5

Omdurman, Fashoda, and Khartoum, 1898–9

The Anglo-Egyptian victory at Atbara complete, Kitchener spent the summer of 1898 in both Cairo and at the front preparing for the impending march on the Khalifa's army, now holding fast at Omdurman. The chief question debated by the Sirdar and his subordinate generals and staff during those weeks was whether or not Abdullahi would keep his men behind the protective mud walls of the city in anticipation of the advance of the Anglo-Egyptians, or lead them out to wage an open-field battle. Reginald Wingate, based on earlier precedent as well as on information gleaned from his intelligence-gathering network, was sure that a fight on the open plain would be the Khalifa's choice.¹ To that end, a convinced Kitchener ordered additional men and equipment including gunboats be brought up on the almost-finished railway, which had reached Atbara by the beginning of July. By then the enlarged Anglo-Egyptian army encampment was a buzzing hive of activity. Everyone was readying for what was assumed would be the final act in the 15-year British desert drama that had commenced with Colonel Hicks in 1883 and would reach its climax with Kitchener by the end of the year.

Later, in July, and having returned from four restful weeks spent in Cairo, Kitchener led his powerfully reinforced army unopposed to encamp at Wadi Hamed, located 60 miles north of Omdurman. Under Kitchener's command now were some 25,000 men, comprised of about 17,000 Egyptians and Sudanese, and around 8,000 British regulars. The ordnance in support of these troops was substantial: ten well-armed gunboats, along with some 60 field pieces, including 20 maxim guns – the signature weapon of the age about which Hilaire Belloc would write sardonically that year in recognition of European technical superiority in the age of empire: ‘Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not’.² In addition, covering the Sirdar's flanks, was a force of about 2,500 Arab irregulars on one side, and the Egyptian Camel Corps on the other. All told, Kitchener's desert army was a formidable force. Altogether, the assembled army, its stentorian commander, and the prospect of a comprehensive and highly symbolic victory lent the advance on Omdurman a certain celebrity made more pronounced by the continuing presence of journalists. Lamentably, as far as Kitchener was concerned, one such journalist – in the person of the young subaltern Winston Churchill – was exactly the wrong kind of scribe to be on the campaign (G.A. Henty, the novelist of imperial adventure, on the other hand, was also there and was manifestly the right kind, in Kitchener's estimation) and he made no compunction about his dislike of both him and his meddling society mother Jenny, Lady Randolph Churchill, who had done much to ensure her son's unwelcome presence in Sudan.³

Churchill, as he himself of course hoped, was fast making a name for himself on campaign. In the spring of 1898 he had published his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, chronicling the eponymous Indian North-West Frontier campaign in which, in truth, he had played a very minor role.⁴ In Kitchener's view, therefore, Churchill was little more than a glory-hound who had used every possible political connection – including that with Prime Minister Salisbury, who had read the book – to enable a posting of ‘convenience’ to Sudan.⁵ Thoroughly indisposed towards Churchill from the beginning, Kitchener was pestered unremittingly by Lady Randolph and other sympathizers to find a post for the young aspirant, and finally in exasperation he approved his attachment to a cavalry regiment, the 21st Lancers. But on no account did Kitchener actually want to meet him. Churchill duly arrived in Cairo at the beginning of August, cavalry commission in hand, to go with the one he had also with the Morning Post to file letters describing the campaign, ‘as opportunity served’.⁶ By the end of the month Churchill was encamped at Wadi Hamed, writing to his mother that shortly ‘there will be a general action, perhaps a very severe one’. As always, supremely confident in his own destiny, Churchill assured her that he would come out of it all right and that ‘nothing … would make me turn back now’.⁷

Churchill certainly was right about timing. The impending great battle indeed was imminent. The Nile was in full flood meaning that the array of gunboats and steam transports could be used to their maximum advantage by Kitchener. Accordingly, on the morning of 26 August the army started its final march to confront the Khalifa. The sight, as well-described later by Churchill, was nothing less than breathtaking: a vast array of khaki-clad, topi-wearing men, accompanied by heavy and cumbersome equipment and bawling, snorting animals moving along the western bank of the Nile. ‘In the clear air the amazing detail of the picture was striking’, he wrote, almost in awe. ‘There were six brigades of infantry, composed of twenty-four battalions; yet every battalion showed that it was made up of tiny figures, all perfectly defined on the plain’.⁸ Kitchener rode at the head of this massive agglomeration, sitting astride his white Arab charger, like a vision of Alexander himself. The front stretched almost three miles wide, the troops in ready formation in case they were called upon to fight immediately. Wingate had reported that a Dervish force of at least 50,000 men, potentially more, lay in wait at Omdurman; but they might be expected to move at any minute out of the mud-walled fortress to advance onto the open Kerreri Plain just a few miles north of the city. In command under Kitchener were the trusted Brigadier General William Gatacre, of the British Division, and his counterpart commanding the Egyptians, Major General Archibald Hunter. Meanwhile, the 15-boat flotilla continued to churn through the high-water of the Nile. All was in readiness. Kitchener himself was poised for action, ‘very cheery and in great fettle’, as his brother Walter, in charge of the expedition's 2,500 camels, described him.⁹

On the morning of 1 September the entire force – ‘the grand army of the Nile’, as Churchill called it – was encamped at El Egeiga, a village on the west bank of the river.¹⁰ A zariba was hurriedly constructed, the expectation being that they were at the place from which battle would most probably be joined. From a nearby 300-foot-high elevated viewpoint called Jebel Surgham Kitchener looked out across the Kerreri Plain to Omdurman in the middle distance, about three miles away, its cityscape punctuated only by the gleaming 85-foot-high tower of the Mahdi's tomb. Beyond that a little further southeast and across the Nile, lay the still-ruined city of Khartoum. On the plain in the foreground could be seen a gigantic, dark moving mass. The Ansar in their thousands had indeed left their Omdurman base and were advancing toward Kitchener's position. When, just before noon, an official report was brought to him about the advance by none other than Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill, Kitchener – without betraying whether or not he recognized the messenger (he did) – ruminated for a few minutes, and then said: ‘How long do you think I've got?’ Churchill replied that he figured about an hour or so.¹¹ Kitchener took in the estimate calmly and then dismissed him. Shortly thereafter he ordered the Anglo-Egyptian brigades to advance about 500 yards beyond the zariba in anticipation of impending action. Having done so they waited, wilting in the intense 40-degrees Celsius heat of the mid-afternoon desert sun. The tension of the atmosphere was soon broken, but not by rifle-fire; rather it came from the throaty, piercing call of Allahu akbar (‘God is great’) emanating from the mouths of more than 50,000 Islamic warriors. The war cry was strange and chilling to most of the (new) British troops, but when it ended the desert, apart from the sound of Kitchener's Arab irregulars successfully putting down intermittent resistance on the east side of the Nile, lapsed again into silence. For the time being, the enigmatic Ansar had ceased their advance and remained unmoving in position. In the early-afternoon, British artillery fire commenced and shells began to rain down upon Omdurman, especially upon the dome of the Mahdi's tomb, inflicting serious (and symbolic) damage to the city.¹² A cataclysmic fight was coming, but it would not come that day, however. Kitchener instructed that the gunboats should keep their searchlights on as evening fell, sweeping brightly across the plain and as far as the Dervish lines. Both sides then settled into a long and fitful evening and night.

The next morning, 2 September 1898, the bugles and fife & drums of reveille awakened the Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese camp at 4 o'clock. Dawn was still an hour away. The nighttime rain – August and September is the wettest time of the year in Sudan – had only just ceased so the troops were soaked through, as well as hungry and jumpily nervous. The British ate their usual breakfast of porridge and bully-beef rations, cleaned and oiled their weapons – principally the Lee-Metford bold action magazine rifle (the Egyptians and Sudanese carried the lesser-quality Martini-Henry single shot lever action rifle) – and waited for the word. Based on past practice the expectation was that a Dervish attack would come about the same time as sunrise, which was expected around 5 o'clock.

By 5:30, however, no movement amongst the Khalifa's forces could be detected. Kitchener decided that he could wait no longer and ordered that the lines should begin to form up in front of the semi-circular zariba. In the near distance, less than two miles away, the Ansar were also forming up along a broad front spread across four to five miles of desert. Kitchener's men were outnumbered over 2:1, but far exceeded their enemy in firepower. The Ansar were mainly foot soldiers armed with sword and spear. Some had Remington rifles, and a handful of field artillery pieces (mainly captured at Khartoum in 1885, and before that in 1883 at Shaykan) bolstered the Khalifa's killing power. He also had some 2,000 cavalry. In the main, however, the only hope for success lay in an onrush of thousands of enraged Ansar whose determination and sense of ordained fanaticism – the Khalifa claimed that in a vision both the Mahdi and the Prophet Mohammad had assured him of victory and all who died would be ushered straightway into paradise – would prove overwhelming to the well-ordered and well-armed British, Egyptian, and Sudanese forces.¹³

Shortly after 6:30 a.m. with the sun well-up and fully bathing the Kerreri Plain in bright morning light, the first of the Ansar crested the low hill of Jebel Surgham to the southwest of the zariba. Churchill – always, it seems, in the optimal spot – reported breathlessly that indeed they were on the move, and what a sight it was! ‘All the pride and might of the Dervish Empire’, he wrote later in admiration, ‘were massed on this last great day of its existence’.¹⁴ The onrush was underway, which is exactly what Kitchener had expected would happen. As about 8,000 Ansar under the command of one of the Khalifa's generals, Osman Azraq, began their automaton-like approach in wave after wave, giving voice to their war cry of La Ilaha illa Ilah wa Mohammad rasul Allah (‘There is one God and Mohammad is the messenger of God’), Kitchener ordered his main (32nd) field battery to open up at a range of about 2,700 yards. The effect on the enemy was immediate and devastating. As the incoming shells burst metal tore with ease through their flimsy patchwork jibbah and the Ansar began to fall in droves. In a foretaste of mechanized modern warfare (seen first during the US Civil War of some 35 years earlier) the bravely advancing Ansar, fighting in medieval formation, were cut down en masse in great numbers and in horrific style.

As the sky rained hot metal for what would be almost an hour on the centre of the Khalifa's army, his divisions to the north (fighting under the Green Standard), to the south (under the White Standard, from which Azraq had detached his troops), and the rear (under the Black Standard) began to move more deliberately into position. Together, these three divisions comprised some 40,000 men, about 17,000 of which were under the Khalifa's own Black Standard and were purposely being held in reserve. As the British barrage continued dead and mangled bodies lay everywhere, covering the battlefield in a shockingly bloody palimpsest of human detritus. Artillery, the gunboats, the Maxim gun, the Lee-Metford rifle – ‘pound, pound, pound’, remembered one of Kitchener's officers, all had produced an enormous butcher's bill of dead Ansar.¹⁵ By 7:30 a.m., barely an hour into the battle and even with the assistance of Kitchener's old enemy Osman Digna, Azraq's onrush had petered out in the face of the endless withering fire emanating from behind the trenches and the Mimosa hedge that demarcated the British zariba. The courage of the enemy in facing down this remorseless fusillade was clear to ordinary British soldiers, with one of them, Sergeant Edward Fraley, for example, remembering it this way: ‘The Dervishes are very brave – to stick it like they did was wonderful …. First one dropped, then the fellow carrying the flag, another picked it up and still came on, when the two left almost dropped together, they marched straight to death right enough’.¹⁶ Their blind fortitude stands as a rebuke, as it were, of the Khalifa's old-style, head-on strategy and its clear lack of any understanding of the killing power of modern weaponry. But of course, there would be many in the early part of the twentieth century, especially of course during World War I, who likewise could not comprehend what to do in the face of the immutable stopping power of mechanized weapons. In the event, having never gotten closer to the British lines than about 300 yards, at least 2,000 Ansar lay dead in the dust, with thousands more wounded. Azraq himself mounted a final charge, a forlorn hope, and was duly annihilated by a wall of British metal. The face of ultra-modern warfare had had its baptism here on the Kerreri Plain, a terrible introduction to what would soon define a whole generation in Britain after 20,000 of the nation's soldiers were killed in a not dissimilar fashion just 18 years later on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916.

At just the moment that Azraq met his grisly end, Kitchener was observing the slaughter from a position behind the trusted Cameron Highlanders as they fired pell-mell onto the enemy from the safety of the zariba. Anglo-Egyptian casualties over that first hour of the battle totalled fewer than a hundred and the enormous disproportion in the numbers of killed and wounded boded exceedingly well that the day would soon belong to the Sirdar. Kitchener, impassive and observant throughout the early morning's action, ‘sat stolidly upon his horse’, wrote a junior officer later, ‘and at this period of the day no expression upon his face gave evidence of any emotion. The only evidence of what he must really have felt was in the many short questions which he shot incessantly at the various members of his staff’.¹⁷ Around 8 o'clock he called for an end to the firing: ‘Cease fire …’, he called out, ‘What a dreadful waste of ammunition!’¹⁸ The cacophony duly died away briefly, at least within Kitchener's direct line of sight. But to the right in the near distance, 250 feet up in the Kerreri hills, the next significant chapter in the day's battle was forming. The Anglo-Egyptian cavalry and the Camel Corps under the command of Lieutenant Colonel R.G. Broadwood were massed there and looking down upon about 15,000 Ansar as they marshalled under the Green Standard of Osman Din. For them, the possibility of being cut off from the safety of the zariba was real. What to do?

Broadwood's options for action were limited. If he were to fall back on the zariba, as shortly Kitchener would instruct him to do, he might easily bring with him the full brunt of Din's men in hot pursuit.¹⁹ Having made rather short work of the first frontal Dervish attack on their entrenched position the British may have been equal to such a challenge, but the prospect of 15,000 Ansar smashing into the centre-north face of the zariba – believed to be the weakest part of the redoubt since it was being held by the Egyptians and Sudanese only – was to Broadwood a risk not worth taking. Instead, he decided to try and draw Din's force away from the zariba in a fighting retreat that would take both him and them farther into the hills. In part, he was successful. The trouble with the plan, however, was that the ponderously slow Camel Corps was in no position to escape the onrush of the swiftly pursuing Ansar. But in a frantic attempt to reach the zariba it had begun a race that it had no chance of winning. The Camel Corps galloped hard, but the Ansar on horseback galloped faster. The moment it were to be over-taken a fearful massacre would surely ensue, of this the now helpless Broadwood was in no doubt. Recognizing early the perilous situation in which the Camel Corps now found itself, Kitchener had instructed the gunboats to move down the Nile so as to bring them into optimal position to rain shells down upon the heads of the fast moving Ansar.²⁰ Major Monkey Gordon, the Sirdar's long-time trusted protégé, was in command of the gunboat Melik and he was first on the scene, opening up on the unsuspecting Dervishes with a devastating combination of Maxims, various cannon, and Nordenfelt guns, a multiple barrel machine gun of uniquely destructive power. The attacking Ansar staggered immediately under the onslaught, and when another gunboat (the Abu Klea) likewise moved into position and began to pour down additional hot fire they broke and retreated, leaving the way clear for the Camel Corps to gain the zariba after having suffered few casualties and avoiding sure catastrophe. Shortly thereafter, a greatly relieved Broadwood – assisted by, among others, Captain Douglas Haig, then at the outset of a military career that would of course culminate in World War I – arrived too with the cavalry.²¹

The excitement of the Camel Corps’ near escape had temporarily drawn Kitchener's attention away from what now was expected to be the attack of the Khalifa and his Black Standard troops, in a kind of last-ditch effort reminiscent of a Napoleonic battle in which the French Imperial Guard would be thrown into action to save (or seal) the day. At 8:30, almost two hours into the battle, Kitchener ordered a charge by the 21st Lancers in an attempt to cut off any possibility of the Khalifa's troops angling in retreat towards Omdurman, should the enemy decide to take this moment to re-group and fight another day.²² If any sole action of the battle spoke of old-style British imperial warfare, this charge (made famous by Churchill as one of its participants) was it. Indeed, the charge of the 21st Lancers would be the last of its kind in the history of British warfare. And even though the charge was immortalized by its enamoured chronicler Churchill, success did not come easily and had it failed might just have given enough hope to the faltering Ansar to rally and save themselves – and the Mahdist state – from what was looking now like their sure destruction.²³

In advance of the Lancers’ expected charge a couple of patrols were sent out to reconnoitre Jebel Surgham hill and to determine the status and movement of the Black Standard troops. Kitchener was duly informed that indeed a long line of Ansar could be seen on the move towards Omdurman, but the Black Standard itself signifying the location of the Khalifa was not apparent. To this intelligence, the Sirdar replied flatly: ‘advance and clear the left flank and use every effort to prevent the enemy re-entering Omdurman’.²⁴ Lieutenant Colonel Rowland Martin, in command of the 21st, took this instruction as a mandate to attack, which he did forthwith at a shallow hollow or khor to the left of Jebel Surgham. Lying in wait there was a force of about 2,500 Ansar, a far greater number than was thought by the British and certainly too many to risk a charge. But thinking that the number was considerably smaller (perhaps a thousand) Martin gave the order to attack and into the fray rode some 300 British horsemen. Slamming into the stationary and partially hidden Ansar at full gallop, the impact was immense and it staggered the enemy, sweeping them ‘head over heels into the khor’, wrote Churchill, in typical form overjoyed to be one of the 300 riders.²⁵ The momentum of the charging Lancers carried most of them right through the shattered Dervish line and at some 200 yards distant they dismounted, turned, and enfiladed the Dervishes with rifle fire. Those British cavalrymen who had not made it through the Dervish line – such as Churchill – were engaged immediately in savage hand to hand combat, the result of which would lead to the awarding of three Victoria Crosses.²⁶ Dramatic and violent though it was, the whole action was brief, the charge and ensuing melee lasting mere minutes.

In response to the Lancers’ successful charge, Kitchener believed a comprehensive victory now was close at hand. At 9:15, therefore, he set off for Jebel Surgham at the head of a substantial force of five brigades, the most important of which was Hector MacDonald's, bringing up the rear. Kitchener trusted MacDonald implicitly, believing that if the Green Standard troops still in the Kerreri hills were to attack from behind MacDonald would be able to fend them off. Indeed, they would attack in just that manner in due course, but more menacing still was the presence of the Black Standard troops, which the desperate Khalifa now chose to unleash. A furious firefight ensued, second only in intensity to the opening Dervish attack of the day. Ultimately, MacDonald's brigade needed to be reinforced in order to withstand it and the oncoming Dervishes got to within 300 yards of the brigade's lines before being beaten off. The Black Standard itself was seen fluttering in the wind and surrounded by a mound of bloodied bodies, was captured. But not before the Khalifa had fled rather ignominiously on a donkey towards the relative safety of Omdurman amidst an artillery bombardment ordered by Wingate when he spotted the Dervish leader stealing away from the battlefield.²⁷ Thus by about 11:30 a.m., not quite four hours after Asraq's initial assault on the British zariba, the battle of Omdurman was well and truly over and won. Relieved, satisfied, and triumphant, but ever phlegmatic, Kitchener turned to his gathered officers and remarked that the enemy had been given ‘a good dusting’.²⁸ And with that cryptic comment the Sirdar put away his field glasses, signalled for a general advance to begin shortly, and then crossed the last few miles to the gates of the stricken city of Omdurman.

Kitchener's understatement describing the battle belied the fearful slaughter of that blood-soaked morning. All told, around 10,000 Dervishes had been killed with a further 12,000 wounded and some 5,000 taken prisoner. Fully half the Khalifa's army were casualties of battle that September day. In stark contrast, Kitchener's army had suffered a mere scratch, as it were: 48 dead and 382 wounded.²⁹ There was no mistaking the comprehensive nature of the victory, the completely disproportionate casualty numbers lending the Battle of Omdurman an air not of a fair and honourable fight, but rather of an imperial bully having run rampant over a completely outclassed opponent. ‘It was not a battle, but an execution’. So wrote the embedded, and otherwise usually admiring, journalist G.W. Steevens.³⁰ More of this will be said later, but of course, the same charge of an unfair fight could be (and had been) made against the Mahdi's descent upon Khartoum when in his final attack against General Gordon in January 1885 some 10,000 defenders and inhabitants of the city – as we have seen, one-quarter of its long besieged and starved population – were without mercy put to the sword by a force of some 50,000 Ansar.³¹ However calculated, Kitchener's victory that September day signified the imminent end of a 15-year theocratically retrograde regime in Sudan. As Fergus Nicoll points out in his probing book on the period, few people could rightly lament the passing of the Mahdi-Khalifa governing axis, even if the human cost of ending it was high.³²

Kitchener, in advance of his culminating entry into Omdurman and after the exertions of the morning, rested briefly. Then at 2:00 p.m., he mounted his white horse and riding alongside Major John G. Maxwell and his brigade cantered an hour later into what was a supremely cowed city. The Khalifa's capital was a shambles of destroyed mud buildings and houses. Human and animal corpses lay everywhere, the stench almost unbearable in the hot afternoon sun, which caused some of the British troops to vomit.³³ No resistance to the arriving British was given apart from the occasional pocket of loyal Ansar determined to fight on in what was manifestly a lost cause. A lone elderly emir approached Kitchener and after being told that the surviving women and children of the city would not be massacred – as they would have been in internecine jihadist warfare – he presented the Sirdar with the key to the city. Kitchener was then roundly cheered by the relieved populace. On rode the triumphant British along the sole unobstructed avenue in Omdurman, which cut through the abundant destruction and squalor all around, towards the Khalifa's citadel located at its centre. Enclosed within its 14-foot high mud walls was what had served as the headquarters of Mahdist rule for the preceding 13 years. The armoury and treasury; the prison; the mosque; the battered Mahdi's tomb, where the Khalifa had come after earlier fleeing the battlefield and from which he had not long since departed once hearing that Kitchener had entered the city; the palace. The prize, such as it was, had been won, but the Khalifa himself had escaped and Kitchener soon tasked Lieutenant Colonel Broadwood with tracking him down in what would prove to be a vain attempt at his capture.

In the meantime, Kitchener and his retinue approached the Mahdi's tomb amidst the dangerous incongruity of friendly shellfire ordered in the belief that the Khalifa might still be present. Having spied the Khalifa's standard waving near the tomb (as he was escaping) the gunners of the 32nd Field Battery opened up as instructed and in the process inadvertently killed a newspaper correspondent (Hubert Howard of The Times), and very nearly hit Kitchener himself. Unperturbed in the face of the continuing fire, however, Kitchener remarked flatly that ‘I don't see how we can stop it, and it would be a pity to lose our ticket when the day is won. I am afraid we must give them the honour’.³⁴ He then proceeded on to the prison, where about 30 Europeans remained languishing in what Churchill described as a ‘foul and gloomy den’.³⁵ Just a few years earlier in 1895, one of the then-prisoners, Rudolf von Slatin, had escaped. An Austrian, Slatin had served as a provincial governor in Sudan under Gordon until taken prisoner by the Mahdi. At the time of the fall of Khartoum he had identified Gordon's decapitated head in the Mahdi's camp and as a colleague of the slain governor general was subsequently jailed for a decade in Omdurman.³⁶ After breaking out of prison with Wingate's help early in 1895, as noted earlier, Slatin had made it safely to Aswan and then eventually was seconded to service in the Egyptian army for the re-conquest.³⁷ Now, at the moment of supreme vindication, he was determined to capture the Khalifa in repayment for his brutal ten-year incarceration, but ultimately would be disappointed in the event. At the prison, Kitchener freed the captives, which included some Roman Catholic nuns – ‘Out you go!’ – before eventually composing and dispatching telegrams to London telling of the nature and success of the battle. Exhausted after a supremely momentous day, the victorious Sirdar then retired for the night.³⁸

The next day, 3 September, Kitchener inspected the heavily damaged tomb of the Mahdi and decided that to prevent it from becoming a place of future fanatical pilgrimage it should be razed to the ground. The job would be given to Monkey Gordon, who happily obliged a few days later. Before that, Kitchener had had the bones of the dead Mahdi disinterred and in a controversial move that was seen by some – including Queen Victoria – as both dishonourable and distasteful, had them cast into the Nile. Later, after writing to Kitchener that what had been done with the Mahdi's remains was suggestive of the ‘Middle Ages’, the Queen reminded him that ‘the graves of our people have been respected and those of our foes should, in her opinion, also be’.³⁹ Amazingly, the Mahdi's skull was retained briefly by Kitchener for possible use as an inkpot, but then he felt better of it and eventually had it buried secretly in a Muslim cemetery at Wadi Halfa. The jocular consideration of the Mahdi's skull and the callous disposal of his remains rightly did Kitchener no credit, either then or later. Indeed, in Churchill's private letters of the time he was scathing in his view of Kitchener's actions in this regard, although as we have seen earlier, he had his own agenda when it came to criticizing the Sirdar.⁴⁰ A short while later, in the first edition of The River War, Churchill's chronicle of the campaign which came out in 1899, he continued to criticize Kitchener, accusing him of ‘vandalism’ in razing the Mahdi's tomb. Doing so had been nothing less than a ‘wicked act’ in Churchill's estimation, along with dumping the Mahdi's bones in the Nile. Moreover, he also accused Kitchener of treating the Dervish wounded abominably and of allowing the shooting of prisoners, a charge, however, which was untrue.⁴¹ For his part, Cromer expressed to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, that he was sure that toppling the tomb was ‘necessary’ and ‘justifiable’.⁴² Still, Salisbury thought that the way in which the Mahdi's bones were dealt with was questionable at best, and if they had simply been re-buried immediately in a Muslim cemetery, ‘no one would have said a word’.⁴³ For Kitchener, his actions after the taking of Omdurman certainly removed some of the shine from the victory and did nothing except reinforce his public reputation as a harsh and unbending military man, something that was played up in the press and periodicals, especially by Ernest Bennett in the Contemporary Review.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, Kitchener insisted to Cromer that his actions were only ‘taken after due deliberation, and prompted solely by political considerations’.⁴⁵ Such a position certainly was explanation enough for both the Egyptian and British governments, the latter of which would honour him in the highest manner, as we shall see.

Immediately, however, it was honouring the memory of the slain General Gordon that was of utmost importance to Kitchener and this he did at Khartoum on 4 September. Appropriately, for the Christian service presided over by an ecumenical group of army chaplains, the 4th was a Sunday. That morning, two gunboats were loaded with hundreds of men representing all the various corps and regiments of the Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese force, and ferried the short distance across the Nile from Omdurman to Khartoum. There they disembarked directly in front of the ruins of the Governor's Palace where Gordon had held out against the Mahdi and his Ansar before finally succumbing to their terrifying onslaught on 26 January 1885. Now, almost 14 years later, and in numbers Gordon could only have dreamed of as he waited in vain for the promised relief, the troops assembled in front of the crumbling wall of the palace near the steps where it was thought he had been speared to death before his body too – like his nemesis, the Mahdi – had been severed from its head and thrown into the Nile.

The memorial service, which Kitchener had drawn up himself, was a set-piece of British imperial memorialization. Flags were unfurled, first the Union Jack and then that of Egypt. Bands played ‘God Save the Queen’ and the ‘Dead March’ from Handel's oratorio, Saul. Then came ‘huzzahs’, gun salutes with live ammunition, Bible readings, the mournful braying of the bagpipes, the hymn, ‘Abide with Me’ – believed to have been Gordon's favourite – and finally, a stirring benediction. By this culminating point in the service all present, it seems, were in tears, including the usually emotionless Kitchener. Awash in memories of the planning, hard work, battles fought, and men killed that had led to this moment, Kitchener's trademark impassivity could not be maintained and tears rolled down his sunburned cheeks.⁴⁶ Finding himself too emotionally distraught to dismiss the troops he motioned for it to be done by Major General Hunter. Altogether, the scene reads cathartically for all involved, particularly Kitchener. And when it was over he and the assembled men wandered round the ruined palace taking in the atmosphere and one supposes trying to imagine the nature of Gordon's predicament in the course of his final days before the Mahdi's attack. For the only time in his military career, it would seem, Kitchener was completely at peace, one of his junior officers remembering the scene in the following way: ‘The sternness and the harshness had dropped from him for the moment, and he was gentle as a woman …. His manner had become easy and unconstrained. He was very happy’.⁴⁷ If a later writer chose to describe Kitchener as always looking ‘faintly absurd’ owing to his humourless visage and overlarge moustache, there was nothing remotely absurd about either him or the service on the banks of the Nile that morning.⁴⁸ The Queen noted in her diary that she had received from Kitchener ‘a most touching account, and most dramatic, of his entry into Khartoum and of a memorial service held to the memory of poor Gordon on the spot where he was killed! Surely he is avenged!’⁴⁹ And in holding this view the aged Queen, the victorious Sirdar, and the triumphant British people on that memorial day in Khartoum were of one accord.

As moved emotionally by the events of 4 September as he had been, Kitchener, however, had very little time to savour their afterglow because almost immediately following the Gordon memorial service he was required to embark on a diplomatic exercise further up the Nile. The mission would prove fraught with danger and the potential for a major rupture in Anglo-French relations was close at hand. As it so happened, throughout the latter stages of the Sudan campaign, Kitchener had carried with him sealed orders from Prime Minister Salisbury to be opened only after Khartoum had been re-taken. Upon duly reading them in the few days following the victory at Omdurman he discovered that they ordered him to lead an expedition up the Nile from Khartoum deep into equatorial Sudan. Over a decade's worth of Anglo-French diplomatic jockeying over the Nile Valley was just then reaching a climax, and Kitchener was the chosen conduit to prevent an attempt by France to claim the Nile basin in the service of its growing West African empire. That claim had come in the form of a French expedition under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, a 34-year-old career military officer who had participated in the conquest of Senegal by France in 1889 and since then had been engaged principally in West African exploration. Recently, he had led a 150-man French force east to the upper-Nile, and since July had been encamped at the remote village of Fashoda, where they had re-built the fort and run the French tri-colour up the flagpole.

The ‘Fashoda Incident’, as this diplomatic moment in late-nineteenth century Anglo-French relations came to be called, had its genesis in the growth of parallel national interests in the Nile Valley. These interests had their roots in the anti-slavery measures of the 1870s, which then continued through the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the French desire to expand into West Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, and subsequent British and French moves in East-Central and West Africa, respectively. By 1898, all told, Britain and France found themselves on a collision course in Africa and the point at which they came together would turn out to be the squalid village of Fashoda, located some 400 miles south of Khartoum, about as remote an African location as can be imagined, both then and now. Barely more than a run-down anti-slaving fort, but situated almost exactly at the geographic intersection of the British ‘Cape to Cairo’ imperial dream and its French analogue, ‘Dakar to Djibouti’, Fashoda bore the full weight of competing Anglo-French imperial aspirations in the climactic phase of the partition of Africa.⁵⁰

In order to ward off this impending dispute the Salisbury government's intention for Kitchener was to complete the consolidation of Britain's position in the Nile Valley that the occupation of Egypt and the recent victory at Omdurman portended. Fashoda, Salisbury believed, was the all-important coda that would seal Britain's regional paramountcy by right of conquest; and ‘of this the Union Jack would be the symbol’.⁵¹ (A secondary prong of the strategy was to keep at bay the Abyssinians should they threaten to move westward. Accordingly, Major General Hunter was assigned that task, which he carried out successfully at the same time along the Blue Nile.) On the morning of 10 September therefore, barely a week after his victory at Omdurman, Kitchener, accompanied by Wingate, a few other officers, and about 1,500 men steamed out of Khartoum in a small flotilla of five boats. By this point in time they had been apprised that Fashoda was to be their destination and that the small number of French and Senegalese troops there were under the command of Marchand. Upriver they went, beyond contact with London as the telegraph wires were down, to the lip of the Sudd, the vast swamp that extends far in to the southern regions of Sudan. In advance of landing at Fashoda, Kitchener drafted a letter announcing his imminent arrival. In practiced French, he praised Marchand for the achievement of marching his expedition (it had taken 14 months) to the Nile from West Africa, told him about his fresh victory over the Khalifa at Omdurman, and about how he would be coming as an emissary of the Khedive in order to re-affirm Egypt's authority over Sudan and the Nile Valley. Any mention of Britain's role, per se, in these matters was purposely omitted so as to emphasize the Egyptian nature of the exercise.

Two days later on 19 September, Kitchener's small flotilla approached Fashoda. Standing on the upper deck of the steamer Dal, the Sirdar could see the French flag flying above the makeshift government buildings on the riverbank. Affronted by the fluttering tri-colour's presence, about which he would shortly lodge an official protest, Kitchener then noticed coming towards his gunboat a small craft. Manned by a detachment of smartly red-uniformed Senegalese, the boat flew two French flags, a small one in the bow and a substantially larger one in the stern. Presently handed a letter from Marchand by one of the Senegalese – ‘I hear with the greatest pleasure of … the final death of Mahdism in the Nile valley’ – Kitchener proceeded to lead his flotilla into dock where he was met by his French counterpart, sporting smart dress whites for the occasion.⁵² Accompanied by a junior officer, Marchand then came on board the Dal and for the next two hours a delicate negotiation took place in which the potential of a local (diplomatic) conflict escalating into a wider Anglo-French military one lay in the balance. The whole undertaking was highly gentlemanly in the Victorian manner, with occasional bows and bon mots. But it was backed up nonetheless on the British side by the proximate presence of three gunboats and 1,500 battle-hardened men as opposed to Marchand's seven French officers and perhaps as many as 200 lightly-armed Senegalese.

As discussed by Marchand and Kitchener, the essential French diplomatic position since the fall of Khartoum in 1885 was that Sudan had been made res nullius; that is, territory belonging to no one.⁵³ Certainly, the French had never recognized any form of British sovereignty over the country, and only grudgingly that of Egypt itself. On legal grounds the French stood strong, but the realpolitik of the situation was what really mattered and in that world Britain and its Egyptian client were paramount. In this light, therefore, Kitchener insisted that the Anglo-Egyptian position was a sound one in international law and that it trumped that of the French. Accordingly, he maintained, Marchand should respect it without reservation. To that end, Kitchener said that he was willing to supply Marchand and his party with a gunboat to take them down the Nile to Egypt and with that all the fuss over Fashoda would come to an end. Unsurprisingly, the Frenchman refused, however, suggesting provocatively that only the use of force by Kitchener would budge him from the ‘glob of mud’ that he claimed belonged to France.⁵⁴ At this point in their talks the situation understandably became extremely sticky as the prospect of a devolution into violence had become clear.

Kitchener, without question, was no natural diplomat. But his French language skills were good, and after all he was dealing soldier to soldier. Given his recent exertions at Omdurman he also did not want to unleash the dogs of war if doing so was avoidable, especially against the ultimately formidable French. Altogether, Kitchener desired a compromise and indeed would find one by suggesting that the Egyptian flag (not the British one) be raised in accordance with his orders, and possession of the area taken in lockstep with the French. Once these local actions had been undertaken jointly, he suggested that the matter should then be turned over to London and Paris for a final diplomatic determination. After a tension-filled wait for Marchand's response, Kitchener's halting diplomacy seemed to have won the perfect compromise. While showing his Gallic pride and admitting to a ‘terrible desire’ to refuse the offer and let events run their natural (and therefore probably martial) course, Marchand nonetheless agreed with the British proposal. Kitchener, dressed in his Egyptian uniform to further appease the terminal anti-British sensitivities of the French, the agreement was struck and the Egyptian flag was duly hoisted accompanied by a 21-gun salute. Kitchener then at last came ashore to drink champagne at Fashoda's Fort St-Louis. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the politeness and courtesy of the French officers’, remarked Kitchener afterwards.⁵⁵ Having achieved all that was possible, the next day the flotilla (save for one boat, left behind as a slightly menacing guarantor) turned around and steamed northward for Khartoum. As a fillip, copies of some London newspapers were left behind at Fashoda containing coverage of the breaking ‘Dreyfus Affair’ that would roil the French government for years to come, effectively removing its eye from any issues in far-away Sudan. In reference to the unfolding Dreyfus scandal Kitchener earlier had startled his French hosts by saying that in what had just taken place between Marchand and himself ‘the French government will not back you up’.⁵⁶ Isolated for months from the outside world, neither Marchand nor any of his men were aware of the scandalous catastrophe that the Dreyfus case was visiting upon French government and society, especially following the January 1898 publication of Emile Zola's ‘J'accuse’, in which he had charged the French Army and the War Ministry with committing perjury in their anti-semitic treatment of the scorned putative spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. In the event, Kitchener was right. Even then in Paris, French Foreign Minister Theophile Delcasse was part of a tottering government and a week later when he had been informed about the events at Fashoda, Delcasse stated with accurate ruefulness: ‘We have nothing but arguments and they have got troops’.⁵⁷

Throughout the early autumn the Fashoda ‘Crisis’, as the chancelleries had quickly come to style it, would rumble on in Paris and London. But its outcome was never really in doubt. Salisbury was supremely confident in the British position and simply waited for the French to quit blustering and face the inevitable outcome. Right of conquest made all of Sudan fall under British paramountcy, he maintained, and there was no way around that reality. Indeed, Marchand himself had rather simplified matters by peremptorily decamping from Fashoda five weeks after his meeting with Kitchener. After that, only the diplomatic niceties remained, which would be duly contained in the Anglo-French Declaration of March 1899. As Salisbury then happily told the Queen simply and in person: ‘it keeps the French entirely out of the Nile Valley’.⁵⁸ France thus excluded, the meaning of Fashoda for the British had now been clarified: their strategy had connected ineluctably the Mediterranean, the Nile and Suez, and India, and therefore, in London's view at least, the world had been made a much more secure place for British interests.⁵⁹

His work at Fashoda completed successfully, Kitchener and the flotilla returned to Khartoum five days later on 24 September, the downstream flow of the Nile speeding their progress. En route he was brought a telegram from the Sudanese capital sent by the Queen informing him that the re-conquest and its signal victory at Omdurman had merited him a peerage, which would soon be bestowed. Buoyed by such adulatory royal news, and by the receipt of a number of laudatory letters from others – ‘I had such good men under me that it would have been difficult to go wrong’ – he wrote to Lord Wolseley in response to his former colleague's congratulatory missive, Kitchener nevertheless was exhausted by the preceding many months of intense work.⁶⁰ A return to England for a rest therefore was both imminent and required. And by the end of October, after settling some last details in Khartoum, Kitchener very happily had arrived home.

In returning to England for a well-deserved rest Kitchener was to find that in fact he did not have much time to do so. A celebratory and tumultuous arrival at Dover on 27 October, where he was hailed as the conquering hero, foretold a similar reception when his special train pulled into Victoria Station later that same day. ‘Popular feeling’ for Kitchener, reported The Times, was as high as it had ever been.⁶¹ Here was Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman, restorer of Khartoum, avenger of Gordon, and even the diplomatic winner (as would be shortly confirmed) over France at Fashoda! Indeed, he really was the ‘Sudan machine’, as George Steevens had admiringly dubbed him in his book of the re-conquest that had just been published hurriedly.⁶²

Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of England's newest hero. Of course that included the prime minister, with whom he had already spent the weekend at Hatfield discussing his plans for the rebuilding of Khartoum and Sudan, post-re-conquest. Then it was on to Balmoral Castle in Scotland and an audience of the similarly enamoured Queen on 31 October, still relishing the previous year's Diamond Jubilee of her reign and now able to celebrate its appropriate encomium in the presence of Gordon's triumphant legatee. It is little wonder that she had insisted upon a peerage for Kitchener and that the honour came the next day when he was created ‘Baron Kitchener of Khartoum’ (which came with a substantial parliamentary grant of thanks in the amount of L30,000).

Back in London on 2 November and staying at the Belgrave Square townhouse of his enduring friend, Pandeli Ralli, the newly ennobled Lord Kitchener lent polish to the words of a speech he would give that evening at a celebratory dinner held in his honour by the Lord Mayor at Mansion House. Then it was off to Cambridge for an honourary degree. The whirl of serial feting was not exactly enjoyable for a man of Kitchener's retiring nature, but it did give him the opportunity to act on some features of his plan to re-generate Khartoum and Sudan; especially and in the first instance was his hope of establishing a college of higher education in the capital named in honour of Gordon. He went public with this idea in The Times on 30 November, accompanied by an appeal for L100,000, a significant sum (approximately L5-million in today's values).⁶³ The money flowed in quickly and Gordon Memorial College (the foundation of the University of Khartoum) would be launched shortly after Kitchener's return to Africa at the end of the year. His return there as governor general, about which he was voluble in his correspondence with a number of people, including a deeply sympathetic and encouraging Salisbury, was keenly anticipated.⁶⁴

Even though Kitchener had been away from Sudan for only two months prior to his return in December 1898 a considerable amount of work had been done already in Khartoum clearing up the rubble of the ruinous 14 years of Mahdist rule. Having left his brother Walter in charge of the city while he was England, Kitchener returned to the first stirrings of his plan for Khartoum's renewal along the lines of grid-like town planning and new government and public buildings, the initial centerpiece of which was to be Gordon College. Lord Cromer – newly bereaved, his wife had died in October but he was keen nonetheless to tour the battlefield at Omdurman – came for a visit shortly after Kitchener's return. They discussed plans for revivifying Sudan's civil governance as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium with Kitchener as governor general and Wingate as head of the army. Directly, on 4 January 1899, Cromer laid the cornerstone of the new college with much pomp and ceremony. Kitchener contributed to the festivities also, though in the sardonic view of a junior administrator named Harry Boyle, at least, just a bit too grandly in ‘helmet, khaki riding breeches, and coat with insignia and ribbons of the Bath across it’.⁶⁵

Two weeks later on 19 January the Anglo-Egyptian convention establishing the condominium was signed into law. As Cromer explained to Kitchener, he would ‘control the big questions’, while ‘detail’ would be left to Kitchener as governor general and therefore ‘managed locally’.⁶⁶ There is no surviving record of what Kitchener may have thought of this directive, but its likely effect was to confirm Cromer's usual patronizing impact on most of those with whom he worked. In any event, Kitchener got on with the job at hand, but as a civilian administrator, at least, Cromer thought Kitchener to be lacking in understanding and finesse. The charge was mostly groundless, however, and making it betrays more about Cromer's own difficulties in selling the condominium structure to a skeptical Khedive and a similarly ill-disposed Egyptian government than it does with anything Kitchener might have been doing to assist in the development of a devastated country. If anything, the real problem was the perennially stingy Egyptian treasury and the lengths to which Kitchener had to go in order to wheedle out of it the funds necessary for Sudanese reconstruction.

During the early weeks of his governor-generalship one of the most pressing questions with which Kitchener had to deal was the status and whereabouts of the escaped Khalifa. After hurriedly departing Omdurman, as noted above, and eluding initial attempts at capture afterwards, he had gone to ground and simply disappeared. In February, however, Wingate's intelligence operatives reported that the Khalifa now had emerged from hiding and was advancing on Khartoum.⁶⁷ In fact, nothing came of this particular report but the new Sirdar and former intelligence chief spent most of his time following up leads pertaining to the Khalifa and would, as we shall see, eventually preside over his death in battle.

As the months passed Kitchener, unsurprisingly, found the work of an administrator to be increasingly wearisome. In some ways, as a stickler for detail with a wont to economize to the last penny – he had, after all, managed well the Sudan campaign that all-told had cost about L2.3 million, an enormous sum – he was ideally suited for the job.⁶⁸ But the endless back and forth correspondence with Cromer, as well as with Eldon Gorst, the Khedive's officious – at least in Kitchener's view – new financial adviser – ‘the meanest little brute I ever met’, he remarked – left him yearning for the hard clarity of being on campaign. ‘I am very sick and low’, he had opined to Wingate in February, ‘so I will not bother you. I can quite see there is no confidence in my work’.⁶⁹

Throughout this period widespread famine was one of the main problems with which Kitchener was wrestling. It had first struck south of Khartoum during the early Mahdist years and then was exacerbated under the brutal rule of the Khalifa. To stem its remorseless impact Kitchener negotiated with local merchants and contractors to try and rebuild their broken crop growth and importation systems, but it was a thankless task for which, in his view, the authorities in Cairo had no nuanced understanding. Miserable local conditions, and the fact that with the elusive Khalifa still at large southern Sudan remained almost a war zone, precluded an effective economic and marketing strategy that would have alleviated some of the obvious suffering of the destitute and starving Sudanese. Altogether, by mid-1899, though sympathetic to the plight of the local populace, Kitchener was fed up with the situation, as well as with the constant carping of Cromer – all former good feeling having dissipated – and the similarly inclined Gorst. Cromer, by now in a not unexpected manner, had even chosen to lecture Kitchener face to face that as a ‘Christian ruler’ he needed to remember that the Sudanese were ‘human beings, not blocks of wood’.⁷⁰ In the event, an angry Kitchener went home to England that summer ready for a long break from both Cromer and Gorst, and declaring altogether that he had had ‘about enough of the Sudan’.⁷¹

Kitchener's anger did not last, however. That summer in England proved a balm to his frazzled mind and upon returning to Khartoum in the autumn he plunged anew into the interminable problems of governing the country. Kitchener was the first, as it turned out, of a series of British governors who would stretch all the way down to Sudanese independence in 1956. And beginning under him the Sudan Political Service developed its key governing role as it carved out a sterling reputation both at home and on the ground in Sudan as a thoroughly just and efficient body of district administrattive officers.⁷² But before any of these positive developments could take place Kitchener believed that all vestiges of the Khalifa's baleful influence in Sudan must be extinguished. The Khalifa's capture was therefore imperative as the scope for recidivist action by him and his remaining loyalist followers was great, and Kitchener enjoined Wingate to redouble his efforts to either capture him or defeat him in battle.⁷³

Accordingly, by late-November Wingate had been able to do exactly that, tracking the Khalifa to Umm Dibkayarat in the province of Kordofan and there, when capture was unsurprisingly resisted, defeating him in a very much smaller reprise of Omdurman.⁷⁴ The Khalifa died in the bloody encounter, his body discovered lying prominently amongst the corpses of the last of the thoroughly defeated Ansar. Unknown to Kitchener, just then he was about to be called away from Sudan to the war the British had undertaken recently in South Africa. The Khalifa's defeat and his ‘grand and fine’ death on 24 November – as the greatly impressed Queen put it in a letter to Kitchener –marked the true end of the Sudan campaign. His presence at Gordon's re-built Governor's Palace in Khartoum to hear the news of the Khalifa's demise therefore offered a poetic end to that, and as it turned out just a few days later, to his governor-generalship of Sudan altogether. If the South African War would come to mark in many respects the end of the old British Empire, its heightened prelude came in the overwhelming power of Britain's re-conquest of Sudan. In the exultation experienced in England at Kitchener's triumphant return home as the conquering hero in the autumn of 1898, and in his subsequent ennoblement as ‘Lord K of K’, one of the many news magazines covering the spectacle had enthused that he came overwhelmingly from ‘a fighting race’.⁷⁵ Never again, however, would fighting and winning come so easily for Kitchener and the British as it had just done in Sudan. The war in South Africa, for which he departed on 18 December 1899, would make sure of that.