First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (28 page)

With this news, the overriding question for Gordon now was when would the Madhi decide the time had come to mount a major assault on the city.
Judging the situation as the engineer he was, he concluded that the attack would come toward the end of the year, when the Nile began to drop.
Would the relief column arrive in time?
he wondered.
Did Wolseley truly understand how different was war in the Sudan desert from war anywhere else in Africa—or the Empire for that matter?
Would Wolseley follow the same pattern of methodical, plodding campaigning he had employed against the Zulus five years earlier, or would he strike with the dash and drive that Gordon knew was the key to campaigning in the African desert?
Sensing that the Mahdi feared the approach of a British Army, the General got word to Kitchener that when the relief column arrived, the troops should wear their traditional red tunic rather than the khaki-colored ones that were now standard issue in the British Army.
So potent had the image of redcoated infantry become among the peoples of Africa and Asia that their appearance would leave no doubt among the Mahdi’s followers as to the identity of their new foes.

The same day that the news from Kitchener arrived, the Ansar were finally able to bring some of their guns to bear on the city itself.
While their shells did little damage, the intermittent but never-ceasing bombardment became more enervating with each passing day.
One of the four remaining steamers ran aground on the north bank of the Blue Nile, and the Mahdi’s artillery soon set it afire.
It had been one of the more reliable steamers, and its loss was soon felt, as Omdurman came under steadily increasing pressure and their was no chance of further reinforcement or resupply for the hapless garrison there.
Surrounded and cut off from the river, devoid of any artillery of its own, the fort came under a steady barrage of small arms fire from the Ansar, and casualties mounted daily.

Despite careful rationing and the raids on Arab camps during the summer and autumn, food was beginning to run low and everyone within the city began to feel the effects of malnutrition.
The war of nerves escalated, as an Ansar gun was sited across the river from the Governor’s Palace and began an intermittent shelling that lasted day and night.
The shells did little damage, for the building was constructed of heavy sandstone, but the noise made it impossible to sleep.
When the guns weren’t firing, a large drum sited on the north bank kept up a steady beat, pounding heard in almost every quarter of the city.
Little by little the morale of Khartoum was crumbling.

Though he was able to keep the boatyard working and had it build a replacement steamer for the one that had been lost—in a moment of black humor Gordon named it the
Zobeir
— there was little room left for his river flotilla to maneuver.
The level of the Nile was falling, and as it fell vast stretches of mudflats on either bank allowed the Mahdi’s forces to approach closer to the city than ever before.
More ominously, as the Nile fell, so did the level of the moat, and by December 13, Gordon was beginning to worry that it was no longer deep enough to provide a barrier to a determined assault.

It was on that day that he wrote what would be the last reliable communication the world would ever receive from him or Khartoum.
“NOW MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honor of my country.
Good-bye.
C.
G.
Gordon.” Bundling up this note with his journal and papers, along with the telegrams sent and received during his ten months in Khartoum, he attached a note to it that read: “Events at Khartoum.
General Gordon’s Journal.
No secrets as far as I am concerned.
To be pruned down if published.
C.
G.
Gordon.” The bundle was given to the captain of the steamer
Bordein
, who was then ordered to make for Metemma and the Relief Expedition.

CHAPTER 9

THE RELIEF COLUMN

Everything now hung on General Garnet Wolseley’s plans for his relief expedition to Khartoum.
The fate of the city, of Gordon, and the Mahdi’s revolt would be determined by Wolseley’ success or failure.
The greatest enemy was time: despite Kitchener’s best efforts, the information coming out of Khartoum was sketchy at best, and often contradictory.
Consequently Wolseley was unsure of how secure—or perilous—was Gordon’s true position.
He thus hesitated to make a decision as to whether it was urgent that he risk a rush to the city’s relief, or whether he had time to make the careful, methodical approach he preferred.
Whether he was willing to acknowledge it or not, the specter of the massacre of William Hicks’ army in the desert still loomed darkly over any plans for campaigning in the Sudan.

While he was still in England, Wolseley had called on the talents of a young officer by the name of William Francis Butler to solve an essential part of his problem: transport up the Nile.
Butler had made the acquaintance of then-Colonel Garnet Wolseley fifteen years earlier when, as an officer of the 69th Infantry, he had been posted to Montreal, Canada.
There he had procured boats for Wolseley’s Red River campaign, which the General was now using as a model for his Nile expedition.
Butler had become something of an expert on small boats to be used for military operations, and so was given the responsibility of finding the right boats in sufficient numbers to carry the expeditionary force up the Nile.

Just two days after the relief column was authorized by Parliament, Butler and a Colonel Alleyn of the Royal Engineers went down to Portsmouth to inspect standard-design lifeboats for possible use.
These were determined to be unsuitable, primarily because they drew too much water: the expedition would be trying to sail up the Nile at a time of year when the level of the river would be falling.
Deciding that they could produce a design that met their exact needs and which could quickly be produced in the numbers required, the two men conceived of a thirty-foot boat they called the “Nile whaler.” Fitted to mount a dozen oars, it could also step a small mast which would support a lug sail.
Each whaler could carry ten soldiers and two crewmen, plus a half-ton of stores and ammunition.

Satisfied with their design (it was endorsed as sound and practical by no less an authority on African rivers than the world-famous explorer Henry Stanley), the two officers placed orders for four hundred of their distinct watercraft with a total of forty-seven boatyards.
In four weeks all four hundred of them were stowed aboard eleven steamers bound for Alexandria.
As plans for the expedition progressed, growing more detailed and elaborate at each stage, it became apparent that the original number of boats would be insufficient, and another four hundred were quickly built and shipped out.

While procuring a sufficient number of boats was easily handled, another problem less readily resolved was finding crews for them.
Again turning to his Red River experience, Wolseley sent word to Ottawa that he was seeking to employ four hundred Canadian riverboatmen, known as
voyageurs
, at the then-handsome wage of $40 per month.
Recruits flocked to the government offices, and soon a rather curious collection of trappers, hunters, boatmen—even Meti and Iroquois Indians—were gathered and shipped east to Suez.
Before long, the seemingly chaotic buildup for the expedition became known as the Circus on the Nile.

As confused and confusing as the preparations may have appeared, there was an overall sense of organization to it, the hallmark of any undertaking to which Wolseley put his hand.
His plan of campaign was based on the use of two columns of troops, one mounted on camels—a “camelry” was Wolseley’s rather peculiar term—moving across the desert to Dongola, the other moving up the Nile in Major Butler’s boats towed behind a flotilla of river steamers.
The two columns would converge on Dongola and advance from there to Korti, less than a hundred miles overland from Khartoum, where they would prepare for the final advance.
Lt.
General Sir Redvers Buller was named Chief of Staff and at the same time given command of the forces that would sail up the Nile, while Brigadier Sir Herbert Stewart (no relation to the late Colonel Stewart who had been Gordon’s second in command) was given command of the Desert Column, the troops who would move overland to Dongola.
Major Henry Brackenbury was appointed the Deputy Adjutant and Quartermaster, while Sir Evelyn Wood was assigned to keep open the expedition’s lines of communication.

Wolseley and his troops spent nearly a month in Cairo and Alexandria, Wolseley spending the time planning, while the troops trained and became acclimated to the harsh Egyptian climate.
The most difficult challenge lay in organizing the Camel Corps.
It was hard enough for men fresh from England to adapt to the strength-sapping heat, but making camel-riders out of soldiers proved an even more daunting task.
Cavalrymen, accustomed to their elegant chargers at Wellington Barracks, were hardly enthusiastic about their new dromedarian mounts, while infantry privates whose only experience mounting animals harked back to old Bessie and Dobbin from their days on the farm in Yorkshire or Kent, were absolutely baffled by the bellowing, spitting, vile-smelling and foul-tempered creatures.
Yet the Camel Corps was destined to play a decisive role in the coming campaign, and even as public and politicians alike in London murmured about what they regarded as Wolseley’s unnecessary delays, the time given to acclimation and training would prove well spent.

By the time he left Cairo, Wolseley had decided that Gordon’s most recent, generally reassuring messages meant that there was little need for urgent haste.
Consequently the expedition would be a carefully paced affair.
When the two columns reached Dongola, “the situation,” in Wolseley’s words, “would be reviewed” and a decision made as to how to proceed to Khartoum.
As events turned out, the land column’s progress began as a relatively swift, uneventful passage across country to the Sudanese border.
The mocking title, the “Circus on the Nile,” had been well earned, for some of the senior officers in the column had personal baggage trains that numbered as many as forty camels.
It was hardly the lightly burdened, swift-moving force that Kitchener had envisioned and for which he had pleaded in Cairo.

Once the Desert Column entered the Sudan, conditions became more trying.
As the desert sun beat down, the column made its increasingly difficult way across the scree-strewn terrain, edging past the knife-edged rocks and boulders that lined the Valley of the Nile.
As the force approached Dongola, sickness began to become a problem, as isolated cases of cholera, scurvy, and typhoid appeared; without constant attention, they could become epidemics that would lay low the entire force.

For General Buller and the River Column, the progress up the Nile was steady but exhausting, and often as painful as that of the Desert Column.
The “Nile whalers,” laden with troops and supplies, were towed behind paddle-steamers as far up the Nile as Aswan, just below the First Cataract.
The Cataracts were stretches of the river too rocky or shallow to be successfully navigated by the steamers, and it was here that the River Columns’ real slogging began.
While the cataracts were supposed to be passable by light boats, by this time the water level was dropping at a rate of six inches a day.
Sandbars, shallows, and shoals would appear overnight, rendering what had one day been a navigable stretch of river into an impassable tidal flat the next.

It was two hundred miles from Aswan to Wadi Halfa, site of the Second Cataract.
No steamers were available on this section of the river, so the passage would be made by muscle-power alone.
First the troops had to portage their boats and equipment past the First Cataract, then once the boats were re-launched, they had to be rowed to Wadi Halfa.
At times the sails helped, but the winds in the Valley of the Nile were capricious and unreliable, so most of the two hundred miles of river passage was accomplished through back-breaking work.
It was little wonder that, with the mocking humor that was so often the hallmark of the British soldier, Wadi Halfa became known as “Bloody Halfway.”

By day the boats would pass through a harsh, bleak landscape, often barren of any sign of life aside from scattered desert scrub.
The men would row their boats against the strong Nile current under an increasingly powerful sun, its heat and glare magnified as it was reflected from the water.
Often the soldiers and crews wore improvised goggles to avoid desert blindness.
As darkness fell the boats would push ashore where the soldiers would set up bivouacs and light small fires of driftwood.
The nights were almost enough to make up for the days, as a coolness would descend upon the desert and the cloudless skies would reveal the stars, uncountable in their number and unimaginable in their brilliance.
The men would sleep, and then stand-to just before dawn, which would burst across the desert like a silent thunderclap.

The portage at Halfa was, if anything, more difficult than that at Aswan.
The rapids of the Second Cataract, which stretched for over twenty miles, ran through Bab-el-Kebir, the Belly of Stone, a ravine fifty yards in length and only thirty feet wide.
Through this narrow portal the entire flow of the Nile poured, bursting out of the ravine in a raging torrent.
There was a railway at Halfa which skirted the cataract, but there were no railway cars capable of carrying the whalers.
This meant that the boats had to either be hauled through the Bab-el-Kebir or carried around it.
Buller chose to portage them around the rapids, as the risk of losing any of the boats was too great to run.
As they had done at Aswan, the troops unloaded the boats’ supplies and gear, and somehow managed to manhandle them around the Cataract, where they were reloaded and re-launched.
At Gemai, upriver from the worst stretch of the Second Cataract, the column halted for several days to set up a supply base and a boat repair yard, while General Buller rested his nearly exhausted troops.