Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (47 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Even more reviled was the British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, Sir Evelyn Baring, who had opposed Gordon’s mission from the very outset. There was a grain of realism in Gordon’s paranoia. Gladstone, still uneasy at having ordered the occupation of Egypt, had no intention of being drawn into the occupation of Sudan. He repeatedly evaded suggestions that Gordon should be rescued and authorized the despatch of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s relief expedition only after months of prevarication. It arrived three days too late. By now the readers of the
Pall Mall Gazette
had come to share Gordon’s suspicions. When the news of his death reached London there was an outcry. The Queen herself wrote to Gordon’s sister:
To think of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the World, not having been rescued. That the promises of support were not fulfilled – which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go – is to me grief inexpressible! Indeed, it has made me ill ... Would you express to your other sisters and your elder Brother my true sympathy, and what I do so keenly feel, the stain left upon England for your dear Brother’s cruel, though heroic, fate!
 
Gladstone was reviled – no longer the ‘Grand Old Man’, now ‘Gordon’s Only Murderer’. Yet it was thirteen long years before Gordon could be avenged.
The Anglo-Egyptian army that invaded the Sudan in 1898 was led by General Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Behind a patina of Prussian military ruthlessness, as we have seen, Kitchener was a complex, in some ways even effeminate character. He was not without a sense of humour: cursed with poor eyesight all his life, he was such a poor shot that he named his gundogs Bang, Miss and Damn. But as a young and self-consciously Christian soldier, he had been powerfully attracted to Gordon’s asceticism when the two men had met briefly in Egypt. The thought of avenging Gordon brought out the hard man in Kitchener. Having been a junior officer in Wolseley’s earlier invasion force, the man who was now Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian army knew the terrain well. As he led his expeditionary force southwards into the desert wastes, he had only one thought: to repay his debt to Gordon with compound interest, or rather to make Gordon’s killers pay it. The Mahdi himself might by now be dead; but the sins of the father would be visited on his heir, the Khalifa.
It was at Omdurman on the banks of the Nile that the two civilizations clashed: on one side, a horde of desert-dwelling Islamic fundamentalists; on the other, the well-drilled Christian soldiers of Greater Britain, with their Egyptian and Sudanese auxiliaries. Even the way the two sides lined up expressed the difference between them. The dervishes, who numbered about 52,000, were spread out across the plain beneath their bright black, green and white flags, forming a line five miles long. Kitchener’s men – there were just 20,000 – stood shoulder to shoulder in their familiar squares, backs to the Nile. Watching from the British lines was the 23-year-old Winston Churchill, an Old Harrovian army officer who was supposed to be in India, but had wangled his way into Kitchener’s expedition as a war correspondent for the
Morning Post
, a position now regarded as equivalent in status to a cavalry captaincy. As dawn broke, he had his first sight of the enemy:
I suddenly realized that all the masses were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about and before their ranks. Scouts and patrols scattered themselves all over the front. Then they began to cheer. They were still a mile away from the hill, and were concealed from the Sirdar’s army by the folds of the ground. The noise of the shouting was heard, albeit faintly, by the troops down by the river. But to us, watching on the hill, a tremendous roar came up in waves of intense sound, like the tumult of the rising wind and sea before a storm ... One rock, one mound of sand after another was submerged by that human flood. It was time to go.
 
The courage of the dervishes profoundly impressed Churchill. It was based on a burning religious zeal: the shouting he heard was the chant of ‘
La llaha illa llah wa Muhammad rasul Allah
’ – ‘There is one God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God’. Nor was the battle entirely without risk for their opponents. Indeed, there was a moment late in the day when only prompt action by Hector Macdonald – in defiance of the Sirdar’s orders – averted much heavier British casualties. Ultimately, however, the dervishes stood no chance against what Churchill called with more than a hint of irony ‘that mechanical scattering of death which the polite nations of the earth have brought to such monstrous perfection’. The British had Maxim guns, Martini-Henry rifles, heliographs and, moored in the river behind the British force, gunboats. The dervishes had, it is true, a few Maxims of their own; but mostly they relied on antiquated muskets, spears and swords. Churchill vividly described the inevitable outcome:
The Maxim guns exhausted all the water in their jackets, and several had to be refreshed from the water-bottles of the Cameron Highlanders before they could go on with their deadly work. The empty cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed small but growing heaps beside each man. And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting dust – suffering, despairing, dying ... The charging Dervishes sank down in tangled heaps. The masses in the rear paused, irresolute.
 
It was all over in the space of five hours.
By one estimate, the dervish army suffered close to 95 per cent casualties; at the very least a fifth of their number were killed outright. By contrast, there were fewer than four hundred casualties on the Anglo-Egyptian side, and only forty-eight British soldiers lost their lives. Surveying the field afterwards, Kitchener laconically remarked that the enemy had been given ‘a good dusting’. Nor did this satisfy him, for he proceeded to order the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb and, in Churchill’s words, ‘carried off the Mahdi’s head in a kerosene-can as a trophy’. He then shed mawkish tears as the assembled military bands performed what amounted to an open-air concert, the programme of which ran the whole compressed gamut of Victorian emotion:
God Save the Queen
The Khedival anthem
The Dead March from
Saul
Handel’s March from
Scipio
(‘Toll for the Brave’) (all performed by
the band of Grenadier Guards)
Coronach Lament (performed by the pipe band of the Cameron and
Seaforth Highlanders)
Abide with Me (performed by the band of the 11th Sudanese)
 
Privately, Churchill deplored not only the desecration of the Mahdi’s remains but also ‘the inhuman slaughter of the wounded’ (for which he also held Kitchener responsible). He was profoundly shocked by the way British firepower had transformed the vibrant dervish warriors into mere ‘dirty bits of newspaper’ strewn over the plain. Yet for public consumption he dutifully pronounced Omdurman ‘the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians’. Fifty years later, after annihilating the Japanese fleet air arm at the Mariana Islands, the Americans would call this kind of thing a ‘turkey shoot’.
The lesson of Omdurman seemed to be the old and unambiguous one that no one challenged British power with impunity. There was, however, another lesson that could be drawn. Watching the battle intently that day was Major von Tiedemann, the German military attaché, who duly noted the devastating impact of the British Maxim guns, which one observer reckoned accounted for around three-quarters of the dervish casualties. To Tiedemann, the real lesson was obvious: the only way to beat the British was to match their firepower.
The Germans had not been slow to appeciate the war-winning potential of the Maxim. Wilhelm II had witnessed a demonstration of the gun as early as 1888 and had commented simply: ‘That is the gun – there is no other’. In 1892, through the agency of Lord Rothschild, a licence was granted to the Berlin machine tool and arms manufacturer Ludwig Loewe to produce Maxim guns for the German market. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman the decision was taken to give each Jäger battalion in the German army a four-gun Maxim battery. By 1908 the Maxim was standard issue for every German infantry regiment.
By the end of 1898 there was only one tribe in southern Africa that still defied the might of the British Empire. They had already trekked hundreds of miles northwards to escape from British influence at the Cape; they had already fought the British once to retain their independence, inflicting a heavy defeat on them at Majuba Hill in 1881. This was Africa’s only white tribe: the Boers – farmers descended from the early Dutch settlers of the Cape.
To Rhodes, Chamberlain and Milner, the Boers’ independent-mindedness was intolerable. As usual, British calculations were both strategic and economic. Despite the growing importance of the Suez Canal for British trade with Asia, the Cape remained a military base of ‘immense importance for England’ (Chamberlain) for the simple reason that the Canal might be vulnerable to closure in a major European war. It remained, in the Colonial Secretary’s view, ‘the cornerstone of the whole British colonial system’. At the same time, it was hardly without significance that one of the Boer republics had turned out to be sitting on the biggest gold seams in the world. By 1900 the Rand was producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply and had absorbed more than £114 million of mainly British capital. Having been an impoverished backwater, the Transvaal suddenly seemed set to become the economic centre of gravity in southern Africa. But the Boers saw no reason why they should share power with the tens of thousands of British immigrants who had swarmed into their country to pan for gold, the
Uitlanders
. Nor did they approve of the (somewhat) more liberal way the British treated the black population of Cape Colony. In the eyes of their president Paul Kruger, the Boers’ strictly Calvinist way of life was simply incompatible with British rule. The problem for the British was that this African tribe was unlike all the others – though the difference turned out to lie less in the fact that they were white than in the fact that they were well armed.
It can hardly be denied that Chamberlain and Milner provoked the Boer War, believing that the Boers could be bullied quickly into giving up their independence. Their demand that the
Uitlanders
be given the vote in the Transvaal after five years’ residence – ‘Home Rule for the Rand’, in Chamberlain’s hypocritical phrase – was merely a pretext. The real thrust of British policy was revealed by the pains taken to prevent the Boers securing a rail link to the sea via the Portuguese-controlled Delagoa Bay, which would have freed them and the gold mines from dependence on the British railway running to the Cape. At all costs, even at the cost of war, the Boers had to lose their independence.
Chamberlain was confident of victory: did he not already have offers of military assistance from Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Canada, West Africa and the Malay States?
82
As the Irish MP John Dillon caustically remarked, it was ‘the British Empire against 30,000 farmers’. But the Boers had been given ample time to prepare for war. Ever since 1895, when Rhodes’s crony Dr Leander Starr Jameson had led his abortive ‘raid’ into the Transvaal, it had been obvious that a showdown was imminent. Two years later, the appointment of Milner as High Commissioner for South Africa had sent another unambiguous signal: his stated view was that there could be no room in South Africa for ‘two absolutely conflicting social and political systems’. The Boers duly stocked up with the latest armaments: Maxim guns, of course, but also as much of the Essen company Krupp’s latest artillery as they could afford, as well as caseloads of the latest Mauser rifles, accurate over 2,000 yards. Their way of life had made them crack shots; now they were well armed too. And of course they knew the terrain far better than the British
rooinekke
(Afrikaans for ‘rednecks’, on account of the typical Tommy’s sunburnt skin). By Christmas 1899 the Boers had struck deep into British territory. This time, it seemed, the turkeys were shooting back. And nothing demonstrated the accuracy of their shooting better than what happened at Spion Kop.
General Sir Redvers Buller – soon to be nicknamed ‘Sir Reverse’ – had been sent to relieve the 12,000 British troops besieged by the Boers at Ladysmith, in the British province of Natal. In turn, Buller gave Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren the job of breaking through the Boer defences around the hill known as Spion Kop. On 24 January 1900 Warren ordered a mixed force of Lancasters and
Uitlanders
to scale the hill’s steep, rocky face under cover of night and fog. They encountered only a single enemy picket, who fled; the Boers, it seemed, had surrendered the hill without a fight. In the thick dawn mist, the British hacked out a perfunctory trench, confident that they had won an easy victory. But Warren had misread the lay of the land. The British position was completely exposed to Boer artillery and rifle fire from the surrounding hills; indeed, they had not even reached the highest point of Spion Kop itself. As the mist cleared, the slaughter began. This time the British were on the receiving end.

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