Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  KHARTOUM

  Michael Asher is a graduate of the University of Leeds, and has served in both the Parachute Regiment and the SAS. He is the author of sixteen books, including works of travel, biography, military history, four novels and the best-selling The Real ‘Bravo Two Zero’. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has won awards for desert exploration from the Royal Geographical and Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He has also presented three documentaries for Channel 4.

  Michael Asher lived in the Sudan for ten years. A fluent speaker of both Arabic and Swahili, he now lives near Nairobi, Kenya, with his wife, Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, and his two children. Michael Asher currently runs small-group, self-contained treks by camel in the deserts of the Sudan. Access his website at www.lost-oasis.org

  Khartoum

  The Ultimate Imperial Adventure

  MICHAEL ASHER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  1

  Copyright © Michael Asher, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–91010–9

  To the memory of the brave soldiers,

  British, Sudanese, Egyptian and others, who fought and died in

  the Nile Campaigns, 1883–9

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 Part One

  2 Part Two

  3 Part Three

  4 Part Four

  5 Part Five

  6 Part Six

  7 Part Seven

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Section One

  1. Mohammad Ahmad, the Mahdi or ‘Expected Guide’

  2. Lieut. General William Hicks

  3. Khartoum in 1885

  4. The Khedive Tewfiq

  5. Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer)

  6. Suakin, the Sudan’s main Red Sea port

  7. Lieut. General Valentine Baker

  8. Lieut. General Sir Gerald Graham, VC

  9. Trinkitat Island, 30 January 1884

  10. Captain Arthur Wilson, RN, at the second battle of et-Teb

  11. The second battle of et-Teb, February 1884

  12. ‘Osman Digna, dressed Haddendowa style

  13. Tombs at et-Teb

  14. The battle of Tamaai, Eastern Sudan, 13 May 1884

  15. Burning ‘Osman Digna’s camp at Tamaai, 13 May 1884

  16. Lieut. General Lord Garnet Wolseley, 1884

  17. Major General Charles Gordon

  18. Major (later Field Marshal Lord) Herbert Kitchener

  19. Major General Sir Redvers Buller, VC

  20. Major General Sir Herbert Stewart

  21. The Desert Column under General Herbert Stewart

  Section Two

  22. The Desert Column waters at Jakdul Wells in the Bayuda desert

  23. The Desert Column marching towards Abu Klea

  24. Building a stone zariba above Abu Klea

  25. Lieut. Colonel Sir Charles Wilson of the Royal Engineers

  26. Lieut. Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards

  27. The melée at Abu Klea

  28. ‘The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead.’ Lieut. Colonel Burnaby lies mortally wounded on the field of Abu Klea

  29. Bird’s-eye view of the battle of Abu Klea

  30. The British square at Abu Kru

  31. Evacuating Herbert Stewart and other soldiers

  32. The death of Charles Gordon

  33. Charles Wilson’s gunboats arrive at Khartoum, 28 February 1884

  34. Rudolf von Slatin and Reginald Wingate

  35. The battle of Tushki, August 1889

  Section Three

  36. Major General Sir Herbert Kitchener

  37. The first action of the reconquest

  38. The battle of Firka, 7 June 1896, from the foot of Firka mountain

  39. The battle of Firka, advancing into the dervish camp

  40. The battle of ‘Atbara, 8 April 1898

  41. The emir Mahmud, captured at the battle of ‘Atbara

  42. The battle of Omdurman, 2 September 1898, the view from a British gunboat

  43. The battle of Omdurman

  44. The main dervish attack at Omdurman

  45. Lieut. Colonel Hector MacDonald

  46. The charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman

  47. The dervish dead around the Black Standard at Omdurman

  48. Kitchener enters Omdurman

  49. Scenes in Omdurman and Khartoum after the battle

  50. Raising the flag in Khartoum, 3 September 1898

  51. British soldiers visiting the ruins of Khartoum

  The illustrations are taken from the following sources:

  Illustrated London News: 3, 8–9, 11–13, 15–16, 22, 24–6, 31, 33, 36–7, 39, 42, 44–5, 47–9, 51

  Mary Evans Picture Library: 1–2, 4, 7, 10, 19, 32

  National Portrait Gallery: 5

  National Army Museum: 6, 14, 20–21, 23, 27–30, 34–5, 38, 40–41, 43, 46, 50

  AKG-Images: 17

  Bridgeman Art Library: 18

  List of Maps

  1. The Sudan and Egypt, 1883–98

  2. Northern Sudan, 1883–98

  3. The Fall of Khartoum, 26–28 January 1885

  4. Eastern Sudan

  5. Khartoum and Omdurman, 1898

  6. The Battle of Omdurman, 2 September 1898

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank my editor at Penguin, Eleo Gordon, for her patience in waiting, for fighting my corner, and especially for allowing me to change tack and embark on what turned out to be a great adventure for me. I would like to thank all Viking-Penguin staff for their dedication and professionalism.

  My thanks also go to my agent, Anthony Goff, of David H
igham Associates, and his assistant, Georgia Glover, for their tireless loyalty.

  I could not have completed the book without the help of my good friends and partners in Khartoum, George and Eleonora Pagoulatos, and George’s brothers Tanash and Gerossimos and their wives, proprietors of the Acropole Hotel and the Acropole Tourist Corporation. I would like to add a very special thanks for the patience and companionship of my drivers Ramadan – already famous as the companion of Paul Theroux and others – and Ahmad.

  I could not have completed my library research without the help of the staff of the British Institute of East Africa Studies in Nairobi, the London Library, the British Library, and the Palestine Exploration Fund. I owe them all a great debt. I am also grateful for the help of my neighbours, Esmond and Chryssee Bradley Martin, in Nairobi.

  I suppose authors don’t always make the best husbands and fathers, so I much appreciate the encouragement and patience of my wife, Mariantonietta, and my children, Burton and Jade.

  Michael Asher

  Langata, Nairobi, Kenya, 2005

  Prologue

  The deserter Gustav Klootz had seen death before, but never carnage like this. The bodies were scattered over a distance of two miles through the thorn-scrub: eleven thousand Egyptian soldiers and camp-followers in piles, hacked, stabbed and shot to ribbons. Swarms of dervishes were moving among them, dipping their ten-foot-long spears ritually in the wounds. They were stripping the corpses of everything – weapons, ammunition, boots, watches, even the blood-soaked uniforms themselves. The sky was already black with circling vultures. Some of the dead were smouldering from bullets fired at point-blank range. The dervishes claimed they were infidels being consumed by hellfire. Klootz saw one dead soldier hanging suspended from a huge baobab tree, where he had probably climbed in a futile attempt to escape the slaughter.

  Among the corpses was that of Klootz’s former commander, Lieut. General William Hicks. Nearby were the bodies of the two men for whom Klootz had served as orderly – the giant Prussian Major Baron Gotz von Seckendorff, and the drunken Irish war-correspondent Edmund O’Donovan, of the Daily News. O’Donovan in particular had been furious at Klootz’s betrayal. ‘What must be the condition of an army,’ he had written in his journal after Klootz had absconded, ‘when even a European servant deserts to the enemy?’1

  Klootz, a tall, blond Berliner with socialist notions, had joined the dervishes at er-Rahad a week previously and had converted to Islam. He had contributed to the massacre by alerting the enemy to the column’s weakness. He had once won the Iron Cross for bravery with the Uhlans, but still he was nauseated by what he saw on the battlefield. ‘I had the greatest difficulty in keeping myself from breaking down,’ he said, ‘when I saw the mutilated corpses of those with whom but a short while before I had laughed and spoken.’

  The savage attack by forty thousand screaming dervishes had smashed into the Egyptian column in the forest of Shaykan, Kordofan Province, in the western Sudan, that morning, 5 November 1883. Hicks’s force had been moving tactically in three ragged squares, one up and two back. The leading square had buckled instantly under the onslaught. The riflemen in the flanking squares were so exhausted and racked with thirst that they could hardly focus. They had wheeled and fired blindly into the mêlée, killing their own comrades as well as the enemy. ‘Almost at the same instant,’ said Mohammad Nur al-Barudi, Hicks’s cook, who had survived after being shot and slashed with a sword, ‘the dervishes simultaneously attacked from the woods on both sides and from front and rear. The wildest confusion followed. Squares fired on each other, on friends and enemies… the surging mass of dervishes now completely circled the force and gradually closed in on them.’2 Any remnants of discipline among Hicks’s force evaporated. The squares fractured into thrashing knots of men, who were cut to pieces. ‘No proper formation could be preserved among the soldiers,’ an unnamed survivor said. ‘They fought in detached groups, each body of men surrounded by [dervishes], who picked them off in turn.’3

  The only organized resistance came from the eleven European officers and their bodyguard of Bashi-Bazuks, or irregular cavalry – mostly Turks, Albanians and Shaygiyya tribesmen from the northern Sudan. On point of the column when the attack came, they drew up with their backs to a baobab tree, and fought to the last man. Hicks himself was one of the last to die. He emptied his revolver three times, loading and reloading automatically. When his rounds were spent, he charged a body of dervish horsemen brandishing his sword so maniacally that they actually ran away. His stallion wounded, he slipped out of the saddle and fought the enemy off with his blade, until he was speared to death. ‘[Hicks] was full of courage like an elephant,’ said Sheikh ‘Ali Gulla, a dervish wounded earlier in the fighting. ‘He feared nothing… the bravest of all the brave men I have known.’4 Afterwards, the heads of both Hicks and Seckendorff were cut off and carried as trophies to the dervish camp, where Klootz was required to identify them. Later they were stuck on spikes over the gate of el-Obeid.

  The Egyptian colonial government had walked into this massacre through over-confidence and a desire for decisive action. For two years a rebel force based in Kordofan had inflicted on them defeat after defeat. Columns had been ambushed and wiped out, garrisons had been slaughtered. Then, in January 1883, Kordofan’s capital, el-Obeid, had fallen. The Khedive Tewfiq had at first dismissed the rebellion as a local disturbance by religious fanatics. By early 1883, though, it had become clear that if el-Obeid was not retaken the whole of the Sudan might be lost.

  The rebellion was led by a Muslim holy man named Mohammad Ahmad, who claimed to be the Mahdi – the direct successor of the Prophet Mohammad. His followers were known as daraweesh, after the Sudanese colloquial word for ‘holy men’ – anglicized as ‘dervishes’. Preaching death to anyone who refused his own brand of Islam, the Mahdi had subverted tens of thousands of tribesmen from the Nile Valley and the western Sudan, united in their shared religion and their hatred of Turco-Egyptian rule.

  In September, the Khedive Tewfiq had sent the Hicks expedition to recapture el-Obeid and put an end to the Mahdi once and for all. It was the largest modern army ever dispatched into the interior of the Sudan: 8,300 infantry, nearly two thousand cavalry, an artillery battery of sixteen Krupp mountain-guns and Nordenfeldt machine-guns, and a baggage-train of two thousand men and some six thousand camels, mules and donkeys. It should have been formidable weighed against the motley rabble the Mahdi could muster, many of whom were armed with swords, sticks or spears. But the Egyptian force had one major weakness: its morale.

  Many of the troops had been captured by the British fighting for the Egyptian nationalist leader, Colonel ‘Arabi Pasha, at Tel el-Kebir in the Nile Delta the previous year. Most had been sent to the Sudan in shackles. A British officer who had inspected them in Cairo before departure had been shocked to discover that some had cut off their own trigger-fingers to avoid being re-enlisted. Others had even rubbed lime into their eyes to ruin their eyesight. Almost all had obtained forged certificates proving that they could not be called on for further service.

  As for Hicks himself, his name had been literally picked out of a hat in Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel. Though he had never held a major executive command before, he was a courageous, competent officer, concerned simply with getting the job done. Fifty-three years old, married with two children, his ambition was to obtain a secure full-time post in the Egyptian service. He had arrived in the Sudan with dreams of a knighthood, and later of taking over from the current Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army, Sir Evelyn Wood, VC. Tall, rugged and physically tough, Hicks was a retired honorary colonel of the Indian army. He had survived more than twenty actions in India and Abyssinia, and had been mentioned in dispatches twice. Despite the calumnies poured on him afterwards, he was no fool.

  In June, he had suggested that the army should be used simply to defend the Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and the Jazira – the area to the south between the Blue and White Niles. Here, in
April, his field force had held steady and had scored one of a handful of victories against the rebels in the past two years. Dervish horsemen had charged to within a few yards of the square, but had been flattened by volleys from the Egyptian troops. Six hundred dervishes had been left dead on the battlefield, including a brother of the Mahdi. ‘The Egyptian soldiers were much steadier than I expected,’ Hicks had written after the first engagement, ‘but I don’t know that they will be so steady when we cross to the Kordofan side, where we shall meet many more rifles and guns.’5

  Hicks was correct in his assessment. Fighting in sight of the Nile, with the support of armed steamers, was one thing: marching out into the arid steppes of Kordofan was quite another. What Hicks did not know was that the Egyptian fellahin had a traditional terror of the desert.

  As an Englishman in the service of the Egyptian Khedive, though, Hicks was in a difficult position. The Khedive was not master in his own country. Ousted in 1879 and replaced by the nationalist Colonel ‘Arabi Pasha, he had been reinstated by the British after the battle of Tel el-Kebir in 1882. Since then, Khedive Tewfiq had ruled only in name. The real authority in Egypt was Her Britannic Majesty’s agent in Cairo, Sir Edward Malet.

  Malet agreed with Hicks that the army should be used only to defend Khartoum, but his hands were tied by his own government. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, a Liberal, was reluctant to get drawn into affairs in the Sudan. His Foreign Secretary, George Leveson-Gower, Lord Granville, had obliged Malet to carry on the pretence that, in its relations with the Sudan, the Egyptian government was in fact independent.

  Sir Evelyn Baring, who took over Malet’s job three days after Hicks had left, had been opposed to the expedition from the start. He later blamed the massacre on British hypocrisy. Gladstone’s government, he said, could not claim to have been unaware of the dangers. In March 1883 a British officer, Lieut. Colonel John Donald Hammill Stewart of the 11th Hussars, had been sent to Khartoum. He had produced a report outlining the risks of an expedition into hostile territory, which had been scathing about the cowardliness of the Egyptian troops and their officers. Stewart had been clear in his opinion that, should Hicks be defeated, the whole of the Sudan would probably be lost.