The Making Of The British Army (42 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
Even so, the Khalifa’s plan did not lack subtlety. He would mount direct attacks against the
zariba
from due west and in the southern flank, supported by fire from the
mulazimin
(guard) who would take the Kerreri hills on which sat the Egyptian cavalry and the Camel Corps. With some 14,000 troops in the assault, he believed he had every chance of breaking into the
zariba
defences. But if he did not, he would fall back, luring the infidel out of the
zariba
and on to the plain, whereupon his reserve of 12,000 mounted men and foot soldiers concealed behind the Jebel Surgham would take them in the flank, while the
mulazimin
streamed down from the Kerreri hills to complete the destruction.
Kitchener’s cavalry patrols (which included Churchill) reported the Mahdists’ movement at first light – a host of mounted men and foot soldiers. In the 1972 film
Young Winston
, Churchill himself brings the information to Kitchener who is on the march with his army towards Omdurman. In reality, Kitchener’s infantry were already stood to in the
zariba
with five brigades deployed forward on the mile-long perimeter, one in reserve and the artillery interspersed the length of the defences. But then
Young Winston
was one of Richard Attenborough’s films. Zoltan Korda’s 1939 epic
The Four Feathers
, an adaptation of A. E. W. Mason’s novel, is a far more accurate portrayal – unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the screenplay was by R. C. Sherriff, a decorated former infantry officer and author of
Journey’s End.
In Korda’s film a young soldier watching the great ‘dervish’ host coming on relentlessly asks the older soldier next to him, anxiously, ‘When do we open fire?’, to which the old sweat replies, ‘When we’re told!’ Masterly dialogue, and the very essence of fire control.
At 6.45 the Maxim – Nordenfeldts of 32 Battery RA opened up, sights and fuses set for 2,800 yards. The Grenadier Guards volleyed shortly afterwards at 2,000 yards, the extreme of the Lee-Metford’s range, and the Maxims burst into chattering life at about 1,700 yards (a fraction short of a mile). The bulk of the infantry joined in at 1,500 yards, and at about 800 most of the battalions ordered rapid fire.
The gunnery and small arms produced the most deafening noise that any soldier had ever heard – even those at Waterloo – for the high-velocity weapons packed huge explosive power in the breeches, and the fire was continuous. And suddenly, as if crazed by it, the Baggara horsemen, thousands of them tight-packed, broke from the great press of advancing Mahdists and charged flat out. Every rifle in the
zariba
turned on them, and every man and horse was brought down.
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Not a single ‘dervish’, mounted or on foot, reached the perimeter, while the Khalifa’s artillery, out of range, could not inflict a single casualty on the defenders. On the Kerreri hills the attack by the
mulazimin
was cleverly drawn away by the admirable Colonel Robert Broadwood (who would command a division on the Western Front and die of wounds in 1917) and his Egyptian cavalry, taking them completely out of the battle. The Khalifa’s plan was fast unravelling.
With the initial attack repulsed, Kitchener now ordered a sortie by the 21st Lancers – four squadrons, some 320 troopers – to harass the retreating Mahdists and head them off from Omdurman. In
Young Winston
the Lancers trot to their task with parade-ground smartness. Churchill, in
The River War
, paints a more realistic picture of troops on active service: the regiment was ‘a great square block of ungainly brown figures and little horses, hung all over with water-bottles, saddle-bags, picketing-gear, tins of bully-beef, all jolting and jangling together; the polish of peace gone; soldiers without glitter; horsemen without grace; but still a regiment of light cavalry in active operation against the enemy’.
Brown
figures indeed – khaki: gone were the red of the infantry and the blue of the light cavalry. This was modern war. But would it be modern war for the Lancers?
As they rounded the eastern end of the Jebel Surgham they saw scattered parties of horsemen and foot soldiers. Churchill describes what happened next:
We advanced at a walk in mass for about 300 yards. The scattered parties of Dervishes fell back and melted away, and only one straggling line of men in dark blue waited motionless a quarter of a mile to the left front. They were scarcely a hundred strong. The regiment formed into line of squadron columns, and continued at a walk until within 300 yards of this small body of Dervishes. The firing behind the ridges had stopped. There was complete silence, intensified by the recent tumult. Far beyond the thin blue row of Dervishes the fugitives were visible streaming into Omdurman. And should these few devoted men impede a regiment?
Yet it were wiser to examine their position from the other flank before slipping a squadron at them. The heads of the squadrons wheeled slowly to the
left, and the Lancers, breaking into a trot, began to cross the Dervish front in column of troops. Thereupon and with one accord the blue-clad men dropped on their knees, and there burst out a loud, crackling fire of musketry. It was hardly possible to miss such a target at such a range. Horses and men fell at once. The only course was plain and welcome to all. The Colonel, nearer than his regiment, already saw what lay behind the skirmishers. He ordered, ‘Right wheel into line’ to be sounded. The trumpet jerked out a shrill note, heard faintly above the trampling of the horses and the noise of the rifles. On the instant all the sixteen troops swung round and locked up into a long galloping line, and the 21st Lancers were committed to their first charge in war.Two hundred and fifty yards away the dark-blue men were firing madly in a thin film of light-blue smoke. Their bullets struck the hard gravel into the air, and the troopers, to shield their faces from the stinging dust, bowed their helmets forward, like the Cuirassiers at Waterloo. The pace was fast and the distance short. Yet, before it was half covered, the whole aspect of the affair changed. A deep crease in the ground – a dry watercourse, a khor – appeared where all had seemed smooth, level plain; and from it there sprang, with the suddenness of a pantomime effect and a high-pitched yell, a dense white mass of men nearly as long as our front and about twelve deep. A score of horsemen and a dozen bright flags rose as if by magic from the earth. Eager warriors sprang forward to anticipate the shock. The rest stood firm to meet it. The Lancers acknowledged the apparition only by an increase of pace. Each man wanted sufficient momentum to drive through such a solid line. The flank troops, seeing that they overlapped, curved inwards like the horns of a moon. But the whole event was a matter of seconds. The riflemen, firing bravely to the last, were swept head over heels into the khor, and jumping down with them, at full gallop and in the closest order, the British squadrons struck the fierce brigade with one loud furious shout. The collision was prodigious. Nearly thirty Lancers, men and horses, and at least two hundred Arabs were overthrown. The shock was stunning to both sides, and for perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his enemy. Terrified horses wedged in the crowd, bruised and shaken men, sprawling in heaps, struggled, dazed and stupid, to their feet, panted, and looked about them. Several fallen Lancers had even time to re-mount. Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on. As a rider tears through a bullfinch,
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the officers forced their way through the press; and as an iron rake might be drawn through a heap of shingle, so the regiment followed. They shattered the Dervish array, and, their pace reduced to a walk,
scrambled out of the khor on the further side, leaving a score of troopers behind them, and dragging on with the charge more than a thousand Arabs. Then, and not till then, the killing began; and thereafter each man saw the world along his lance, under his guard, or through the back-sight of his pistol; and each had his own strange tale to tell.Stubborn and unshaken infantry hardly ever meet stubborn and unshaken cavalry. Either the infantry run away and are cut down in flight, or they keep their heads and destroy nearly all the horsemen by their musketry.
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On this occasion two living walls had actually crashed together. The Dervishes fought manfully. They tried to hamstring the horses. They fired their rifles, pressing the muzzles into the very bodies of their opponents. They cut reins and stirrup-leathers. They flung their throwing-spears with great dexterity. They tried every device of cool, determined men practised in war and familiar with cavalry; and, besides, they swung sharp, heavy swords which bit deep. The hand-to-hand fighting on the further side of the khor lasted for perhaps one minute. Then the horses got into their stride again, the pace increased, and the Lancers drew out from among their antagonists. Within two minutes of the collision every living man was clear of the Dervish mass. All who had fallen were cut at with swords till they stopped quivering, but no artistic mutilations were attempted.Two hundred yards away the regiment halted, rallied, faced about, and in less than five minutes were re-formed and ready for a second charge. The men were anxious to cut their way back through their enemies. We were alone together – the cavalry regiment and the Dervish brigade. The ridge hung like a curtain between us and the army. The general battle was forgotten, as it was unseen. This was a private quarrel. The other might have been a massacre; but here the fight was fair, for we too fought with sword and spear. Indeed the advantage of ground and numbers lay with them. All prepared to settle the debate at once and for ever. But some realisation of the cost of our wild ride began to come to those who were responsible. Riderless horses galloped across the plain. Men, clinging to their saddles, lurched helplessly about, covered with blood from perhaps a dozen wounds. Horses, streaming from tremendous gashes, limped and staggered with their riders. In 120 seconds five officers, 65 men, and 119 horses out of fewer than 400 had been killed or wounded.
Death
and
glory. It was, indeed, a precipitate charge, and to no significant tactical effect. The one service the regiment might have performed – to discover the Khalifa’s reserve behind the
jebel
– was now out of the question as the Lancers licked their wounds. And although medals were given out afterwards, the commanding officer was censured. The duke of Wellington would no doubt have cursed them for ‘galloping at everything’.
But the battle was almost over: Kitchener’s force was simply too strong. Even when the 12,000 horsemen of the Black Standard hurled themselves at the army’s flank as the regiments surged from the
zariba
, they were stopped by the Martini–Henry fire of the 1st Egyptian–Sudanese Brigade under the remarkable Colonel Hector Macdonald. A crofter’s son who had risen through the ranks (shades of Sir Colin Campbell), as Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald he would command the Highland Brigade in South Africa.
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By evening the army was in Omdurman, and two days later Kitchener entered Khartoum in ceremonial procession.
It would take another fifteen months of follow-up operations to finish Mahdism for good, however. In the end the Khalifa and his emirs died on their prayer mats facing Mecca at Omdibakarat, a battle won largely by the Maxim guns and their 600 rounds a minute. But in the eyes of the world the British army had regained its ascendancy. Kitchener too had gained an awesome reputation (and a peerage, as Baron Kitchener of Khartoum – ‘K of K’); and Gordon had been avenged. Or, as Churchill puts it with rhetorical flourish, and in cadences that would become familiar to millions of listeners nearly half a century later:
The long story now approaches its conclusion. The River War is over. In its varied course, which extended over fourteen years and involved the untimely destruction of perhaps 300,000 lives, many extremes and contrasts have been displayed. There have been battles which were massacres, and others that were
mere parades. There have been occasions of shocking cowardice and surprising heroism, of plans conceived in haste and emergency, of schemes laid with slow deliberation, of wild extravagance and cruel waste, of economies scarcely less barbarous, of wisdom and incompetence. But the result is at length achieved, and the flags of England and Egypt wave unchallenged over the valley of the Nile.
And the lessons? The ‘River War’ showed the army almost everything it needed to know about war in the future, except the use of aircraft (it was curious that Kitchener did not use observation balloons: they had been used in the first Sudan campaign and in Bechuanaland in 1885, and the Royal Engineers’ Balloon School had opened at Chatham in 1888). But although many individual lessons were absorbed, in logistics especially, and small-arms and artillery improvements continued apace, the totality of these lessons escaped most theorists and practitioners alike. But just as the action at Rorke’s Drift had set the gold standard for tenacity, fortitude and courage, so Kitchener’s planning and management had set the standard for the
organization
of war. No one as yet seemed to imagine that war in future could be waged on an industrial scale – despite the lessons of the American Civil War to hand.
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Even so, some germ of an idea had evidently been planted deep in Kitchener’s mind, for when he was appointed secretary of state for war in 1914 he threw over the War Office’s plans for the modest expansion of the army based on the Territorial Force and called instead for volunteers for ‘New Armies’ – an astonishingly prescient and bold course, for Britain had never before improvised a mass army.
