The Making Of The British Army (41 page)

Sir Garnet Wolseley – ‘our only general’ – the safe pair of hands in many a campaign of Victoria’s wars.

An advance guard of Wolseley’s men reached Khartoum by river on 28 January 1885, having taken the gruelling short cut across the desert from the great bend of the Nile at Korti to rendezvous with steamers sent by Gordon, fighting two sharp battles on the way at Abu Klea and Metemmah (and in red jackets still – the last time British troops would wear red on campaign)
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. But it was too late: Khartoum had fallen to the Mahdists two days earlier, and ‘Gordon Pasha’ had been killed.

Wolseley returned to London to a consolatory viscountcy (and would later be promoted field marshal), for the opprobrium was turned entirely on Gladstone, who promptly resigned. But the aura of success that had accompanied ‘our only general’ for so long was somehow dimmed by the failure, not least because it emerged that he had dismissed local advice from soldiers like Sir Evelyn Wood (a VC and later field marshal) who had urged him to take not the Nile route but the far shorter desert one from Suakin on the Red Sea to Berber, and thence to Khartoum via the easily navigable 200 miles of the Upper Nile. And though it was Gladstone, the ‘Grand Old Man’, who carried the can (the popular press reversed the initials G.O.M. to spell ‘Murderer of Gordon’), Wolseley lost some of the moral authority he needed in his long-running battle with the commander-in-chief, the duke of Cambridge, for army reform. It would be another ten years before the duke would retire (or, more correctly, be forced to accept retirement) and Wolseley would take over, by which time his intellectual power was fading. That would be too late for the army, which was about to have its biggest test since the Crimea, against the Boers (for a second time), in which it would falter as badly. But before that test would come the reconquest of the Sudan by the man who perhaps comes closest to ranking with Marlborough and Wellington – Kitchener.

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The first lesson of Wolseley’s Nile campaign had been clear enough: as ever, logistic preparation was everything. At the tactical level there had been an important lesson in firepower, too. Like the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, Wolseley’s infantry carried the Martini–Henry rifle whose black-powder cartridges made concealment difficult – though this would be more of a problem in South Africa against the Boers than in the Sudan (and in any case, a red coat was hardly an aid to concealment). The norm was still volley fire from a standing or kneeling position, followed by rapid (individual) fire. In the open, when the enemy obliged by charging en masse and without fire support, this was usually enough to defeat any attack, although at Abu Klea the Mahdists had broken a square – if only temporarily. But the presence there of a few Gatling guns (primitive machine guns)
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suggested how the infantry might increase their defensive fire in the future, and how they might arrange their own supporting fire in the attack, which up to then had been the job of the artillery. For the machine gun, integral to the infantry company, could release the artillery to concentrate its fire for greater effect, not least against the enemy’s artillery. An eye witness at the battle of Abu Klea describes how the partially broken square of the Royal Sussex Regiment managed to re-form, and that At last the Gatling guns were got into action, and that practically ended the battle. The Soudanese were simply mown down. Their bodies flew up into the air like grass from a lawn mower.’

When it came to the second expedition to Khartoum, twelve years later, time was not so pressing: there was no Gordon to relieve. But the neighbouring friendly colonial power, Italy, had suffered a major defeat in Abyssinia and there was every expectation that the Mahdists, under the late Mahdi’s successor, the Khalifa or ‘steward’ Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, would move against the Horn of Africa, with all the consequential problems for Cairo and London of a heightened threat to Egypt itself and a menacing presence bordering the route to India.

Major-General (Horatio) Herbert Kitchener, who had served as a staff officer on Wolseley’s campaign, and who was now sirdar (commander-in-chief) of the Egyptian army, was given a clear enough military task: defeat the Mahdists and re-annex the Sudan. Perhaps
because he was a sapper, and certainly because of Wolseley’s experience of inadequate logistics, he determined on a very deliberate advance up the Nile, consolidating his gains in Mahdist territory and building up his lines of communication before going further. In this there was nothing new – the approach was both Marlburian and Wellingtonian – but it had not been practised much in the lifetime of Kitchener’s contemporaries. The sharp checks at the beginning of almost every colonial campaign to date had, however, reminded those with a will to see (and Kitchener’s cold ambition made him a very careful observer) that there was a balance to be struck between the bold manœuvre on exterior lines, which can knock the enemy off balance and leave him open to defeat by smaller numbers, and the application of mounting pressure from the methodical build-up of strength along interior lines. For although the latter risks allowing the enemy freedom of action, the pressure can be steadily increased until it becomes irresistible. The modern colloquialism is ‘the more you use, the less you lose’.

And Kitchener intended using everything he could lay his hands on. He began his advance from Wadi Halfa on the Egyptian – Sudanese border in March 1896 with the initial aim of clearing Dongola province. His force of 15,000 was predominantly Egyptian, with British officers in key appointments, plus six Sudanese regiments loyal to Cairo and a stiffening of British battalions (there would be 8,000 British troops by the end of the campaign). By September, after two minor actions at Akasha and Firket, he had secured Dongola. And here he made his base for a whole year while behind him a railway was built from the border to the junction of the Nile and the Atbara River just south of Berber. Some 400 miles of track was to run through the desert to the bend of the Nile at Abu Hamed (which he took in August 1897), and then along the east bank to within 200 miles of Khartoum, where the river once more becomes navigable to gunboats during the flood season – for which they would now have to wait. Telegraph lines from Atbara to Cairo, and to several points east and west, made for timely and efficient movement of men and materiel and allowed Kitchener to rest his men in the rear areas rather than having them all at the furthest point of the advance.

In April 1898 he sent a reconnaissance force to determine the strength of the Mahdist defences south of Berber. These consisted essentially of a
zariba
, or thorn enclosure, with mounds and entrenchments. The force would have come to grief but for the initiative in
extricating them of a young cavalry officer, Captain Douglas Haig. As it was, with the information gained Kitchener was able to launch an attack three days later which quickly overwhelmed the defenders, though he came in for criticism for unimaginative tactics and relatively heavy casualties (568 killed and wounded). They might have been even heavier but for the Royal Artillery’s preparatory fire, which had evolved some way towards the model which has been used ever since, known as the ‘fire plan’.
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In Kitchener’s fire plan the guns, rather than deploying side by side with the infantry, would fire on the objective from a different position, preferably at such an angle that the bombardment could continue until the infantry had advanced almost on to the enemy position.

The Royal Artillery’s field guns had improved out of all recognition since the Crimea. They were Maxim–Nordenfeldts – breech-loading, rifled, highly mobile, and firing fixed-case mechanically fused ammunition. They could hurl 9 pounds of Lyddite 5,000 yards with great accuracy, aided by optical sights.
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The gunners fired direct – observing themselves where their shot fell – rather than indirect, for there was no need of concealment when they vastly outranged the enemy’s small arms, and the Khalifa had no artillery (worth the name) of his own. Thus used, these guns wrought a great deal of destruction, although with better coordination the infantry might have been able to get into the
zariba
before the Mahdists had time to recover.

Even so, the British infantry at least were armed with a superior rifle, the new magazine-fed Lee – Metford, with smokeless cartridges and a much greater rate of fire than earlier models (though the Egyptian – Sudanese regiments carried the older single-shot Martini – Henry). The battalions still advanced in tight formations, halting to volley at long range and then firing independently when the Mahdists’ Remingtons, captured from the Egyptians in earlier campaigns, took effect at 300 yards, before going the last 50 with the bayonet. Major Ivor Maxse, one of the Egyptian-brigade-majors who later interrogated the Mahdist prisoners, and who would command a corps during the First World War, concluded that ‘What beat them was
the steady, disciplined advance of our drilled battalions, things which they had … not seen nor imagined.’ It was, indeed, a rather old-fashioned battle, if fought with modern weapons; and it would not be the last such.
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But still Kitchener was in no hurry to advance. After the battle at the
zariba
he thinned out his troops, sending the regiments back down the railway to summer quarters where they could rest and train while work continued on his lines of communication. By the middle of July 1898 the railway had at last reached Atbara itself, and Kitchener could begin bringing up his second British brigade, for the river was now high enough for the final push on Khartoum. With these reinforcements came a British cavalry regiment, the 21st Lancers, who were particularly eager for action. Since their re-raising thirty-four years earlier they had scarcely heard a shot fired in anger (their motto, said the wags, was ‘Thou shalt not kill’). With them on secondment from the 4th Hussars was the 23-year-old Lieutenant Winston Churchill, who the following year would write a gripping and astonishingly mature account of the campaign,
The River War.
The railway also brought up several gunboats in sections, and more artillery including two massive 40-pounders and mule-drawn Maxim machine guns, which had by now replaced the Gatlings. Kitchener’s firepower was now formidable, a match for anything the Khalifa could bring to bear, and heavy enough to batter down the fortifications of Khartoum itself.

Several of the Khalifa’s emirs had in fact urged him to quit Khartoum and move west to the country of the Baggara, the tribe of which he was also leader, but he refused: he was first the leader of the whole country, he protested; and besides, he could not abandon the capital and the tomb of the Mahdi. He therefore decided to strengthen the Khartoum garrison and concentrate his field forces at the village of Omdurman on the opposite, western bank of the Nile. This, however, left the river free for Kitchener’s gunboats to sail right up to the walls of the city.

By the middle of August, Kitchener’s advance guards were within sight of the capital, their methodical advance marked by numerous
supply depots, and his Anglo-Egyptian army had grown to 26,000. Captain Douglas Haig described the sight that greeted the cavalry as they crested the Kerreri ridge on the morning of 1 September:

Not wasting any more time, they withdrew south into Kitchener’s own
zariba
a few miles north of Omdurman, which was supported by the gunboats.

Kitchener wanted to lure the Khalifa into a fight in the open, drawing him on to his superior firepower. As Haig and the cavalry observed from the Kerreri ridge, he played a clever psychological game by embarking a battery of 5-inch howitzers (high-angle guns which could drop shells over the walls) and despatching them with 3,000 irregulars under Major Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley (who would command a division at the Somme) to begin the bombardment of Khartoum – with specific aim at the Mahdi’s tomb, striking symbolically at the heart of Mahdism. As the Khalifa’s men watched helplessly, shells began tearing holes in the great white dome towering 90 feet above the tomb. One of the Coptic clerks wrote afterwards that ‘There was a natural and embarrassed silence in the ranks of the army.’

There was also dissent among the emirs: should they attack, or await attack? And among those who urged attack there were some who wanted to do so at once and others who wanted to wait for darkness. The problem was the gunboats (and soon the other artillery, for the east bank quickly fell into Kitchener’s hands): they made Omdurman untenable as a defensive position by day, and at night their searchlights swept the approaches to the
zariba.
In the end the Khalifa, who had never seen a living white man, let alone the effects of the Lee–Metford and the Maxim, was stung into action by his eldest son’s jibe that to attack other than in daylight would ‘be like mice and foxes slinking into their holes by day and peeping out at night’. They would attack at dawn on 2 September – almost incredibly, into the rising sun.