling. The nominally ruling Khediviate, first under Ismail and now headed by his son and heir, Tewfik, was effectively bankrupt and the country had erupted in a proto-nationalist backlash.

All the way back to the 1820s under the first Khedive, Muhammad Ali, Egypt had been on a halting course toward economic (and to some extent political) modernization. The building of the Suez Canal between 1844 and 1869 symbolized this process, if also that of Egypt's increasing financial control by Europeans. The construction of other significant pieces of modern economic infrastructure such as railways and ship-building, as well as the expansion of cotton production, meant material progress, but it also produced soaring government debt. Indeed, by 1880 approximately two-thirds of Egypt's annual governmental revenues were given over to debt service, a debt held largely by British and French investors.¹ As a key part of the Eastern Question for successive nineteenth-century British governments, Egypt was recognized by the Conservatives under Disraeli as the cornerstone of its imperial policy and in 1875 the government made this position abundantly clear by purchasing 44 per cent of the Canal's shares. The resulting injection of L4 million into the Treasury of the Khedive gave his embattled regime a financial respite, but only briefly. By the following year an international commission headed by Britain's Controller General in Egypt, Sir Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer from 1892), had imposed on the country a strict financial regime complete with a tight stringency on expenditures.² Some in government – such as Major General Charles Gordon, then the Governor General of Egyptian-controlled Sudan – thought that the debt commission's demands were both unfair and potentially dangerously counter-productive, and argued that some form of debt forgiveness be enacted.³ Baring, however, had other ideas and insisted on maintaining a financial hardline in order to appease the demands of the always tetchy Anglo-French investors. In light of these strictures it is unsurprising that Egyptian Khedivial independence, such as it was, became severely curtailed and proved to be the tinder from which a nationalist revolt sparked into flame.

The key actor in this Egyptian uprising was an army colonel by the name of Ahmed Arabi Pasha. Educated, affluent, and a long-time nationalist, Pasha was incensed by the political and financial machinations of both the Ottomans and the Europeans, and in February of 1881 led a large and loud street demonstration against them in Alexandria. This provocative action led to others of a similar nature and soon a coup was carried out successfully in which the army was wrested from direct Khedivial control and put under Arabi's supervision as newly-named Minister for War. Unsurprisingly, tensions now rose precipitously. The embattled Khedive was keenly desirous of British help in reasserting control over the deteriorating situation, but only after a simple argument between an Egyptian donkey boy and a belligerent Maltese trader in Alexandria in June of 1882 had escalated into a street riot in which 50 Europeans were killed, was the British government convinced to intervene militarily.

William Gladstone, now two years into his second prime ministerial administration, abhorred this descent into public violence in Egypt but was prepared to send British warships and troops to intervene if doing so was the only way to prevent the escalation of social and political disorder.⁴ Even though during his Midlothian Campaign of 1879 that had led up to the general election of the following year Gladstone had articulated a clearly-defined internationalism, he was certainly no pacifist. ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ as he put it, may have been the preferred outcome of the situation, but such an achievement could only be expected to come after the various interest-holders in Egyptian government, society, and the economy had been satisfied. As for the latter, this meant essentially those European bondholders whose investments were tied tightly to the stability of the Khedivial regime. One of those bondholders was Gladstone himself, a fiscal reality provoking of some discomfort, yes, but certainly of no incompatibility with holding public office at the time. To Gladstone, public order counted above all else in society. Even though he was routinely unconvinced by strategic arguments about the centrality of the Canal and India to British imperial and foreign policy, by mid-1882 events in Egypt were closing in on him in such a way as to make his voice almost the only one in Cabinet wanting to avoid military intervention. While Gladstone was prepared to intervene in this way, he did not advocate for it. But the rebellious and murderous events of July tipped the Egyptian situation into one of serial disorder and with it the naval bombardment of Alexandria was undertaken and the British occupation of the country ensued. General Wolseley, late of South Africa, was drafted to lead the invasion, and the instructions given to him by Gladstone's Cabinet were pointed and uncompromising: ‘Put down Arabi & establish Khedive's power’.⁵ By mid-September and the successful battle of Tel-el-Kebir in which the rebellious Egyptian forces were routed and Arabi captured, the instructions had been fulfilled. ‘No more blood I hope’, wrote Gladstone in his diary two days later on 15 September. And then an encomium typical of the man: ‘Wolseley in Cairo: Arabi a prisoner: God be praised’.⁶ A mere two months had yielded a thoroughgoing military success, a stunning exhibition of British power, and the beginning of what would stretch into 40 years of British control over Egypt.

Herbert Kitchener's military career would be shaped by the cockpit of Anglo-Egyptian affairs in 1882 for the next 20 years, so it is appropriate that on 11 July as Britain's big naval guns opened up on the Alexandrian ramparts from the roads just offshore, that he was aboard the flagship HMS Invincible observing it all. Back on board ship after a dangerous and exhilarating week of onshore reconnaissance dressed in civilian clothes and disguised as a ‘Levantine’, Kitchener for the first time ever was enjoying the heightened atmosphere of war and his own tiny part in it. If his one-week leave of absence from Cyprus had been occasioned by a bout of boredom mixed with malarial fever, he now desired to extend his leave in order to stay near the centre of the action. To that end, he asked Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, in command of the Royal Navy's operations at Alexandria, to contact Major General Sir Robert Biddulph in Cyprus for an extension of his leave. Seymour, impressed by the young Kitchener, was happy to oblige. His request was met, however, with a flat refusal by Biddulph. Even more off-putting than Biddulph's refusal, however, was his anger at what he saw to be Kitchener's insubordination in using his leave to depart Cyprus for service elsewhere. Kitchener was flabbergasted to think that Biddulph considered him to be both duplicitous and, pointedly, absent without leave. Facing, therefore, the possibility of a court-martial a chagrined Kitchener returned to Cyprus immediately where he sought to appease the enraged Biddulph. His superior was not easily mollified, however, but Kitchener did his best: ‘I have been very much pained ever since my return’, he wrote to Biddulph on 2 August, ‘at the view you took of my absence in Alexandria’. At length he sought to explain himself:

I think it my duty to let you know how extremely anxious I am to see service in Egypt …. I cannot help feeling that my remaining here in a civil capacity while military service was offered me might be used against me in my future career …. I feel sure that you will agree with me that a soldier's first duty is to serve his country in the field when an opportunity is offered him …. Of course I would gladly relinquish all my pay to those doing my work and I would leave my resignation in your hands’.⁷

Biddulph was not moved, however, by Kitchener's imprecations and so unhappily but stoically, therefore, Kitchener carried on with the survey for the rest of that summer and autumn oblivious to the fact that as he did so the Gladstone government was deciding to re-constitute the shattered Egyptian army and put it under British command. The officer chosen to head it as ‘Sirdar’ (leader) was Major General Sir Evelyn Wood, selected over the transplanted and now (partially) rehabilitated Valentine Baker. A seasoned, decorated officer (he had been awarded the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny) and a member of Wolseley's Ring, he was appointed in December and instructed to select 25 commanding officers to serve under him.⁸ Both Wood and Kitchener were recommended by Charles Gordon. Kitchener, biding his time completing the Cyprus survey, did not take much convincing, although he was afraid of once again running afoul of Biddulph. ‘Will you join me for soldier's duty,’ queried Wood of Kitchener on 28 December. ‘… no allowances except forage two years engagement.’⁹ While Kitchener's initial response was negative: ‘Very sorry present work will not permit me to leave Cyprus for one year’, this opportunity was not one to be missed.¹⁰ Wood persisted in his recruitment attempt, and in the face of an equally persistent Kitchener Biddulph finally relented. Accordingly, by late February 1883 Kitchener was in Cairo, having left behind for good both Cyprus and the ‘noble’ survey. From the rank of captain Kitchener had been raised to the equivalent of major (‘bimbashi’) in the Egyptian army.¹¹ Indeed, he was ‘pretty well satisfied’ with the course of these latest events as he explained to Millie, and ready at last ‘to do some soldiering’.¹²

Once in Egypt, Kitchener was posted to the army's sole cavalry regiment, the 19th Hussars. As second in command, Kitchener was required to ensure that fresh recruits to the regiment were turned as quickly as possible into competent fighting horsemen. Like many people who have mastered a skill with which others remain unfamiliar, Kitchener was less than patient in forging quality horsemanship in his Hussars. But he was doggedly persistent and by July the new Egyptian cavalrymen were riding successfully on parade. During this period he worked closely with fellow officer Andrew Haggard, the elder brother of the yet-to-be famous novelist of empire, Rider Haggard.¹³ The two young men got on well together and shared numerous regimental and off-duty meals at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, the social heart of British military and administrative life in Egypt from the middle of the nineteenth century until eventually burning down in 1952. In 1895, by then a lieutenant colonel, Andrew Haggard published a memoir of his time in Egypt called Under Crescent and Star, in which Kitchener receives ready reference. The prose is often purple, and the memories recorded have much to do with young officer indulgence: ‘we [Haggard and Kitchener] had a match with each other, like a couple of schoolboys, to see who could eat the most’; but a portrait of an entirely sociable Kitchener is made clear nonetheless.¹⁴ While reticence and taciturnity were marked features of his character, (the young) Kitchener was always able to relax and enjoy himself, particularly in the company of his fellow officers.

Those early days in Cairo also brought Kitchener his first (and probably only) full-blown love affair. Valentine Baker had come to Cairo in 1882 in the service of the Khedive and remained doing so, though rather desultorily, it seems, as head of what he called the ‘rubbishy’ Egyptian police, a distinctly second-order appointment in his view once Wood had been named Sirdar.¹⁵ Baker and his family lived in residence at Shepheard's and as a frequent guest and visitor to the hotel Kitchener easily reacquainted himself with them.¹⁶ Being much admired by Baker (as well as by his famous brother Samuel¹⁷) Kitchener spent considerable time dining and socializing with the family, drawn especially by Hermione, the beautiful teenaged elder daughter of Valentine and his wife, Fanny. Of delicate health – or at least treated that way in the prevailing Victorian fashion – Hermione had fast elicited Kitchener's devotion and throughout the balance of 1883 and into the next year whenever he was in Cairo he paid court to her. Though characteristically silent on the subject others within the small British social circle that centred on Shepheard's assumed that the two young people (Kitchener, at 33, was 15 years older than Hermione) were fated to marry.

One such observer, just then living with her parents beside the hotel in the British Consulate, was the ten-year-old daughter of a judge in the Egyptian native courts, Bonte Amos. In later years Bonte Sheldon Elgood, as she became, practiced as a physician in Egypt, living her entire life there until being expelled in 1956 during the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. She is one of the only – and certainly the best – sources of information on Kitchener and Hermione's (almost certainly chaste) brief love affair. In 1959, retired and living in England, she remembered one particular incident between them from sometime in 1884, near to what proved to be the end of their courtship. Firm in her recollection – ‘I knew it as fact’ – Elgood recounted it this way:

Hermione, whom I greatly admired (as little girls of 10 do admire young ladies of 18), was seriously ill in their rooms there [Shepheard's], and my mother (in the absence of any sort of hospital), living next door, frequently went there with specially-cooked diet. On one of these occasions I was with her, and I well remember that as my mother had just opened the bedroom door to enter, a tall young officer came up and hurriedly spoke to my mother. My mother drew me back and we waited on a nearby couch while he went in alone. I remember clearly saying, ‘But why? Doesn't she want the beef-tea?’ And my mother said, ‘Yes, but Major Kitchener is going to marry her, and wants to see her quietly’. She died, I think, not so long after, and we were all very sad.¹⁸

On 21 January 1885, not very long after this episode had occurred and just before Gordon's death and the fall of Khartoum during which Kitchener was at Korti as part of the relief mission, Hermione Baker died in Cairo of typhoid fever. A month later her mother Fanny died also, and two years after that and still in Egypt Valentine did likewise, of a heart attack. Altogether, the sad demise of a family. In the interim, however, Valentine had given Kitchener one of Hermione's lockets as a keepsake of their sadly abbreviated relationship, which he kept for the rest of his life.

After the serial frivolities of British social life at Shepheard's, Kitchener's personal heartbreak over Hermione Baker's illness (and later death) was more in line with what was taking place to the south. The year 1883 was a momentous one in Egyptian affairs because of the steady descent into Islamic3-inspired warfare in its contiguous dependency of Sudan. The preceding 62 years of Turco-Egyptian rule (the ‘Turkiyya’) in Sudan had produced a well-spring of resentment in the Sudanese towards their overlords. Heavy taxation, recurring warfare, compromises with ‘infidel’ Turks, Egyptians, and Europeans were a potent cocktail in the hands of anyone who might seek to conjure a revolt, and by the 1870s such a backlash was brewing under the leadership of Muhammad Ahmad, a young mystic from the Nilotic town of Dongola. Claiming for himself the title of ‘al-Mahdi’, the Prophet Muhammad's successor as the ‘expected one’ or ‘guide’ in the tradition or hadith of Sunni Muslims, Ahmad claimed that under him the advent of the ‘Mahdiyya’ was to prepare the way for Allah's final Day of Judgement. Little of this Islamic theology (and teleology) was understood by the contemporary British or anyone else for that matter in Western society at the time, but the threat to order and stability in the vast one million square mile Sudan was real enough. From Ahmad's announcement of the commencement of the Mahdiyya in June of 1881 he had gone on the offensive against the ‘infidel Turks …’, commanding his followers thusly: ‘let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels’.¹⁹

In response to the threats being uttered by Ahmad and the increasing fervour of his followers, known as the ‘Ansar’ (helpers), Egyptian authorities moved to have him arrested in December. The attempt failed, however. Emboldened by this failure, Ahmad continued to build strength and with his following now numbering in the thousands he laid siege to a 4,000-man Egyptian force sent from Khartoum to engage him in June 1883 at El Obeid in the province of Kordofan. By now, the situation had become dire in the view of both Cairo and Khartoum. In the latter city throughout that summer a force of some 8,000 troops congregated and was placed under the command of Colonel William Hicks. A 53-year-old veteran of the Indian Army, Hicks had entered the Khedive's service in 1882 and early the next year was sent to Khartoum as military chief of staff. His troops were poor and dispirited, however, most of them having recently fought for the defeated Arabi, and were hardly enthusiastic about a posting to Khartoum, or the prospect of fighting the increasingly fearsome Mahdi. Hicks himself was equally unenthusiastic about their quality. Ordered to attack the Mahdi at El Obeid, Hicks marched his bedraggled force out of Khartoum on 9 September. Some weeks later at Shaykan Hicks's disoriented troops, severely weakened by thirst as well as by a critical lack of provisions, were set upon by the Mahdi's army. A fanatical force of some 40,000 Ansar, they made short work of Hicks's men, almost all of whom were killed. The annihilation was overwhelming, with Hicks's severed head being the ultimate trophy of Islamic war taken to the Mahdi's encampment at El Obeid to be put on display.²⁰

News of the Hicks debacle was met with equal dismay in Khartoum, Cairo, and London. To most observers it had become clear that Sudan was slipping into jihadist anarchy. Not only had the western side of the country become almost ungovernable, in the east along the Red Sea one of the Mahdi's lieutenants, Osman Digna, would soon achieve victories against Egyptian troops sent to put down the allied Hadendoa people (the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzys’, as British soldiers called them, on account of their high-mounted and wildly-matted hair). Led by Valentine Baker who had come south from Cairo specifically for the purpose, the Egyptians nonetheless were quickly defeated at El Teb. A revived Egyptian force drew a measure of revenge against Digna a short while later, however, only to suffer a reverse again at Tamai.²¹

Throughout the increasing tumult in Sudan Kitchener had continued to acclimate himself to an officer's life in Egypt. His staff responsibilities did not (yet) mean service to the south in Sudan. Indeed, after a busy regimental summer he was able to go on leave and in November 1883 renewed his still close association with the Palestine Exploration Fund by joining its expedition to the Arabah Valley, which runs south for about 110 miles from the Dead Sea to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. On the expedition Kitchener was accompanied by George Armstrong, later to become secretary of the PEF. Being back on survey was highly enjoyable for Kitchener, and trekking again through Biblical lands, this time in the ‘wilderness of Zin’ as recounted in the Old Testament book of Numbers, was the perfect way to spend his leave. The enjoyable archaeological and map-making reverie was interrupted, however, at the end of the year when he was informed by General Wood of the Hicks disaster in Sudan. At once, Kitchener resolved to return to Cairo and did so by cross-country passage through the unforgiving Sinai Desert, a 200 mile journey by camel (made again in disguise, only this time not as a Levantine but rather as an Egyptian official). Safely back in Cairo at the beginning of 1884, by March of that year Wood had Kitchener hard at work as an intelligence officer. Fluent in Arabic and well-versed in the geography and politics of the Near and Middle East, Kitchener was ideal for the job.

Kitchener's Arabah and Sinai peregrinations had taken place almost exactly at the same time that the Gladstone government, in the face of the Hicks disaster and the Mahdi's ongoing jihad, decided to enact the evacuation of Sudan.²² Initially, Gladstone's predisposition against regarding Suez and the route to India as central to British imperial policy had made him downplay the importance of the Sudan crisis, as well as view it through the lens of his developing advocacy of the rights of small states and powerless peoples. Indeed, in the spirit of Midlothian he would later declaim (in)famously in Parliament that the Mahdists were ‘struggling to be free; and they are struggling rightly to be free’.²³ But before Gladstone did that, however, decisions about the nature and scope of the evacuation simply had to be made. For certain members of the Liberal Cabinet, the choice of General Gordon to lead the exodus from Sudan became irresistible in the early days of January. Gordon had spent all of 1883 in Palestine on a self-imposed study leave before agreeing to become King Leopold of Belgium's personal emissary to the Congo in an effort to limit the slave trade there as he had done in southern Sudan as Anglo-Egyptian governor general a few years earlier. To do so, Gordon had returned to England on 7 January 1884 intending to resign his British commission and prepare to depart for Africa in the service of the Belgian king. But events intervened. Just a few days earlier, Garnet Wolseley, now Adjutant General of the British Army, had written to Gordon in an effort to dissuade him from taking up Leopold's offer, and instead consider closely the deteriorating situation in Sudan.²⁴ Others too had Gordon's name on their lips as the right person for Sudan. Cabinet ministers such as Lord Granville at the Foreign Office and Lord Hartington at the War Office were plumping for Gordon to be sent to Khartoum. The popular press was pushing for Gordon too, especially W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette whose liberal sympathies lay clearly with the government and who managed to obtain an interview with Gordon himself the morning of his recent arrival back in England. In the emergent modern ‘ambush’ journalistic style, Stead appeared unannounced at Gordon's sister's home in Southhampton where he was staying and proceeded to elicit from him the bullish opinion that evacuating Sudan was the wrong policy. ‘Even if we were bound to do so’, Gordon remarked, ‘the moment that it is known that we have given up the game, every man will go over to the Mahdi. All men worship the rising sun’.²⁵

The next 11 days proved frantic, as Gordon was drafted for service in Sudan, agreed to go, and left hurriedly on 18 January 1885. His instructions as to precisely what he was being sent to achieve in Sudan – report on the situation, or evacuate all British troops, administrators, and civilians? – were unclear. Gladstone was fearful that a man of Gordon's known independence of mind might very easily disregard the instructions of a far-away government. ‘Must we not be very careful …’, he wrote to Granville on 16 January, ‘that he does not shift the centre of gravity as to political and military responsibility for that country’.²⁶ In Cairo, Baring, now British Consul General, though sharing with Gordon a background at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich (Baring was an artilleryman, however), never liked or trusted him and was equally uneasy about sending him back to Sudan.²⁷ But in the heat of the ongoing crisis such misgivings were shunted aside and after meeting with Wolseley, and then a few days later with four members of the Cabinet (which did not include Gladstone who was away at Hawarden, his country estate in North Wales), Gordon set out for Sudan on the 18th. Exactly one month later, on 18 February, he arrived at Khartoum. Once there of course, he would never leave.

The saga of the 11 months that followed until Gordon's death at the hands of the Mahdi's Ansar on 26 January 1885 is one of the defining epics of the late-Victorian British Empire and has been told often and well.²⁸ A full reprise of it need not be included here, therefore. But what is salient, of course, is the place in it of Kitchener, and to that we shall now turn.

During the handful of months over which Gordon had accepted his assignment, travelled to Sudan, and settled into his executive role in the Governor's Palace on the banks of the Blue Nile at Khartoum, Kitchener had been relishing his life as a peripatetic intelligence officer under the director of military intelligence, Major Reginald Wingate, who later would command the Egyptian Army as Sirdar and become a pivotal figure in the military history of the Middle East.²⁹ The jihadist uprising in Sudan, the first of its kind in modern Africa and one of the main precursors to what has become readily evident in today's world, convinced the Egyptian government of the necessity of creating a dedicated staff in order to both understand and resist the revolt. The obvious charisma of the Mahdi, the devotion of the Ansar, the ceaseless emotive rhetoric, and the apparent carelessness towards death and destruction that characterized the rebellion produced in the British on the ground an earnest desire for the revolt's defeat. As one of those men on the spot Kitchener therefore threw himself into the task of trying to solicit Arab collaborators whose loyalty to the Anglo-Egyptian regime could be counted upon against the relentless emotional and religious onslaught of the Mahdi. Much of Kitchener's early work in this regard was centred on Berber, located about 200 miles north of Khartoum and invested by the Ansar, or ‘Dervishes’ as they now had been dubbed by British soldiers in a nod to the ‘whirling’ Dervishes of Sufi Muslim fame.³⁰ To the east along the old caravan route about 280 miles away lay the Red Sea port of Suakin, vital to any future British military operation that did not involve ascending the Nile from Cairo. Kitchener's main job at this point in the revolt was to form an irregular fighting force of Arabs who could be used to dislodge the Ansar from Berber and open the way to Suakin.

The spare, elemental, soldierly life Kitchener now lived was one that he had very quickly come to relish. ‘Just got back from 17 days desert ride and rather exciting hunt of one of the Mahdi's emirs’, he wrote breathlessly in June to a former PEF colleague.³¹ On these and other dangerous forays he was accompanied by a small group of Arabs who pledged to him their unquestioning loyalty, and together they hurtled across the undulating desert in an attempt to outwit the Mahdi and achieve whatever end either the British government, or Gordon, was attempting to achieve. Determining what both these parties wanted was of course extremely difficult, and Kitchener dressed in Arab robes, conversant in the language, and caught up in the unfolding drama emanating from Khartoum can hardly have been expected to be anything but a strong supporter of the increasingly heroic Gordon. Kitchener's pre-existing dislike of Gladstone prejudiced him against the Prime Minister of course, but what seemed to be the interminable prevarication of the Liberal Cabinet over the correct next steps in Sudan in the face of what was a rising chorus of loud voices demanding action sealed his contempt for the Grand Old Man of British political life.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1884 Gordon had made it clear through reports, messages (until the telegraph line was cut in mid-March), and letters from Khartoum that he was not about to simply pack up and go home, leaving the field open for the Mahdi to do as he pleased. Logistically, with over 20,000 troops and some 11,000 civilians in Sudan, any sort of evacuation would have been extraordinarily difficult. But even if Gordon had been inclined towards evacuation (which he was not), the actions of the Mahdi militated against any outcome other than a climactic showdown between the two men. ‘I have asked Gov't. to give me categorical orders what to do’, Gordon wrote to his sister Augusta in Southampton, in an undated (probably March 1884) note.³² If Gordon remained of the mind that the Gladstone Cabinet was unclear in its purpose, at home pressure was building within both Parliament and public alike that Gordon was fast becoming a hostage to the Mahdi and the only proper course of action that remained was for the government to send a fully-equipped relief mission to save both him and the honour of the nation. Queen Victoria was equally vexed about Gordon's fate, although earlier she had praised Gladstone for sending him out: ‘I am glad that my Government are prepared to act with energy’.³³ As the weeks passed, however, the Queen grew increasingly frustrated with what she took to be government muddle and timidity in the face of what was believed to be Gordon's own unfolding and potentially tragic heroism.

By the end of March the Mahdi had moved his Ansar into proximate distance from Khartoum and began to lay siege to the city. ‘They will not fight us directly but will starve us out’, Gordon reported to Augusta.³⁴ And that is exactly what transpired. But still the government resisted action on account of its anger at Gordon's apparent insubordination, as well as to a serious misreading of the national mood. As the political temperature rose in London about whether or not Gordon would be ‘relieved’, and if so by land or water, the man himself continued to hold out doggedly against the Mahdi. In early August, Gladstone finally succumbed to intense political pressure – the Secretary of State for War, Lord Hartington, threatened to resign if a relief force was not sent – and authorized the sending of an expedition under the command of Wolseley. By September therefore, the relief force was staging in Egypt for its chosen route up the Nile, which then commenced on the 27th.

The four autumn months that followed were rife with tension, a knife's edge existence shared by all who participated in this desert drama, including Kitchener. He was assigned as intelligence officer to the relief force, an acknowledgement of the good work he had done already over the preceding months, much of which was encapsulated in a newly written report for the Sirdar, General Wood.³⁵ Kitchener was under the command of Sir Charles Wilson, his old diplomatic patron who earlier had drafted him to serve as military vice-consul in Anatolia. Wolseley, still harbouring a degree of animus toward Kitchener resulting from their former disagreement in Cyprus, objected both to the appointment and to his being promoted brevet major in the British Army. But as far as Wood was concerned, Kitchener was manifestly the right man for the job. Kitchener duly was grateful both for the appointment and for the promotion: evidence, as he wrote in a note to the Sirdar at the end of August, that ‘you approve of my work’.³⁶ And from his base at ed-Debba Kitchener plunged into such work afresh.

By the autumn of 1884 Gordon's only means of communication with the outside world from Khartoum was via secret messenger. Chosen runners were sent out and if they got through the city's outskirts their messages would be relayed further along the 200-mile route to Kitchener's headquarters at ed-Debba where successful runners would be paid and then sent back, the cycle repeating itself. Early in the process Gordon thought that Kitchener's own intelligence operatives, his ‘outsiders’, were a ‘feeble lot’ and perhaps the only way to improve them was to increase their pay.³⁷ ‘I always pay the messengers well,’ Kitchener reassured Gordon in early November, and the quality of them did seem to improve.³⁸ But on top of the inherent perilousness of communicating in this way was the fact that the messages were sometimes designed intentionally to confuse with dis-information any of the Mahdi's men who might intercept one of Gordon's runners. The result was confusion all-around, however, which made it extremely difficult for Kitchener to know with any degree of certainty the exact nature of the prevailing situation in Khartoum. During these months of direct if uneven contact Kitchener and Gordon developed a certain rapport, which, from the younger man's point of view, would come to elicit near-veneration. Gordon, for his part, was quick to send Kitchener his ‘kind regards’ too, and the close feeling was to some degree mutual.³⁹

Like most men of arms Kitchener deplored the inexcusable slowness of any military operation when it was curtailed by political considerations. He was convinced that a proper demonstration of force against the Mahdi would break through the ring of Ansar encamped around Khartoum and give Gordon the relief he required. As he had stated forcefully to Baring as far back as August: ‘Send up your troops. There is no difficulty, and one good fight close to Khartoum will see the matter through’.⁴⁰ Almost exactly 14 years later, Kitchener himself would engage in ‘one good fight close to Khartoum’ at Omdurman, which shattered the Mahdiyya and paved the way for the British re-conquest of Sudan. But in the autumn of 1884 no such readily available expedient existed and as Wolseley's force gradually ascended the Nile it remained unclear to Kitchener and hence to Gordon just what form the final plan of relief would take.

As the Mahdi's noose tightened around Khartoum, Gordon sent a steamer downriver with a handful of men, including his second in command, Colonel J.D.H. Stewart, hoping that they would be able to establish a clearer communication network than the one afforded by runners, possibly making it all the way to Cairo. Departing Khartoum on 12 September, within days, however, the Abbas had run aground on rocks not far north of Berber. Disembarking from the stricken steamer the men warily accepted an offer of traditional Arab hospitality, which indeed proved to be a trick and they were all killed almost immediately by Ansar. Meanwhile, in ed-Debba Kitchener's messenger network had informed him that the steamer had been seen approaching Berber and he asked Wolseley if an armed vessel therefore might be dispatched to escort Stewart's party downriver. Wolseley, short on river-craft and not fully trusting of Kitchener's information, replied no. In response, Kitchener had then sent one of his runners across the full 200-mile expanse of the Bayuda Desert from ed-Debba to Berber in an attempt to intercept Stewart and tell him to leave the steamer and cross over to his headquarters by land, thus avoiding the long loop taken by the Nile and the steady presence of hostile Ansar along its banks. The message, alas, never got through and the next thing Kitchener heard was that Stewart and his colleagues were dead. Understandably, he was furious about this ‘murder by Red Tape’, as he called the sad episode.⁴¹

In Khartoum, the Stewart debacle confirmed for Gordon that without the soon arrival of the relief expedition he would have to take on the Mahdi alone. In a letter from his nemesis at the end of October Gordon was indeed told to surrender and convert to Islam and therefore all would not be lost. Rejecting the ignominy inherent in the offer, Gordon responded flatly: ‘It is impossible for me to have any more words with Mohammad Achmed, only lead’.⁴²

The weeks of waiting continued to pass and with them hopes of success dwindled. Wolseley proposed to continue upriver as far as Korti, the place where the Nile begins its long loop, and from there send a column of about 1,100 men across the Bayuda on camelback to Metemma, located about 100 miles north of Khartoum. The balance of his force meanwhile would continue on the river as far as Berber. For the Camel Corps, once having arrived at Metemma an advance on the besieged city could be made, which would then be buttressed by the arrival of the troops on board the boats. Kitchener joined the new column as intelligence officer, accompanying them as far as Jakdul, about mid-way across the desert, before being ordered back to Korti to await further instructions. Chafing at this enforced return to base, Kitchener poured out his frustration to sister Millie: ‘My Lord Wolseley has not forgotten or forgiven and has just sent me a gentle reminder …. I fancied I had little claim to get on to Khartoum’.⁴³

The Gordon saga was now fast approaching its climacteric. A few days later at Abu Klea, the Camel Corps endured a ferocious attack by Ansar that they were ultimately able to withstand, but at great human cost. Kitchener was well to be back in Korti and away from the fighting, although that was little consolation at the time. At last, a few days later on 28 January 1885, an advance party of 20 men arrived at Khartoum on board a steamer. Under Sir Charles Wilson, to whom command had devolved after some other senior officers had been killed at Abu Klea, the clutch of men on board the steamer stared out at the utter ruin and desolation of the city. Two days earlier the Mahdi had chosen to launch a final attack and early on the morning of the 26th the Ansar had poured into the stricken city and for the next dozen hours had killed, raped, and plundered indiscriminately. Fully one-quarter of Khartoum's population of 40,000 were killed that day by the Mahdi's frenzied jihadists, including of course Gordon, who, Kitchener later reported, likely had been ‘killed near the gate of the palace’.⁴⁴ Gordon's body was never found, however, but his head was placed on a pike for display in the victorious Mahdi's encampment across the river at Omdurman.⁴⁵

In the aftermath of the failed relief expedition there of course was much recrimination, most of which fell upon the head of Gladstone, now called derisively by some the M.O.G. (Murderer of Gordon) rather than the hitherto affectionate G.O.M. (Grand Old Man). Kitchener's own feelings about the sad situation were angry and raw. He blamed Gladstone, but so too did just about everyone else who shared the British imperial creed, not the least of whom was the Queen. As we know she had long been outraged by the delay at ‘rescuing’ Gordon and now despaired utterly at his loss.⁴⁶ Wolseley, whose view of Kitchener had come to change completely given his stellar work on campaign, was singularly apoplectic about what he regarded as the total disaster of Sudan and of Gordon's loss, and was certain as to Gladstone's culpability for both. His animus towards him in this regard would be long-lasting. In January 1886, a year after the events of Khartoum when Gladstone had again won (brief) re-election, he wrote to Kitchener lamenting the outcome of the vote. ‘God must be very angry with England’, opined Wolseley, ‘when he sends back Mr. Gladstone to us as First Minister, … an unprincipled man …. Nothing is talked of or cared for at this moment but this appalling calamity that has fallen upon England’.⁴⁷

In the days following the certain news that Khartoum had fallen and that Gordon indeed was dead Kitchener played his part in bolstering the morale of the dispirited British troops. Jubilant Ansar attacked the retreating British and at Abu Klea, site of the signal though costly victory just a few weeks earlier when hopes still ran high of saving Gordon, Kitchener took the lead filling in the wells. Such an action was regarded as contrary to the rules of war and therefore ungentlemanly, but in light of the fact that marauding Ansar continued to harass the British Kitchener felt justified in doing so.

By late-February Kitchener's work potentially was almost done. He was now back at Korti (and then later ed-Debba) and beginning to prepare for a possible return to England, although the prospect of further action in Sudan remained and would not be made firm until the British government's decision on 21 April that no subsequent offensive operations would be undertaken. While at Korti some of Gordon's personal effects salvaged from the destroyed Governor's Palace in Khartoum were brought into camp. Included among them was one of the last of Gordon's letters, dated 26 November 1884, in which he criticized his political masters for almost the last time: ‘There will be no peace between me and Gladstone's Government – that is certain’. He then goes to on conclude with a ringing encomium in praise of Kitchener as his natural successor as governor general, stating that his appointment ‘would be well for the people, and you would have no difficulty that you could not master’.⁴⁸ To be endorsed in this way by the fallen hero who was fast being turned into an ‘imperial saint’, was the height of validation for Kitchener and he sent the totemic letter to his father for safekeeping.⁴⁹ ‘It is the best reward that I shall get for a good many months’ hard work …, he wrote about Gordon's endorsement. ‘I feel that, now he is dead, the heart and soul of the Expedition is gone. The shock of the news was dreadful, and I can hardly realize it yet’.⁵⁰

Gordon's posthumous praise may have been enjoining for Kitchener, but a similar kind of commendation from the living had served also to raise his reputation in the minds of the popular readership at home. Gordon's saga had been followed very closely in England and in it the role of the trustworthy ‘Major Kitchener’ was given great play, especially in the pages of The Times.⁵¹ Owing to his earlier work in the PEF especially, Kitchener's name had become at least incidental to newspaper readers prior to the Sudan expedition. But with the events in Sudan his name now gained widespread recognition, and the ensuing public acclaim also had an impact on the way his military superiors viewed him.

In his as yet continuing role of intelligence officer Kitchener had drafted a long memorandum for Sir Redvers Buller, who had been given command of the Desert Column as it began its retreat in the aftermath of the failure to advance on Khartoum. A soldier of long experience, winner of the Victoria Cross during the Anglo-Zulu War, and later to take command in South Africa in the Anglo-Boer War, Buller thought highly of Kitchener's abilities, a view reinforced by Kitchener's 15-page summative memo submitted to him on 1 May 1885 detailing his ‘Report on the Present Situation & Future Government of the Sudan’. Kitchener's informative memo had followed on a series of linked notes written on 4 February and based on immediate intelligence of events detailing Gordon's final days. In Kitchener's hand the notes comprising ‘The Fall of Khartoum’ are highly emotional in tone and in that way starkly different from the bureaucratic memo written by him a few months later. In these earlier notes the state of affairs in Khartoum is grimly recounted by Kitchener: dwindling food stocks and desperation leading to the fact that ‘all the donkeys, dogs, cats, rats, etc. had been eaten’; betrayals and butchery; and finally, ‘sudden assault when the garrison were too exhausted by privations to make proper resistance’. Some of the emotion of his notes naturally crept into his official ‘Report’, and altogether, Kitchener's 3,000-word document is a tale of woe that tells the story of ‘noble resistance’ owing to the ‘indomitable resolution and resource of one Englishman. Never was a garrison so nearly rescued, never was a Commander so sincerely lamented’, he concluded.⁵²

On 8 May 1885, a week after Kitchener's Report was submitted, the Gladstone government announced that a full-scale withdrawal from Sudan would be undertaken. Ridiculed by Kitchener and others as a ‘Policy of Scuttle’, the decision was final (and would be maintained by the Salisbury Conservative government when it won power in July 1886 by defeating the Liberals, who by then were riven by internal dissension over the Irish Home Rule bill).⁵³ Kitchener's Sudan service therefore was ineluctably winding down. In June, the Mahdi died unexpectedly, probably of typhoid fever, and he was succeeded by Abdullahi Ibn Muhammad, the ‘Khalifa’, with whom Kitchener later would be indelibly linked. In recognition of Kitchener's excellent intelligence work, he was promoted brevet lieutenant colonel. Shortly thereafter he resigned his commission in the Egyptian Army and on 3 July, having just passed his 35th birthday, he boarded ship in Alexandria and sailed for home.

After the intense strain of the preceding months in Sudan Kitchener's summer in England proved halcyon. He spent it on leave and was feted, even lionized, as the returning hero, basking in the reflected glory of the slain and now-considered-to-be saintly Gordon. Feting of this sort began in mid-July at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, the Italianate architectural confection purchased and renovated by Queen Victoria and the late Prince Albert 40 years earlier in 1845 and afterwards the royal family's favourite residence. For Kitchener, newly returned from the desert, Osborne was all lush greenery and cool water and he reveled in his visit there, as he did equally in his first meeting with the Queen, as each officer was formally presented to her. The balance of the summer was spent mainly in London and in Leicestershire socializing and visiting old Colonel Kitchener and Millie, who had taken up residence there. Kitchener's London headquarters became the Belgravia home of Pandeli Ralli, while at the same time he began to be exposed to aristocratic country house life when invited to Taplow Court near Maidenhead in Berkshire, the estate of William Henry Grenfell. Athlete, mountain climber, big-game hunter, and MP, Grenfell was the epitome of the Victorian ‘hearty’ and took an instant liking to the war-hero Kitchener, which prompted the first of many weekend invitations. The feeling was mutual and Grenfell's friendship was an important step in Kitchener's socio-political education in the ways of the late-Victorian elite. His lack of wealth, title, and public school or university education meant that Kitchener's ‘outsider’ status needed to be compensated for by military achievement and helpful friends if the heights of smart society were to be scaled. The Sudan had supplied one, and Grenfell (later Lord Desborough) assisted in showing the right path to the other.

By the autumn of 1885 the thoroughly feted Kitchener was ready for a fresh assignment but when it came it did so in the form of a disappointing posting to Ireland with the Royal Engineers, there to assist in the building of a new barracks in Cork. Hardly the sort of task to set the blood pumping – especially after the serial excitement of Sudan – Kitchener made a vociferous appeal to the War Office to have the order rescinded and something better put in its place. Perhaps Kitchener's gradually developing network of friends in high places helped in the situation, although his correspondence does not reveal anything specific in this regard. In any event, on 7 October he received a letter of appointment from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, that his services were required by the Foreign Office (he was loaned out again by the War Office) as the British representative on the Zanzibar Boundary Commission.⁵⁴ Together with his fellow commissioners from Germany and France, Kitchener was charged with evaluating the Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar's claims to a large swathe of East Africa (much of today's Tanzania and Kenya), a pressing diplomatic question in the aftermath of the Berlin West Africa Conference that had ended just a few months earlier and which had set down rules for the European delimitation of Africa. The ‘scramble’ or ‘partition’ of Africa was just about to begin in earnest, and Kitchener, much better-pleased about his replacement assignment, was to be engaged in one corner of its execution.⁵⁵

The clove-scented island of Zanzibar, located about 40 miles off the coast of East Africa, had been of considerable British interest as far back as the early part of the nineteenth century when the Royal Navy's anti-slaving squadron had begun to do its work of intercepting slave ships of the Arab trade. By mid-century Zanzibar was host to a series of explorers – most notably David Livingstone – who used it as a staging base for forays inland, and now as the century was drawing to a close the island and its ruling sultan were at the centre of how East Africa would be divided up amongst the three major European powers concerned: Germany, Britain, and France. As it happened, the Germans had the most pressing local claims. Their explorers, missionaries, and agents, such as Johannes Rebmann, Johann Ludwig Krapf, and Karl Peters had arrived in advance of any other Europeans, and – in the case of Peters – had drafted treaties with some of the local tribal groups, which the Germans argued were legal and therefore deserving of international ratification. The British and the French were a little late in taking up the diplomatic game on the African east coast and inland, but in light of the Berlin Conference they too desired a settling of the fluid situation, especially as it bore on access to the Great Lakes in the interior and hence to the Nile watershed with its decisive geo-strategic implications related to India.

Kitchener arrived in Stone Town, Zanzibar's capital, on 29 November 1885, and was met by Dr John Kirk, the British Consul. Kirk, famous for his part in Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition of some 25 years earlier, welcomed Kitchener (with whom he had already corresponded) and gave him a full briefing on the prevailing diplomatic situation.⁵⁶ The German and French commissioners were already in residence and for Kitchener the next nine months would prove to be a rather prickly period of argument with his fellow commissioners and diplomatic jockeying for position. As the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, appointed by Gladstone following the Liberal defeat of the Tories in the Commons over the Irish land bill at the beginning of 1886, put it to him in a letter in March: ‘I think it well to give you a hint that at Berlin they think you lean a little towards the French commissioner’.⁵⁷

Loneliness too was a problem: ‘one is dreadfully cut off from the world …’ he wrote to Millie. But a cruise along the east African coastline was rewarding, a foreshadowing of Kitchener's later extensive land purchase in Kenya, which he thought would be ideal for his eventual retirement.⁵⁸ In the end the deliberations of the Commission were circumvented by executive action in the three home capitals by which the Sultan was given a 600 mile coastal strip along with the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia; the French were awarded control of the Comoros Islands near Madagascar, the latter of which they gradually succeeded in formally colonizing in 1897; and Germany and Britain had their ‘sphere of influence’ claims over what would later become German East Africa (Tanganyika) and British East Africa (Kenya) recognized. Altogether, the Berlin Conference mandate had been exercised in a swift and patronizingly effective way: executive imperialism at its most blatant. As for Kitchener, however, the whole episode proved mostly forgettable, except for the fact that to ensure the balance of power in the Indian Ocean he recommended that the British government acquire the then tiny port of Mombasa as a naval base, which, in due course, is exactly what it did.⁵⁹

Happy to have the Zanzibar assignment behind him, Kitchener headed for home in August of 1886. Upon reaching Suez, however, his journey was interrupted by a message apprising him that the new Tory government of Lord Salisbury, which had vaulted back into office after defeating the Liberals on the Home Rule Bill and subsequently winning the general election, had chosen to appoint him ‘Governor-General of the Eastern Sudan and Red Sea Littoral’ and that he was required to report immediately to Suakin, his new territorial charge's capital. England therefore would have to wait.

Despite the grand-sounding title, Kitchener's appointment at Suakin was largely about maintaining British control over its last Red Sea port and keeping it out of the hands of the irrepressible Osman Digna and the ascendant local Mahdists. ‘What curious people these Arabs are’, Wolseley wrote incredulously to Kitchener, ‘to allow Osman Digna to come back to bully them’.⁶⁰ A small, ancient town, Suakin was built originally of coral harvested locally. Conquered by the Ottomans in 1517, it soon fell into decline and eventually in 1865 the town was given to the Khedive Ismail. Stiflingly hot from May until November and without obvious strategic value until the 1880s, Suakin had then emerged as an important port in the ongoing struggle against the imposition of the Mahdiyya. Kitchener's arrival there in the intense heat of summer marked a new chapter in Britain's attempt to contain the ramifications of the fall of Khartoum the year before.

Over the preceding few years the British, as noted earlier, had fought three battles locally: twice at El Teb and once at Tamai, in an attempt to keep open the land route from Suakin to Sudan's interior. Brief success gave way to defeat, however, and in the aftermath of the Khartoum debacle and the government's decision to withdraw from Sudan, Suakin was now a pin-prick outpost pressed down upon by the preponderant power of the Khalifa's regional subordinate, Digna. Despite the less than optimistic situation into which he arrived, Kitchener nonetheless was gratified to have been made a ‘Governor-General’ and set about immediately to settle in and transform the rather neglected Residency into a home fit for the Queen's representative. There is something earnest, perhaps even grasping, about the Kitchener of Suakin, trying very hard to live up to the perceived grandeur of his gubernatorial appointment, even if it was that of a tiny, dusty Red Sea port town. Still, the job was reasonably important given the geo-politics of the day and together with his aide-de-camp, William Staveley Gordon, he got down to work. Son of the late general's elder brother, Sir Henry William Gordon, the young Gordon was an accomplished artilleryman and went by the nickname of ‘Monkey’. Just 23 years old, Monkey Gordon immediately ingratiated himself to Kitchener and proved to be the first of a number of young aides that he would employ for the balance of his career. ‘A nice little chap’ may not be the highest form of praise, but in first describing him in this way to Millie, it is clear that the young Gordon had begun to make himself indispensable to Kitchener in his early days at Suakin.⁶¹

The local battles of the preceding three years had left Kitchener with an Anglo-Egyptian force under his command of about 2,500 men. The territory inland from Suakin was almost completely controlled by Digna, however, whose operational design was to squeeze the garrison until it had no choice but to surrender and decamp. Digna, a slave dealer and participant in Arabi's uprising in Alexandria in 1882, was fully committed to the Mahdist cause and his February 1884 defeat of Valentine Baker's force at El Teb made it evident that despite the ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzys’ unconventional appearance – their hair rose up from their heads in tower-like fashion – they were nonetheless skillful and fierce fighters. Their reputation was burnished again at the Second Battle of El Teb as well as at Tamai, the latter being chosen by Kipling to sing the praises poetically of the properly-named Beja people (more specifically the sub-group Hadendoa) in his famous poem, ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, in which he acknowledges that they had ‘broke a British square!’ (which had never happened before, but would happen again within a year at Abu Klea).⁶²

Naturally emboldened by Gordon's defeat and the fall of Khartoum, Digna had endeavoured to export the Mahdist cause to Ethiopia later in 1885, but was defeated in September at the Battle of Kufit. Still, his position in eastern Sudan was strong, and as Winston Churchill later put it effusively in his history of the British re-conquest, ‘under the leadership of the celebrated, and perhaps immortal, Osman Digna’, the Mahdists began to put pressure on Suakin.⁶³ Kitchener countered by attempting to co-opt local sheikhs into rejecting the warlike position of Digna, stressing to them that long-term stability in the region lay in their acceptance of the Anglo-Egyptian regime. ‘Peace to those who enter and who leave this place’ was written on the town gate at the behest of Kitchener and during the latter months of 1886 and throughout the following year an attempt was made to live up to the injunction. Kitchener implemented a no-trade policy with the Sudan interior as a means to choke off support for Digna, but it had the unintended effect of annoying resident European traders who claimed that choosing to trade with the Mahdists was their absolute right. Most of Kitchener's time, however, was taken up in ensuring that Suakin was well-fortified. Additionally, he continued to do his best imitation of running a full-fledged Government House, which included hosting formal dinners and welcoming his sister Millie, for example, as a guest during which time she became something of a chatelaine in her brother's service. Meanwhile, Digna tested the outer defences of Suakin, but under Monkey Gordon's direction the town was reasonably well-protected from successful attack.

After a relatively quiet 1887, the contest of wills between Kitchener and Digna heated up again in January of the New Year. Just then Digna was encamped at the village of Handub located a little to the northwest of Suakin, and Kitchener saw his known proximity there as an opportunity to go on the offensive against him. To do so he used no regular Anglo-Egyptian troops – the Sirdar, Francis Grenfell, would not authorize regulars for a raid – but rather a combined force comprised of about 400 Turkish troops, (‘bashibazouks’), Egyptian police, and non-Mahdist Sudanese. Early on the morning of 17 January 1888, therefore, before the baking sun had risen, Kitchener struck at the Mahdists’ camp and landed an effective surprise blow, nearly capturing Digna in the process. The now aroused Mahdists, however, recovered quickly and the lesser quality of Kitchener's irregulars began to show as many of them broke and ran in the face of withering fire from the enemy. Kitchener himself was shot in the face, the bullet splintering a piece of jawbone and coming to rest awkwardly near his throat. While grisly, the wound was not likely going to kill him, but it was severe nonetheless and bleeding profusely he had to leave the field immediately and return to Government House in Suakin for treatment. Kitchener's second-in-command, T.E. Hickman, therefore took over and conducted a reasonably well-ordered retreat. Initially, the episode had the smell of defeat about it. However, the superior firepower of Kitchener's otherwise undependable force meant that some 200 of the enemy were killed compared to a handful of Kitchener's men. In the pages of The Times, therefore, the Handub raid was treated as an example of the sound exercise of government policy by a commander and governor general who knew the country well and understood that ‘hostile tribes and predatory bands must, whether ‘rebels’ or not, be taught to respect the Egyptian flag and the territory and property it covers’.⁶⁴

The aftermath of the successful raid on Handub saw Kitchener sail for Suez and then proceed on to Cairo where he was hospitalized for a month. Buoyed up by letters of concern from Wolseley, among others – ‘I hope that by the time this note reaches you, the wound in your face may have made good progress towards healing’, he wrote in February, by mid-March Kitchener had recovered sufficiently to return to Suakin, there to reap the rewards of his forward policy against Digna.⁶⁵ In April, he was promoted brevet colonel and appointed aide-de-camp to the Queen, all on the same day! Kitchener's star now was rising fast, in large part because of his success in blunting Digna's impact along the Red Sea. He was the leading man-on-the-spot at an important crossroads of the British Empire and it did not matter seem to matter very much that the relatively tiny engagement at Handub had been a marginal affair, and, depending on how one looked at it, more of a defeat than a victory. The fact that the battle had taken place, that Kitchener was in charge of it and had been wounded, and that some kind of ‘victory’ could be claimed over the interminable Mahdists, was enough to propel him even higher up the ladder of success. Validated in this way he returned home to London for the summer where his facial wound healed fully and equally important, personal adulation prevailed. Highly impressed with the young governor general and commander, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, invited Kitchener to Hatfield, his family's storied country estate in Hertfordshire. Dating from the Elizabethan period, Hatfield's 127 rooms were alive with numerous members of the Cecil family and their steady stream of guests. Altogether – and Kitchener would henceforth get to know them very well – the Cecils were engaging and talkative – ‘the family learnt everything by discussion’ – and the normally taciturn Kitchener spent an enjoyable and gilded weekend there during which Salisbury told him that he would be returning to the Middle East with the new appointment of adjutant general of the Egyptian army and therefore second in command to the Sirdar.⁶⁶ In retrospect, Salisbury's decision to reward Kitchener in this way was the key moment of his early career and would set him up for subsequent swift promotion.

Kitchener duly arrived back in Cairo in September 1888 and was drawn in quickly by impending military action; first at Gemaizeh that autumn, and then later at Toski, where the Khalifa's attempt to export Mahdism across the border between Sudan and Egypt was stoutly resisted. Led by the Sirdar, a small Anglo-Egyptian force annihilated a Mahdist army of 6,000 men, killing some 1,200 of them (including its commander, Emir Wad-el-Nujumi) and capturing 4,000 others while suffering few casualties in return. Such complete battlefield domination was a clear example of Western technological prowess, a foretaste of the even more lopsided Battle of Omdurman in 1898, as we shall see. These were signal battles nonetheless, especially Toski, fought on 3 August 1889, and Kitchener was involved closely in both of them. At Toski under the command of Grenfell – whose own conduct was rewarded with immediate promotion to major general – Kitchener led the cavalry, was mentioned glowingly in despatches, and afterwards was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Altogether, his rise within the British military now had become inevitable.

Accordingly, shortly thereafter at the beginning of 1890, Baring appointed Kitchener inspector general of the Egyptian police.⁶⁷ Viewed initially by Kitchener as potentially a career-stalling move, he protested to Baring who replied with the un-disguised scorn that had made his nickname of ‘Over-Baring’ apt: ‘My dear Colonel, if you do not accept posts that are offered you, you may have no career!’⁶⁸ Rather than being a drag on Kitchener's upward trajectory, however, the post proved instead to smooth his rise to the position he now coveted more than any other: Sirdar of the Egyptian army. And after a successful year of directing the Egyptian police, on 13 April 1892 such an appointment came to pass, the decision being made by none other than the Duke of Cambridge, 21 years after having reprimanded the young Kitchener for his brief service in the French army in their memorable interview of 1871 and still Commander in Chief of the British Army: ‘I am personally very much pleased’, he wrote to the equally well-disposed Prime Minister, Salisbury, ‘that the choice should fall on Colonel Kitchener, whom I always considered a very good man for the place’.⁶⁹ Promoted to the local rank of Major General on the same day as Sirdar, Kitchener was just 41 years old. Among other things, he was now in a position to eventually avenge Gordon's defeat, the preparation for which would be his main task for the rest of the decade and lead to the crowning field operation of his career.